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Both the first and the second volumes of this Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, which appeared in 1982 and 1986, were subtitled La bataille de cent ans (The Hundred Years Battle). But only the second volume of this “battle” was translated into English; it was renamed Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. In the two volumes, Elisabeth Roudinesco's vivacious and sweeping account spans a century of French intellectual history as the fitting backdrop for Jacques Lacan's ascent to cultural hegemony—from Freud's first visit to Paris in 1885 to 1985. With the benefit of hindsight, she implies that Lacan was destined all along to become the Parisians” intellectual master and hero as well as the heir to Freud's legacy—both to the therapy through dreams of individuals on couches and to the psyches of poets, writers, and political thinkers. Thus Roudinesco makes no bones about the fact that she takes Lacan's side against the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) with which he broke in 1953 (her mother had been the first student in the SociéAté psychanalytique de Paris [SPP] to confront Lacan's opponents, and remained one of his stalwart supporters), or that she has anything but a parti-pris position.
Although both volumes cover the period between 1925 and 1939, Lacan & Co. alone focuses on the relations among psychoanalysis, surrealism, and the Communist movement. To set up her central argument that Lacan was infinitely more than a doctor with psychoanalytic training, that he had had a literary and political past, Roudinesco begins with his background in Hegelian philosophy and his associations with the Surrealists. Throughout the book, she comes back to their influence on his thoughts and actions, to their original