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This volume is the third collection of articles by Francis Pasche, after A partir de Freud (1969) and Le sens de la psychanalyse (1988). Unfortunately it is a posthumous work as Francis Pasche died in 1996.
In 1950, he became an elected member of the SPP (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) and was its President from 1960 to 1964. For thirty years, he was the director of consultations at St Anne's hospital, in the famous department run by Professor Jean Delay, where he trained a large number of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, of both French and foreign origin. During his time there, he created a supervision group for psychiatric cases for which standard treatment was not indicated—psychotics, perverts, patients with severe character disorders and so on.
Before this, he had had an unusual background as a pharmacist and philosopher, which not only left him with a wide culture but also a taste for clear, reality-oriented thinking.
His experience with psychotics and the psychiatric world led him to take a renewed interest in Freudian metapsychology and the origins of the structure of the mind. He never regarded psychoanalysis as a closed system or as an isolated discovery, but saw it as an extension of human knowledge that had remained unconscious in man; knowledge that had been partially revealed by religions—monotheistic religions in particular—and mythologies.
In an interview with Denys Ribas in 1992, which appears at the end of the book (but which may also be read as an introduction to the author's thinking), he admits with a touch of humour that he had been a ‘guardian of orthodoxy’ but only on the condition of remaining open to all schools of thought. This did not prevent him from resisting the intellectual modes of his time and from being an eloquent example of the liberty and creativity of psychoanalysis.
The book is divided up into six parts, each of which deals with a new theme. The various texts have been grouped together according