Bruce Fink

Freud, an old style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest; he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science.--

Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's Introduction is an invaluable guide to what really goes on in Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating many of Lacan's theoretical notions, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with the pressing questions of diagnosis, what therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change. Fink provides a comprehensive overview of Lacanian analysis, from the first meeting to the termination of therapy, explaining the analyst's aims and interventions at each point in the treatment. He uses four case studies to elucidate Lacan's unique structural approach to diagnosis. These cases, taking up both theoretical and clinical issues in Lacan's views of psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, highlight the very different approaches to treatment that different situations demand. This book does for Lacanian analysis what Freud's Papers on Technique did for Freudian analysis, and as such should prove indispensable to practitioners and potential patients, the initiated and the uninitiated alike.

A stunning young analyst-in-training keels over dead in front of three hundred guests at her Institute's annual conference. It looks like murder. But initial inquiries suggest she was liked by one and all: her teachers, supervisors, fellow-students, and even patients. New York's finest are forced to call upon Inspector Canal, an allegedly former French secret serviceman now living in Manhattan (loosely based on the inimitable Parisian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan), to penetrate the calm demeanor of the dead womane's professional entourage.More daring than ever, changing identities and donning the most unlikely of disguises before, during, and even after a mad Halloween party, Canal feels his way through a minefield of denials and dissimulations, trying not to trigger any further detonations. As in his previous escapades, the Frenchman gets caught up in the misadventures of Eros while attempting to solve age-old and newer forms of crimes of the heart, grappling with the biggest mysteries of them all: love and death.

xxiii, 358 pages ; 25 cm