Irrepressible Truth: On Lacans The Freudian Thing [Hardcover]

This book offers readers a uniquely detailed engagement with the ideas of legendary French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The Freudian Thing is one of Lacans most important texts, wherein he explains the significance and stakes of his return to Freud as a passionate defence of Freuds disturbing, epoch-making discovery of the unconscious, against misrepresentations and criticisms of it. However, Lacan is characteristically cryptic in The Freudian Thing. The combination of his writing style and vast range of references renders much of his thinking inaccessible to all but a narrow circle of scholarly specialists. Johnstons Irrepressible Truth opens up the universe of Lacanian psychoanalysis to much wider audiences by furnishing a sentence-by-sentence interpretive unpacking of this pivotal 1955 essay. In so doing, Johnston reveals the precision, rigor, and soundness of Lacans teachings.

Introduction: Returning to the Vienna of Freud.- 1. Situation in Time and Place of this Exercise.- 2. The Adversary.- 3. The Thing Speaks Itself.- 4. Parade.- 5. The Things Order.- 6. Resistance to the Resisters.- 7. Interlude.- 8. The others Discourse.- 9. Imaginary Passion.- 10. Analytic Action.- 11. The Locus of Speech.- 12. Symbolic Debt.- 13. The Training of Analysts to Come.- Conclusion: Taking it to the Dogs.

This book is a textually faithful, painstaking exposition of Lacans seminal ?crits The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis & . The book is stimulating and enlightening (and, importantly, clear) reading for both the uninitiated and initiated alike. (Gregory Trotter, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 51, 2018)

Adrian Johnston is a Professor in the Department of Philosopls)