Michel Sapir

Michel Sapir (May 8th, 1915 with Moscow - 2002 with Paris) is a French psychiatrist of Russian origin.

Michel Sapir was born in Moscow on May 8th, 1915 in a family from the Russian Jewish upper middle class. His/her large maternal father, Maximilien Epstein, an important industrialist of the area of Moscow, were also near to the left wing of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party. He was contacted after the revolution of October 1917 by the Bolchévique S, for a station with the Conseil of the police chiefs of the people. After having hesitated to begin fully at the sides of the Bolsheviks, the family folded up itself on Odessa during the summer 1918, from where she emigrated, partly towards Italy and partly towards Poland. Michel Sapir arrived with his parents, Ludmilla and Jacob, in Warsaw at the beginning of spring 1920. After having made his studies with the French College of Warsaw, Michel Sapir came to Paris in 1934 to make his medicine. Naturalized in 1937, it made come his mother to France in 1938 (his/her father had died in 1936). After the defeat of 1940 it becomes resistant then member of the Communist party (which it had already approached in his youth in Poland). It will be one of the persons in charge of the National front of Resistance in the Alpes-Maritimes under the pseudonym of Commander Dartois. It is in the clandestinity which it will meet Marie-Therese Roubaud that it will marry after war and of which it will have in 1954 a son, the economist Jacques Sapir. After contributehaving largely contributed to the release of Nice in 1944 it will direct a medical antenna of FFI on the face of the " pockets of Atlantique" where the capitulation of Germany surprises it in Royan. It will finish its studies of medicine then, renonçant with a political career within PCF in the Alpes-Maritimes.

There will remain however member of the PCF until the Fifties, playing a big role within the doctors communist and turning over twice to the USSR. It will be excluded in 1958 from PCF because of its opposition to the line of the party denying the Khrouchtchev Report/ratio. After having been one of the founders of the Autonomous Socialist party (PSA), which will become the PSU thereafter, it will give up the active political commitment in the Sixties, while always claiming intransigent left on the social and democratic principles.

Gastro-enterologist of formation, it will begin an analysis at the end of the Fifties and will turn definitively to the psychoanalysis in the Sixties. During this time hinge of its intellectual work it will on the occasion to work on the psychosomatic effects of the stress to work. It was close to the ideas of Sandor Ferenczi and Michael Balint, in particular for the question of the relation look after-neat. In this double intellectual filiation, it will develop an at the same time many and fertile scientific production. It adapted a specific technique of relieving known as " with inductions variables".

He collaborated with Leon Chertok and created with him the " Psychosomatic company of Medicine " in 1956. It will maintain the close links with the companies Switzerland and Italian, organizing during long years the annual meetings of Divonne and Sils-Maria. Michel Sapir devoted a broad part of his work in the Seventies and Eighties to the training of the doctors and medical staffs, topic which was due to him much in heart and to which it devoted many publications.

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