This book is as much a literary text as an essay; it aims to make a sensitive case for what psychoanalysis can be without any recourse to jargon, introducing it as you might introduce one friend to another. Away from the discreet, cocooned locations where it is practiced, can the things that happen on the couch ever truly be seen? That is the challenge taken up by this book.
With this in mind, it reveals gripping stories and case histories as well as philosophical and autobiographical reflections, arranged in short chapters. The author does not try to fall in line with any particular theory but attempts rather to describe things that happened as they actually happened, what the analyst did and heard, what he learnt, and what resonance that has in his own life. With us, he explores what really happened - what appears and disappears between the death wish and the instinct for life. If psychoanalysis does not fall into the category of invention or art, the author maintains in this important book, then it is doomed. Not forgetting that the truths it reveals are never definitive.
Michael Larivière is a philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was born in Canada and has lived in the United States, and now works as a psychoanalyst in Strasbourg. He is a former co-director with Conrad Stein of the review Études freudiennes, was director of teaching at the CHU psychiatric clinic in Strasbourg from 1981 to 1992, founded the review L’Artichaut (1981 - 1986), is a member of the Academy for the Psychoanalytic Arts (United States) and was a co-director of the Sunland Seminars in Los Angeles until 2006; he has also run seminars in France, Italy, Canada and the United States.
L'auteur
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