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Assured in its approach, this study, written by a practicing American Lacanian analyst trained (and analyzed) in France and currently involved in translating Lacan's Écrits and the Séminaires, pursues two sometimes discordant themes. Fink wants to ground American conceptions of Lacan in a clinical praxis as well as in the pure theorizing often presented. He is therefore not concerned with related fields such as literary criticism, where Lacan's voice is already familiar. But scrupulous in not defining his subject, the subject, too narrowly, Fink also delves into the sometimes contradictory logic behind the systems connecting Lacanian concepts. Even though Fink is most interested in “a 1970s perspective…a cut of Lacanian theory…particularly powerful and useful to the clinician and theorist alike” (p. xvi), he notes the shifting elaboration and formalization of Lacan's thought from the 1950s on as Lacan became more convinced that the register of the real determines the action of psychoanalysis. (“The real is essentially that which resists symbolization and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the symbolic order, in which one thing can be substituted for another” [p. 92].)
Fink pursues his theme within a main concern of contemporary psychoanalytic thought—the analyst's notions of and relation to the patient's subjectivity. Understanding what subjectivity means within a Lacanian framework is worth tackling, and Fink's passage into this territory shows what's most problematic as well as what's most revealing in his approach. For example, Lacan emphasized that the subject is structured—not found, understood, experienced, felt. Those are events that of course occur, but they exist as potential moments within the conceptual schema that positions and determines the subject in relation to language—and thus within symbolization,