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Summary
In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic," "imaginary," and "real." Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories--neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories--their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here.)
Parts VI and VII of this collection take us well beyond Seminars I and II, relating Lacan's early work to his later views of the 1960s and 1970s. Slavoj Zizek explores the complex philosophical relations between Hegel and Lacan regarding the subject and the cause. And Lacan's article, "On Freud's 'Trieb' and the Psychoanalyst's Desire"--that appears here for the first time in English and is brilliantly unpacked by Jacques-Alain Miller in his "Commentary on Lacan's Text"--takes a giant step forward to 1965 where we see a crucial reversal in Lacan's perspective: desire is suddenly devalued, the defensive, inhibiting nature of desire coming to the fore. "What then becomes essential is the drive as an activity related to the lost object that produces jouissance."
Bruce Fink is a Lacanian Psychoanalyst and Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. Maire Jaanus is Professor of English at Barnard College. Richard Feldstein is a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and co-editor (with Willy Apollon) of Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, also published by SUNY Press. All three edited the companion volume to this one, Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, also published by SUNY Press.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I: Introduction
An Introduction to Seminars I and II Lacan's Orientation Prior to 1953 (I)
Jacques-Alain Miller
An Introduction to Seminars I and II Lacan's Orientation Prior to 1953 (II)
Jacques-Alain Miller
An Introduction to Seminars I and II Lacan's Orientation Prior to 1953 (III)
Jacques-Alain Miller
Part II: Symbolic
The Symbolic Order (I)
Colette Soler
The Symbolic Order (II)
Colette Soler
Transference
Colette Soler
Time and Interpretation
Colette Soler
The Oedipus Complex
Éric Laurent
The Subject and the Other's Desire
Bruce Fink
Lacan and Lévi-Strauss
Anne Dunand
Part III: Imaginary
Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan
Françoise Koehler
The Imaginary
Marie-Hélène Brousse
Language, Speech, and Discourse
Marie-Hélène Brousse
The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations
Richard Feldstein
Part IV: Real
The Nature of Unconscious Thought or Why No One Ever Reads Lacan's Postface to the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"
Bruce Fink
An Overview of the Real, with Examples from Seminar I
Ellie Ragland
A Discussion of Lacan's "Kant with Sade"
Jacques-Alain Miller
Part V: Clinical Perspectives
An Introduction to Lacan's Clinical Perspectives
Jacques-Alain Miller
Hysteria and Obsession
Colette Soler
Clinical Vignette: A Case of Transsexualism
Françoise Gorog
"Black Jacket": A Case of Transitory Fetishism
Claude Léger
A Case of Childhood Perversion
Dominique Miller
From Freud to Lacan: A Question of Technique
Robert Samuels
On Perversion
Jacques-Alain Miller
Part VI: Other Texts
"A Civilization of Hatred": The Other in the Imaginary
Maire Jaanus
Logical Time and the Precipitation of Subjectivity
Bruce Fink
The Ethics of Hysteria and of Psychoanalysis
Vicente Palomera
Hegel with Lacan, or the Subject and Its Cause
Slavoj & Zizek
Part VII: Translation from Lacan's Écrits
On Freud's "Trieb " and the Psychoanalyst's Desire
