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In this book, the author gives us a gradual increase in the polyphonic complexity found in the psychoanalytic process, just as Johann Sebastian Bach did in the Art of fugue. No doubt, the interplay of polyphonic lines is here more important than was the instrumental individuality described in Donnet (1995). As in Bach's Well-tempered clavier, the functional adaptation of the instrument is meant to be an integral feature of the work. Now, Donnet studies the complexity of the process in a very rich and complex series of 11 chapters. Paradoxes, disjunctions, oppositions, contrasts and dialectic links are so numerous and subtle that I hardly dared to review and gladly welcome seven wonderful and tasteful vignettes that enlighten the metapsychological stakes.
In planning this review, I noted that the first chapter begins by quoting Polonius in Hamlet: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in't’ (II, ii, l. 206). Feeling slightly overwhelmed, I recalled Hamlet speaking of his own madness: ‘I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (l. 378). I decided to use as pointers four pairs of ‘subjects’—like four cardinal points or four parts in a fugue—as a ‘method’ for my review:
playing/protecting method;
illustration/interanalytic exchange;
acting/speaking; and
treatment/analysis.
A basic question opens the book: how is it possible to let an associative sequence appear and disclose afterwards its unconscious logic? We take it for granted that we have to use the fundamental rule based on the psychoanalytic method. But we have to remember that Freud shifted from a first distinction between investigation/method