Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Women Psychoanalysts in Canada

Geschichte

Gottfriede Aufreiter (Austria)
Françoise Boulanger
Gabrielle Clerk
Ruth Easser
Nadia Gargour
Josette Garon-Léonard
Mireille Lafortune
Eva P. Lester
Lise Monette
Vilma Popescu (Germany)
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (USA)

Françoise Boulanger née Girard (1920-1954)

Françoise Marguerite Girard was born in France and completed her studies at the Institute of Psychology in Paris with a diploma in Educational Psychology. She was already a professor of psychology when she began her psychoanalytic training at the Institut de Psychanalyse in Paris. A pupil of Jacques Lacan, she became an associate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) in 1953. In 1951, she married the Franco-Canadian psychiatrist Jean Baptiste Boulanger (1922–2000), who was then undergoing his psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in Paris. They moved to Canada in 1953 and participated in establishing the Société Canadienne de Psychanalyse
Françoise Boulanger was enthusiastic about the ideas of Melanie Klein and, in 1949, offered to translate Klein’s book The Psycho-Analysis of Children into French. Melanie Klein had engaged Lacan as the translator, but he lost interest in the translation and passed the work on to Françoise Boulanger and her husband. Although Françoise Boulanger did not live to see the publication of La psychanalyse des enfants in 1959 - having died prematurely following surgery - her initiative played a decisive role in introducing Klein's ideas to the French-speaking world. (Top of the article)



Gabrielle Clerk née Brunet (1923-2012)

Gabrielle Clerk, a pioneer of Canadian psychoanalysis, was born in Ottawa. Her father Raymond Brunet was a construction contractor and Mayor of Hull, Québec, in the 1940s. In 1940, Gabrielle Brunet began studying psychology at the Université de Montréal, where she obtained a license in psychology in 1948 and a PhD in 1953. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the prognostic value of the Rorschach test. In 1949, she began her academic career as an associate professor at the Université de Montréal's Institute of Psychology where she then taught clinical psychology with a psychoanalytic orientation as a full professor from 1960 until her retirement in 1987. In addition she consulted at Montreal Children's Hospital.
Also in 1949, Gabrielle Brunet married Marc Clerk (1923–2018). They had two children, Nathalie (b. 1950) and David (b.1952).
Gabrielle Clerk obtained her psychoanalytic training at the Institut Canadien de Psychanalyse where, in 1968, she became the first woman in Canada to be licensed as a psychoanalyst. She specialised in psychoanalysis of adults and children and was responsible for the training of child analysts in the Société Canadienne de Psychanalyse. Her teaching focused on projective techniques, child and adolescent psychopathology, research on aggression, and female psychosexuality, emphasising the incorporation of sociological and psychosocial aspects. Her research topics included the role of the mother of the schizophrenic child, object relations and attachment, bisexuality, and fetishism.
In her study La féminisation de la psychologie, Gabrielle Clerk explored the psychoanalytic aspects of the interaction between masculinity and femininity within the sciences, especially psychology. She pointed out the problematic nature of the male-defined principle of objectivity and pleaded for the recognition of a feminine-associated relationship between researchers and their objects.
Gabrielle Clerk died at the age of 89 in Cowansville, Québec. (Top of the article)



Ruth Easser (1922-1975)

