Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Women Psychoanalysts in France

Geschichte

Liliane Abensour
Annie Anzieu
Jenny Aubry
Piera Aulagnier
Marie Balmary
Ilse Barande
Laurence Bataille
Anne Berman
Marie Bonaparte
Françoise Boulanger (Canada)
Denise Braunschweig
Elsa Breuer
Elsa Cayat
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
Maryse Choisy
Anne Clancier
Margaret Clark-Williams
Odette Codet
Myriam David
 Monique David-Ménard
Françoise Dolto
Judith Dupont
Micheline Enriquez
Solange Faladé
Juliette Favez-Boutonier
Charlotte Feibel (Germany)
Marcelle Geber
Florence Guignard
Dominique Guyomard
Luce Irigaray
Évelyne Kestemberg
Julia Kristeva
Paulette Laforgue
Ruth Lebovici
Rosine Lefort
Anne Levallois
Maud Mannoni
Joyce McDougall
 Judith Miller
Catherine Millot
Françoise Minkowska (Switzerland)
Michèle Montrelay
Sophie Morgenstern
Marie Moscovici
Ilse Odier-Ronjat
Marie-Cécile Ortigues
Gisela Pankow
Catherine Parat
Ginette Raimbault
Blanche Reverchon-Jouve
Élisabeth Roudinesco
Monique Schneider
Eugénie Sokolnicka
Anne-Lise Stern
Maria Torok
Nathalie Zaltzman

Liliane Abensour (1932-2011)

Liliane Abensour was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Paris VII, before she underwent psychoanalytic training at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). One of her control analysts was Évelyne Kestemberg, under whose supervision she began to analyse psychotic patients in the late 1970s. She then worked at the Centre de psychanalyse et de psychothérapie Évelyne et Jean Kestemberg (CEJK) in Paris, devoting herself to the treatment of psychosis until her retirement. In 2001 she participated in founding the Centre's journal Psychanalyse et Psychose, to which she was editor-in-chief (until 2009 together with Antoine Nastasi). She became a training analyst of the SPP in 2000.
Motivated by her love of English literature, Liliane Abensour was particularly interested in the British school of psychoanalysis, i.e. the Kleinian school, represented by Wilfred Bion, Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld. Her analytic work with psychotic patients was especially related to the approaches of Evelyne Kestemberg and Piera Aulagnier. In her best-known book, Psychotic Temptation, Liliane Abensour stated that every human being possesses the potentiality to be tempted by the psychotic solution as a response to deal with the traumatic dimension of psychic development. According to her, the psychotic delusion draws from what she called the "liminal" sphere, the space between the preconscious and the conscious. From that space, cut off from all contact with a regressive unconscious, comes "liminal writing", a kind of writing that Abensour compared to that of poetry. Writing then becomes an anti-traumatic act.
Liliane Abensour was also interested in the metapsychological definition of the maternal. In her study L'ombre du maternel (The Shadow of the Maternal), she dealt with the undecidable quality of the maternal: orientated both towards origins until an elusive vanishing point and towards a mode of functioning and relationship. Its two-directional nature gives rise to various theoretical models.
Liliane Abensour lived in Paris, where she died of leukaemia on 19 August 2011. (Top of the article)



Annie Anzieu nèe Péghaire (1922-2019)

Annie Anzieu studied philosophy and psychology (with Daniel Lagache) in Paris after the end of World War II. In 1947 she married her fellow student Didier Anzieu (1923-1999); their daughter Christine was born in 1950, their son Patrick in 1953. Didier Anzieu was the son of Marguerite Anzieu, née Pantaine, who was hospitalised at Sainte-Anne in 1931 and became known as Jacques Lacan's famous case of "Aimée". Didier Anzieu, who had no idea of this connection, began analysis with Lacan in 1949.
Annie Anzieu worked as a psychologist and taught philosophy, before she became a logopedist and psychotherapist at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in 1958. Together with Daniel Widlöcher she founded the Department of Psychotherapy for Children at the Salpêtrière, which she led for many years. She underwent training analysis with Georges Favez and became a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France, founded in 1964. She specialised in child analysis and created with Florence Guignard, in 1984, the Association pour la psychanalyse de l'enfant, of which she was president, and, in 1994, the Société Européenne pour la Psychanalyse de l'Enfant et de l'Adolescent (SEPEA).
Daniel Lagache, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott influenced the thinking of Annie Anzieu. In cooperation with Didier Anzieu she developed the concept of the skin ego. In addition to child analysis, she is especially interested in female sexuality. In her book La femme sans qualité (The woman without qualities) she argued that a woman's psyche is influenced by the representations of her body's interior, formed by a sexual cavity. In her opinion femininity does not connote the lack of a penis, but the notions of orifice and passage.
Annie Anzieu's daughter, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, is also a psychoanalyst. (Top of the article)



Jenny Aubry née Weiss (1903-1987)

Jenny Aubry was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis in France. She was born into an educated upper-middle-class family in Paris; her mother, Jeanne Javal, was of Jewish origin and her father, the engineer Paul Louis Weiss, was Protestant. Her older sister, Louise Weiss, was a famous suffragette. Urged on by her mother and against the wish of her father, Jenny Weiss studied medicine, neurology and child psychiatry. In 1928 she married Alexandre Roudinesco (1883-1974), a paediatrician who had emigrated from Romania, by whom she had three children. Her daughter Elisabeth Roudinesco also became a psychoanalyst.
Jenny Roudinesco interned with the neurologist Clovis Vincent and was an assistant with the child psychiatrist Georges Heuyer from 1935 to 1939. At that time she met the child analyst Sophie Morgenstern. After obtaining the title of a hospital doctor in 1939, she worked as a physician at the Salpêtrière hospital, the hospice in Brévannes and the Enfants-Malades hospital. During the German occupation she joined the Resistance and, protected by false papers, she used her position to hide Jewish children and to prepare certificates of tuberculosis for young men likely to be sent to forced labour camps.
In 1946 Jenny Roudinesco became Chief of Paediatrics at the Ambroise Paré hospital, to which the Fondation Parent-de-Rosan was attached. This public welfare warehouse was the home to young children abandoned by their mothers. Confronted with the children's suffering from hospitalism, she became interested in the psychoanalytic concepts of René Spitz and John Bowlby. Encouraged by Anna Freud and a study visit in the United States, she finally began psychoanalytic training in 1948. She underwent training analysis with Michel Cénac and Sacha Nacht. One of her supervising analysts was Jacques Lacan, whom she followed into the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne (SPF) in 1953 and subsequently into the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). In 1952 she divorced Alexander Roudinesco and married Pierre Aubry (?-1972), a mathematician.
In her book Enfance abandonée, published in 1953, Jenny Aubry described her work with hospitalised children and the success of psychoanalysis in the prevention and treatment of psychosis. She engaged in pioneering work by introducing psychoanalysis into the world of non-psychiatric hospitals. While working at the polyclinic on the Boulevard Ney from 1952 onwards, she expanded her activities to the prevention of school problems and developed a sort of group therapy for kindergartens.
From 1963 to 1968 Jenny Aubry was Head of the Paediatrics Department at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades in Paris, where she established the first psychoanalytic consultation service in France. After her retirement to Aix-en-Provence in 1968, she helped promote Lacanianism in the south of France. After the death of Pierre Aubry in 1972, she returned to Paris, where she served as a training analyst. An anthology of her papers was published in 2003 under the title Psychanalyse des enfants séparés. Etudes cliniques 1952-1986. (Top of the article)



Piera Aulagnier née Spairani (1923-1990)

Piera Aulagnier was born in Milan, the daughter of a sixteen-year-old mother. After spending her first years in Egypt, she grew up with her grandparents in Italy. She studied medicine in Rome and moved to Paris in 1950, where she completed her studies in psychiatry. From 1955 to 1961 she underwent training analysis with Jacques Lacan and became a member of the Société française de psychanalyse. She later underwent a second analysis with Serge Vidermann.
In 1964 she followed Lacan into the École Freudienne de Paris, but left the EFP in 1969 after Lacan had proposed the "pass", a more subjective procedure of nominating a training analyst. The same year she founded, along with her colleagues François Perrier and Jean-Paul Valabrega, the Organisation psychanalytique de langue française (OPLF), the so-called Quatrième Groupe. In 1967 Piera Aulagnier founded, together with Conrad Stein und Jean Clavreul, the review L'Inconscient, and two years later the journal Topique.
After separating from her first husband, the businessman André Aulagnier, with whom she had her son Claude, Piera Aulagnier married Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), a philosopher-psychoanalyst of Greek origin, in 1975. They divorced in 1984.
Piera Aulagnier specialised in the treatment of psychotics and worked at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where she read a weekly seminar from 1962 to 1990. Many of her publications were linked with this seminar. Aulagnier's work, which stands in the tradition of Lacan, is considered to be one of the most important French contributions to psychoanalytic theory; however, it is not easy to understand. Her starting point is the communication of the psychotic and the question of the meaning of psychosis. Aulagnier stated that the specific factor underlying psychosis is an insoluble discordance between what the small child experiences and the meaning imposed by the mother's discourse. The system of delusional thinking is the attempt to resolve this contradiction.
Based on her clinical experience with psychosis Piera Aulagnier enlarged on the Freudian metapsychology and established a new theorization of the I: The agency called I is constituted by discourse and its task is the production of sense. She developed a number of new conceptions such as the "primal process" (processus originaire), which precedes the primary and secondary processes. All three are processes of psychic "metabolisation": they transform that which is not psychical into something psychical by specific forms of representation. The representational mode is different for each of the three processes: the primal process represented by "pictograms", the primary process represented by unconscious fantasies, and the secondary process represented by verbal announcements. When the primary and secondary processes fail to function normally, the individual regresses to the archaic level of the primal process, which infiltrates the mind and subsequently becomes the source of psychotic thought processes.
Piera Aulagnier died of lung cancer at the age of 66. (Top of the article)



Marie Balmary (*1939)

Marie Balmary, born into a Catholic family in Brittany, studied psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. She received her psychoanalytic training at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris founded by Jacques Lacan and Françoise Dolto. Her doctorate thesis on the subject La prise de conscience, submitted to the university in 1974, was not accepted due to her questioning of some basic ideas of Sigmund Freud. Marie Balmary published her findings five years later under the title L'homme aux statues [Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis. Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father (1982)]. Using Lacanian theory to psychoanalyse Freud, she explored his own family secrets. In particular she referred to Freud's rejection of the seduction theory (sexual abuse) in favour of the Oedipus theory (infantile sexuality). According to Balmary, Freud developed a truncated conception of the Oedipus complex, in which the attempted filicide of Oedipus by his father Laius is expunged, in order to hide the transgressions of his own father: Jacob Freud's hidden fault was to have driven his second wife, Rebekka, to commit suicide because he wanted to marry Freud's mother, Amalie, who was already pregnant with young Sigmund. Other Freud historians, however, declared that Balmary's assumptions were purely speculative.
From the 1980s, Marie Balmary's work centres on the task of enriching psychoanalysis with a spiritual dimension. She reads the work of Freud and the Bible in parallel and explores the analogies between them. For this purpose, she learned Hebrew in order to undergo a real exposure to the biblical texts closest to its original form.
Marie Balmary practises psychoanalysis in Paris. She is married and has two children. (Top of the article)



Ilse Barande née Rothschild (1928-2012)

Ilse Rothschild was born in Mannheim, the only daughter of a German-Jewish family, who emigrated to France after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. She studied medicine and psychology in Paris, graduated in psychology in 1953 and specialised in psychiatry. After qualifying as a doctor of medicine, she worked from 1955 to 1960 as a senior physician in psychiatry. In 1953 she started her training at the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). She was elected an associate member of the SPP in 1962, and a full member in 1965.
In 1946 Ilse Rothschild met Robert Barande (1926-2001), a French psychoanalyst, who also studied medicine and psychology in Paris. They married in 1954 and had two children. Together they wrote a number of psychoanalytic texts, among others, on the history of psychoanalysis in France.
Ilse Barande worked as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Paris and at the SPP Centre de Consultations et de Traitements Psychanalytiques. One of her analysands in the 1970s was Julia Kristeva. From 1967 to 1988 she was affiliated with the editorial board of the Revue française de psychanalyse (RFP), between 1984 and 1988 as editor-in-chief. She served as a child psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the Théophile Roussel Hospital in Montesson and, since the late 1960s, in the children's and youth guidance centre of the psychiatric hospital Henri-Rousselle (in the hospital complex Sainte-Anne, Paris), led by her from 1988 to 1993.
In 1972 Ilse Barande published her book on Sándor Ferenczi who, at that time, was little known in France. In 1977 she published Le maternel singulier (reissued in 2011 under the title: Le Maternel au masculin), a study on the autobiographical content of Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. In it, she highlighted the "singular maternal" in creativity, which is hidden behind the father theme and above differences of sex and generations. In 2009 appeared L'appétit d'excitation, a selection of her RFP articles. The central theme is the human "appetite of excitation", on which Barande based her discussion of the evolutionary neoteny or lifelong incompleteness of man. Ilse Barande also translated the complete works of Karl Abraham into French. (Top of the article)



