Psychoanalyst Claude Halmos, a childhood specialist who frequently appeared in the media, died on July 9 at the age of 80 of a cardiac arrest, the Psychologies magazine, to which she collaborated, announced Thursday, July 16.
“For twenty-eight years, Claude Halmos has answered questions asked by readers of our newspaper. Through her words, but also through her practice as a psychoanalyst, she helped an unimaginable number of people to understand that they had the right to talk about their suffering,” Psychologies wrote in a tribute posted on its site.
Claude Halmos died of a cardiac arrest and was buried on Wednesday, said journalist Violaine Gelly, who signed the tribute for Psychologies and worked alongside him for a long time. It was part of “his last wishes” that his death “not be made public before the funeral”, added Violaine Gelly.
Claude Halmos has appeared on public radio franceinfo for a long time, with the columns “Savoir être” from 2007 to 2016 then “C’est dans ma tête” from 2016 to 2022. On television, she was a columnist in the show “La grande famille” on Canal+ in the 1990s. She has also written numerous works devoted to childhood.
Psychology on air
“Claude Halmos was one of the remarkable voices of franceinfo. For almost twenty years, she spoke about psychology on our airwaves with pedagogy, rigor and empathy,” reacted the director of franceinfo, Agnès Vahramian, presenting the radio’s “sincere condolences” to her family and loved ones.
Claude Halmos had trained in psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan and had worked alongside Françoise Dolto, notably in institutions such as Antony’s nursery.
In her tribute, Violaine Gelly emphasizes that we must not reduce her “unfairly to an image of a ‘child psychologist'”, even if, “like all the voiceless, they were at the heart of her work, she whose suffering of not having one was inconsolable”. “Beyond his somewhat cold image, he was a person full of contradictions and extremely endearing,” said the journalist.
Claude Halmos’ paternal family was of Hungarian Jewish origin, and some of them died in the gas chambers. “In 2012, in court, she obtained the right to attach to Halmos the original name of her family, Rosenthal, which her Hungarian grandfather, faced with the rise of anti-Semitism, had abandoned in 1918,” he recalls in Psychologies.
