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This work is fairly representative of the main theoretical trends at work in contemporary French psychoanalysis. However, the authors to whom it makes most frequent reference, not only André Green and Didier Anzieu, but also Winnicott and Bion, are internationally well known. It constitutes a very dense conceptual whole that is nevertheless always rigorously argued and is interspersed throughout with clinical examples that help us to understand the complex trajectory of the author's thinking. The author proposes a truly psychoanalytic theory of visual perception, the product of an extensive study first outlined in Lavallée (1993), which is revised and completed here. This conception is based, and herein lies its originality, on the central idea that a hallucinatory dynamic that is simultaneously positive and negative lies at the heart of the functioning of the perceptual apparatus. According to the author, this apparatus is driven—constantly and from the outset of psychic life—by a hallucination of primal desire with two aspects. There is a positive aspect that gives rise to a proto-representation of the object in its absence, and a negative that provides protection from the surplus of the object's presence and constitutes a shield of Perseus that protects against the fear of being absorbed or pierced by the Gorgon's gaze.
The positive hallucinatory aspect tends towards a fusional continuity with the primary object, to binding and figuration, but must be modulated by the negative hallucinatory to allow perceptions to be libidinally cathected without then being confused with representations. Thus, although he is working directly in line with Anzieu's (1990) theory of psychic envelopes, Guy Lavallée diverges very markedly from this by introducing a general model of a negative hallucinatory envelope, a psychic structure emerging from complex drive impulses leading to the establishment, in relation to raw perceptions (Anzieu, 1990), of a filtering screen with three funct