Laurence Bataille (1930-1986)

Laurence Bataille was the only child of the writer and philosopher Georges Bataille (Fig.) and Sylvia Maklès, a French actress of Romanian-Jewish descent. Her parents separated in 1934 but did not divorce until 1946. Starting in the late 1930s, Sylvia Bataille was a companion of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom she married in 1953, and with whom she had a daughter, Judith Bataille-Lacan.
Laurence grew up close to her stepfather with her half-sister Judith. At the age of sixteen, she became the mistress of the painter Balthus, who made several portraits of her. Laurence Bataille first entered an actress career. After a tour with her theatre company in Algeria in 1954, she was a temporary member of the Communist Party and involved in promoting Algeria's independence. In 1960 she was imprisoned for six weeks for aiding the National Liberation Front, FLN. In 1961 she married Andrè Basch (*1933), a physician and her comrade in the FLN. They had one daughter, Sandra, and divorced in 1971.
Familiar with the ideas of Lacan since her youth, Laurence Bataille studied medicine and entered into training analysis with Conrad Stein in 1963. She became a member of the École Freudienne de Paris, which was dissolved by Lacan in 1980. After Lacan's death, she joined the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (ECF) directed by her brother-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller. From 1976 to 1978 she acted as director of the Lacanian journal Ornicar?, where some of her articles and reviews were published. In 1982 she left the ECF, because she disapproved of the fact that Jacques-Alain Miller used Lacan's circular letters posthumously as legal texts.
Laurence Bataille, whom Lacan called his loyal Antigone, died of liver cancer in 1986. A year after her death, a small anthology of her essays was published under the title L'ombilic du rêve. In her paper of the same title, she described the work of interpretation using as an example a dream which played an important role in her own analysis. (Top of the article)



Anne Berman (1889-1979)

Anne (Annette) Berman was born into a Jewish family. A university-trained pharmacist, she worked in the laboratory of Édouard Toulouse at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris until 1924. That year she bought a pharmacy in Paris, where she worked until 1940. She graduated as a doctor in 1926, the subject of her thesis was the family of Boraginaceae. In 1928 she joined the Soroptimist Club, an international organization for business and professional women.
In 1927 Anne Berman was accepted as the first associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). After undergoing analysis with Marie Bonaparte from 1930 to 1932, she became her personal secretary in 1933. She was administered the secretariat of the Institut de Psychanalyse from its inception in 1934 and held the post as secretary of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse from 1948 to 1969. Although no practising analyst, she was elected a full member of the SPP in 1949.
Anne Berman became known as a translator of numerous psychoanalytical works. Among others, she translated several of Sigmund Freud's works into French: Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1936), Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1948), Abriß der Psychoanalyse (1949), and Freud's and Josef Breuer's Studien über Hysterie (1956). Anna Freud's Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (1949) and Ernest Jones' The life and work of Sigmund Freud (1958) were also translated by her.
Anne Berman had a lengthy affair - until the end of the 1930s - with Adrien Borel (1886-1966), a French psychiatrist and in 1926 co-founder of the SPP. (Top of the article)



Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962)

Princess Marie Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud's representative in France, was born in Saint-Cloud, near Paris. She was the great-granddaughter of a brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Her mother Marie-Félix Blanc, the daughter of the wealthy entrepreneur of the casino in Monte Carlo, died of tuberculosis a few weeks after Marie's birth and bequeathed a vast fortune to her husband, Prince Roland Bonaparte. Marie Bonaparte grew up in the care of nannies and governesses and under the severe regiment of her grandmother. As a little girl she believed that her father, whose love she tried in vain to win, had collaborated with the evil grandmother in murdering her mother out of greed. In addition she felt herself responsible by her birth for her mother's death. From the age of seven onwards, she filled five notebooks with cruel fantasy tales, which served later as a basis of her analysis with Sigmund Freud.
Her wish to study medicine remained unfulfilled. Submitting to her family's expectation she married Prince George of Greece and Denmark (1869-1957) in 1907, with whom she had two children, Eugénie and Pierre. She was suffering from melancholia and somatic disorders when she met the French psychoanalyst René Laforgue in 1923, who wrote to Freud on her behalf. Her meeting with Freud in 1925 was not only the beginning of an analysis, but also of a close, lifelong friendship between them. Her analysis lasted until 1929, followed by a top-up with Rudolph Loewenstein and further tranches with Freud in Vienna until 1938. In 1926, she was a co-founder of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and was elected vice president of the SPP in 1934.
With her wealth Marie Bonaparte financed many psychoanalytic institutions, among others the Institut de psychanalyse in Paris and the Revue Française de Psychanalyse. She saved Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess from destruction and helped Sigmund Freud and his family emigrate from Vienna to London after the "Anschluss" in 1938. When the Germans occupied France in 1940, she decided that there would be no "rescue" of psychoanalysis like in Germany. The SPP stopped all its activity, and Marie Bonaparte went into exile in Greece and South Africa. Returning to Paris in 1945, she saw herself as the bearer of the Freudian word, and like Anna Freud she opposed the theories of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein. She translated Freud's work into French and as a vice president of the IPA she championed lay analysis.
The writings of Marie Bonaparte are seen to be not as considerable as her eminent role in the history of French psychoanalytic movement. The subject of one of her finest papers, published in 1927, was the case of Marie-Félicité Lefebvre, who murdered her pregnant daughter-in-law. Bonaparte interpreted this murder as an unconscious death wish against the own mother put into action, and she plead for a therapy of psychologically disturbed criminals.
Bonaparte's study on Edgar Allen Poe is considered to be her most important contribution. She interpreted Poe's oevre as an attempt to come to terms with his dead mother who obsessed over him and rendered him impotent. Her interpretation of Poe implied a self-analysis: the ambivalent attachment to a dead mother was also a childhood trauma of her own and her frigidity a lifelong problem. In 1924, in her article Considérations sur les causes anatomiques de la frigidité chez la femme, she argued that frigidity in women often has an anatomic cause - a too great distance between clitoris and vagina. She stressed that the transition from clitoral fixation to vaginal pleasure could only be reached by a mixture of psychoanalytic treatment and surgical intervention - an operation which she underwent several times without success.
In her later essays on female sexuality Marie Bonaparte continued to take a psycho-biological approach. She was the first to observe an active phallic stage in the young girl, in which the clitoris corresponds to the phallus. This phallic activity toward the mother is sandwiched between two stages of passivity, first toward the mother, then toward the father. For Bonaparte libidinal fixation on the "masculine" clitoris corresponds to a basically biological masculine character incorporated in the feminine organism. She saw this bisexual constitution of woman as a main obstacle to the development of normal sexuality.
Marie Bonaparte died of leukaemia at the age of eighty. (Top of the article)



Denise Braunschweig (1918-1998)

Denise Braunschweig-Demay was a proponent of the psychoanalytic psychosomatics in France. She studied law, psychology and medicine, before she turned towards psychoanalysis and became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. She worked several years in child psychiatry, e. g. at the Centre Georges-Amado in Vitry and, with Serge Lebovici, at the Hôpital de jour du 13e arrondissement in Paris.
In 1972 she founded, together with Pierre Marty, Catherine Parat, Michel d'Uzan, Michel Fain and Christian David, the Institut de psychosomatique, where she worked until the end of her life. In addition, she was an editorial member of the Revue Française de Psychosomatique starting in 1991. Standing in the classic tradition of Sigmund Freud, Denise Braunschweig made an essential contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of female sexuality. Her writings, mostly published along with Michel Fain, focused on subjects like narcissism, fetishism, object change in girls, cathexis of the female sexual organs, and the impact of sexual difference on the relationship to reality.
Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain conceived the notion of "censoring the lover in her" [censure de l'amante], which means that a mother's life as a lover "censors" the erotic feelings aroused by maternal care. Her daydreams about her love life with the father of the child introduce the third party into the mother-child relation. This early state of triangulation is the basis for the infant's future Oedipal organisation. (Top of the article)



Elsa Breuer (1888-1967)

Élise "Elsa" Breuer was born into a Hungarian Jewish family. She studied medicine at the university of Budapest, where she qualified as a doctor. In about 1935 she underwent training analysis with Marie Bonaparte in Paris and became an associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1936. She survived the German occupation in Bordeaux, where she stayed with a friend of her family.
After the end of the war Elsa Breuer returned to Paris, where she worked as a training analyst of the SPP. One of her analysands was the philosopher and sociologist Georges Lapassade. On the recommendation of Daniel Lagache, he began an analysis with Elsa Breuer at the end of the 1940s, which took about nine years.
In 1952 the French Medical Association accused Elsa Breuer - like Margaret Clark Williams before her - of unlawfully practising medicine: She had made the mistake of treating panel patients and signing the forms with "Dr. Breuer". Elsa Breuer lost the trial, because her Hungarian doctorate was not recognised in France, and she was also defeated on appeal in 1954. The Paris Court of Appeal stated that, according to the law, only physicians were allowed to perform psychoanalysis and that there was no regulation for lay analysts.
Elsa Breuer stayed a member of the SPP until 1965.



Elsa Cayat (1960-2015)

The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat was born into a Jewish family in Tunisia. Her father, Georges Khayat, was a gastroenterologist, her mother worked in the legal profession. She grew up in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, and studied medicine. Qualified as a doctor by the age of 21, she subsequently began her psychiatric training as an "Interne des Hôpitaux de Paris". She underwent psychoanalytic training and became a Lacanian analyst running a successful private practice in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. She also worked as a writer and columnist. Among others, she wrote Charlie Divan, a fortnightly column with a wide range of psychological and social issues in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Elsa Cayat published two books, Un homme une femme + = quoi? and (along with her Charlie Hebdo colleague Antonio Fischetti) Le désir et la putain, dealing with sexual questions and gender relations.
On 7 January 2015, Elsa Cayat was the only female victim murdered by the brothers Kouachi in their attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo - presumably because she was Jewish. She left behind her companion, the Dutch shoe designer Paulus Bolten, and their daughter Hortense. (Top of the article)



Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1928-2006)

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, the daughter of immigrant parents from Russia and Poland, was born in Paris. Her father, Jules Smirgel (or Smirguel), was an engineer and a painter. Her mother was frequently ill and partially replaced by Janine`s admired aunt Anne, a pneumologist. Following the war, Janine Chasseguet studied political science (diploma in 1952) and psychology at the Sorbonne. From 1953 to 1956 she underwent psychoanalysis with Bela Grunberger (1903-2005), her future husband. She completed her qualifying training in 1958 and became a training analyst of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1965. She served as president of the SPP from 1975 to 1977 and as a vice president of the IPA from 1983 to 1989. She obtained her doctoral degree in 1982, and in 1982/83 she was invited to take the Freud Memorial Chair at the University of London. From 1992 until her retirement in 1996 she was Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology at the Charles-de-Gaulle-Universität in Lille.
The thinking of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was influenced by Sándor Ferenczi, Bela Grunberger and Melanie Klein. Her work has focused on female sexuality, creativity and perversion, narcissism and the ego ideal as well as the application of psychoanalysis to art, literature, film, and politics. In one of her first papers Feminine guilt and the Oedipus complex she criticised Sigmund Freud's concept of a female penis envy by claiming that girls do not envy the penis for its own sake, but as a revolt against the omnipotent mother. The wish to appropriate the paternal phallus and to depose the mother is the source of female guilt for Chasseguet-Smirgel.
In her essays about creativity and perversion, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel compared the authentic work of an artist with the fetishistic "false" object of a pervert. Creativity of an artist implies that he overcomes his regressive desire to return to the perfection of primary narcissism by projecting his ego ideal on paternal models. The pervert, however, succumbs to the "malady of the ideal" and preserves, often confirmed by his mother, the infantile illusion to own the idealized pregenital (anal) phallus and thus to be equal and even superior to his father.
Chasseguet-Smirgel stressed a structurally necessary polarity of an anal-phallic-destructive maternal world of regression and perversion and a paternal world of structure, law and creativity. The integration of these two worlds by Oedipal maturity, however, fails mostly. The rebellion against father and law is marked by traits of perversion and regression - and according to the diagnosis of Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger (under the pseudonym "André Stéphane") this was the case with the 1968 student revolt and its theorists.
Sensitised by the fate of her own Jewish relatives who died in the Holocaust, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was particularly interested in psychoanalytic explanations of National Socialism. She interpreted the national socialist race ideology as the wish to expel aliens from the womb and to melt with the omnipotent mother represented by the group.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel died of leukaemia at the age of 77. (Top of the article)



Maryse Choisy (1903-1979)

