Reading Room: A Talk with the Authors
Special Maternities: The Assumption of Subjecthood
Catherine and Alain Vanier
(Éditions érès, 2025)
Friday, April 24, 2026 • 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
The book addresses two critical disturbances to the earliest mother-child relation: pregnancy and post-partum for women labelled “psychotic,” and the intensive care of gravely premature newborns. Through them, we discover that a mother’s granting of subjecthood is what allows the necessary separation that sustains newborn life.
Location: In-person in NYC and online via Zoom.
Fee: Attendance is free and open to the public. Registration details to follow.
—
Alain Vanier is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and an emeritus professor at the Université Paris VII Diderot. He is a vice-president of Espace Analytique and an Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association faculty member. Among his most recent books are Une introduction à la psychanalyse (Colin, 2018) and Épistémologie et méthodologie en psychanalyse et en psychiatrie (érès, 2017). In English translation, the Other Press has published his monograph Lacan.
Catherine Vanier practices psychoanalysis in Paris. She is a member of Espace Analytique, heads L’École Expérimentale de Bonneuil-sur-Marne, and is a faculty member of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. Besides many books in French, she has published in English (as Catherine Mathelin) Lacanian Psychotherapy with Children: The Broken Piano, and (as Catherine Vanier) Premature Birth: The Baby, the Doctor and the Psychoanalyst (1917, Karnac Press).
