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This volume, written by a leading figure in contemporary French psychoanalysis, is a welcome addition to the analytic literature. It is clearly written, informed by developments in contemporary French psychoanalysis and the Paris Psychosomatic School (Marty, M’Uzan, and David 1963) and richly illustrated by numerous clinical examples. The essays it contains offer readers at all levels of analytic experience and expertise a consummate explication of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.
The book is organized into five sections: French Psychoanalysis, The Heart of the Treatment, Soma, Psychosexuality, and Vicissitudes of Thinking. These address many of the major areas of current psychoanalytic controversy and interest. The result is a profound demonstration of the extension and reach of analytic theory and technique beyond neurosis to “patients whose discourse is not living … . [and] who construct their lives against desire” (187, italics original).
Aisenstein begins with three essays about French psychoanalysis that describe the inevitable influence of Lacan and briefly summarizes the French training model. Readers will immediately discover that she is a devoted and impassioned reader of Freud, who is equally passionate about knowledge, discovery and psychoanalysis. For Aisenstein, as for so many contemporary psychoanalysts, “it is clinical process that defines the discipline, while theories are understood as attempts at generalization, or systems of metaphor, that are always subordinate to clinical experience” (Michels [1917] 2017, xiv). Thus, she proposes, in what sounds to this reviewer like a very useful “French twist” on Bion's thinking, that “the specificity of our art is anchored … in … infinite becoming … where all knowledge is a recreation, recognized retrospectively” (12). (The French emphasis is on the addition of the central role of apres coup to Bion's (1965, 1970) transformations in O, something that emerges with increasing clarity as one reads through th