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The latest book by Jurgen Reeder is the mature and refined product of a radical reflection on the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, gradually prepared and compiled from a series of papers published in the last ten years. Two of the papers, one on Freud's narrative and the other on the issue of unconscious fantasy, are familiar to the readers of our journal, since they were published in International Forum of Psychoanalysis (1, 2).
Yet the book as a whole makes an unexpected impact on the reader, who is diverted from the usual paths of thinking. Indeed, this work is radical in a double sense: because it eludes an easy classification, and because it removes the reader from the familiarity of the known perspectives. The field of inquiry, as defined in chapter one, is “Metapsychology”, yet the reader will find no reference to the long lasting debate which took place within Ego-psychology, ending in the so-called “crisis of metapsychology”, i.e. in the admission of the impossibility of a theoretical foundation for psychoanalysis.
Metapsychology has to do with foundation for the author as well, but not in the classical theoretical sense, because psychoanalysis is, according to Reeder, first and foremost “a form of praxis” (p. 14). Here we find the crucial move which permits us to reconsider the whole question, since “what the practice of psychoanalysis ultimately takes as its interest is not what is said, but the saying, i.e. the process or activity of two subjects in dialogue and the effects that this may engender” (p. 15). The shift from what is said to the saying corresponds to the distinction between knowledge and knowing (which in is turn borrowed from the distinction by Foucault between connaissance and savoir). Consequently, the field of inquiry is redefined in terms of foundation of psychoanalytic knowing. This is why we will not find references to the debate which took place within the ego-psychological approach.
By addressing its inquiry to prepositional knowledge, t