This volume gathers together the recent writings of the analysts and members of the Freudian School of Melbourne and the Belgian analyst Christian Fierens, displaying the ongoing interrogation by the School of Lacanian psychoanalysis into its history, theories and practices. Within the framework of Lacan’s interventions in Freudian psychoanalysis, the book in particular highlights Lacan’s inventions in theoretical discourse and clinical practice, including the no-sexual relation, the discursive structures of language, the school, the cartel and the pass. Theoretical shibboleths such as the Oedipus complex are questioned, while the historical writings of Sabina Spielrein are read and interpreted anew. Chapters also engage with the psychoanalysis of children, the questions posed by the psychoses to psychoanalysis and the intersection of creativity and the arts in new and original ways. Bringing together a range of expert contributions, this text will be an illuminating resource for scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis.

Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Žižek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Žižek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.

This groundbreaking book was seeded by the first-ever joint Jung–Lacan conference on the notion of the sublime held at Cambridge, England, against the backdrop of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. It provides a fascinating range of in-depth psychological perspectives on aspects of creativity and destruction inherent in the monstrous, awe-inspiring sublime. The chapters include some of the outcrop of academic and clinical papers given at this conference, with the addition of new contributions that explore similarities and differences between Jungian and Lacanian thinking on key topics such as language and linguistics, literature, religion, self and subject, science, mathematics and philosophy. The overall objective of this vitalizing volume is the development and dissemination of new ideas that will be of interest to practising psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics in the field, as well as to all those who are captivated by the still-revolutionary thinking of Jung and Lacan.

This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of cruelty—a psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and Žižek to untie the knot of “psychic cruelty” intrinsic to perversion and therefore “de-sexualize” perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature.

This bibliography in two volumes, originally published in 1988, lists and describes works by and about Jacques Lacan published in French, English, and seven other languages including Japanese and Russian. It incorporates and corrects where necessary all information from earlier published bibliographies of Lacan’s work. Also included as background works are books and essays that discuss Lacan in the course of a more general study, as well as all relevant items in various bibliographic sources from many fields.

A major influence on French intellectuals in the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan has been referred to as ‘the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud’. Routledge Library Editions: Lacan offers a selection of titles, which examine the influence of Lacan’s theories in a number of disciplines and includes an annotated bibliography of his works. It brings together as a set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print titles, originally published between 1983 and 1991.

The informal tone of these ten lectures by Roberto Harari reflects their original character as classes held at El Centro de Extension Psicoanalitica del Centro Cultural General, San Martin Buenos Aires. Destined for a wider audience than just the psychoanalytical camp, Harari's work presents the Lacanian endeavor without presupposition of specialized knowledge—and yet without conceding intellectual subtlety. Harari provides an introductory display of essential themes developed in Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and offers his own insightful reading of the text's central ideas. These ten classes, sparked by the crucial Seminar XI within the teaching of Lacan, reframe a wide range of questions in psychoanalysis for the professional in the field, scholars and students across disciplines, and interested lay readers. Harari is so at ease with Lacan's oeuvre that he can dismantle and rebuild its structure so that order and logic suddenly appear inherent to Lacan's way of thinking. The unconscious, transference, repetition, and the drive are here reintroduced, not only to do justice to Freud's insights, but also to link these concepts to the larger question of the complex relationships between psychoanalysis, religion, and science. Harari's didactic approach and his analytic style come together to bring us one step closer to understanding Lacan and one step closer to understanding ourselves.

Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan brings a unique, non-partisan approach to the work of Jacques Lacan, linking his psychoanalytic theory and ideas to broader debates in philosophy and the social sciences, in a book that shows how it is possible to see the value of Lacanian concepts without necessarily being defined by them. In accessible, conversational language, the book provides a clear-sighted overview of the key ideas within Lacan’s work, situating them at the apex of the linguistic turn. It deconstructs the three Lacanian orders – the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real – as well as a range of core Lacanian concepts, including alienation and separation, après-coup, and the Lacanian doctrine of temporality. Arguing that criticism of psychoanalysis for a lack of scientificity should be accepted by the discipline, the book suggests that the work of Lacan can be helpful in re-conceptualizing the role of psychoanalysis in the future. This accessible introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan will be essential reading for anyone coming to Lacan for the first time, as well as clinicians and scholars already familiar with his work. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of philosophy and cultural studies.

The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacan’s Écrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries – by some of the world’s most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars – on the complete edition of the Écrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘The Youth of Gide’, ‘Science and Truth’, ‘Presentation on Transference’ and ‘Beyond the "Reality Principle". The originality and importance of Lacan’s Écrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text’s notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan’s Écrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan’s pivotal work.