Catalog All books
René Frydman
God, Medicine and the Embryo
With ethical questions raised about medically assisted pregnancies and medical experimentation, the eugenics debate has become a mute point. Yet bioethical legislation has remained ambiguous. René Frydman has made himself the ardent defender of progenics, a predictive and humanistic medicine. Here, Frydman reflects on the problem of the human embryo through the different points of view of science, religion, law, and morality, and answers ethical and religious questions that he has been asked by his patients. René Frydman is a gynecologist-obstetrician and a member of the FrenchEthics Committee.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux
In the Eye of the Mirror
How do the Greeks think of themselves ? Why do mirrors rarely reflect the true image of the person that looks into them ? And what image are they trying to project on others ? Formulated from an abundance of literature, iconography, and archeology, this book discusses the beginning foundations of individual representation. It is primarily a study of realities and appearances in an interpersonal society where social and personal status are dependant on how one is viewed and received in society. Secondly, the book analyses sexual identity and what it was in ancient Greece, through the study of a universal symbol, the mirror. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux teach at the College of France.
Denis Jeambar
A State Secret
From a resounding victory, full of promises, to a surprise, humiliating defeat, the presidency of Jacques Chirac didnt manage to astonish the French nation or the world. This book lifts the lid on the plotting and secrets of the presidency. Denis Jeambar is the editor of the Express.
René Frydman, Muriel Flis-Trèves
Dying before living ?
Miscarriages, medical terminations of a pregnancy, embryonic destructions, perinatal mortalities these babies born prematurely dont even have the chance to be properly recognised as a part of this world, leaving their parents to solitude, grief and even a sense of guilt. Isnt it natural that the parents, even if it is painful for them, want to see their child, to name him, to register his existence ? That they need to follow the rituals of bereavement and record the child in the family history ? Doctors, midwives, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts ask themselves what their role is when faced with this kind of sudden death, which has the capacity to affect so intensely other lives : how, they ask, can we help these patients along the road of their bereavement ?
Darian Leader
What are you thinking about ? The incertitudes of love
What does it mean to be a woman ? What is the point of jealousy ? What is it that can lead a man to weakness ? And why do we so often end up asking one another : "What are you thinking about ?" Through little insights, both alert and educated, taking their sources from Freud and Lacan as well as from the cinema, literature and his own experience as a psychoanalyst, Darian Leader paints a subtle, enriching and dedramatized portrait of the sentimental motivations of the two sexes. Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst. He practices and teaches in London and in Leeds. He also regularly collaborates with the French Red Cross.
Libby Purves
How Not to be a Perfect Family
Perfect families, as we know, live in perfectly kept houses, have admirably well-organized vacations...
Colette Chiland
Changing Sex
Some human beings refuse to take the path that leads from being male to becoming a man or from being female and becoming a woman and want to belong to the sex for which their bodies were not designed -and this at any price. In our culture, these transsexuals want to both occupy the other place in the network of symbolic exchanges and have a mark of this change in their bodies. Their sadness is irremediable, for although they can change their social sex, they cannot change their bodily sex. "It's better " states one transsexual, "to change what's in the mind". Will we succeed in doing so ? A university professor, Colette Chiland taught psychology and psychopathology of children and adolescents, then clinical psychology at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
David Lepoutre
At the Heart of the Suburbs Codes, Rites and Languages
In the last 15 years, the social disease of suburban youth has been on the front pages of newspapers, feeding fear and encouraging a certain social and political discourse centered around the notions of crisis, disorder and desocialization. Coming from a direct experience, this book opposes the "problematic of the social vacuum" with a resolutely ethnological approach to relations between the adolescents of large urban settings. David Lepoutre is a professor of History and Geography in the second degree and gives courses in Ethnology at the Universities of Paris XIII and Lille II.
Patrice Huerre, Martine Pagan-Reymond, Jean-Michel Reymond
Adolescence doesn't exist
Adolescence is a recent conception in the history of man, a method of signifying, via puberty, the passage from childhood to adulthood which has always existed. In the past, this passage was celebrated and defined through the practice of rituals. Today the transition is no longer marked within such a strict timescale. Even more serious is the tendency for adults to refuse young people entry into their grown up world, either as a result of their own fear of aging, or of their desire to protect the young person from all possible risk. Patrice Huerre is a hospital psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and director of the Georges Heuyer University Medical Clinic in Paris. Martine Pagan-Reymond is a certified professor in Modern Literature. Jean-Michel Reymond, formerly Chief of Staff of Child and Adolescent Psycology is now Director of the Medical-Pedagogic Center of Saint-Lô.
Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Anne de Kervasdoué
Women are Not Just Men
The changes which have come to be in the second half of the 20th century have taken women a long ways from the profile adopted by their mothers. Do all these transformations lead us to trace the portrait of a woman who has become a clone of men ? We can ask ourselves this question when we remember the arguments of feminists in the 70's employing the "egalitarian" themes of Simone de Beauvoir. More recently, some have gone so far as to announce the coming of an "androgynous" society. But what do the women and the men of this country think about all this ? How do women see themselves in relation to men ? How do they define themselves and how do they describe the men of their lives ? A very pointed realization of today's female identity. Janine Mossuz-Lavau is Director of Research at the CNRS.
Antoine Garapon
Judging Well Essay on Judicial Ritual
Imagine for a moment that you assist at a trial for the first time. There is no doubt that you would be struck by the strange procedure which happens in front of you, the judicial discussions. It is true to say that before being a moral faculty, judging is firstly an event. According to the author, before there were laws, judges and courthouses, there was a ritual. This book aims to unveil all these facets, showing by example how the public gallery is there to culpabilise and inhibit the defendant, in order to make him submit to the judicial order. Can judges avoid staging trials in order to judge well ?
Boris Cyrulnik
The Enchantment of the World
In this book, Boris Cyrulnik analyses empathy, our capacity to put ourselves in the place of the other, hypnosis, the power of fascination that we have on others or that others have over us...
Bernard Diu
Do atoms really exist ?
Few scientific notions have aroused the speculative imagination like the thermodynamic entropy. All organised systems - societies, living creatures - are destined without exception to decline and eventual death. This book clearly exposes the historical and conceptual development of thermodynamics. Born from a desire to understand and master steam powered machines - the symbol of our industrialised societies - it became the science of the human body. However, it was suddenly passed over in favour of the theory of atoms. It was thus demolished by statistical mechanics which ceded to the imperatives dictated by the atomical structure of the body. After an epic struggle, sometimes quite ferocious, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have been reconciled by adopting the base of the second with the techniques of the first. This book reads like a novel about contemporary physics. Bernard Diu, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieur, is a professor at the University of Paris VII.