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Psychoanalytic literature at its best touches the foundations of theory, conveys a vivid sense of the clinical encounter, and exhibits the analyst's personal style. It may also situate analysis as a scientific and/or cultural production. Canadian analyst Dominique Scarfone is deeply grounded in Freud's teaching and demonstrates a consciousness of how his teaching both reflects Western culture and contributes to an understanding of it. As he characterizes psychoanalysis as a praxis in this collection of essays, whose title may be translated “districts with nameless streets,”2 Scarfone evokes the mystique of human action carried out in a forgotten or unknown territory. Protagonists of the clinic traverse a liminal space that bridges presentation, enactment, and significance, where subjective truth emerges in a region of uncertainty between wordlessness and speech, past and future.
The obscurity of the path, however, doesn't diminish the revelatory power of the method. As Scarfone asserts in the title essay:
Freud's central contribution to the knowledge of the human soul is not the discovery of the unconscious; it's the invention of a method to gain access to the psychic formations that derive from it. (p. 7)
Clinically, the primary sign of the unconscious is that the free association