Claude Nachin (born 1930) is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the majority of whose writings have affiliations with the joint work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, particularly with respect to their concept of the intergenerational "phantom".
Nachin became Register in Psychiatry at Vinatier (Lyon-Bron), participating in early work on Largactil, and was a lecturer in psychopathology at the University of Picardie.
He described it as 'the work in a subject's unconscious, of an inadmissable dark secret (illegitimacy, incest, crime ...) belonging to another (in a superior position, but also the object of love)'".
Nachin extends Abraham's definition of the phantom to include "work induced in the subject's unconscious by his/her relationship with a parent, or an important love object, who is the carrier of an incomplete mourning process, or of some other unsurmounted trauma - even in the absence of an inadmissable guilty secret.
From a metapsychological point of view, the ghost is the psychic work of the child undertaken in order "to understand and treat the parent, in the hope of being in turn itself better understood and cared for.