Écrits

Publishers Weekly

French psychoanalyst Lacan (1901-1981) is perhaps best known for claiming that the unconscious is like a language that needs to be interpreted, rather than a storage space for repressed feelings. His writings, which borrow from such diverse fields as linguistics, philosophy, mathematics and religion, have had a profound impact on literary and cultural criticism as well as psychoanalysis. While the English-speaking world has enjoyed James Strachey's Standard Edition of Freud's complete works since 1967, there is no comparable standard English translation for Lacan's oeuvre. There have been at least six different translations of his writings into English, and some of the early translations are notoriously unreliable. Fink, a practicing psychoanalyst and professor at Duquesne University, has produced the first complete English translation of Ecrits. This opus, first published by Editions du Seuil in 1966, includes Lacan's most influential texts and is one of the most widely read works of 20th-century critical thought. The collection spans 30 years of Lacan's career and contains 35 texts, from "Beyond the `Reality Principle'" (1936) and "The Mirror Stage" (1937) to "Science and Truth" (1966). Most of the texts date from the 1950s and 1960s-a crucial turning point in Lacan's development: it was then that he shifted his focus from the operations of language and the imaginary and symbolic orders to the concepts of the real, fantasy and the objet petit a. Fink's precise new translation makes this pivotal period in Lacan's thought more accessible to English speakers. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

French psychoanalyst Lacan (1901-81) has generated more excitement in cultural studies and literature than in psychoanalysis. Known as a brilliant but confusing commentator, he borrows freely from many disciplines, using analogy, metaphor, self-contradiction, and other provocations with reader-be-damned flamboyance. This is the first volume in a new English translation of Lacan's landmark crits (1966), which comprises 29 major texts and six introductions and appendixes. Herein, Lacan discusses nine facets of his psychoanalytic theory and technique. He claims that the unconscious is structured like a language and is known for his theory of the "mirror stage" in child development. Those who want to decide for themselves whether to praise or bury Lacan need look no further than this careful translation by Fink (psychology, Duquesne Univ.; A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis), which belongs primarily in academic collections. Intelligent lay readers will be able to grasp some of the text, but they will need additional assistance, e.g., Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's Lacan: The Absolute Master, a rich and relatively accessible overview by a native French speaker, and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, which devotes a chapter to Lacan's misuse of mathematics.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC