Psychoanalysis in France: Edited by Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlöcher. New York: International Universities Press, 1980, xiv + 451 pp., $35.00.

Without a common, abstract, symbolic language by which international scientific exchange would be facilitated, attempts to present and integrate divergent schools of thought in psychoanalysis are seriously hampered. This problem, evident from the beginning of psychoanalysis, has received increasing attention in the past few years. There now exists an International Publications Committee, composed of editors of psychoanalytic journals throughout the world, which has initiated an exchange of abstracts of papers from the various journals. Psychoanalysis in France, available in an excellent English translation, is one product of another type of informal exchange—of anthologies of the psychoanalytic literature of a particular country and culture. A similar anthology of papers from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, edited by Harold Blum and translated into French, has already appeared and has been well received in France.

The volume under review here includes only purely psychoanalytic contributions, excluding applications of psychoanalysis to psychosomatic medicine, art, philosophy, history, anthropology, and politics, which are extensive in France. Moreover, French psychoanalysts, the editors say, have a marked preference for theoretical subjects, especially metapsychology and applied psychoanalysis, while clinical psychoanalysis and technique are relatively neglected. In their selection of 21 papers, the editors have corrected this imbalance by including three that deal with development, seven devoted to metapsychology and theory in general, six discussing problems of technique, and five clinical contributions. In this review, specific mention will be made of only a few of the contributions. An anthology presenting so many authors, subjects, and viewpoints within a single field is more conducive to an impressionistic than a detailed examination.1

Lebovici and Widlöcher offer their critique in a brief, perspicacious introduction, all the more