Inhibition, symptom and distress

The influential French psychoanalyst Michel Plon, co-author of *The Dictionary of Psychoanalysis* with Elisabeth Roudinesco, makes his debut in the *Reading Freud* Collection. In the newest title in the *Reading Freud* Collection, Michel Plon traces the trajectory of Freud's discourse on anxiety. Focusing on the essay *Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety* (1926), the Parisian psychoanalyst proposes both examining the antecedents that led Freud to write his seminal text on the subject and analyzing the events that followed its publication. To this end, he returns to Freudian texts in which anxiety already appeared: both explicitly—as in *Studies on Hysteria* (co-authored with Josef Breuer, 1895), *Project for a Scientific Psychology* (1895), *The 25th Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis* (1917), and in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess—and implicitly—as in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* (1920) and *The Ego and the Id* (1923). Furthermore, Michel Plon addresses the work of Freud's interpreters, and especially Jacques Lacan's reinterpretation of this subject. For Nina Saroldi, the collection's organizer, "Even for readers familiar with Freud's work, the text analyzed here presents a significant degree of difficulty, not only because of the sheer ambition of addressing themes [...] that require a laborious recap of the history of psychoanalytic thought, but also because, in it, Freud does not spare the reader his digressions and, above all, his disagreements with himself." In this book, readers have a rare opportunity to delve deeper into this elementary Freudian concept accompanied by one of the greatest psychoanalysts of our time.