Foreword

This book is the first translated from its original language into another language under the auspices of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). To bridge the linguistic and cultural gaps among the different language groups of psychoanalysts, the IPA is facilitating publication through underwriting and providing translation of a very significant contribution to psychoanalysis. This volume has not been previously available except in the original language and so is known only to those fluent in French. It is also evident that different psychoanalytic cultures have different ‘psychoanalytic languages’ with different theoretical frameworks and concepts, which have been altered as psychoanalysis has evolved.

The Violence of Interpretation is an unusual analytic work by a highly gifted, innovative, and ruggedly individual French author who was not a member of the IPA. Piera Aulagnier was deeply influenced by Freud's thinking on the importance of language, the development and differentiation of primary and secondary process, and the pathogenesis of psychosis. She conveys the French psychoanalytic cultural interest in linguistics and semiotics and some of the concepts of Lacan, but she is uniquely her own person in her research on cognition and language, their complex development, and their impairment in psychosis. Her profound investigation of psychotic communication leads her to both new inferences and new questions about thought and thought disorder.

In this age of the defined human genome and the discovery of specific gene activity and effects there are naive expectations that the genetic, constitutional factors in psychosis, which Freud always recognised, will offer new and complete explanations of psychosis. The interpretation and reinterpretation of psychotic thought by Aulagnier attains fresh importance as it emphasises the complementary role of the caregiver. Language itself depends on hearing the spoken words of the mother tongue in an affectionate, affe