After Lacan: The Other French School Conference

Programme 

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Speakers and Chairs

Lionel Bailly (British Psychoanalytical Society, L’Association Lacanienne Internationale, North East London NHS Foundation Trust, University College London)

Biography: Lionel Bailly is Honorary Professor at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, a member of the Association Lacanienne Internationale and a Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He trained in medicine at the Salpêtrière university hospital in Paris, became head of the Child Psychopathology Unit at Sainte Anne Hospital before moving to the UK and becoming a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in the NHS. He was also involved in working with victims of political violence and collaborated with the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

Abstract: With a background in neuropaediatrics, an analysis with Jacques Lacan and an early collaboration with Prof. Julian De Ajuriaguerra, the theoretical work of Jean Bergès could not be ordinary. Strongly anchored in Lacan’s writings, his work innovates and leads to new understandings of the chemistry at work between a mother and a baby, so that both the baby’s thinking and his subjective place is changed in a radical and necessary way. The outcome is a consistent and powerful model of early interactions, leading to a more general understanding of psychic mechanisms. Babies in Bergès’ work are, like Lacan’s, little philosophers, but they also have a body. More precisely they are bodies, whose functioning they enjoy, and which therefore make them think. Examining this thinking in all its complexity led Jean Bergès to develop the conceptual importance of ‘the hypothesis’ – hypotheses formed both by the baby and by its interlocutors. This has led to a model of psychic complexity capable of dealing with the large effects of minute incidents, and the differences of structure between individuals apparently exposed to the same environment. It does to dyadic interactions what relativist physics did to Newtonian observations.

Sharmini Bailly (British Psychoanalytical Society, and British Psychotherapy Foundation)

Biography: Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Essex, where she also works as a psychotherapist for the NHS. She is a member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society and a Senior Member of the BPF. She translated the first English edition of The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge 2022), by Francoise Dolto, and edited Lacan, A Beginner’s Guide (One World Press 2009) and The Lacan Tradition (Routledge 2018). She has worked as a consultant psychotherapist at a residential special needs school and teaches on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Essex. Previously, she worked in journalism.

Abstract: Freud’s idea that fear of castration played the central role in the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex has attracted controversy since its inception, and yet the term has endured and become a keystone in newer theories. Sham Bailly takes us through the evolution of ‘castration’ from Freud’s original proposal that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex initiated the beginnings of an adult moral sensibility, through the formation of the Lacanian barred subject, to Françoise Dolto’s lively and demystifying conceptions of ‘the castrations’ (in the plural) and their importance in the access to the Symbolic, or the integration of law in the mind. This is a topic of some importance in an age where perverse and antisocial functioning is of increasing social concern.

Marika Bergès-Bounes (L’Association Lacanienne Internationale)

Biography: Marika Bergès-Bounes has been a psychoanalyst since 1981 and is part of the International Lacanian Association (Association Lacanienne Internationale, ALI) in Paris. Marika was a therapist at Saint-Anne Hospital, in Paris, from 1975 to 2005 in the department of biological psychopathology focused on the child and the teenager led by Mr. Bergès. In the International Lacanian Association, she is in charge of a group of psychoanalysts specialised in child and teenager psychoanalysis. Since 2004, Marika is also co-head of the collection “Psychanalyse et clinique”, founded by Jean Bergès and published by Erès.

Abstract: Jean Bergès (1928-2004) was a French pediatrist, neuropsychiatrist and psychoanalyst based in Paris. In 1965, he took over from Julian de Ajuriaguerra and entered the department of psychopathology focused on the child and teenager at Hôpital Saint-Anne. Issues of the body, of tonus, of posture and of motor skills were at the core of his work, but he also focused on the language of the child, which he never ceased to prioritise, exploring the links between body and language, organic and signifier.

During his appointments with patients, he always gave the child credit that he had something to say. He anticipated that there was knowledge contained in the speech of the child (the hypothesis of the patient as a subject), which could then unfold.
His work focused on the necessary “abnegation” of the mother - she does not make the child her object but leaves room for the expression of the body and knowledge of the child.

