Ecrits

Ecrits gathers the papers in which Jacques Lacan set out his return to Freud, and this edition, translated by Bruce Fink and published in 2006, was the first to render the whole collection in English. The volume runs from the 1949 paper on the mirror stage through the Rome report on the function and field of speech and language, the essay on the instance of the letter, the paper on psychosis and the paternal metaphor, and the long text on the direction of the treatment. Across these papers Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language, that the signifier governs the subject, and that speech is the medium in which analysis works. The writing is deliberately difficult; the argument doubles back, puns, and withholds. For the clinician who works with Lacan, the book supplies the primary texts themselves, in an accurate translation, with Lacan's own cross-references and Fink's editorial apparatus for orientation.