Introduction to Charles Melman’s Tribute

Published online: 6 February 2024

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024

This tribute to the great psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Charles Melman, one of Jacques Lacan’s most important pupils, who passed away on 20 October 2022, is the fruit of a joint effort with my colleagues from the Association Lacanienne Internationale, Helen Sheehan and Stéphane Thibierge. The richness of the work he left behind is so vast that choosing among the fields in which he produced important advances for psychoanalysis was not easy. Yet, we wanted to honour and make better known to the English-speaking world the work of our master in psychoanalysis through three texts. The first of these texts, which I have written, is a presentation of a concept introduced by Charles Melman in 2002, that of the “new psychic economy”, which he linked to the neoliberal evolution of our society. The second text is an introduction to Charles Melman’s Studies on Hysteria Revisited (2022) written by Helen Sheehan, the book’s translator. Studies on Hysteria Revisited is based on a transcript by his students of a seminar that Melman held in 1982 and 1983 at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, published in 1984 by Clims and reissued in 1992 by Érès. This introduction underlines the interest of this work on hysteria, which was at the origin of the birth of psychoanalysis, for the understanding of our modernity. The third text, co-authored by Stéphane Thibierge and myself, focuses on a clinical phenomenon of psychosis, that of the “party wall”, first described by Charles Melman in 1963 and since taken up in several of his seminars and texts. In 2023, two issues of Journal Français de Psychiatrie (issues 51 and 52) were devoted to the clinical, topological and social implications of this phenomenon, which is also related to the expansion of segregation phenomena in Western societies, which Jacques Lacan had been denouncing since the 1960s.