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Published a year after the death of the author in 2018, Permanent Disquiet: Psychoanalysis and the Transitional Subject is a collection of essays by the French psychoanalyst and neuropsychiatrist, Michel Émile de M'Uzan. A founding member of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, de M'Uzan gathered his clinical experience over sixty years in hospital settings. His first and only other book in English, Death and Identity (2013), concerns the work of dying, and links the psychic tasks at the end of life to the unconscious work of the newborn, since both stages require primitive mechanisms (such as splitting and depersonalization) to either forge or part with identity. In Permanent Disquiet, de M'Uzan continues to work where “the frontier between the inert and the living is unstable and uncertain” (p. 116), helping patients not only tolerate this uncertainty but assume it, and accept their “permanent disquiet.” His chapters step in and out of the treatment setting and pull in the broader culture to examine the value of ambiguity. This book contains a glossary of original terms that is so rich it practically warrants a spot at the head of the book rather than the tail. The author worked closely with his life partner to create that document, stating that this “vigilant glossary was entirely established by Murielle Gagnebin, but is a text written, as it were, with four hands” (foreward, xv).
The first half of Permanent Disquiet stands at the intersection of art and psychoanalysis. De M'Uzan has a lively exchange with