You start from a long way off, no doubt, it's tiring, one doesn't properly see what it is that you're driving at, but still, retrospectively, one can see that there was some relationship between where you started and where you ended up [p. 296].

Well along in the course of this seminar, Lacan quotes a listener approvingly in the above wistful sentence, and it is a good introduction to a review of any of his work, including the present volume. Translation of his Seminars into English has been taking shape gradually, and is now reaching the point where we have on hand instructive materials for the understanding of one who is probably the most difficult, but arguably one of the most important, of modern psychoanalytic writers. The Seminars in their French original were published in the text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law and