RACAMIER, PAUL-CLAUDE (1924-1996)

The French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Paul-Claude Racamier was born on May 20, 1924, in Pontde-Roide, and died on August 18, 1996, in Besançon.

The youngest of three brothers, Racamier had solid roots in his native Franche-Comté by way of his father, who came from a Catholic family in the Drôme and worked as an engineer at the Peugeot factory, and his mother, who came from a Protestant family in the Montbéliard region. Racamier's mother considered her son's health to be delicate and home-schooled him until the age of nine; this experience imparted a life-long stance marked by a passion for very individualistic ideas and a refusal of all conformism. After receiving a good secondary education in Montbéliard, he studied medicine in Besançon and then in Paris; he passed the medical exam qualifying him to practice in the psychiatric hospitals in 1952.

Racamier spent the first part of his career at the psychiatric hospital in Prémontré, where he worked from 1952 to 1962. Shocked by the dehumanizing conditions there, he established an improved setting for patients in his ward and gradually developed the therapeutic services of the institution itself. He then followed the same course of action in Switzerland, at the clinic of Rives de Prangins (1962-66), and subsequently at La Velotte, a treatment facility he created near Besançon in 1967, which would become his life's work. A limited number of patients (twelve at most), as many caregivers as patients, places for daytime activities and treatment, clearly separated from tastefully decorated and furnished, family-style living quarters, maintaining close contact with families, and so forth—such were the facility's principles. They were based on Racamier's original theories.

These theories were nevertheless closely linked to Racamier's psychoanalytic training and activity. After undergoing analysis with Marc Schlumberger (and later with Evelyne Kestemberg), he worked with Sacha Nacht and Francis Pasche. He became a member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP; Paris Psychoanalytical Society) in 1958 and was elected to permanent membership in 1962. He taught at the University of Lausanne from 1962 to 1967, and then at the faculties of medicine and human sciences in Besançon. At the same time, he conducted many psychoanalytic and psychiatric training seminars; he served as director of the SPP's Institut de psychanalyse (Institute of Psychoanalysis) from 1975 to 1982.

Racamier's collaboration with colleagues who created and ran the mental health services of the 13th arrondissement in Paris (Philippe Paumelle, Serge Lebovici, René Diatkine, René Angelergues) led to a collectively authored book entitled Le Psychanalyste sans divan (The psychoanalyst without a couch; 1970). In this book Racamier stressed an idea he would often return to: the need to simultaneously "care for" patients, caregivers, the group they form, the institution where they live, and families. The key word is to fight against the repetition compulsion that tends toward a routine where everything becomes fixed.

His theoretical writings originated in his practice working with adult psychoses: in Les Schizophrènes (Schizophrenics; 1980), he sought to show the "paradoxality" at work in these disorders. But his ideas went further. So did the ideas that came out of his work with patients suffering from postpartum psychoses. Developing the notions of "mothering" and "motherhood," he found close links between maternal psychosis and the child's development; beyond this, he showed that in such situations, the entire process of "personnation," the sense of being an autonomous, coherent, and continuous person, is disturbed.

The same spirit of "going further" is evident in the notion of the Antoedipus (1989), a key element in Racamier's thinking. In coining this term, Racamier intended to refer to both the "anti-oedipal" (that which is an obstacle to the oedipal organization) and the "ante-oedipal" (that to which the psyche is thus sent back); thus, in a "world of non-object objects," the "anti-fantasy fantasies," the "fantasies of self-procreation" that radically cancel out sexual and generational differences and the like, lead, according to the vicissitudes of this "shattered Antoedipus," to psychosis or narcissistic perversions. However, the outcome of the Antoedipus is not necessarily so tragic: it remains present but discreet in the oedipal structures, contributing to their fluctuations and necessary reequilibrations.

This central notion is taken up anew in Le Génie des origines: Psychanalyse et psychoses (The genius of origins: Psychoanalysis and psychoses; 1992), where Racamier articulated it, on one side, with the notion of primal mourning (renunciation of total possession of the object), and on the other, with a eulogy to ambiguity (to be distinguished from ambivalence), the condition for a psychic life that is sufficiently flexible, rich, and creative.

Racamier's final work, L'Inceste et l'incestuel (Incest and the incestuous; 1995) returns to and broadens these ideas by going back to the very bases of his theorization, with the "incestuous," that is, the totality of parent-child relations (particularly mother-child relations) that, by way of multiple substitutions, aim to maintain the eroticized narcissistic union of mutual seduction and block the oedipal organization.

Throughout, this succession of works shows the development and blossoming of a lively and original way of thinking that inevitably resonates with that of Donald W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, or even Jacques Lacan, even though Racamier, firmly anchored in his own practice, was not greatly concerned with backing it up with the theories of other authors. Racamier left behind a substantial life's work, through his creation of institutions for the care of adult psycho-tics and his practice there, through the theoretical contributions that were both the fruit of and the support for that practice, and, finally, through his teaching.

Roger Perron

See also: Ambivalence; Criminology and psychoanalysis; Delusion; Double bind; France; Incest; Infantile psychosis; Paradox; Parenthood; Postnatal/postpartum depression; Puerperal psychoses; Self-representation; Tenderness; Weaning.