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This is the seventh book to come from the pen of Guy Rosolato, who is also the author of a score of papers published since 1956. This alone shows that he is an important psychoanalyst of great originality and creativity. Dr Rosolato, like many of the psychiatrists of his generation associated with Professor Jean Delay's unit at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, was analysed by Jacques Lacan. He is one of those who at first remained faithful to Lacan but broke with him when his mentor's therapeutic practices and manner of transmitting psychoanalysis became increasingly questionable. He rejoined the French Psychoanalytical Association, a component organisation of the IPA, in 1967. This progression well illustrates the qualities to be found throughout his book: non-conformism, open-mindedness and a constant capacity for self-questioning and for casting doubt on his own certainties.
As Dr Rosolato himself announces in his preamble, the aim of his book is to scrutinise and examine in depth ‘the five main trends and principal currents of psychoanalysis that have developed over the years since Freud’. He invokes this intention again in his conclusion (which also constitutes a remarkable condensation of the whole):
The main concern was to demonstrate a wide field in which the psychoanalyst can move while at the same time defining the limits of his discipline, in the knowledge – sometimes arrived at only after the event – that he is opting for a particular standpoint based on his own career, his practical experience and the variety of clinical cases that have presented themselves to him (p. 275).
The author names these five trends in accordance with their most salient feature, as follows: (1) ‘logodynamic analysis’ (in which the focus is on ‘the power of words’ and on listening); (2) ‘technological analysis’ (which concentrates on the setting, interpretation, the transference and the study of resistances); (3) ‘ideal-led analysis’ (with its constant reference to a ‘leader’ or Idealised