This volume devoted to textual variants of Lacan's Écrits opens with an introduction by Elisabeth Roudinesco, who begins by drawing attention to the importance of the author's work in describing Lacan's thirty-year intellectual odyssey and then considers in detail the circumstances of the publication of the Écrits, which were published in November 1966 and contain a selection of papers almost all of which had already appeared in a variety of journals between 1936 and that year.

The title Écrits was chosen by Lacan, who wished to distinguish his written oeuvre from that presented orally at the seminars he had held without interruption since 1951. Although Lacan called it a compilation (Recueil), the author, the Spanish scholar Angel de Frutos, points out that it actually consists of rewritings,