Introduction

A new generation of psychoanalysts enabled that science to develop rapidly in France; that expansion soon became one of the major trends in psychoanalysis throughout the world after the Second World War. Freud wrote: 'The analyst must not want to be English, French, American or German, before becoming an adept at Analysis; he will have to place the common interests of the latter above national interests'. French psychoanalysis was born of two contradictory trends: the influence that psychoanalysis had in the English-speaking world, and the radical rejection of that movement as expressed in Britain and America. The emphasis that American psychoanalysis laid on Freud's structural model came therefore to be displaced onto his earlier topographical model. More than for any other school of thought in psychoanalysis worldwide, the link between Freud and French psychoanalysis is a special and fundamental relationship, because the reference to Freud's concepts has a direct influence on our clinical understanding.