Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious

The book is organised into a prolegomenon and three major parts. The prolegomenon presents the purpose of the work and offers a subjective history of psychoanalysis since the Second World War. Part One, “Practice,” examines the work of psychoanalysis, therapeutic indications, the analytic setting and process, transference and countertransference, the organizing axes of pathology, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Part Two, “Theory,” studies Freud’s epistemological breaks, the subject and object lines, representations, affects, character, anxiety, psychic pain, hallucinatory experience, acting out, somatization, disturbances of thought, psychic space and time, thirdness, language, the work of the negative, and the recognition of the unconscious. Part Three situates psychoanalysis at the beginning of the third millennium by analysing its relationship with philosophy, neurobiological and anthropological models, scientific knowledge, and postmodernity.