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This is the third issue of an annual from the Association Psychanalytique de France. Like its two predecessors, it brings together contributions on the basis of a set of related ideas; in this case, the notions of mal [evil/ailment] and malaise and maladie [illness] serve to place the concept of cure under scrutiny. A stimulus to debate is provided by contrasting two propositions of Freud's, both formulated in Analysis terminable and interminable. The first views psychoanalysis as doing what needs to be done when the patient's life itself has failed to do it. The second proposition is that psychoanalysis gives rise to a “newly created state” in the ego, a state which clearly distinguishes “a person who has been analysed” from one who has not (Freud, 1937, p. 227. The first stresses the psychotherapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis, the second the ‘cultural work’2 to which the psychoanalytical quest contributes. This implies a live connection between psychotherapy and philosophy, a connection upon which each of the contributors to this collection seeks to base the originality of the psychoanalytical process.
Before going into detail, it is worth briefly reviewing the plan of this volume, the unity of whose theme makes it more of a coherent work than a journal in the usual sense.
A first section, ‘Entretiens' [Exchanges] comprises three presentations, each followed by a rejoinder. The first presentation, by Patrick Mcrot, tackles the question of truth, asking what definition of truth would be consistent with its having heuristic value in our understanding of the curative process. In his rejoinder, Jacques André makes the provocative suggestion that truth might be what the patient needs to be cured of. A second presentation, by Jean-Francois Daubech, links the process of cure to ‘creativity’ along the road, the long road, that psychoanalytical ‘research’ requires as opposed to the short cuts of psychotherapy. Jean-Claude Rolland's response extends Daubech's thesis by sho