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The title of the book promises an interesting and appetizing intellectual meal. Most psychoanalysts working in the Anglo-Saxon sphere feel separated from the development of the French-speaking culture. Moreover, the topic of psychosomatics and patients who do not thrive stimulates many thoughts and questions. The author addresses the split between these two psychoanalytic cultures when he writes in his introduction (9): “It is still easier to find a book about the transformation of disease concepts in China than it is to lay hands on a scholarly monograph on non-Lacanian French psychoanalysis produced this side of the millennium”.
The author describes the work and scientific development of 12 protagonists of the “Ècole Psychosomatique de Paris”. Starting with Pierre Marty, he then dedicates a chapter each to the following analysts: Michel Fain with Denise Braunschweig, Nicos Nicolaïdis, Gérard Szwec, Anna Potamianou, Jean Benjamin Stora, César and Sára Botella, Claude Smadja, Christophe Dejours and Jacques Press. Each of these analysts developed his/her own creative approach to understanding and analysing patients who showed characteristics of mechanical thinking, not being able to use metaphor, phantasy or symbolization, and a tendency to develop physical symptoms. In the analytic setting they cannot freely associate. Their stories appear to be dead, robotic and without affect. Marty coined the term “pensée opératoire” to describe their state of mentalization. From Marty’s ground-breaking beginnings in the 1960s, Lost to Desire spans a period of 60 years until today, describing how outstanding French analysts further conceptualized the notion of operational thinking in their own personal, creative and sometimes idiosyncratic ways.
This outline may interest and attract many analysts grappling in their practice to come to terms with these types of patients. The reader, however, is confronted with a growing problem. In each chapter a new author is presented with a new c