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Not everything is expressible in every country.
At the mysterious heart of Freud's ‘dream of Irma's injection’, a dream that launches The Interpretation of Dreams and so psychoanalysis itself, lies a stuttering, enigmatic symbol: “propyl, propyls … proprionic acid … tri-methlamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type)” (Freud, 1900, p. 107). Trimethylamine, Freud had learned from Fliess, is “one of the products of sexual metabolism” (Freud, 1900, p. 116); according to Lacan: “Indeed - I've made inquiries - trimethylamine is a decomposition product of sperm, and it gives it its ammoniacal smell when it's left to decompose in the air” (Lacan, 1991, p. 158).’ And so, at the heart of this seminal dream of psychoanalysis, a dream space that penetrates into the mysteries of sexuality and a woman's body, lies a literally seminal symbol which, given its importance to Freud (and French psychoanalysis), penetrates into the origins itself of psychoanalysis. The structural formula of this molecular symbol is, uncannily, a multiply branched chemical ‘tree’.
At least uncannily to me because, to my eye, a similar, strangely disem-bodied, entangled and mysterious tree of French psychoanalytic genealogy (a tree of who analyzed whom) introduces this extraordinary book, a book that quite literally begins with the complex enigma of its own origins and paternity and the uniquely traumatic question of French psychoanalytic history itself. Who is the father?
Of course, we know who the grandfather is, Freud himself. Nevertheless, the origins of the distinctive, urbane style of French psychoanalysis - philo-sophically sophisticated with rich, complex, non-linear conceptions of language, time, desire and memory - remain controversial, disputed, and still unassimilated. Like the uncanny branching symbol of the Irma dream, this chart of many fathers - wi