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These two volumes are a unique venture in the analytical literature. They are revised transcripts of an experience. For two whole years the author—one of the best known analysts in France—has given a weekly lecture on what in his mind analysis was really about. Granoff—who has written relatively little (at least by 'analytical' standards)—is not only a clinician and a theoretician but has played an important role in the shaping of the French psychoanalytical scene. He is also a conteur and he has produced these truly original books, which are unrelated to anything that one can read to-day under the name of 'analytical' literature.
It is not feasible to comment on these books without first making a certain detour. This detour is necessarily brief in this instance, merely a few remarks on the particular nature of the French psychoanalytical field these books are entering. Here, as elsewhere, the flow of theory is so closely linked to the history and organization of the social field of psychoanalysis that description and explanation could be endless. This task will have to be undertaken, but strangely enough, the possibility seems always to recede.
The most recent and the most important characteristics are undoubtedly bound to the existence of 'Lacanism' and the position it occupies. Lacanism is not purely a theoretical construction. For the French it is also a practice: the existence of a Society (Ecole freudienne de Paris), created by a man who is definitely alive and functioning. And for many it signifies attendance at a bi-monthly 'seminar' which continually draws not only analysts but the Parisian intelligentsia too, and nourishes the literary, philosophical, and indeed the psychoanalytical writing of this French world. But it also means that there is a no less impassioned refusal of this man and his 'Ecole'.
This French intellectual world is highly paradoxical, sophisticated, and yet provincial to a point which is hard to imagine. Provincial in the sens