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It is an unusual book that Louise de Urtubey presents to us here. In this new work, she undertakes to condemn some transitions to the act that are too often passed over in silence because they occur within the privacy of the analytic setting.
She speaks out and thinks the unthinkable about a transgression that causes irremediable damage to the functioning of analysts, as well as to their community, and how it is regarded by society at large, at a time when fierce criticism of Freudian theory has been circulating following the publication of the Livre noir de la psych-analyse (Meyer et al., 2005).
Now it is from within the French analytic world that a voice is being raised. Urtubey sees the necessity to speak out as a way of alerting not only patients but also young analysts, and she also wonders, and makes us wonder, about the silence that has fallen over French analytic societies, whereas in other countries, especially the United States, these transitions to the act have often been condemned. What is the explanation for this resistance? Does it stem from the “horror of incest and the violation of boundaries” (p. 12) that is latent in each one of us? Or is it the same silence as that observed by Freud after he discovered his neurotica, which led to the suggestion that (a hypothesis contested by the author) he had abandoned his theory because this was the only way that he would be able to make further progress while avoiding violent controversy?
Whatever the answer, something of that violence certainly affects us, on reading the many short testimonies from female patients, mostly gathered in the course of a new analytic treatment. This is a violence that Urtubey offers to decipher for us, as possibly the only means of defusing it, through 12 short chapters (a sort of step-by-step progression towards the inexorable) that seek to understand what it is in the encounter of the analyst–patient couple that can make such deviations possible.
This most recent work can be seen as