Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:1355–1369 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12409 Key Papers Piera Aulagnier, an introduction: Some elements of her intellectual biography Patrick Miller Member of Societ e Psychanalytique de Recherche et de Formation, 31 Quai des Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris, France – [email protected] The title of this paper, ‘Naissance d’un corps, origine d’une histoire’, bears witness to the importance that Piera Aulagnier granted to the dimension of history, and more precisely to the notion of historicization which she emphasized, and is related in some ways to that of the identificatory process in the development of personality. However, as far as her biography is concerned, we are left with scarce mate- rial, and the essence of it is mostly intellectual. It lies mainly in her books and articles where we can try and retrace the development and transformation of her thinking. It also resides in the Journals she created: first L’Inconscient (in collaboration with Jean Clavreul), then Topique which she launched in 1969 as sole chief editor, and in the part she actively played in the history of the French psychoanalytical movement, its controversies and schisms. First in the Societe Francßaise de Psychanalyse (SFP)1 where she trained and graduated and began publishing, then at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris founded in 1964 where she followed Lacan who had just been banned from being a training analyst by the IPA site visit committee when the SFP became an IPA Study Group, out of loyalty and solidarity because she thought the ban was unacceptable rather than out of support for his positions on training. When Lacan implemented a new graduating procedure he called ‘La Passe’, she, together with Francßois Perrier and J.P. Valabrega fiercely criti- cized it and refused to comply. As Lacan refused any discussion, she first resigned from her position as Director of Training, then in January 1969 decided to resign from the Ecole Freudienne de Paris together with Francßois Perrier and J.P. Valabrega. They founded the fourth analytic group in France, which they simply named the Quatrieme Groupe. The first issue of Topique was on analytic training. Piera Aulagnier was keen to denounce all forms of abuses and alienation by way of transference in the training, and the intrusion of institutional issues in the personal analysis of candidates. A very interesting debate on issues of training took place within 1The Societe Francßaise de Psychanalyse was founded by Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan, after the first split in the history of psychoanalysis in France in 1953. There trained a number of talented young analysts who greatly contributed later to psychoanalytic thinking in France: Piera Aulagnier, J.B. Pontalis, Jean Laplanche, Francßois Perrier, Wladimir Granoff, Daniel Widlocher,€ Guy Rosolato, J.P. Valabrega. Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis 1356 P. Miller the Quatrieme Groupe, published in Topique, which led to a critique of the didactic aspects of training analyses and to a decision to give up the notion of Training Analyst and training analysis, which much later inspired the two French IPA societies to do the same. She was born in Egypt in 1923, Piera Spairani, in an Italian family; she then grew up in Italy, where she studied medicine. With her medical diploma she came to France to marry and to do research as she was very interested in biology. Her encounter with psychoanalysis was somewhat for- tuitous as she once explained to me. Her Italian medical degree was not rec- ognized in France at the time and she could not pursue research in an interesting scientific environment in the way she would have liked. One of her friends, who was a professor of aesthetics at La Sorbonne, told her about psychoanalysis as an interesting field. She began reading Freud methodically and ‘scientifically’, thought he was a great mind, applied for training, and chose as her first analyst another great mind who impressed her by his intelligence when she met him: Jacques Lacan.2 Piera Aulagnier had a sparkling intelligence, reflected in the vivacity of her beautiful green eyes, and an imposing and sophisticated mind, the head of a highbrow intellectual, a passionate theoretician, who intimidated many who kept their distance and missed the warmth and generosity. Canadian psychoanalyst Julien Bigras once told me with his marvelous Quebec accent: “En fait Piera c’t’ une embrasseuse!” (“Actually Piera, she’s a great hug- ger!”). And he was right. She had an amazing openness to everything foreign: cultures, strange ways of being and thinking, alien food (she was always interested while she was traveling, to taste the most ‘alien’ of dishes without any sign of repug- nance). Considering her tightly knitted rational way of theorizing and writ- ing, one could not have suspected that she had a fascination for Africa and its animistic traditions. She also had a tranquil capacity to establish contact in the most candid and straightforward way with the ‘disinherited’: a home- less person on the street, a delusional psychotic in a public place, etc. There was no trace of pity or commiseration: it was Mensch to Mensch. All of this already says a lot about the way she handled her clinical prac- tice. Her encounter with psychotic patients3 was a determining factor in her 2She did a second analysis with Serge Viderman which she began towards the end of the 1960s. She must have been in analysis with Viderman while she was writing her first book La Violence de l’Interpretation (1975). 