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The occasional traveller to France—one who has some interest in psychoanalytic matters, at any rate—can scarcely have failed to note over the years a striking change in literary tastes as reflected in the counters of Parisian bookshops. In the post-war years and well through the early 1960's he would have been hard put to find copies of the classics of Freud, let alone more recent works, except in specialized stores on the Left Bank. More recently, however, his attention is virtually assaulted even in commercial bibliotheques by masses of glossy new psychoanalytic publications prominently displayed. The long-standing antagonism of French intellectuals to psychoanalytic ideas has been replaced by what appears to be an infatuation with 'le chose Freudien, ' and to be 'in analysis' has become a virtual social necessity.
'Psychoanalytic Politics' is the attempt by an American sociologist to account for this intellectual and cultural revolution. Dr Turkle understandably centres her argument on the career of Jacques Lacan, who has, as theoretician, guru and propagandist been the focal figure in the 'revolution Freudienne', and remains one of the most controversial and provocative figures in the psychoanalytic world, Gallic and international.
Turkle clearly demarcates the abortive social revolution of 1968 as the great divide in this historical process. It was, she suggests, the failure of this euphoric effort at recasting the forms of French society—and, in particular, the French educational establishment—that drove