Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Princess Marie Bonaparte, known as Princess George of Greece and Denmark upon her marriage, was a French author and psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany.
Jean Laplanche was a French author, psychoanalyst and winemaker. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud's seduction theory, and wrote more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as "the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day."
Françoise Dolto was a French pediatrician and psychoanalyst.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a leading French psychoanalyst, a training analyst, and past President of the Société psychanalytique de Paris in France. From 1983 to 1989, she was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Chasseguet-Smirgel was Freud Professor at the University College, London, and Professor of Psychopathology at the Université Lille Nord de France. She is best known for her reworking of the Freudian theory of the ego ideal and its connection to primary narcissism, as well as for her extension of this theory to a critique of utopian ideology.
Jean Starobinski was a Swiss literary critic.
Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher.
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst. She conducts a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis at the École Normale Supérieure.
Jean-Yves Tadié is a French writer, biographer, and academic, noted particularly for his work on Marcel Proust.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-French artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher based in France. Born in Mandatory Palestine, she lives and works in Paris. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concepts of the matrixial space, Matrixial Gaze and related concepts around trauma, aesthetics and ethics. Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin. In 2023, she was part of the Finding Committee for the Artistic Director of Documenta's 2027 edition. She resigned from that role with a public letter intended to open a radical discussion in the artworld, following the administration's rejection of her request for a pause due to the attacks on civilians in Israel and in Gaza and the ongoing heavy losses of life.
Antoinette Fouque was a French psychoanalyst who was involved in the French women's liberation movement. She was the leader of one of the groups that originally formed the French Women's Liberation (MLF), and she later registered the trademark MLF specifically under her name. She helped found the publishing house Éditions des Femmes as well as the first collection of audio-books in France, "Bibliothèque des voix". Her position in feminist theory was primarily essentialist, and heavily based in psychoanalysis. She helped author Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (2013), a biographical dictionary about creative women.
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. A member of the school of French feminism and écriture féminine, she has published books with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. She has also made contributions to musicology; her Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1979) is notable for its emphasis on the representation of women in opera.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is a professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the author of many works on the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and hypnosis. Born to Danish parents, he began his studies in France and emigrated to the United States in 1986. His constructivist analysis of the co-production of psychical "facts" emphasises the accuracy of historical accounts of mental disorders.
Célia Bertin was a French writer, journalist, biographer, French Resistance fighter and winner of the 1953 Prix Renaudot. She was awarded as an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and an Officer of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Per Magnus Johansson is a Swedish psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and historian of ideas. Through his research on the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden, Johansson has contributed to the understanding of the heritage of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical movement in the 20th century. Johansson's psychoanalytical training took place in Paris, where he completed a training analysis with Pierre Legendre. On Pierre Legendres passing in March 2023, Johansson published an obituary in French, Italian and Swedish describing Legendres contributions to the Freudian legacy.
The Schiller Prize was a Swiss literary award which was established in 1905 to promote Swiss literature and was awarded until 2012 when it was replaced as a national literary award by the Swiss Literature Awards.
Anne-Lise Stern was a French psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor.
