Lacan

How could Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) be one of the greatest thinkers of our time and yet consider thought to be an illness ? Was he a guru trailing in his wake enthralled young followers ? A charlatan who misused scientific truths and manipulated philosophic tradition in a very unacademic way ? A surrealist who accidentially drifted into serious thought ? His personality was certainly baffling — he never seemed to « fit » the labels people wanted to assign him. This « someone who read Freud », as he liked to refer to himself, was also someone who, in doing so, unquestionably reinvented psychoanalysis. This book does not attempt to explain Lacan the Man, but rather introduces us to some of his major concepts — Real-Symbolic-Imaginary, Mirror Stage, Subject, Signification, Other, Object A, Unary Mark, Phallus, Name-of-the-Father, Matheme, Borromean Knot, etc. — by which he baffled and led us into uncharted territory — previously known, however, only by his followers. This was the psychoanalyst role which Lacan uncompromisingly incarnated.Alain Vanier, a psychoanalyst and former hospital psychiatrist, is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot.