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The recently published English version of Laurence Kahn’s Le psychanalyste apathique et le patient postmoderne (Psychoanalysis, Apathy, and the Postmodern Patient, 2014) is maddeningly problematic. To review it in the normal way, with a summary of its contents and then some comments, would be to turn a blind eye. The core of the book is so tendentious, one has to fight one’s way into it.
Kahn is an important voice in French psychoanalysis. Like many Parisian intellectuals, she is willing to engage in free-wheeling public discourse, a genre most Anglo-American analysts avoid. When Kahn is expounding her own ideas, she is very interesting, if sometimes difficult to follow. When she is critiquing other people’s ideas, she can be arrogant, and sometimes a little petty. Le psychanalyste apathique is in the latter category.
If the publishers had wanted to give Kahn a good introduction to the English-speaking analytic audience, they would have done better to translate her earlier (2004) book, Fiction et verite freudiennes: Entretiens avec Michel Enaudeau (Freudian Truth and Fiction: Interviews with Michel Enaudeau), which provides an expansive and informative overview of her Freudian convictions and her considerable scholarship. As an alternative
, the editors might have considered her more recent book, Ce que le nazisme a fait à la psychanlyse (What Nazism Did to Psychoanalysis). Though even more of a jeremiad than the present volume, it offers a compelling historical and cultural analysis of the effects of the Shoah on psychoanalysis.
The present work, Psychoanalysis, Apathy, and the Postmodern Patient, never rises above Kahn’s desire to take a sharp axe to American psychoanalysis. If you are going in for the kill, of course, the congregation needs to believe that the murder is for a higher purpose. Unfortunately, Kahn never considers explaining her higher purpose to anyone not already sharing her instinctive hostilities. Her talismanic ideal of Freudian orthodoxy is esse