Tribute to Janine Puget (1926-2020)

Janine was a founding member of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. She participated in its birth in Montreal, Canada during August 2006. Janine was and will remain a figure who has marked my development as a person and as a professional. In Latin America, and in some European countries, she has been an emblematic figure for many generations, owing to her scientific coherence, her ethics and her innovative courage. This is what she called: “breaking the walls”.

A critical psychoanalyst, she has represented two worlds: France, from where her family emigrated after going through traumatic personal and social upheavals, and Argentina, which allowed her to complete her psychoanalytical training, to be enriched by the new world, to continue to be nourished in her country of origin, and to become a citizen of the world.

My first personal encounter with Janine took place in 1981, at a time of personal crisis, at the end of a period of dictatorship in Argentina. This meeting inaugurated a connection between us based on our common background, and by two central figures of Argentine psychoanalysis: Marie Langer and Enrique Pichon Rivière. This connection continued in France through our annual meetings. Pichon marked the beginning of her interest in psychoanalysis as she worked for him as his English translator. Rue Copernic, where Pichon Rivière and his wife, the famous psychoanalyst

Arminda Aberastury, lived in the 1950s, became a laboratory for meetings between artists and psychoanalysts. It was at this time that she started medical school and trained in psychoanalysis at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association.

Her situation as an emigrant allowed her to understand that there are stories that cannot be shared because they correspond to different life scenarios. For her, this situation was a great opportunity to discover the logic of stories told within both countries, and to create a theory of the incomparability of subjectivity. She started out as an individual and group psychoanalyst, at a time when the group was considered an impure area of psychoanalysis. It has always been situated on the border between the classical and marginal trends of psychoanalysis.

In the evolution of her work, it is possible to recognise different stages, starting from individual psychoanalysis to the fields of group, couple and family psychoanalysis.  Between 1956-1982, she participated in the foundation of the Association of Group Psychotherapy of Buenos Aires, together with León Grinberg, Marie Langer and Emilio Rodrigué (1957) (1982); and ran the journal of the Argentine Association of Group Psychology and Psychotherapy. She published numerous articles on the theory and technique of groups and families. She was always at the side of analysts who introduced theoretical and technical novelties into psychoanalytical practice and wrote articles on the training of psychoanalysts (1961, 1967). During the period of the Argentinean military dictatorship (1976-1982), she was part of the resistance into the Solidarity Movement for Mental Health.

We can place her research on couple´s psychoanalysis alongside the work of Isidoro Berenstein, in developing family psychoanalysis, between 1986-90.

At that time, she theorized the notion of the ‘single object’ in couple relationships. According to her, this hypothesis explains the tendency towards monogamy, love, the fantasy of sharing everything and the transference to the analyst. She describes reproach and misunderstanding as characteristic symptoms of the couple, both related to the ‘single object’. The reproach would occur because of the unknown or strange aspect of the other. She considered that many failures in individual psychoanalysis were caused by the maintenance of the illusion of being the “unique object” for the other.  With Isidoro Berenstein, she developed work on the concept of “vincularity”: the space of each subject; the singularity of each person; and the link (bond?) resulting from connections between heterogeneous realities. They developed the theme of bond configurations, i.e. the different forms that bonds take, whether in the group, the couple, the family or the institution. Each configuration requires a specific therapeutic device and working method.

Philosophy played a central role in her scientific output. For four decades she was a member of ADEP, an institution formed by five analysts and five philosophers and directed by Gregorio Klimovsky, a mathematician and philosopher of science who was awarded the International Psychoanalytical Association’s prize for his contributions to the epistemology of psychoanalysis in 1986. She worked for ten years with the Argentine philosopher Ignacio Lewkowicz.

In the introduction to the book Faire avec l’incertitude, Janine (Puget, 2020, p. 20, 28) proposed an original definition of the notion of ‘link’. [It should be noted that translating the term ‘vinculo’ (Spanish) to French and English presents difficulties, and we do not have a translation for ‘lo vincular’ or for ‘vincularity’]. What differentiates their theory of the link is that it attends to the logic of ‘presentation’ and ‘effects of the present’ in the therapeutic space. Janine would say that inhabiting social, family or personal spaces brings us into contact with the fragility and instability of subjective, family, couple or social connection. She introduced a new conception of family. Being father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister is, she argued, a presupposition linked to the concept of family. However, it was not possible to predict who would occupy these positions, as they depend on the propensities of each individual. For her it was a question of exercising the parent-child functions rather than “doing everything”.

Another fundamental axis of her work concerned the interdisciplinarity approach she adopted, since she questioned the idea of single-origin foundations and proposed that origins were plural reconstructions. This presupposes recognizing discontinuity in the relationship between representation and presentation; between the expected and the unpredictable; between space and time. Further rich reflections on the place of contemporary psychoanalysis led her to introduce hypotheses on a social metapsychology.

In the last stage of her life, she was part of an Argentinian movement that studied the relationship between psychoanalysis and the social link, called “Psicoanalistas Autoconvocados”. In 2020 – 2021 she accompanied us to the end in providing online seminars for therapists in Russia and Spain on the different currents of the psychoanalysis of the links. For Janine, there were always two different logics in the construction of the history of a subject:

1.History constructed from the present.

2.The present constructed from history.

For her, the big question was to know if the present was a repetition of history or if it was a new history, one that it was possible to build through the present. A child’s history would have an impact on the present, but it would not necessarily have a causal effect. What would be central would be two interacting and heteronomous states. The link became more complex once the social, cultural and political spaces of the present that could not be explained by the past were taken into account.

Janine played a leading role in the last three IACFP congresses. Her presence was remarkable for the vivacity of her thinking, her ability as a communicator, and her openness to others.

Your presence is always alive

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Bibliographical references

Jaitin, R. (2021). À propos de Janine Puget, Revue de Psychothérapie Psychanalytique de Groupe, 76, 216-219. doi: 10.3917/rppg.076.0203

Puget, J (2020). Subjectivité sociale : habiter des espaces. In Faire avec l’incertitude. Investir le présent du sujet, pp. 92-95. Lyon: Chronique Sociale.