Lost to Desire The École Psychosomatique de Paris and Its Encounter with Patients Who Do Not Thrive by Wolfgang Lassmann New York,  Routledge, 2022,  332 pp.

This book from Wolfgang Lassmann, a Viennese psychoanalyst, stems from a PhD project undertaken between 2011 and 2018 at the University of Essex, about the evolution of the notion of “pensée opératoire” (operative thinking) in the French psychoanalytic literature. This concept was formulated in the early 1960s by Pierre Marty and his colleagues from their work with patients prone to somatisation, patients, they found, apparently lacking both memory and desire. It was further developed mainly by authors involved in the École Psychosomatique de Paris as well as by others well acquainted with their works. These authors tried to better understand the origins and the meaning of such states, as well as what an analytical encounter had to or could offer such patients.

Lassmann focuses less on psychosomatic issues (even if those are obviously often alluded to) than on what is absent from patients with operative thinking or mode of functioning, and on the later evolution of French psychoanalytical thinking about traces left in the psyche by experiences that could not lead to fantasies and representations. He wished his book would help making these authors and their works, mostly published in French, better known to the anglophone psychoanalytic world.