Daniel Lagache (1903–1972)

Daniel Lagache died on 3 December 1972 on his 69th birthday. He was born on 3 December 1903. With his death the psychoanalytical community has lost one of its great figures, the French psychoanalytical movement has lost one of those who made a profound impression on it, and many of us have lost a master and a friend. Lagache demanded and obtained the same qualities from himself as he expected from others—'strictness' and 'liberté d'allure'—two expressions of his which are as good a definition of his own character as they are of the course of his professional existence.

With that in mind, I feel it is worth giving a brief outline of his career. For over and above all his qualifications—a rare achievement for one man—it shows that Lagache was anxious to deepen his learning and to affirm his experience with precise methods and techniques of investigation. There was no approximation, no reference to second-hand information. This man who loved literature, who was fond of Paul Valéry and Thomas Mann (I can still hear him talking to me with relish about Joseph and His Brothers), would never put forward anything that could not be submitted to the administration of proof. 'Psychoanalysis as an Exact Science', the title of one of his last articles, condenses his lifelong ambition. The more the object of study is resistant to conceptualization the more it questions, by its nature, the instruments that are inherited from classical logic, and the more it calls for a strict methodology from us. A psychoanalyst can be difficult, but he does not have the right to be obscure!

What was his career then? In 1924 Lagache entered the École Normale Supérieure (Lettres). Among his co-students were Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre—stimulating company! In 1928 he was awarded l'agrégation de philosophie. Under the influence of Georges Dumas he became interested in psychology, which was just beginning in France to free itself from introspecti