This book is composed of forty letters sent by an experienced psychoanalyst to a young colleague who is just starting her career. The challenges of their practice are clearly exposed and illustrated with clinical examples.
Psychoanalysis is, for the author, a form of humanism. What comes first is the therapeutic dimension and the various modes of commitment, as rigorous as the rules governing friendship.
The author draws on the experience of contemporary colleagues, for whom psychoanalysis is part of life. He refutes the conventional concept of psychoanalysis as a practice focused on tragedy and pain.
He reminds us that Freud was indebted to Spinoza, an author who emphasized the joy and passion at play in the elaboration of a therapy.
The aim of this book is to go back to the simplicity with which Freud first presented his discovery of the unconscious, and to allow the reader to grasp the significance of the unconscious in context, as a key element in our experience of the world.
Heitor O’Dwyer de Macedo is a psychoanalyst born in Brazil. He has worked as stage director for the theater in São Paulo and then in Rio de Janeiro. In 1968, dictatorship forced him into exile. In France, he worked for years in psychiatric hospitals and taught the thought and practice of Françoise Dolto and Gisela Pankow, at the University of Jussieu (Paris-VII). He heads the Fondation franco-latino-américaine Rocinante, and organized a colloquium of French and South-American psychoanalysts who worked under State dictatorship. As well as numerous specialized articles, O’Dwyer de Macedo has written three books before the Lettres: Ana K., histoire d’une analyse (Gauthier-Villars, 1977), Le psychanalyste sous la terreur (Matrice-Rocinante, 1988) and De l’amour à la pensée - la psychanalyse, la création de l’enfant et D.W. Winnicott (L’Harmattan, 1999).
L'auteur
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