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This is the third volume in the teaching series of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. The other two are both by Jean-Michel Quinodoz - Reading Freud, first published in French as Lire Freud, and Listening to Hanna Segal, respectively. The layout of Reading Freud is exemplary as a teaching text; clear and concise on the content of each of Freud's main papers with distinctly separate texts for different kinds of discussion about them, even if the emphasis is sometimes uneven. Although Quinodoz discusses the many ways there are of examining Freud's written work he presents it chronologically in his book. The achievement of doing this does not strike the British reader where we have had the Standard Edition of Freud's work available to us for generations of psychotherapists. In France this is not the case: so far 14 volumes out of a planned 20 of the Oeuvres Complètes de Freud have appeared in print. As Quinodoz (2009) makes clear, the history of the translations (and mistranslations) of Freud's writings have influenced French psychoanalytic thinking, a point I shall return to.
In Reading French Psychoanalysis there is a multiplicity of texts. By way of guidance there are summary notes colour-coded in boxes within Alan Gibeault's introductions to each of the seven sections. By and large these are helpful as long as the ideas they foreshorten are not too unfamiliar. At 817 pages this book is literally more substantial than its predecessors. Like them, it is also an impressive and ambitious undertaking, but I am less sure about its place in the teaching series, in the sense that there is no explicit pedagogic aim. It is a collection of papers grouped under headings much like other publications in the New Library of Psychoanalysis. This volume has three editors, two British and one French respectively, three translators for selected material and includes papers from 41 authors.
That there should be a substantial collection of this sort indicates the current level of interest