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Bruce Fink starts his paper by pointing out that there is “no single Lacanian approach to psychoanalytic practice.” This is accurate, firstly, because it is unclear what it is to be Lacanian. When in 1980, having dissolved the institution he had created, Lacan travelled to Caracas to address his South American “pupils,” he stated: “I come here before launching my Freudian Cause. You can see how important this adjective is to me. You’ll be Lacanian if you want. Me; I am Freudian.” (Lacan 1980) In addition, Lacan never defined the canon of an orthodox Lacanian practice as he was discovering it all his life, through experimentations with the Freudian model. On one hand, Lacan practised in different ways when he was a young analyst, a less young analyst and eventually a great master, and with this particular analysand or that one. On the other, he contributed an enormous theoretical edifice, which remained for a long time unwritten. Bruce Fink, humbly but also realistically, suggests that the Lacanian community may shiver at the fact that it is an American analyst who has been granted the prestigious task of writing this paper in the holy journal of the IPA, an organisation that Lacan, once president of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and training analyst, never wanted to leave. Maybe his own grasp of Lacanian theory is “thought by some in the Lacanian community to be overly direct, transparent, and simplistic … ” but what makes him particularly fit to achieve this challenging task is twofold: there is no doubt that he has read Lacan, and he is an outsider. Having “devoted the past 35 years to grappling with and translating Lacan’s often difficult work,” Fink has not only read a great deal more than most but also had to ponder the meaning of the text. Beyond negotiating the didactic function of its ambiguity, metaphors and jokes, the fruitful digressions about the previous evening’s conference somewhere or a veiled reference to a friend’s clever and useful comment,