What Is the Lacanian Field? A Review Essay of Two Volumes by Bruce Fink: Against Understanding: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key, Vol. 1. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. 257 pp.Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key, Vol. 2. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014. 272 pp.

Introduction

Bruce Fink is a psychoanalyst based in Pittsburgh; he teaches in the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University. Fink has attained world-wide recognition for his translations, case studies, commentaries, and critiques of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here, he sets out to explain within the space of two volumes what it means to be a clinician in this day-and-age when the Zeitgeist is in search of quick fixes, whereas a typical analysis within any school of psychoanalysis takes years of effort on the part of the analyst and the patient. What would an authentic psychoanalytic orientation be in such a world? How would this orientation relate to the literal and metaphorical translations of the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Marie Émile Lacan in the English-speaking world at large? How well does Lacan translate outside the basic assumptions of French culture? Why is it so difficult to replicate the Lacanian orientation without the danger of methodological compromises in America and elsewhere? What is the Lacanian notion of a case study? How “singular” and specific should the construction of such a case study be? Why is the notion of the unconscious not sufficiently incorporated into

the diagnostic models of most contemporary schools of psychotherapy? What, if anything, can be done to correct this situation? These, then, are some—though by no means all—of the important questions that Bruce Fink takes up in these volumes where what is in contention are “cases, commentaries, and critiques.”

Before addressing these questions, which can be said to constitute the “Lacanian field,” we must address the significance of the hermeneutic term “understanding.” So, for instance, what does it mean to say that psychoanalysis is not a discourse that aims solely at understanding the patient? It might appear at first sight that patients seek out analysts precisely because they are haunted by the idea that nobody—not even their parents—truly understands them. Why the