LEBOVICI, SERGE SINDEL CHARLES (1915-2000)

Serge Lebovici, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was a professor emeritus of child psychiatry and an officer of the Legion of Honor. He received the Croix de Guerre for service in 1939-1945. He was born June 10, 1915, in Paris, and died August 12, 2000, in Marvejols in the south of France.

His father was Solo Lebovici, a well-known general practitioner and specialist in dermatology. A Romanian Jew, he emigrated to France in 1904. His mother, Caroline Rosenfeld, was from a Jewish family from Alsace. Lebovici began his medical training in 1933. After being admitted as an intern at the Hôpitaux de Paris in 1938, he was forced to interrupt his studies between 1938 and 1941. After his military service he was mobilized during the "phony war," then spent time as a prisoner of war in Nuremberg. After being freed, along with his father, in January 1941, he completed his doctoral dissertation and in 1942 married Ruth Roos. They had two daughters, Marianne, born in 1943, and Elisabeth, born in 1953. In August 1942, his father was arrested by the Nazis after being denounced but managed to save his wife by passing her off as his part-time mistress. After spending time in the camp of Pithiviers, he was deported to Drancy on September 23 and died in Auschwitz.

Lebovici, who worked for a time with the Assistance Publique, where he was protected by professors Paul Milliez and Raoul Kourilsky, cared for his mother and two sisters, along with his wife and first daughter. He soon made contact with communist members of the Resistance, to whom he provided medical assistance. He became a member of the French Communist Party at the time of the Liberation, in 1945, when he joined the army. There he met another French Resistance member, Sacha Nacht, who was also of Romanian origin, and began psychoanalysis with him before participating in the reconstruction of the French psychoanalytic movement, which had stalled during the Occupation.

Lebovici specialized in child psychiatry. As an assistant to the department of child psychiatry with Professor Heuyer from 1946 to 1957 at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades (Hospital for sick children), then at the Salpêtrière Hospital, he helped train an entire generation of psychoanalytically oriented child psychiatrists. During the post-war period, still under the influence of communist theories, he insisted on the socioeconomic origin of child disturbances and, in 1949, cosigned the antipsychoanalytic manifesto published by La Nouvelle Critique. It required Communist Party psychiatrists to follow the recommendations of Zhdanov throughout the Cold War. However, along with his friends Jean and Evelyne Kestenberg and Salem Shentoub, he soon renounced the manifesto and quit the French Communist Party to devote himself to psychoanalysis.

Made an associate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) (SPP) in 1946, he became a full member in 1952, the same year as René Diatkine, who remained his close friend. Lebovici and Diatkine together contributed to the creation of a number of institutions, which imparted some of Lebovici's originality to the French psychoanalytic movement. In 1948 they adapted the practices of Jacob Moreno for use in "psychoanalytic psychodrama" to treat child and adolescent psychoses. During the 1953 split, Lebovici sided with Sacha Nacht against Jacques Lacanand the cofounders of the Société française de psychanalyse (French Psychoanalytic Society), arguing for theoretical and institutional "orthodoxy," a position that won many friends and created many lasting enemies.

In 1961, on behalf of the Mental Health Association of the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, formed in 1958 by Philippe Paumelle, Lebovici and Diatkine created the Centre Alfred-Binet for child and adolescent psychiatry. This pioneering institution promoted a new multidisciplinary approach to psychiatry in which psychoanalysis had a preponderant role. One offshoot of this was the review La Psychiatrie de l'enfant, which he began in 1958 with the help of Julian de Ajuriaguerra and René Diatkine.

Lebovici was made secretary of the Institut de psychanalyse de Paris (Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis) at the time of its creation in 1952, then director from 1962 to 1967. He made it possible for non-doctors to become accredited psychoanalysts, which Sacha Nacht, his predecessor, had opposed (enabling Evelyne Kestemberg to become a member in 1963). Along with his private practice his activities within the SPP were ongoing and varied; they included numerous conferences, colloquia, seminars, and supervisory activities. Internationally he helped train and organize psychoanalysts, and at home helped popularize the work of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, René Spitz, and Donald Winnicott, whom he brought to Paris. Because of his work he was elected vice-president of the executive board of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1967 and made president in 1973. He was the first person of French nationality to hold that position, but he was later reproached for not having been severe enough with a Brazilian teaching analyst whose student, a doctor, had participated in the torture of political prisoners. At the end of his term, in 1977, he was appointed associate professor at the University of Paris-North, in Bobigny. The following year he created a department of child psychiatry at the Avicenne Hospital.

