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This international meeting took place in Lyon, a university town often competing with Paris for leadership in research,
medicine, and psychoanalysis. The link between neuroscience and psychoanalysis is one of their interests, so a conference organized by the Psychopole, a network of universities in the south of France and Switzerland jointly with CNEP (a member of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society), was more than welcome.
René Roussillon, a psychologist at Lyon University and a training analyst of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (Société psychanalytique de Paris: SPP), introduced the conference with his colleague Nicolas Georgieff, professor of psychiatry in Lyon, who said that there had been links between the two fields in their city for a long time (Georgieff, 2010; Roussillon, 2010), after Widlöcher's pioneering work in Paris: “Psychoanalysis will not be able to claim itself of a pioneering ideology much longer” (Widlöcher, 1986, p. 15). Roussillon argued that the Paris Neuropsychoanalysis Congress was too neuropsychiatric and did not reach far enough toward psychoanalysis when considering the pathology of the mind.
Roussillon addressed three aspects of associativity in clinical practice:
The fundamental rule, the history of which goes from the conditioned reflex, to focal associativity, then to associativity in all directions. Associativity is the method that cures.
The rule of listening, which requires evenly suspended attention, in co-associativity. If the link between elements is surprising, the analyst has to make hypotheses (there is an unconscious logic). Elements are linked according to the unconscious fantasy (e.g., primal scene).
The psyche itself, which has mainly an associative functioning (Roussillon, 2001, 2007).
Furthermore, Roussillon argued that associativity was Freud's primary conception of psychic life, in his work on aphasia (1891) and in the “Project” (1950 [1895]). Because associativity is a common object between the two fields, a