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 patients 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.

Jean-Luc Donnet is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Paris. Between 1983 and 2000 he was vice director-practitioner, then director-practitioner of the Psychoanalytical Consultation and Treatment Centre of the Psychoanalytical Society of Paris (Centre Jean Favreaux). His main works include: 'L'enfant de ca' (with A. Green), 'Le divan bien tempere', 'Le surmoi Freudien et la regle fondamentale' and 'La situation analysante'.