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Leon Blum, the French prime minister during the 1930s, commented, “How can I govern a country with over 600 varieties of cheese?” In the politics of the French psychoanalytic institutes there are splits, divisions, internecine polemics, and a brilliance of research, clinical innovations, articles, and books, all embedded in the culture. A diagram (pp. x-xi) in this portentous volume of excellently translated papers by psychoanalysts of various schools, illustrating the multiple institutes, societies, and associations, resembles a genealogical tree. I counted 24 varieties.
Psychoanalysis is alive and well in France. Looking at a kiosk in Paris during a recent visit, I read the cover of a popular news magazine that stated, “Psychoanalysis is popular.” A literary magazine devotes an entire issue to psychoanalysis. Freud's image is on the cover. There is an interview with Lacan.
Contrast this with the demise of psychoanalytic candidates in the United States, the paucity of patients seeking psychoanalysis, insurance companies limiting reimbursement, and medication management.
Are the French born introspective? Do they suffer from more “difficulties in living?” Or is there a cultural self-searching through language? Rabelais, the physician, questioned religious ideology through satire, or Stendhal, in his continuous introspection, painted a canvas in language that depicts the unconscious becoming conscious through character traits within a societal outside that becomes an inside.
Facing this volume, I was reminded of an experience I had as a young student. I was going to visit the Stendhal Museum in Grenoble. Seated in a train, I discovered the train was not moving. I looked out the window to discover the locomotive chugging away, unconnected to the passenger cars. Would these papers connect with a reader from another culture?