The Klein—Lacan Dialogues. Edited by Bernard Burgoyne & Mary Sullivan. London:  Rebus.

The title of this book is The Klein-Lacan Dialogues, and it is tempting to say that there is not much ‘dialogue’ in it — but this is not strictly true. The interchange in ‘Discussion of Papers on Sexuality’ shows the Kleinian Jane Temperley engage thoughtfully with Lacanian ideas. However, in ‘Discussion on the Unconscious’ the non-Lacanians seem completely floored by the notion of the ‘signifier’, which is quite a simple notion. In the ‘Discussion on Child Psychoanalysis’ Bice Benveneuto makes the point that, for Klein, insofar as the father's penis remains in the ‘empire of the mother's body’ it is a persecutor of the paranoid-schizoid position. The father, for Lacan, is not inside mother — he has to be symbolised as something that makes order in the world. This discussion degenerates somewhat over the question of ‘short sessions’ which are, I think, an integral part of the Lacanian approach. Few Lacanians actually vary the lengths of their session dramatically — most seem to favour a more-or-less fixed time, say twenty or twenty-five minutes, and analysts sometimes see the same patient twice in one day. (Must sleep intervene between sessions?) The Lacanian theory is articulated by Geerardyn in ‘The unconscious from a Lacanian point of view’ and Nobus in ‘Theorising the comedy of the sexes’. These essays could not, however, serve as an introduction to Lacan as they are quite sophisticated.