After Lacan: The Other French School Conference

French psychoanalysis has become enormously popular internationally.  In the UK, the writings of Andre Green, Jean Laplanche and Didier Anzieu among others are taught as standard in any psychoanalytic training. These writers and others included in British curricula studied under Lacan and/or were analysed by him, but later rejected him, developing ideas that borrow from his without acknowledgement, or that propose alternative versions of themes he invented. These writers, who remained in the IPA following the split in French psychoanalysis, built their work upon a ‘non’ to Lacan.  However, there is another psychoanalytic tradition within France that did not reject him. These authors include Lacan’s collaborators and students who developed further concepts of their own, building upon his theories of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary realms, the Other, the paternal metaphor, the signifying chain, the divided subject, desire and lack. In particular, they made important advances in theories of intersubjectivity, child development, clinical practice and applied psychoanalysis. Reintegrating the contributions of this Other French school into ‘classical’ psychoanalysis can only strengthen and broaden our collective understanding of the human psyche, or after Lacan, the parl’être. 

This conference will present contributions on Francoise Dolto’s concept of The Castrations, Jean Berges’s model of Transitivism, Charles Melman’s New Psychic Economy and Marcel Czermack on the psychoanalytic treatment of psychoses.

Lionel Bailly

Sham Bailly

Marika Bergès-Bounes

Nicolas Dissez

Thierry Roth 

Helen Sheehan

After the event a recording of the conference will be available to registered participants (on request) for 4 weeks.

Online only via Zoom. 

Registration will open shortly! If you have any queries in the meantime, please contact us at events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk

Jean Berges and Gabriel Balbo, An essay on transitivism, in The Lacan Tradition, David Lichtenstein, Lionel Bailly, Sharmini Bailly Eds, Routledge, London, 2018, p123-136.

Marcel Czermak, Patronymies - considerations cliniques sur les psychoses, Eres, 2012.

Francoise Dolto, The unconscious body image, Routledge, London, 2022, introduction by Sharmini Bailly, p1-7

Charles Melman, A new psychic economy, in The Lacan Tradition, David Lichtenstein, Lionel Bailly, Sharmini Bailly Eds, Routledge, London, 2018, p227-234