An introduction to Michel Fain’s thought*

Some biographical elements

Michel Fain was born in Paris on 29 November 1917 at 95 rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. This address is not without importance because it was the ultimate stage of a long and tumultuous emigration that had led his father from Moscow to the Sentier, a famous textile district. His mother, a worker in haute couture, had herself emigrated to France on account of the economic crisis and unemployment that was rife in Belgium.

Now, as Michel Fain recounted, his parents’ marriage was marked from the outset by a conflict. His mother, a pure Walloon, was not well accepted by his father’s Jewish family, especially as Jewishness is transmitted by women—a Jewishness, moreover, that was denigrated by his mother’s relatives. We can already see in the making something of a position apart, or in-between, which would always be one that Michel Fain held. Indeed, he did not want to belong to any particular school. If he turned towards medical studies, it was due to his father’s firm refusal to accept young Michel’s own choice; he had wanted to be a pharmacist. This profession attracted him because he thought it would allow him a lot of freedom. He imagined getting someone to manage his pharmacy and having plenty of time to “stroll” through the city and life, to follow his own thoughts and look around … His father’s opposition had consisted of a single sentence which Michel Fain said could be understood as an interpretation of the unconscious compromise contained in his vocation: “A shopkeeper, that’s out of the question!” But that’s exactly what his father was in the Sentier district. Years later, having been successively the Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and then President of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP: Société psychanalytique de Paris), Michel Fain was always proud of “defending the shop,” whilst not being (and I will come back to this) very inclined towards ecumenism or any kind of demagogy. He pursued his medical studies from 1937