Psykoanalysens Hemlighet. Samtal Med Åtta Franska Psykoanalytiker. (The secret of psychoanalysis. Conversations with eight French psychoanalysts.): Torberg Foss. Stockholm: Brutus Östling Bokförlag, from the series: Modern French Thinkers. 199 pages. Bibliography. No index.

A Norwegian psychotherapist, at present in training at the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Institute, Torberg Foss, living in Hammerfest, a small town at the north Atlantic well beyond the arctic circle, has written a book based on conversations with eight important analysts working in France. About his motive for writing this volume, Foss says he wants to demonstrate why psychoanalysis ‘still has the right to claim our attention’ and how it comes that the clearest expression of the persistent actuality of psychoanalysis is to be found among the different streams within today's psychoanalysis in France' (p. 7).

His underlying opinion for this statement is revealed later in the book, where the author contrasts the poorness of anglo-saxon psychoanalysis, which Foss considers to be lacking vitality and creative spirit, with the fertile soil of the French psychoanalytic scene. The French capital is for Foss the Mecca of today's psychoanalytical world. Today, Foss writes, ‘the road to Freud leads through Paris’. The abundance of important analysts in the French capital is, according to Foss, due to the life and work of ‘one single man: Jacques Lacan’ (p. 16).

For someone, who like me, has but little insight into Lacanian thinking, such statements arouse, of course, curiosity as well as a certain amount of scepticism. Foss says about his book that it is not a book about Lacan. Yet, the feeling I get is that, in a sense, Lacan is the main character of the book. Of the eight analysts interviewed, five are presented as being important representatives of the Lacanian school, i.e., Guy Rosolato, Moustapha Safouan, Juan-David Nasio, Michèle Montrelay and Octave Mannoni, the latter labeled dissident because of his late disagreement with Lacan on the duration of the sessions. The interviews with these five, occupying about two thirds of the book, offers the reader glimpses into the world of Lacanian thought as conveyed by his followers.

In the three interviews with the non-Lacanians Se