Link to a photo of Maryse Choisy

The journalist, psychoanalyst and author Maryse Choisy was born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France. She grew up in the château of her aunt, Comtesse Anne de Brémond, who associated with celebrities like Oscar Wilde, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Picasso. At the end of the First World War, Maryse and her aunt moved to London, where she entered Girton College and studied philosophy and psychology. She wrote her dissertation on Samkhya philosophy (Les systèmes de philosophie Samkhya).
In 1925 she began an analysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. After three sessions she broke off the treatment when Freud deduced from her dream that she was an illegitimate child - a fact that was confirmed by her aunt. She never learned who her parents were and assumed the name "Choisy" ("Chosen"). In 1925 she became a journalist with the magazine L'Intransigeant and occupied an important position in the intellectual and art world of Paris. Maryse Choisy was a pioneer of investigative journalism and researched undercover in a brothel for her book about prostitution, Un mois chez les filles, which caused a scandal upon its publication. As a leftist and feminist she fought for the women's right to vote.
Maryse Choisy married the journalist Maxime Clouzet, the father of her daughter, Colette, born in 1932. At the end of the 1930s, she met Teilhard de Chardin and converted to Catholicism. She then found her way back to psychoanalysis and went into analysis with Charles Odier, René Laforgue (1944) and Maurice Bouvet (1955). Choisy became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and devoted her efforts to bringing together religion and psychoanalysis. The result of her search for a benediction for psychoanalysis from the Catholic Church was that Pius XII issued an approval of a "serious psychotherapy" as long as it did not look for sexual causes and violate the confession.
In 1946 Maryse Choisy founded the Centre d'etudes des sciences de l'homme - with numerous luminaries such as Pierre Janet, René Laforgue and Teilhard de Chardin - and its organ Psyché. She hoped this review of psychoanalysis and the human sciences would counter the Freudian atheism with a synthesis of psychoanalysis and spirituality. Psyché was inspired by the journal Imago and attempted to find a larger public with well-known authors such as Laforgue, Françoise Dolto, Juliette Favez-Boutonier and Octave Mannoni. Besides psychoanalytic topics, the review discussed the subjects acupuncture, graphology, eastern religions and cultural events. Psyché closed down in 1959 (with one special issue in 1963).
Maryse Choisy published numerous books, novels, poems, essays and reports as well as works popularising psychoanalysis. (Top of the article)



Anne Clancier née Gravelat (1913-2014)

Anne Clancier was born Anne Marie Yvonne Gravelat in Limoges in the Limousin region (Haute-Vienne). She studied at the École de Médecine and at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique in Limoges. In 1940, she wrote her doctoral thesis about superstition, legends, manners and customs in in the Limousin region. She worked at the hospital of Limoges (under Joseph de Léobardy) and as a general practitioner, before she became medical health inspector in 1940.
In 1939 Anne Gravelat married Georges-Emmanuel Clancier (1914-2018), a poet and novelist born in Limoges, the father of their two children, Juliette and Sylvestre. They moved to Paris, but returned to the Limousin at the outbreak of World War II. Anne Clancier specialised in psychiatry and after the end of the war, she was appointed assistant physician at the psychiatric hospitals Ayné-le-Château (Allier) and Chezal-Benoit (Cher). Since 1950 she worked at the Centre médico-psycho-pédagogique at the Institute Claparède de Neuilly-sur-Seine for a couple of years. During this time, she began her psychoanalytic training at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). She was trained by Sacha Nacht, Maurice Bouvet, Marie Bonaparte, Jacques Lacan and others, and underwent supervision with Donald Winnicott in London. In 1966 she was became a member of the SPP.
Anne Clancier was particularly interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, which was also the subject of her lectures at the University of Nanterre and of numerous publications. Drawing on Charles Mauron's method of "psychocritique", a psychoanalytic literary criticism, she analysed the unconscious fantasies and personal myths of an author. In analogy to the term of "contre-transfert", countertransference, she created the notion of "contre-texte", referring to the reader's reactions to the unconscious of the author. (Top of the article)



Margaret Clark-Williams (1910-1975)

Margaret Clark-Williams was born in the United States of America. On the invitation of her aunt, she came for the first time to France at the age of 21. In 1931/32 she spent the winter in Vienna, where she made her initial contacts in psychoanalytic circles, before she went back to the United States. She was first analysed by the Swiss analyst Raymond de Saussure, who practised in New York from 1940 to 1952. After marrying and a period in the United States with her two children, she returned to France in 1945. Margaret Clark-Williams studied psychology with Daniel Lagache and received clinical training from the child psychiatrist Georges Heuyer. She underwent training analysis with Georges Parcheminey, her supervising analyst was John Leuba. In 1950 she became an associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.
Margaret Clark-Williams was working as a child therapist at the Centre psychopédagogique de Claude-Bernard in Paris, when the Order of Physicians made a complaint against the non-medical analyst, accusing her of illegal practice of medicine due to the fact that she practised psychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte, who herself was a "lay analyst" without medical training, and Juliette Favez-Boutonier, the former medical director of the Claude-Bernard Centre, supported the case of Margaret Clark-Williams. The trial beginning in 1951 caused a sensation. Clark-Williams was first acquitted, but a second verdict in 1953 found her guilty - a disaster for lay analysis.
Margaret Clark-Williams was a long-standing colleague of André Berge until she retired in 1973. (Top of the article)



Odette Codet née Maugé (1892-1964)

Odette Maugé was born in Rosny-sous-Bois in France. She started her study of medicine in the beginning of World War I, during which time she was married to the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Henri Codet (1889-1939). In 1925, Odette and Henry Codet were founding members of the first Freudian group in France around the review L'Évolution psychiatrique. Odette Codet completed her doctorate on the subject of baby diet in 1931. During the 1930s she worked in Édouard Pichon's outpatient department at Bretonneau hospital in Paris, where Françoise Marette became her assistant in 1938.
Odette Codet underwent training analysis with Marie Bonaparte and became an associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1934 and a full member in 1935. In 1940 the SPP ceased its activities in occupied France and Odette Codet continued working in private practice. After her first husband died in an automobile accident in 1939, she married the architect Pierre Laurent-Lucas-Championnière.
In 1953 she, along with Marie Bonaparte and Georges Parcheminey, were opponents of a medicalisation of psychoanalysis by Sacha Nacht, then nominated director of the new Institut de Psychanalyse. Together with the liberal group of Daniel Lagache, Jacques Lacan and others, they formed a majority against Nacht, but the differences with Lacan were too great. During a decisive session of the SPP, Odette Codet called for a motion of non-confidence against Lacan, which led to his dismissal as President of the SPP and the withdrawal of numerous members. Odette Codet herself was elected President of the SPP in 1959, but due to illness she had to retire a year later.
In her article À propos de trois cas d'anorexie mentale (1939) Odette Codet described the cases of three anorectic girls between the ages of three and fifteen. In it she highlighted the fact that conflicts increase in complexity with the age of the girl, and stressed that parental attitudes have a primordial role in the genesis and treatment of such conflicts. (Top of the article)



Myriam David (1917-2004)

Myriam David was born into a Jewish family in Paris. In 1933 she began the study of medicine in Paris, with the focus on paediatrics, and graduated in 1942. The same year she fled from Nazi persecution to Southern France, where she joined the Résistance. She was arrested at the end of 1943 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she survived the concentration camp and returned to Paris in 1945.
In 1946 Myriam David went to the United States to specialise in child psychiatry, first with Leo Kanner at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, then at the Judge Baker Guidance Clinic in Boston and the James Jackson Putnam Children's Centre guided by Marian Putnam and Beata Rank. Simultaneously she received her psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. She returned to Paris in 1950 and, supported by Jenny Aubry, she established a psychotherapeutic consultation service at the Enfants Malades hospital. In 1966 she set up a therapeutic institution of foster family placements in Soisy-sur-Seine, which she directed until 1983. In 1976 she founded a children's unit within the Fondation Rothschild based on the model of the J. J. Putnam Children's Center.
Myriam David, who herself lost her mother at an early age, was a pioneer of infant psychiatry in France and was particularly interested in the consequences of an early separation from the mother. In the 1950s she researched this subject in the child care centres Parent-de-Rosan and Amyot, here along with John Bowlby. In 1962, together with her friend, the psychologist Geneviève Appell, she undertook a long-term study of children who had been separated from their mothers within the first three months after their birth. The researchers accompanied these children until their fourth year. Myriam David used the notion of "empty behaviour" to describe depressed babies, which seemed to lack an internal world of representations and fantasies. In 1973 David and Appell gave a report on the successful pedagogical approach of Emmi Pikler in Lóczy, a residential home for abandoned infants and young children in Budapest.
In 2002 Myriam David received the Serge Lebovici Award. She died two years later in Paris at the age of 88. (Top of the article)



Monique David-Ménard (*1947)

The work of Monique David-Ménard, born in Lyon, focuses on the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis. She completed a master's degree in philosophy with Paul Ricœur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris IV, 1990).
From 1969 to 1974 Monique David-Ménard was professor of philosophy in Reims at the Lycée classique et moderne, and from 1974 to 2007 in Paris at the Lycée Lakanal and the Lycée Janson de Sailly. She received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) led by Jacques Lacan, and was a member of the EFP from 1979 to 1980. From 1982 to 1994 she was a member of the Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychanalytiques (CFRP). In 1994 she became a member of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne. She was directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and vice president from 1995 to 1998. From 1999 to 2011 she was appointed Professor of Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis at the Université Denis Diderot, Paris VII, where she was also head of the Centre d'Études du Vivant (2005-2011). She is a founding member of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.
Monique David-Ménard's main interest centres on the manner in which fantasies and sexuality operate actively in the production of philosophical discourse. Using psychoanalysis as a critical lever, she highlights, for instance, the weak points in the notion of the universal and shows that the construction of universality in Kant and other thinkers depends on a masculine anthropology of sexual desire. According to David-Ménard, the logic of the universal implying the equality of subjects refers to a seriality of equivalent objects of desire, which does not exist in women. (Top of the article)



Françoise Dolto née Marette (1908-1988)

Françoise Dolto is considered to be the second most important figure in the history of psychoanalysis in France after Jacques Lacan. Born as the fourth of seven children into a Catholic family of the great Parisian middle class, she grew up in a sexually repressive milieu characterised by nationalism and anti-Semitism. Her father, Henri Marette, was an engineer and artillery captain and her mother, Suzanne Demmler, was a trained nurse. A traumatic childhood experience was the death of her elder sister, the favourite of her mother, who became depressed as a result, regretting that her less-beloved daughter was still alive. Françoise spent her youth in a climate of grief and guilt; a serious neurosis was the consequence.
After completing a nursing diploma, Françoise Marette began, like her younger brother Philippe, to study medicine in 1932 - with the aim to become an "education doctor". In 1938, she became Odette Codet's assistant in Edouard Pichon's outpatient department at Bretonneau Hospital. From 1934 to 1937, she underwent training analysis with René Laforgue. During her analysis she was able to emancipate herself from her familiar background, with the exception of her Catholic beliefs. In 1938 she became an associate member, in 1939 a full member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). Three years prior she met Jacques Lacan, whose ideas she shared on the central role of language and the linguistic structure of the unconscious. After the war, they became close friends.
As a non-resident student 1936/37 at Georges Heuyer's unit of infantile neuropsychiatry, Françoise Marette worked together with Sophie Morgenstern, who introduced her to child psychoanalysis. Referring to Morgenstern's approach, she explained her technique of child analysis in her medical thesis on the subject of psychoanalysis and paediatrics in 1939. For her, child analysts should be a spokesperson for children and employ the language of childhood in analysing the child's thoughts. Dolto's educational thinking was inspired by Célestin Freinet, Alfred Adler and Alexander S. Neill. An important mentor was Édouard Pichon, whose consultancy at the Trousseau hospital in Paris she took over in 1940 and ran until 1978. In 1942 she married Boris Dolto (1899-1981), a Russian émigré doctor, with whom she had three children: Yves-Chrisostome, Grégoire and Catherine.
In 1953 Françoise Dolto, Lacan and others quit the SPP in protest against the stronger regimentation of psychoanalytical training and founded the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Ten years later the IPA forbade Françoise Dolto to train analysts, arguing that she influencds her pupils like a guru and did not respect the training rules of the IPA. As a result she and Lacan founded the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964.
At a colloquium on childhood psychosis in 1967, Françoise Dolto presented the famous case of Dominique, a 14-year-old schizophrenic patient whom she successfully treated. Her report on her analysis is a classical text in the field of child analysis. Dolto evolved a personal theory focused on the concepts of the "unconscious body image" and the "symbol-generating castrations"
The body image is the unconscious symbolic incarnation of the desiring being, before it is able to say "I". It is a representation without words reflecting the first relational experiences that develop from physical and psychical needs. Symbol-generating castrations mean the necessary separations from beloved partial objects and the renunciation of the symbiotic participation in the mother's body linked with archaic fantasies of omnipotence - for Dolto the condition of symbolization. By means of these castrations, the child becomes a social being able to verbalise, with an unconscious body image corresponding to its physical ripeness. Psychoses, however, are connected with a mutilated body image, they originate in failed castrations, i. e. fixations or regressions on a former state of object relation.
In 1979 Dolto opened the first Maison Verte in Paris, where children from birth to age three learn to deal with separation experiences in a protected way. The model set a precedent and today there are Maisons Vertes in many countries. Due to her radio programs published in Lorsque l'enfant paraît, Françoise Dolto became the most popular French psychoanalyst. She died at the age of 79 from a serious lung disease. (Top of the article)



