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Dr. Laforgue is one of the founders of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and of 'l'Evolution Psychiatrique'. Of these two societies, he says they 'prepared public opinion for the development of a new science, psychopolitics which should permit us to treat collective conflicts with the weapons by which today we combat the individual conflicts of the neuroses'. The central thesis of the book is that Talleyrand 'was one of the great forerunners of this new science, to whom we must appeal for an understanding of certain aspects of the destiny of men and peoples'. Talleyrand was a member of a great aristocratic family, a bishop of the Church, a pillar of the old regime of monarchical society. In breaking with his family, the Church, and the regime, in accepting the French Revolution, and in throwing in his lot with Napoleon, he 'overcame', says the author, his personal superego. Then in betraying the revolution and Napoleon, in working for the counterrevolution and in assuring the return in new form of the old 'legitimacies', he triumphed for himself, for France and for Europe over the 'collective superego'. His example is held to be a guiding light at present when all men must face 'the great fear produced by a new revolution: that of "machinism" of which totalitarianism in the political and moral domain is but a single aspect'.
In a foreword Dr. Laforgue writes that he might not perhaps have had the 'force' to write the book 'without the collaboration of those who by their calumnies and ingratitude forced me to take a position'. He goes on, 'Psychoanalysis is still obliged to seek painfully its road in order to defend human values against the collective disbalance caused by a "scientism" which through "machinism" easily leads to the abuse of pure force … It is not the least of our tasks to need to brave the "sottise" of an epoch in which so many intellectuals consider themselves omnipotent and having lost a sense of reality, play the game of imposture, at ti