Preface to This Edition

Piera Aulagnier is a psychoanalytic author and researcher of unusual quality. She embarked on the discipline of psychoanalytic thought in the manner in which a research worker might approach an exact science—aiming to discover and possess all existing analytic research on the subject of psychosis, with the intention of exploring the psychogenesis of mental illness as well as that of human passion, with the double aim of furthering the potentiality of psychoanalytic therapy in the field of psychosis as well as seeking to enrich our knowledge of the spirit of humankind.

She also approached her engagement in her personal psychoanalysis in the manner of a scientific positivist, and chose Jacques Lacan because she was inspired by his reputation as an innovative thinker, and in particular, because of his interest in psychotic states. She further claimed that she undertook the experience of a personal analysis in order to test the value of Freud's discoveries—but, as she later admitted laughingly to her friends, ‘with no anticipation or preparedness for the subjective experience that I was destined to undergo’.

Born in 1923 to Italian parents, their only child, Piera Spairani spent the first years of her life in Egypt. She used to say that these years were shrouded in mystery since her mother, who was only seventeen years of age when Piera was born, was reluctant to discuss either the circumstances of her birth or give detailed information regarding her absent father. (This factor may have had some influence on Piera's later writings on secrecy and the right of analysands to maintain certain secrets during their analytic experience.)

She remembered being sent as a young child to Italy where she was then cared for by her maternal grandparents, to be joined by her mother some years later. It was also in Italy that she completed her medical studies but, in the early 1950s, she opted to come to France in order to pursue her interest in psychiatry and psychoan