Lacan on Desire

“This extraordinary introduction to Lacan’s thinking starts with the clarification of ‘desire,’ but then expands into a comprehensive, clear, and profound review of Lacan’s entire theory and clinical approach. There is no other text I know of that translates Lacan's formulations so perfectly. It provides new focus and depth to contemporary controversies in psychoanalytic thinking.”

—Otto Kernberg, Professor Emeritus, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York

“Why don’t we want what we want? In this eloquent guide to one of Lacan’s most important and misunderstood concepts, Bruce Fink blends clinical insight and theoretical clarity, shedding light on what animates us—desire. Fink turns desire inside out, showing how Lacan pushes Freud beyond the Oedipal. This compelling book also provides profound clinical insights into the complex nature of desire, thus appealing to students as well as practitioners.”

—Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis

“In this book, Bruce Fink delves into one of the seminars he translated: Desire and Its Interpretation. He explains and contextualizes the key problems Lacan was working on during that era of his teaching, providing an outstanding standalone discussion of core concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis.”

 —Stijn Vanheule, Ghent University, author of Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy

This companion to Lacan’s Seminar VI guides readers through an examination of desire, fantasy, dream interpretation, death, object a, and the signifier of the lack in the Other. It includes both close textual analysis and illustrative clinical vignettes.

Fink’s discussion of the seminar constitutes a timely intervention for clinicians, for whom an engagement with desire is crucial to the direction of the treatment, and for students and scholars interested in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, comparative literature, art, film, and social and political theory, for whom desire, fantasy, and object a may be useful conceptual tools.

Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He has authored nine books on Lacan and has translated many of his works into English, including Écrits and Seminars VI, VIII, XVI, XVIII, and XX.