Judith Dupont née Dormandi (*1925)

Judith Dupont, the granddaughter of Vilma Kovács and niece of Alice Balint, was born in Budapest. Her mother, Olga Székely-Kovácz, was a painter and sculptor who portrayed numerous psychoanalysts. Her father, László Dormandi, was the owner of the Hungarian publishing house Pantheon and the author of several novels. In the mid-1920s, her parents, whose ancestors were Alsatian and Spanish Jews, converted to the Christian faith.
Judith Dormandi grew up in the house of her grandfather Frédéric Kovács in Budapest, the residence of the psychoanalytic polyclinic and also the home of the Balint family. In 1938, the year of the "Anschluss" of Austria by Nazi Germany, the Dormandis emigrated to Paris, where they survived the German occupation. After the end of the war Judith Dormandi studied medicine in Paris and graduated in pathological anatomy in 1955. One of her fellow students was Jacques Dupont (*1927), a left-wing printer, in whose printing house she had worked and whom she married in 1952. Together they have two children, Hélène (*1955) and Pierre (*1956).
Judith Dupont specialised as a pediatrician before starting a four-year training analysis with Daniel Lagache in 1954. Her supervisors were Juliette Favez-Boutonier, Françoise Dolto and Georges Favez. She became a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France and worked as a child analyst in different institutions, among others at the Centre de Guidance de l'Aisne (directed by Marcelle Geber) and the Centre Etienne-Marcel in Paris. In addition, she established a private practice where she treated adult patients.
In 1969 she founded the journal Le Coq-Héron, where she was a co-editor for many years. One of the journal's main themes is the history of psychoanalysis, namely Hungarian psychoanalysis. Judith Dupont is a French co-translator of the writings of Michael Balint and Sándor Ferenczi and of the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ferenczi. She administered the heritage of Ferenczi in France as well as internationally and, like Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, she has fostered the high appreciation of Ferenczi in France. In 2013 she received the Sigourney Award for outstanding achievement in psychoanalysis. (Top of the article)



Micheline Enriquez née Joly (1931-1987)

Micheline Enriquez was born in Châlons-sur-Marne. She studied psychology in Paris from 1950 to 1954 and subsequently was appointed a psychologist at the mental health clinic of the Faculté de médecine in Paris and at the Versailles Hospital. From 1960 to 1962 she taught projective techniques at the Institute of Psychology at the Sorbonne.
She underwent her training analysis with Serge Leclaire of the Société Française de Psychanalyse, and her supervising analyst was Piera Aulagnier. Later she had a second analysis with Serge Viderman. She became a member of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) founded by Jacques Lacan in 1964. In 1969 she left the EFP and joined the Quatrième Groupe, where she became president in 1986. As well, she was a member of the International Association for the History of Psychanalysis since its foundation in 1985. In 1978 she was awarded the Maurice Bouvet Prize in psychoanalysis for three of her articles published in the review Topique during the 1970s.
In her book Aux carrefours de la haine published in 1984, re-issued in 2001 under the title La souffrance et la haine, Micheline Enriquez provided new insights into paranoia, masochism, and what she referred to, after the Marquis de Sade, as apathy. She showed that paranoiacs and masochists eroticize suffering and hatred, while those who are apathetic reject affects in order to maintain a distance from others, which is essential for them.
Micheline Enriquez was married to Eugène Enriquez (*1931), a pioneer of psychosociology. She died at the age of 56 in an automobile accident.



Solange Faladé (1925-2004)

Solange Adelola Faladé, one of the first African psychoanalysts, was born in Dahomey (now called the Republic of Benin). She was a granddaughter of Behanzin, the last independent king of Abomey. In 1933 she and her brother Max Faladé were sent to attend school in France. Solange Faladé studied medicine in Paris in the beginning of the 1950s and graduated as a doctor in 1955. The subject of her thesis was the psychomotor development of African children from Senegal. Fighting for the independence of the African states, she founded the Fédération des étudiants d'Afrique noire francophone (FEANF) in 1950 and was its first president.
In 1952 Solange Faladé met Jacques Lacan and became his disciple and intimate friend. She underwent her training analysis with Lacan as a candidate of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), her supervising analyst was Françoise Dolto. Another important teacher was Jenny Aubry, whose consultancy at the Fondation Parent-de-Rosan she attended.
At the split of the SFP in 1964, Faladé followed Lacan into the newly established École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), where she was a member of the board from 1967 to 1980. After the dissolution of the EFP and Lacan's death in 1981, she was a co-founder of the only short-lived Centre d'etudes et de recherches freudiennes (CERF), before founding her own school in 1983, the École Freudienne (EF), which she directed until the end of her life. The EF stands in the tradition of Lacan's return to Freud.
Solange Faladé was active in the Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS), she founded the Institut d'ethno-psychopathologie africaine in Paris and was a researcher in anthropology and ethnology at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. In 2003 transcriptions of her seminar held at the EF in 1991/92 and 1992/93 were published under the titel Clinique des névroses. (Top of the article)



Juliette Favez-Boutonier (1903-1994)

Juliette Boutonier, a daughter of teachers, was born in Grasse in the south of France. She attended school in Grasse and Nice and subsequently studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1926 she was one of the first women to take the state doctoral exam in philosophy. She taught at schools in Chartre and Dijon, while studying medicine in Dijon. In 1935 she obtained a job in Paris teaching philosophy and there she met the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache and began psychoanalysis with René Laforgue. She received her training in clinical psychopathology at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris with Georges Heuyer. In 1938 she wrote her medical dissertation on ambivalence, and in 1945 she qualified as a doctor of philosophy. Her award-winning thesis about anxiety - Contribution à la psychologie et à la métaphysique de l'angoisse (published under the title L'angoisse) - was directed by Gaston Bachelard.
In 1946 Juliette Boutonier was elected a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). That same year she founded along with Georges Mauco the Centre psychopédagogique de Claude-Bernard, an institution for children with school problems, where she was medical director in 1946. In 1947 she took over the chair of psychology from Daniel Lagache at the University of Strasbourg. Like Lagache she strived for a synthesis of psychology and psychoanalysis.
In 1952 she married the psychoanalyst Georges Favez (1901-1981). A year later they both left the SPP in protest against the "dictatorship" of Sacha Nacht and his medicalization of psychoanalysis. Together with Lagache, Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto and others they founded the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). As President of the SFP, Juliette Favez-Boutonier fought for the recognition of the SFP by the IPA, but finally participated in the creation of the Association Psychanalytique de France (APF) in 1964, recognized by the IPA in 1965.
In 1955 Juliette Favez-Boutonier was appointed professor of psychology at the Sorbonne. Her main interest was clinical psychology. Like Lagache, she represented the values of a tradition inherited by Pierre Janet. In 1959 she established the first Laboratory of clinical psychology at the Sorbonne, which she led until her retirement in 1974. In 1969 she helped with the creation of the department of Sciences Humaines Cliniques, which was opened at the University of Paris VII. (Top of the article)



Marcelle Geber (1919-2020)

Marcelle Geber was born in Pavillons-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris, as the younger of two sisters. In 1936 she began her medical study in Paris, specialising in psychiatry under Jean Delay and Georges Heuyer. Shocked by methods of psychiatric treatment like straitjacket and insulin coma therapy, she preferred to specialise in paediatrics. After the end of the war, she returned to psychiatry and was a resident in child psychiatry at the Ambroise Paré hospital in Paris from 1947 to 1950. In 1950 she wrote her doctoral thesis L'échec scolaire des enfants surdoués under the supervision of Jenny Aubry.
From 1948 to 1952 Marcelle Geber carried out investigation on the effects of deficient maternal care in early childhood, together with Jenny Aubry and the team of John Bowlby. At the same time she explored, on behalf of the World Health Organization, the development of young children in urban and rural milieu. In 1950 she founded the first of three child guidance clinics in Aisne and was director of the Centre de Guidance de l'Aisne until 1969. She was president of the Association pour la Santé Mentale de l'Enfance and medical director of the Centre Médico-Psycho-Pédagogique at Suresnes (1970-1987).
Marcelle Geber became especially known for her research on comparative developmental psychology in Africa between 1954 and 1992. She started in Kampala, Uganda, where she explored the psychological factors in the aetiology of kwashiorkor (a nutritional deficiency disease), by comparing sick and healthy children. In the following years she continued her research in several African countries, becoming part of an international comparative long-term study. Parallel studies were run by Solange Faladé in Senegal. Marcelle Geber found that African children were in a more advanced state of psychomotor development than European children, particularly marked in the first year of life. She suggested that the difference is attributable to the close body contact between African mothers and their babies throughout the first year. Geber was the first to emphasize that kwashiorkor is not only associated with malnutrition but also with a disturbed mother-child relationship.
Marcelle Geber was married to the Israeli artist Ben Banay (1915-2005). (Top of the article)



Florence Guignard (*1934)

Florence Guignard was born in Geneva, the daughter of Charles Guignard and Marcelle Rau. Her father was a physician, her mother a violinist and music professor. Florence Guignard took singing and piano lessons, before she studied clinical psychology at the University of Geneva. She worked alongside with Jean Piaget and directed research for the Fonds national suisse pour la recherche scientifique in the 1960s. In particular, she led a study on symbolization disorders in children with a mental disability.
She started her psychoanalytic training in Geneva at the Société Suisse de Psychanalyse (SSPsa), with Raymond de Saussure, Olivier Flournoy and René Spitz. Then she married Jean Bégoin (*1925), a member of the SSPsa since 1965, with whom she had two children. They moved to Paris, where Florence Bégoin-Guignard continued her psychoanalytic training with Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, Michel Fain, Joyce McDougall and Pierre Luquet. In 1979 she became a member and in 1982 a training analyst of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), of which she was two times the vice-president. She and Jean Bégoin belong to the small group of Kleinians in France and engaged in promoting the understanding of the theories of Melanie Klein and the post-Kleinian thinkers such as Wilfred R. Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Donald Meltzer.
With Annie Anzieu, Florence Guignard created, in 1984, the Association pour la Psychanalyse de l'Enfant and, in 1994, the Société Européenne pour la Psychanalyse de l'Enfant et de l'Adolescent. A member of the IPA Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis (COCAP) since its creation in 1997, she was its chair from 2008 to 2014. In addition, she was the chair of the editorial board of the Review L’Année psychanalytique internationale during six years. Florence Guignard worked in Paris as a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and adults, before retiring to Chandolin, Switzerland, in 2013. The focus of her work lies in the sense of identity, femininity and maternity, the genesis of mental disturbances and problems of the psychoanalytic technique. (Top of the article)



Dominique Guyomard (19?-2015)

Dominique Guyomard studied psychology and received her psychoanalytic training from Octave Mannoni and Françoise Dolto. An important motive in her decision of becoming an analyst was her childhood experience of not having been able to get access to her insane grandmother, whose speaking made no sense to her. Dominique Guyomard became a member of the École Freudienne de Paris founded by Jacques Lacan and later dissolved by him in 1980. She helped to set up the Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychanalytiques (CFRP), which was founded by her husband Patrick Guyomard in 1982, together with Octave and Maud Mannoni. After the dissolution of the CFRP in 1994, she was a founding member of the Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne (SPF), which refers to Lacan's return to Freud and takes greater account of the Anglo-Saxon school.
Dominique Guyomard located her theoretical position between Lacan on the one side and Donald W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein on the other. The focus of her work lies in questions of femininity. She stresses that the feminine super-ego is a maternal superego and women are always in danger to remain riveted to the pre-Oedipal mother in the desire for omnipotence. In her book L'effet-mère, published in 2009, Guyomard dealt with the problems of motherhood and the development of motherliness. In order to understand the narcissistic bond which is characteristic of motherliness, Guyomard created the notion of the "narcissism of bond" ["narcissisme du lien"], situated in the mother-child-dyade and differentiated from the narcissistic object relation [relation narcissique d'objet]. (Top of the article)



Luce Irigaray (*1930)

