Lacan Book Review

Zia Muhammad
English -520
Dr. Waseem Anwar
Review on “JACQUES LACAN” by Sean Homer
Routledge Critical Thinkers is an accessible introduction to the key figures in contemporary critical thought. The books provide crucial orientation for further study and equip readers to engage with theorists ' original texts. The volumes in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series place each key theorist in his or her historical and intellectual context and explain: why he or she is important, what motivated his or her work, what his or her key ideas are, who and what influenced the thinker, who and what the thinker has influenced, what to read next and why. Featuring extensively annotated guides to further reading, Routledge Critical Thinkers is the first point

Deeply controversial, Lacan’s work has transformed psychoanalysis as a theory of the unconscious mind. Lacanian thought now pervades the disciplines of literary and film studies, women’s studies and social theory. From the perspective of literary studies, the discovery of Lacan in the mid-1970s, initially by feminist and Marxist literary critics, revitalized and reinstated psychoanalysis at the cutting edge of critical theory. This book provide a good deal of contrast between Lacan and Traditional Freudian; it locate how Lacan filled the gaps emerged due to traditional approach to Psychoanalysis. After much initial enthusiasm for Freudian and post-Freudian readings of literature for an account of classical Freudian readings, psychoanalytic criticism had degenerated into the reductive practice of identifying Oedipal scenarios within texts and spotting phallic symbolism. Lacan’s conception of the unconscious as structured like a language and the relationship between the symbolic order and the subject opened up a whole new way of understanding the play of unconscious desire in the text. The object of psychoanalytic criticism was no longer to hunt for phallic symbols or to explain Hamlet’s hesitation to revenge his father’s death by his repressed sexual desire for his mother but to analyse the way unconscious desires manifest themselves in the

The most wonderful thing about this study guide is that Homer actually places the key terms and theories into a theoretical and historical context. In the back of the book he has not only added some suggestions for further reading, but has also added a section called 'After Lacan ', which contains short summaries of the development that some aspects of his theories have undergone since Lacan wrote them. In addition to mapping out how key ideas evolved in the course of Lacan 's work, this book provides ample philosophical and theoretical context (Structuralism, Phenomenology, Anthropology, Heidegger, Husserl, Levi Strauss, Roman Jakobson etc...) for understanding the origins and development of Lacan 's