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This selection from Lacan's works includes nine articles which originated as lectures to fellow analysts or students: “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I”; “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis”; “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”; “The Freudian thing”; “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud”; “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis”; “The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power”; “The signification of the phallus”; “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious”.
Jacques Lacan, generally considered the most influential French thinker since Sartre, is primarily a practicing psychoanalyst. He is especially concerned with the training of analysts. Lacan is clearly not a systematic thinker, unfolding the development of concepts from one book to another. His only book, in the strict sense, was his doctoral thesis on paranoia, published in 1932. His influence and reputation in France for the past twenty years has mainly rested on weekly seminars attended by a generation of French intellectuals.
Lacan's method has been a radical return to Freud's writings, a reformulation of their central insights, and, above all, a return to the unconscious as the preponderant field of psychoanalytic concern. Lacan's famous dictum, “The unconscious is structured as a language,” concisely states his point of view.