Works of Daniel Lagache: Selected Papers, 1938-1964

‘There is still much to be said about Lagache the psychoanalyst. As early as 1947, he founded the Library of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Presses Universitaires de France, and forty-two volumes have appeared, by French and foreign authors, nine of them works or reprints of articles by Freud. It was here, under the direction of Lagache, that Laplanche and Pontalis produced their precise and important The Language of Psychoanalysis (1968), which has been translated into many languages. At the same time, Lagache played a role of prime importance in the history of the psychoanalytic movement in France. He participated actively in two main splits that mark the history of this movement and was president, at their inception, of both the French Psychoanalytic Society in 1952 and the Psychoanalytic Association of France in 1964.Eva Rosenblum collated the texts of The Works of Daniel Lagache and published them in six volumes between 1977 and 1986 at the Presses Universitaires de France. It was an enormous research task, and we can be grateful to her for accomplishing it.The present English edition in one volume is a selection of those texts that are most representative of the psychoanalytic thinking of Daniel Lagache. It is a thinking that is rich in epistemology, ensuring that psychoanalysis is set in relationship to behaviorism and clarifies its status as an exact science . It deserves to provoke a lively response from the English speaking public.’- From the Foreword by Didier Anzie