Link to a photo of Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray, whose work had a remarkable influence on the feminist movement in Europe and the USA, was born in Blaton in Belgium. In 1955 she graduated in philosophy and arts at the Catholic University of Louvain and taught French and Classics in Charleroi and Brussels from 1956 to 1959. Subsequently she moved to Paris to study psychology - with a focus upon psychopathology - and linguistics. At this time she participated in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic seminars and became a disciple of his.
She underwent training analysis with Serge Leclaire and became a member of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) directed by Lacan. She qualified as a doctor of linguistics in 1968 (Le langage des déments) and in psychology in 1974. Her thesis Spéculum de l'autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman), a deconstruction of the phallo- and logocentrism of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Western philosophy, was inspired by Jacques Derrida and earned her recognition as a leading feminist theorist and continental philosopher. The EFP, however, expelled Irigaray and terminated her teaching position at the University of Vincennes (1970-1974).
In 1964 Luce Irigaray started working at the CNRS, a research centre in Paris, where she became Director of Research in Philosophy in 1986. In the 1980s she conducted research on the difference between the language of women and the language of men. In 1982 she held the International Chair in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, which resulted in the publication of her book Éthique de la différence sexuelle (An Ethics of Sexual Difference) in 1984.
In addition to her teaching activities and her psychoanalytic private practice, she was active in the feminist movement, working together with numerous circles of women from different countries and cultures. In the 1980s and 1990s she concentrated on the conversion of her theoretical ideas into political practice.
Luce Irigaray critiques the phallocentric logic of identity, according to which femininity is the negation of the male subject - psychoanalytically: a cavity of the penis. Irigaray deconstructs this mirror image of sexual difference and develops "femininity" as the radically other independent of the logos and his power of definition, taking on ever-new forms between the concepts and images. According to Irigary the girl is "expatriated" to the phallic order through the object change from the mother toward the father. Thus she loses the possibility of a female genealogy and a female desire. The only way out for a woman is the strategy of mimesis, which means submitting herself to the masculine views of women in a playful way. The unfaithful repetition of the views makes visible that women are something other than the view expressed. For Irigaray the autoerotic body experiences of women evade the phallocentric binary oppositions. The result is the "fluidity" and ambiguity of woman's language.
While Irigaray first tried to avoid a definition of femininity by consciously using ambiguities, she later sketched essential formulations of femininity. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference she pleaded for a non-complementary sexual difference, regarding each of the sexes as a whole and different from another. To attain a female subject position, women must create their own species by way of female genealogies and a positive mother/daughter relationship. Luce Irigaray even goes so far as to put into play the urgency of female divinity. (Top of the article)



Évelyne Kestemberg née Hassin (1918-1989)

Évelyne Kestemberg was born in Constantinople as the daughter of a French merchant and his Jewish-Russian wife. Soon after her birth her parents moved to Paris, where Évelyne Hassin attended high school with Juliette Favez-Boutonier as her philosophy teacher. She earned a university degree in philosophy, before emigrating from occupied France to Mexico in 1942. In Mexico she met Jean Kestemberg (1912-1975), a Polish Jew and Spanish Civil War combatant, who also fled the Nazis and soon became her husband.
In 1945 Évelyne and Jean Kestemberg returned to France, where they joined the Communist Party and took up psychoanalytic training. When the party leaders required the members to dissociate themselves from the Freudian theory, the Kestembergs as well as Serge Lebovici signed a manifesto in 1949, in which psychoanalysis was condemned to be a reactionary ideology. Later they retracted their position and left the Communist party.
Évelyne Kestemberg underwent training analysis with Marc Schlumberger and became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1953. The same year she and her husband adopted a little girl, Catherine, who later became herself an analyst. Although she had no medical training, Évelyne Kestemberg was appointed training analyst in 1963.
She practised as a child analyst at the Centre psychopédagogique Claude-Bernard and worked closely with Serge Lebovici and René Diatkine at the Centre Alfred-Binet, a psychiatric department for children and adolescents founded in 1956. She was a co-founder of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis in 1966 and President of the SPP from 1971 to 1973. After the death of her husband she continued his task at the Centre de psychanalyse et de psychothérapie du XIIIe for psychotic patients, which she directed until 1988.
The work of Évelyne Kestemberg was influenced by the ego psychology. She integrated techniques of group therapy into her analytic practice and together with Diatkine, Lebovici and others created individual psychoanalytic psychodrama. In her writings she devoted herself particularly to the problems of adolescents, the anorexia and the "cold psychosis", i. e. mental disorders with a splitting of the ego but without delusions.
The concept of the cold or non-delusional psychosis was introduced by Jean and Évelyne Kestemberg and Simone Decobert in their book La faim et le corps, which deals with the mental anorexia, the model of the cold psychosis. Typical for the anorexia is the denial of the real body and its idealizing as an unreal and inaccessible object. The satisfactory incorporation is replaced by the lust of hunger and emptiness. With the cold psychosis the ego is pervaded by the ideal ego, and the external object constitutes a projection of the ideal ego. The only possible relation is a fetishistic relation to the object. (Top of the article)



Julia Kristeva (*1941)

Julia Kristeva stands as one of the foremost French proponents of post-structuralism. She was born in Sliven in Bulgaria as the daughter of Stoyan and Christine Kristev; her father was a physician and a theologian. After studying linguistics at the University of Sofia, she came to Paris at the end of 1965. Under the supervision of Lucien Goldmann she completed her doctoral thesis Le texte du roman in 1968.
She joined Tel Quel, a literary journal inspired by Jacques Derrida, and was a leading member of the editorial board from 1970 to 1982, the year of the journal's discontinuation. In 1967 she married Philippe Sollers (1936-2023), the chief editor of Tel Quel. Hoping to connect the aesthetic avant-garde with the revolutionary political movement, the Tel Quel group was in contact with the Communist Party and visited Mao's China in 1974. Following this trip Julia Kristeva wrote her book Des chinoises, in which she compared the role of women in Chinese and Western culture.
In 1973 Julia Kristva finished her habilitation thesis La révolution du langage poétique and became Professor of Linguistics at the University Paris VII-Denis Diderot. In the midst of the 1970s she went into analysis with Ilse Barande. In 1987 she became an associate member, in 1997 a full member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.
Kristeva's theoretical work centres on the investigation of the social symbolic systems. With the help of psychoanalysis and self-reflective structural linguistics, she explores the unconscious mechanisms of symbolic structures, especially those of the language. For Kristeva the symbolic is not a static system but a process, which only functions by excluding something that she identifies, like Lacan, with the feminine. The excluded undermines the structures and evades a positive definition.
Julia Kristeva presented the basic ideas of her complex thoughts in her most comprehensive theoretical work, Revolution in Poetic Language, which gave her an international reputation. Starting from the poetry of Lautréamont and Mallarmé as well as the theories of Freud and Lacan, she sketches a thinking of heterogeneity by creating concepts like "the semiotic", "intertextuality" and "subject-in-process" which break open the ostensible coherence of the phallic structured symbolic order. Thus she makes visible the trace of the pre-symbolic - the bodily ground of speech and desire - within the symbolic.
According to her, the unconscious is not only structured like a language, as Lacan postulated, but in addition it also contains the memory of the pre-lingual. Kristeva called this infantile pre-symbolic - first undifferentiated and then accentuated by drive cathexis - the semiotic maternal "chora". After the entry into the symbolic order, the ego remains furthermore exposed to the operations of the semiotic - a source of psychosis as well as of creativity. Based on her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva developed her theory of abjection in the 1980s. Abjection originates in the primal repression, when the child has to separate from the mother in order to become subject of the symbolic. What has been the mother, will turn into an abject. The abject, i. e. everything that is filthy and produces feelings of loathing, confronts us with the fragile boundary between me and other.
Kristeva's later texts are more concrete and more personal: Psychoanalytic case studies and literary analysis complement each other. Her studies on famous women, especially her trilogy Female genius about the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and the writer Colette, as well as her novels can also be read as autobiographical projects. According to Kristeva, the analyst writes his "secret autobiography" as metamorphized in each of his interpretations (The secrets of an analyst). (Top of the article)



Paulette Laforgue née Erickson (1897-1983)

Paulette Erickson [Erichson, Erikson, Ericson], the daughter of a pharmacist in Colmar in Alsace, was a teacher before she began practising psychoanalysis. In the early 1920s she was associated with the Theosophical Society in Strasbourg, where she met René Laforgue (1894-1962), psychiatrist and later a co-founder and president of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). They married in 1922 and moved to Paris, where René Laforgue entered in analysis with Eugénie Sokolnicka.
In 1925 Paulette Laforgue had to undergo a hysterectomy and subsequently could no longer bear children. At the instigation of her husband she also underwent analysis with Sokolnicka. After supervision with Heinz Hartmann, she became a member of the SPP in 1929, where she was the only pedagogue during the first years. She worked along with Sophie Morgenstern at Georges Heuyer's clinic for infantile neuropsychiatry at La Salpêtrière in Paris. Like Marie Bonaparte and Anne Berman she translated Sigmund Freud's texts into French. In 1938 René Laforgue divorced her and later married his former patient Délia Clauzel. Paulette Laforgue was listed as a member of the SPP until 1957. (Top of the article)



Ruth Lebovici née Roos (1913-2003)

The French analyst Ruth Lebovici was born in Alsace as the daughter of Jewish parents. She first taught mathematics, when she married Serge Lebovici (1915-2000) in 1942, who later became a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and president of the IPA. Their daughters Marianne and Élisabeth were born in 1943 and 1953. During the German occupation, Ruth and Serge Lebovici joined the Résistance. After the liberation in 1945 they both became temporary members of the French Communist Party - as well as Jean and Évelyne Kestemberg.
After the end of the war Ruth Lebovici decided to train as a psychoanalyst. She underwent training analysis with Marc Schlumberger and was supervised by Jacques Lacan. She became, like her husband, a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and stayed there after the 1953 split. Serge Lebovici and Sacha Nacht adopted a radical position in favor of strict medically-oriented standards for training and were opposed to Daniel Lagache, Lacan and the cofounders of the Société française de psychanalyse.
Particularly known is Ruth Lebovici's paper Perversion sexuelle transitoire au cours d'un traitement psychanalytique about a patient with phobia, who developed a transitory sexual perversion in the course of a psychoanalytic treatment. Lacan discussed in an exemplary way Lebovici's case study in his Seminar IV on object-relations (1956-1957), proposing that the analyst's interpretation of the transference triggered the acting out of the patient's perverse fantasy. Such sort of "artefacts pervers", he argued, were the outcome of an analysis in which the place of the symbolic in the relation analyst-analysand was ignored. (Top of the article)



Rosine Lefort (1920-2007)

The French child analyst Rosine Lefort, a daughter of the well-known journalist Geneviève Tabouis, began her analysis with Jacques Lacan in 1950. At the same time she worked at the Fondation Parent de Rosan in Paris, a public institution for the temporary care of young children who had been abandoned by their mothers. Within the frame of a research project on hospitalism directed by Jenny Aubry, Rosine Lefort conducted the treatment of several psychotic and autistic infants, beginning in 1951: Nadia, Marie-Françoise, Robert the "wolf child", and Maryse. Two of these cases (Nadia and Robert) were presented by Rosine Lefort at Lacan's Seminar, and they are regarded as remarkably lucid examples of the clinical application of Lacanian concepts.
Rosine Lefort worked closely together with her husband, the psychoanalyst Robert Lefort (1923-2007), with whom she published her books. Rosine Lefort's case reports show clearly the existential function of the signifier in the subjectivation. According to the Lacanian terminology, the psychotic is stuck in an unmediated relationship with the Real and cut off from meaningful structures, which proceed via the signifier of the Other. For Lefort the analysis of the preverbal infant is particularly suited to show that the subject, before it speaks, "speaks in the Other", where it finds its significant place.
Rosine Lefort was a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and participated in the foundation of the Centre d'étude et de recherche sur l'enfant dans le discours analytique (Cereda), an international network of Lacanian child analysis. (Top of the article)



Anne Levallois (1935-2006)

Anne Levallois was a jurist before she turned to psychology, anthropology and psychoanalysis in the early 1960s. The mother of three children (her married name was Colot), she participated at that time in literacy campaigns in Senegal. She began to study psychology at Dakar, where she became a disciple of the philosopher Edmond Ortigues and worked along with the psychoanalyst Marie-Cécile Ortigues at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic.
After her return to Paris she completed her diploma in clinical psychology and trained as an analyst with Serge Leclaire. Together with Myriam David and others she explored the relation of single mothers to their first child and subsequently worked as a psychologist at a Salvation Army institution for single mothers. In 1972 she established a psychoanalytic practice in Paris, shortly before she divorced. Anne Levallois was a Lacanian analyst and member of the École Freudienne de Paris (EPF). During the resolution phase of the EPF, however, she belonged to the critics of Jacques Lacan. In 1980 she was a founding member of the Collège de psychanalystes, of which she was Vice President from 1980 to 1984 and President from 1985 to 1987. From 1983 to 1985 she directed the journal Psychanalystes.
Anne Levallois, whose companion for thirty-five years was the historian Dominique Iogna-Prat (*1952), was particularly interested in the relation between psychoanalysis, biography and history. Together with the historian Michel Levallois she conducted research into the life of their great-grand-uncle, the Saint-Simonist Ismaÿl Urbain, son of a Frenchman and a Guyanese woman, who converted to Islam and became an adviser of Napoleon III. Levallois' study on Urbain elucidated the effects of traumatising social conditions on subjectivation.
Further main points of Anne Levallois were tranference phantasies and the signifiers of femininity. An anthology of her texts between 1974 and 2005 was published posthumously under the title Une psychanalyste dans l'histoire. (Top of the article)



