Reading Lacan

Apologies for the delayed reply, heres the list - I hope you find it useful. Ill tidy it up a bit and
publish it on the site as a blog post later this week.
Gentle Introductions to Lacan
As the Ecrits are gruelling, and the Seminars sometimes very long-winded, I would recommend
starting with the interview Lacan gave to LExpress in France in 1957. According to Roudinescos
biography of Lacan, the interviewer insisted that Lacan agree to the condition that he speak as if
to a lay audience, and avoid the kinds of elaborate rhetoric he was already becoming known for.
You can find a copy of the interview here.
If youre not familiar with it already, Darian Leaders Introducing Lacan is deceptively simple
but a masterwork of compression, providing a great taste of the old mans very tricky ideas with
verve, wit and crystal clarity.
I would recommend anything by the earlier period Zizek, but especially The Sublime Object of
Ideology and Looking Awry. I once heard a story about how Zizek first emerged on the scene. In
the early nineties, in the wake of the Sokal and Bricmont affair, there was great suspicion
amongst academics of anyone purporting to talk with authority about continental philosophy.
When a hyperactive, bearded Slovenian philosopher with what seemed to be a made-up name
emerged with a book entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock many academics, wary of being duped again, believed this was another
hoax. An astonishing beginning for a man who has introduced so many readers to Lacans work!
In the later period, Zizeks own Introduction to Lacan, the cheekily-titled How to Read Lacan is
highly recommended. You can read the full book for free at Lacan.com here.
Translator of Lacans crits Bruce Fink has written a number of great books on Lacan. His
The Lacanian Subject provides perhaps the best introduction to Lacans thought, written with
great clarity and without pretension.
Another introduction to Lacans work that often gets ignored because of its non-obvious title is
Van Hautes Against Adaptation. Strictly speaking it is, according to its subtitle, an introduction to
Lacans paper Subversion of the Subject, but the ground it covers is much wider, and Van Haute
does a great job bridging Freuds thought with Lacans.
Finally, as one of Lacans former students, Moustafa Safouans slim volume Four Lessons of
Psychoanalysis is another easily-digestible introductory work.
Gentle Introductions to Freud
Theres nothing like the man himself to provide the best introduction to his own work - the
Introductory Lectures and New Introductory Lectures, from two very different periods of his
work, make fascinating reading side-by-side and give a great overview of what he considers to be
the most important of his discoveries in each period. His method of introduction to psychoanalysis
(repeated in The Question of Lay Analysis), pre-empting and responding to the criticisms that
sceptics are likely to make against his thought, give the uninitiated reader a brilliant way to
approach his work.
Whilst The Interpretation of Dreams remains his definitive masterwork,On Dreams - a more
condensed and accessible paper introducing his dream theory - provides a less punishing
introduction than the hefty full book itself.
Going beyond these introductory texts by Freuds own hand, anyone new to Freud could do
worse than follow these with his papers on metapsychology, from the middle-Freud period, to give
them an introduction to the theory of psychoanalysis. And at the same time, and from around the
same period, his so-called technical papers on the technique and practice of psychoanalysis.
Some other authors also provide great introductions to Freuds work. I would particularly
recommend the late Richard Woolheims Freud for a solid general overview. Jean-Michel
Quinodozs Reading Freud, the result of many years laborious seminar work - will provide the
reader with a paper-by-paper analysis of Freuds key texts, with commentary situating the issues

explored by each in modern-day psychoanalysis, and historical notes on the cultural and
institutional background these works sprang from.
More Advanced Freud and Lacan
To take your reading a bit further, there are some great works on psychoanalysis by nonLacanians. I would certainly recommend Mikkel Borch-Jacobsens Lacan: The Absolute Master
as a more advanced introduction to Lacans work.
Jean Laplanche is to my mind one of the very few analysts who can give Lacan a run for his
money when it comes to interpreting Freud. Hes not as creative a thinker as Lacan, but his work
has extraordinary rigour and clarity. His series of lectures are published in French as the
Problematiques. I am only aware of a single English translation of this series, The Unconscious
and the Id. I cannot recommend this highly enough if youve grasped the rudiments of Freud and
want to get deeper into psychoanalytic theory.
One of Lacans contemporaries, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, also wrote an excellent book,
Freud and His Philosophy, which Id recommend highly too.
Clinical
People used to complain about the deficit of available clinical material published by Lacanian
psychoanalysts. In the last ten to fifteen years that has changed greatly. There are a handful of
general clinical introductions worth checking out. Fink has published two: The Fundamentals of
Psychoanalytic Technique and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Philip Hill has
a larger volume called Using Lacanian Clinical Techniques, and more recently, a highlight from
last year, Millers Lacanian Psychotherapy is also highly recommended. Paul Verhaeghes On
Being Normal and Other Disorders does a good job of situating Lacanian psychoanalysis within
the wider context of modern mental health treatments, and engaging with them.
On more specific areas of symptomatology, three books by Darian Leader are worth checking
out: What is Madness? on psychosis, The New Black on depression, and Why Do People Get
Ill? on psychosomatic disorders.
Outside the Lacanian world, I would recommend the Edward Glovers 1955 The Technique of
Psychoanalysis, and the classic from former IPA president Horacio Etchegoyen, Fundamentals
of Psychoanalytic Technique. This should give you an idea of how different analysts from
different orientations and across different generations have approached clinical problems. Finally,
an alternative view comes from Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, most recently known to psychoanalysts
as one of the co-authors of the French book The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which caused
quite a stir when it was released and has contributed to the current parlous standing of
psychoanalysis even in France. I would recommend two books, Making Minds and Madness and
Remembering Anna O., both of which are written in a crystal-clear, easy-to-read style and
provide, in my opinion, the most fascinating opposition to psychoanalysis.
Lighter Psychoanalytical Reading
Darian Leaders Why Do Women Write More Letters than they Post? and Promises Lovers
Make When it gets Late are both very accessible, pop-culture examples (in the best sense of the
term) of Lacans theories applied to everyday life.Verhaeghes Love in a Time of Loneliness was
published a couple of years after these and follows in much the same line. An older example in
this vein is Sapirsteins The Paradoxes of Everyday Life from 1955, if you can get your hands on
it. Coming back to the present, building on a brilliant premise Henry Bonds Lacan at the Scene
imagines how Lacan would interpret crime scenes in the UK through the 1950s and 1960s.
Psychoanalytical Reference Works

To help you through all the psychoanalytic jargon (and there is plenty!) there are two reference
works I would consider absolutely indispensible. First, from a Lacanian perspective, Dylan Evans
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and second, from a more general
psychoanalytic perspective, Laplanche and Pontalis The Language of Psychoanalysis.
This is by no means an exhaustive list - its just the works that I have read that I think are great.
Hope you manage to get your hands on a few of them and that you do too!
Owen