Piera Aulagnier, an introduction: Some elements of her intellectual biography

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Notes

1. The Société Française 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, François Perrier, Wladimir Granoff, Daniel Widlöcher, Guy Rosolato, J.P. Valabrega.

2. She 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'Interprétation (1975).

3. Dr Georges Daumezon, who was head psychiatrist of Hôpital Henri Rousselle within the Hôpital Sainte‐Anne in Paris, a prominent figure of Psychothérapie Institutionnelle, encouraged psychoanalysts, regardless of their institutional belonging, to have a consultation at Sainte‐Anne, and/or to hold seminars. 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.

4. To 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.

5. Between 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.

6. ‘Erogeneous pleasure is a vital necessity’ (1975, p. 42).

7. There are some very difficult issues of translation. ‘Auto‐engendrement’, in French, was translated in the English version of The violence of interpretation by ‘self‐procreation’.

I prefer to keep auto‐ (as in auto‐eroticism) and translate ‘auto‐engendering’. There is no pre‐existing self procreating a self‐image. A need situation within the soma creates the necessity to auto‐provide a first degree of ‘meaning’ where meaning has no meaning for an agency which does not exist yet. The organism is ‘auto‐triggered’ by the sensory dimension and the resulting pleasure/unpleasure effects to construct the first degree of a psychical agency.

8. A potential link could be made here with Winnicott and his insistence on the necessity to preserve, by the quality of the holding, the illusion of omnipotence allowing for a sense of creating the object. But the metapsychologies and the styles remain very different.

9. There seems to be an affinity here with what Bion developed as a commensal relationship between container and contained, both container and contained growing due to their mutual relationship. However, the notions of container and contained remained alien to Piera Aulagnier's theoretical thinking.

10. For Piera Aulagnier psychic activity consists of three modalities of functioning, which appear chronologically in time: the primal (originaire) processes, the primary processes and the secondary processes.

The representational product of the primal is the pictogram and the agency resulting of its activity is the representing agent (le représentant).

The representational product of the primary is the phantasy, the agency resulting from its activity is the phantasying agent (le phantasmant) also called the stage director (metteur en scène).

The representational product of the secondary is the ideational representation or the enunciation, the agency resulting from its activity is the enunciator or speaker (l’énonçant) or the I (le Je).

There exists a strong relationship between the three successive modes of psychic activity and the evolution of the system of perception.

All three modalities remain active throughout life.

11. He used to say that he refused to be ‘poubelliqué’ as a structuralist. This complex neologism is a condensation of: poubelle (waste bin), publier (to publish), and belliqueux (belligerent).

12. Parole in French is both a spoken word (une parole) and speech (la parole). Porter is to bear but also to hold. As we will see there is a reference to a holding function of speech, almost in a Winnicottian sense of holding. So actually porte‐parole can be translated as word‐bearer, but also as speech‐holder.

13. “By emphasising the fact that, in order to give life to the psychical apparatus, the object must be endowed with a power of excitability, she invites us to think in paradoxical terms: it is this power of excitability which, by enabling the processual capacity of the psychical apparatus to be set in motion, acts as a protective shield against excitation” (Miller, 2014, p. 132).

14. There is an affinity here with André Green's seminal paper ‘Le complexe de la mère morte’ (1981).