Stendhal’s novelistic and autobiographical work is so in tune with a psychoananlytic reading that interpretation seems superfluous. Nonetheless, Jean Bellemin-Noël brings to light the way each unit of text can resonate with the reader’s unconscious beyond any straifghtforward revelation of this or that Freudian complex. This paper intends to show how the family novel in La Vie de Henry Brulard (The Life Of Henry Brulard) takes us out of the theoretical framework towards an emancipation that is at once pulsional, aesthetic and political.