In Essays on the Pleasure of Death, Ellie Ragland discusses the interconnection of Freud and Lacan's theories, while maintaining that crucial differences between them still exist. Ragland argues, however, that Lacan's "return to Freud" gave coherence to concepts which Freud could never explain: psychosis, narcissism, the body and the death drive. Drawing upon Lacan's untranslated seminars through 1981, Ragland analyzes his theories of the death drive and the concept of jouissance, the driving force behind language and libido. Along with her...

Lacan postulated that the psyche can be understood by means of certain structures, which control our lives and our desires, and which operate differently at different logical moments or stages of formation. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure offers us a reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only an issue in the last seminars.

Ellie Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place...