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Rethinking Psychoanalysis with the Sciences, the title of the book by Georges Pragier and Sylvie Faure-Pragier, might be a source of some concern if one were not already familiar with the authors’ approach. This approach, stated and pursued unambiguously for twenty-odd years now,2 resides in the exploration of a “fresh path that attempts to integrate metaphorically new scientific models currently grouped together under the term ‘sciences of chaos’” (p. 4). With such material, there was a great risk of falling into the trap of being seduced by models that are often disturbingly resonant with the psychoanalytic ‘model’. The authors have, however, managed to avoid doing so and propose an already invigorating study which aims “to systematize ideas about change whose elements were ‘already there’, disseminated in the theoretical and clinical elaborations of colleagues who had spoken of their difficult patients” (p. 5).
The rigorous approach adopted by Georges Pragier and Sylvie Faure-Pragier, the absence of facilitating complaisance in explaining scientific data, the well-spaced-out structure of the book and its meticulous and lively style of writing, all contribute unflinchingly to a goal that is entirely in the service of the vitality of psychoanalysis.
Going beyond a linear determinism of psychic processes, the authors seek “to develop new theorizations in relation to a question that concerns a good many of us: what is the source of the new elements that emerge in analytic treatment?” (p. 6). Which evokes the related question: how is the sudden emergence of a symptom that reveals a pathology to be understood? (p. 67). In the service of the goal of this project, there is a procedure that Freud would not have disowned: like Freud, who drew on the physical and biological sciences of his time, let us try, say the authors, “to apply to our own field the models offered to us by the sciences today. Let us pretend or act for a moment ‘as if’ certain discoveries could be applied