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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
Prague, in the spring of 1968: the party is over, freedom to act is finished. Soviet tanks invade the country and its capital. In a last-ditch effort, the
people of Prague try, if not to defeat the aggressor, then at least to lose him. In the hope, undoubtedly naïve, of disorienting the enemy or even driving him crazy, the people tear down the names of streets transforming the districts of the city into districts without names.
This historical scene provides the metaphor for the title of Dominque Scarfone's book; a metaphor for what Scarfone seeks to grasp from the psychoanalytic situation. Like any metaphor, this one has the seductive force of an image and suffers from some approximation. From the invasion of Prague to the scene of transference, we have to take one more step: “Analysis one day leads to unconscious configurations, where ‘something’ presents itself without having a correspondence on the side of psychic representation. In these districts, the streets never had names; for that matter, they are not even streets but indistinct traces of barely passable pathways” (p. 12).
Condensed into these few words, we have the project of the book. Whatever thematic variations there are from one chapter to the next, the reader is always brought back to this navel of analysis where for the first time the trace becomes representation. “In analysis, we are sooner or later taken off stage to districts where the streets are without names. Places where representation actually fails, where the topographical maps of the soul become vague, then blur and end by disappearing” (p. 12). More than childhood - with its memories, history and possible narrative - it is the in-fantia, the time before speech where these remains stay cap