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This is probably not the best time to make a claim for any form of radicalism. Yet I choose the word radical to describe an author who in the sixty or so years of his psychoanalytic career has managed to stay firmly based in Freudian thinking, all the while making major contributions to the field. In his case, therefore, “radical” must be heard in several senses: bold, thorough, having deep roots in the discipline of Freudian psychoanalysis. But
if anyone in our confused and confusing epoch finds the expression misplaced, it could easily be replaced by primal. Applied to the book I am reviewing, that word refers to a primal stratum of thinking and praxis that shares fundamental qualities with Freud's works, an oeuvre that produced a radical breach with the psychology of consciousness.
In Freud's time, psychology stayed tautologically within the field of conscious phenomena, without possessing—any more than today—an adequate theory of consciousness. It was psychoanalysis that, in part, wakened psychology from its dogmatic slumber. Today, after more than a century of psychoanalysis, another slumber is threatening, one from which a radical analyst like Michel de M'Uzan may awaken us. I am referring to the kind of falling asleep to which psychoanalysis is cyclically subject as a result of what might be called “metapsychological fatigue.” By this I mean the tendency to fix on psychoanalysis as a kind of “psychoanalytic psychology.” This happens when analysts find it too risky or not scientifically respectable enough to resort to the “sorcerer metapsychology,” as Freud called it. Psychoanalysis is then inserted within a more consensual framework, one more easily accepted, by virtue of steering clear of the disquieting effects of a more “radical” or “primal” psychoanalytic experience, as against, say, what is offered by manualized treatments.
Metapsychology obviously seems riskier, more speculative, and less palatable (if at all) in scientific fields where only the measura