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Introducing Graphic Guides
Introducing Lacan
This series is renowned for its ingenious combination of graphic illustration and intelligent, precise text by leading academics on some of the most challenging subjects around. This text on Lacan is one of a number of titles that is being relaunched with an updated cover.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
385 people are currently reading
1267 people want to read
About the author
Darian Leader
48 books148 followersDarian Leader is a British psychoanalyst and author. He is a founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR).
Darian Leader is President of the College of Psychoanalysts, a Trustee of the Freud Museum, and Honorary Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis at Roehampton University.
From Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_L...
Darian Leader is President of the College of Psychoanalysts, a Trustee of the Freud Museum, and Honorary Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis at Roehampton University.
From Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_L...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
December 15, 2007
still do not understand.
March 22, 2011
The classic short graphic guide to Lacan is written by Darian Leader who is generally worth reading in his own right. However, the graphic format should not be confused with simplicity - this is a difficult liitle book because Lacan is very difficult. You may need to read it more than once to 'get' it.
Lacan is worth the effort but perhaps with a critical eye towards the Freudian framework within which he was writing. Perhaps he might best be thought of as someone struggling to find the language for what it is to be a human being and contributing significant insights without, in the end, succeeding.
A useful introduction but only the first step on a very long journey which you may not want to take - if only because life is short and there is no guarantee that the train will end up where you want to be.
Lacan is worth the effort but perhaps with a critical eye towards the Freudian framework within which he was writing. Perhaps he might best be thought of as someone struggling to find the language for what it is to be a human being and contributing significant insights without, in the end, succeeding.
A useful introduction but only the first step on a very long journey which you may not want to take - if only because life is short and there is no guarantee that the train will end up where you want to be.
July 9, 2018
تقديم كافي ووافي لشخصية معقدة وناضجة مثل جاك لاكان، استمتعت شخصياً بالكتاب كثيراً. لكنني فضلت النسخة الانجليزية على العربية بالرغم من ترجمة أمام عبد الفتاح أمام، لكن لغة التحليل النفسي اراها أكثر استساغة باللغة الانجليزية... ربما لأن دراستي كانت باللغة ذاتها، ربما أو على الأكثر
February 7, 2022
This graphic novel takes Lacan more seriously than Lacan takes himself. Psychoanalysis can be silly at times and its practice is impenetrable because at times it is not about helping the patient but rather about justifying a psychoanalyst's next vacation. Lacan makes a joke like that in Ecrit but this graphic novel never ventured far from the seriousness of it all.
I read this to see overall what Lacan was getting at in Ecrit since that book is more of a series of essays (lectures) spread out over a long period and with a psychoanalyst changing his view point.
Finnegans Wake has a lot of obvious influence (well nothing is obvious when it's about FW) with Lacan and this graphic novel told me that Lacan befriended Joyce when Lacan was 17 and did a seminar on him later in life.
I read this to see overall what Lacan was getting at in Ecrit since that book is more of a series of essays (lectures) spread out over a long period and with a psychoanalyst changing his view point.
Finnegans Wake has a lot of obvious influence (well nothing is obvious when it's about FW) with Lacan and this graphic novel told me that Lacan befriended Joyce when Lacan was 17 and did a seminar on him later in life.
June 28, 2013
This maybe be largely due to the difficulty of Lacan's ideas, but I really didn't find this particularly helpful in trying to understand Lacanian concepts.
Starts off explaining concepts such as the mirror phase well, but very quickly reduces its attempts to explain essential Lacanian concepts to disjointed rambling that never really attempts to lay out his ideas with any clarity, or provide any overview of an idea before or after it is explored.
This book severely lacks the relative precision and clarity that the many other books in Icon Books' "Introducing..." series which I have read (Freud, Marx, Zizek, Joyce) demonstrate.
There may or may not be an easy way into Lacan, but this really isn't it.
Starts off explaining concepts such as the mirror phase well, but very quickly reduces its attempts to explain essential Lacanian concepts to disjointed rambling that never really attempts to lay out his ideas with any clarity, or provide any overview of an idea before or after it is explored.
This book severely lacks the relative precision and clarity that the many other books in Icon Books' "Introducing..." series which I have read (Freud, Marx, Zizek, Joyce) demonstrate.
There may or may not be an easy way into Lacan, but this really isn't it.
