Secondary literature 1996

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Dylan Evans

by Evans, Dylan

Synopsis

Dylan Evans's An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996; Taylor & Francis e-book 2006) is not a conventional glossary but a sustained attempt to map the architecture of Lacan's theoretical language by tracing each term's shifting usage across the full span of his teaching, from the 1930s doctoral work on paranoia through to the late topology of the sinthome. The book's central argumentative bet is that Lacanian psychoanalysis constitutes an autonomous, internally consistent theoretical language whose terms cannot be imported into or translated out of other psychoanalytic idioms without fundamental distortion. Evans pursues this by attending to three registers simultaneously for each entry: (1) the Freudian and non-Lacanian background a term responds to or critiques; (2) the precise moment and context in Lacan's teaching at which the term first appears or is radically redefined; and (3) the relational topology of the term within the tripartite RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) system. The result is an account of Lacanian theory as a rigorously differential system in the Saussurean sense—a closed, self-referential structure in which terms have no positive existence except through mutual opposition—while simultaneously charting the historical development (the "four phases" of language, the successive reformulations of repetition, objet a, jouissance, and so on) that complicates any purely synchronic reading. Evans is also persistently attentive to clinical stakes, foregrounding how conceptual distinctions (e.g., repression/foreclosure/disavowal; resistance/defence; repetition/transference) have direct consequences for analytic technique, and how Lacan's institutional conflicts with the IPA shaped his theoretical polemics. The implicit overall argument is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is best understood as a post-Freudian reformation rather than a deviation: a return to the letter of Freud read through structural linguistics, Hegelian dialectics, and mathematical formalism, producing a distinctive ethics of desire irreducible to any competing school.

Distinctive contribution

What this dictionary does that no other single volume in the Lacanian secondary corpus quite matches is provide a developmental conceptual cartography: for each of over two hundred terms, Evans reconstructs not just what Lacan means by the term at its most celebrated moment, but how that meaning was arrived at, what it replaced, and what it was arguing against. This developmental attention is theoretically consequential. Take objet petit a: Evans traces four discrete phases (imaginary little-other in schema L; object of desire/fantasy from 1957; real cause of desire and surplus-jouissance from 1963; semblance of being linked to the Borromean knot in the 1970s), showing that these are accumulative rather than simply superseding strata. Or repetition, retraced from the automatisme tied to the complex (pre-1950) through the insistence of the signifier (1950s) to the return of jouissance (1960s). No other introductory text sustains this level of diachronic precision across the whole vocabulary simultaneously.

A second distinctive feature is Evans's consistent triangulation of every concept against Lacan's three primary interlocutor-traditions: the Freudian corpus (read against the Standard Edition and against post-Freudian schools—ego-psychology, Kleinian analysis, object-relations theory—that Lacan was explicitly contesting); the structural linguistics and anthropology tradition (Saussure, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss); and the philosophical tradition (Hegel via Kojève, Heidegger, Descartes, Kant). This triangulation is itself an implicit argument: Lacanian theory cannot be understood in isolation from the specific polemical contexts that shaped each conceptual intervention. Evans also gives unusual attention to the clinical and institutional dimensions—the IPA conflicts, the variable-length session controversy, the pass procedure, the cartel—weaving these into the conceptual entries in a way that shows how clinical technique and theoretical position are mutually determining. Together, these features make the dictionary function not merely as a reference tool but as an argument about the nature and internal unity of the Lacanian project.

Main themes

The RSI triad (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) as the fundamental classificatory system organising all Lacanian concepts
Language and the signifier as the paradigm of structure and the constitution of the unconscious
The developmental evolution of Lacan's key concepts across four broad phases of his teaching
Clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) defined by structural operations (repression, foreclosure, disavowal) rather than symptom clusters
The subject as divided, split, and constituted by the signifier—against any ego-psychological ideal of autonomous selfhood
Desire, lack, and jouissance as the three registers of libidinal economy displacing both biological need and object-relational satisfaction
Lacan's sustained polemical relationship with Freud's post-Freudian inheritors (ego-psychology, Kleinian analysis, object-relations theory)
The ethics of psychoanalysis: the analyst's desire, the end of analysis, and the subject's responsibility to his desire
Topology (Borromean knot, Möbius strip, torus) as non-metaphorical structural description replacing optical models
The institutional and historical context of Lacanian psychoanalysis (IPA expulsion, EFP, pass procedure, cartels)

