BOUVET, MAURICE CHARLES MARIE GERMAIN (1911-1960)

A French psychoanalyst, Maurice Charles Marie Germain Bouvet was born August 14, 1911, in Eu (Seine-Maritime) and died on May 5, 1960, in Paris. His father, a graduate of theÉcole Polytechnique and a career officer, married while he was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand. It was here that Bouvet completed his secondary education and his medical studies. He did his internship between 1931 and 1932.

After arriving in Paris he was appointed a resident in 1936, a doctor at a psychiatric clinic in 1939, and made head of clinical services under Professor Laignel-Lavastine in 1940. In 1942 he served as doctor and interim director of the psychiatric hospital in Moisselles and was transferred to a hospital in Clermont in the Oise region of France from 1943 to 1945.

Because of his fragile health, Bouvet began to experience problems with his vision by 1940, which resulted in near blindness. During the Occupation he began a teaching analysis with Georges Parcheminey, soon followed by supervised analyses with John Leuba and Sacha Nacht. He became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1946 and was made a member on November 16, 1948. For a number of years Bouvet served as treasurer and vice president, before becoming president in 1956. During the period prior to the 1953 split in the society, Bouvet felt that liberalization of the organization was needed. However, possibly because of the analysis he was conducting with Daniel Lagache, Bouvet decided to remain neutral. He subsequently decided to remain within the society, primarily because of his medical background.

His publications had attracted notice as early as 1948. In November 1952, he was reporter for the XV Conférence des Psychanalystes de Langues Romanes, whose topic was "The Ego in Obsessive Neurosis: Object Relations and Defense Mechanisms." In 1954 he published "La cure-type" (The standard cure) in the Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale, there describing the distinction between "transference resistance" and "resistance to transference." In that same article Bouvet expressed his fidelity to Freud, indicating that interpretation must adhere closely to the behavior of the ego. The following year Jacques Lacan's article "Les variantes de la cure" (Different forms of therapy) seemed to supply a rebuttal to Bouvet, the only theoretician in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society who could take advantage of his growing reputation. He returned to the problems of therapy during the Twentieth International Psychoanalytic Congress, which took place in Paris in July 1957, with a report on "Les variations de la technique (Distance et variations)" [Variations in technique: Distance and variations].

Lacan maintained his critical stance while Bouvet promoted "object relations" in 1952 and completed his study of the subject in "La clinique psychanalytique. La relation d'objet" (Clinical practice in psychoanalysis: Object relations), published in La Psychanalyse aujourd 'hui (1959). For Bouvet the object relation represents "a flow of drive energy, a movement controlled and directed by the ego toward external objects." He described the various aspects of object relations and their pathological states, such as phobias, obsessions, psychoses, and perversions, emphasizing the regression to oral or anal object relations in "pregenital" subjects with "weak" egos. He established a "distance relation" between the subject and its objects, which becomes greater as these are transformed by projection.

Bouvet studied these mechanisms in detail, especially in the context of obsessive neurosis, and described the states of depersonalization that occur whenever the patient is unable to defend himself through isolation because of the uncontrollable violence of his affects and the predominant anal-sadistic projection that characterizes such patients. This was the theme of the XXI Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langues Romanes in April 1960: "Dépersonnalisation et relation d'objet." Unfortunately the decline in his health prevented Bouvet from presenting the article, which was read by Pierre Marty. Afflicted with malignant hypertension and respiratory failure, he died on May 5, at the age of forty-nine.

The analyst of André Green, Michel de M'Uzan, François Perrier—and even, for a short while, of Maryse Choisy—he was remembered through the creation of the Prix Maurice Bouvet in 1962; his publications were collected and published in 1968. As Michel de M'Uzan wrote in his introduction, "For many Michel Bouvet was a master, but a discreet master, who was as demanding in the affirmation of his knowledge as he was in his sense of freedom. Nothing demonstrates this better than the way his ideas were transmitted."

Although he is not widely remembered today and his concepts of the object relation and standard cure have assumed negative and outmoded connotations in France (unlike the United States), he remains a key figure in the theoretical and clinical fields he investigated throughout his life.

Alain de Mijolla

See also: Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Depersonalization; Object; Psychoanalytic treatment; Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris.