Letter from Paris

It is fair to say, I think, that French psychoanalysis today is rich and lively. To give a clear picture of the current psychoanalytic landscape, it is necessary to go back to the 1950s. After the World War II, in the enthusiasm of the post-war years, psychoanalysis nourished in Paris. At the time it was strongly influenced by ‘ego-psychology’, imported from Vienna by Lowenstein. At the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), founded in 1926 by Freud and Princess Marie Bonaparte, there were some strong personalities such as Sacha Nacht, Daniel Lagache and … a young analyst by the name of Jacques Lacan.

Gifted and charismatic, Lacan's appeal resided in his talent and culture: he wrote, taught and had many students and analysands. Sacha Nacht, the Society's president, was a charismatic clinician but a poor theoretician, and he and Lacan clashed violently: both had been analysands of Lowenstein who had just emigrated to the United States, along with Hartmann and Spitz.

The famous split occurred in 1954, and Lacan was obliged to leave the Society on account of his technical innovations which concerned the setting. The specific issue at stake was the ‘variable length session’, with Lacan defending the interesting but unacceptable idea that a session could be shortened and ended when important material emerged. The interruption would then acquire the value of an interpretation.

Excluded from the SPP, Lacan founded his own school, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) which he tried in vain to have recognized by the IPA. In 1963, a group of colleagues left him, receiving immediate recognition from the IPA as a component society, and became the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF).

Until its dissolution in 1980 when the Lacanian movement broke up into multiple groups, the EPF had been subject to numerous splits. I will just mention here the one that gave birth in 1967 to the association known as the ‘Quatrième Groupe’ or Fourth Group, which still defines itself today as non-Lacani