Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'

by Derek Hook_ Calum Neill_ Stijn Vanheule (2019)

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Synopsis

This volume is the second of three sets of paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries on the complete English edition of Lacan's Écrits, covering the essays from "The Freudian Thing" through "Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presentation." Edited by Derek Hook, Calum Neill, and Stijn Vanheule, and drawing on contributions from seven specialist Lacanian scholars, the book pursues a dual argument: first, that each of the seven essays it treats constitutes a polemical intervention against the distortions of ego psychology, Americanized psychoanalysis, and the IPA institutional apparatus; second, that these same essays collectively elaborate Lacan's positive theoretical program — the linguistic unconscious, the split subject, the structural distinction between Imaginary and Symbolic registers, the primacy of the signifier, the Name-of-the-Father as paternal metaphor, and the topology of desire. The introduction frames the Écrits itself as a reluctant, labyrinthine, transference-inducing object whose very obscurity is theoretically motivated rather than incidental. Each chapter then situates its essay historically and institutionally before tracking its conceptual argument at the level of individual paragraphs, showing how Lacan's rhetorical performances (prosopopoeia, fable, parable, algebraic formalization) enact the very theses they expound. The overall arc moves from the general polemic of "The Freudian Thing" — Lacan's manifesto for a return to Freud's discovery of the speaking unconscious — through increasingly technical elaborations of metaphor and metonymy, psychosis and foreclosure, the direction of the treatment, and the topology of ego and subject, culminating in "Remarks on Lagache," which synthesizes the imaginary, symbolic, and nascent object a into a single optics of desire. The volume's answer to its governing question — what does Lacan's middle-period Écrits actually argue? — is that every text in this cluster is simultaneously a clinical ethics (the analyst must attend to the signifier and desire, not shore up the ego) and an institutional politics (genuine analytic training must resist medicalization, technicization, and IPA conformism).

Distinctive contribution

What this volume does that no other single work in the Lacanian secondary literature accomplishes is to provide systematic, paragraph-level exegesis of an entire cluster of canonical Écrits texts — from "The Freudian Thing" to "Remarks on Daniel Lagache" — while simultaneously contextualizing each essay within the precise institutional, political, and intellectual moment of its composition. Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter performs close reading of individual passages but does not cover this breadth; Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's The Title of the Letter engages only "Instance of the Letter" and from a deconstructive angle; Vanheule's The Subject of Psychosis treats psychosis across Lacan's career rather than through the lens of a single écrit. Here, seven different scholars each bring disciplinary strengths — philosophy (Johnston on Hegel and materialism), clinical psychoanalysis (Vanheule on psychotic structure), rhetoric (Matheson on "Instance of the Letter"), institutional history (Gherovici and Steinkoler on the 1956 essay) — producing a genuinely multi-perspectival commentary that neither reduces Lacan to a system nor abandons conceptual precision.

A second distinctive contribution is the volume's sustained attention to Lacan's institutional and political critique as an integral component of his theory, not merely biographical backdrop. The commentaries on "The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956," "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching," and "The Direction of the Treatment" show how Lacan's attacks on the IPA, ego psychology, and medicalized training are inseparable from his theoretical arguments about the ego as alienating sedimentation, the analyst's desire, and the symbolic structure of transference. This integration of intellectual history with conceptual explication makes the volume valuable not only for readers of the Écrits but for anyone interested in the sociology of psychoanalytic institutions and the politics of therapeutic normalization.

A third contribution, less visible but important, is the volume's consistent demonstration that Lacan's rhetorical and stylistic choices — the talking lectern, the frozen-words fable from Rabelais, the cast of allegorical IPA characters, the chess metaphor, the prosopopoeia of Diana — are not ornamental but are themselves theoretical performances: each figure enacts the point about the primacy of the signifier, the opacity of the ego, or the subject's constitution in language that the surrounding argument is making discursively. No other single commentary volume brings this level of attention to Lacan's rhetoric as theory.

