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Didier Anzieu (1923-1999), a highly esteemed and productive French psychoanalyst, is perhaps best known to English-speaking analysts
through his study of Freud's self-analysis (1959) and his monumental work The Skin Ego (1985). He is the author of numerous books and articles, including those related to his research in groups and psychodrama, studies of creativity, the analysis of Beckett with Bion, and explorations of neighboring fields of inquiry such as attachment, infant research, and communications theory. For this collection, his colleague Catherine Chabert has gathered sixteen of his papers, extending from 1974 to 1999, and contributed an informative introduction. She has elsewhere published a book summarizing Anzieu's career (Chabert 1997).
Anzieu's work carries the mark of a passionate quest that reflects a dual imperative to discover and to heal, commented on after his death by his student and colleague, René Käes, and his peer at the École Normale Superieur, Jean Laplanche.1 In conversations with Gilbert Tarrab (Anzieu 1986), he stated that he had become an analyst to care for his mother, a severely ill woman who in 1931 became a patient of a young Jacques Lacan and served as the subject of Lacan's doctoral thesis in psychiatry. By a strange coincidence, Anzieu himself was referred to Lacan for analysis by his mentor, Daniel Lagache, during his graduate studies at the Sorbonne. Anzieu followed Lagache and Lacan out of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society to the new French Society they founded, but left Lacan when he discovered the connection to his mother, subsequently becoming a harsh critic of his former analyst. After Lacan's expulsion by the IPA, Anzieu remained in the newly formed Association Psychanalytique de France, where he became an influential member, while pursuing for many years an academic career in clinical psychology.
Anzieu shared many interests with his better known “imaginary twin,” André Green (p. 249), notably the themes of le vide (the v