Alain de Mijolla, MD, 2004 (1933-2019)
Dr. de Mijolla's significant achievement was conceiving, directing, and editing the authoritative Dictionnaire International de la Psychanalyse, published in both French and English. The dictionary received widespread acclaim throughout Europe and represented a landmark undertaking for the psychoanalytic community as a whole. To complete it, de Mijolla engaged more than four hundred contributing scholars — a groundbreaking feat in the field. The work encompasses analytic concepts and terms, commentary on international psychoanalysis, and brief biographies of the major pioneers of the discipline.
His 1999 article "Freud and the Psychoanalytic Situation on the Screen" addressed a fundamental tension between two very different ways of representing inner life. Cinema is an external, visual medium — it shows behavior, expression, dialogue, and action. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is almost entirely interior and relational, unfolding through free association, silence, transference, and the slow, largely invisible movement of the unconscious. De Mijolla observed that these two forms are in many ways incompatible, and that film consistently struggles — or fails — to honestly represent what actually happens in an analytic setting. Rather than simply celebrating the appearance of psychoanalysis on screen, de Mijolla was asking harder questions about fidelity, representation, and the limits of translation between one medium and another.
A renowned author, lecturer, editor, and historian of psychoanalytic ideas, de Mijolla made wide-ranging contributions to the field and served as president of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis.