François Perrier (1922–1990) was a French doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.
Perrier played a prominent role in Lacanian and in post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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Perrier studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris; and became a psychoanalyst after a first analysis with Maurice Bouvet, a second with Sasha Nacht, and a third with Jacques Lacan.
As a Lacanian, he became one of the soi-disant 'musketeers of the future troika: Serge Leclaire, Wladimir Granoff and François Perrier'.[1]
Perrier has been called 'the wandering troubadour of Lacanianism, naive and passionate, as whimsical as his master (whose genius he lacked), but a prodigious theorist of female sexuality, hysteria, and love'.[2]
A man 'obsessed by his father complex...his tormented love for a master', he might be said to have frittered his career away 'between presumptiousness and aimlessness'.[3]
After belonging to the Société psychanalytique de Paris, Perrier took part in the creation of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (S.F.P.) in 1953.
'From 1960 Perrier, Granoff, and Leclaire (nicknamed "the Troika") took part in various negotiations with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), attempting to secure the integration of the SFP into the international movement'.[4] After the failure of their efforts, it was at Perrier's house, in the presence of Jacques Lacan and Nathalie Zaltzman, his ex-wife, that the foundation of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris took place in 1964.
Perrier was the first to resign from the board of the new institution, in 1966, over the question of training; and in 1969 'the terrible schism that saw the departure of Aulagnier, Perrier, Valabrega, and others...the third schism in the history of the French psychoanalytic movement' led to him taking part in the creation of a fourth group: the Organisation psychanalytique de langue francaise (OPFL)'.[5]
The first president of the Fourth Group, Perrier resigned from it in 1981.
Perrier came to conclude that Jacques Lacan was 'a troublemaker of genius';[6] and that his followers were 'travellers in the realm of "Translacania" - as François Perrier once called it'.[7]
Élisabeth Roudinesco called a hitherto unknown letter 'written by Perrier to Lacan in January 1965... a wonderful letter'.[8]
'"You are in the process of destroying what you claim to found, whether it be a school or a treaty of trust with your friends... bringing out the fact that your own relationship to any collegiate body is that of a loner, one who excludes himself voluntarily and rejects all groups... The difficulty you have in relating to any independent group, especially if it consists of true friends, always brings you back to the special relationship, the two-man understanding dependent on complicity toward any third person. And so you always divide but never rule"'.[9]
As Roudinesco comments, 'Although Perrier didn't offer any suggestions for remedying the crisis, he did paint a very true portrait of Lacan himself. And no doubt Lacan recognized the accuracy'.[10]
'Perrier's vast body of work shows an analytic and original approach to the totality of clinical practice, whether it is a question of phobias (1956), erotomania (1966), schizophrenia and psychosis (from 1956), alcoholism, hysteria, or female sexuality. He also contributed to thinking about the training of analysts and training analysis (1969)'.[11]
On love and childhood, '"what kills childhood is knowledge", François Perrier writes; "what kills love is knowledge. Yet...there is no true love except in the aptitude of a subject, or two subjects, to return to childhood"'.[12]
For 'François Perrier...female sexuality takes shelter in motherhood so as to live out its perversion and madness, which could also be a chance to work them through'.[13]
On perverse love, 'François Perrier takes up the traditional discussions in France and establishes a connection between erotomania as it appears in Clérambault's first observations and Lacan's much later contributions...[with] great sensitivity'.[14]
Perrier, François; and Granoff, Vladimir. (1960). Le désir et le féminin. Paris: Aubier.