Michel Tort's thought presents a curious amalgam between an orientation towards dialogue and debate, often harsh, with his fellow countrymen, and an openness to contributions from diverse geographical origins and from different social and human disciplines. In this sense, we can consider him as a psychoanalyst who has accepted to limit the claim of universality of many premises and assumptions of his discipline, in order to recognize the historicity, and therefore, the contingency, of clinical observations made in a social space and in a given time.

In the context of neoliberalism, various currents of thought and the technologies of the self that derive from them compete for the market of assistance to subjective discomfort. Although Tort sharply criticizes many of these alternative proposals, he does not fail to highlight the process of capture that some discourses that have emerged from the psychoanalytic community have undergone, which became supportive of conservative social trends, re-updated in the face of the anxiety aroused by the vertiginous cultural changes in matters of family and gender identity and sexual orientation.

Reading this book allows us to delve into debates that are both cultural and inherent to the psychoanalytic discipline itself. They are also, paradoxically, locally French, and also global. Those who read it carefully will find numerous coincidences with authors from other latitudes and with some theoretical productions of our milieu. Perhaps these convergences will allow us to understand that our thought, far from being an echo of metropolitan discourses, is one more voice, which resonates in the global chorus that is at the same time a forum for debates on new modes of existence.