CHERTOK, LÉON (TCHERTOK, LEJB) (1911-1991)

A French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Russian origin, Léon Chertok (Lejb Tchertok) was born October 31, 1911, in Lida (a Byelorussian city near Vilnius, Lithuania) and died July 6, 1991, in Deauville, France. Because of the educational quotas for Jews in Poland, Chertok studied medicine in Prague, where he defended his dissertation in 1938. On his way to America to escape the Nazi invasion, he stopped in France, where war broke out in 1939. He volunteered for the army, was demobilized in 1940, and entered the Resistance, where he worked mostly with the Jewish MOI section ("Main-d'oeuvre immigrée," which brought together communist and foreign militants). Appointed to head the Mouvement National contre le Racisme (MNCR) [National Movement Against Racism], he founded the clandestine newspaper Combat médical and played an active role in saving Jewish children threatened with deportation. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

After the war his interest turned to psychiatry and he spent several months at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City before being made a doctor of medicine in 1948 by the School of Medicine of the University of Paris. Between 1949 and 1963 he served as a resident and then an assistant at the Hospital of Villejuif, where, with Victor Gachkel, he became co-director of the Center of Psychosomatic Medicine, which they had recently created. From 1963 to 1972 he was head of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the La Rochefoucauld Psychiatry Institute in Paris, then, from 1972 to 1981, the director of the Déjerine Center for Psychosomatic Medicine, in Paris, where, with Didier Michaux, he started a hypnosis laboratory. The founder and executive secretary of the Société Fran-çaise de Médicine Psychosomatique, he was also editor-in-chief of the Revue de médecine psychosomatique.

In 1948 he began a training analysis with Jacques Lacan, which was concluded in 1953, during the first split in the French psychoanalytic movement. In spite of supervised analyses with both Marc Schlumberger and Maurice Bouvet, Chertok the nonconformist was not admitted to the Société Psychanalytique de Paris; the fact that he made extensive use of hypnosis in his practice, becoming one of the leading specialists in France, certainly did not improve his chances of admission. His practice, and the many articles he wrote about his work, ultimately pushed him further and further from traditional psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, in 1973 he co-authored, with Raymond de Saussure, La Naissance du psychanalyse, de Mesmerà Freud, a historical work on the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis that has become a classic.

At the request of Philippe Bassine and A. E. Sherozia, he also organized a symposium on the unconscious held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 1979, which was attended by a number of psychoanalysts, including several from France. This was the first official event where psychoanalysis was openly discussed in Soviet Russia.

However, hypnosis was Chertok's true field of research and the subject of considerable thought. In 1987, toward the end of his life, his work took a new turn when he and Isabelle Stengers began a seminar entitled "L'hypnose, problème interdisciplinaire."

Alain de Mijolla

See also: Hypnosis; Suggestion.

Bibliography

Chertok, Léon. (1966). Hypnosis (D. Graham, Trans.). Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. (Original work published 1963)

——. (1981). Sense and nonsense in psychotherapy: The challenge of hypnosis (R.H. Ahrenfeldt, Trans.). Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. (Original work published 1979)

Chertok, Léon, and Stengers, Isabelle. (1992). A critique of psychoanalytic reason: Hypnosis as a scientific problem from Lavoisier to Lacan (Martha Noel Evans, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Chertok, Léon, and de Saussure, Raymond. (1979). The therapeutic revolution, from Mesmer to Freud. (R. H. Ahrenfeldt, Trans.). New York: Brunner/Mazel.