Lacan

by B O W I E (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1993

  $45.62

  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) is a uniquely complex writer and the originator of an especially unsettling view of the human subject. But the singularity of Lacan's achievement has been understated by many of his critics. Often he is seen merely as a figure famous for being famous--an essential reference point in structuralist and poststructuralist debate--rather than as a theorist whose writings demand and reward detailed scrutiny.Malcolm Bowie traces the development of Lacan's ideas over the fifty-year span of his writing and teaching career. The primary focus is on the fascinating mutations in Lacan's interpretation of Freud. Bowie reinserts the celebrated slogans-- The unconscious is the discourse of the Other, The unconscious is structured like a language, and so forth--into the history of Lacan's thinking, and pinpoints the paradoxes and anomalies that mark his account of human sexuality. This book provides a firm basis for the critical evaluation of Lacan's ideas and the rhetoric in which they are embedded; it is based on a close reading of Lacan's original texts but presupposes no knowledge of French in the reader.Although Bowie is sharply critical of Lacan on several major analytic questions, he argues that Lacan is the only psychoanalyst after Freud whose intellectual achievement is seriously comparable to Freud's own. Lacan provides the ideal starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $5.15

  In this Modern Master on Jacques Lacan (1901-81), Malcolm Bowie presents a clear, coherent introduction to the work of one of the most influential and forbidding thinkers of our century. A practising psychoanalyst for almost 50 years, Lacan first achieved notoriety with his pioneering article on Freud in the 1930s. After the Second World War, he emerged as the most original and controversial figure in French psychoanalysis, and because a guiding light in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of the 1950s, Lacan initiated and subsequently steered the crusade to reinterpret Freud's work in the light of the new structuralist theories of linguistics, evolving an elaborate, dense, systematic analysis of the relations between language and desire, focusing on the human subject as he or she is defined by linguistic and social pressures. His lectures and articles were collected and published as Ecrits in 1966, a text whose influence has been immense and persists to this day. Knowledge of Lacan's revolutionary ideas, which underpin those of his successors across the disciplines, is useful to an understanding of the work of many modern thinkers - literary theoriest, linguists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists. Malcolm Bowie's accessible critical introduction provides the perfect starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.