René Laforgue, French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was born on November 5, 1894, in Thann, Alsace, then under German control, and died in Paris on March 6, 1962. He was the first president of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society).

His mother, Eugénie Heitzmann, came from a large family that lived in the Vosges. His father, Joseph, a copperplate engraver for a cloth manufacturer, was an illegitimate child. Laforgue studied at the Collège de Thann, in Forbach, and in Fribourg, then with Franz Oppenheimer, a physiologist from Berlin. In 1913, while working with Oppenheimer, he came across a copy of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. During the First World War he was mobilized in the German army and barely escaped death in the Carpathian mountains.

In 1919 Alsace again became French and Laforgue concluded his medical studies as an intern at the Hoerdt Psychiatric Hospital,...