Main themes

• Lacan's 'return to Freud' as polemical repetition-with-difference against ego psychology and the IPA
• The linguistic unconscious: the signifier's primacy over the signified and its clinical implications
• The ego as alienating, narcissistic sedimentation versus the split subject of the unconscious
• Metaphor and metonymy as the twin axes of unconscious formation (condensation/displacement)
• The Name-of-the-Father as paternal metaphor and its foreclosure in psychosis
• Psychoanalytic training, institutional politics, and the ethics of analytic practice
• Transference, desire, and the analyst's position as incarnation of the big Other
• The distinction between need, demand, and desire and its structural consequences
• The Imaginary/Symbolic/Real triad and the topology of subject-formation
• Lacan's rhetorical style as theoretical enactment: fable, prosopopoeia, and formalization

Chapter outline

• Introduction to 'Reading the Écrits': La trahison de l'écriture
• The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis
• Psychoanalysis and its Teaching
• The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956
• The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud
• On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis
• The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power
• Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presentation: 'Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure'

Chapter summaries

Introduction to 'Reading the Écrits': La trahison de l'écriture

The editors open by interrogating what kind of object the Écrits actually is. Drawing on Roudinesco, they note that the volume resembles Saussure's Course and Hegel's Phenomenology — a founding 'Book' of an intellectual system — but differs crucially in its reluctant, almost accidental genesis: François Wahl reportedly played a greater role than Lacan in motivating publication, and Lacan is said to have had the texts 'pried away from him.' The editors trace the text's origin in scattered journal publications, its resistance to collection, and the deferred, symptomatic quality of its eventual appearance in 1966 (when Lacan was 65). This deferred arrival is read as itself theoretically meaningful — the Écrits does not present a system to be consumed but enacts the desire it theorizes, functioning as a transference-inducing object whose difficulty is a feature rather than a bug.

The introduction also frames the editorial project of the three-volume commentary: to provide paragraph-by-paragraph explication that renders the Écrits readable without domesticating it. The editors insist that the Écrits' symptomatic relation to Lacan's seminars — existing in the interstices between oral performance and written text — is essential to understanding what the book is asking of its reader. The commentary volumes are positioned not as replacements for the primary text but as companions that multiply interpretative routes through a text whose very structure generates interpretative labor.

Key concepts: Écrits as transference-inducing object, Resistance to writing, Deferred publication, Oral teaching vs. written text, Desire and reading, Labyrinthine text Notable examples: Roudinesco's comparison to Saussure's Course and Hegel's Phenomenology; Bruce Fink's speculation about Lacan's reluctant publication; Paul Ricoeur's De l'interprétation as competitive spur

The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis

Adrian Johnston's chapter provides a comprehensive section-by-section reading of Lacan's 1955 Vienna lecture. Johnston begins with the historical and institutional context: the essay was presented on the eve of what would have been Freud's centenary, in the city of Freud's discovery, and is aimed polemically at the IPA and Anglo-American ego psychology, which Lacan diagnoses as a symptomatic betrayal of Freud — an 'eclipse' enabled by emigration to the United States, the domestication of psychoanalysis to capitalist ideology, and the misreading of Freud's second topography as a mandate to strengthen the ego over the id. The essay's central metaphor — the prosopopoeia of Diana/Truth declaring 'I, truth, speak' — is read as the essay's governing thesis: unconscious truth is not a hidden depth but a surface-inscribed, linguistically constituted force that inevitably manifests regardless of repression or theoretical falsification.

Johnston traces Lacan's critique through successive sections: 'The Adversary' (ego psychology's Euclidean depth-model of defense), 'The Thing's Order' (the symbolic order as a Saussurian system of signifiers without positive terms), 'Resistance to the Resisters' (defense analysis as ideological suggestion), 'Interlude' (the talking lectern as a reductio ad absurdum of the ego-psychological ego), 'The Other's Discourse' (the ego as sedimentation of alienating identifications), 'Imaginary Passion' (the mirror stage and narcissistic amour-propre), and 'Analytic Action' (the L-schema as the proper four-term model of the analytic situation). Throughout, Johnston emphasizes Lacan's Hegelian debts — the cunning of reason as proto-psychoanalytic, the dialectic of recognition — as well as the essay's retranslation of Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological 'Where id was, there ego shall be.'

For Lacan, the telos of analysis is the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject, not the consolidation of ego dominance. The Rat Man case is invoked to illustrate the transgenerational, signifier-mediated structure of neurotic symptom formation: the Rat Man's obsessions are encrypted testimonies to his father's symbolic debts, transmitted through speech and gesture rather than biology. The essay closes with a call for analytic training institutes to re-open to the human sciences, mathematics, and structuralism, countering the medical-specialist enclosure that Lacan attributes to post-war American influence.

