Preface

A large number of dictionaries or vocabularies of psychoanalysis already exist. Their usefulness and reliability are valuable for the knowledge of theory: they make it possible to locate classical notions within the architecture of the Freudian apparatus as well as to follow the trajectory of the different currents of thought belonging to the history of the discipline. However, psychoanalysis is first and foremost an intimate clinical experience and the concepts that it elaborates have a particular object: they aim to grapple with the specific phenomena that unfold in the singular space of an analysis, when a patient speaks and an analyst listens.

In this book, we consider the analytic exchange from a contemporary perspective. Our aim is to give concrete examples that go beyond fashion and polemics of how clinical phenomena take shape and are theorised by the contemporary psychoanalyst. We would like to show how analysts think, and the concepts that they employ when working with those who confide their inner life to them.

The structure of the contributions presented matches this concern; drawing on a fragment of an analysis, each contribution illustrates how this or that notion reveals unforeseen perspectives. It thus constitutes a testimony to the work of thinking that has its source in the concepts elaborated since Freud to organise day-to-day clinical reflections. By grounding, in each instance, the theoretical reflection on a clinical case, this glossary hopes to lead the reader towards the incessant

to-and-fro process which, from clinical experience to theory, governs the analyst's reflections. Psychoanalysis, considered as a hybrid body of knowledge, half-theory, half-clinical practice, is neither a simple practice nor a philosophy that disavows its name: it may be likened to what the Greeks called métis, a sort of sixth sense that enabled Odysseus to appreciate the colours of time and to return to the shores of his