Maud Mannoni née van der Spoel (1923-1998)

Maud Mannoni was born Magdalena van der Spoel in the Belgian city of Courtrai. She spent her early childhood in Colombo, Ceylon, where her father was general consul of the Netherlands. The return of her family to Europe in 1929 signified for the little girl the loss of her childhood paradise. She forgot her mother tongue English and the Singhalese words of her nurse when she lived with her French speaking grandfather, and in her unloved new residence in Amsterdam she had to learn Dutch. These experiences shaped Maud Mannoni's central question: how to refind the lost language of childhood.
After attending a convent school in Antwerp, Magdalena van der Spoel studied criminology in Brussels. During World War II she worked with psychotic adolescents at a psychiatric clinic and decided to train as a psychoanalyst. She underwent training analysis with Maurice Dugautiez, the founder of the Association des Psychanalystes de Belgique (later the Société Belge de Psychanalyse), of which she became a member in 1948. The same year she moved to Paris to continue her training with the child analyst Françoise Dolto at the Trousseau hospital. In 1948 she married the philosopher and psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni (1899-1989), an analysand of Jacques Lacan and a left-wing intellectual. During the 1960s Maud Mannoni and her husband engaged themselves in fighting for the independence of Algeria.
In 1950 she met Jacques Lacan, with whom she had her second analysis, and became a Lacanian. She was a member of the Société Française de Psychanalyse, before she followed Lacan into the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. During a stay in London she became acquainted with the concepts of Donald W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein and the anti-psychiatry of Ronald D. Laing. Maud Mannoni did not share Laing's radical anti-institutional attitude, developing her own approach of the "exploded institution" ("institution éclaté"), i. e. an institution open to the outer world, but staying at the same time a protected space.
Maud Mannoni was able to realise her ideas in 1969 by founding the Experimental school of Bonneuil along with Robert Lefort, a residential community for psychotic, retarded and troubled children and adolescents in Bonneuil-sur-Marne. It was the only anti-psychiatric project in France inspired by the British model. As the directrice of this school she put into practice Lacanian psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatric ideas and Winnicott's concept of a "supporting environment".
For Mannoni the disturbed child is a "spokesperson" for the dysfunctional family, whose history is written in the child's symptoms and expressions. In her view this pathogenic development is reinforced by social exclusion mechanisms. At Bonneuil the children were encouraged to give voice to their fears, destructive feelings and fantasies. Central to Mannoni's therapeutic approach is the cultivation of the capacity to play that makes loss bearable. She seeks to free the child from the suffocating effect of the anxiety and desires of the Other - first of all his mother - by helping him find a personal language in the symbolic order.
In 1982, two years upon the dissolution of the EFP, Maud Mannoni established, together with Octave Mannoni and Patrick Guyomard, the Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychanalytiques (CFRP) in Paris. During the dissolution process of the CFRP in 1994, Maud Mannoni founded her own association, Éspace analytique, which she directed until her sudden death from heart disease. (Top of the article)



Joyce McDougall née Carrington (1920-2011)

Photo: Jacques Sassier
© Éditions Gallimard

Hilary Joyce Carrington was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, the elder of two daughters of the merchant Harold Carrington. Her father was a New Zealander, her mother Lillian Blackler an Englishwoman. Following her study of psychology in Dunedin, Joyce Carrington worked as a vocational and family counsellor in Dunedin and Auckland. In 1941 she married the educationist Jimmy McDougall (†1996), their son Martin was born in 1952, their daughter Rohan three years later.
In 1950 the family settled in England. Joyce McDougall began to train as a child analyst with Anna Freud in London and entered into analysis with John Pratt. She met Donald W. Winnicott and attended his course in woman's psychosexuality. When her husband was offered an education job with Unesco in 1952, the family moved to Paris, where Joyce McDougall continued her training at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). She underwent training analysis with Marc Schlumberger and was appointed training and supervising analyst of the SPP in 1961. In 1969 she became the scientific secretary of the SPP. She underwent another analysis with Michel Renard.
In the early 1950s she met Sidney Stewart (1920-1997), an American writer and psychoanalyst, who became her second life partner after her separation from Jimmy McDougall. She established a child-therapeutic practice and analysed, under the supervision of Serge Lebovici, a nine-and-a-half-year-old psychotic boy, whose case she described in her book Dialogue with Sammy.
The thinking of Joyce McDougall was most of all influenced by the ideas of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Main themes in here writings are: female homosexuality - for the first time discussed by her in her study Homosexuality in women, as well psychosomatic illness and issues of sexual identity and creativity.
In her first book Plea for a Measure of Abnormality she suggested her renowned revision of the Freudian concept of perversion. In Joyce McDougall's view the classical division into neurosis, psychosis and perversion is too rigid to understand sexual deviations, which are linked with narcissistic personality disorders. Instead of "perversion" she prefered the term "neosexualities", i. e. innovative sexual creations as attempts at self-cure. Joyce McDougall was convinced that all sexual behaviour so bizarre and strange as it might be serves for psychic survival. She pleaded to accept "deviant" sexuality and not to adapt it to norms by psychoanalysis.
In Joyce McDougall's work psychic reality appears like a stage on which the narcissistic and oedipal dramas are played out. Referring to Melanie Klein and Piera Aulagnier, she conceived the metaphor of an inner theatre particularly in her books Theaters of the Mind and Theaters of the Body. Her book The Many Faces of Eros deals with the varied forms of human sexuality basing on an inborn bisexuality. For McDougall female homosexuality, for instance, is no pathological deviation, because homosexual wishes of a girl toward her mother are a fundamental component of female development. Only the shaping of these wishes is different in the lives of homosexual and heterosexual women.
Joyce McDougall was a member of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies and the New York Freudian Society. She died at the age of 91 in London. (Top of the article)



Judith Miller née Bataille (1941-2017)

Judith Sophie Miller was born in Cagnes-sur-Mer as the daughter of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille, née Maklès, a French actress of Romanian-Jewish descent. At the time of Judith's birth her mother was still married to Georges Bataille, whom she divorced in 1946. She married Jacques Lacan in 1953. Unlike her half-sister Laurence Bataille who had received formal psychoanalytic training, Judith Bataille-Lacan did not undergo analysis, but formed part of the circle of Lacan's disciples since her teens.
She attended the Collège Sévigné in Paris and was placed at the top of her year in the philosophy agrégation in 1966. That same year she married the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller (*1944), father of her children Eve and Luc. In 1969, she began lecturing at the philosophy department of the new experimental university Paris VIII (Vincennes). Her involvement in the Gauche Prolétarienne and her commitment to Maoism in a press interview led to her dismissal from Vincenne in 1970, which was only lifted under the socialist government in 1981.
Judith Miller played an important role in the Lacanian movement. She directed the Fondation du Champ freudien, established by Lacan in 1979, and like Jacques-Alain Miller she was one of the leading figures in the École de la Cause freudienne (ECF), founded in 1981. In 1982, along with Robert and Rosine Lefort, she initiated Céréda, an international network of Lacanian child analysis.



Catherine Millot (*1944)

The Lacanian psychoanalyst and author Catherine Millot, born in the French départment of Ain, spent her childhood and youth in the capitals of Europe, where her father André Millot was accredited as an ambassador. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, before she began an analysis with Jacques Lacan in 1971, which lasted eight years. During her analysis she became his lover. From 1977 until 1980 she was a member of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). After its dissolution she became a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne (ECF), where she underwent control analysis with Michel Silvestre and a second analysis with Brigitte Lemérer. She left the ECF in 1989.
Catherine Millot became already known beyond the borders of France for her thesis published in 1979 under the title Freud anti-pédagogue. She stated that pedagogy which bases on psychoanalysis must end up in a blind alley, because the position of a child analyst is not compatible with that of a pedagogue. The latter cannot represent a neutral mirror, for he always has - consciously or unconsciously - an educational intention. Unlike the pedagogue, a psychoanalyst has no certainties or solutions to offer, unless it is the realization of an indelible lack and thus the liberation from depending on the look of the Other. In her partly autobiographical book Abîmes ordinaires Catherine Millot shows that emptiness and loss of self can become the source of inner peace and renewal.
Well known are Millot's theses on transsexuality. In her essay on transsexuality, Horsexe, she maintains that a woman's transsexuality reveals a hysterical process, while a man's transsexuality bases on a psychotic identification with the ideal woman, i. e. an inaccessible completeness.
Further subjects of Catherine Millot's work are the conditions of literary creativity as well as perversion or homosexuality in the literature. Beside her books she published numerous articles in the Lacanian journals Sicilet and Ornicar?. Since 1975 she has been Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris-VIII. (Top of the article)



Michèle Montrelay née Navratil (1934-2023)

Link to a photo of Michèle Montrelay

Michèle Montrelay was the eldest of three children of Charlotte Lebaudy and Michel Navratil, professor of philosophy and psychology, who was a survivor of the sinking of Titanic. She studied philosophy and worked as a graphologist and model before she turned to psychoanalysis. She underwent training analysis with Serge Leclaire, supervisory analysis with Françoise Dolto, and became a member of the Lacanian society École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1965. The same year she presented her paper on Marguerite Duras' novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein in the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, which was the beginning of her theoretical examination of femininity. In 1970 her most important study Recherches sur la féminité (Inquiry into femininity) appeared in Jacques Derrida's journal Critique. In it, Montrelay takes up the 1920s Freud-Jones controversy about femininity from a structural psychoanalytic perspective and sketches her concept of a precocious "concentric" (circular oral-anal-vaginal) femininity.
She shows that the girl, in contrast to the boy, cannot differentiate herself from the body of the mother, because the real of the maternal body remains present in her own body. Thus the symbolic castration i. e. the exclusion of the maternal body as an object of desire, a repression that inaugurates the symbolization, is incomplete in women. The result is a concentric psychic economy, which is, according to Montrelay, characterized by idle representations and plenitude in the real. Instead of a lack, which initiates the economy of wishing and speaking, there is an object in excess and the symbolic order only a façade. The privileged relationship of women to the body however implies also a frightening too great closeness to the objects. The women's access to symbolization depends on the transition into the phallocentric economy by substituting the phallic signifier for the concentric representatives. Thus femininity is repressed and can be symbolized.
Michèle Montrelay's essays on femininity, published in 1977 under the title L'ombre et le nom, transcend Lacan's phallocentrism. In 1979 Lacan forbade her to conduct a seminar on male sexuality at his institute at the University of Vincennes, declaring that if women are not entirely governed by the phallic function, they can have nothing to say about it.
After Lacan had dissolved the EFP in 1980, Michèle Montrelay no longer belonged to a psychoanalytic association. From 2016 to 2018 she held seminars at the Cercle Freudien. She was married to her colleague Robert Montrelay and had three children. (Top of the article)



Sophie Morgenstern née Kabatschnik (1875-1940)

Sophie Morgenstern, one of the pioneering figures of child psychoanalysis in France, was born into a Jewish family in Grodno in Poland. She was married to Abraham Morgenstern, her daughter Laure was born in 1897. In 1906 Sophie Morgenstern began her medical studies at Zurich and graduated with a thesis on the subject of mineral elements of the thyroid glands (Ueber einige mineralische Bestandteile der Schilddrüse) in 1912. She then left Switzerland for Russia and Poland but returned to Zurich in 1915 in order to work as an assistant physician at the psychiatric asylum of Burghölzli under Eugen Bleuler. In 1924 she moved to France, where she became the assistant of Georges Heuyer at his clinic for infantile neuropsychiatry at La Salpêtrière in Paris. She held the position from 1925 until her death in 1940.
Sophie Morgenstern underwent training analysis with Eugénie Sokolnicka and became a full member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1929. She was also a member of the group Évolution psychiatrique. She taught about infantile neuroses at the Institute of Psychoanalysis of the SPP. Her most illustrious student was Françoise Dolto.
Like Anna Freud, she believed that children's neurosis had the same structure and the same origins as those of adults. In her 1927 study on a case of a child suffering from psychogenic mutism (Un cas de mutisme psychogène), she described the use of drawings as a new technique for treating children. She stressed that the children's drawings gave the analyst access to their unconscious and psychic conflicts in a similar way as the dreams and free associations of an adult would do - an insight less familiar at her time than nowadays. The symbolic sense of the imaginative creations of the child was the subject of her main work Psychanalyse infantile, published in 1937 and dedicated to her daughter Laure.
Laure Morgenstern had died during an operation in 1936, and Sophie Morgenstern never got over the loss of her only child. Her husband was already dead, the rest of her family lived in the Polish city of Lwów when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1939. On 13 June 1940 she committed suicide, one day before German troops entered Paris. (Top of the article)



Ilse Odier-Ronjat née Loebell (1883-1965)

