The Three Times of the Law: The Stunning Commandment, the Injunction of the Superego, and Musical Invocation

Literary Nonfiction. What is there in language that is so dreadful that, most often, man assents to it only in order to chatter rather than to speak? This book proposes a radically novel approach to the enigma of the superego, one of the most relevant and least developed aspects of analytic practice. Continuing a private dialogue with Lacan (who made it public in his last seminars), Alain Didier-Weill articulates the relation between invocatory drives and music, dance and painting. THE THREE TIMES OF THE LAW, first published in 1995 and reprinted many times in France and South America where it is considered a classic, appears now for the first time in English.

Alain Didier-Weill is a psychoanalyst and a playwright. A former member of the École freudienne de Paris, he co-founded Le Coût freudien and, in 2002, created Mouvement Insistance: art psychanalysis, politics. His many publications include Invocations (1998), Lila et la lumière de Vermeer (2003), Un mystère plus lointain que l'inconscient (2010), Quartier Lacan (2010), Qu'est-ce que le surmoi? (2016), and many plays. His monograph, Théâtre, was published in 2010. His widely performed plays include Vienna 1913 (2003), Memoires de Satan (2004), and Freud-Einstein Mai 1933 (2016). THE THREE TIMES OF THE LAW: THE STUNNING COMMANDMENT, THE INJUNCTION OF THE SUPEREGO, AND MUSICAL INVOCATION is his most recent translated book (Agincourt Press / The Sea Horse, 2017)