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Published first in 1972, this book was written in response to the Wilhelm Reich revival in France following the 1968 'revolution' and represents 'a contribution to the analysis of dissidence within the Freudian psychoanalytical movement'. The intensely political climate of that period in France could partly explain the determined Freudian orthodoxy of the book, an orthodoxy which somehow compromises the writers' intent to answer this ideological revival with a detached scientific argument.
The authors begin with Freud's distinction between scientific psychoanalysis and its applications in the medical and the non-medical fields alike. Their concept of scientific psychoanalysis, however, seems to be a more or less closed system within which Freud's percepts provide insights ('not just a key but the key' as they say) into all basic human psychic activity. These percepts, seen as rooted in biology, are accepted as 'truths' standing all by themselves, not answering to any social, cultural or political realities. Presented this way as a system of absolute truths, Freudian orthodoxy then becomes vulnerable to the accusation that like any other orthodoxy it is not fundamentally different from an ideology. Sensitive to such an attack, addressed in the form of reductionism, the authors respond: 'As for the infamous "reductionism", isn't this mainly being carried out by those who try to constrain analysis to the consulting room? All that would remain of Freud's vast project, from his ambition to "understand something of the riddles of the world" would be the vestiges of a therapeutic practice' (pp. 81–2). To this reader this answer to the accusation of reductionism may appear tautological because it implies that the application itself of Freudian percepts to extra-therapeutic fields of knowledge mitigates against any scrutiny of their validity and the relevance of that application.
In the first three chapters titled 'The implications of a return to Freud' and with the us