The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (Peregrine Books)

Jacques Lacan's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, offer a controversial, radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive . Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility. Discusses Lacan's philosophy of psychoanalysis based on a structural affinity w/language, relation to religion, death. 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 One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Jacques Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers. Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. His exploration leads us to startling insights on "the consequence of man's relationship to desire" and the conflicting judgments of ethics and analysis. Because I am beginning on time today, I will start by reading a poem which, in actual fact, has no relation to what I am about to say, but which is related to what I said last year, in my seminar, about the mysterious object, the most concealed object, that of the scopic drive. Probes the relationship between psychoanalysis and science and religion as well as defining the unconscious, the repetition, the transference, and the drive as the underlying concepts of psycho-analysis