You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Jean-Luc Donnet’s latest book, Dire ce qui vient. Association libre et transfert, is a magnificent synthesis of all his works: it draws out the essentials of his metapsychological thought while retracing its dynamics. It is of course based on his rich, intense, and varied clinical practice, while also drawing on his substantial institutional experience both in public services and within the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, where he completed his psychoanalytic training and where he still holds a major position as a training analyst and titular member. Donnet is, without question, a major figure in contemporary psychoanalysis, and he belongs, powerfully and tenaciously, to an intellectual movement in France that seeks a deeper knowledge of Freud’s works, while putting them to the test of the practice and the metapsychology. For Donnet, psychoanalysis can only maintain a rigorous epistemology by taking account of the clinical practice, the method, and the metapsychology, which must be linked if any advances are to be made.
Donnet is a man who is actively engaged, on all fronts, and, since his earliest days, as a young psychiatrist during his military service in Algeria, he treated traumatic war neuroses with cathartic hypnosis and developed his theory of suggestion on the basis of this experience. During his training at the Paris Psychoanalytical Institute, he followed Lacan’s teaching until 1965, adopting above all its ‘return to Freud’, in the form of a rigorous critical reading of Freud’s texts, and the importance accorded to the role of speech and language. He also worked with Pierre Mâle, Conrad Stein, Serge Viderman, Joyce McDougall, and Piera Aulagnier, but it is with André Green in particular that he pursued a long collaboration, most notably in their book L’enfant de ça, which played a key role in opening up psychoanalysis to psychosis in France.
He has had some important institutional attachments: at an early age he was medical director of the Centre Étienne Ma