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To read Roustang is to meet psychoanalysis at its most familiar and most strange: an elusive therapeutic enterprise whose most basic tenets are open to question. In How to Make a Paranoid Laugh or, What Is Psychoanalysis? Roustang plays the provocateur as he ranges overtopics such as the suggestively titled “The Laboratory
of Cruelty” and “On the End of Analysis and Self-Hypnosis as a Cure.” His style is of close questions and poetic leaps; therefore, this book is not for cautious readers who want a replay of the fundamentals.
For those prepared to be surprised and even to chuckle, however, it is a welcome collage of essays that examine most of those fundamentals. Free association, neutrality, regression, symptoms, dreams, transference, the body, and psychoanalytic knowledge are all revisited by Roustang in the light of his clinical experience and theoretical acumen. He proceeds with hard questions and succeeds in setting many core concepts on their ear. For example, for Roustang, the basic rule sounds much like a hypnotic induction where he places the patient's “speech at the service of his sensations” (p. xv) as he proposes attention to “the rhythm of his breathing” (p. xiv) so that “he should descend into the foundations of his own life” (p. xv). This draws our attention to the absolute now ness of associations. And why did we need to be reminded? Similarly, regression is not regression into the archaic, but rather a shift to the poetic, “the scene of unalienable subjectivity” and “suffering that defines singularity” (p. 69). Here I have more trouble keeping up: However sympathetic I am to the notion of a poetic-linguistic substrate to consciousness, Roustang's dropping of the“archaic” unconscious is a startling closure. After all, isn't it an essential problem of psychoanalysis that the archaic unconscious is forever being banished?
Then there's neutrality: an availability to “don all sorts of masks” (p. 168), a receptiveness to all possibilities, sometimes enge