Daniel Widlöcher, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was formerly head of Psychiatry at Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière, in Paris. He is a member of the Psychoanalytic Association of France and a former president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Daniel Widlöcher is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst and a major figure of French psychoanalysis. From 1953 to 1962, he underwent psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan.
Alain Braconnier has written of Widlöcher: “His life is identified with psychoanalysis, as he defined it: a cultural practice as much as a therapeutic one, it does not hand down truths but opens a new road.”
It is this road, as much as his own intellectual trajectory, that Widlöcher seeks to present in this book constructed around key events in his life, which were crucial to his thinking, acted as turning points for psychoanalysis, and resulted in much debate.
He traces his encounter and subsequent break with Jacques Lacan, and recalls the meaning of his activities at the head of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Underlying these landmarks in Widlöcher’s self-analysis is a series of profound questions: What should be remembered of his career? What should be passed on? What exactly does psychoanalysis represent for him? What should psychoanalysis be?

• In the tradition of Freud’s Autobiographical Study, Widlöcher reviews landmarks in his own thought and career in a multifaceted self-portrait.

• Discreetly and modestly, Daniel Widlöcher shares some of his private thoughts for the first time.

• A master of psychoanalysis recounts how his career and his thinking made him who he is.

• Free of polemics, this book provides an alternative view of psychoanalysis — far from the clichés spread by its detractors.