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Although the papers in this volume were originally delivered at symposia in May 1976, co-sponsored by the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and New York University, most have already been published in either English or French. The book is divided into four sections: A Sociology of Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalysis; Creativity; and Psychoanalysis and Literature. Since themes often overlap, the papers will not necessarily be considered in sequence.
The first two, by Julien Bigras and François Péraldi, are polemical attacks on American psychoanalysis and ego psychology: for being conformist, dogmatic and authoritarian; for taming its candidates and manipulating its patients in submission to medical ideology; for over-theorizing on the one hand and devitalizing Freudian theory on the other, by discounting the death drives; for overestimating responsibility to the individual while seeking through technique to adapt the person to the complexity of his or her self and the accepted social order. In short, American psychoanalysis is counterrevolutionary and disregards its social and political responsibility by failing to understand, along with Hartmann, that reality is the battlefield of social classes, as already analyzed by Marx and Hegel.
This attack on American psychoanalysis runs concurrently with the discovery of the French Freud. Thus, one may suspect that France's sudden embrace of psychoanalysis, which followed their student riots of 1968, has less to do with psychoanalysis than with the French. That it is a complex social phenomenon is made clear in a thoughtful article by Sherry Turkle. Psychoanalysis is experienced by the French general public as a recent French discovery. It is seen as more radical, mature, and intellectual than that "perpetrated" by the United States. The sudden infatuation between