Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and identification in psychology and psychoanalysis

Many first-time readers of Jacques Lacan come to his work via psychology, a discipline that Lacan was notoriously antagonistic toward. Six Moments in Lacan takes up the dual challenge of introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis to an audience interested in psychology, while also stressing the fundamental differences between the two disciplines. Punctuated by lively examples, Six Moments in Lacan demonstrates the distinctive value of Lacanian concepts in approaching afresh topics such as communication, identity, otherness and inter-subjectivity.

Avoiding the jargon and wilful obscurity that so often accompanies expositions of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories, this book puts Lacanian ideas to work in practical and illuminating ways. A handful of concepts, draw from distinct moments in Lacan’s teaching, are contextualized and explained, and applied to the task of exploring the ‘psychological’ and unconscious dimensions of everyday life. Notions such as the ‘big Other’, ‘full’ versus ‘empty’ speech, logical time, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ identification, and the idea of ‘the master signifier’ are brought to life via popular cultural references. Revitalizing several Freudian and Lacanian concepts for everyday use, Six Moments in Lacan asks – and answers – a series of compelling questions:

• Why is it that each instance of speech implies a listener?
• Why is the notion of subjectivity inadequate when it comes to the ‘trans-subjective’ nature of language?
• Is it possible to elaborate a ‘non-psychological’ theory of identification?
• Why is a Lacanian approach to ‘the subject’ so at odds with models proposed by psychology?

Six Moments in Lacan provides an accessible and highly engaging introduction to Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis, aimed at early practitioners and students in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and those studying upper undergraduate and postgraduate level psychology.

Derek Hook is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University and an Extraordinary Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics and Birkbeck College, he is the author of A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial and (Post)apartheid Conditions.