Lacan Reconsidered: History beyond Trauma: Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Cannot Stay Silent. By Fran¸oise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière. New York:  Other Press, 2004,  282 pp., $30.00. Lacan's Seminar on “Anxiety”: An Introduction. By Roberto Harari Translated by Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz. Edited by Rico Franses. New York:  Other Press, 2001,  282 pp., $27.00. Lacan and Contemporary Film. Edited by Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York:  Other Press, 2004,  246 pp., $28.00.

Since his death a quarter of a century ago, Jacques Lacan's ideas have not gone away (as many wished), nor have they quietly infiltrated mainstream psychoanalysis (as many feared). His work is read and cited more and more, many institutes offer their advanced candidates an elective on Lacan, and the number of books in English attempting to convey his ideas are too numerous to list. Many are still being written in the kind of idealizing jargon that serves primarily to sustain a cult and leaves readers feeling irritated and excluded. The posture of an “official” dogma with its correct interpretation, which was so offensive in the past (Muller 1988), has become less overt and the reader will not find it in the books reviewed here.

The authors of History beyond Trauma have distilled in this volume thirty years of psychoanalytic work with patients who suffer intermittent psychotic breakdown. Although they have consulted with patients in hospital settings, the bulk of their work in Paris is with individual patients seen in their private offices. To provide containment, they rely not on external constraints or medication but rather on the recognition provided by the symbolic exchanges at work in the analytic relationship.

Their thesis is original but straightforward: the chief cause of madness (their word for psychosis) is war, whose traumatic effects are