This new translation of Jacques Lacan's deliberation on psychoanalysis and contemporary social order offers welcome, readable access to the brilliant 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.

The French text was prepared by Jacques-Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the seminar.

This Seminar, together with Seminar I, which was published simultaneously, was worked on by both translators so as to produce uniformity in both terminology and style. Considerable attention was paid to the practices of previous translators of Lacan, in particular Anthony Wilden, Alan Sheridan, Stuart Schneiderman and Jacqueline Rose, in the hope that some consistency in the English rendition of Lacan can be achieved.

Sometimes controversial, invariably fascinating, Jacques Lacan's psycholinguistic approach to analysis of the psychoses is seen here in virtually unmediated form. Lacan deftly navigates the ontological levels of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to explain psychosis.

Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions and the attraction of transgression, Lacan illuminates Freud's psychoanalytic work and its continued influence. Lacan explores the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy (a reading of Sophocle's Antigone), and the tragic dimension of analytic experience. His exploration leads us to startling insights on the consequence of man's relationship to desire and the conflicting...