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This work contains about two hundred entries, representing the terms used by Lacan over the course of nearly fifty years. It is an attempt to elucidate Lacanian psychoanalytical language, often accused of being deliberately obscure—‘an attempt’, Dylan Evans says, ‘to open Lacanian discourse up to wider scrutiny and critical engagement’. The author considers a dictionary a good instrument for shedding light on any theoretical discourse, because it has the same structure as a language: both are synchronic systems whose individual terms have no positive existence in so far as they are defined by their mutual differences. Lacan said of his own discourse that ‘each term is sustained only in its topological relation with the others’ (1973, p. 89).
In his introduction, Evans points out that earlier Freudian dictionaries—such as the classic work of Laplanche & Pontalis (1967) and that of Rycroft (1968)—have served as valuable tools for exploring psychoanalytic theory. But none of the dictionaries in French that deal extensively with Lacanian terms has yet been translated into English, so the anglophone student has been without a useful tool of reference until now.
Evans is aware of the inherent dangers of his project. The first is that ‘by emphasising the synchronic structure of language, the dictionary can obscure the diachronic dimension’ (p. x), i.e. the fact that psychoanalytic terms change their meaning with use. This concern has led him to incorporate etymological information and to trace the evolution of Lacan’s concepts from their usual beginning in his reading of Freud. ‘By showing how the changes are often gradual and hesitant’, the author hopes to avoid some ‘simplistic narratives of epistemological breaks’. Observing that ‘whenever Lacan’s terms acquire new meanings, they never lose their older ones’, Evans sets out to counter the illusion that all of Lacan’s concepts were always ‘already there’.
The entries have been chosen mainly on the basis of the frequency wit