Key concepts: Return to Freud, Ego Psychology critique, Unconscious as speaking Thing, L-schema, Mirror Stage, Symbolic Order, Wo Es war soll Ich werden, Transgenerational symbolic debt Notable examples: Prosopopoeia of Diana/Truth; Talking lectern; Rat Man case; Anna Freud's defense analysis; Hartmann-Kris-Lowenstein ego psychology

Psychoanalysis and its Teaching

Michael J. Miller's commentary situates 'Psychoanalysis and its Teaching' (1957) within the bitter institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis: the 1953 split from the SPP, the founding of the SFP, and the SFP's repeated failed applications for IPA membership due to Lacan's controversial practices (particularly variable-length sessions). Lacan's lecture to the French Philosophical Society is read as simultaneously a theoretical manifesto and a political intervention: the double meaning of 'teaching' (as noun — what psychoanalysis teaches us — and as verb — how to teach it) enacts the essay's central claim that the content of psychoanalytic knowledge and the act of its transmission are structurally interdependent.

Miller traces Lacan's argument that the unconscious is not a hidden depth but a locus where 'it speaks' — the Other speaks within the subject. Symptoms are not symbols to be decoded imaginaristically (as in Jungian archetypalism or Kardiner's cultural anthropology) but signifiers to be read in their relation to the signifying chain: metaphor (condensation) and metonymy (displacement), tied to Freud's death drive and the compulsion to repeat, constitute the basic grammar of unconscious formations. Lacan's critique of the Neo-Freudians (Adler, Fromm, Erikson, Jung, Horney, Kardiner) as having 'domesticated' and 'castrated' Freud's discovery — replacing the drive with interpersonal relations and social psychology — is situated as an attack on the imaginary reduction of the symbolic.

The section on neurosis and the imaginary explores how hysteria and obsession each represent structural responses to the facticity of the subject's constitution in language — the alienation of entry into the symbolic order via the Name-of-the-Father. Miller notes Lacan's use of the Jeremiah passage and the Aesopian fox fable to illustrate the diachronic transmission of signifiers and the way the subject 'dons the fox mask' of neurotic desire. The essay concludes with Lacan's insistence that the Other (capital O), not the imaginary other, is the proper locus of analytic address — and that ego-psychological 'reintegration into the ego' produces only deepened alienation.

Key concepts: Teaching as noun and verb, Unconscious as Other's speech, Metonymy and death drive, Metaphor and condensation, Neo-Freudian critique, Imaginary vs. Symbolic approaches to neurosis, Name of the Father Notable examples: Jeremiah 31:29 and the fox fable (La Fontaine/Aesop); Kardiner's basic personality structure; Jungian archetype vs. Lacanian signifier; Fort-Da game

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler provide a richly contextual reading of Lacan's satirical, polemical essay — published in the philosophical journal Études Philosophiques for Freud's centenary — which Lacan himself later instructed readers to re-read before engaging his 'Proposition of 9 October 1967' on the passe. The commentators situate Lacan's use of 'situation' in the Sartrean intellectual climate of the 1950s, noting both the homage and the sharp divergence: where Sartrean freedom concerns action, Lacanian freedom concerns the subject's subjection to language as a 'prison house.' The essay's polemical energy is directed against the medicalization of psychoanalysis under Nacht, the IPA's bureaucratic hierarchy, and the 'dentist' model of analytic training that produces only behavioral adaptation.

Gherovici and Steinkoler trace a series of set pieces: the 'golden age' of free association that paradoxically became a liability when its interpretations were pre-digested by analysands; the 'third ear' (Reik) as an imaginary fantasy of unmediated access to the unconscious; the 'pelican' analyst who nourishes analysands with narcissistic 'good objects'; and the extended fable of the 'Sufficiencies,' 'Little Shoes,' 'Truly Necessaries,' and 'Beatitudes' as allegorical figures for the IPA's institutional hierarchy. The frozen-words passage from Rabelais is read as Lacan's key figure for the symbolic order's precedence over the subject: language floats in the air before the subject's birth, determining them in advance. Pavlov's dog is invoked not to praise behaviorism but to expose it as inadvertently demonstrating the primacy of the signifier — the bell is a symbolic stimulus, and the experiment's only speaking subject is Pavlov himself.

