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 s "A 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."

In this book the author 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 analy