PAR"I:ISAN REVIEW
79
questioning its own operation; and psychoanalysis and linguistics are the
privileged instruments for this questioning of discourse on both the level
of the formation of ideas and that of the thinking to which those ideas
give rise.
It
is for this reason that the real ground of contemporary
thought has so obviously expanded on the level of the
essay,
which
combines theory with concrete critical observations.
Most critical and philosophical studies at the moment show the
strong influence of psychoanalysis as a means of coming to know the
subject and his speech. In Paris there are four groups which are dis–
tinguishable from one another according to the position which each
adopts toward the teaching of psychoanalysis. The most orthodox of
these groups is the
Socil:t~
Psychanalytique de Paris, which is connected
with the international association: hence its attendance last July at the
Congr~s
de Paris, in the course of which the relationship between the
analyst and the society was thrown into question, as was the scientific
status of this "art."
From the point of view of training, the
Societ~
Psychanalytique de
Paris is particularly strict : the program of courses here is compulsory, as
are the controls placed on future analysts. Theoretical research is not
required. Some members of this society have set up a pilot project in the
Thirteenth Arrondissement under the direction of Drs. Diatkine and
Leibovici. Psychotherapy and analytic investigation are carried on there
in
the schools; it's a form of preventive hygiene against mental illness.
This kind of practice is oriented very much along the lines of what might
be called "orthopedagogy."
The second group, which split off from the first around 1950, is led
by J. Laplanche and B. Pontalis, authors of the well-known
Dictionnaire
de la Psychanalyse.
Their disagreement with the first group centered on
the problem of analytic knowledge. They publish an excellent journal,
La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse
(Gallimard), the latest issue of which
(Number 7), on "Bisexuality and the Difference between the Sexes,"
opens up the enormous problem of sexual ambivalence by denouncing the
suppression to which it has in effect been subjected since Freud. The
first group publishes
Etudes Freudiennes,
under the direction of Conrad
Stein.
But the two most divergent groups are the third and fourth . The
third is that of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, and it is led by Jacques
Lacan, who has just begun publishing his celebrated seminars with
Livre
XI
(Seuil), which is concerned with what he regards as the four funda–
mental concepts of psychoanalysis : the unconscious, repetition, drives,
and transference. This group publishes
Scilicet,
a collective effort signed