October 20, 2015
Me parece que a teoria lacaniana é demasiado complexa para tudo que este livro quer abarcar, pois ele vai além do mero introducing e aborda temas que só quem se aprofundou na teoria tem acesso total de entendimento.
June 27, 2020
I got into Jacques Lacan through Slavoy Zizek. In my only book from Z. that I read, he cites Lacan in differentiating "The REAL" from "REALITY". The Virus is "REAL", it exists out there and it comes upon us and that is frightening. Then, when the virus came, it became "REALITY" and we kinda learned to live with it (more or less). I found this concept very interesting, so I turned my attention to Mr.Lacan.
Don't get fooled by the fact that this book contains a lot of pictures and "cartoons". They are "grown-ups-cartoons" (and btw all the babies have a face similar to Lacan's which was quite disturbing in a funny way), some of them being rather difficult to understand.
Actually this book is a short presentation of Lacan's work (meaning here his contribution to psychoanalysis, his concepts and his concepts and interpretations in relationship to Freud's). It is not meant to make you understand the multitude of elements, but to give you an insight. And Mr.Leader succeeded quite well in this matter. However, to understand more of Lacan's theories, one should not stop at the present book.
A few elements from the present book:
- the mirror phase: the child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child. The ego is thus constituted by an alienating identification (on an image outside ourselves)
- Signifiers - acoustic images (like a word), a signified is a concept. We use signifiers to get access to signifieds (we use words to say what we mean). HOWEVER: words generate meanings which are beyond the understanding of those who use them. There is a difference between what you mean to say and what your words say. Signifiers organize our world, the very texture of which is symbolic.
=> The baby is bound to its image by words and names (linguistic representations). The identity of the child will depend on how he or she assumes the words of the parents.
=> a symptom may be literally a word trapped in his/her body.
The things go more difficult as the book goes on. But it opened my appetite of wanting to know more. So the book accomplished its goal.
Fascinating stuff and I cannot but give 5 stars to this Introduction.
Don't get fooled by the fact that this book contains a lot of pictures and "cartoons". They are "grown-ups-cartoons" (and btw all the babies have a face similar to Lacan's which was quite disturbing in a funny way), some of them being rather difficult to understand.
Actually this book is a short presentation of Lacan's work (meaning here his contribution to psychoanalysis, his concepts and his concepts and interpretations in relationship to Freud's). It is not meant to make you understand the multitude of elements, but to give you an insight. And Mr.Leader succeeded quite well in this matter. However, to understand more of Lacan's theories, one should not stop at the present book.
A few elements from the present book:
- the mirror phase: the child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child. The ego is thus constituted by an alienating identification (on an image outside ourselves)
- Signifiers - acoustic images (like a word), a signified is a concept. We use signifiers to get access to signifieds (we use words to say what we mean). HOWEVER: words generate meanings which are beyond the understanding of those who use them. There is a difference between what you mean to say and what your words say. Signifiers organize our world, the very texture of which is symbolic.
=> The baby is bound to its image by words and names (linguistic representations). The identity of the child will depend on how he or she assumes the words of the parents.
=> a symptom may be literally a word trapped in his/her body.
The things go more difficult as the book goes on. But it opened my appetite of wanting to know more. So the book accomplished its goal.
Fascinating stuff and I cannot but give 5 stars to this Introduction.
June 18, 2019
I discovered Lacan quite late. I've seen him referenced in quite a few places, but his work seemed impenetrable, so I never bothered to read anything about him. While I was in a bookshop, I saw this book and figured it would be a good chance to finally learn what Lacan was about.
It was my first book of this "graphic guide" series. I've seen it all over the place, but I was somewhat sceptical of its quality. But given Lacan seemed hard to read, having a short and introductory book seemed a good idea.
Lacan was a psychoanalyst, heavily influential in the 20th century. He was associated with the Parisian surrealist movement, being Picasso's therapist and acquainted with many artists like Dalí. He was a key figure leading post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics and 20th-century French philosophy.
The book starts with his work on paranoia, which was his doctoral thesis. He recounts the case of Aimée, which tried to stab a well-known Parisian actress. She suffered from ideas of persecution, and the case was famous at the time. According to Lacan, Aimée's identity was outside herself. The actress was the "ideal image", an object of hate and aspiration. This is the starting pointing of a lot of Lacan's thought - how the ego relates to the world, and also how the ego categorizes the world.
