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This review is part of a specially commissioned set of reviews of books by Quebec Francophone authors. Please read the introduction from the Book Review Editor in Canada, Richard Simpson here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com
To write about the book A psychoanalyst in his century was not a simple undertaking, especially for a ‘young’ analyst born in the last quarter of that
century. With a work that resembles a biography, I was trying to understand what the man, André Lussier, who lived practically through that century, was trying to tell us. In fact, the author himself says he wrote this book to understand better what he had to say by returning to his past and drawing new light from it.
I say ‘man’ because this is a book by a psychoanalyst but also a story of the life and struggle of a citizen who wants to put forth a clear and informed view of what he and his companions faced in those times in Quebec in the era before the Quiet Revolution, particularly concerning the abuses of authority by the Church and political powers which he witnessed between 1920 and 1960. He was a man involved in his own society who thought extensively and wrote frequently, including in the political revue Cité Libre, where he expressed a critical view of three major forms of authority: State, Church and Nation. He states that “it would not be untrue to think that the heart of this book is a confrontation with institutions” (p. 14). However, this confrontation as a social and human journey takes place through a major encounter with what will become a special tool of observation: psychoanalysis.
This most recent book of André Lussier's is above all a Freudian story, so to speak. Through a vast and rich personal and professional trajectory, it tells how the dimension of the drives is at the centre of human experience, with the possibility of individual and collective drift. It is a Freudian story about the primordial place of the fat