Bloch, Jean-Richard (1884-1947)

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BLOCH, JEAN-RICHARD (1884-1947)

Jean-Richard Bloch was a writer, historian, and socialist propagandist. He founded the socialist review L 'effort in Poitiers in 1910, collaborated with the publisher Frédéric Rieder, and edited the newspaper Ce soir with Louis Aragon. He was the first French editor to publish articles of a psychoanalytic nature.

Born in Paris into a Jewish family that had settled in Auxerre (Yonne) in the eighteenth century, he studied history at the Sorbonne (with Charles Seignobos), received his teaching degree in 1907, and was appointed to the lycée in Lons-le-Saulnier, then in Poitiers (1909). He collaborated with Gaston Thiesson and Dr. René Morichau-Beauchant, his friend for many years, in producing L 'effort, a "journal of struggle and ideas." Morichau-Beauchant was the psychology and psychiatry editor for the review.

In L 'effort Bloch presented Morichau-Beauchant's very first article on psychoanalysis, "L'inconscient et la défense psychologique de l'individu" (The unconscious and the psychological defense of the individual; 1910), published a year before his "Le rapport affectif dans la cure des psychonévroses" (The affective relationship in the treatment of psychoneuroses; 1911). He later published three additional articles by this same author. A reader of Freud, Bloch himself wrote an article entitled "La mort d'Œdipe" (The Death of Oedipus), followed by two novels, La nuit Kurde (1925; A Night in Kurdistan, 1931) and Sybilla (1935), where the influence of analysis is obvious. Writing La nuit Kurde had a therapeutic effect on its author: "I have to complete my work. . . . I have overcome my neurasthenia, my apprehension; I have taken back possession of my ego."