You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Laurence Kahn is a psychoanalyst member of the Association Française de Psychanalyse, a classical scholar and linguist with expertise in Greek philosophy and German romanticism, and a child psychotherapist. Her work came to wider attention with her masterful report on “la figurabilité” (figuration) at the Sixty-first Congress of French-speaking psychoanalysts in 2001, which revealed a powerful analytic mind and an extensive knowledge of Freud's texts. La Petite Maison de L'âme (The Little House of the Soul) is a collection of essays that together and separately take up a number of unresolved issues in psychoanalytic theory and practice, including Freud's conceptions of history and the infantile, and, pari passu, in Greek mythology, as if to demonstrate a kind of latent unity of thought that points to a fundamental truth of origins. It is a dense and difficult work that distills many of the central preoccupations of French psychoanalysis, of which it must be considered one of the jewels in the crown. I mean this in two senses: it is at once a brilliant achievement of integration and scholarship and a kind of museum piece, a highlight of a remarkable period of psychoanalytic creativity in the last half of the twentieth century.
In a conference of the Montreal Psychoanalytic Society in 2005, Kahn expressed concern about the future of Freudian psychoanalysis, which seems to be veering away from its classic focus on infantile sexuality as the substratum of neurosis and the motor force behind the transference. In this regard, Kahn has a penchant for unraveling contradictions and paradoxes in Freud's thinking that touch on the major issues psychoanalysis will have to confront in order to survive as a relevant theoretical enterprise, rather than being relegated to the status of a fascinating interlude of intellectual history. Her careful and admiring reading of Freud, more typical of French analytic writing than North American, oscillates between a homage to the master and a