The appendix — excluded from the 1966 Écrits but present in the original 1956 publication — is given special attention: here Lacan argues that successful analysis would cut the ego down to size rather than identify analysand with analyst, and calls for a return to Freud's texts to rescue psychoanalysis from the 'conformist terror' of identification-based training. The commentators note the essay's satirical deployment of Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a figure for the IPA's endless deferral of analytic 'sufficiency.'

Key concepts: Analytic training critique, IPA institutional hierarchy, Primacy of the signifier, Symbolic order as external to subject, Free association's golden age, Identification with the analyst, Adaption vs. desire Notable examples: Rabelais' frozen words fable; Pavlov's dog as structuralist avant la lettre; Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Nacht's medicalization; The allegorical IPA cast ('Sufficiencies,' 'Little Shoes,' etc.)

The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud

Calum Lister Matheson's commentary emphasizes the essay's rhetorical as much as its linguistic dimensions, arguing that 'Instance of the Letter' was both a credo and a political act — written for the philosophy students of the Fédération des Étudiants ès Lettres, published in the context of Lacan's anathematization from the IPA, and intended to establish the legitimacy of his intervention in structural linguistics. Matheson carefully unpacks the multiple senses of 'instance' in Lacan's title: law (the predictable operations of the signifier), insistence (the repeated imposition of the letter), and instant (the contingency of its specific occurrence) — all three are operative simultaneously.

The commentary traces Lacan's critical revision of Saussure: where Saussure draws the sign as signifier and signified united in an oval, Lacan inverts and bars this, insisting on the primacy of the signifier over the signified and the resistance of the bar to easy crossing. Matheson explains the letter as the material medium that concrete discourse borrows from language — neither purely structural (a synchronic element of the lexicon) nor purely pragmatic (a specific utterance), but the signifying effect produced by their juxtaposition. Metaphor corresponds to Freudian condensation (Verdichtung): one signifier replaces another, condensing two symbolic chains, with the absent signifier never fully disappearing. Metonymy corresponds to displacement (Verschiebung): the sliding of affective significance from one signifier to another along the chain, independent of the signified.

Matheson's distinctively rhetorical reading foregrounds Lacan's use of Quintilian's notion of trope — an 'artistic alteration' of meaning that changes both structure and content — to argue that the analysand's speech is best understood rhetorically, not just grammatically: the unconscious operates through figures (dead metaphors, metonymic chains) that analysands deploy without knowing they do so. The final section on 'the letter, being, and the other' traces Lacan's argument that the ego is a formation that papers over 'the radical heteronomy' Freud discovered in the subject — a lie directed not merely to imaginary others but to the big Other as the entire symbolic economy. Matheson notes Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's deconstructive challenge to Lacan's system, suggesting that 'Instance of the Letter' ultimately replaces Saussurian linguistics with a new algebra of the unconscious.

Key concepts: Instance/insistence of the letter, Signifier over signified (the bar), Metaphor as condensation, Metonymy as displacement, Rhetoric vs. grammar of the unconscious, The big Other as symbolic economy, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Lacan's tree diagram (S/s); Fort-Da as rhetorical figure; Glanz/glance case (Freud); Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter; Quintilian on trope

On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis

Stijn Vanheule's commentary on Lacan's most important paper on psychosis proceeds through the text's five major sections: 'Toward Freud,' 'After Freud,' 'With Freud,' 'Schreber's Way,' and 'Postscript.' The essay is framed as Lacan's articulation, by the late 1950s, of what his 'return to Freud' had actually produced: a structural — not nosological — theory of psychosis as a mode of relating to the signifier and the Other, distinguished from neurosis not by the content of symptoms but by the mechanism of foreclosure (Verwerfung) rather than repression (Verdrängung).

Vanheule carefully explains the essay's key theoretical moves. Pre-Freudian and post-Freudian psychologies alike are criticized for reverting to Scholastic frameworks or to ego-based models (affective projection) that fail to grasp Freud's genuinely structural contribution. The 'I've just come from the pork butcher's' case study demonstrates how a hallucinated word ('sow') fills the place of a missing signifier in the subject's discourse, creating an imaginary intrusion rather than a symbolic naming of the subject's position — the structural contrast with neurotic name-calling is made vivid. The L-schema and R-schema are introduced as formal models of the subject's relation to the Other, with the R-schema distinguishing the triangular constitution of reality (through ego-ideal, ideal ego, and the phallus as imaginary object) from the psychotic I-schema where the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (P₀) and the corresponding phallic hole (Φ₀) produce a parabolic, delusional restructuring of reality.

