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Gide et Freud: La réception de la psychanalyse dans les lettres françaises is a book-length study incorporating numerous articles published in French and English since the late 1970s by David Steel, Professor emeritus in French Studies at Lancaster University and author of a ‘thèse d'Etat’ on ‘Le Thème de l'enfance dans l'œuvre d'André Gide’ (see notably Steel, 1977). The book aims to recount the history of the ambivalent relationship that André Gide maintained with Freudian psychoanalysis. If Gide was surprised to discover a thought so close to that which he expressed in his own works, ‘remarkable premonitions of psychoanalysis’ according to Steel (p. 18), he always differentiated himself carefully. As is well known, the writer played a decisive role in the dissemination of psychoanalysis in France by directly requesting Freud's permission to have his works translated and published. In terms of contextualization, Gide and Freud delves into the reception of psychoanalysis within a literary milieu that greatly contributed to its diffusion in France. Steel reviews the psychoanalytic readings and references in the work of various early twentieth-century French writers in order to shed new light on the initial convergences between literature and Freudianism. In the absence of French translations until the early 1920s, French writers discovered psychoanalysis through works such as Le Sommeil et les rêves by Nicolas Vaschide or La Psychanalyse des névroses et des psychoses by the psychiatrists Angelo Hesnard and Emmanuel Régis. In his 1918 novel Némésis, Paul Bourget was the first to use the term ‘Flucht in die Krankheit’ [flight into illness], which thereby reached the broad audience of this now largely forgotten author (p. 42). Retrospectively imposed on his characters, Bourget's psychological commentaries are deemed clumsy by Steel (p. 43) who aligns himself with the playwright Henri-René Lenormand and his rejection of the psychoanalytic ‘roman à thèse’ (p. 49). Befor