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This volume collects ten previously published essays by Stanley A. Leavy, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, now retired from both institutions. Dr. Leavy is an analyst with diverse intellectual interests. He is strongly influenced by Lacan, as well as by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and the romantic tradition in literature; he is also a critical thinker who is open to questioning even those thinkers and traditions from which he draws.
Two essays aspire to introduce Lacan, whom Leavy regards as the “most important innovator since Freud” (p. 75), to an American audience. He appreciates Lacan's exclusive focus on the psychoanalytic setting, and, in particular, his sharp eye for “paronomasias,” words that unintentionally reveal a deeper realm of meaning. Leavy clearly explicates Lacan's well-known claims about the unconscious—that it is “the Other” and that it is structured “like a language.” Leavy is captivated, as many analysts were in the 1970s, with language as a symbolic realm that lies at the heart of clinical work. He emphasizes his identification with a hermeneutic perspective on psychoanalysis, quoting Ricoeur to the effect that we