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.
North American psychoanalysts often contemplate reading their French counterparts, even in translation, with trepidation. They associate French analysis with Lacan's unfamiliar and revolutionary reading of Freud, with the daunting complexity of Lacan's writing, and with the heavy metaphysical and metatheoretical language they can follow only with the greatest difficulty. Of course, they are taking the part for the whole and assuming that all French psychoanalytic thought (and its presentation) is like Lacan's. They are in error. There are and have been psychoanalysts in France who have disagreed with Lacan on major issues and whose thought has developed creatively in other directions, and this book not only offers us the extraordinary richness of their psychoanalytic culture, but offers us a bridge to its richness by providing us the editorial tools we need to understand their writings.
The analysts in question are those who have trained in and are, or were until their deaths, members of the two long-standing French institutes that are part of the International Psychoanalytical Associaton, the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and the Association Psychanalytique de France (APF).1 These analysts include familiar names such as Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Jean Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis, Michel de M'Uzan, Jean-Luc Donnet, Pierre Fedida, René Diatkine, André Green, Joyce McDougall, and Didier Anzieu, among others who broke decisively with Lacan if they were ever affiliated with him. Green, for instance, distanced himself in disagreement over Lacan's ideas about affects (Green 1973), as did Anzieu over Lacan's clinical ethics (see Roudinesco 1986, pp. 135-136; 245-246).