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René Roussillon is a representative of the important French current of psychoanalytic thought that sets out to revisit, question and rethink Freud's texts and to bring them into the present in truly living form. He has also assimilated the ideas of Winnicott, involving the notions of paradox, play and transitionality, as well as the theories of systems and of change; these appear as constant linking elements in his reflections, which seek to identify the conditions of psychoanalysis, to determine how change occurs and to specify the limiting transference constellations that can unite analyst and analysand in the treatment of borderline or psychotic pathology. A consistent pattern is emerging in Roussillon's works as each new contribution is published and he is now beginning to be acknowledged as one of the leading French-language psychoanalytic authors.
The author begins this book, whose title might be rendered ‘Logics and Archaeologics of the Psychoanalytic Setting’, by summarising his work as a historian of psychoanalysis, which is concerned with the practices and theories of hypnosis and with the foundations of psychoanalysis, and of which a full account is given in his book Du baquet de Mesmer au ‘baquet’ de Freud (Paris: PUF, 1992). He notes that Freud did not arise out of the blue, nor did he represent an epistemological discontinuity in the history of ideas. On the contrary, the practice of psychoanalysis is shown to proceed from a progressive destruction of hypnosis on both the practical and the theoretical levels, one of the consequences of this process being that residues are left behind. This validates the archaeological metaphor used by Freud, who regarded the work of psychoanalysis as an archaeology of the ego, observing that a recent building includes certain raw materials used in the construction of the older edifice upon which it is built.
The author revisits certain texts in order to discover how Freud built up the theory and practice of psychoanalysi