The Birth of a Political Self

This paper stresses the importance of psychoanalysis for all people who suffer from psychosis and trauma. It follows the author's journey, beginning in London in the 1970s in order to learn from the teachings of the anti‐psychiatrists, to public psychiatric hospitals in France, where she became a psychoanalyst. Through clinical examples, the paper describes transference in cases of psychosis and trauma as a process of co‐research into catastrophic zones of society, a process that unveils what cannot be said, at the crossroads of the patient's and the analyst's stories and history.