Prologue

In the spring of 1983, a group of French and American analysts met in Paris to compare theories and clinical practices in the two countries. The question behind the meeting was captured in its working title: “Two Paths, One Goal?” This issue grew out of that meeting. The satisfaction of the participants in part revealed the anticipatory, cautious skepticism with which each group had approached the other. The Americans half-expected to find the French obscure and preoccupied with semiotics, detached from clinical experience. The French half-expected to find the Americans mechanistic and preoccupied with abstruse metapsychology. Instead, all discovered a common set of struggles in trying to grasp, describe, and understand clinical psychoanalytic experience.

Included in this issue are both French papers discussed at that meeting and others presented here in English for the first time. France is an intellectually vibrant country, bubbling with diversity. It would be as erroneous to view France from across the ocean as a stereotyped, monolithic caricature of Jacques Lacan as it would be to view us from that distance as a similarly sterotyped monolith modeled on a caricature of Heinz Hartmann or Heinz Kohut. These figures have been vital influences, the sources of contributions and controversies. But in neither country has analytic thought been narrowly limited to any one school.

The papers in this issue have been selected as a sampling of the range of ideas of French analytic thought. As a result, the contents are not exhaustive in their breadth, inevitably omitting other valued contributors. Limited by the space available, we have had to make a limited choice of papers. All of the authors are practicing clinical psychoanalysts; their backgrounds and their orientations vary. We are privileged to have the opportunity to present a case report by a Lacanian analyst, material long of interest to those of us not directly