BIGRAS, JULIEN JOSEPH NORMAND (1932-1989)

A Canadian psychiatrist and training analyst, Julien Bigras was born February 12, 1932, in Laval, Quebec, and died May 10, 1989, in Montreal. He spent his childhood at the family farm and studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Montreal; he completed his psychoanalytic training at the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute.

A member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (1963) and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (1954), and a training analyst, he maintained a psychoanalytic practice, directed a seminar, published the review Interprétation (Montreal) and two collections of books in Paris and Montreal, and collaborated on Études Freudiennes (Denoël, Paris) and Patio (Paris). He also ran a seminar at McGill University (1983-1989) and participated in the Clinical Lacanian Forum in the United States.

He published ninety-one articles, twenty-six chapters in anthologies, and eleven works of fiction including L 'Enfant dans le grenier (1977), Le Psychanalyste nu (1979), Kati of course (1980), Ma Vie, ma folie (1983), and La Folie en face (1986).

He was a great admirer of Donald Woods Winnicott, Harold Searles, and Sándor Ferenczi because of their lack of dogmatism and their clinical freedom of expression during transference. Madness, incest, the therapeutic use of stories, and transference and violence associated with the psychoanalyst were common themes throughout his work. Bigras's research led him to ask two fundamental questions: 1) Is violence necessary for access to the unconscious, does it provide the only opportunity for the analysand and for the psychoanalyst/analysand to rediscover or recreate a new and singular maternal language, a primal language, the only one that can produce the fecundity of being? 2) Is the violence of the psychoanalyst (the unanalyzed in all of us) an expression of the other's desperate cry to be heard, a limiting transference situation in which the one who is best able to hear this cry would be his own patient? Can writing or any other form of creative art provide confirmation, and pick up the thread where the analysand or the analyst left off?

Élisabeth Bigras

See also: Canada;Études Freudiennes ; Interprétation ; Société psychanalytique de Montréal (Psychoanalytic Society of Montreal).

Bibliography

Bigras, Julien. (1977). L 'enfant dans le grenier. Paris: Hachette.

——. (1979). La folie en face. Paris: Robert Laffont.

——. (1979). Le psychanalyste nu. Paris: Robert Laffont.

——. (1980). Kati of course. Paris: Mazarine.

——. (1983). Ma vie, ma folie. Paris-Montréal: Mazarine-Boréal Express.