Psychoanalysts in Session

Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis is an intimate clinical experience and the concepts that it explores aim to grapple with the specific phenomena that unfold when a patient speaks and an analyst listens. This book aims to give concrete examples of how these concepts take shape when analysts work. The structure of the contributions presented in this book matches this concern; drawing on a fragment of an analysis, each contribution illustrates how a notion reveals unforeseen perspectives. The list of entries selected is diverse, with notions encountered in international studies since the Second World War prioritised. Certain classical concepts are nonetheless included when their significance has been shaped by the innovative rereading that contemporary authors have made of them. However, not all the entries in this glossary constitute concepts: some correspond to notions, others to intuitions, and even to recurrent situations with which the analyst is confronted. By grounding, in each entry, the theoretical reflection on a clinical case, the reader is lead towards the incessant to-and-fro process which governs the analyst’s reflections from clinical experience to theory. This book therefore constitutes an essential tool for psychologists, psychoanalysts and all professionals in the field of mental care.