Lebovici was world renowned in the field of child psychoanalysis and published a large number of books and papers (nearly five hundred bibliographic references). These include La Connaissance de l'enfant par la psychanalyse, published in 1975 with Michel Soulé, a friend who also contributed, along with René Diatkine, to the 1985 Traité de psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent. These early publications contain a sketch of his future interest in the direct observation of infants. He was also involved in the study of autism and the use of psychoanalysis to treat psychotic children. His work culminated in the publication, in 1960, with Joyce McDougall, of Un cas de psychose infantile:Étude psychanalytique.

In France he became one of the principal initiators of the direct observation of early interactions between mother and child. In this he drew from the work of John Bowlby (the theory of attachment), T. Berry Brazelton (neonatal competence of the baby), and Daniel Stern (affective tuning), authors whom he introduced to French clinicians working with young infants. In 1983 he published, together with Serge Stoléru, Le Nourrisson, la mère et le psychanalyste: Les interactions précoces, a book that marked the start of perinatal clinical research in France. In 1989 he edited, with Françoise Weil-Halpern, La Psychopathologie du bébé. In these two books the complexity of behavioral interaction—affective and fantasy—between mother, father, and infant in the development of early bonds is explored and innovative therapeutic approaches are introduced. In his work on parent-child interactions, Lebovici introduced an original approach that combined the French psychoanalytic tradition with Anglo-American developmentalism. In it he emphasized the intergenerational transmission of parental infantile conflicts and the reciprocity of inherent narcissistic transactions. Although he did not overlook the contributions of experimental psychology, ethology, or the neurosciences, he felt that an understanding of the process of parenthood required a psychological component that took into account the imaginary, fantasy, mythic, and narcissistic representations of the developing child. In his last works Lebovici developed the concept of "enaction" to describe the analyst's emotional and physical trial in the presence of the mother and child during therapy and that of "metaphor-generating empathy" to signify his ability to verbalize and represent their affects during therapeutic sessions involving the parents and the child.

President of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP) from 1966 to 1970, then of the World Association of Infant Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines (WAIPAD, now the WAIMH), Lebovici held a number of important functions in international organizations in his field. In spite of the increasing demands made on him by Parkinson's disease, which served to isolate a man whose entire life had expressed a need for communication, until the end of his life Lebovici participated in the work of the psychoanalytic institutions he had always been involved with. He was made honorary vice president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and honorary president of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

An able manager, a humanist who loved music, a man with a curious mind who was always in search of new areas of research and activity, Lebovici played a role in the leading innovations in psychoanalysis of the second half of the twentieth century.

Alain de Mijolla

Notion developed: Prepsychosis.

See also: Anaclisis/anaclitic; Analytic psychodrama; Brazil; Centre Alfred-Binet; Child analysis; Colloque sur l'Inconscient; Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Dependence; Developmental disorders; Diatkine, René; Early interactions; Ethology and psychoanalysis; France; Hospitalism; Indications and contraindications for psychoanalysis in an adult; Infant development; Infantile neurosis; Infantile schizophrenia; Infantile, the; Inter-generational; International Psychoanalytical Association; Nacht, Sacha Emanoel; Narcissism, primary; Object; Oedipus complex; Phobias in children; Reverie; Société psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse de Paris; Stranger; Tics; Transference in children.

Bibliography

Coblence, F. (1996). Serge Lebovici. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Lebovici, Serge. (1983). Le Nourrisson, la mère et le psychanalyste. Paris: Le Centurion.

——. (1989). Psychopathologie du bébé. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Lebovici, Serge, and Soulé, Michel. (1970). La connaissance de l'enfant par la psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Lebovici, Serge, Diatkine, René, and Soulé, Michel. (1995). Nouveau traité de psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent (2nd ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Mijolla Alain de. (1988). "Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in France between 1939 and 1945", Int Forum Psychoanalysis, 12, 136-156, 2003, Stockholm.