Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go. François Roustang. tr. by Ned Lukacher. Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

As the title suggests, the author, who is a regular visiting professor of French at The Johns Hopkins University as well as a French psychoanalyst, does not think that psychoanalysis as currently practiced is able to dissolve the transference that binds patients to their analysts. In an earlier book also reviewed in this issue (Dire Mastery), he argues that the aims of psychoanalysis are inconsistent with the formation of a society, even one dedicated to the advance of psychoanalysis, because social relations necessarily involve domination and the goal of psychoanalysis is liberation. If the reader of the earlier text wondered why liberated people could not form a qualitatively different society and thus escape Roustang's dilemma, there is at least some support for thinking along those lines to be found in the discussions of suggestion, transference, and individuation in this one.

The American reader is apt to be put off by Professor Roustang's style and to find it difficult to place his theory and practice of psychoanalysis in relation to the variety of its familiar modes. He has studied with Lacan and shares with him a fondness for philosophers and theoretical reflections, but is critical of his views on transference, language, and the unconscious. In a single reference to object relations theorists who substitute the mother-child for the father-child model of development, he dismisses them as making no advance because they persist in assuming object-relations rather tha analyzing all the way to their (pre-oedipal) psychic origins. Freud remains his chief inspiration, despite this failure to think through the problems of suggestion and transference, because his repeated struggles with concepts and phenomena at the horizon of psychoanalysis, the uncanny, the repetition compulsion, the death wish and in general the archaic and pre-verbal, show the way to the extension of psychoanalysis that Roustang seeks. In this he is thinking along the lines pursued by Searles and