©Aline Le Bail-Kremer

 

 

Aline Le Bail Kremer

 

Portrait de Micheline Weinstein

 in

Le Magazine du FSJU • N° 219 

https://www.fsju.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/219_CN-WEB.pdf

 

 

 

Ø

 

Aline Le Bail-Kreimer

 

Portrait of Micheline Weinstein

Coralie Bucaille • Translator

 

An exceptional Woman

 

Micheline Weinstein is a psychoanalyst, a profession she embodies with passion. “The only thing that ever interested me in life”, she says. With no children nor heirs, she decided in her will to make the FSJU (United Jewish Social Fund in France) her legatee. A sublime gesture that reflected her absolute intellectual spirit. 

“If I speak about myself, it is only because it might perhaps be of help to others, when it comes to its universal aspect”, she explains. But one should not expect Micheline Weinstein to present herself to the world as a victim, or to engage in a public and media sycophanthic performance. Why ? “Because it’s not Jewish”, she replies, and because it might go against her professional ethics and her conception of psychoanalysis, which is to say, against her entire life. On the other hand, she meticulously manages a website on which every one can browse through some of her detailed work and reflections. Imbued with the teachings of the psychoanalysis Françoise Dolto, “she was born into it” she sums up and above all, “it was for me the discovery that we could advance civilisation, true civilisation.”

 

Born on November 15, 1941 at the Rothschild Hospital in Paris, the only medical institution made accessible to future Jewish mothers, she was saved from the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup thanks to some modest ways, non-Jewish, independent of any organised resistance network “but probably close to the Communist Party, at whose house I was hidden and where the French police came to look for me on the tip-off of the concierge”. Her “nanny” claimed that the child in the house was hers, sent the police away and took her away immediately under a blanket. “The Polish lady living opposite, in the courtyard, was not so lucky. She and her baby were taken away”. About her saviours, she regrets : “I was never able to have them recognised as Righteous. Simply because I had no family reference. I didn’t know who I was or where I came from. I didn’t really know what a human being looked like either, apart from a strange individual whose mouth would pronounce words, I thought then, hidden in the Jura”. As a Ward of the Nation, she obtained an identity card at the age of 14. Of her father’s family, she found a few traces. Of her mother, none. But when Micheline chose to write under a pseudonym, she used her mother’s first name, together with her maternal grandmother’s surname, anglicised. Tania Bloom. From shelter to shelter, after a long journey, she was taken in at Taverny and then at the OSE association, in Draveil, and crossed the path of Jacqueline Lévy-Geneste who entrusted her to Françoise Dolto. The latter became a great friend, as some of the prefaces to her books testify. 40 years later, on the morning of Françoise Dolto’s death, Micheline is with her.

 

Micheline is now going to be 80 years old, “and for me, it’s strange. I have no sense of time, I can say « the other day » to evoke an event from 30 years ago. It must be said that psychoanalysts work in the present time, session after session”. But those she loved, esteemed and admired are now all gone, “there is no one left. And there comes a time when one can no longer « reinvest.»”

 

Merciless critic of Lacan’s shortcomings, critic of his friendships with Jung and Heidegger deconstrucying the “mirror-stage”, one follows her through the selected encounters of her life, such as Claude Lanzmann or Marceline Loridan-Ivens, among thousand anecdotes - often funny, after all : isn’t the aim of an analysis “to acquire a sense of humour and the right distance” ? - a magnificent lover, tragically swept away : encounters made all through an authentic, sincere and passionate intellectual life. “If, after wandering from institution to institution, I chose the FSJU association as my universal legatee, it is because it federates all the major Jewish associations, whatever their collective and private ideologies”, she explains, and continues: “Didn’t Freud say that the ideology of psychoanalysis is « flesh-coloured » ? The same colour for each one of us ? That could define mine”. “In short, my legacy, however modest, is to contribute to the urgent need to guarantee the existence of Israel. I would like it to be directed in particular to those Israelis affected by the endemic poverty threshold (like babies, children and their mothers, former deportees, and more generally those of all ages affected by indigence)”, had Micheline Weinstein first specified.

 

Her itinerary, the elements of her biography are only given to us to know, only if, “among them, some are likely to shed light on the psyche of the direct heirs of the Shoah, and more precisely on the psyche of the absolute orphans that the Shoah generated and, following them, their descendants”.