3Dr Georges Daumezon, who was head psychiatrist of Hopital^ Henri Rousselle within the Hopital^ Sainte-Anne in Paris, a prominent figure of Psychotherapie Institutionnelle, encouraged psychoanalysts, regardless of their institutional belonging, to have a consultation at Sainte-Anne, and/or to hold semi- nars. That is where Lacan first began his seminar, at Henri Ey’s invitation. Daumezon offered Piera Aulagnier a weekly consultation, where she received numerous psychotic patients hospitalized there and a room where she held her seminar. Her public seminar was opened, without registration, and was the place and time when she would present the first drafts of what later became chapters of her books. Interest for psychoanalysis has now, sadly, almost completely disappeared from Sainte-Anne. The legacy has not endured. Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Piera Aulagnier, an introduction 1357 relentless endeavor to deepen and enlarge Freud’s metapsychology in order to forge4 representations of the origins of psychic life which might, in turn, help us better understand what psychotic patients need from an analytic listening to come to terms with the “blancs” (blank spots) in their early development. In the first pages of the introduction to The violence of interpretation she explains what lay at the origin of her theoretical endeavor: the experience, while listening to psychotic patients, of a split between what her “thinking was experiencing” and “the knowledge of the psychotic phenomenon which proves ineffective when confronted with the field of experience” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. xxvii. Citation translated by author.) Trying to bridge this split by revisiting Freud’s metapsychology and his drive theory was going to occupy almost 30 years of her thinking and writ- ing,5 and embarked her on a working through journey from her early con- tributions, still permeated with Lacan’s vocabulary and disembodied formalized way of thinking about the workings of the psyche to a concep- tion of the origins of psychic life deeply rooted in the soma (biological) and in the body (as erogenous body). The violence of interpretation, the title of her first book, refers to this “radical and necessary violence” exerted on the infans in order to enable access to this “shared patrimony: language”. Piera Aulagnier has retained Lacan’s justified insistence on the issue of language in psychoanalysis. But she attempts to rethink it, not starting from the external “chain of signifiers” but from the analyst’s experiencing, confronted to a psychotic “discourse”, of an irruption, within his/her psychic space of a “speech- thing-action” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. 18). This led her to elaborate on what she called the pictographic activity, or representative process of the primal, giving birth to the first representational ‘product’: the pictogram, “which ignores the word-presentation and is only constituted of the image of the corporeal thing” (Aulagnier, 1975, p. 19). Piera Aulagnier’s thinking and her way of expressing it in writing, are dense and highly organized in that the author tries to be as consistent as she can be and proceeds by closely tied together definitions. Reading her requires a step-by-step gradual exploration. She is certainly not an easy-to-read author who lures you quickly into a feeling of being smart and illuminated. One needs to make one’s way slowly into the metapsychological landscapes she draws, and redraws, a ‘corpus’ hard to penetrate. It certainly is partly due to her own idiosyncratic way of thinking, but is also a reflection of her topic: Confronted by (the psychotic) discourse, I have often felt that I was receiving it as the wild interpretation made to the analyst of the non-evidence of the evident. (Aulagnier, 2001, p. xxv) 4To forge, forging, are typical of Aulagnier’s vocabulary. The words appear very often throughout her writings. They certainly refer to the intense psychic work required from the psyche to metabolize bodily feelings into psychic representations. It should be remembered that Aulagnier wrote in French, which was not her mother tongue. 5Between 1962 and 1990, at the time of her untimely death at the age of 67, of a lung cancer which killed her within two months after the diagnosis.