Lacan by Malcolm Bowie Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1991,  244 pp., $19.95 Arguing with Lacan: Ego Psychology and Language by Joseph H. Smith New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1991,  vi + 153 pp., $20.00 The Lacanian Delusion by François Roustang Translated by Greg Simms. Odéon. New York:  Oxford University Press, 1990,  138 pp., $27.50

The three books under review here represent three important, and dramatically disparate, approaches to the work of Jacques Lacan. Their wide range and distinctive voices give a clear sense of the staggeringly varied responses, both here and abroad, occasioned by Lacan's work.

In Lacan, Malcolm Bowie, Director of the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of London, offers both the clinical and the nonclinical reader an excellent overview of Lacan's theoretical project, his self-designated “return to Freud.” Bowie writes as one who has been deeply influenced but not bowled over by the effects of that project. The result is a broad, incisive, critical overview: “an outline of Lacan's theory, but…also an account of his elaborate quarrel with conventional theoretical writing” (p. 1).

Throughout, Bowie's writing is nimble and philosophically informed, deeply engaged yet unmarred by polemics. He does not present himself as a Lacanian insider. This unindebted and relatively disinterested position is, in fact, quite unusual among commentators on Lacan. It greatly enhances Bowie's credibility. A typically winning example of Bowie's acute and agile approach occurs as he addresses the well-known, yet still enigmatic,