Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique A Lacanian Approach for Practioners, by Bruce Fink,  W.W. Norton, New York and London, 2007,  301 pp., $35.00.

Books on psychoanalytic technque are rare. The systems builders: Freud, Klein, Horney, Sullivan construct technique within their theories. Glover (1955) and Greenson (1967) reified the Freudian approach and their own. Technique and theory combine to give a sense of comfort to the analyst; theory is added to skill and practice. The novelist Saul Bellow satirized this comfort by writing that the analyst knows what is in the patient's unconscious before the patient, so why not save time and inform him/her.

Fink's work on technique, strtuctured in Lacan's thinking, seminars, and books, gives another perspective and dimension. The analyst doesn't know what the patient's “fundamental desire” is in the unconscious. The analyst possesses knowledge, and the patient imagines a knowledge to uncover the desire that leads to “jouisssance.” However, repression is ever present to avoid knowing the “fundamental desire” in the dyadic relationship. The symbolic, language, gives clues to the unconscious and leads to lifting repression. Lacan belives that repression isn't only a defense. Repression becomes a structure that needs to be reached through the analytic work. In language, the signfier is what you hear, the signified is what sounds mean. Slips, tone, silence lead to getting at what is repressed. Dethy (2003), a French psychoanalyst, wrote a book to clarify Lacan's writing. He wrote the real is not to be confused with the true. The true is concrete, visible. An ulcerous lesion is true, a psychic lesion is real.

Fink went to Paris, studied French, and enrolled in Lacan's Institute. His book serves as an overview of psychoanalytic theories. He contrasts Lacan with all contemporary theories and with excellent writing and discussions, illustrates the differences. Yet he returns to Freud. He quotes Lacan saying, “Reading Freud in itself trains us.”

The clinician reader is presented with an entirely new way of approaching transference, counter-transferencee, projective identification, t