After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, edited and with an Introduction by Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone,  SUNY Press, New York, 2002,  197 pp.

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted … the man begins to understand the inscription … deciphers it with his wounds.—Franz Kafka (1946 1971, p. 150).

At a recent conference, I had the good fortune to encounter GIFRIC (the Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles of Quebec). I say it in this way because in encountering several members of that organization, I felt as though I had encountered something quite solid and unique — a frame of mind, really — that profoundly altered my view of psychoanalysis. When I returned home, I found that this encounter had affected the ways in which I conceptualized clinical work and also the ways in which I interacted with my patients and my students.

For me, the crux of the matter was the idea of the Subject who becomes caught by the desire of the Other. I had heard these words before, but they had never had quite this meaning, of becoming utterly objectified and thereby lost to one's self. Suddenly, there was a new illumination on the field — a light shining that had not been there before — and I was eager to learn more. One thing that fascinated me was that the clinical insights that I had gained in listening to these individuals from GIFRIC talk about their work did not depend on “learning a new analytic language” or accepting a particular dogma but, rather — much as the conceptualizations of Freud, Klein, and Bion have done for me — on opening up the field and shedding greater light on some very important and very complex clinical realities. And yet, the language itself seemed to mark and to further elucidate these experiences.

I found myself wanting to share my newfound discovery with colleagues and with my students, most particularly. The idea I found most compelling was the way in which the analysts from GIFRIC spoke of the Subject — of the importance of finding the subject; the subject who has become lost, caught by the desire of the other. How, then, do we encounter the s