Obituary
Guy Rosolato
(1924–2012)

Guy Rosolato was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1924 and died in Paris on 6 March 2012.

A free and creative psychoanalytic spirit, he made his influential mark on the last forty years with a major body of work grounded on his great erudition, his concern to link advances in thought with the demands of human life and clinical reality and, lastly, his ability to confront the mystery of the unknown at all times.


At the age of 20 he joined the French forces fighting in Lebanon. He resumed his interrupted medical studies after the war. In 1953 he was a junior doctor at the Sainte Anne Hospital in Paris, where he later became a senior physician. There he met Henri Ey and Jacques Lacan, with whom he embarked on an analysis. He formed close friendships with André Green, Roger Mises, Conrad Stein, Serge Leclaire, Daniel Widlöcher and others, with whom he engaged in vigorous but friendly psychoanalytic debates, in which each defended his own position. This, after all, was the time when the psychoanalytic scene in France was riven with disputes between opposing camps. Rosolato joined the SFP (French Psychoanalytical Society), which split off from the SPP (Paris Psychoanalytical Society), where Jacques Lacan held sway and whose members in 1953 already included the likes of Françoise Dolto and Daniel Lagache. His 1957 thesis on the psychopathological references of surrealism won an award. Ever a hard worker, he was already confronting Lacanian theory with his knowledge of Freud’s oeuvre and his clinical experience. His writings from the years 1954 to 1969, gathered together in the volume Essais sur le symbolique, were recognized as highly creative.


At first a disciple of Lacan, in 1967 Guy Rosolato joined the APF (French Psychoanalytical Association), which split from the SFP in 1964. He took this decision when Lacan introduced la passe, a form of training characteristic of an institution that had become authoritarian. Rosolato felt that the APF embodied the rigour, inventiveness and fidelity to the letter and spirit of Freud’s texts without allegiance to a master or an institutional apparatus – in a word, the heritage of the SFP.


He served as the APF’s President from 1977 until 1979. Didier Anzieu, Victor Smirnoff and Rosolato himself were members of J.-B. Pontalis’s Editorial Committee for the Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse (published by Gallimard). He was involved in Psychanalyse à l’Université with Jean Laplanche (see obituary in this E-NL) and worked on the Revue française de psychanalyse (published by PUF) and Topique, the journal of the ‘Fourth Group’.


Guy Rosolato sought to combine Lacan’s preoccupation with language and symbolism with the other, less linguistic aspect of language associated with the affects, memory traces and fantasies. He put forward the concept of the demarcation signifier, which he located within a metaphoric–metonymic oscillation between linguistic meaning and non-verbal communication, thus advancing along the same path as other authors such as W.R. Bion. He expanded Freud’s object relations to encompass an unknown. The relation d’inconnu, or ‘relationship to the unknown’, was directed towards its perspective object, in which some discern traces of the primacy of Lacan’s signifier. In psychoanalytic theory, the relation d’inconnu conceptualizes an area beyond castration anxiety with anxieties of separation, of the void or of death – a theoretical advance fuelled by Rosolato’s clinical experience of fetishism and the perversions.


Rosolato’s writings on his cultural, religious and mythological interests are examples of his original contributions on the place of the symbolic and of ideals in thought and focus particular attention on the function of the father (the idealized father or the dead father) together with the place of the wish.


The fertile combination of fidelity and dialogue characterizes Guy Rosolato’s career on both the personal and scientific levels, presenting a psychoanalysis (his psychoanalysis) which he saw as an exploration, as bearing witness. He never shunned controversy or even confrontation. Strictly abiding by his personal convictions, he was able to preserve his inherited traditions while not being afraid to expose them to harsh scrutiny. ‘Be critical at all times’ was the watchword which Guy Rosolato never ceased to expound within the French Psychoanalytical Association and which is his message to the psychoanalysts of today.

Dominique Suchet, General Secretary, French Psychoanalytic Association

Principal works
Essais sur le symbolique [Essays on the symbolic]. Paris : Gallimard, 1969.
La Relation d’inconnu [The relationship to the unknown]. Paris : Gallimard, 1978.
Eléments de l’interprétation [Elements of interpretation]. Paris : Gallimard, 1985.

Further reading
Arfouilloux, J.–Cl. (2000) Guy Rosolato, Psychanalyste d’aujourd’hui [Guy Rosolato, a psychoanalyst for today]. Paris: PUF.
Green, A. et al. (2009) L’inconnu, dialogue avec Rosolato [The unknown, a dialogue with Rosolato]. Paris: PUF.