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In this essay, I discuss eight reviews of Reading French Psychoanalysis, edited by Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flanders, and Alain Gibeault. The reviews I consider are Cheshire (2010) in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Forde (2010) in the Revista de Psicoanálisis, Glassgold (2014) in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Lefer (2011) in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Reed (2012) in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Ruth and Kahn (2011) in Division Review, and Verhaeghe et al. (2016) in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. All the reviews can be found on Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; seven are from English-language journals and one from a Spanish journal. (I am unable to comment on one review from an Italian journal and another from a Dutch journal.)
Reading French Psychoanalysis is an immense tome of 817 + xxi pages, consisting of a General Introduction followed by 40 chapters divided into seven sections: History of Psychoanalysis in France, The Pioneers and Their Legacy, The Setting and the Process of Psychoanalysis, Phantasy and Representation, The Body and the Drives, Masculine and Feminine Sexuality, and Psychosis. Obviously, the book covers a tremendous amount of material that is central to psychoanalytic theory and technique.
Only one of the 40 chapters reprinted in Reading French Psychoanalysis is by Lacan, and the editors state on the first page of their General Introduction that “A project that included … the Lacanian school is beyond the scope of this book, which is meant as an introduction to the work of colleagues from the two Societies that belong to the International Psychoanalytic Association …” (Birksted-Breen et al., 2010, p. 1). Nevertheless, all the reviews of this volume discuss Lacan in more-or-less depth, and in this, they mirror the volume, whose editors two pages later state, “Those aspects of Lacan which were not questioned [in French psychoanalysis] have taken root and their origin masked. Other aspe