Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) came to psychoanalysis by way of medicine and psychiatry. In 1951 he turned his attention to the training of analysts, and this was one of the issues which led him and his circle to part company with the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. He became, in 1953, the first President of a new group, the Societe Francaise de Psychanalyse, whose declared aim was a return to the true teaching of Freud. Eleven years later the Societe Francaise was dissolved and, under Lacan's direction, gave birth to the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. Jacques Lacan was a practising psychoanalyst and teacher up until his death in 1981.

Dr Lacan'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?" Dr Lacan argues in particular that there is a structural affinity between psycho-analysis, construed as the science of the unconscious, and language - the science of linguistics being one of the significant discoveries of our time. He also discusses the relation of psycho-analysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on a wide range of topics, such as sexuality and death, love and libido, alienation, interpretation, repression and desire.This book constitutes the essence of Dr Lacan's sensibility. There is no clearer statement of the ideas and issues which have aroused such passionate reactions in France, and which can now gain the hearing they deserve in the English-speaking world.

• Preface to the English-Language Edition -- Editor's Note -- Excommunication -- The Unconscious and Repetition -- The Freudian Unconscious and Ours -- Of the Subject of Certainty -- Of the Network of Signifiers -- Tuché and Automaton -- Of The Gaze as Objet Petit a -- The Split between the Eye and the Gaze -- Anamorphosis -- The Line and Light -- What is a Picture? -- The Transference and the Drive -- Presence of the Analyst -- Analysis and Truth or the Closure of the Unconscious -- Sexuality in the Defiles of the Signifier -- The Deconstruction of the Drive -- The Partial Drive and its Circuit -- From Love to the Libido -- The Field of the Other and back to the Transference -- The Subject and the Other: Alienation -- The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis -- Of the Subject Who is Supposed to Know, of the First Dyad, and of the Good -- From Interpretation to the Transference -- To Conclude -- In You More than You -- Translator's Note