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A shift in the fortunes of French psychoanalysis is apparently proceeding according to a scenario by now long familiar to American psychoanalysts. "After a time of unprecedented popularity," write Grunberger and Chasseguet-Smirgel, "marked by a diffusion of Freudian thought through the mass media, by its teaching at the university, by its publication in pocket books—a popularity resting on a gigantic misunderstanding—psychoanalysis finds itself exposed to more and more violent criticisms, which have for us, in fact, the merit of dissipating precisely the misunderstanding on which that sudden and necessarily debased glory was founded" (p. 17).
A powerful stimulus to the French Freudian revival that began in the late 1950's and early 1960's was the writings and lectures of Jacques Lacan. His novel and challenging interpretations of the corpus of Freud's works were offered as a rescue from faded orthodoxy of what is essential in Freud's discoveries. Lacan and his disciples claim that Lacan's version of psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis, a view not shared by the International Psychoanalytic