The analysis of Schreber's Memoirs occupies the essay's longest section. Vanheule explains the distinction between 'code phenomena' (disturbances at the level of the signifying system itself) and 'message phenomena' (disturbances at the level of what is communicated), the emasculation delusion as Schreber's attempt to become God's phallus — to be the organizing point of a chaotic Other's desire — and the I-schema as a formalization of the stabilized psychotic structure. The postscript clarifies the title: the 'question prior to any possible treatment' is the question of the lack-of-being (manque à être) and how the signifier is operating in any given structure — for psychosis, no paternal metaphor transforms the jouissance of the (m)Other, leaving the subject without symbolic anchorage.

Key concepts: Foreclosure (Verwerfung), Name-of-the-Father, R-schema and I-schema, Psychosis as clinical structure, Paternal metaphor, Hallucination and the Real, Lack-of-being Notable examples: 'I've just come from the pork butcher's' case; Schreber's Memoirs (emasculation delusion, soul murder); Maurits Katan's post-Freudian interpretation critiqued; Merleau-Ponty on hallucination; L-schema

The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power

Reitske Meganck and Ruth Inslegers provide a detailed reading of Lacan's 1958 Royaumont lecture, organized around four questions: Who analyzes today? What is the place of interpretation? Where do we stand regarding transference? How to act with one's being? The commentary situates the essay in the context of Lacan's fierce polemic against Nacht's La Psychanalyse d'aujourd'hui (PDA) and the French IPA orthodoxy, showing how Lacan's theoretical arguments — about the ego, interpretation, transference, and desire — are inseparable from his institutional critique.

On interpretation, Lacan contrasts his signifier-based model with Devereux's Gestaltian 'confrontation/interpretation' distinction, arguing that interpretation must introduce something into the synchrony of signifiers so as to open the diachrony of unconscious repetition. The figure of Tiresias is invoked to suggest that the analyst's properly oracular position — knowing something the analysand does not yet know how to ask — is undermined whenever analysis degenerates into imaginary ego-to-ego confrontation. Freud's 'inexact' interpretation of the Rat Man (attributing the prohibition to the father rather than the mother) is held up as a model precisely because it operated at the level of the symbolic frame rather than biographical accuracy.

On transference, the commentary tracks Lacan's critique of three dominant theories (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and distance-reduction approaches), all of which are found to err by treating the analytic situation as a dual imaginary relation rather than a triadic symbolic one. The Lebovici case (the man obsessed with his height) illustrates the failure of ego-psychological direction of treatment: by taking reality as the benchmark of success and persisting with the interpretation of the 'phallic mother in armor,' Lebovici merely displaces the symptom (the man now worries about his shoes). The final section — 'Desire Must Be Taken Literally' — reads Freud's butcher's-wife dream to argue that desire is always the desire for an unsatisfied desire, structured through identification with the Other's lack, and that the analyst's task is to preserve rather than close off the place of desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand.

Key concepts: Direction of the treatment, Desire of the analyst, Transference as symbolic structure, Interpretation and the signifier, Need/demand/desire triad, Graph of Desire, Subject supposed to know Notable examples: Devereux's Gestaltian confrontation/interpretation; Tiresias and Oedipus; Rat Man case (Freud's 'inexact' interpretation); Lebovici's case (man obsessed with height); Butcher's-wife dream; Lacan's own clinical vignette (impotent patient and mistress's dream)

Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presentation: 'Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure'

Ed Pluth's commentary situates this 1960 essay as a summation of Lacan's theoretical results from Seminars I through VII, while also functioning as a forward-looking exploration of object a and the ethics of psychoanalysis. The essay is a response to Daniel Lagache's personalist, intersubjective approach to personality structure — a position Pluth presents as genuinely close to Lacan's in some respects (rejecting biologism, emphasizing intersubjectivity) but ultimately inadequate because it relies on a naturalist set-theory that takes elements as discrete unities rather than understanding sets as structured by differential relations that precede and constitute their terms.

