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...

Since its inception, Lacanian psychoanalysis has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for inducing acrimonious conflicts and facilitating tumultuous struggles between its own constituency and other areas of inquiry, as well as within its own ranks and among its most loyal adherents. Although Lacanianism has spread like wildfire across the academic disciplines, Lacan's intellectual legacy has maintained a highly unstable equilibrium at the theoretical, clinical and institutional levels of its modus operandi. At the same time, Lacanians have often been at the forefront in addressing the...

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.' Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis.
Freud's...