Lionel Bailly

Lionel Bailly
Born	Paris, France
🏫 Education	Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Sorbonne University, Paris
💼 Occupation

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Lionel Bailly is a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist specialising in the work of Jacques Lacan. He is based at University College London, where he publishes and teaches in the domain of French psychoanalysis, Freud, and trauma. He previously chaired l'Association de Langue Française pour l'Etude du Stress et du Trauma (The French Speaking Association for Trauma and Stress Studies) and was a board member for the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a member of the Association Lacanienne Internationale, co-founded in 1982 by his supervisor Jean Bergès.

Bailly has published numerous books and papers on psychoanalysis and psychiatry, including on topics such as Lacan's mirror stage, trauma in children, and the problems of psychiatric diagnostic practice. He received wider attention for his 2007 book Lacan: A Beginner's Guide, for which he received both public and scholarly recognition as an important interpreter of Lacanian theory.

Biography and Education

Bailly studied medicine and psychiatry at the Salpêtrière Hospital, part of Sorbonne University in Paris. Under the influence of Jean Bergès, he became head of Sainte-Anne Hospital's Bio-psychopathology Unit.

Prior to moving to England, Bailly formed part of a group of interdisciplinary humanitarian projects aimed at alleviating the suffering (in psychological and in other ways) of victims of war. This included travelling to the Kurdistan Region and to former Yugoslavia during times of war. These experiences would form one of the influences for his first book, Les Catastrophes et leurs Conséquences Psychotraumatiques chez l'Enfant (Catastrophes and their Psychotraumatic Consequences for Children), which examined the mechanisms of psychic/traumatic responses to accidents, terrorism, wars, State violence, torture, and natural catastrophes.

Work

Bailly's Lacan: A Beginner's Guidehas been a significant influence to readers around the world, and is often described as necessary for understanding the intricacies of Lacan. The book presents an advanced systematic introduction to Lacan's work, and with its scope and rigour, British psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy stated that Bailly "succeeds where almost everyone else has failed". The publication was widely recognised as helping students engage with the difficult work of Lacan, without sacrificing the complexity and originality of Lacanian theory., and joins much of Bailly's work in creatively interpreting and presenting Lacan to a wider audience.

Influenced by Juliet Mitchell's work on 'The Law of the Mother' (a variation on Lacan's 'Name of the Father' which grounds the symbolic structures of the law), Bailly introduced the 'Maternal Covenant' as a new concept capable of explaining sibling-and-mother relationships from the perspective of their proto-symbolic value. Bailly argued that the more implicit socialising role of the mother could not be assimilated to the prohibiting and signifying level of Law, the latter being a consequence of the empty, yet crucial, 'paternal metaphor'. He therefore introduced the Maternal Covenant as a rudimentary agreement between mother and children, which in itself introduces certain imaginary exchange-relations between children and their mothers, yet which lacks the radical inter-subjective structuring unique to the Law.

Selected Publications

Books

• Les Catastrophes et leurs Conséquences Psychotraumatiques chez l'Enfant, ESF, 1996
• Lacan: A Beginner's Guide, Oneworld, 2007

Edited

• The Lacan Tradition, edited with David Lichtenstein and Sharmini Bailly, Routledge, 2018

References

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