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Jean-Luc Donnet of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, former director of its Consultation and Treatment Center (Centre Jean Favreau), is a leading voice in contemporary French psychoanalysis. The Analyzing Situation, now made available to English-speaking readers in Andrew Weller's excellent translation, represents one of Donnet's key contributions to French thinking about the method of psychoanalysis. This is a challenging, at times difficult, but very worthwhile book to read, as Donnet attempts to navigate the dialectical complexities of the analytic working situation in search of a way to characterize the problematics and possibilities of its method.
Rather than simply being read in a straightforward, instructional way, this text will yield best results if it is engaged, thought about, and struggled with. Indeed, for this reviewer, the experience of reading this book was so much like being immersed in an extended dialogue with the author that it led to a brief but useful correspondence between us that further clarified my understanding of Donnet's thinking and intent.
The book is divided into two parts. The first section, which is identical in content to the French edition and which I shall discuss below in