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When the International Journal of Psychoanalysis asked me to review Roger Kennedy's book, little did I know my good fortune. The volume seems to me to embody genuine research in the sense in which I understand the word, which differs from that advocated by many analysts. There are, I believe, three possible kinds of research. The first, which I do not favour, is a centrifugal one, in which psychoanalysis is extended beyond its boundaries and, on the honourable pretext of taking an interest in other disciplines, presented as the method of choice for obtaining knowledge of the unconscious. That is why some face-to-face therapies call themselves ‘psychoanalytic’ if that proves to their advantage. As to other disciplines,
such as the neurosciences or philosophy, it is hard to avoid claiming that they fail to take account of what the unconscious really is, on the grounds that their protagonists ‘have not had analysis’.
The second research approach, espoused to excellent effect by Kennedy, is centripetal, involving the selection from other disciplines or investigative fields (e.g. philosophy or sociology) of whatever is best able to help us grasp what we actually do as psychoanalysts. This kind of research, while less pretentious, is no less ambitious for that, based as it is on the experience of analytic treatment as offered to us by Freud, with its unique setting (the couch and the armchair) and its fundamental concepts, directed towards