Angelo Hesnard


Angelo Louis Marie Hesnard was a French born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and was an important figure in 1930s French sexology.

Life and career

Coming from an impoverished background, Hesnard educated himself through the French navy; and it was a naval doctor that he co-authored the first book on Freud in French in 1914. Despite never being analysed, Hesnard was a founding member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, the first French psychoanalytics institution. Loyal to Vichy France in the war, Hesnard continued to serve in the navy, and was in French North Africa when he wrote his notorious article of 'The Jewishness of Sigmund Freud'/
In the fifties he debated with Jacques Lacan over the meaning of Freud's saying "Where It was, shall I be"; but when debarred by the IPA from the roster of training analysts as a representative of the chauvinist wing of French psychoanalysis, he followed Lacan into the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964

Works