The Analyzing Situation

In this book Jean-Luc Donnet explores the particularities of the status of the method in psychoanalysis, linked to the specificity of unconscious psychic processes. If the method aims at ensuring a level of technical mastery, it must also make sure that analytic treatment does not become an “application” of knowledge. A modern conception of the analytic situation implies going beyond the classical pair of “setting-interpretation”. Starting out from the postulate of a transferential dynamic of the encounter, the author brings into play the pair “analyzing site-situation”. The “analyzing situation” emerges from the utilization, in a “found-created” mode (Winnicott), of an initial site constituted by a set of means put at the patient’s disposal. The analyzing situation includes patient and analyst in a self-organizing structure. The notion of a site makes it possible to approach the difference between psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy differently: each site has a “logic”, an intrinsic functional coherence, which have their own incidence on the therapeutic process. In the second part of the book, which ends with analysis of an essential screen-memory ‘A Child Is Being Talked About’, the author also presents four other texts: a vertiginous study of Conrad’s novel,Lord Jim; a new exploration of “tender humour”; a moving reading of Freud’sA Disturbance on the Acropolis, and a radical approach to Civilization and its Discontents which reflect the central place he gives to the agency of the superego as a keystone of Freudian thought.