Quick Facts
Biography
Édouard Pichon (24 June 1890 – 20 January 1940) was a French pediatrician, grammarian and psychoanalyst. He was born in Sarcelles and died in Paris.
Career
A distinguished and innovative grammarian, Pichon was analysed by Eugénie Sokolnicka, and became a founding member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1926. A member of the royalist and reactionary Action Française, Pichon represented the jingoistic strand of French psychoanalysis, with his belief in “the genuine culture and the true civilization of our country...this fundamental Frenchness”.
Through his mixture of linguistic and psychoanaltic thinking, Pichon was a powerful influence on Jacques Lacan (as well as a practical mentor). In Écrits, Lacan paid tribute to “a divination that I can attribute only to his practise of semantics...that guided him in people's dark places”.
Among the psychoanalytic concepts introduced by what Élisabeth Roudinesco called Pichon's “fatalist genius”, were those of oblativity, scotomization, and foreclosure.