Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic" "imaginary" and "real" Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories-neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories-their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here)