Review by Choice Review
Like The Cambridge Campanion to Freud, ed. by Jerome Neu (1991), this superb volume offers a set of introductory essays designed to orient the student of psychoanalysis to the major trends in an important figure's thought. The 15 essays included here situate the life and works of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan in relation to key ideas and questions in the history of psychoanalysis: desire, the symptom, scientific method, ethics, Marxism, perversion, feminism, queer theory, and so on. Each contributor is an expert in the often-arcane philosophy and clinical practices of Lacan, and each manages to explain this difficult subject matter with remarkable clarity. For this reason, the book joins Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalyis (1997) as one of the very best introductions to the Lacanian field of psychoanalytic inquiry. This book should appeal to anyone interested in the development of Freudian thought and the history of ideas concerning human subjectivity. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. M. Uebel University of Kentucky
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
