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X (aged 10)—Daddy, what’s analysis? What do you do with your patients?
Y (his brother, aged 11½).—Analysis is…analysis. Just like you do logical analysis or grammatical analysis at school, well, Papa does the same thing with his patients.
X (peremptorily and rather indignantly)—Oh, no! People aren’t words!
(Conversation between a psychoanalyst’s sons in the presence of their father)
This book began as a paper. In 1970 I addressed the Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langues romanes in Paris on the subject of the affect. This work took on the dimensions of a book and, in the opinion of many, it was one. And so it is reborn today in that form and, as such, it will bring the subject to a wider public. And yet a report is not a book. What I mean by this is that if the original intention had been to write a book, it would have been written in a different way. So the rather peculiar nature of this text requires a few explanations as to its origin, its aim, its form and the public for which it was intended.
In 1953, Jacques Lacan and a number of his colleagues left the Societe psychanalytique de Paris for reasons that I shall not go over here. That same year, Lacan was to deliver a report to the Congrès des Psychanalystes de Langues romanes entitled ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse’, now generally referred to as the ‘Discours de Rome’.1
Lacan’s thinking has become increasingly influential. The Colloque de Bonneval on ‘L’inconscient’, organized by Henri Ey in 1960,2 was undoubtedly dominated by the Lacanian contribution, direct and indirect, despite the criticism that Lacan later made of the text that was inspired by his thinking.