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This book proposes a large perspective: Lacan, seen “from the inside,” is made to speak not only for Freud but also for the role of psychoanalysis in contemporary thought and culture. Such questions as “What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to think and consequently, What does it mean to be contemporary?” (p. 9) are at issue.
Most of the chapters have appeared as earlier essays, some in a different form: “The Case of Poe” in 1980; “What Difference Does Psychoanalysis Make? or The Originality of Freud” in 1980-81; “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable” in 1982; and half of “Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis” in 1983. But interestingly, Shoshana Felman's book, now that the great waves of Lacanian influence (as well as the jargon) have subsided, provides a frame within which important questions are foregrounded clearly.
Several themes become prominent. Freud's “radical” discovery was not the unconscious itself (discovered by poets well before him) but that the unconscious speaks. Thus, reading takes on an overwhelming role, for “the unconscious…is not simply that which must be read but also, and perhaps primarily, that which reads” (pp. 21-22). Lacan's “Seminar” on Poe's The Purloined Letter demonstrates, for Felman, not a method by which psychoanalysis is applied to literature, but, rather, a technique by which psychoanalysis and literature are “interimplicated in” each other. It is no doubt in this context that the claim for Lacan as a modernizer of Freud has special relevance, since Lacan brings to bear linguistic and structuralist analyses where Freud, true to his time and training, used deterministic and mechanistic models.