SOCIÉTÉ PSYCHANALYTIQUE DE GENÈVE

The Geneva Psychoanalytic Society was founded in September 1920, its creation being announced in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse (1921), although it never figured among the component societies recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association. It was founded shortly after the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, which was constituted in Zurich in 1919.

The Geneva Psychoanalytic Society brought together both physicians and non-physicians, as well as people who practiced psychoanalysis and others who took an interest in it without practicing it. Its president wasÉdouard Claparède, physician and professor of psychology at the science faculty of Geneva University. Although not a psychoanalyst, Claparède took a great interest in psychoanalysis from 1906 onwards and regularly kept the readers of Archives de psychologie up to date with Freud's latest discoveries. In 1920 he wrote the preface to the first French translation of Freud's Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910a), which he first published in the Revue de Genève. Alongside Claparède we find Pierre Bovet, director of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, as well as Henri Flournoy and Charles Odier, who were among the first to practice psychoanalysis, and Raymond de Saussure, who joined the society a little later. Also active in the society was Dr. Ferdinand Morel, who later abandoned psychoanalysis, Dr. William Boven, from the Lausanne medical faculty, and Sabina Spielrein. One of Jung's former patients, Sabina Spielrein came to Geneva in 1920 and was Jean Piaget's analyst. We know little enough about the life of the society or how it came to be dissolved. It is easy to imagine that after 1928 the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, reorganized by its new president, Philipp Sarasin, had a greater attraction for psychoanalysts in French-speaking Switzerland.

Jean-Michel Quinodoz

See also: Claparède,Édouard; Flournoy, Henri; Odier, Charles; Sarasin, Philipp; Spielrein, Sabina.

Bibliography

Roch, Marcel. (1980).Á propos de l'histoire de la psychanalyse en Suisse romande. Bulletin de la Société suisse de psychanalyse, 10, 17-30.

Saussure, Raymond de. (1967-68). L'histoire de la psychanalyse en Suisse romande. Bulletin de la Société suisse de psychanalyse, 6, 1-4.