Béla Grunberger


Béla Grunberger was a Franco-Hungarian psychoanalyst known for his 1969 work L'univers contestationnaire, written with fellow IPA member Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, under the joint pseudonym 'André Stéphane'. In this book, the authors postulated that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian Stalinists, and proffered the hypothesis that they were "affected by a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the father".
Notably, Lacan mentioned this book with great disdain. While Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel were still cloaked by the pseudonym, Lacan remarked that for sure none of the authors belonged to his school, as none would stoop to such a low drivel. The authors in turn accused the Lacan School of "intellectual terrorism".