DUGAUTIEZ, MAURICE (1893-1960)

Maurice Dugautiez, a Belgian civil engineer and psychoanalyst, was born near Tournay in 1893 and died in Brussels in 1960. He was born and reared in a middle-class, provincial environment where nothing predisposed him to be a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Belgium except perhaps a passionate curiosity about psychic life. He was an autodidact and initially very enthusiastic about hypnotism and suggestion. He gave many lectures in a socialist politico-cultural forum, which were later printed in the review Le pédagogue (The teacher).

During this period, in 1933, he met Fernand Lechat in the course of one of these seminars. The two men became progressively aware of their common interest in psychoanalysis and contactedÉdouard Pichon, then president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, who encouraged them to do a training analysis with Dr. Ernst Hoffman, a Viennese refugee in Belgium. After the silence of World War II, contact was reestablished with Paris in 1945. Dugautiez and Lechat were invited as special students to attend the courses of the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute, and by 1946 Dugautiez was a full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.

In 1947 Dugautiez and Lechat founded the Belgian Association of Psychoanalysts, where they began to train and supervise candidate psychoanalysts. As the result of intense gassing in World War I, Dugautiez's health was fragile and forced him to take a less active role. The responsibility of directing seminars and editing the Bulletin de l'Association des psychanalystes de Belgique (Bulletin of the Belgian Association of Psychoanalysts) thus fell to Lechat. Dugautiez, who was more of a clinician than a theorist, continued to train Belgian psychoanalysts until the end of his life.

Daniel Luminet

See also: Belgium

Bibliography

Dugautiez, Maurice. (1953). J. Leuba n'est plus. Bulletin de l'Association des psychanalystes de Belgique, 15.

Dugautiez, Maurice. (1953). Réflexions sur l'article "Les ten-dances de la psychanalyseà New York" du Pr. Reding. Bulletin de l'Association des psychanalystes de Belgique, 16.