The Clinical Lacan

"The Clinical Lacan" is a guide to Lacanian psychoanalytic practice. It elucidates the concept of psychic structure that distinguishes neurosis, psychosis and the perversions and is so seminal in Lacan's theory. With the help of exciting clinical examples, Dor explains the crucial difference between symptoms - that is, what can be phenomenologically grasped - and the actual psychic structure of the subject, a structure that can be revealed only through the discourse of the patient in the psychoanalytic situation. Yet "The Clinical Lacan" is not a book directed exclusively to clinicians. Anyone interested in psychoanalysis will find much food for thought in these clinical descriptions. Dor makes it clear that pathology and subjectivity are tightly interwoven, so that readers themselves will be involved in the text as they wonder which psychic structure is their own. According to Dor, each of us is situated in our intersubjective world with a specific way of desiring and wanting to be desired. What this book reveals is that we spend most of our lives unwittingly working out the meaning of sexual difference. "The Clinical Lacan" is faithful to the ethics of psychoanalysis in that it rigorously distinguishes its field from that of social reality. What psychoanalysis discovers is the intersubjective reality of the unconscious, the dynamics that operate "behind our backs". Thus in Dor's text, fetishism, transsexualism, transvestism, hysteria and obsessional neurosis are never presented as deviations from a norm but rather as specific modes of desiring and constituting one's subjectivity. In this sense, "The Clinical Lacan" constitutes a challenge to the recent attempt of American psychoanalysis and psychiatry to revise the diagnostic nosography of sexual orientations and practices so as to accommodate to the climate of "political correctness".