The "image" is the identification of the ego with something else. Lacan often presents this illustrating the emerging consciousness of a child which doesn't have an identity yet. The child uses an "image" to gain further knowledge about the world and develop, but this causes the child to be trapped in the "imaginary" - it's trapped in an image alien and outside of herself. Thus, the ego is fragmented because it's only a collection of images. However, it tries to create wholeness and coherence, and it does so by distorting its own image - the falsifying ego.
The signifier is an image, while the signified is a concept. A word (the signifier) does not have an unambiguous and objective that results in the signified. In addition, signifiers form networks, in which each signifier is connected to another one in a large chain, that can't, for the most part, be accessed consciously. This is crucial in Lacan's thought because this is the landscape of the "symbolic", the very organization of our phenomenological world.
This ties together with the previously mentioned development of the child. Not only does the child identify with external images, but it's also shaped by the symbolic universe it's embedded in. Language, in particular, seems to be the most important, since that's the most common signifier. Although it also extends into social and cultural signifiers.
In addition to the Symbolic and Imaginary, Lacan names an extra dimension called the Real. The real is everything that isn't in the symbolic nor the imaginary. Our everyday reality is the symbolic and imaginary, while the real is the "objective reality", something like Kant's noumenal world. Paradoxically and brilliantly, this is exactly what's outside of our reality.
There is a lot more to Lacan's thought, and the book covers a fair bit of work, but this is what I found the most interesting and useful, as far as I understood it. Some of it I found a bit nonsensical, particularly when he tried to develop Freud's ideas. But overall, I regard him as an original and interesting thinker.
Regarding the book format, I think I did quite a nice job, and the illustrations were generally well done. Nevertheless, I felt the illustrations should have been minimised. It has an illustration in literally every page, which of course results in having close to meaningless images just to fill in.
About the content itself, it was harder than I expected. Even being short, and even while being marketed as an introduction, a lot of it can get quite complex. I think the book tried to have a very extensive introduction of many aspects of Lacan's thought. While this has its benefits, it cannot go into any single subject very deeply, and thus the explanations have to be shrunk considerably. I think perhaps picking the most important five Lacanian concepts would be more useful, rather than trying to explain thirty different ones in a couple of pages.
Nevertheless, you do get a sense of what Lacan was trying to achieve, and it's not a terribly difficult read, so the book achieves its purpose. If you're completely new to Lacan, you will likely benefit from it. However, I'd look into other options. I just recently discovered that Darian Leader has an introductory book on Lacan. I've read his "What Is Madness?" book which I found excellent, so I have some faith in the author. It's still reasonable short, and perhaps overcomes some of the drawbacks of this book.
It was my first book of this "graphic guide" series. I've seen it all over the place, but I was somewhat sceptical of its quality. But given Lacan seemed hard to read, having a short and introductory book seemed a good idea.
Lacan was a psychoanalyst, heavily influential in the 20th century. He was associated with the Parisian surrealist movement, being Picasso's therapist and acquainted with many artists like Dalí. He was a key figure leading post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics and 20th-century French philosophy.
The book starts with his work on paranoia, which was his doctoral thesis. He recounts the case of Aimée, which tried to stab a well-known Parisian actress. She suffered from ideas of persecution, and the case was famous at the time. According to Lacan, Aimée's identity was outside herself. The actress was the "ideal image", an object of hate and aspiration. This is the starting pointing of a lot of Lacan's thought - how the ego relates to the world, and also how the ego categorizes the world.
The "image" is the identification of the ego with something else. Lacan often presents this illustrating the emerging consciousness of a child which doesn't have an identity yet. The child uses an "image" to gain further knowledge about the world and develop, but this causes the child to be trapped in the "imaginary" - it's trapped in an image alien and outside of herself. Thus, the ego is fragmented because it's only a collection of images. However, it tries to create wholeness and coherence, and it does so by distorting its own image - the falsifying ego.
The signifier is an image, while the signified is a concept. A word (the signifier) does not have an unambiguous and objective that results in the signified. In addition, signifiers form networks, in which each signifier is connected to another one in a large chain, that can't, for the most part, be accessed consciously. This is crucial in Lacan's thought because this is the landscape of the "symbolic", the very organization of our phenomenological world.
This ties together with the previously mentioned development of the child. Not only does the child identify with external images, but it's also shaped by the symbolic universe it's embedded in. Language, in particular, seems to be the most important, since that's the most common signifier. Although it also extends into social and cultural signifiers.
