Didier Anzieu: La psychanalyse, encore!

Introduction: Life and work

The contradictory demands that characterize Didier Anzieu’s work, which clearly appear in the text chosen for this commentary, also shape his unusual and unfinished portrait. His life and work can sometimes follow clear and easily discernible lines of energy; but around these revolve multiple orientations, movements of numerous interests, which form a kind of aureole difficult to grasp, but whose continuous and insistent presence must be taken into account if we are to see the complete picture. Two parallel versions should be constructed: one that would take up the chronology of an almost linear resumé identifying the major early stages (the years of training, the entry to the École Normale Supérieure, the doctorate in philosophy, the turn to psychology, the encounter with psychoanalysis), then the teaching activities and university career, the break with Lacan and the commitment to the French Psychoanalytical Association (APF) – and always, as a continuous thread, research and writing rooted in the very body of psychoanalysis and in the thought of its originator. And another version that would focus on the author’s multiple interests: projective methods and psychodrama, the unconscious and the group, philosophy and fairy tales, Pascal and Beckett … . And from these two versions could perhaps emerge an idea of the man, of his work, inseparably linked by a “single skin”, like the fantasy uncovered by Didier Anzieu relating to mother and child.

Didier Anzieu was drawn into the movements of psychoanalytic thought in France and thus into the vagaries of its developments. Trained at the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP) and the French Psychoanalytical Society (SFP), he was an active player in the splits that occurred in one and then the other society, the first time with Lacan, the second time against him. In 1964, he was a participant in the founding group of the APF, within which he worked energetically and continuously. From his point of v