Jacques Lacan • Écrits: A Selection
Jacques Lacan was arguably the most influential French thinker after Sartre. Yet of the extraordinary constellation of minds to emerge into prominence in France in the 1950s – Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, and others – Lacan took the longest to achieve general recognition. The notorious density of his language was one reason for the dealy. Another was that he was not a systematic thinker, unfolding the development of his thought from one book to another. Indeed, his only ‘book’, his doctoral thesis on paranoia, was published as long ago as 1932. He was a practising psychoanalyst, concerned particularly with the training of analysts. He was also a lecturer; for over twenty years his weekly ‘seminar’ was a principal source of his influence and reputation in France. A true follower of Freud, he listened, then spoke. All these ‘writings’ originated as speech, as lectures delivered to fellow analysts or students. This selection of the Écrits – Lacan’s own – represents just under half of the original French volume.
For Lacan, much of the development in psychoanalysis that followed Freud was a betrayal, an evasion of the radical nature of the original Freudian insights. Freud’s theory and practice was either ossified into an institutionalized orthodoxy or distorted by various ‘revisionisms’. Lacan’s own way was to return to Freud’s writings, and to the unconscious as the preponderant concern for psychoanalysis. The gist of all Lacan’s teaching was implicitly contained in a principle stated by Freud: that psychoanalysis is the intersubjective communication between analyst and patient and its sole medium is the patient’s speech. Lacan himself made explicit the significance of this statement in his famous dictum: ‘the unconscious is structured as a language’.
Jacques Lacan died in 1981.
‘The Selection, authorized by Lacan, is necessary reading for anyone concerned with psychoanalysis and its radical effect on all the other human sciences.’: New Society
Table of Contents
Translator’s note
Bibliographical note
ONE The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I – Page 1 – 7
TWO Aggressivity in psychoanalysis – page 8 – 29
THREE The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis – Page 30 – 113
FOUR The Freudian thing – page 114 – 145
FIVE The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud – page 146 – 178
SIX On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis – page 179 – 225
SEVEN The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power – page 226 – 280
EIGHT The signification of the phallus – page 281 – 291
NINE The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious – page 292 – 325
Classified index of the major concepts – page 326 – 331
Commentary on the graphs – page 332 – 335
Index of Freud’s German terms – page 336
Index of proper names – page 337
Tavistock - Routledge, Paperback, english, 338 pages