Language and Meaning Work in a Diachronic Horizontal Fashion

If you could recommend only one essay in Écrits, which would it be? I’d probably pick “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” — the same essay in which Lacan put the finishing touches on the graph of desire:

Is “The Subversion of the Subject” a difficult essay? You bet it is. But it's also a remarkably comprehensive introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

So when Pacifica Graduate Institute asked me to introduce their clinical psychology doctoral students to Lacanian psychoanalysis, I couldn’t resist.

Here’s the opening lecture — the first of seven I delivered last summer. Stay tuned for more in the coming days!

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