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It is ‘easier to find a book about the transformation of disease concepts in China than it is to lay hands on a scholarly monograph on non-Lacanian French psychoanalysis produced this side of the millennium’ (p. 9), Wolfgang Lassmann laments in his introduction to Lost to Desire: The École Psychosomatique de Paris and Its Encounter with Patients Who Do Not Thrive. Lassmann’s book is a monograph that addresses this gap, dealing as it does with a series of post-war French psychoanalysts who had ‘no wish or need to emulate Lacan’, and ‘found it easier than Lacanians of the times to focus on the reverberations of action-based scenes on inner echo rooms’ (p. 298).
Lost to Desire, whose origins lie in Lassmann’s PhD thesis, is an intellectual history of post-war French psychoanalysis told through the lens of a particular type of patient - one presenting with inexplicable (psycho)somatic complaints and referred by physicians for an analysis they did not request - and the particular concept elaborated to understand this patient: pensée opératoire, or operative thinking. Opératoire is the psychoanalytic counterpart to the psychiatric ‘alexithymia’, meaning a difficulty in recognizing, expressing and describing one’s emotions, though they have different epistemological origins despite their clinical and phenomenological similarities (Pirlot & Corcos, 2012). Lost to Desire is a valuable contribution to an area less well known in the history of alexithymia as a concept: the contributions of psychoanalysis (Taylor, 2018).
The work of 12 analysts who grappled with the problem of opératoire is probed in chronological order, beginning with the work of Pierre Marty, founder of the École Psychosomatique de Paris (EPP) in 1962. The EPP aimed to answer questions addressed to psychoanalysts by non-analytic medical colleagues who worked alongside them in hospitals, a territory unclaimed by Lacan because it did not partake of orders of the symbolic. In addition to tracing the genealogy of t