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Alain de Mijolla died on 24 January 2019. Born on 15 May 1933, he lived to be 85 years old. At his funeral, his family and friends paid him affectionate tribute and his grandchildren spoke fondly of their Papé, as grandfathers are known in Provence, and as he called his own grandfather who with his grandmother had brought him up.
I will first give an example of the psychoanalyst Mijolla's work with his fine article of applied psychoanalysis about Arthur Rimbaud, which along with his other article on identification fantasies—Fantasmes d’identification: Jakob, Freud et Goethe (1975a)—was awarded the Maurice Bouvet prize in 1976. Work on the identifications that will give a book: Visions of the Ego (1981).
Modestly leaving to the numerous commentators on the poet's life and works the ambition of explaining the source of its creativity, Mijolla illustrates his theories concerning the importance and the forms of identifications by focusing specifically on what is missing from the works and the documents, namely the poet's father, Captain Frédéric Rimbaud.† A young army volunteer, through his serious approach he became a non-commissioned officer then an officer promoted from the ranks. Sent to Algeria for eight years, after three years of combat he became head of the Arab office in Sebdou, a quieter post where his task was to administer matters relating to the native population and keep the army staff informed about their docility or any rumours circulating about the elusive Emir Abd-el Kader and his rebel troops. He returned to France in 1850 and married Vitalie Cuif in 1853 following his own father's death. Always posted far away from his family, he was never accompanied by them in his appointments, and he gave them a child on each of his return visits. He disappeared permanently from his family's life when Arthur was six years old, and this is the desertion to which Mijolla refers since Captain Rimbaud was never an army deserter, leavin