Barbara Ruth Easser was born in Toronto into a Jewish working-class family. Her father, Sam Easser, a machinist who had emigrated from Poland to Canada, was active as a trade unionist and socialist. Her mother, Sarah, who also came from Eastern Europe, shared her husband's political ideals. During World War II, Ruth Easser studied medicine at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1945.
She then moved to the United States, where she completed her psychiatric and psychoanalytic training from 1946 to 1949 at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research in New York, which was directed by Sándor Radó. Her training analyst was Fanny von Hann-Kende. At the age of 27, she was certified as a psychoanalyst and opened a private practice in New York. In 1953, Ruth Easser became a training analyst and supervisor at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic, where she served as Admissions Service Supervisor from 1954 to 1967 and taught psychoanalytic technique.
In 1950, she married Stanley R. Lesser (1919–1986), a fellow psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. They raised four children - two adopted daughters and two biological sons. Ruth Easser and Stanley R. Lesser co-authored several psychoanalytic articles. In 1970, they left the U.S. and returned to Toronto, where Ruth Easser became the first female training analyst and supervisor at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, founded the year prior. Until 1975, she also taught psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital.
As a gifted teacher and clinician, she had a profound impact on a generation of postwar psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Her main interest centered on the hysterical and narcissistic personality, the affect development (in the tradition of Radó), and the inhibition of emotions and empathy. Her most important works are Hysterical personality. A re-evaluation (1965, with Lesser), in which she differentiated between hysterical and hysteroid patients; Transference resistance in hysterical character neurosis (1966, with Lesser); and Empathetic inhibition and psychoanalytic technique (1974), which addressed the difficult treatment of narcissistic personality and its marked lack of empathy.
Ruth Easser died of cancer at the age of 53. Her early death left many of her works unpublished. (Top of the article)



Nadia Gargour née Pahilo (1944-1996)

The psychoanalyst Nadia Gargour was born in Egypt. She studied psychology in Montreal and received her BA from the English-language Concordia University in 1978. In 1984, she completed her MA in psychology at the Université de Montréal. Her master's thesis focused on single mothers by choice and their children.
She received her psychoanalytic training at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, which had been established in Montreal in 1961. She became a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, where she was the chief administrator for nearly thirty years.
Nadia Pahilo Gargour was married to Gilbert Gargour, with whom she had two children, Brigitte and Philippe. She died at the age of 52 in a car accident. (Top of the article)



Josette Garon-Léonard

© PUF

The French-Canadian psychoanalyst Josette Garon-Léonard completed her studies at the Département de Philosophie de l'Université de Montréal in 1968. Her dissertation focused on psychoanalysis and art. After her training as a psychoanalyst, she became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal and opened a private practice in Montreal. She was part of the editorial team of the journal Interprétation, and after it ceased publication in 1981, she co-founded the journal Frayages in 1984 together with Jacques Mauger, Lise Monette, and François Peraldi. Three issues were published until 1987. She is also a member of the scientific advisory board of the journal Filigrane. Today, she practices in Outremont, Québec.
A central focus of Josette Garon’s work is the treatment of adults who were sexually abused as children. In her essay Skeletons in the closet, which she presented at the International Conference “Sandor Ferenczi Clínico” in Turin in 2002, Garon discussed the application of Sándor Ferenczi’s trauma theory in the analysis of traumatized adults. At the heart of her work is the concept of transgenerational trauma, which refers to the unconscious transmission of unspoken family secrets and disavowed traumatic events to subsequent generations, leaving behind foreign bodies that cause great disruption in their psychic lives (cf. Maria Torok). (Top of the article)



Mireille Lafortune (1935-1998)

Mireille Lafortune was born in Montreal, the daughter of Omer Lafortune and Mireille née Daoust. In 1956, she married the Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Julien Bigras (1932-1989), who was studying medicine in Montreal at the time. They had three sons: Daniel (*1957), Jean-François (*1961) and Guillaume (*1964). Mireille Bigras completed her studies in psychology at the Université de Montréal in 1958, before she and her husband moved to Paris in 1960. They stayed there for three years, while Julien Bigras completed his psychoanalytic training and became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. The couple divorced in 1967.
Mireille Lafortune underwent training analysis with a member of the Société Canadienne de Psychanalyse (SCP), but as a non-medical "lay analyst," she was not admitted to the SCP. In the late 1960s, she decided to practice as an independent psychoanalyst in Montreal. In 1972, she earned her PhD with a dissertation on the feeling of guilt and the choice of a contraceptive method in women. From 1970 to 1991, she served as a professor of psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where she was one of the first to teach psychoanalysis. In 1988, she participated in founding the Groupe d'Études Psychanalytiques Interdisciplinaires (GÉPI), an association of psychoanalytically-oriented professors at UQAM.
Like François Peraldi, whose Lacanian seminar she attended in Montreal in 1976, Mireille Lafortune was an adherent of Lacanian ideas. She was particularly interested in questions of femininity, which she explored in her essay Le sujet emprisonné, discussing the feminine as a multiple metaphor in psychoanalysis. In this work, she described two types of representations of the feminine: a phallic one and an archaic one, the latter remaining elusive and pointing to a beyond of language (in the sense of Michèle Montrelay). Lafortune was also interested in approaches to qualitative research in psychology, which she addressed in her book Le psychologue pétrifié.
In the 1970s, Mireille Lafortune advocated for the right to abortion and was briefly involved with the doctor Henry Morgentaler (1923-2013), who fought and won this right in Canadian courts. (Top of the article)



