École Freudienne de Paris

The École freudienne de Paris (EFP) was a French psychoanalytic professional body formed in 1964 by Jacques Lacan.

It became 'a vital — if conflict-ridden — institution until its dissolution in 1980'.

In 1953 conflict within the Paris psychoanalytical society had reached such a pitch that "a group of senior figures, including but not led by Lacan, broke away to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP)". The latter's long quest for recognition from the IPA finally stalled in 1963: "it emerged again and again that Lacan's 'variable sessions' were the contentious issue" and in the end "the price of recognition was the final and definitive exclusion of Lacan from the training programme". As a result of the IPA demand to remove Lacan from the list of training analysts with the organisation Lacan left the SFP, which was dissolved the following year: "Half its assets went to the EFP, and half to a new Association Psychoanalytique de France...[which] was recognised by the IPA".

In June 1964 Lacan published the "Founding Act" to establish his own school, which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). Grandly proclaiming that "a labor is to be accomplished — a labor which, in the field opened up by Freud, restores the cutting edge of his discovery...[&] denounces the deviations and compromises that blunt its program", the Founding Act sought from the start to claim the moral high-ground in opposition to the IPA.

On the vexed question of training, the Act proclaimed that "a psychoanalyst is a trainer, for having conducted one or several analyses which proved to be of a didactic nature. Such empowerment is de facto".

The conjoined issues of authority and of training analyses, which had led to the foundation of the EFP, plagued its history from the very start. In December, 1965, Francois Perrier resigned from the Board over the question of training, writing to Lacan that 'What we expect of you is serene authority...not reckless skirmishes that might be the work of ex-guerrillas turned desperadoes...you always divide but never rule'. In 1967, Lacan proposed the notion of "the Pass" in the hope of providing an answer to the question of accredition; but the following year, in 1968, Perrier and two other former board members, with some twenty other members disputing as a group the EFP's accreditation process, broke away to form the , also known as the "Quatrième groupe".

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