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Listening to the counter-transference, looking for useful paragraphs in the most recent important articles, keeping one's diary in order and a rein on one's suspended attention, smoothing the covers for the next patient: all very serious activities that can deprive our work of its few charms. Is it true that the certified analyst never laughs? Not much, eh? Well, actually, it's just widespread negation. In the course of our daily labours, there's a great deal to laugh about, and heartily. And this little book gives a detailed account of where the amusement lies. It starts already with the cover illustration, by J.J. Sempé, the masterly French cartoonist, come to offer useful tips to young designers partial to pseudo-Mirò, Kleeclones, quasi-Kandinsky and the like, and as attentive to the signifier as they are distant from the signified. There are a lot of them around. Sempé's cartoons, scattered through the book, need no explaining, and illustrate some of the basic themes of our working-day: money, couch, sense of guilt and aggressiveness. But the text is much more than this; it's a handbook which explains what psychoanalysis is, what an analyst is and how to recognize one, the various sub-species analysts are divided into and where they can be found. So we are given the definition of psychoanalysis by Laplanche avec Pontalis, then Lacan's (where things start to get amusing), and finally that of our Salvatore: “Something that happens when a person lying on a couch tells everything and anything to an individual who keeps very quiet (…)”. Many useful details follow, including references to the mysterious relation between analysis and railways, a subject which Freud pioneered (just think if Little Hans had known how many horse-power a locomotive generates!), while we now suspect that there is some kind of connection between analytic training and railways.
We learn a great deal about the ideal age, the religion and the sex of our analyst. Then a crucial point. How long do