From an Other to the Other: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI. By Jacques Lacan, translated by Bruce Fink and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge UK and Hoboken NJ:  Polity Press, 2024.  370 pp

Readers should not be deceived by the title of this 1968-1969 seminar which is Lacan’s sixteenth in a series of twenty-seven over the course of his lifetime’s work. Coming as it does after The Psychoanalytic Act and immediately prior to the more well-known The Other Side of Psychoanalysis where he develops his theory of the four discourses, this seminar, while about the Other, places its emphasis on the subject, and offers a centralization henceforth of the subject in Lacan’s teaching. The seminar should also be placed, and this will be of interest to non-Lacanian readers, in the context of serious social upheaval in France and in psychoanalytic institutions and universities which were reforming in the late 1960s. Afoot was serious unrest in Lacan’s own school, the École Freudienne de Paris, which was revising its process for formally designating psychoanalysts within its procedure called the “Pass.” Lacan, true to form, was against any standardization in which formation could be linked to a conjunction of knowledge and power, and because senior members of the school—the old guard—were being overlooked by the new Pass procedures, dissent and trouble were swirling and a split was in the offing. The younger generation attending Lacan’s lectures was more radical and revolution was the air. They sought a purer Lacanianism freed from its Freudian origins.1 Against this backdrop of social and institutional unrest, and what Lacan perceived to be stagnation within his own psychoanalytic group, this seminar is directed to a teaching about how psychoanalysis should be taught and transmitted.

The seminar’s translator is Bruce Fink, and he builds upon a previously published 2006 French edition by Seuil.2 This English translation is technically the second as it follows Cormac Gallagher’s translation in 2002, with