The Purloined Poe. Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading: Edited by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. 394 pp.

Lacan's proposition that the unconscious is structured like a language has been most frequently cited to summarize Lacanian psychoanalysis for the non-Lacanian. Lacan's words, however, are taken out of proper context, so while their emblematic status remains impeccable, their apparent clarity eschews a greater complexity. A statement regarding language and the unconscious is, after all, familiar enough to most psychoanalytic colleagues and can therefore be easily assimilated into accustomed modes of thinking. Therefore, how are we to account for the intense resistance that, in fact, has greeted Lacanian thinking in this country? A questioned psychoanalytic practice and the provocative personality of Jacques Lacan have been offered as reasons by some. But for an otherwise intelligent and self-critical group of psychoanalysts, such reasons cannot justify premature dismissal of some very challenging ideas.

John Muller and William Richardson have assembled a collection of papers which are less about Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter and more about the Lacanian challenge to our accustomed ways of thinking about language, the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic process itself.