Chapter outline

Preface and Format of the Dictionary
Alphabetical Entries: A (Absence through Autonomous Ego)
Alphabetical Entries: B–C (Bar through Countertransference)
Alphabetical Entries: D (Death through Dual Relation)
Alphabetical Entries: E (Ego through Extimacy)
Alphabetical Entries: F–G (Factor c through Graph of Desire)
Alphabetical Entries: H–I (Hallucination through Inversion)
Alphabetical Entries: J–K (Jouissance through Kleinian Psychoanalysis)
Alphabetical Entries: L (Lack through Lure)
Alphabetical Entries: M–N (Madness through Name-of-the-Father)
Alphabetical Entries: O (Object-Relations Theory through Other/Other)
Alphabetical Entries: P (Paranoia through Punctuation)
Alphabetical Entries: Q–R (Quaternary through Resistance)
Alphabetical Entries: S (Sadism/Masochism through Symbolic)
Alphabetical Entries: T–W (Thing through Woman)

Chapter summaries

Preface and Format of the Dictionary

Evans opens by positioning the dictionary itself as a theoretical object: like the Saussurean language it describes, it is a 'synchronic system in which the terms have no positive existence, since they are each defined by their mutual differences', a closed, self-referential structure in which meaning is 'always delayed in continual metonymy'. This framing is not merely rhetorical; it commits the book to treating Lacanian theory as an internally differential system, not a collection of isolable definitions. Evans explicitly acknowledges the paradox: Lacan's discourse subverts any attempt to pin down meanings, and his style was, in Derrida's words, constructed 'so as to check almost permanently any access to an isolatable content'. Evans does not claim to resolve this paradox but to work productively within it—not providing 'adequate definitions' but evoking the complexity and the shifts of each term across Lacan's teaching.

The preface establishes several methodological commitments that govern the body of the dictionary. Evans will trace each major concept back to its origins in Freud, Saussure, Hegel and others; he will attend to the clinical basis of Lacan's work, not only the theoretical; he will leave algebraic symbols untranslated (following Lacan's own preference); and he will render Trieb as 'drive' rather than 'instinct', following what had become common anglophone practice. The format section explains the cross-referencing system and the abbreviations (E for Écrits selection, Ec for French Écrits, S1–S20 for the seminars), which function as a secondary citation apparatus allowing the reader to verify each claim against primary sources.

Key concepts: Language as differential system, Signifier/signified, Synchronic structure, Return to Freud, Algebraic symbols, Drive vs instinct

Alphabetical Entries: A (Absence through Autonomous Ego)

The dictionary proper opens with entries that, taken together, establish several of Lacan's most foundational theoretical commitments. The entry on absence sets up the symbolic order's constitutive dependence on the absence/presence binary, linking Jakobson's phonemic analysis to Freud's fort/da game and arguing that the symbol is 'a presence made of absence'. The entry on act introduces the ethics of psychoanalysis: acts are symbolic and imply responsibility, whereas 'acting out' and 'passage to the act' are failures of symbolisation—the first a ciphered message to an Other who will not listen, the second an exit from the symbolic scene altogether. Together these entries establish that the clinical and the ethical are not separable domains in Lacanian theory.

The entries on adaptation and ego-psychology present the sustained polemical background against which much of Lacan's theoretical work must be read. Lacan's opposition to the adaptation concept is traced across his entire career: the ego's 'reality' is itself a fictional misrepresentation, not an objective given; to set adaptation as the aim of treatment turns the analyst into an arbiter of reality and psychoanalysis into social control. The entry on aggressivity situates it in the imaginary order of the mirror stage—an erotic-aggressive tension between specular image and fragmented body—distinguishing it from Freud's death-drive-based account while showing how both accounts address the fundamental ambivalence of narcissistic identification. The entry on algebra explains Lacan's use of algebraic notation as a means of formalisation that resists imaginary intuition and permits integral transmission of psychoanalytic theory, laying out the key symbols (A, a, S̶, S1, S2, etc.) with careful caveats about their shifting meanings across Lacan's work.

Key concepts: Absence/presence, Symbolic order, Acting out, Adaptation, Ego-psychology, Aggressivity, Algebraic symbols, Mirror stage Notable examples: Freud's fort/da game; Young homosexual woman case (Freud/Lacan); Lacan's critique of American ego-psychology

Alphabetical Entries: B–C (Bar through Countertransference)

The 'B' and 'C' sections introduce several pivotal structural concepts. The entry on bar traces how a single typographical element—the line separating signifier from signified in the Saussurean algorithm—comes to do multiple theoretical work: it represents the resistance inherent in signification, is used to 'bar' the subject (S̶) to indicate its division by language, bars the Other (A̶) to show its incompleteness, and bars the definite article la in 'la femme' to indicate that femininity resists universalisation. This single entry thus threads together linguistics, subject theory, and the theory of sexual difference. The beautiful soul entry uses Hegel's figure to illuminate the ego's projective structure: the ego denounces disorder in the world while failing to recognise itself as the source of that disorder, a structure homologous to paranoiac méconnaissance.

