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A lecturer at the University of Paris VII and a Lacanian, Sylvie Le Poulichet has previously investigated the problems of the clinical treatment of drug addiction, with telling discussions of these ‘narcoses of desire’ (Toxicomanies et psychanalyse, Presses Univ. France, 1987), and has also dealt with various aspects of fantasies about the environment.
In the present book she examines psychoanalytic treatment as a specific form of the linking of time—or rather as the emergence of times that favour the process of becoming a subject or show this process at work.
Her main hypothesis emerges clearly from the very first chapter: it is the idea of an ‘identifying time’ connected with the transference and with the present-day presence in the treatment of the history, that is, of a past which is not of the past. This identifying time constitutes and transforms the distinction between outside and inside and reveals the alien within the similar. ‘Repetition gives rise to objects’—to the rhythm of the transference, which is at all times a process of transition.
This pertinent thesis gives much food for thought; it is brought home by a full style of writing that evokes rather than demonstrates, in a kind of phenomenology of the treatment whose theoretical status is not always well defined. It is illuminated by analyses of the time of dreams and on the linking of times in the family romance; although these are in a way very classical, they inspire reflection, with their valuable alternation between the revisiting of Freudian texts and clinical description. A kind of meditation on human temporality thus arises. The pages on the ‘no-go area’ of an individual's origin, which undergoes constant recomposition, help us to conceive of the catastrophic instant, the moment when the linking of times proves inaccessible, thereby ruling out any recomposition of the origin and any possibility of becoming a subject.
Brilliance of formulation sometimes replaces the work of conceptualisation. The s