ABSTRACT
Chapter Two considers the main lines of development within French psychoanalysis from the 1940s to provide the reader with a feeling for the terrain, the main protagonists and some of the major conflicts fought out on it. Since the immediate reason for the deep divisions in the SPP, the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, before 1953 was the closely fought battle on who would obtain control over the training institute, the results of the split meant that it reverted to Sacha Nacht was able to determine the agenda for the next decade. His approach encouraged reflections on a convergence between the respective angles of Psychoanalysis and Medicine, in the understanding of psychosomatic phenomena. This provided opportunities for Pierre Marty and a number of close colleagues to study the particular challenges offered by interviews with somatic patients seen in a hospital environment. As a consequence of conceptual difficulties with Lacan, - who, at the time, took exception to admitting to psychoanalytic work what did not belong to the order of language - a number of French psychoanalysts who were not aligned with Lacan were becoming increasingly interested in British psychoanalysis, which offered an approach worlds apart from Lacan’s.