The castration complex entry is one of the most substantive in this section, tracing Freud's account through Lacan's decisive reinterpretation: castration is one of three forms of lack of object (alongside frustration and privation), it is a symbolic operation rather than an imaginary mutilation, and it is articulated with the distinction between the imaginary phallus (which both sexes must renounce in the Oedipus complex) and the symbolic phallus (which is distributed asymmetrically between the sexes). The entries on cause, chance, code, and cogito together establish Lacan's epistemological position: causality is located on the border between the symbolic and real; automaton (the insistence of the signifier) is distinguished from tyche (the encounter with the real); codes (composed of indices) are distinguished from language (composed of signifiers); and the Cartesian cogito is both the model for modern western ego and the site of its subversion, since the subject of the Freudian unconscious is the same as the Cartesian subject of doubt but emphatically not the same as the autonomous ego.

The countertransference entry is important for its clinical register: Lacan defines countertransference as a resistance—'the sum of the prejudices, passions, perplexities' of the analyst—and illustrates this with readings of the Dora case and the young homosexual woman case, where Freud's countertransference (his identification with the male protagonists, his assumption of heterosexuality as normative) prematurely terminated both treatments. But Evans also notes Lacan's refusal of the 'stoical ideal' that the well-analysed analyst is beyond passion; the training analysis does not eliminate affects but restructures the analyst's desire so that he does not act on them.

Key concepts: Bar, Split subject, Castration complex, Lack, Cogito, Countertransference, Cause/chance, Code vs language Notable examples: Dora case; Young homosexual woman case; Hegel's 'beautiful soul'; Aristotle's automaton/tyche distinction

Alphabetical Entries: D (Death through Dual Relation)

The 'D' section contains some of the dictionary's densest and most consequential entries. The entry on death maps the concept across five distinct registers in Lacan's work: the symbol as the 'murder of the thing' (the symbolic); the 'second death' and the zone-between-two-deaths (ethics/aesthetics); death as constitutive of freedom and as 'absolute Master' (Hegel/Kojève); the analyst's self-'cadaverisation' in the treatment (technique); and the obsessional's question ('Am I dead or alive?'). These registers are not merely metaphorical variants but structurally distinct deployments of the concept, showing how death functions differently in each of the three orders.

The death drive entry makes Lacan's major reinterpretation of Freud explicit: by the mid-1950s, Lacan locates the death drive not in biology but in the symbolic order—'The death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order'—as the fundamental tendency of the signifying chain to produce repetition. In 1964 he goes further, arguing that every drive is virtually a death drive because every drive pursues its own extinction, involves the subject in repetition, and attempts to go beyond the pleasure principle to the real. This entry connects to the drive entry, where Lacan's reworking of the Freudian circuit is explained: the drive originates in an erogenous zone, circles round the object (without attaining it), and returns—structured by three grammatical voices (active, reflexive, passive)—so that the aim of the drive is not its goal but the circular path itself.

The desire entry is structurally pivotal: desire is the metonymy of the lack of being, 'the desire for something else' that perpetually defers satisfaction along the signifying chain; it is always unconscious and always sexual; it is constituted dialectically in relation to the desire of the Other. The discourse entry presents Lacan's four-discourse theory (master, university, hysteric, analyst) as social bonds structured by the positions of four algebraic elements (S1, S2, S̶, a), each discourse being generated by a quarter-turn rotation. The dual relation entry explains why Lacan insists on triadic rather than dyadic schemes: the dual relation is imaginary and inherently aggressive, whereas the symbolic always involves a third term (the big Other) that mediates imaginary relations—the Oedipus complex being the paradigmatic passage from dual to triangular structure.

Key concepts: Death drive, Drive, Desire, Four Discourses, Dual relation, Repetition, Symbolic order, Jouissance Notable examples: Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Kojève's master-slave dialectic; The four discourses diagram (S17)

Alphabetical Entries: E (Ego through Extimacy)

The ego entries constitute a sustained critique of ego-psychology's central concepts. The ego entry traces Lacan's reworking of Freud's Ich: the ego is not the centre of the subject but an imaginary object, formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage. The entries on ego-ideal, ideal ego, and ego-psychology triangulate the three 'formations of the ego', carefully distinguishing what Freud conflated: the ideal ego (imaginary projection, formed in primary identification, the source of narcissistic illusion) and the ego-ideal (symbolic introjection, formed at the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the guide of the subject's symbolic position). This distinction is then illustrated through the optical model. Ego-psychology is presented not merely as a technical deviation but as a theoretical betrayal of Freud's fundamental discovery, rooted in the cultural conditions of its American milieu (the 'factor c' entry explains this as 'ahistoricism').

The end of analysis entry maps Lacan's evolving conceptions of the analytic telos across four periods: (1) 'the advent of true speech and the realisation by the subject of his history' (early 1950s); (2) a state of anxiety and abandonment comparable to infantile helplessness (1960); (3) the traversal of the fundamental fantasy (1964); and (4) identification with the sinthome (late teaching). Common to all formulations is the idea of a 'subjective destitution' and the fall of the analyst from the position of the subject-supposed-to-know—the end of analysis as the passage from analysand to analyst.

