Francois Perrier (psychoanalyst)

François Perrier (25 July 1922 – 2 August 1990) was a French doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.

Perrier played a prominent role in Lacanian and in post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Perrier studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris; and became a psychoanalyst after a first analysis with Maurice Bouvet, a second with Sasha Nacht, and a third with Jacques Lacan.

As a Lacanian, he became one of the so-called 'three musketeers' of leading disciples, to be known as the 'troika': Serge Leclaire, Wladimir Granoff and François Perrier.

Perrier was called by Élisabeth Roudinesco "the wandering troubadour of Lacanianism, naive and passionate, as whimsical as his master (whose genius he lacked), but a prodigious theorist of female sexuality, hysteria, and love".

In a more critical judgement, linking his obsessive father complex to his ambivalent search for a psychoanalytic master, she also considered him to have frittered away his career "between presumptiousness and aimlessness".

After belonging to the Société psychanalytique de Paris, Perrier took part in the creation of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (S.F.P.) in 1953.

Together with Granoff, and Leclaire, in the early 1960s Perrier attempted to have the SFP acknowledged formally by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). After the failure of their efforts, it was at Perrier's house, in the presence of Jacques Lacan and Nathalie Zaltzman, his ex-wife, that the founding of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris took place in 1964.

Perrier was the first to resign from the board of the new institution, in 1966, over the question of training; and in 1969, in what has been called the third schism in French psychoanalytic history, he, along with Piera Aulagnier, Jean-Paul Valabrega, and (a minority of) others broke away from the EFP to set up a fourth group: the Organisation psychanalytique de langue francaise (OPFL). The first president of the Quatrième Groupe, Perrier would eventually resigned from it in 1981.

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