You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In accordance with a certain tradition, a treatise takes the form of a systematic survey of a given field or problem, with the aim of providing a basic introduction to it. For quite some time, however, there has been a growing conviction that nothing so much as a treatise (and to a lesser extent, a manual), demands of the reader a solid background of knowledge of the subject, as well as highly developed critical faculties.
Unfailingly, the problem comes up again with this impressive collection of essays by more than 80 authors — coordinated by Lebovici, Diatkine and Soulé. While being a cultural undertaking of indisputable interest, it proposes a comparison between two approaches — the psychiatric approach and the psychoanalytical one — in many ways difficult to trace back to one or to the other.
Published more than ten years after the Manuale di psichiatria del bambino by J. de Ajuriaguerra , which was the first “milestone” in this relatively young discipline, it differs from the latter in certain features which reveal the extent to which psychoanalytical knowledge has gradually filtered into French psychiatric institutions from the '40s on. Lebovici's Trattato is not a re-proposal of Ajuriaguerra's systematic, organic approach, which despite its grounding in a genetical-structural model with an environmental point of reference, was still divorced from clinical experience as a vital part of the social and institutional fabric. In fact, the perspective emerging from the most significant writings in the Trattato is that of a therapeutic tradition which, starting from the problematical question: “How can one be a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst at the same time?” (Vol. I, 17), has directed its intervention towards transforming the approach to the patient, who is not simply objectified by classification grids, but met with in the