The series Psychanalystes d'aujourd'hui, published by PUF (Presses Universitaires de France), has been enriched by the addition of four studies on Freud's work, offering a rigorous and synthetic approach to the elaboration and coherence of the thought of the founder

of psychoanalysis. In line with the guiding principle of the series, each volume contains a study of some eighty pages, followed by a comprehensive bibliography and a significant choice of texts.

Françoise Coblence, a philosopher and member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, is a lecturer at the University of Picardy. She offers us a rigorous and precise introduction to Freud's thought from the year 1886, when Freud was in Paris to follow the courses of Charcot, up to 1897, when he relinquished the theory of seduction as a general explanation of hysteria. She makes it clear at the outset that her reading of Freud's work during these years of discovery is informed by the later evolution of Freud's work: her purpose is to understand and show how Freud exemplified the boldness and tenacity of the . Certainly, the ‘quarrel over hysteria’ was neither concluded nor resolved with psychoanalysis; but with Freud it underwent a considerable shift and acquired important heuristic value for the understanding of psychic functioning. Marked by his encounter with Charcot, Freud began to study the hysterical body in its differences from the organic body. The new meaning that he—in opposition to Breuer—gave to sexuality, linking it to trauma and shifting the emphasis towards infantile experience, was to completely change the way in which the neuroses, and psychic life in general, were understood.