The role of psychoanalysts in the history of the department of Psychiatry of the University of Montreal

The authors want to illustrate how psychoanalysis or best a certain psychoanalytical vision without dogmatism and theoretical exclusivism have played an important role in the history of the university department.The authors have made a recension of the principal activities of three psychoanalysts and their immediate collaborators: Dr. Camille Laurin, Dr. Yvon Gauthier and Dr. Arthur Amyot.Dr. Laurin permitted psychiatry to become a distinct discipline from neurology. He greatly emphasized the pre-graduate and post-graduate cursus: he has also endowed the department with the first complete program of residency. Dr. Gauthier, in a way, built the administrative organization by creating its principal committees. Dr. Amyot really formed the university network by integrating the different hospitals in the projects and the decisions of the department.Each one, in his own way, contributed to one of the distinctive marks of the department, that is the importance given to psychotherapy training. In so doing, they favoured the transmission of psychiatry in which the bio-psycho-social perspective is not a vain word.