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Richard Boothby is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. I started this book with high hopes because it seemed that he was about to transverse some of the same territory that I cover in my book (1992). And indeed, the first chapter of the book did seem to be going in that direction, covering, of all things, Monet's paintings, followed by James, Bergson, Nietzsche, Gestalt psychology and phenomenology, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and concluding with a discussion of the unthought ground of thought in the Freudian unconscious. All of this is very interesting and is written in a fairly clear manner, although it is highly condensed as discussions of all these thinkers. It will probably make the reader who is untutored in philosophy feel overwhelmed.
However, that is not the point of this book at all. What it really is, is a paean to the thinking of Lacan and will probably only have appeal to those who are deeply interested in Lacanian thought and are able to follow the incredible contortions of his so-called “return to Freud.” Boothby states at the beginning that his book is
study of Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious and, in particular, what Freud called his “metapsychology.” At the same time, it is a treatment of Jacques Lacan's radical reinterpretation of psychoanalysis, a treatment that seeks to clarify both key aspects of Lacan's thought and to map its relation to Freud. Then again, it is a work of philosophy that draws new implications from the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and does so by means of introducing a number of original concepts. (p. xiii)
To pack all of this into 300 pages is an ambitious endeavor.
We are also told “Unfortunately for those who would like to sample a section here and there, this book is understandable only as a whole” (p. xv). Indeed it is, and it reaches the conclusion that Lacan offers an enormous improvement in our understanding of Freud's metapsychology.
Boot