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The psychoanalyst Denis Vasse has written a number of books that delve deep into the heart of what makes man human. He speaks to us as a dedicated clinical psychoanalyst patiently seeking his truth, which he offers to those who tell him of the distress of having life pass them by. He writes as a Christian, integrating faith and the sacred texts with delicate touches that emphasise the Truth of Man, as in the following quotation from the Old Testament: ‘My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning’ (Psalm 130, v. 6).
His own complex progression, paralleling the wanderings of the human soul, is filled with emotions that accompany a process of stripping bare which no psychoanalyst reading the book can reject for himself.
In this inevitably brief review, it is impossible to convey all the themes, concepts and notions that are here developed with a precision born of an art of communication, of telling oneself to the other if he is prepared to listen; here, then, is the fundamental subject-matter of this book on jealousy and incest, namely the refusal to speak, which always involves two protagonists, even if the primal attribution of the refusal remains uncertain and although this refusal of course concerns the analysand.
Let us consider in more detail some of the ideas presented. Jealousy carries within itself the need for possession, lying, exclusion, refusal to speak, to share and to give. While rejecting the possibility of an encounter, it incessantly lays claim to it in ways subtly masked by pernicious demands for the possession, or even extinction, of the other; ‘it is either him or me’ then represents the triumph of the jealous subject. The theatre of jealousy stages a primal scene in which the subject wants everything, but without desire, so that he aborts before he is even born. The jealous subject, who seeks his pleasure in the place that is rightfully the other's, is driven by hate. He destroys himself by avoiding the place from which