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I shall begin by briefly giving a background that is not immaterial. Jean Laplanche, the co-author of Language of Psychoanalysis, founded a center of psychoanalytic research at the Université de Paris VII, which already had been known for its interdisciplinary openness. Within the center's program of study and under the direct supervision of Laplanche, Maurice Dayan wrote his doctorate dissertation on the relation between the unconscious and reality. I should explain to a North American audience that Dayan's doctorate is actually a Doctorat d'État, the highest of several kinds obtainable in France and one ordinarily requiring a decade or more to be completed (in Dayan's case, nine years). In point of further illustration: the 476-page tome under review contains but two parts of the original thesis; the third part, Les Relations au Réel dans la Psychose, was published under separate cover, in the same year.
At the center of Dayan's concern is that problematic issue in Freud's metapsychology whereby the unconscious is negatively characterized by its absence of regard for reality, and yet, given the submission of unconscious processes to the principles of pleasure and unpleasure, the unconscious is positively driven to substitute external reality by psychic reality. According to the author, in conformity with the pleasure principle, the unconscious "seeks ways of discharge for