You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The first 1998 issue of Revue française de psychanalyse is devoted to the theoretical and clinical problems posed by the patient's ‘first meeting’ with the psychoanalyst. It contains interesting reflections on the offer of an analytic setting, the foundations of commitment to a treatment and the adaptation of analytic practice to present-day changes in pathology. As we ponder the future of psychoanalysis at the end of the present century, this volume expresses the concern to ‘keep the psychoanalytic ship firmly on course’ (p. 90). The various contributions display confidence in the ability of the Freudian and post-Freudian edifice to imagine technical and therapeutic modifications based on socio-cultural trends. The difficulty, however, is to steer a satisfactory course between the Scylla of a suffocating contraction of the field of application of analytic practice and the Charybdis of a drift towards techniques remote from analysis of the transference.
The first analytic meeting could perhaps be defined as what René Diatkine has called an ‘attempt to prevent the psychic apparatus from going round in circles’ (p. 135). The papers presented in this issue can certainly be seen in this light. Analysts here allow us to share in the specificity of their experience in applications of psychoanalysis as diverse as psychosomatic medicine and work with adolescents, babies, psychotics and even prisoners. These practitioners reflect on the ‘outlines of their activity’ and the technical variations they are able to contemplate. They seek to show how the inevitably destabilising singularity of the meeting with the psychoanalyst should be capable of representing a moment of ‘passage’ and of ‘constituting an inaugural phase of the establishment of a new form of psychic functioning’ (p. 5). They raise the interesting question of