Psychoanalytic Politics. Freud's French Revolution.Sherry Turkle. New York:  Basic Books, 1978,  288 pp.

This book is written by an American sociologist about a French movement in psychoanalysis. The author conveys a wealth of information concerning the French Left and the emergence of the alliance between the ideologists of the May, 1968 student uprising and Lacan, the psychoanalyst who by then had been expelled from the traditional psychoanalytic organizations. She compares the group which continually forms and re-forms around Lacan to the original group around Freud and suggests that both leaders are equally authoritarian and therefore necessitated continuous breaks within the ranks. This authoritarian attitude on the part of these two leaders is at odds with another fundamental similarity which they share: the “subversiveness” of their theory.

Since, according to Turkle, the followers of Lacan have maintained their opposition to organized contemporary psychoanalysis as represented by, among others, the International Psychoanalytic Association, they have maintained the essential subversiveness of psychoanalysis, whereas the established organizations are representatives of the middle class values of their societies. Turkle is sensitive to the fundamental problem of the interplay between the need for standards as set by some authority and the need for autonomy, and she has gathered a great amount of information concerning both the structure of Lacan's group as well as its aim, which is to reconcile these two opposite needs. Anyone wishing to be informed about the alliance of the political Left with the practitioners of this new “psychoanalysis” can gain much insight. The author is quite aware that sometimes a huge amount of transformation, both on the part of the leftist politicians and of the practitioners of psychoanalysis, was necessary to make this alliance plausible, but their effort of will succeeded as judged by the tremendous popularity of the Lacan phenomenon.