Jean Bergès’s department welcomed many children with learning difficulties, hyperactive children (a disorder now called ADHD), for whom the issue of the link between body and speech (be it oral or written) was always at the forefront. In 1982, he founded the International Lacanian Association (ALI) with Charles Melman, Marcel Czermak and Claude Dorgeuille. In 1965, “therapeutic relaxation” was introduced to the department, a form of therapy that allows the patient to gradually link speech and body through the intermediary of a relaxation therapist - something which the department still offers.

Nicolas Dissez (Maison de Santé d'Epinay-sur-Seine, and Ecole Psychanalytique de Sainte-Anne)

Biography: Nicolas Dissez is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst in Paris. He had an enduring collaboration with Marcel Czermak who founded the Sainte-Anne Psychoanalytic School. He published in 2022 a book entitled "Les apologues de Jacques Lacan" at the publisher Presses Universitaires de France.

Abstract: As a young doctor, Marcel Czermak facilitated Lacan’s clinical interviews of inpatients at the Henri Rousselle wards of Sainte Anne hospital in Paris. Listening to the master, he learned a lot. Later, it was Czermak that young trainee analysts would seek and observe working, to learn the complex and challenging art of treating analytically psychotic patients.  Marcel Czermak in his presentations, his papers and his books managed to weave clinical cases and psychoanalytic theory in a way rarely encountered in French psychoanalysis. Reflections on transference in the treatment of psychotic patients, dissociation between voice and speech, proper names demoted to common names and the role of the patronym are some of the aspects of Czermak’s work that clinicians will find illuminating.

Thierry Roth (L’Association Lacanienne Internationale)

Biography: Thierry Roth, psychologist and psychoanalyst in Paris, member and former president of the International Lacanian Association (ALI). Author of numerous articles, Th Roth published Les affranchis. Addictions and contemporary clinic in 2020 (published by érès).

Abstract: Twenty years ago, Charles Melman published a surprising book, born out of what he observed in his analytic practice. He had noted that more and more his analysands rejected the real for the virtual, that they trivialised violence, drug use, licentiousness, that classic authority figures seemed to have lost their authority, and that a youth without bearings experienced a spectacularly increased rate of depression. He named this a new psychic economy, no longer fuelled by desire but by enjoyment. Unfortunately, a look at society today seems to give these views a prophetic quality. While Melman stated clearly that psychoanalysis could not be a social therapy, is psychoanalysis nonetheless able to respond to these new challenges, brought by unstoppable social changes?

Helen Sheehan (Milltown Lacanian Association (M.L.A), and L’Association Lacanienne Internationale) 

Biography: Helen Sheehan studied psychoanalysis in Paris where she obtained her PhD in 2000. She has contributed to psychoanalytic journals in Ireland, England and France. She translated Dr Charles Melman’s Nouvelles Etudes Sur L’Hysterie in 2022 as Studies on Hysteria Revisited: Charles Melman on Trauma, Incompatibility, Repression and the Unconscious. (Routledge)

She is a member of the Milltown Lacanian Association (M.L.A) and L’Association Lacanienne Internationale.

Abstract: Charles Melman’s The New Psychic Economy: the way in which we think and enjoy today (Éditions Érès 2019) spans nine years (1999 – 2008) and contains five  chapters with an Introduction by Jean Pierre Lebrun.

This intriguing and somewhat confusing book deals with interlinking themes ranging from Freud’s solution to Civilisation and its Discontents, to a discussion on matriarchy.

Melman asks … Is psychanalysis able to respond to the new challenge posed by today’s cultural transformations?

This paper will attempt to answer this question and in the course of so doing will describe these cultural changes and elucidate their essential components.

Image Credits: Marika Bergès-Bounes, L’Association Lacanienne International, and Françoise Dolto Paris, 1985 © Alécio de Andrade, ADAGP Paris, 2023