In addition to the Symbolic and Imaginary, Lacan names an extra dimension called the Real. The real is everything that isn't in the symbolic nor the imaginary. Our everyday reality is the symbolic and imaginary, while the real is the "objective reality", something like Kant's noumenal world. Paradoxically and brilliantly, this is exactly what's outside of our reality.
There is a lot more to Lacan's thought, and the book covers a fair bit of work, but this is what I found the most interesting and useful, as far as I understood it. Some of it I found a bit nonsensical, particularly when he tried to develop Freud's ideas. But overall, I regard him as an original and interesting thinker.
Regarding the book format, I think I did quite a nice job, and the illustrations were generally well done. Nevertheless, I felt the illustrations should have been minimised. It has an illustration in literally every page, which of course results in having close to meaningless images just to fill in.
About the content itself, it was harder than I expected. Even being short, and even while being marketed as an introduction, a lot of it can get quite complex. I think the book tried to have a very extensive introduction of many aspects of Lacan's thought. While this has its benefits, it cannot go into any single subject very deeply, and thus the explanations have to be shrunk considerably. I think perhaps picking the most important five Lacanian concepts would be more useful, rather than trying to explain thirty different ones in a couple of pages.
Nevertheless, you do get a sense of what Lacan was trying to achieve, and it's not a terribly difficult read, so the book achieves its purpose. If you're completely new to Lacan, you will likely benefit from it. However, I'd look into other options. I just recently discovered that Darian Leader has an introductory book on Lacan. I've read his "What Is Madness?" book which I found excellent, so I have some faith in the author. It's still reasonable short, and perhaps overcomes some of the drawbacks of this book.
November 29, 2016
My rationale for reading 'Introducing Lacan' was that I aspire one day to finish a book by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is a contemporary left-wing political philosopher who shares my fascination with Robespierre, so of course I want to read his books. Unfortunately, my attempts thus far have been stymied by Žižek's copious use of Lacanian terms (and other philosophical/psychological language that I don't understand). A quick internet search is insufficient to provide clarity, especially as I've never studied psychology.
So, did this book help me understand Lacan's ideas and, by extension, language? Yes, insofar as I previously didn't understand them at all. That said, I think I need to reread this book at least once and maybe read another similar text. I am certainly not ready to explain Lacan's graph of desire, although the idea of it appeals. That said, Lacan is supposed to be difficult, so I'm not surprised. Moreover, I now feel like I want to read more about psychoanalysis, which it turns out is rather fascinating.
The elements of Lacan's work that I found most approachable concerned language (a structure) as distinct from speech (a performance). I liked Lacan's thoughts on the process of assigning meaning to language during childhood. The idea of a chain of signifiers, which reveal meaning in the space between them, is also useful. I've always found the importance of words to human identity and personality very interesting. (At one point, I had this idea that a human soul consists of a tangle of words; I strongly identified human consciousness with use of words. Then I came across a thought experiment - a baby is born that can use none of the five senses and grows up unable to sense their surroundings or communicate. Can they be said to possess consciousness as we understand it? If so, would they spontaneously structure their thoughts in words, without any external example of language to follow? I have no answers, but that thought experiment blew my mind. And ruined any clarity I ever had about whether I believed in a human soul.)
Other terms that I now have at least some understanding of thanks to this book: jouissance, phantasy, transference (which Lacan understood differently to Freud, it seems), and the phallus. I liked the irony of the word phallus being used so frequently at one point in this book that it lost all meaning. This amused me because to Lacan 'the phallus' is (as I understand it) always an absent object, not meaningless but literally meaning nothing(ness). This also made me wonder to what extent the labelling of abstract concepts with gendered words embeds prejudices within psychoanalysis. At the time Freud and Lacan were writing, the feminist critiques of structural misogyny hadn't happened. Moreover, Lacan apparently considered the basis of men's and women's sexuality to be fundamentally different, which apart from any other problems presupposes a strict gender binary. I presume subsequent psychoanalytic theorists have addressed this? Dammit, the problem with reading an introduction to a previously unknown field is that I now want to know more about it.
I suppose in that case this book can be said to have done its work. I feel much better informed about Lacan's life and work, I have learned some of the key terms he used, and there are various concepts which I didn't grasp but might with further research (such as the castration complex, 'not-all', and 'sinthome'). The book was quick to read and flowed well, probably because the cartoons and other imagery seemed better integrated into the text than was the case in 'Introducing Focault'. I particularly liked the illustration used for the concept of a circular square.
