Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’ From 'Signification of the Phallus' to 'Metaphor of the Subject'

The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacan’s Écrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries – by some of the world’s most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars – on the complete edition of the Écrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘The Youth of Gide’, ‘Science and Truth’, ‘Presentation on Transference’ and ‘Beyond the "Reality Principle". The originality and importance of Lacan’s Écrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text’s notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan’s Écrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan’s pivotal work.

Introduction to ‘ReadingLacan's Écrits’: La trahison de l'écriture - Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule The Signification of the Phallus –Todd McGowan In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism – Filip Geerardyn and Alain Pringels On An Ex Post Facto Syllabary –Yael Goldman Baldwin Some Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality – Eve Watson The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire – Jean-Michel Rabaté Kant with Sade – Dany Nobus The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious – Fabio Vighi Position of the Unconscious – Paul Verhaeghe On Freud’s "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire – Theo Reeves-Evison Science and Truth – Ed Pluth Metaphor of the Subject – Stephanie Swales

Stijn Vanheule is a psychoanalyst andProfessor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. He is also a privately practicing psychoanalyst and a member of the New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective and Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited – From DSM to Clinical Case Formulation. Derek Hook isAssociate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics and at Birkbeck College, he is a psychoanalytic practitioner, and the author of Six Moments in Lacan. Calum Neill isAssociate Professor of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory at Edinburgh Napier University. He is the author of Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, Ethics and Psychology: Beyond Codes of Practice and Jacques Lacan: The Basics.