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François Duparc's third book further develops a personal line of thought derived from clinical practice and strictly anchored not only in the work of Freud and his successors but also in the important themes of research on present-day society. The author belongs to the school of French psychoanalytic thought that couples clinical practice with theory, the latter being based on a constant critique of the practice of analytic treatment. The book reflects the issues confronting psychoanalysts today who have to deal with non-neurotic patients—those we describe as ‘difficult cases’—who call into question the validity of a theory that rests on neurotic structures. The problem arises with the various kinds of patients mentioned by Duparc in his extremely lucid survey—namely borderlines, sufferers from psychosomatic conditions, drug addicts, adolescents with deficient psychic structures and manicdepressives. These last inspire the author to some of his most interesting ideas: ‘However brilliant these subjects, whether they are obsessional, schizoid or psychotic, their impaired thought
eventually becomes sterile as a result of autoerotic redundancy, if indeed it does not ultimately plunge into delusion’ (p. 28).
Particular emphasis is placed on the relations between thought and instinctual life, in the context of the continuinng French debate triggered by the positions of Lacan. The author makes no attempt to conceal his debt to the work of André Green, who has written a foreword to this volume and is also the subject of one of Duparc's previous books (Duparc, 1996. André Green. Paris: Presses Univ. France).
The book is divided into three parts. The first comprises a theoretical examination of the practical conclusions of analytic work. This work is then discussed in the second and third parts, on the analytic setting and interpretation respectively.
1) From the introduction on, the author draws attention to the need to take account at all times of a two-fold current in the trea