It was with a pleasurable sense of anticipation that I approached this much-heralded translation of what is regarded as a classic work on psychosis in the French tradition, commissioned by the New International Library of Psychoanalysis.

Alan Sheridan is the translator of much of the work of Lacan as well as that of Foucault, ‘le maître véritable’. The book opens with a characteristically lucid account of Aulagnier's ideas by Joyce McDougall and Nathalie Zaltman. This is very helpful, and Susan Budd, the editor responsible for this book, is to be commended for it.

The author's aim she states as finding ‘a way of analysing the psychotic's relationship to discourse that would bring psychoanalytic practice closer to achieving the ambition of its project’ (p. xxv). She says that she had intended Part One to be merely an introduction, setting out the concepts to be used in her elaboration of psychotic discourse in Part Two. ‘Unsurprisingly’ she