Le Discernement. La Psychanalyse Aux Frontières Du Droit De La Biologie Et De La Philosophie. (Discernment. The Psychoanalysis of the Law of Biology and of Philosophy.): By René Major, M.D. Paris: Éditions Aubier Montaigne, 1984. 186 pp.

In Crebillon's play, La Nuit et le moment, an unexpected visitor invites himself into the bedroom of a young woman whom he does not know. He accomplishes this through the disconcerting force of his speech. The argument of this play can be used as a metaphor for the intrusion of psychoanalysis into what certainly should not be termed the "other" sciences. The latter tend to resist psychoanalysis the way Crebillon's young woman struggles against the intrusion of the young man who seeks to gain entry into her bedroom. The argument, expressed in the brilliant and perspicacious utterances of the intruder in the play, is: "Deep down you desire me." This argument is not entirely lacking in applicability to the other situation.

Le Discernement by René Major appears to have been written in response to the biologist Jean-Pierre Changeux's L'Homme neuronal.1 The latter begins with an appeal (very ambivalent, it must be said) to psychoanalysis for a dialogue, but on the implicit condition that psychoanalysis return to its "neuronal" ambitions. These ambitions certainly were at one time those of Freud, but of Freud before the epistemological break that resulted in the birth of psychoanalysis