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This book, the fruit of a twenty-year association between psychoanalysts and prehistorians, seeks to establish the basis of the singularity of man. It includes contributions by the psychoanalysts Alain Gibeault and Richard Uhl, Marie-Lise Roux and François Sacco (all members of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society) and by the prehistorians Georges Sauvet, Gilles Tosello, Yvette Taborin, Denis Vialou and Jean-Pierre Mohen.
The following quotation from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, S.E. 4-5), reproduced on p. 42, in itself provides sufficient justification for this co-operation between prehistorians and analysts:
Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the re-construction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.
Psychoanalysts and prehistorians, ‘united in the search for the origins and meaning of their finds’, cause ‘the remains of bygone epochs’ to speak. In this way, the nine authors make the reader ponder over what it is that characterises the human. Each provides a ‘definition’ of the specificity of man in accordance with his or her own field of specialisation and scientific interests.
For the psychoanalysts Alain Gibeault and Richard Uhl, what is specific to man is the compulsion to symbolise. Presenting theoretical arguments in favour of their conception, they show how man constantly strives towards a goal, which demands a ‘representation’ (see glossary, p. 201) and objects thereby represented. The authors note at the same time that, when the hands were freed by bipedalism, the first hominids became capable, unlike animals, of creating tools to fashion other tools (homo habilis, 2.5 million to 1.5 million years ago). This spectacular specialisation was accompanied by an evolution from biological rhythms to socialisation. According to Leroi-Gourhan (1964, personal