ABSTRACT
Chapter One takes a look at secondary literature produced over the decades to reflect on the concept of the opératoire, proposed by Pierre Marty and his colleagues in France. Within the considerable range of literature, Marion Michel Oliner’s Cultivating Freud's Garden in France (1988) stands out as one of the rare examples of an approach that studies French clinical positions in a broader context. Some contributions tend to isolate positions of Pierre Marty’s work dating back to the 1970s and 1980s without taking time to take a closer look at contemporaneous nuances offered by Michel Fain and Denise Braunschweig, or to absorb newer developments in the reception of his work, within the ÉcolePsychosomatique de Paris, the school Pierre Marty founded, leading to considerable clinical ramifications. As the chapter goes to show, it would merit the effort to set a clinical concept firmly within the theoretical debates it is part of and to place the overall debate in its historical context.
