‘There was a time when I felt that I had grasped Lacan’s essential being from within – that I had gained, as it were, an apperception of his relation to the world, a mysterious access to that intimate place from which sprang his relation to people and things, and even to himself. It was as if I had slipped within him.’ In this short book, Catherine Millot offers a richly evocative reflection on her life as analysand and lover of the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud. Dwelling on their time together in Paris and in Lacan’s country house in Guitrancourt, as well as describing their many travels, Millot provides unparalleled insights into Lacan’s character as well as his encounters with other major European thinkers of the time. She also sheds new light on key themes, including Lacan’s obsession with the Borromean knot and gradual descent into silence, all enlivened by her unique perspective. This beautifully written memoir, awarded the André Gide Prize for Literature, will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the life and character of a thinker who continues to exert a wide influence in psychoanalysis and across the humanities and social sciences.

What is it about "having a life"- which is to say, about having a sense of separate existence as a subject or self - that is usually taken for granted but is so fragilely maintained in certain patients and, indeed, in most of us at especially difficult times? In Having A Life: Self Pathology After Lacan, Lewis Kirshner takes this Lacanian question as the point of departure for a thoughtful meditation on the conceptual problems and clinical manifestations of pathologies of the self. Beginning with the case of Margaret Little, analyzed by D. W. Winnicott, and proceeding to extended case presentations from his own practice, Kirshner weaves together an avowedly American reading of Lacan with the approaches to self pathology of an influential coterie of theorists. By drawing out common threads in their respective discourses on the self, Kirshner achieves an original integration of Lacanian theory with other contemporary approaches to self pathology. Of special note is his ability to sustain a dialogue between Lacan and Kohut, whose shared clinical object, discernible through divergent vocabularies and conceptions, is the struggle of the subject to avoid fragmentation that would obliterate a sense of aliveness and preclude active engagement with the world. Kirshner's opening chapter on the gifted, troubled Margaret Little and his concluding chapter on the eminent political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose self pathology culminated in his strangling of his wife, Hélène Rytman, in 1980, frame a study that is brilliantly successful in bringing "self" issues down to the messy actualities of lived experience. Analytic therapists no less than students of the human sciences will be edified by this cogent, readable attempt to infuse Lacanian concepts with the conceptual rigor and clinical pragmatism of American psychoanalysis and to apply the resulting model of therapeutic action to a fascinating range of case material.

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan’s career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness. Widely recognized as the leading authority on Lacan, Élisabeth Roudinesco revisits his life and work: what it was – and what it remains.

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

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.

This work presents thoughts on the Lacanian subject: What are we as a speaking being? What makes us a human subject from a psychoanalytic perspective? Is it feelings and affect that make us a human? Or was it the Freudian invention of the unconscious that drew a line between human and a non-human? What can be learnt from the subject of the unconscious in the clinic of psychoanalysis that can help us to approach these questions? Berjanet Jazani takes examples from the psychoanalytic clinic as well as cultural references ranging from ancient Persia to London’s Theatreland in order to elaborate the question of subjectivity, reality and truth from a psychoanalytic perspective. In the era of hyperreality, the agency of branding and marketing strategies has overshadowed the reality of a human being, his true nature and agency. The hyperreality of contemporary society creates in each individual a false hope of becoming a high-fidelity copy of their idols, and such a fallacy has led many to believe that this is what determines their being in a social bond. Jazani explores the question of the reality and mortality of a subject through a Lacanian prism, from the theorising of analytical subjectivity that starts with the Freudian Oedipal myth more than a century ago to the futurist aspiration to fabricate human beings according to some ideal model. This book will be important reading for students and academics of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as professionals concerned with complex social problems.