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For those analysts who venture off the main roads of North American psychoanalysis into the territory of Lacanian thought, the journey is by turns demanding, tantalizing, frustrating, and exhilarating. For such a journey one needs companions and maps of new ways to think, which Lacan demands of his readers. Both John Muller and Bruce Fink are well travelled in Lacan's thinking. Each, in very different ways, gives the reader the benefit of his considerable scholarship and effort spent contending with Lacan. Muller has explored uncharted territory in the realm of semiotics, which is the branch of knowledge that deals with the production of meaning by sign-systems in various fields. He goes back to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the American philosopher, whose work in semiotics has been appreciated only in the past few decades. Muller makes Lacan more accessible by using semiotics as a bridge between Lacan and contemporary North American psychoanalysis. At the same time he makes developmental semiotics into a viable clinical theory that complements Lacan's work
In contrast Bruce Fink trained at the centre of the post-Lacanian world in Paris, brings to an English-speaking audience a satellite photo of the huge body of work that Lacan constructed during his career.
Muller's book is readily understandable for those who are intrigued by Lacan but have read little or none of his work. In a way, the book is a great elaboration on the implications of Lacan's fundamental theoretical frame of reference the three registers of human experience the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real A colleague asked me to define what register meant in this context. From the dictionary, register has the following meanings 1 a book in which entries are made of details to be recorded for reference and 2. in a