Germaine Guex - The Abandonment Neurosis

Germaine Guex was born on 17 April 1904 in Arcachon, Aquitaine, France, and died on 20 November 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Her father, Georges Guex, was a native of Switzerland and a Protestant pastor. Her mother Hlne, ne Millet, was French, and died when her daughter was still young. At seventeen, Germaine Guex moved to Switzerland and lived with her aunt. There, she studied education and psychology at the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva until 1923, after which she worked as an assistant to Jean Piaget in the psychology laboratory of the Institute until 1930. During this time, she became familiar with the work of Freud, completed a training analysis with Raymond de Saussure, and became a member and training analyst at the Socit Suisse de Psychoanalyse.

Above all, Guex was drawn to clinical work, so, in 1930, she was recruited by psychoanalyst Dr Andr Rpond, director of psychiatry in the Malvoz clinic, Valais, Switzerland, to oversee a psychoanalytically inspired medical unit and psychological counselling centre for children and parents. Being both a therapeutic and preventative facility, it was the first of its kind, and became the model for similar institutions in Switzerland and France. Three years later, Guex contracted tuberculosis and had to forego this work. She moved to Lausanne, where she met her partner to be, the Swiss psychoanalyst Charles Odier (18861954).

After the Second World War, Guex began teaching at the Raymond de Saussure SwissFrench psychoanalytic education centre in Geneva. With Odier and Henry Flournoy, she sought to combine Freudian psychoanalysis with the genetic and psychological theories of Piaget. The research was, for the most part, inspired and shaped by their concept of what became known as abandonment neurosis, which they argued had a pre-oedipal aetiology, founded on the individuals fear of abandonment and need for affective security.

This research culminated with Guexs book, La nvrose dabandon , first published in 1950, which was, and still is, a ground-breaking work. Her research turns on two observations: the frequent occurrence of analysands whose neurotic symptoms are unrecognisable when measured against any of the Freudian diagnostic models, and the relatively large number of these patients who sought help from her, having already undergone thorough, classically Freudian treatments with analysts whose abilities and credentials were never in question, but who, none the less, could do nothing to relieve the suffering of these patients. What the analysands all had in common, Guex observed, were extreme, life-debilitating feelings of abandonment, insecurity, and lack of self-worth, originally ignited by severe pre-oedipal trauma.

Guex describes abandonment neurosis in terms of how to identify it diagnostically. She then goes on to outline every tool and treatment methodology, developed over many years of clinical practice, which can be deployed in the successful and lasting eradication of this pervasive pathology, repairing shattered lives in ways that seems to achieve the impossible, by helping these neurotics adapt to the rigours of reality and, ultimately, establish meaningful, ongoing relations with others.