Author's Biography

Jean-Michel FITREMANN, was born in Paris 4th of August 1944 at the close of World War II.

Scientific studies

He entered the École Normale Supérieure, rue d'Ulm, Paris, France, in 1963 and graduated in 1966-1967 (Licence de Physique and Licence de Mathématiques (equivalent to todays Maîtrise or Masters)) and earned the title of Agrégé de Science Physiques. He worked in the field of geophysics, atmospheric research and astrophysics, and produced a degree on the "Study of the Sun Corona in the Far Infrared" (1967). Then he went to fluid mechanics, at the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Fluides, Orsay, University Pierre et Marie Curie of Paris, France (1968-1980), and specialised in multiphase flows, both investigations and theorisation, with applications ranging from oil transport, oil spills, multiphase chemical treatment, flow in porous media, emulsions and suspensions, to dredging polymetallic nodules by air suction. He left an original theory of two-phase flow based on the mathematical theory of distribution giving a complete set of equations for the description of non-miscible fluids and solids. He created a Multiphase Flow Laboratory in Nantes, France, at the École Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique (today École Centrale de Nantes)(1979-1982). As consultant, he worked on turbulent noise generation and propagation for SNECMA, France (1964-1984) and for various industrial companies in the field of multiphase flows, such as IFP, elf, total, norsk hydro, etc. He led the small company Hydroscience for specialised studies on two-phase flows and produced there an number of simulation programs for the calculation and prediction of two- or three-phase flows in various devices for the industry (1980-1987). He was Chargé de Mission of the Directeur Scientifique of CNRS (executive for the Head of the Department of Engineering Sciences), the French national agency for research (1978-1980).

Psychological studies

He started studying psychology in 1980, and begun then a personal therapy which was to last until 1998, using a variety of techniques and settings. He studied gestalt and reichian methods, various massage and bodywork techniques, rebirth, group dynamics and psychodrama, and various tools such as hypnosis and psychic reading. He studied psychology, psychoanalysis and its techniques at the graduate level at the University of Minnesota and at the post-graduate level at Université Denis Diderot of Paris (Paris 7), France (1990-1995) where he earned a DESS in Clinical Psychology. In clinical research, he kept his focus on the field of psychoses and made a number of clinical field work and observations at the psychiatric unit 7, CHR of Nantes (State Hospital), France, (memorandum on 'possession' and psychotic acting out), at the cure centre for alcoholics CALME, , France and the post-cure centre for alcoholics CITC of La Baronnais, Bouguenais, France (memoranda on alcoholism and psychoses, and body phenomena). His main sources of inspirations come from various therapeutic experiences: body release work, primal and regression work, sexual work and sexotherapy (Margo Anand, Jack Painter, Michael Plesse and Gabrielle St. Clair, Jean-Claude Roche, Jacqueline Alonzo, Jacques Waynberg), gestalt and massage (Roberta DeLong-Miller), ericksonian hypnosis and hypnotherapy (Frank Stass, Jean Godin), transferential setting and analysis (Georges Delhommeau), psychoanalytic interpretation (lacanian school of Paris, Ginette Michaud, Alain Vanier, Joël Dor). He also kept investigating the methods of healing in various ethnological groups, especially Buddhists and Tibetan, Sufi, North-American Indian, and Afro-Brazilian. He concluded then to ethnic differences of the original construction of the individual and consequent different means of relief (i.e. we have an ethnic rather than a universal collective unconscious), and that structuring by acts and by symbols was the highest impact of the group on the infants and children. He also concluded that techniques can be gained from foreign sources, but that the hope of direct importation of rites and healing procedures was an illusion owing to these differences in the archaic structuring of the child and the lack of deep resonance of foreign symbols. He is interested in the trance phenomenon as a direct mean of access to the psychic structure and its ability of direct healing under such states. He is member of the reviewing delegates of Journal of Mind and Behavior, New York, NY, USA. He is also a individual member of the European Association for Psychotherapy, Vienna, A.