Ilse Odier-Ronjat was born Ilse Henriette Catherine Loebell in Freiburg, the daughter of a physician. In 1907, she married the French lawyer and linguist Jules Ronjat (1864-1925), who was from Vienne sur le Rhône. She moved with him to Vienne, where their son Louis was born in 1908. Their second son Pierre died shortly after his birth in 1910.
With the outbreak of World War I, Ilse Ronjat, being German, could not remain in France. She and her husband emigrated to Switzerland and settled in Geneva in 1914, where Jules Ronjat taught linguistics at the university until his death in 1925. In 1927, Ilse Ronjat married the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Charles Odier (1886-1954), who was a co-founder of the Société psychanalytique de Genève in 1920 and of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1926.
In the 1920s, Ilse Ronjat was a candidate at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and underwent control analysis with Karen Horney in 1928. In the same year she became a member of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse (SGPsa) and a pedagogical associate of the Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für Psychoanalyse. Also in 1928, she became a full member of the SPP and moved to Paris with her husband in 1930.
After the beginning of World War II, Ilse and Charles Odier returned to Switzerland and settled in Lausanne. In 1948 her SPP membership was transferred back to the SGPsa. In Lausanne, Charles Odier separated from his wife and lived with the psychoanalyst Germaine Guex until his death. Ilse Odier-Ronjat passed away at the age of 82 in Emmendingen.
In her psychoanalytic work, she particularly addressed the mother-daughter relationship. The term "défoulement" (release) complementary to "refoulement" (repression) originated from Ilse Ronjat, coined by her in her study Le cas de Jeannette. In 1934, together with Charles Odier, she translated Sigmund Freud's work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur into French (Malaise dans la civilisation). (Top of the article)



Marie Moscovici née Bromberg (1932-2015)

Marie Moscovici was the daughter of Jewish-Polish parents who immigrated to France shortly before her birth. The Bromberg family survived the German occupation in Paris under a false name ("Bataille"). Marie Bromberg studied psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne attending lectures and seminars of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. She was working as a sociological research intern at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, when she married Serge Moscovici (1925-2014), a Romanian-Jewish social psychologist with whom she had two sons. Their eldest son Pierre, later a well-known politician, was born in 1957.
In 1965 Marie Moscovici graduated with a thesis about social change and family organisation. She became a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France and was associated with the journals Cahiers de Confrontation and Novelle Revue de Psychanalyse before she founded, together with Jean-Michel Rey, the journal L'Écrit du temps in 1982. In 1994 she created, in collaboration with Pierre Fédida and Patrick Lacoste, L'Inactuel, a journal for "untimely meditations" on psychoanalysis and cultural subjects, where Marie Moscovici was the editor.
The concept of inactuality, understood as the continuance of a past event in the unconscious, was one of the main subjects of Marie Moscovici's writings. Referring to Sigmund Freud's thoughts about murder, war and violence, she explored the inscription of historical events into individual histories and its unconscious transmission from one generation to the next. (Top of the article)



Marie-Cécile Ortigues geb. Gélinier (1915-2008)

Marie-Cécile Ortigues was born in Corbigny (Nièvre), the daughter of Xavier Gélinier and Philomène Bernasse. Her father worked as a mining engineer all over the world, and Marie-Cécile and her brother Octave spent their childhood in Portugal and Mexico. In 1927 the family returned to France and settled in Paris.
Marie-Cécile Gélinier attended an arts and crafts school in Paris and received her nurse diploma in Lyon (1943) before studying psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1948 to 1957. At the same time, she received psychoanalytic training from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. Starting in 1947, she underwent analysis with Octave Mannoni, followed by analyses with Odette Codet and Marc Schlumberger. Particularly interested in child analysis, she worked at the Centre psychopédagogique de Claude-Bernard in Paris. Her supervisor was the child analyst Françoise Dolto.
In 1954 she married the theologian and philosopher Edmond Ortigues (1917-2005), her daughter Isabelle was born in 1958, her son Vincent in 1960. In 1961 she and her husband went to Senegal, where Edmond Ortigues became a professor of philosophy at the University of Dakar. Marie-Cécile Ortigues worked from 1962 to 1966 in the team of Henri Collomb at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar. In 1966 Edmond Ortigues was made professor at the University of Rennes, and in 1976 the couple finally settled in Paris. In addition to her clinical work in psychiatry and psychoanalytic private practice, Marie-Cécile Ortigues carried out training in transcultural psychotherapy for psychologists, psychiatrists and pediatricians.
Her dissertation Le complexe d’Œdipe et acculturation (1965) and the book Œdipe africain (1966) she wrote with her husband were primarily based on her clinical experiences as an analyst in Senegal. Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, taking a Lacanian-inspired approach, concluded that the Oedipus complex structure exists in Africa, but not in the same way as in Europe. Special features are for example the assimilation of the father figure with ancestors and spirits and the displacement of rivalry onto the "brothers", the importance of a person’s position in the social and mythical structure, and the establishment of the symbolic order by initiation and other rituals. (Top of the article)



Gisela Pankow (1914-1998)

Gisela Pankow was born in Düsseldorf and grew up in a liberal anti-fascist family. She studied mathematics and physics (plus geography and philosophy) at the University of Berlin, worked as a private teacher and statistic researcher, before she began in 1943 her medical training in Tübingen. Since 1946 she participated in the constitutional biological research of Ernst Kretschmer, whose assistant she became in 1949 after qualifying as a doctor at the University of Tübingen. In 1951 she went to Paris and continued her research at the Hôpital de la Pitié and the University of Paris, where she obtained the French doctorate in science in 1953.
In 1944 Gisela Pankow took up psychoanalytic training in Tübingen, first with Luise Weizsäcker, then with Käthe Weizsäcker-Hoss, an anthropologically oriented Jungian - both were members of the German Institute for Psychological and Psychotherapeutic Research (Göring Institute) - and finally with Ernst Blum in Berne. In France she conducted a number of supervised analyses with Jacques Lacan, Françoise Dolto and Daniel Lagache and became a member of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) in 1953.
In the 1950s Gisela Pankow converted to Catholicism. After giving a series of conferences in Australia and spending a year of research and teaching in the United States, she returned to Paris in 1957. There she introduced a private seminar on Psychothérapie analytique des psychoses in 1958 and broke with the SFP in 1959. She taught at the University Saint-Antoine (1957-1981) and the Sainte Anne Hospital (1981-1992) in Paris as well as at the University of Bonn (1960-1970).
Gisela Pankow's main area of interest was the analysis of psychosis. Basing on the Freudian theory and on phenomenology, she developed her conception of an "image of the body", which was inspired by Françoise Dolto's idea of the unconscious body image. According to Pankow the body image serves two symbolic functions: The first ensures the recognition of spatial and formal structure (incorporating a dialectic of inside and outside, and part and whole), the second involves the content and meaning of that structure. Thus the body image is the basis of the ego and its relation to the other.
The body image of a psychotic is disturbed. It is radically dissociated in "nuclear psychoses" (schizophrenia) with disturbances of the first function, whereas in "marginal psychoses" (hysterical psychoses), which concern the second function, the body image is only partially affected. The objective of the cure is the restoration of the symbolic structures of the body image through a reintegration of the excluded. For this purpose Gisela Pankow introduced her original technique involving modelling clay as a mediating element. (Top of the article)



Catherine Parat (1917-2014)

Catherine J. Luquet-Parat, born in Paris, was a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) until 2011. She was married to the psychoanalyst Pierre Luquet (1918-2000). In 1972 she founded, together with Pierre Marty, Michel d'Uzan, Michel Fain, Denise Braunschweig and Christian David, the Institut de Psychosomatique de Paris. Her study L'ordinaire du psychosomaticien is considered as an eminent contribution to the psychosomatic metapsychology.
Catherine Parat's work centres on masochism, female sexuality, and the importance of the affect. A collection of her papers was published in 1995 under the title L'affect partagé. Best known is Catherine Parat's conception of "basic transference" ("transfert de base"), designating the patient's spontaneous positive cathexis of the person of the analyst. Parat stressed the kinship between such a transference cathexis and Sigmund Freud's narcissistic object-choice.
One of her earlier essays, Le changement d'objet, published in 1964 in the illustrious volume Recherches psychanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité féminine (Female Sexuality), dealt with the girl's change from the maternal to the paternal object. Based on a Kleinian approach, Catherine Parat stated a normal feminine masochistic move at the time of the Oedipus complex. According to Parat, femininity is achieved when the girl adopts actively the passive or receptive aim, thus diverting earlier active sadistic impulses directed toward the father's penis.
Catherine Luquet-Parat served as a training analyst of the SPP until 1997. One of her analysands was André Green, who dedicated his famous study La mère morte to her. (Top of the article)



Ginette Raimbault née Girardey (1924-2014)

The French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ginette Raimbault, born in Belfort (Algiers) as the daughter of a teacher, passed her childhood in Algeria. After receiving a M.Sc. from Columbia University in New York, she studied psychology (diploma in 1949) and medicine in Paris and graduated with a thesis on natural birth in 1956. While studying medicine, she trained as a psychoanalyst and underwent training analysis with Jacques Lacan. In 1951 she was admitted to the Société psychanalytique de Paris, after the split in 1953 she changed to the Société française de psychanalyse and finally became a member of the Lacanian École Freudienne de Paris.
Ginette Raimbault took up her psychiatric training with Jenny Aubry, with whom she worked together for about twenty years. In 1954 she met Michael Balint, and both she and her husband, the psychoanalyst Émile Raimbault (1923-1998), became enthusiastic about Balint's ideas. In 1960 she attended Balint's seminar at the Tavistock Clinic in London and subsequently started, along with her husband, one of the first Balint groups in France. In 1971 she received her licence as a psychiatrist. Since 1961 she worked at the Institut national des sciences et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) in Paris, where she was Directrice of Research beginning in 1985 until her retirement in 1990.
Ginette Raimbault's main area of interest is the psychology of the ill child. She was working with dying children in the nephrology clinic of the Hopital des Enfants-Malades in Paris since 1965 and published several books on themes like mourning, illness and death from the point of view of children and parents. In her book Lorsque l'enfant disparaît, for instance, she reported the traumatic experience of well-known personalities of the 19th and 20th century, who had lost their child, and analysed the various phases and forms of mourning work.
Ginette Raimbault was suffering from Alzheimer's and died at the age of 89 in Paris. (Top of the article)



Blanche Reverchon-Jouve (1879-1974)

Link to Martine Colignon's portrait of Blanche Reverchon-Jouve

Blanche Reverchon, born in Paris, studied philosophy and medicine and later specialised in neurology under Joseph Babinski. She practised as a psychiatrist in Geneva, when she met the poet Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) in 1921. In 1923 they settled in Paris and were married in 1925. At this time Blanche Reverchon-Jouve qualified as a doctor and entered into analysis with Eugénie Sokolnicka. After visiting Sigmund Freud in Vienna, who obviously encouraged her to become an analyst, she continued her psychoanalytic training supervised by Rudolph Loewenstein. Later she went into further analysis with René Laforgue.
In 1923 Sigmund Freud's essays on sexual theory were published in France, translated by Blanche Reverchon-Jouve (Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité). In 1928 she was accepted as a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. At the time of the 1953 split, Reverchon-Jouve, although a physician herself, was one of the opponents of the medicalization of psychoanalytic training. Together with Daniel Lagache, Jacques Lacan and Françoise Dolto she left the SPP and became a member of the newly founded Société Française de Psychanalyse.
Blanche Reverchon-Jouve introduced her husband to psychoanalysis and supplied him with the clinical material from her psychoanalytic practice, which he transformed to his novels about mad women. His novel Vagadu, for instance, is drawn from his wife's analyses with Sokolnicka and Loewenstein and from the case history of Mademoiselle H., which was also the subject of Blanche and Pierre Jean Jouve's article Moments d'une psychanalyse, published in 1933.
Blanche Reverchon-Jouve's analysands were mainly wealthy patients and artists, among them the Belgian author and psychotherapist Henry Bauchau, who depicted her as "La Sybille" in his first novel La dechirure. (Top of the article)



Élisabeth Roudinesco (*1944)

