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As a long time student of Lacanian thought, I consider this exploration of its clinical dimensions to be extraordinary good. Fink presents Lacan's ideas in the context for which they were intended, and he renderes them readily accessible, even to those who have no previous acquaintance with Lacan. At the same time, Fink succeeds admirably, even when the oversimplifies, in preserving the polyvalent and allusional character of Lacanian thought.
A reader of this book might well find herself or himself in a position like that of the young Marx, after he read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Marx had become an Hegelian. One cannot read Hegel and understand him without having one's ways of thinking changed in some way. Lacan may have wished that his readers would be similarly affected. Like Hegel, he made the task of understanding him difficult, writing in a dense and, some would contend, impenetrable prose. Yet, for the reader who could find his or her way in, there was no easy way out. One would find oneself, of necessity, adopting the notions and patterns of thought that had constructed that prose. Lacan, however unlike. Hegel, did not really intend his writings simply to be read (p. xii). He claimed that the objective of all his teaching was the training of psychoanalysts, implying thatt the study of his thought