Jacques Lacan

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, 'My Teaching' is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst. Drawing on examples from popular culture and common sense, this lively book explores a range of Lacan's most important ideas, including his debt to Freud, linguistic unconsciousness and sexuality in its relation to psychoanalytic truth. Engaging, witty and personal, 'My Teaching' offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Lacan's own general explanation of his teaching to a non-psychoanalytic audience.

Often controversial, always inspired, French intellectual Jacques Lacan begins the twentieth year of his famous Seminar by weighing theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such influential and diverse thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. From here he leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new and unexpected way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Anticipated by English-speaking readers for more than twenty years, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love, desire, and jouissance.

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.--

Jacques Lacan's critique of Sigmund Freud's ego psychology.

This new translation of Jacques Lacan's deliberation on psychoanalysis and contemporary social order offers access to the author's seminal thinking on Freud, Marx, and Hegel; patterns of social and sexual behavior; and the nature and function of science and knowledge in the contemporary world. --From publisher's description.