Abstracts and Book Reviews

S AND BOOK REVIEWS Jacques Lacan. The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan: Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 11: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. Catherine Clement. The Weary Sons of Freud. Translated by Nicole Ball. London & New York: Verso, 1987. Lacan's central theme in his first two seminars is that the essence of the Freudian discovery is the decentering of the subject in relation to the ego; this places him in head-on conflict with American ego psychology, and allows him to develop what is to be his monumental lifework in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. Brilliant, never quite graspable, immense in their range, these two books are compulsory reading and re-reading for anyone concerned with Freudian theory and with its elucidation and reshaping by Lacan. His themes range from repression, resistance, narcissism, desire and object-relations theory, to questions concerning meaning, beyond the pleasure principle, the Freudian schemata of the psychic apparatus, and Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter. Irrupting through this, notably in the two magnificently developed passages concerning Freud's dream of Irma's injection (Book 11, 146-71) and the discussion of Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus (Book 11, 229-33), are the great bloody flowers of a Lacanian