Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution: By Sherry Turkle. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978. Pp. 278.

It seems to me that all psychoanalysts who take psychoanalysis seriously in all the areas indicated by Freud should be very grateful to Sherry Turkle for this deeply thoughtful and provocative book. Certainly the dust cover remark by Stanley Hoffman of Harvard University is pertinent: 'a shrewd and witty account of the belated invasion of French intellectual life by psychoanalysis and of the way in which French culture and politics have in turn remade it in their image—modish and radical.' However, the somewhat ambiguous title (which becomes clear in reading the book) and the French locale should not obscure the fact that the French experience, with all its individuality and uniqueness, is essentially interesting because it is also paradigmatic of many of the great and enduring problems in psychoanalysis everywhere. Among these one can indicate the following: the sociological conditions necessary in a given society and culture for psychoanalysis to have a wide appeal; the impact of psychoanalytic thought upon the culture in which it takes root; the counter-effects of this culture upon psychoanalysis itself; the disrupting but potentially vitalizing effect of the exceptional analyst, with new ideas, on the psychoanalytic movement; the inevitable tensions in the psychoanalytic institution, designed to transmit and further the development of psychoanalytic knowledge, but which can so easily become ultra-conservative and bureaucratic and thus tend to stifle the spirit of analysis and psychoanalytic research; the application and misapplication, so difficult to evaluate, of psychoanalytic theory and thought to social and political issues; and the ineluctable conflicts between psychoanalysis viewed as a science of the mind and its therapeutic aspects answerable to society's expectations.

In the introductory chapter, Turkle situates her interest in the subject of this book as beginning with the year 1968–1969 which she spent in France. André Malraux considered the May