Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan

In this first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work, Nasio eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments.

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan is the first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work. Juan-David Nasio makes numerous theoretical advances and eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments. What is distinctive, in the end, about Nasio's treatment of Lacan's theory is the extent to which Lacan's fundamental concepts-the unconscious, jouissance, and the body-become the locus of the overturning or exceeding of the discrete boundaries of the individual. The recognition of the implications of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, then, brings the analyst to adopt what Nasio calls a "special listening."

Juan-David Nasio is a psychoanalyst in Paris and former member of the École Freudienne of Jacques Lacan. He teaches at the University of Paris VII (Sorbonne) and is the director of the Séminaires Psychanalytiques de Paris, a major center for psychoanalytical training and the dissemination of psychoanalytical thought to nonspecialists. David Pettigrew is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. François Raffoul is Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus. Pettigrew and Raffoul have cotranslated The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and coedited Disseminating Lacan, both published by SUNY Press.