Lacan's opening engagement with set theory is shown to be a prologue to his core point: linguistic structure is not a higher-order grouping of pre-given natural units but a system whose laws 'trump' the organisms it settles into. The id's apparent disorder (its being 'unorganized,' 'without negation,' 'silent') is re-described through the analogy of a synchronic language-as-lottery-wheel: signifiers lie together apparently randomly, but their sequential extraction reveals an underlying grammatical order, and — crucially — the absence of signifiers can be detected. This allows Lacan to argue that Freud's three 'paradoxical' claims about the id are coherent once the function of the signifier is properly understood: lack and negation are introduced only by the symbolic, which means the id itself is the space cleared out for the subject by linguistic structure — a space the ego then comes to usurp.

Pluth gives particular attention to Lacan's use of the inverted bouquet optical illusion (introduced in Seminar I) to elaborate the relationship between ideal ego, ego-ideal, and the Other. The illusion — in which a real vase appears to surround real flowers by means of a concave mirror and a flat mirror — models how the subject's imaginary self-image (i(a), ideal ego) is formed and how the flat mirror (the Other) mediates the subject's access to its own 'libidinal being' through secondary narcissism and the ego-ideal. Psychoanalysis is described as the situation in which the analyst as incarnation of the Other allows the analysand to be placed 'behind the mirror' — into the field where the subject can encounter the space of desire rather than the projective mirage of the ego-ideal. The concluding section 'Toward an Ethics' addresses the moral law as the internalized voice of the Other, riffing on Kant's two wonders (starry heavens and the moral law within) to argue that psychoanalysis has disenchanted the moral law just as science disenchanted the cosmos.

Key concepts: Set theory and linguistic structure, Ideal ego and ego-ideal, Inverted bouquet optical model, Negation and the id, Object a as cause of desire, Foreclosure (Verwerfung) vs. repression, Ethics and the Other's voice Notable examples: Lagache's personalism critiqued; Inverted bouquet/vase illusion (optical schema); Kant's two wonders (moral law / starry heavens); Teilhard de Chardin mocked; Freud's 'egg with an eye' schema from The Ego and the Id

Main interlocutors

• Jacques Lacan, Écrits
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar I (Freud's Papers on Technique)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar II (The Ego in Freud's Theory)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar III (The Psychoses)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar V (Formations of the Unconscious)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
• Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
• Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Ferdinand de Saussure
• Roman Jakobson
• Daniel Lagache, Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure
• Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter
• Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter
• Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
• Sacha Nacht
• Hartmann, Kris, and Lowenstein (ego psychology)
• Sandor Ferenczi
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Slavoj Žižek

Position in the corpus

This volume sits in an indispensable middle position in the Lacanian secondary literature: it presupposes familiarity with basic Lacanian concepts (signifier/signified, Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, mirror stage) and with Bruce Fink's translation of the Écrits, but provides the detailed textual scaffolding that makes the primary sources genuinely usable. It should be read alongside — not instead of — the corresponding primary texts, and is most productively paired with Fink's Lacan to the Letter (which covers much of the same terrain with greater economy but less institutional depth), Evans's An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (for terminological orientation), and Hook's own Six Moments in Lacan (for a more synthetic, thematic treatment). Readers approaching the psychosis essay should also consult Vanheule's The Subject of Psychosis for a fuller clinical elaboration, and those interested in the institutional polemics should read Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life alongside the relevant chapters here.\n\nWithin the wider corpus of Lacanian secondary literature, this volume occupies a space distinct from both introductory surveys (Fink's A Clinical Introduction, Neill's Jacques Lacan: The Basics) and advanced theoretical monographs (Johnston's Žižek's Ontology, Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology). It is the closest English-language equivalent to a critical apparatus for the Écrits — analogous in ambition to what the Hyppolite commentary is to Hegel's Phenomenology or what the Derrida readings are to Husserl. Readers who have struggled with the density of the Écrits and found themselves unable to gain purchase on arguments they sense are important will find this volume the most direct and thorough point of entry currently available in English.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Signifier
• Unconscious
• Imaginary
• Symbolic
• The big Other
• Ego Psychology
• Identification
• Transference
• Ego
• Desire
• Metaphor
• Metonymy
• Name-of-the-Father
• Foreclosure
• Mirror Stage
• Repression
• Point de capiton
• Splitting of the Subject
• Symptom
• Lack