Piera Aulagnier

Piera Aulagnier (; née Spairani, ; November 19, 1923 – March 31, 1990) was an Italian-born French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Her contributions to psychoanalysis include the concepts of interpretative violence, pictogram and originary process.

Life and contributions Aulagnier was born in Milan in 1923 and studied medicine in Rome, before moving to Paris in 1950 to finish her psychiatric training. She undertook a training analysis with Jacques Lacan from 1955 to 1961, In 1969, however, Aulagnier, and François Perrier split from the EFP over the bitter question of the Pass as a qualification for analyst status, and created the (OPLF), the so-called Quatrième Groupe (Fourth Group). The organization played a prominent role in post-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Clinically, Aulagnier specialized in the treatment of psychosis at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center, where she read a weekly seminar from 1962 until the year of her death. She co-founded the journals L'Inconscient in 1967, and two years later. and continued to work for a theoretical recuperation of the importance of body and feelings as non-verbal presences within early thought. She also warned against the danger of interpretations being experienced as invasive by an analysand, (particularly when their own omnipotence has been projected onto the analyst).

Her first marriage was to businessman André Aulagnier, with whom she had a son, Claude. Aulagnier died of lung cancer in Paris in 1990.

Selected writings Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier. The Violence of Interpretation. From Pictogram to Statement, trans. Alan Sheridan (2001 ). The New Library of Psychoanalysis 41. London: Brunner-Routledge. .