Studying Lacan's Seminars IV and V

"A stellar constellation of readers analyze two of Lacan’s major seminars here, one on our relation to the object and the other on "unconscious formations" like dreams, daydreams, and fantasies. Fascinating work will be found here on phobia, fetishism, and perversion more generally, as well as on witticisms, lack, metaphor, the phallus, castration, and clinical practice with children and adults." --Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst, author of several books on Freud and Lacan, translator into English of Lacan’s Ecrits and Seminars VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, VIII: Transference, and XX: Encore

"At last, a scholarly examination of Lacan’s Seminars IV and V by practitioners who know how to read Lacan and show us the intimate link between conceptual developments and clinical work. This book couples two seminars, enabling us to trace the to and fro in Lacan’s Seminar between subject and signifier, and here from lack to desire." --Ian Parker, Psychoanalyst, Secretary Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix.

"Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V represents a fundamental breakthrough in the understanding of Jacques Lacan’s thought. Through a series of fecund essays unpacking the intricacies of two of the more difficult early seminars, this volume sheds light on key problems like phobia, the phallus, and lack. Anyone who wants to know anything about the psychoanalytic project must view the collection that Carol Owens and Nadezhda Almquist have put together as utterly essential." -- Professor Todd McGowan, University of Vermont

"As if live-streaming the seminars, this excellent collection highlights Lacan’s contemporary relevance by putting it into action. Punctuated with clinical material, the book moves with ease between theory and practice, astutely deploying controversial psychoanalytic notions such as lack, desire, and the phallus. Drawing useful distinctions between phobias, fetishism, and perversion, the authors explain the clinical use of dreams and jokes. These forceful essays, all written with verve and clarity, set a model for the transmission of psychoanalysis while providing an indispensable companion to Lacan’s seminars IV and V." --Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017)