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These two volumes focus on the relation between the psychoanalytic process and the psychoanalytic setting. Both authors, Jean-Luc Donnet and Raymond Cahn, try to define the frame within which psychoanalysis takes place. They examine its psychological function, its constitution, and the degree of permissible flexibility in the setting that is consistent with or necessary for the unfolding of an analytic process.
Both authors must begin with Lacan, if only to repudiate him. They are in agreement that the fervent questioning of theory and practice that began with Lacan has over the past several decades made French psychoanalysis a vibrant force and a “dominant pole” in the world psychoanalytic movement. Cahn, however, cites a pointed comment by Pontalis: “Each one of us has been at one time close to Lacan, each one has disengaged himself from him, and all of us say: at such and such a date, one could not but be Lacanian, and after such and such a date, one could be Lacanian no longer. But the dates each of us would give are not at all the same” (p. 249; translation mine, here and throughout). Cahn himself sums up Lacan's influence: “The schism provoked by [Lacan's] practice of treatment—unacceptable for all other [non-Lacanian] analysts—had, however, two other particular consequences: the one, happy, of stimulating, to the extreme, research and reflection on practice and theory, among his partisans as well as among his adversaries. The other, deplorable, consequence was the multiplication, at whatever the cost, of the number of his disciples—the practice