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

This is an illuminating and entertaining book on the sociology of psychoanalysis in France over the past decade. Freud wrote that the “final and decisive battle” for psychoanalysis would be waged “where the greatest resistance has been displayed.” France, with greater tenacity than any other western country, has resisted the integration of psychoanalysis into its intellectual and cultural life for more than half a century. Turkle's book provides a thorough analysis of the belated resolution of that resistance and of the resultant “progressive communication,” which has since taken place between French culture and psycoanalytic theory. Turkle dates the beginning of Freud's “French revolution” with the student upheavals of 1968. Since then under the leadership of the “French Freud,” Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis has invaded every aspect of French culture, thought and politics and in turn has itself been recast in the characteristic French image—a dramatic fusion of science and poetry. A major achievement of this book is the lucid exposition which Turkle provides of Jacques Lacan's linguistically based psychoanalytic theory.