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La violence de l'interprétation by Piera Aulagnier has finally been translated into English, twenty-six years after its first publication. This work will be of interest to English-speaking readers for a variety of reasons. First, it bears witness to an essential stage in the career of a deeply individual author, who has enriched contemporary French psychoanalysis by, in particular, shedding new light on the study of psychosis. Secondly, the English-speaking reader, aware of the debates between Melanie Klein and Winnícott, will read with interest the author's elaborations on the origins of psychical life, the weight of reality in the constitution of the psyche of the subject, and the links between this reality and the maternal body and psyche. Thirdly, the central place the author gives to identification and to the ‘identificatory project’ will catch the reader's eye.
Piera Aulagnier does not make light reading: her theorising is rigorous and her overall thinking cannot be approached without first separating her concepts one from the other; however, the originality and wealth of their content merit careful reading.
Of Italian origin, Piera Spairani studied medicine in Rome and moved to France in the early 1950s. She has always used the name of her first husband, Aulagnier. Between 1955 and 1961 she embarked upon analysis with Jacques Lacan and became a student of the French Psychoanalysis Society (Société francaise de psychanalyse), established in 1953 by former members of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (Société psychanalytique de Paris). In 1963 Aulagnier was to appear on the list of teaching members of this association. Later she joined Lacan, who, expelled from the French Psychoanalysis Society, set up the ‘École Freudienne’.
In January 1969, unable to share Lacan's concepts with respect to the training of analysts, Aulagnier withdrew from the École Freudienne. Along with two of Lacan's former associates who had also resigned from the School, she decided to found a