Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Overture to this Collection’ to ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’

Reading Lacan's Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan's Écrits to be published in English, providing an indispensable companion piece to some of Lacan's best-known but notoriously challenging writings.

With the contributions of some of the world's most renowned Lacanian scholars and analysts, Reading Lacan's Écrits encompasses a series of systematic, paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries that not only contextualise, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments but also afford the reader multiple interpretive routes through the complete edition of Lacan's most labyrinthine of texts. Considering the significance of Écrits as a landmark in the history of psychoanalysis, this far-reaching and accessible guide will sustain and continue to animate critical engagement with one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century.

These volumes act as an essential and incisive reference-text for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers. This volume covers the first two sections of the Écrits, providing close readings of the first eight essays.

Calum Neill is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Continental Philosophy at Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of Jacques Lacan: The Basics (2023), Ethics and Psychology (2016) and Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumptions of Subjectivity and editor of Lacanian Perspectives on Blade Runner 2049. With Derek Hook, he edits the Palgrave Lacan Series.

Derek Hook is Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, USA, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan (2017) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial (2012) and editor of Lacan on Depression and Melancholia (with Stijn Vanheule) (2022) and Lacan and Race (with Sheldon George) (2022). With Calum Neill, he edits the Palgrave Lacan Series.

Stijn Vanheule is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, a practising psychoanalyst and a member of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. He is author of Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited (2017) and The Subject of Psychosis (2011) and editor of Lacan on Depression and Melancholia (with Derek Hook) (2022).