This volume is based on a year's seminar 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. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.

Includes index.

Excommunication -- Unconscious and repetition: Freudian unconscious and ours; Of the subject of certainty; Of the network of signifiers; Tuché and automaton -- Of the gaze as Objet petit a: Split between the eye and the gaze; Anamorphosis; Line and light; What is a picture? -- Transference and the drive: Presence of the analyst; Analysis and truth or the closure of the unconscious; Sexuality in the defiles of the signifier; Deconstruction of the drive; Partial drive and its circuit; From love to the libido -- Field of the other and back to the transference: Subject and the other, alienation; Subject and the other, aphanisis; Of the subject who is supposed to know, of the first dyad and of the good; From interpretation to the transference -- To conclude: In you more than you.