Since 1995, he fights for the advancement of structural ideas, for the building up of a real science of psychology under the postmodern paradigm, system theory and the exploration of myth. He is currently looking for contacts with all researchers in the field of structural psychology and structural psychology, and also psychology as an experiential science of the self. His effort is to cluster fundamental theory, social projections of the unconscious such as ideologies, social forms and social representations, myths and rites, out-of-the-ordinary experiences and experiences on the border of consciousness, healing and transformation strategies, investigating and healing states, into a host of experiences pertaining to a single approach of the human being and gathering a more unified vision of psychology.

Publications in psychology

Alcoolisme et Psychose, Jean-Michel Fitremann, Université Denis Diderot, Paris, F, 1993.

The use of ecstatic trance for the treatment of addictive and abused individuals, Jean-Michel Fitremann, 11th conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternate Modes of Healing, San Rafael, California, September 3-5, 1994.

Alcoolisme, Corps et Psychose, part I-III, Jean-Michel Fitremann, Université Denis Diderot, Paris, F, 1995.

The Ecstatic Trance State as a Model for Health, Jean-Michel Fitremann, 1st Congress of the World Council for Psychotherapy, Vienna 1996.

ABC de la Sexualité, Jean-Michel Fitremann, Grancher, Paris, F, 463 pages, 2002.

Most of the ideas presented in this site come from a combination of constructs of the various schools of structural psychology I know of, the lacanian school of Paris, the Jungian tradition, represented by the Jung Foundation, the general theory of open systems which is growing in physics, the postmodern paradigm, and the theory of antichaos and programmed death.

But most important of all are the testimonies of my clients, an analysis of over 400 case records, and over 40 direct information from people with a psychotic or autistic history who have re-lived their original history with sufficient accuracy. The congruence with the findings of the structuralists schools is remarkable, since most of the data they rely on come from the observation of psychotic children, from which they have deducted what should a `normal', that is a natural infancy should be. There are of course some discrepancies between what I have collected, and what I have learned from those schools, but not so numerous one may think.

The variance is greater when compared with the psychiatric psychotics I have studied, but this is no surprise since there is a psychiatring of the individual in such cases due to psychotropic substances, internment, and the behaviour of the staff, which cannot be assessed. It is well known that when one takes an animal out of his context he behaves no longer as in the wild. When we give a product to a psychotic or take him out of his natural context, we no longer have the same person; this has been thoroughly screened in the theory of addictions.

I claim this approximate agreement between children therapy and adult therapy in certain conditions as a good starting point for improving psychology and psychoanalysis.

To my surprise, this agreement has gone one step further when I came to realise that myths, which as we all know are a major screen of projection of the collective part of the unconscious, also contained patterns having exactly the same details as what my clients finally came to unearth in their infancy. That is to say that the predicament of neonates who become psychotics has a large collective part, pointing to ritual practices of childbirth and nursing which are largely aberrant and generators of specific severe psychic disorders.

Now I turned to look into various traditions for clues as to the universality of these type of early adventures and means of healing. Not all people have these sort of destroying practices on the infants, but of course they have other practices and they suffer from other types of disorders we have no idea of. So I found that our suffering and ailments are not universal, but specific to our `race', or rather to our socio-religious ethnological block, which in fact tend to confirm the findings of Joseph Campbell and his followers.

Most difficult of all, was to disentangle the findings and their putting into theory, from my own experience of psychosis and repair. It has taken me the best of 18 years of therapy and field involvement, which still continues Most reassuring was it to find that I was not alone in my findings, and that some far away or nearby colleagues, not the most popular of course, on this earth have had already a similar insight. We have then built up a strategy for the therapy of autistic-psychotic people and its weaker form of addictive people that we have tried in Paris in the 80s. I still continue to work along these lines, and try to improve them.

Here are the results of these years of reflection.