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Freud worried that his case histories read too much like short stories. Yet the dry, technical style of scientific reports, whose very dullness makes them credible, seemed unsuitable to his material and to his own aesthetic needs. Literary as they were, the genesis of psychoanalysis qua science is contained in those case histories. Marie Cardinal has given us a valuable addition to the genre by writing of her own analysis in the form of an “autobiographical novel.” She writes with passion and skill, and her work brings the analytic process and her own character intensely to life.
The usual published case history, written by an analyst, is meant to advance colleagues' work with a specific type of analysand. It is a communication within a field immured by jargonistic discourse, obscure journals, and often bad writing. Histories written by analysands for the public at large are rare —and good ones rarer still. Their writing and publication belong not just to the history of psychoanalysis as a discipline, but to its history as a social phenomenon.
The Words to Say It, first published in France by Grasset in 1975, details the development of the author's 7-year long experience as an analytic patient. Since the book suggests she began writing soon after termination, I would guess she began the analysis itself during the early 1960s. At that time, in France, psychoanalysis was on the verge of becoming the centerpiece of a cultural revolution. But not quite yet. Both the left and the right still found it unacceptable, and, in France, intellectual life is not at all apolitical. It was practiced by a very small group of analysts torn by struggles for power and by theoretical conflicts. Its impact on the fortress of French family life, therefore, was hardly felt at all.
After the events of 1968, all this changed remarkably and it is against this background of social change that Cardinal's book should be read. The grip of the insular bourgeois family has been stronger in France tha