Pierre Luquet (1918-2000)

For all the friends and colleagues of Pierre Luquet, who died in Paris on 2 April 2000, an important figure has disappeared from psychoanalytic life—a life to which he contributed so much through his vigorous support of the activities of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, and through international exchanges. He has also left us a body of work that is rich in perspectives, marked by thought as original as it is secure.

His solid grounding in medicine and psychiatry quickly led him to a resolutely psychodynamic understanding of psychic disturbances and thence to a preference for the practice of psychoanalysis. But it was not in him to keep his experience, whether of adults or children, to himself, and many remember his teaching activity, with its implications for the work of supervision, as well as the seminars, where he took care to nurture an expansive and participative approach to understanding. His aim was that thinking should develop organically and offer to each the opportunity to express his/her own theoretical stance.

As President of the Paris Society in 1974 and 1975, Luquet was among the first to think deeply about the conditions that could improve the relationship between the Society's scientific life and its teaching mission.

It was to be expected that his expansive nature would lead him to extend his contacts and support the undertakings of like-minded colleagues in other countries. Thus he played an important and active role in the creation and development of the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society, for years travelling to Lisbon with regularity to contribute his erudition, his experience and his gift for listening.

His skill as a communicator was to find its fullest expression in his role as scientific secretary of the Congress of Psychoanalysts of the French language, a position he held for over 32 years, from 1956 to 1988. Called all too imprecisely, for a time, Congress of Psychoanalysts of Romance languages, French was, in fact, the unifying tongue o