The great achievement of “contemporary” economics has been the articulation, implementation, and public acceptance of the Keynesian revolution. The gestation period extended over some three decades, highlighted by these turning points: the publication in New York in 1936 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the enactment ten years later of the Employment Act of 1946, which formally acknowledged the government's responsibility for maintaining full employment; the official recognition in 1954 by a Republican Administration of its obligation to employ “Keynesian” weapons to fight recessions and depressions; and the statement in 1965 by the apostle of modern liberalism (John Kenneth Galbraith) that the “new economics” was the “new orthodoxy,” as well as the admission by the vicar of economic conservatism (Milton Friedman) that “we are all Keynesians now.”

Science and poetry: it is sufficient to conjure up together these two terms of human experience to arouse an idea of opposition in some, an idea of exclusion in others and of suspicion in most. Two methods of perception of the exterior and interior world, at opposite ends of the human mind have produced two languages. They are so far from each other these two languages that have common origin, and after extending their branches to the opposite ends of the earth seem to be able to join together wishing to go beyond.

History is implied in the object, the same as in researches; it is that which partly creates it. The choice of the questions that arise à propos of long historical periods is neither fortuitous nor chaotic. One can discern tendencies that explain themselves on both the historical and sociological planes. In formulating his questions the historian adopts a point of view having itself a certain historic dimension. The different methodologies on the subject of the relative value attributable to such and such a type of problem do not only anticipate numerous aspects assumed by the historical processes of the past. They depend equally on the way in which history and the historian are wedged into contemporary life. The problems of history, the questions themselves that arise constitute a fragment of the history that makes them. History depends then on the future; on the specific correlations established between the present, the contemporary historical reality and the functions that history assumes at the moment, on the one hand, and the knowledge of the past, on the other hand.

The purpose of this paper is to examine those aspects of modern dynamic psychiatry which could stimulate philosophical thought and perhaps lead even to collaborative investigations between the disciplines of psychiatry and philosophy. Although the overlap of their interests is obvious, there is an astonishing lack of communication between workers in these fields.

Avant-garde art has reached a paradoxical situation: it has become accepted by the bourgeoisie. Though professedly anti-traditional from the beginning, it built up a tradition of its own; an aesthetic and morality of uncompromising permanent revolution. The containment of the avant-garde, which began during the 1950s and has been one of the most interesting social developments in art, broke the continuity of more than one and a half centuries of non-conformism and rebellion.

If there is an obvious fact for the observant it is the proliferation of studies or popular writings on the history of Africa. The past of this continent has been abundantly assessed. And still, it is a long time since Egypt, who produced one of the oldest, one of the most dazzling civilizations of all time, has been known as being situated in Africa; but actually the renewal of interest does not concern that Africa, it concerns the interior, that which qualifies it to be called the “dark” continent. The non-Mediterranean Africa is the most studied, Why? First, because its peoples are in the process of liberating themselves. They are searching for their identity. They are trying, not without difficulty, to reassemble the scattered elements of their personality of which the past is one of the most important facts. Their history, which, up to now was only considered and studied as an appendix, like a piece of the history of another country, is being understood more and more from the point of view of an autonomy.