Catherine Millot

File:Catherine Millot (2015).jpg

Catherine Millot (2015)

Catherine Millot (born 1944) is a French Lacanian psychoanalyst and author, professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris-VIII.

A devotee of the Rhineland mystics, in the 1970s she was one of the young philosophers, such as Jacques-Alain Miller, with whom Lacan surrounded himself when devising his seminar, sometimes feeding his clinic with their research, their readings and even their words and concepts.

Like the Freudian study of the Gradiva, she is the author of essays focusing on what a writer's own writing says about the fantasy of the singular structure of the unconscious and reveals the unspeakable of desire. The singularity of her approach, which combines theoretical reflection and personal experience, and the clarity of her writing, which is far from jargon, coupled with the musicality of a style close to free association, have earned her a reputation as a writer 'outside her genre'.

Her thesis, turned into the book Freud anti-pédagogue, argued that pedagogy could not be based on psychoanalysis, since the role of analyst involved a radical openness to lack which was incompatible with the role of teacher.

In 1983 in her book Horsexe, she asserted her belief that transgender women's gender identity is psychotic and relies inappropriately on ideals and stereotypes of femininity.

Works

• Freud anti-pédagogue, 1979
• Horsexe. Essai sur le transsexualisme, 1983. Translated as Horsexe. Essay on Transsexuality, 1990
• Nobodaddy. L'hystérie dans le siècle, Distribution Distique, 1988
• La vocation de l'écrivain, Gallimard, 1991
• Gide, Genet, Mishima. L'intelligence de la perversion, Gallimard, 1997
• Abîmes ordinaires, 2001
• La vie parfaite. Jeanne Guyon, Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, 2006
• Ô solitude, 2011