Clinical experience teaches us that making changes to one's name, which acts as a manifestation of filiation and identity, is always a matter of great significance. This paper examines the reasons behind a subject's hesitation when faced with the prospect of a name change. Generally, a demand for such modification arises at the moment of acquiring a new nationality. This change of status confronts the subject, sometimes indeed violently, with what is most intimate to him, and can threaten him with chaos when it appears as an alienating imperative or as an ideal of integration or possession. The act of name changing also raises larger questions about its legal framework and societal context, in an age where we are seeing a renewed - and symptomatic - interest in the topic of origins.
Name change; naturalization; subjectivity; social bond; filiation; feeling of identity