The entries on enunciation, ethics, and extimacy are philosophically dense. Enunciation introduces the split between the subject of the enunciation (unconscious source of speech) and the subject of the statement (grammatical 'I'), which is constitutive of the divided subject. Ethics frames the analyst's response to the analysand's guilt ('from an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire') and to pathogenic morality, charting a path between libertinism and conformism that is specific to the psychoanalytic position. Extimacy coins Lacan's neologism for the structure in which the Other is 'something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me'—the topology of the torus and Möbius strip, where inside and outside are continuous.

Key concepts: Ego, Ego-ideal/Ideal ego, Ego-psychology, End of analysis, Enunciation vs Statement, Ethics, Extimacy, Subject supposed to know Notable examples: Optical model (S1); Graph of desire; Dora case (Lacan 1951); Antigone (S7)

Alphabetical Entries: F–G (Factor c through Graph of Desire)

The 'F' section is dominated by four pivotal entries: fantasy, father, foreclosure, and the cluster of drive-related concepts. The fantasy entry traces the matheme (S̶◊a) from its introduction in 1957 as the subject's response to the enigmatic desire of the Other ('Che vuoi?') through its function as a 'frozen image' that veils castration, and finally to the question of its traversal at the end of analysis. Fantasy is distinguished from both resistance (which is transitory and imaginary) and clinical structure (which is more stable), though both are conceived as defensive responses to the lack in the Other.

The father entry provides one of the dictionary's most detailed structural analyses, distinguishing symbolic father (the paternal function as law and prohibition, the dead father of Totem and Taboo), imaginary father (the all-powerful, all-possessing rival), and real father (the biological progenitor who may or may not incarnate the paternal function). The entry shows how Lacan's three-times model of the Oedipus complex distributes these three aspects of the father across a logical sequence: first time (imaginary father perceived by child as possessor of the phallus the mother desires), second time (real father intervenes as agent of castration), third time (father reveals himself as himself castrated, bound by the same law he transmits). This multi-layered account of paternity is crucial to the entries on foreclosure and psychosis.

The foreclosure entry traces Lacan's long search for a specific mechanism of psychosis: from his 1938 linking of psychosis to the exclusion of the father, through his 1954 appropriation of Freud's Verwerfung (as rejection of an element from the symbolic), to his 1957 formulation that it is specifically the Name-of-the-Father that is foreclosed, leaving a hole in the symbolic order that can never be filled. The distinction between foreclosure and repression is carefully elaborated: foreclosure is not a burying in the unconscious but a non-incorporation in the symbolic, so that the foreclosed element returns not from within (as in repression's 'return of the repressed') but from without, in the real, as hallucination. The 'G' entries—gap, gaze, gestalt, and graph of desire—together illustrate Lacan's progressive movement from phenomenological references (Sartre's analysis of the look) toward a structural account in which the gaze functions as objet petit a, the gap is constitutive of the divided subject, and the graph of desire formalises the relations among signifying chain, desire, fantasy, and drive.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Father (symbolic/imaginary/real), Foreclosure, Name-of-the-Father, Graph of desire, Gaze, Gap/dehiscence Notable examples: Little Hans case (phobia entry anticipates); Schreber case (Freud 1911); Victor Hugo's 'Booz endormi' (paternal metaphor); Holbein's Ambassadors (gaze/anamorphosis)

Alphabetical Entries: H–I (Hallucination through Inversion)

The 'H' and 'I' sections develop the tripartite RSI framework through a series of entries that define each order by what distinguishes it from the others. Hallucination is explained as the return in the real of a foreclosed signifier ('that which has not emerged into the light of the symbolic appears in the real'), distinguished from projection (a neurotic imaginary mechanism). Helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) is traced from Freud's account of the prematurely born human infant's dependence on the mother through Lacan's emphasis on the linguistic dimension of this dependence: the mother's interpretation retroactively determines the meaning of the child's cries, installing the subject within a symbolic network from the very beginning.

The imaginary entry is one of the dictionary's most important, presenting the imaginary order not as mere illusion but as a constitutive register with powerful real effects. While rooted in the dual relation of ego and specular image (mirror stage), the imaginary is always already structured by the symbolic. Its characteristic features—narcissism, aggressivity, captation, the illusions of wholeness and similarity—are analysed as effects of the mirror-stage identification. The imaginary order includes the signified and signification (as opposed to the signifier, which belongs to the symbolic), and language thus has both symbolic and imaginary aspects.

The identification entry distinguishes imaginary identification (with the specular image, constituting the ego via the ideal ego) from symbolic identification (with the signifier, constituting the ego-ideal at the resolution of the Oedipus complex). The introjection entry clarifies that what is introjected in symbolic identification is always a signifier ('introjection is always the introjection of the speech of the other'), explicitly rejecting Kleinian accounts of introjection as a quasi-physical incorporation of objects. The id entry makes Lacan's counter-intuitive argument that the id is not primitive biological force but the symbolic-linguistic dimension of the subject—'it speaks' (le ça parle)—and reinterprets Freud's 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' as an ethical injunction toward recognition of one's symbolic determinants rather than ego-expansion.