So, did this book help me understand Lacan's ideas and, by extension, language? Yes, insofar as I previously didn't understand them at all. That said, I think I need to reread this book at least once and maybe read another similar text. I am certainly not ready to explain Lacan's graph of desire, although the idea of it appeals. That said, Lacan is supposed to be difficult, so I'm not surprised. Moreover, I now feel like I want to read more about psychoanalysis, which it turns out is rather fascinating.
The elements of Lacan's work that I found most approachable concerned language (a structure) as distinct from speech (a performance). I liked Lacan's thoughts on the process of assigning meaning to language during childhood. The idea of a chain of signifiers, which reveal meaning in the space between them, is also useful. I've always found the importance of words to human identity and personality very interesting. (At one point, I had this idea that a human soul consists of a tangle of words; I strongly identified human consciousness with use of words. Then I came across a thought experiment - a baby is born that can use none of the five senses and grows up unable to sense their surroundings or communicate. Can they be said to possess consciousness as we understand it? If so, would they spontaneously structure their thoughts in words, without any external example of language to follow? I have no answers, but that thought experiment blew my mind. And ruined any clarity I ever had about whether I believed in a human soul.)
Other terms that I now have at least some understanding of thanks to this book: jouissance, phantasy, transference (which Lacan understood differently to Freud, it seems), and the phallus. I liked the irony of the word phallus being used so frequently at one point in this book that it lost all meaning. This amused me because to Lacan 'the phallus' is (as I understand it) always an absent object, not meaningless but literally meaning nothing(ness). This also made me wonder to what extent the labelling of abstract concepts with gendered words embeds prejudices within psychoanalysis. At the time Freud and Lacan were writing, the feminist critiques of structural misogyny hadn't happened. Moreover, Lacan apparently considered the basis of men's and women's sexuality to be fundamentally different, which apart from any other problems presupposes a strict gender binary. I presume subsequent psychoanalytic theorists have addressed this? Dammit, the problem with reading an introduction to a previously unknown field is that I now want to know more about it.
I suppose in that case this book can be said to have done its work. I feel much better informed about Lacan's life and work, I have learned some of the key terms he used, and there are various concepts which I didn't grasp but might with further research (such as the castration complex, 'not-all', and 'sinthome'). The book was quick to read and flowed well, probably because the cartoons and other imagery seemed better integrated into the text than was the case in 'Introducing Focault'. I particularly liked the illustration used for the concept of a circular square.
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June 29, 2012السلسلة فى أغلبها عقيمة، تفتقر إلى التدقيق فى المصطلحات، كما أن ترجمتها سيئة رغم تخصص المترجمين، لم يعجبنى غير كتابين أو ثلاثة، كافكا..فالتر بنيامين..والترجمة العربية وليست المصرية من فوكو رغم الخلل أحيانا فى الترجمة
وختاما...الفكرة فى أصلها فاشلة ولا تؤدى غرضها فى التقريب
بس ساعات بيبقى فى صور"كولاج" حلوة
وختاما...الفكرة فى أصلها فاشلة ولا تؤدى غرضها فى التقريب
بس ساعات بيبقى فى صور"كولاج" حلوة
January 8, 2015
Trippy! First book of 2015. Hope to make this year filled with much more informative books about psychology/culture/history.
August 20, 2019
¡Qué difícil intentar hacer un "para principiantes" de Lacan! Condensar 50 años de enseñanza en constante evolución, siempre inacabada, en unas pocas páginas y asumir el reto de hacerlo accesible me parece una labor imposible. A pesar de la imposibilidad, Darian Leader asume el reto y logra un resultado bastante decoroso, recorriendo históricamente los puntos más básicos de los diferentes momentos de la enseñanza lacaniana.
De haberlo leído en otro momento, mi valoración habría sido diferente. Sí lo recomendaría si no se tiene ningún acercamiento previo a la obra de Lacan, para de ahí saltar a otras "Introducciones" como las de Dor o Assoun.
De haberlo leído en otro momento, mi valoración habría sido diferente. Sí lo recomendaría si no se tiene ningún acercamiento previo a la obra de Lacan, para de ahí saltar a otras "Introducciones" como las de Dor o Assoun.
