Foreword

We do violence each time we make rational and systematic, structural events that emerge from a matrix as organic, absurd, and historic as the human being. Then we are Procrustean, castrating, reductionistic. In the words of a Rabbi, “when I speak, my words turn gold into silver”.

Even more does the written word, as compared with the oral, change a discovered-in-the-stuff-of-life order into a systematic, too often simplistic presentation. Lacan is one of us who exemplifies the McLuhan pronouncement that the medium is the message. He is exciting, disturbing, sometimes infuriating, but always, for me, a provocative thinker.

Much current psychoanalytic writing attempts to order the human mind through the analytic method; it is an informative experience. Often, out of these articles and lectures we discover different ways of seeing our own work.

Lacan is different. He thrusts into our mind-yes, into our feelings and into the unconscious dimension. He speaks to and from the unconscious-his, ours, Freud's. Through his words, it is unmodish to say it, the unconscious speaks as well. The mystery, the unknown, perhaps unknowable (or is it the unnameable?), speaks — hinting at the gold that is das Ding, and the never to be achieved, perhaps nonreal Object of Desire.

The papers presented here come out of a continuing meeting of the authors. They have gathered together monthly in their various home cities to translate from Lacan's French, from the written record of his Seminars, from the unconscious in its many transformations. We have here some of the fruit.

If the texture of the hour is a significant concern for healing, and I believe it is, the session in December, 1984, at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis' Winter Meeting is a vibrant instance of that therapeutic mode. The room was not electric — that often appropriate word with its cosmic, elemental sense accompanied by flashes, brilliance, illumination. This time, one has to say, it was seminal and pregnant; the room swell