Key concepts: Hallucination, Helplessness, Imaginary order, Identification (imaginary/symbolic), Introjection, Id, Index vs signifier Notable examples: Schreber case; Schema L; Mirror stage; Freud's 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden'

Alphabetical Entries: J–K (Jouissance through Kleinian Psychoanalysis)

The jouissance entry is one of the dictionary's most carefully periodised. Evans traces the term from its early appearances (1953) where it means little more than satisfaction of a biological need, through its sexual connotations (1957–8), to its 1960 theorisation as the paradoxical 'painful pleasure' that transgresses the pleasure principle. Jouissance is now defined as 'suffering', as that which exceeds the pleasure principle's regulatory function: 'jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks, as such', because entry into the symbolic order is conditional on an initial renunciation of jouissance in the castration complex. This prohibition is paradoxically what sustains the neurotic illusion that jouissance would be attainable if it were not forbidden. Evans also traces the increasingly important articulation of jouissance with the real (from 1964), its link to surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) in the theory of the four discourses, and the emergence of the concept of feminine jouissance as Other jouissance in the late seminars.

The Kleinian psychoanalysis entry provides an important corrective to any impression that Lacan was simply dismissive of Klein. Evans shows that Lacan's criticisms are directed at specific theoretical points—Klein's neglect of the father, her theorisation of fantasy entirely in the imaginary order, her dating of the Oedipus complex, her 'brutal' interpretive style—while acknowledging Klein's superiority over Anna Freud and ego-psychology on several counts, including the theory of transference. The entry is valuable as a map of Lacan's inter-school polemics, showing the precise points of agreement and disagreement that shaped his reformulation of Freudian concepts.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Pleasure principle, Surplus jouissance, Feminine jouissance, Kleinian psychoanalysis, Castration, Imaginary vs symbolic fantasy Notable examples: Master/slave dialectic (Hegel/Kojève); Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud); Klein's 'Dick' case (symbol formation)

Alphabetical Entries: L (Lack through Lure)

The lack entry is structurally central to the dictionary's account of desire. Evans traces three distinct theorisations: lack of being (tied to desire, with parallels to Sartre's being-for-itself), lack of object (classified into three forms—privation, frustration, castration—in the 1956–7 seminar), and lack of a signifier in the Other (constitutive of the subject, introduced with the barred Other symbol in 1957). The table of three types of lack (from Seminar IV) is reproduced, making the entry a useful reference for the three-order framework in its application to desire and the clinical structures.

The language entry is one of the dictionary's longest and most analytically careful. Evans distinguishes langue from langage throughout, then traces four phases of Lacan's theorisation: (1) 1936–49, philosophical-phenomenological references, language as mediating recognition; (2) 1950–54, anthropological references (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss), language as symbolic pact and exchange; (3) 1955–70, the 'linguistic turn' (Saussure, Jakobson), the unconscious is structured like a language, langage as the paradigm of all structure; (4) post-1970, the lalangue phase, in which the equivocality and materiality of language (as opposed to its communicative function) comes to the fore. This periodisation is one of the most useful heuristic tools in the dictionary. The law entry connects the symbolic order to Lévi-Strauss's anthropology of exchange and the incest taboo, showing how law and desire are dialectically related—law creates desire by creating interdiction, so that 'desire is the reverse of the law'. The letter entry explores the real, material dimension of the signifier, illustrated through the Wolf Man's recurring letter V and Poe's purloined letter.

Key concepts: Lack (of being, object, signifier), Language (four phases), Law, Letter, Signifying chain, Lalangue, Symbolic order Notable examples: Poe's 'Purloined Letter'; Wolf Man case (letter V); Lévi-Strauss on kinship; Little Hans case (gap entry)

Alphabetical Entries: M–N (Madness through Name-of-the-Father)

The 'M' section contains some of the dictionary's most technically demanding entries. The metaphor entry explains Lacan's appropriation of Jakobson's substitutive axis of language: metaphor is the substitution of one signifier for another that produces signification by crossing the bar of the Saussurean algorithm, and the formula of metaphor is reproduced and glossed. Crucially, Evans shows how Lacan deploys this structure across multiple domains: the Oedipus complex as paternal metaphor (Name-of-the-Father substituting for desire of the mother), repression as structured like a metaphor (the return of the repressed in symptoms), and identification (metaphoric incorporation of a single signifier from another's symptom). The metonymy entry complements this by explaining desire as metonymic: desire is always 'desire for something else', perpetually displaced along the signifying chain, never reaching its object.