January 16, 2021
Non-fiction comics with explanatory function are in the position of having to defend their own existence, as it is often not clear what additional value the comic offers in contrast to a "normal" introductory text when it comes to explaining complex concepts. In Lacan's case, this becomes especially clear, since the theory in general and individual theory segments in particular are so highly complex that it is impossible to explain, for example, the "castration complex" on one page, 90 percent of which consists of one illustration and the rest of two speech bubbles. That the book tackles Lacan in the chronological order of his seminars and not in thematic order is also a very odd decision for a beginners guide, which adds a lot of confusion.
Unless you are already halfway into Lacan's theory, I would keep my hands off this book.
Unless you are already halfway into Lacan's theory, I would keep my hands off this book.
June 15, 2020
This is maybe the fourth introduction to Lacan I’ve read, and I’m still stumbling mostly in the dark in attempting to understand his more daunting concepts. I will say that this one is especially great in providing examples to illustrate his central concepts and mechanisms. Engulfing, yet basic.
December 13, 2018
Solid introduction, would recommend to anyone who wants to get a basic handle on Lacan. Has lots of pictures!
March 31, 2020
Excellent, simple, easy read and accurate description of a rather pretty difficult writer to read and interpret
November 6, 2018
I've become fascinated and perplexed with Lacan's thinking since first encountering him through Zizek. I came to this hoping to make some more sense of concepts I found intriguing yet still somewhat impenetrable. It did a good job of stating the basics in plain language, but there's a lack of thoroughness here that made it hard for many of them to stick with me. Of course, that's probably symptomatic of it being a bare-minimum introduction to his thought, so it shouldn't be slighted too much for that. There's not much, if any, personality to the writing here—it felt like a somewhat more refined set of flashcards with pictures added in for flavor. Regardless, it still did what was advertised: introduce Lacan.
February 23, 2021
It does a good job of Introducing Lacan. However, I do not think one can understand Lacan even through this book, in one go. (After all, Lacan was a complicated and interesting thinker)I read this book twice and I still go back to it to understand certain concepts. One must read it slowly. The fact that I go back to this book every time proves that it is really good for basic conceptual understanding. The sketches are really good to understand certain difficult points. I really liked how there is massive usage of examples such as Chinese whisper to explain some difficult concepts like the concept of the phallus signifier.
December 20, 2020
I want you to know I’ve given it 3 stars because I couldn’t understand it fully. I’ve gotten an overview of several concepts in psychoanalysis like the oedipal complex, name of the father, jouissance, etc. I’m not embarrassed of not grasping it fully because I believe I’ve gotten enough curiosity to read more on Lacan and Freud and generally the subject of psychology.
July 27, 2022
Valiant effort to attempt to not only make sense of Lacan's whole body of work but also translate this sense into a short account easily digestible for the reader. I confess that after 20% or less I started to lose all sense of meaning and that by the end of the book I was so confused that it actually hurt. However, I don't really blame the authors. I blame Lacan and more importantly Slavoj Zizek who made Lacan sound appealing.
January 28, 2025
Nice introduction to some of the basic ideas of Jacques Lacan’s philosophy and thoughts about the human psyche. Didn’t need the bits about his backstory tbh. Also was still left a bit confused at the end but I think that is to be expected.
January 2, 2018
No, everything about Lacan is not fully elaborated in here (conspicuously absent are Che vuoi? and lamella). Yes, the concepts are rapidly glossed for heuristic value. Lacan's ideas are living, dynamic, preeminently dialectical, or as he himself emphasizes time and again, "topological." You could not breeze through this guide and then demand certification as "a Lacanian," but it's enough to let you know the water is fine, jump in.
January 28, 2021
good summary
September 27, 2021
I was hesitant about reading this book because of possible simplifications in the graphic guide series. But overall, I think it was satisfactory.
November 7, 2021
I suppose it's good. Coz I'm totally confused.
February 10, 2025
Made some unexpected sense
March 15, 2020
A good introduction to Lacan's amazingly abstract formulas and concepts especially if you have some basic knowledge of Freud.
April 9, 2019
The ‘Graphic Guide’ series is very informative, the book itself explores Lacan’s theories in psychoanalysis. Lacan is notorious for being very cryptic so this book was a great help in introducing his ideas.
October 17, 2019
While this is the most accessible explication of Lacan’s ideas that I’ve read, I would still struggle to explain them to anybody. But now, at least, I can try to approach his work with a little more confidence and clarity.
December 1, 2020
I’ve found this book super interesting, finally succeeding in comprehending just a little of the vast works of Lacan. Some entries were very insightful, those “bling” moments of understanding something new, and made me want to study it more.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews