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Quatre essais sur la vie de l’âme is Jean-Claude Rolland’s fourth book; a psychoanalyst of the French Psychoanalytical Association, he is well known for his works on the analogical interpretation and the consideration of the two dimensions of language and the image—that is, for taking up and extending Freud’s opposition between the word-representation and the thing-representation. This book addresses and develops the themes, concepts and intuitions of the three previous ones, along three main lines: a constantly inventive rereading of Freud and of his “readers”; a listening to patients that is attested, in each chapter, by lucid vignettes; and humanity’s religious and artistic achievements from its most ancient testimonies on prehistoric cave walls to the famous but nevertheless unknown work “Hérodiade” by the first great poet of modernity in France, Stéphane Mallarmé.
More than Rolland’s first three books—(Guérir du mal d’aimer [Healing from the ailment of loving], 1998), Avant d’être celui qui parle [before being the one who speaks] (2006), Les yeux de l’âme [the eyes of the soul] (2010))—which the reader will be able to read or will enjoy rereading for at a second stage, Quatre essais sur la vie de l’âme repays the effort of reading and rereading right through from beginning to end—probably much as it will be enjoyable to listen to an entire work by J.S. Bach, such as the Goldberg variations. This is not because the book has a linear construction. It appears instead that each of these four essays, just like its 15 chapters, was composed at the same time. The progression of a new idea is always associated with a variation on a known theme. Taking up a hackneyed concept from the psychoanalytic literature, particularly the case for the “object relationship,” easily side-tracks the reader by the strong tension that will be inflicted on him by the related reading of a concept that French
psychoanalysis, according to a characteristic of which it is proud, so often d