Psychoanalysis and Catastrophe Theory

Soon twenty years will have passed since the death of René Thom (1923–2002), not much in terms of the history of ideas, but enough to be able to evaluate today, without any fashionable issues, what is the scope of catastrophe theory in psychoanalysis? We shall understand this word “scope” in a double sense: scope by extension—does the theory of catastrophes present a possible extension in psychoanalysis in its clinical dimension as well as in its theoretical dimension—but also scope in the sense of support.