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Gutierrez Terrazas's book invites us to revisit and reflect anew on Freud's metapsychology from two different standpoints, namely topography (the formations of the unconscious) and dynamics (drives—in particular, sexuality). Freud proposed ‘that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a
metapsychological presentation’ (1915, p. 181). We immediately notice the absence, in the author's exposition, of Freud's third element, the economic aspect, which relates to ‘sums of excitation’. A close reading of the book reveals the reasons for this omission. It is not inadvertent, but conforms to the theoretical position of the author, who subscribes to the singular hypotheses of Laplanche, one of the main exponents of what has come to be known as the ‘French school of psychoanalysis’. This school is of course by no means homogeneous, but includes different tendencies that give rise to different readings and exegeses of the Freudian corpus (for the sake of illustration only, I would mention Green as an example of a different view, at variance with some of Laplanche's propositions).
The author seeks to distinguish the subject matter of psychoanalysis from that of academic psychology, which is dominated in our universities by behaviourism, as well as, in the last few decades, cognitivism. Psychology, he tells us, is devoted to the study of the adaptive order, whereas psychoanalysis is concerned with the affective or fantasy order. The main contribution of psychoanalysis, and also its field of exploration, is the ‘analytic situation’, which is defined by the following three elements: (a) its rules (‘say everything’ and ‘listen to everything on one and the same level’); (b) its method of ‘free association’; and (c) the transference—countertransference relationship. The unconscious and the drives are deemed to be the pillars of the ‘psychic reality’ discovered by psychoanalysis, and listeni