Danièle Brun is known as the author of Une part de soi dans la vie des autres (A piece of yourself in the lives of others) and La Passion dans l’amitié (Passion in Friendship). She is a psychoanalyst, a member of the Espace Analytique and emeritus professor at the University of Paris-Diderot where in 2001 she founded the Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Society Research Centre. She is President of the Société de Médecine et Psychanalyse.

During a psychoanalysis seminar in 1965-66, a violent controversy broke out between Lacan and Conrad Stein. It hinged on a fundamental question: that of the purpose of psychoanalysis. It exposed radically antagonistic conceptions.
Danièle Brun takes up this major question in this work and seeks to define what psychoanalysis is and what it consists of, as Freud conceived it and as it is still practised today.
This book invites us back to the very beginnings of psychoanalysis, and to rediscover the freedom with which we read Freud’s founding texts in the 1960s.
With the confusion introduced by Lacan between university education and psychoanalytic therapy, says Danièle Brun, this freedom of interpretation. But it is vitally important to get it back again.