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The fields of psychoanalytic psychology and psychoanalysis are in a period of remarkably vigorous development, change, debate, and ferment. (Welcome, indeed, DIVISION/Review!). Whether or not we personally embrace multi-theoretical models of work, we live knowing there are diverse and divergent psychoanalytic schools. At least from time to time, we become aware that each of these schools is developing new theory and new applications. When we are challenged or stuck, many of us search among conceptual and technical models, wondering what might be most helpful, what might work best.
Our education and training do not necessarily prepare us well for this task. Despite the fact that (or because?) there are more-and more diverse-psychoanalytically oriented training programs than ever before (Downing, 2010), few of us are trained, comprehensively and in depth, in the variety of models of analytically informed clinical work currently being practiced. We have to make our own maps and forge our own, independent ways in our professional lives.
This task takes one set of parameters if we consider only the schools of psychoanalytic thinking predominant in the United States, and a very different one if we take a more global frame. There are schools of thinking-Kleinian and Lacanian, most notably-that have their centers of gravity elsewhere. While we are perhaps more open to their ideas than earlier generations of US psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychologists, it is an uneven and unevenly informed openness.
The volume under reverie/review is a useful tool for US psychologists and psychoanalysts eager for a stimulating encounter with the work of our French colleagues. Indeed, this rich and beautifully edited compendium is that, and even more, but with a twist: It is an encyclopedic sourcebook, and tremendously useful summary and synthesis, of the history of psychoanalysis in France, but not the French psychoanalysis most US readers will expect. Produced by two members of the Bri