The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI)

Title: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI)

Author: Jacques Lacan

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Publication Year: 1998

ISBN-13: 9780393317756

This volume is based on a year's seminar (Seminar XI) in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression.