Janine Puget, MD, 2011 (1926-2020)
Dr. Janine Puget's work explored the challenges of engaging with the otherness of the other — distinct from conflicts arising from identification. Puget's contribution was to argue that there is a separate, under examined category of difficulty — one that arises not from identification or projection, but from the sheer otherness of the other person. The problem isn't that we're confusing them with someone else or projecting onto them. The problem is that they are genuinely, irreducibly different from us, and that difference itself creates psychological and relational challenges. Classical analysis tends to look inward at the self's distortions, while Puget was pointing outward — toward the encounter with genuine difference as its own source of difficulty.
Her work also examined social suffering and prejudice, and the ways in which social events reverberate through clinical life. Puget argued that external social events — political upheaval, collective trauma, violence, instability — do not stay outside the door. They enter the room, shape the patient's material, affect the analyst, and alter the nature of the therapeutic relationship. She insisted that psychoanalysis cannot confine itself to the intrapsychic. Society is not merely a backdrop — it is an active force that generates suffering and continuously shapes what happens between two people in a clinical setting. This led Puget to embrace uncertainty as a foundational principle for navigating the unexpected.