The mirror stage entry traces the concept's own development, showing how what began as a stage in child development (with a beginning at six months and an end at eighteen months) became, by the early 1950s, a permanent structure of subjectivity—the paradigm of the imaginary order. The entry carefully explains the mechanism: the infant's visual system is more advanced than its motor coordination, so the synthetic gestalt of the specular image creates a contrast with the experienced fragmentation of the real body, installing an aggressivity and alienation that underlies all future identifications. The méconnaissance entry shows how this imaginary self-knowledge is simultaneously a structural misrecognition: the ego is constituted by failing to recognise its own symbolic determinants, and this makes all connaissance 'paranoiac knowledge'.

The Name-of-the-Father entry brings together the threads of the paternal function, foreclosure, and the paternal metaphor. Evans traces the term from its initial uncapitalised usage (denoting the prohibitive function of the symbolic father) to its capitalised, technical usage from 1955–6 as the fundamental signifier whose foreclosure produces psychosis. The homophony between nom (name) and non (no) is explained as Lacan's way of condensing the two functions of the paternal signifier: nomination (assigning the subject a place in the symbolic order) and prohibition (the 'no' of the incest taboo). When the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, all phallic signification collapses, since the paternal metaphor is the foundation of all signification.

Key concepts: Metaphor, Metonymy, Mirror stage, Méconnaissance, Name-of-the-Father, Paternal metaphor, Point de capiton Notable examples: Victor Hugo's 'Booz endormi'; Little Hans case (phobia); Schreber case (foreclosure); Schema L (méconnaissance)

Alphabetical Entries: O (Object-Relations Theory through Other/Other)

The objet petit a entry is the most comprehensive in the dictionary, tracing the concept through five distinct phases. In schema L (1955) 'a' denotes the imaginary little-other interchangeable with the ego. From 1957, with the matheme of fantasy, it becomes the imaginary part-object of desire. From 1963, acquiring real connotations, it becomes the cause of desire rather than its goal—the object-cause—linked to anxiety and to the partial drives (voice, gaze, breast, faeces). In the four-discourse theory (1969–70), a becomes surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir), the excess produced by the master signifier's attempt at total representation, inspired by Marx's surplus value. In 1973, it is linked to semblance of being and positioned at the centre of the Borromean knot. Evans's careful tracing shows that these phases are not simply replacements but accumulative layers, with each new determination adding to rather than erasing the previous ones.

The Oedipus complex entry presents Lacan's distinctive three-times model: the first time (imaginary triangle of mother, child, and phallus, in which the child identifies with the imaginary phallus to satisfy the mother's desire); the second time (the father intervenes as agent of castration, the 'devouring father' who refuses the child access to the mother's desire); the third time (the father reveals himself as castrated, as not without the phallus, bound by the same law he imposes—and the child accepts castration in exchange for the promise of having the symbolic phallus in the future). The entry emphasises that for Lacan the Oedipus complex is the paradigmatic triangular structure, the passage from imaginary to symbolic order, and that it always involves symbolic identification with the father regardless of the subject's biological sex.

The Other/other entry distinguishes the little other (a: imaginary counterpart, specular image, not truly other) from the big Other (A: the symbolic order itself, the locus in which speech is constituted, radical alterity that cannot be assimilated through identification). The big Other is both another subject in their radical uniqueness and the symbolic order as such, the 'battery of signifiers', the place where the unconscious speaks. The mother first occupies the position of the big Other for the child; the castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a lack in the Other—and it is this lack that first institutes the subject's desire.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Oedipus complex (three times), Other/other, Part-object, Object-relations theory, Surplus jouissance, Borromean knot Notable examples: Schema L; Four discourse diagram (S17); Marx's surplus value; Plato's Symposium (agalma); Schreber case

Alphabetical Entries: P (Paranoia through Punctuation)

The paranoia entry is notable for showing how paranoia functions in Lacan's work as a privileged theoretical site, not merely a clinical category. The ego has a paranoiac structure (constituted by imaginary identification with the counterpart); all knowledge (connaissance) is paranoiac knowledge (méconnaissance of symbolic determinants); psychoanalytic treatment itself 'induces controlled paranoia'. Lacan's own doctoral dissertation on a paranoiac woman (Aimée) is the origin of his entire theoretical project. The entry traces Lacan's replacement of Freud's homosexuality thesis with the concept of foreclosure as the mechanism of psychosis.

The perversion entry introduces Lacan's definition of perversion as a clinical structure rather than a form of behaviour, characterised by disavowal (of castration) and a specific positioning of the subject as instrument/object of the Other's jouissance, inverting the neurotic fantasy structure. The phallus entry carefully maintains the terminological distinction between penis (biological organ) and phallus (imaginary and symbolic functions), explaining the phallus as the only signifier for the sexual difference—there is no corresponding feminine signifier—and as the object that circulates in the preoedipal triangle and is at stake in the Oedipus complex. Both boys and girls must renounce identification with the imaginary phallus; the resulting asymmetry in their relationship to the symbolic phallus is the basis of Lacan's account of sexual difference.

