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Rejected by the mainstream, Lacan nonetheless has ardent followers as well as eager would-be readers and daunted interpreters, hence the growing number of “guides” to Lacan's writings. However one feels about Lacan, his ideas and his style, his insistence that we attend to Freud's concern with language and his own meditations on that concern make him a theorist worth knowing. The work of Muller and Richardson is dependably clarifying.
The writers of this guide note that Lacan's “message is locked up in an expression so obscure and enigmatic that for the uninitiated it constitutes a kind of rebus [as Freud once described the dream] in itself” (p. 2). The writers do a very good job of representing Lacan's seminal essays without pretending they understand everything—i.e., we often find phrases such as, “Lacan seems to mean …” In a way, the essays are translations, but they go beyond that by filling in important historical information, the context of Lacan's thinking (e.g., Levi-Strauss). For someone who has read Ecrits, the essays act as a kind of dialogue and a reinforcement of the conceptual field Lacan lays out. The writers also offer us, at the end of each chapter a “map of the text”—an outline which allows the reader to see the basic gestalt of the argument and the process thereof. There are, as well, notes on Lacan's notes for each chapter, and a lengthy bibliography.
The writers correctly say that Lacan's style is linked to his subject matter—“Lacan not only explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it” (p. 3). Hence part of the message Lacan offers