SPIIRAL is both an offshoot and partner organization of GIFRIC: Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherches et d’interventions cliniques et culturelles (Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Clinical and Cultural Research and Interventions). Since its founding in 1977 in Quebec City, GIFRIC has functioned as an innovative and rigorous center for the study and teaching of psychoanalysis for its students and members from Quebec, the US, and around the world. It has also functioned as the foundation of three clinical centers.

In 1982 GIFRIC founded the “388,” a center for young adult psychotics located in Quebec City. For 43 years the “388” was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. At the “388” an interdisciplinary team of psychoanalysts, aides who accompanied users in their day-to-day lives [intervenants], and psychiatrists worked together in a cohesive project fully informed by the psychoanalysis developed by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin. The “388” had verifiable results: among patients who were in treatment at the “388” for more than 3 years there was a 78% reduction in hospitalizations. (https://www.gifric.com/388.htm ) Unfortunately, despite the demonstrable success of the “388,” which freed users from the suffering of symptoms linked to their psychoses so that they could engage as creative participants in the future of their collective, without warning the Quebec government ended their contract with GIFRIC and brutally closed the “388” in March 2025. (https://www.le388.ca/ ) Attempts to reinstate or replace the center are currently in progress in Quebec.

In addition to the “388” Center for the Treatment of Young Adult Psychotics, GIFRIC opened the Psychoanalytic Clinic for the Family (Clinique psychanalytique pour la famille) in 1999, which has offices in Quebec City and Montreal. This clinic, based on GIFRIC’s research on kinship systems in Quebec, continues its work unabated today, and provides a model for psychoanalytic family treatment that SPIIRAL aspires to adopt and adapt to the conditions of practice in the US.

The metapsychology developed by Willy Apollon and his colleagues at GIFRIC provides a new perspective for both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalysis practiced at GIFRIC and maintained and extended by SPIIRAL takes the side of a dimension of the human being that Apollon calls the spirit—the capacity to represent what does not exist, to want it, and to create it. We assume that each human has the capacity to bring something new to the world, however modest, which may well be incompatible with the social relationships, cultural practices, and civilizationally given ideals with which this person is living. The paradoxical expression of the creative spirit within the surroundings of the subject requires an ethics of responsibility for the consequences, however, which may be for the better or for the worse in one sense or another. Such an ethics is driven by a concern for the human considered independently of the limits of cultures and civilizations. Among other advantages, the perspective of this ethics possesses the advantage of enabling psychoanalysis to offer the space of the transference to people experiencing psychosis.

SPIIRAL began in 2020 as the project of 12 people involved in various clinical and scholarly activities who, having been struck by the psychoanalytic orientation of GIFRIC, and having absorbed that orientation through years of study, reflection, analytic experience and analytic practice, were interested in extending this orientation into the complex cultural and civilizational space-time of North America, in Anglophone translation (with all that this entails). SPIIRAL is the ongoing project of this extension and translation.