The point de capiton entry explains how the otherwise endless slippage of the signified under the signifier is temporarily arrested at 'quilting points' that create the illusion of stable meaning, with both a diachronic dimension (retroactive effect of punctuation in the signifying chain) and a synchronic dimension (metaphor). In psychosis, insufficient points de capiton result in the dissolution of stable meanings. The punctuation entry shows how the analyst's technical interventions—repeating a fragment of the analysand's speech, interrupting, ending the session—are forms of punctuation that retroactively determine meaning, and connects this to the controversial practice of sessions of variable duration.

Key concepts: Paranoia, Perversion, Disavowal, Phallus (imaginary/symbolic), Point de capiton, Punctuation, Clinical structures, Psychosis Notable examples: Lacan's Aimée (doctoral thesis); Schreber case; Little Hans case; Fetishism and the veil (S4)

Alphabetical Entries: Q–R (Quaternary through Resistance)

The real entry is one of the dictionary's most carefully periodised. Evans traces the term from its first appearance in 1936 (following Meyerson's ontological definition) through its gradual theoretical elaboration: in the early 1950s, the real becomes one of the three orders (neither imaginary appearance nor symbolic structure but 'that which resists symbolisation absolutely'); it is 'always in its place', undifferentiated, without absence; it is 'the impossible'. The real is not simply opposed to the symbolic but is constituted as its outside: 'it is the world of words that creates the world of things'. From the 1960s, the real is increasingly associated with jouissance, with das Ding, and with the concept of tyche (the traumatic encounter). Evans also notes the topological developments of the 1970s in which the real is one of three rings held together by the Borromean knot.

The repetition entry traces Lacan's three successive reformulations of Freud's Wiederholungszwang: as automatisme de répétition tied to the complex (pre-1950); as the insistence of the signifier ('certain signifiers insist on returning in the life of the subject despite resistances'; 1950s); and as the return of jouissance, an excess of enjoyment that repeatedly transgresses the pleasure principle (1960s). This periodisation is coordinated with the broader shift from Lacan's earlier symbolic/imaginary framework to his later real-centred account. The resistance entry addresses a central clinical concept: Evans carefully distinguishes Lacan's view (resistance is structural, inherent in the incompatibility between desire and speech, and there is always an irreducible residue of resistance that psychoanalysis must respect) from ego-psychology's view (resistance as the patient's 'fundamental ill will' to be overcome by the analyst's authority). The key paradox is that 'there is no other resistance to analysis than that of the analyst himself': resistance only succeeds when the analyst is 'in it up to his neck'.

Key concepts: Real order, Repetition (three phases), Resistance, Repression, Regression, Reality principle, Recollection Notable examples: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud); Freud's 'Wo Es war'; Dora case (resistance/countertransference)

Alphabetical Entries: S (Sadism/Masochism through Symbolic)

The 'S' section is the dictionary's longest and most conceptually dense, containing entries on the signifier, sign, signification, signifying chain, the sinthome, the split subject, structure, the subject, the subject supposed to know, sublimation, suggestion, the superego, the symbolic order, and the symptom. The signifier entry presents Lacan's fundamental redefinition: unlike Saussure's signifier (half of a stable sign), Lacan's signifier is a meaningless material element in a closed differential system that produces subjectivity as its effect. 'Every real signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing. The more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is.' The signifier is defined as 'that which represents a subject for another signifier', in opposition to the sign ('that which represents something for someone'). The symbolic order is the field of these signifiers—the field of the Other, the 'battery of signifiers'.

The sinthome entry (written by Luke Thurston) is one of the dictionary's most technically advanced, explaining Lacan's late reformulation from 1975–6: the sinthome is an archaic spelling of symptôme introduced to name a fourth ring in the Borromean knot that ties together real, symbolic and imaginary when the knot would otherwise come undone. Unlike the earlier symptom-as-signifier (a message to be deciphered), the sinthome is 'a kernel of enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic', a signifying formulation beyond analysis, 'what allows one to live'. The entry connects this to Joyce's writing as a model of a sinthome that repairs a defective knotting of the three orders without recourse to the paternal metaphor.

The subject supposed to know entry explains transference as the attribution of knowledge to a subject: the analysand supposes the analyst to know the secret meaning of his speech, and this supposition initiates and sustains the analytic process. The entry carefully distinguishes the function (which the analyst occupies but which is not identical to the analyst as person) from any real knowledge, and traces the end of analysis as the moment when the analysand 'desupposes' the analyst of this knowledge. The symbolic entry provides the culminating synthesis of the tripartite system: the symbolic is the realm of the signifier, radical alterity (the big Other), the law, the unconscious, death, absence, lack, and the death drive—it is the realm of structure itself, the paradigm of which is language but which extends beyond language to encompass all of culture.

