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Michel de Certeau, Jesuit historian—he was a specialist on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and religion—was [[born ]] in Chambéry in Savoy on May 17, 1925, and died at the age of sixty on January 13, 1986. He was introduced to [[psychoanalysis ]] by Louis Beirnaert. He was one of the first members of the École Freudienne de [[Paris ]] in 1964 and remained a member until it was dissolved by Jacques [[Lacan ]] in 1980. Between 1963 and 1967 he directed the review Christus, together with François Roustang, introducing psychoanalysis to the magazine.

His interest in [[alterity ]] and the [[Other ]] led him to study the [[work ]] of Jean-Joseph Surin, a Jesuit [[mystic ]] of the seventeenth century who was brought in to exorcize the possessed at Loudun. To [[understand ]] the mystic priest, Certeau made use of psychoanalysis together with [[semiotics ]] and ethnology. A historian, like Surin, of [[impossible ]] [[speech ]] and the broken [[subject]], Michel de Certeau gave exceptional pertinence to [[Lacanian ]] [[concepts]]. In [[search ]] of the traces of the [[absent]], attentive to the sites of a [[Real ]] that was impossible to restore, he anchored historical [[writing ]] in the relation between the [[body ]] and [[language ]] and in the constituent [[division ]] of the subject between "[[outside]]" and "[[inside]]."

After [[1968 ]] he taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris in [[Vincennes]]. He later [[divided ]] his [[time ]] between the [[University ]] of California at San Diego and Paris, and was appointed head of research at theÉcole des HautesÉtudes en [[Sciences ]] Sociales in 1984.

A tireless investigator of [[ideas ]] and places, Certeau, in his historical work, demonstrated the fecundity of what [[Freud ]] referred to as the work of [[mourning]]. For him historical writing is the equivalent of the "tom-beau," a [[literary ]] and musical genre practiced in the seventeenth century, which gave [[voice ]] to the [[past ]] in [[order ]] to bury it, that is, to honor and eliminate it.

At a time when the [[social ]] sciences were deeply influenced by scientism, Michel de Certeau felt that [[history]], like psychoanalysis, was dependent primarily on a [[hermeneutics ]] of [[loss]]. He defined an [[epistemology ]] of the "in-between," which hovered between [[science ]] and [[fiction]], and which studied the [[memory ]] traces inscribed in a [[present ]] subject to the "[[uncanny ]] familiarity" of a past that was always ready to rise up to haunt our actions.

See also: History and psychoanalysis; [[Religion ]] and psychoanalysis.[[Bibliography]]