Michel de M’Uzan

Michel de M’Uzan took his departure from us on the morning of 7 January 2018. With the “work of dying” having been carried out as he had conceived it, a life programme was completed that he had connected more specifically in the past few years with the vital-identital, the cornerstone of his theory of the two orders at the psychic dawn of being: the vital-identital and the sexual.

Born in Paris in October 1921 of a Tunisian Jewish father and a Danish Protestant mother, de M’Uzan's first marriage was to Marthe Robert, a literary critic, and his second was to Murielle Gagnebin, a psychoanalyst and lecturer in philosophy and the psychoanalysis of art at La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III. De M’Uzan was a founding member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, and from 1969 to 1971 he was Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Paris. His legacy is more extensive, however, because a great many analysts remained his students until the very last years of his life. Analysed by Maurice Bouvet, and having written a doctorate on Kafka in 1948, he leaves behind a substantial and profoundly original and powerful collection of psychoanalytic works.

His journey began as a literary one before it took a psychoanalytic direction. Close in his fiction to the nouveau roman, whose authors were among his friends, with imagination as well, and a literary critic and a writer, de M’Uzan's stories that developed in connection with his later discoveries and brilliant clinical insights include Les chiens des rois [The Dogs of Kings] (1954), Le rire et la poussière [Laughter and Dust] (1962) and Celui-là [That One] (1994).

A great friend of Antonin Artaud, as well as an expert on his work, he tended him in his dying days, and could speak about him with gravity and reverence. In Artaud's writings, de M’Uzan was able to hear those early, egotic “lallations,” consisting of onomatopoeias and akin to a cry, giving way to an early language that he conceptualised as an “idiom of identity” uttered by