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Under the title Éros et Antéros, over 40 years ago, in 1971, Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain first published their “psychoanalytic
reflections on sexuality”. Both training analysts of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, they thereby instigated a collaboration that was to continue in 1975 with the publication of La nuit, le jour, their remarkable essay on mental functioning. This work is a milestone in psychoanalytic thought, if only for their key proposition - “the censorship-of-the-mother-as lover” - which forms the pivot of their model of the birth of psychic life. The decade from 1960 to 1970 witnessed a blossoming of a great many theoretical propositions and debates within the French psychoanalytic world, generated by the schism with Jacques Lacan and the social unrest. Reading or rereading these authors provides an immersion in this valuable period experienced by the psychoanalytic movement, especially in France.
By bringing out a new edition of Éros et Antéros, with an elegant cover that displays Canova's sculpture, the erotic ‘Amour et Psyché’, Editions In Press offers psychoanalysts today an opportunity to rediscover the vitality of that period, the boldness of these thinkers, with their searching analyses and rigorous thinking. And to this day, what theme might seem more exciting than these psychoanalytic reflections on sexuality to 21st century women and men alike, especially if they are psychoanalysts?
This is particularly true given that, as Gérard Szwec points out in his valuable preface, Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain were also a couple in life when they wrote this first book together. And as readers who are sensitized to the psychic effects of primal scenes, we cannot fail to be moved by the charm that emanates from certain chapters, such as ‘Le sommeil des amoureux’ (The sleep of lovers). Having emerged from a long correspondence with a daily exchange of letters, this dense and poetic, complex and colourful text