Introduction to “Lacan in the United States: An Interview with Bruce Fink”

Reading lacan is an experience, not necessarily a pleasant one, but one not to be dismissed. For example, I read the sentence in front of me, and it seems to make sense, but I am often unable to connect it to the sentence before or after, and I feel lost, confused, disoriented. I imagine it is like trying to find one's way in a cavern with just a small lighter that illuminates only the immediate space in front of you, leaving you plunged in the vast darkness of the mind.

We would surely prefer to avoid such experiences, or to have these caverns landscaped and appropriately lit (with clear theory guides) to accommodate our visits to such depths and to make them pleasant. Indeed, we devote much of our mental energy and resources to this sort of landscaping and construction in order to obtain as coherent a “reality” (or psychic reality) as possible. Lacan devoted his efforts to unmasking perceived reality's thin cover of imaginary coherence to reveal its real inaccessibility.

Lacan's writings and his style of theorizing take us down the kind of rabbit holes he believes constitute the psyche. To an American sensibility, all this can seem needlessly convoluted, impractical, and, ultimately, useless. But Bruce Fink has devoted his career to introducing, translating, and interpreting Lacan to the American psychoanalytic community. With a bicultural analytic education, he has helped us to appreciate the French preoccupation with the aesthetics of thought, which is often reduced to an arrogant dismissal of American practicality. Fink has made it his mission to familiarize us with a different analytic language, and thereby draw our attention to our blind spots to Freud, or to what Lacan, and a whole tradition, would claim to be the true Freud. Because of widely differing perspectives on the foundations of psychoanalysis, Fink forces us to consider again the very soul of psychoanalysis, and to question our self-concept as psychoanalysts.

In the following interview, Fink selects s