Reports and Short Communications

We ran into a few difficulties in translating the name of our psychoanalytical journal. Should it be “The weather cock”? That seemed a good idea! But it could also simply be “The Heron Cock”. The first translation reminds us of “The Weathermen”, in their 68 version but also in their original version, as fighters for independence. The second translation brings us closer to the everyday considerations of clinical psychoanalytical practice.

In either case, Le Coq-Héron is a psychoanalytical journal, which appears every two or three months, with four to six issues each year. We are the French psychoanalytical journal with the longest tradition, excepting of course the Revue francaise de psychanalyse. But in contrast to the latter, we have a multiple orientation. Protagoras' philosophy was based on the assumption that we are human and every human concern does concern us. We are concerned with psychoanalysis, but also with psychiatry, medicine, pedagogy, sociology, literature, etc. Our journal was created in 1969 by a small group of Parisian mental health workers. Should we say “Once upon a time”?

Once upon a time, Le Coq-Héron had a board composed of a psychologist, three psycho-pedagogues, a social worker and a psychoanalyst, all of them working together in the same child mental health public clinic, le Centre Etienne-Marcel, located in the heart of Paris. Circumstances offered them a certain amount of money. They decided to invest this money in the creation of a journal, which would be strictly internal to the clinic, but it was very quickly distributed to the general public as well.

Le Coq-Héron is the name of a street in Paris, close to the Centre Etienne-Marcel. We all used to meet there. The six who created the journal were equally impressed by this name, Le Coq-Héron, and we still are today. Are we weathermen, simple everyday labourers or both? We most probably are both!

Each year, if not each month and day by day, the editorial staff has become larger, ne