Eva P. Lester (1923-2008)

Eva P. Lester was born Evangelie Papamatheaki on the Greek island of Crete. Following WWII, she moved to Athens to study medicine. She specialised in pediatrics and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1954 to work as a psychiatric resident in Buffalo, New York. In 1955, she married civil engineer Murray Lester (1925–2005), and they had three children.
Eva and Murray Lester moved to Canada in 1956 and settled in Montreal. Eva P. Lester joined the staff of the Allen Memorial Institute (the psychiatric division of the Royal Victoria Hospital) as a resident in 1956, and stayed on for four decades. She was the Director of the Child and Adolescent Branch of the Allen Memorial, as well as Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal.
While continuing her psychiatric practice, she trained as a psychoanalyst and became a training analyst, supervisor, and president of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. In 1993, she was a co-founder of the journal Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, where she served as editor-in-chief until her retirement in 2002.
Eva Lester's areas of focus included female sexuality, clinical and theoretical considerations of pregnancy, and differences in transference and countertransference between male and female patients respectively analysts. Her essay The female analyst and the erotized transference received considerable attention. In it, she discussed the observation that erotized transferences from male patients to female analysts occur less frequently than comparable transferences from female patients to male analysts. Lester concluded that the fear of the phallic mother inhibits the development of an erotized transference in male patients toward female analysts.
In her book Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis, co-authored with Glenn Gabbard, she examined sexual and nonsexual boundaries and their violations in psychoanalytic theory and practice. These issues were illustrated with examples from the history of psychoanalysis and from clinical work.
In 1998, she received the Sigourney Award for exceptional contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. (Top of the article)



Lise Monette

The Canadian psychoanalyst Lise Monette taught philosophy at Collège Saint-Denis in Montréal from 1962 to 1966. From 1966 to 1969, she studied with Raymond Aron at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and attended Jacques Lacan’s Seminar. Upon returning to Canada, she taught philosophy at the Cégep de Sorel-Tracy before taking a position at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1970, where she was a professor of philosophy until 1994.
After undergoing a personal analysis, Lise Monette trained in psychoanalysis at the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal (SPM). One of her supervisors was Clifford Scott. She participated in the Lacanian seminar initiated by François Peraldi in 1976 at the Université de Montréal and gained clinical experience at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu psychiatric hospital and the Ste-Justine children’s hospital in Montréal. In 1978, she became a member of the SPM and served from 1988 until her retirement as a training analyst and supervisor at the Institut Psychanalytique de Montréal (IPM). Together with Jacques Mauger, she led an introductory seminar on Lacan’s thought there for several years. From 1991 to 1993, she served as president of the SPM; from 1993 to 1995, she was director of the IPM; from 1997 to 1999, president of the Société Canadienne de Psychanalyse; and beginning in 2003, she directed the Institut Canadien de Psychanalyse for two years. She was also co-editor of the now-defunct journals Frayages and Trans.
The two central themes in Lise Monette’s work are mourning and femininity. She addressed mourning, for instance, in relation to her theses on the melancholic side of the psychoanalytic vocation, countertransference as a process of mourning, and the analysis of melancholic patients (“fidèles de la mort”). Key concepts in her psychoanalytic theory of the feminine - drawing especially on Joan Riviere and Luce Irigaray - include polymorphism, undecidability, and masquerade.
Lise Monette was particularly interested in the epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Since psychoanalytic knowledge concerns the unconscious and the repressed, it can only ever be partial, fragmentary, and conjectural. Her central theses are concisely presented in the essay Pure culture, co-authored with Jacques Mauger, which explores the analyst’s resistance to the psychoanalytic process. (Top of the article)



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