Her contributions to psychoanalysis include the concepts of interpretative violence, pictogram and originary process.
[1] She undertook a training analysis with Jacques Lacan from 1955 to 1961,[2] and followed him in 1964 into the newly formed École freudienne de Paris, where she remained for some time a close confidant.
[3] In 1969, however, Aulagnier, Jean-Paul Valabrega and François Perrier split from the EFP over the bitter question of the passe as a qualification for analyst status, and created the Organisation psychanalytique de langue française.
Aulagnier, a founding member of the journal Tropique, is considered one of the most influential French psychoanalysts of her generation, together with Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and André Green.
[6] She also warned against the danger of interpretations being experienced as invasive by an analysand, (particularly when their own omnipotence has been projected onto the analyst).