Key concepts: Signifier, Sinthome, Subject supposed to know, Symbolic order, Split subject, Symptom, Sublimation, Superego, Schema L Notable examples: Borromean knot; Joyce's writing (sinthome); Schreber case (psychosis/symptom); Poe's Purloined Letter; Kant's categorical imperative (superego)

Alphabetical Entries: T–W (Thing through Woman)

The Thing (das Ding) entry traces Lacan's engagement with Freud's distinction between Wortvorstellungen and Sachvorstellungen in relation to the unconscious, showing how Lacan differentiates die Sache (the thing as symbolic representation) from das Ding (the thing in its 'dumb reality', outside language and outside the unconscious—the real beyond the signifier). Das Ding is the lost object of desire, the forbidden object of incestuous desire (the mother), the 'Sovereign Good' that the pleasure principle keeps the subject from approaching too closely. Evans traces how this concept provides the essential features inherited and developed by objet petit a from 1963 onwards: the drive circling round the object without attaining it, the object as cause of desire rather than its goal, its location in the real.

The time entry presents one of Lacan's most original contributions to psychoanalytic theory: the concept of logical time (with its three moments—instant of seeing, time for understanding, moment of concluding) derived from a logical puzzle about three prisoners, which shows that temporality is an intersubjective dialectical structure rather than an objective chronometric sequence. Evans connects this to Lacan's rejection of developmental 'stages' (which implies linear time) and to his stress on retroaction: the meaning of earlier events is determined retroactively by later developments, and the past is not a fixed given but something continually reconstructed. The transference entry traces Lacan's evolving theorisation from dialectical (Hegelian) to anthropological (exchange-based) to structural (the subject supposed to know) accounts, always insisting that transference's essence is symbolic rather than imaginary, even when it manifests as love or hate.

The woman entry culminates the dictionary's treatment of sexual difference by presenting Lacan's formula 'la femme n'existe pas' not as misogyny but as a structural claim: the symbolic order contains no signifier for femininity (the phallus is the only sexual signifier), and the bar through 'la' indicates that femininity resists all universalisation. Woman can only take up a sexual position in relation to the phallus she does not have; her jouissance (Other jouissance, beyond the phallic) is not fully capturable in the symbolic and thus aligns her with the real. Evans also tracks Lacan's debt to Lévi-Strauss's account of women as objects of exchange in kinship structures, and the tension between this structural position and the question of feminine desire and jouissance that preoccupies Lacan's later seminars.

Key concepts: Das Ding, Logical time, Retroaction, Transference, Woman/femininity, Sexual relationship, Topology, Torus/Möbius strip Notable examples: Problem of three prisoners (logical time); Anna O (transference/Breuer); Dora case; Plato's Symposium (love/transference); Schreber case

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud, Totem and Taboo
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud, The Ego and the Id
Freud, 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable'
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Roman Jakobson
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Martin Heidegger
René Descartes
Immanuel Kant
Melanie Klein
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis
Slavoj Žižek
Charles S. Peirce
Jacques-Alain Miller
Malcolm Bowie
David Macey
Jacques Derrida
Jean-Paul Sartre
Aristotle

Position in the corpus

Evans's dictionary occupies a unique position in the Lacanian secondary corpus as the foundational English-language reference work for the terminological system as a whole. It should be read before—or alongside—thematic secondary texts such as Žižek's introductions, Bruce Fink's clinical works, or the feminist-theoretical engagements of Mitchell and Rose's Feminine Sexuality, because it provides the conceptual scaffolding that those texts presuppose. It is particularly valuable as a companion to reading the primary texts: the abbreviation system (E, Ec, S1–S20) makes it function as a continuous set of primary-source references, and the developmental approach means it can guide a reader through the shifts between, say, the linguistic Lacan of the 1950s Écrits and the topological Lacan of the late seminars. Compared to Benvenuto and Kennedy's The Works of Jacques Lacan (which is more expository and thematic) or to Joel Dor's Introduction to the Reading of Lacan (which takes a more narrative approach to the major concepts), Evans offers superior precision in tracking each concept's evolution and its differential relations with other concepts.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian corpus, the dictionary's strongest connections are with works that engage Lacan's linguistics and structural theory (Seminar III, the Écrits, Seminar XI) and with his ethics seminar (Seminar VII, where das Ding, sublimation, and the ethics of desire intersect). It is less well-equipped to serve as a guide to the very late Lacan (Seminars XX onwards and the topological work), though the sinthome and Borromean knot entries (several contributed by Luke Thurston) gesture toward this territory. Readers who wish to move beyond the dictionary into the primary sources might use it as a navigational tool: starting from any entry, the cross-reference network leads into Lacan's own texts with sufficient contextualisation to avoid the worst misreadings that isolated quotation invites.