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By Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. Paris: Payot, 1971, 262 pp., F. 25.70.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, a leading figure in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, has collected her papers on applied analysis in this volume and has added a striking Introduction in which she takes up the issue of the chronic resistance on the part of many psychoanalysts to extratherapeutic applications of depth psychology. She proposes that this reluctance to reach psychoanalytic conclusions about every facet of human behavior, generally rationalized on the grounds of scientific rigor, is often a way of perpetuating a split in the analyst's mind: on one side—that of the treatment of patients—he functions in accord with reason and psychoanalytic knowledge; on the other—in various aspects of his mental life—he remains free to adhere to some system of illusion, whether it be a religious dogma or, as is more likely in contemporary France, a political ideology. The author believes these illusions to be equivalent to infantile fetishes.
The psychoanalytic viewpoint of this book is uncompromising. It may be characteristic of our French colleagues that the theoretical framework takes the libido concept more seriously and more concretely than current American writings tend to do. The bibliography is conspicuously poor in American references (in startling contrast to the practice of British and German authors), but leans to some degree on the work of Melanie Klein. Adherence to this school is neither dogmatic nor unthinking; in fact, one of these papers consists in a demonstration that the Kleinian hypothesis about creativity is inadequate: creative work is not always a matter of making reparation to the object, but may have to do with affirming the cohesion and continuity of the self.
The best of the other papers examines the film Last Year at Marienbad. It succeeds in correlating many aspects of style with the psychological content of the story viewed in terms of object relations. Although this an