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“Lire c’est relire” (Reading is re-reading) is this book’s final chapter, concluding a deep reflection on psychoanalysis in general, technique and the theory of technique and, above all, on how every analyst’s theory, implicit or otherwise, affects their practice. It was the re-reading that enabled me to overcome some initial disappointment, since the title had raised my hopes of a comparison between in-person practices and remote practices. Instead, the author takes us on a guided tour that encompasses all of psychoanalysis, starting from the concept of the setting and including the material of the session. Re-reading the book, however, led me to find this approach self-explanatory: if the introduction of remote practices constitutes a radical modification of the setting, it is necessary to try to understand what is at stake, that as to ask the question: “what therefore is the setting?”
The question of the setting occupies the book’s first chapter, but it already features in its introduction. If the reflections on this concept were already common currency in most analytic societies, how is it, the author wonders, that they did not appear in France until the 1990s? Strangely, while addressing the question of the short sessions introduced by Lacan, “an outright war machine against what is rather quickly termed the establishment of the IPA” (13), Léopoldo Bleger does not make the connection between this delay and the Lacanian legacy. This is more strongly present than it has been possible to admit. And although Lacan never gave his reasons for the short sessions, is it conceivable that this was only about the specifics of his technique, his models or his theories. Or does the question arise, with some of Lacan’s patients, as to the existence of a phobia (specifically, a transference phobia), to which the short sessions were the counter-phobic solution?
Although the concept of the setting only entered psychoanalytic debates and literature at the end of the 1990s, it was