"Roudinesco provides a finely drawn map of the intellectual debates within French psychoanalysis, especially under the influence of the German emigrés during the 1930s and 1940s. She is a good historian, in that she provides not only a narrative history but also extensive passages from Lacan's own oral-history interviews with the various figures, so that we have not only her commentary but some flavor of the original documentation. Many of the quotes are gems."—Sander I. Gilman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the Société Française de Psychanalyse.

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

The author offers the story of a young man from the provinces determined to leave his family fortune and its old-fashioned values behind; the young doctor in Paris who set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions that shapes it all.

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less specialist audience than ever before, amongst whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted "to introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based", namely the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive. In re-defining these four concepts he explores the question that, as he puts it, moves from "Is psycho-analysis a science?" to "What is a science that includes psycho-analysis?"

The work of Jaques Lacan, eminent French psychoanalyst and influential thinker (1901-1981), is recognized as being of vital importance to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and all those concerned with the the study of man and language. Its value is not limited to the field of psychoanalysis alone, but provides the basis for a new philosophy of man and a new theory of discourse. It is, however, notoriously difficult for the non-specialist reader to come to terms with Lacan's reading of Freud and his investigations of the unconscious. Until now, there has been no satisfactory general introduction to Lacan, and this first general exposition of his work, translated and revised from the French edition, is designed to provide the conceptual tools which will enable the reader to study Lacan using the original texts.