The Infantile in Psychoanalytic Practice Today. By Florence Guignard. New York/London:  Routledge, 2022.  194 pp

The Infantile in Psychoanalytic Practice Today is the first-ever translation of Florence Guignard’s now classic work, Au vif de l’infantile , which was first published in French twenty-five years ago. In 2020, a new edition was released with two new chapters, an updated bibliography, and an index. It is this new, expanded edition that Routledge is now offering to the English-speaking public.

In this book, the analyst promotes the notion of the Infantile (with a capital “I”)—a notion derived directly from Freud but which she enriches using insights gleaned from her own practice and her own readings of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, most notably authors such as Bion, Klein, and Green. In a way, the book offers a new interpretation of Freud’s famous apothegm das Kind ist der Vater des Mannes, “The child is father to the man,”1 building on this interpretation to reflect on how to treat children, adolescents as well as adults.

For an analyst, defining what he calls a child is a key issue. At stake is the very nature and originality of one’s metapsychology and understanding of psychoanalytic treatment. Freud’s conception of the child is not exactly the same as that of Klein, Bion, Lacan, or Winnicott. At the heart of Guignard’s book is a specific definition of the child, Freudian in so far

as the sexual is the crux of what the Infantile means—this hypothesis standing as one of the hallmarks of what has become known as French psychoanalysis. Let us note from the outset that this approach, faithful in spirit to Freud’s cutting-edge conception of the child, is underpinned by a rigorous analytic ethic. This ethic sometimes leads Guignard, in order to ensure authentic analytic listening, to venture off the beaten track.

Consisting of sixteen chapters, The Infantile in Psychoanalytic Practice Today is a collection of articles. While they are not all devoted to the central notion of the Inf