Élisabeth Roudinesco is best known for her contributions to the history of psychoanalysis. She was born in Paris as the daughter of the psychoanalyst Jenny Aubry and her first husband Alexander Roudinesco. Her father was an immigrated Romanian-Jewish physician, who had converted to Catholicism. When she was a child, her mother sent her into analysis with Françoise Dolto, and at the age of nine she first met Jacques Lacan.
She received her secondary education in Paris at Collège Sévigné and subsequently worked as a teacher in Algeria (1966-1967), before she studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne with a minor in linguistics. Her master degree was supervised by Tzvetan Todorov, and her doctoral thesis by Jean Levaillant at the Université Paris VIII-Vincennes in 1975. Élisabeth Roudinesco was admitted to the Lacanian École freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1969 and underwent analysis with Octave Mannoni. She was a member of the EPF until Lacan dissolved his school in 1980. During the same time she was a member of the KPF.
Roudinesco was affiliated to the editorial board of the journals Action poétique (1969-1979) and L'homme (1997-2002). From 1986 to 1996 she wrote articles for the newspaper Libération, and since then for Le Monde. In 1991 she completed her habilitation on Études d'histoire du freudisme (published in 1994 under the title Généalogies). Since 1991 she has been the Director of Research in History at the University Paris VII. From 2001 to 2007 she was Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. She was elected as Vice President of the Société internationale d'histoire de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse (SIHPP) in 1990, and President in 2007.
Some of her most important books are a history of psychoanalysis in France, the biography of Jacques Lacan and a dictionary of psychoanalysis (with Michel Plon). Her historical approach refers to the works of Henry Ellenberger, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. Élisabeth Roudinesco defends the importance of psychoanalysis against the talk of its "becoming obsolete" and against the hegemony of scientific efficiency criteria.
Since 1986, Élisabeth Roudinesco has been married to Olivier Bétourné (*1951), who was the CEO of Les Éditions du Seuil until 2018. Together they created the Institut Histoire et Lumières de la Pensée in 2021. (Top of the article)



Monique Schneider (*1935)

Monique Schneider was born in Mirecourt in Lorraine. She studied philosophy in Nancy and Paris and passed her agrégation de philosophie at the École Normale Supérieure in 1958. She subsequently taught philosophy at the Lycée Stendhal in Grenoble and since 1965 she was assistant at the Faculty of Arts, University of Grenoble. In 1970, she was appointed researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. She graduated under the supervision of Paul Ricoeur in 1981, her thesis La réflexion émotionnelle explored the connections between affect and the process of learning.
At the beginning of her teaching career she suffered from insomnia caused by diabolical phantasmas from her childhood, which led to her first analysis. She trained as a psychoanalyst at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris during the 1970s. In 1980 she became a member of the Collège de Psychanalystes, an association founded by practitioners representing various currents of contemporary psychoanalysis. Affiliated with the Lacanian association École de la Cause Freudienne, she practices psychoanalysis in Paris. In addition she taught philosophy at the University Paris VII. She was Directrice of Research at the CNRS until she became an emerita in 2000.
Monique Schneider works at the intersections of psychoanalysis, cultural critique, and philosophy. She has been concerned with questions of trauma, the status of constructions of sexual difference in social discourse and practices of exclusion by psychoanalysis as a patriarchal theory. In her book Généalogie du masculin, for instance, she explored the contradictions of masculinity. Patriarchal metaphors reduce masculinity to phallic symbols of verticality by excluding a devaluated feminine, which is associated with uncontrollability. The result of this is a gap between a man's representation of pleasure as a conquest and his experience of it as an absence of mastery.
In Le paradigme féminin Monique Schneider showed that Freud in his earlier texts used the feminine topography - an opening into an inner room, where "foreign bodies" can be accepted or excluded - as a paradigm of the psychic apparatus and the repression. This "supplementary room" allows another symbolism of femininity than the devaluating phallic metaphor of the feminine sex as a cavity. (Top of the article)



Eugénie Sokolnicka née Kutner (1884-1934)

Eugénie Sokolnicka, born in Warsaw in 1884 (or 1876), was the first practising psychoanalyst in France and a pioneer of child psychoanalysis. She came from a cultivated Jewish family that fought for the Polish independence. Her mother Paulina Flejszer played such an important role in the 1863 uprising that she was honoured with a state funeral. Eugenia Kutner's father, Maurycy Kutner, was a bank clerk.
In 1899 she came to Paris, where she studied biology at the Sorbonne (Lic. ès scienc. 1902) and attended Pierre Janet's lectures on psychology at the Collège de France. She became involved in the Paris section of the Polish Socialist Party, where she met Michal Sokolnicki (1880-1967), a Polish landowner and future historian, politician and private secretary to Józef Piłsudski. She returned with him to Warsaw and they married in 1903. In the following years she wrote a Polish textbook on wildlife and was active in the Polish National Organization (Polska Organizacja Narodowa) and the local League of Women.
In 1911 Eugenia Sokolnicka went to study at the psychiatric clinic of Burghölzli in Zürich and became a member of the Zürich IPA group in 1912. She met Carl Gustav Jung and probably became his student and maybe even his analysand. After Jung's break with Sigmund Freud she decided to go to Vienna and began in 1914 her analysis with Freud. This lasted three months and was broken off by Freud, who did not like her. Sokolnicka attended the sessions of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and became a member in 1916. During this period she separated from her husband.
In 1914, on Freud's advice, she moved to Munich, where Felix Böhm underwent analysis with her. During the First World War she practised in Warsaw and Zürich. In 1917 she tried to found a psychoanalytic society in Warsaw but failed. After the war she traveled to Budapest in 1920 and underwent analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, which lasted about a year. According to Ferenczi, Sokolnicka showed, among others, a strong feeling of superiority as well as depressive and suicidal tendencies. But he also described her as a sensitive and technically gifted analyst.
In 1921 she returned to Paris to organize the psychoanalytic movement in France. As the only training analyst before Rudolph Loewenstein's arrival in 1925, she trained the first generation of French analysts. Among others, René Laforgue and Paulette Laforgue, Édouard Pichon, Paul Schiff, Blanche Reverchon-Jouve and Sophie Morgenstern were her analysands. She delivered lectures at the École des Hautes Études Sociales between 1922 and 1923 and was admitted to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital by Georges Heuyer. In 1926 Sokolnicka was one of the founders of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, where she was appointed Vice-President, a post she held for two years.
Eugénie Sokolnicka was especially welcomed by the literary milieu of Paris. A circle of authors of the Nouvelle Revue Française met at her home each week to discuss psychoanalytic questions with her. Among them was André Gide, who had a few analysis sessions with Sokolnicka in 1922 and depicted her as "Doctoresse Sophroniska" in his novel The Counterfeiters. In it he referred to Sokolnicka's famous healing of a childhood obsessional neurosis (1920), which he turned into an abject failure.
Eugénie Sokolnicka's patient was a ten year-old boy from Minsk, who suffered from a touch phobia and had developed extremely restrictive rituals with which he reduced his mother to a state of slavery. During a six-week analysis Sokolnicka revealed the sexual implication of the boy's symptoms, which disappeared after that. This rapid cure encouraged Sokolnicka to create a minimal analysis, which sees as its end the disappearance of symptoms, while a maximal analysis includes the freeing of the ability to love and the avoidance of repetition.
Although she was regarded as a gifted clinician, Eugénie Sokolnicka lost her position at Sainte-Anne in 1923. She was removed from the hospital by the new director Henri Claude, who did not accept non-physician analysts. Sokolnicka focused on her own private practice, but her clientele diminished over the years. In the beginning of the 1930s she played no longer an important role in the psychoanalytic movement. The position of Freud's legitimate representative in France was taken over by Marie Bonaparte. Poverty, growing depressions, the threat from Nazism in Germany and a sense of rootlessness weighed on her and, in 1934, she took her own life. (Top of the article)



Anne-Lise Stern (1921-2013)

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The child analyst Anne-Lise Stern was born in Berlin and grew up in Mannheim. When Hitler came to power, her father Heinrich Stern, a Jewish-German psychiatrist and Marxist, emigrated with his family to France in 1933. Anne-Lise Stern began to study medicine, but in 1944 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. From there she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, Raguhn and Theresienstadt. She survived the concentration camp and returned to France in 1945.
After the end of the war, Anne-Lise Stern studied psychology and trained as a psychoanalyst, initially with Maurice Bouvet, then with Françoise Dolto and finally with Jacques Lacan. She became an adherent of Lacan and member of the École Freudienne de Paris. For Anne-Lise Stern Lacan's "return to Freud" is the psychoanalysis for the After-Auschwitz.
She worked with psychotic, hospitalised or abandoned children, first at the Bichat hospital and from 1953 to 1968 at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades in Paris, where she cooperated with Jenny Aubry. Inspired by the 1968 student movement, she participated from 1969 to 1972 in the Laboratoire de psychanalyse in Paris for the treatment of patients without means, financed with German reparation money. From 1972 to 1978 she was appointed as a psychotherapist in the department for drug addicts led by Claude Olievenstein at the Marmottan hospital.
The upsurge of Holocaust negationism in France caused Anne-Lise Stern to establish a seminar in 1979, where actual contemporary documents and its relations to the Holocaust were discussed. Since 1991, the bi-monthly seminar called Camps, histoire, psychanalyse - leur nouage dans l'actualité européenne has taken place at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.
In 1994 Stern`s book Le savoir-déporté was published, containing besides her main articles from 1963 to 2003 a report of her experiences in the concentration camp. (Top of the article)



Maria Torok (1925-1998)

Maria Torok's work stands in the tradition of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. Mária Török, the daughter of a Jewish grand bourgeois family, was born in Budapest, where she grew up and survived the German occupation during the war. In 1947 she moved to Paris, where she trained and worked as a chemical technical assistant. In the beginning of the 1950s she studied psychology at the Sorbonne, received a bachelor's degree in 1955 and then worked as a psychological counsellor in nursery schools.
She went into analysis with Bela Grunberger, who also came from Hungary, and later with Margaret Clark-Williams. In 1956 she became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and worked as a child analyst in social-service agencies until 1967.
In 1950 she met the Hungarian-Jewish philosopher and analyst Nicolas Abraham (1919-1975), who became her companion. Torok and Abraham developed a phenomenological psychoanalysis and taught it in a seminar they led together from 1959 to 1961 in Paris. Originating in the work of Ferenczi, they conceived their theory of the "crypt" and the "phantom", in order to explain the psychopathogenic potential of unspoken secrets and traumas transmitted to the next generation. Those unbearable experiences are removed from associative links to the rest of psychic life by "preservative repression" and entombed in a "crypt" that functions within the ego as a false unconscious. The children, who unwittingly inherit the secret of their parents by "endocryptic indentification", are haunted by phantoms which cause great disruption in their psychic life.
In her well-noticed essay The illness of mourning and the fantasy of the exquisite corpse Maria Torok described the "illness of mourning" as an effect of unspoken "incorporations" with traumatic effects, by which a subject tries to regain a lost or prohibited object through the magic of hallucinatory. In contrast to the introjection that allows a process of mourning, the incorporation blocks the libidinal cathexis of new objects and thus the psychic development.
Sympathizing with Jacques Derrida's approach of deconstruction, Maria Torok wrote numerous articles for the journal Confrontation. Like Ferenczi she championed a closer contact with the patient, a position that upset her fellow members of the SPP. She made an important contribution to the critic of Freud's concept of femininity with her early paper The meaning of the "penis envy" in women, where she stressed the symptomatic character of the penis envy: The "false" wish for an idealized penis is a defence against masturbatory fantasies by which the girl appropriates the position of her mother.
In 1983 Maria Torok began to collaborate with Nicholas Rand, an American analyst and professor of French literature, whom she married in 1990. She died from leukaemia at the age of 73. (Top of the article)



Nathalie Zaltzman (1933-2009)

Link to a photo of Nathalie Zaltzman

Nathalie Zaltzman was born in Paris as the only daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her family survived the Second World War hidden in the south of France. Nathalie's father Abram Zaltzman, who had been a lawyer in St. Petersburg, owned a papeterie in Paris and a large private library. In the course of the 1950s, Nathalie Zaltzman worked for several years as a Russian translator at UNESCO in Paris, before she began studying psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1963 she married the psychiatrist and analyst François Perrier (1922-1990). They divorced in 1968, a year after their son Alexis was born.
Nathalie Zaltzman received her psychoanalytic training from the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP). After the dissolution of the SFP in 1964 she became a member of the École freudienne de Paris (EFP) founded by Jacques Lacan that same year. Her training analyst was Serge Leclaire. In 1970 she left the EFP and joined the Quatrième groupe founded by Piera Aulagnier, François Perrier and Jean-Paul Valabrega in 1969. Beginning in 1972, Nathalie Zaltzman occupied several positions in the group and was elected President in 1986. From 1974 to 1998 she was an influential member of the editorial committee of the group's journal Topique, where most of her texts were published. Later she was affiliated to the editorial board of the journal Penser/rêver created in 2002.
Nathalie Zaltzman's articles dating back over a period of twenty years were collected and published in 1998 under the title De la guérison psychanalytique. Her main interest centered on the effects of the psychoanalytic cure and the connection between individual and collective destinies. She renewed Sigmund Freud's notion of "Kulturarbeit" (cultural work) as a basis of psychoanalytic healing. For Zaltzman cultural work means an intrapsychic and trans-individual process that modifies individual development and the evolution of human beings in general.
With reference to totalitarian systems, Zaltzman pointed out in La résistance de l'humain that even under inhuman conditions there is an indestructible rest of humanity, which is guaranteed by the psychic-collective heritage of cultural work. Starting again from the idea of cultural work, Nathalie Zaltzman examined in her book L'esprit du mal the dimensions of evil as an unevolving constant of the human condition and the concept of a "crime against humanity". (Top of the article)



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