It is in the act of attribution that the Christian name takes on singular hues and wears the garb of a family history which provides meaning. In the address to the other, the chosen name is supported by a "call to being" that the child is led to decipher, if he wants to conquer his place within the family. Making a Christian name one's own is, above all, managing the traces of its attribution. It is in the elaboration of a discourse that the outlines of a personal history are drawn whose staging responds to a singular appropriation of family events. It is their revival and interpretation by the subject in the very construction of the discourse which determines his personal history, a little as it would work in fiction. The analysis of enunciation within a research-interview with a young woman whose Christian name was that of a dead elder sister allows to spot some of the psychic elements of this appropriation. Our interlocutor, Marie-Francoise, escaped the death of an elder sister through the belief in a continuity between her Christian name and that of her parents. This continuity was manifest through the fact that a Christian name only makes sense to her in-so-far as it has previously belonged to another, it refers particularly to her own Christian name which associates those of her mother and father, respectively named Francois and Marie. She thus emphasizes the parental reference to discover in it the certainty of parental love for her. Continuity is insistent in Marie-Francoise's discourse, in reaction to her sister's death, but it also allows the avoidance of the danger of what it implies about her supposed place in the family. If Marie-Francoise "inherits" her sister's Christian name, she however refuses the succession it implies by substituting filial continuity to it. For Marie-Francoise, the Christian name thus bears the brand of this death and it is around this trace, or more precisely on it, that she builds bath the history of her Christian name and her place in the family history.
