Irrepressible Truth

This book offers readers a uniquely detailed engagement with the ideas of legendary French psychoanalyst Jacques Laca
n. The Freudian Thing
is one of Lacan s most important texts, wherein he explains the significance and stakes of his return to Freud as a passionate defence of Freud s disturbing, epoch-making discovery of the unconscious, against misrepresentations and criticisms of it. However, Lacan is characteristically cryptic in
The Freudian Thing
. The combination of his writing style and vast range of references renders much of his thinking inaccessible to all but a narrow circle of scholarly specialists. Johnston s Irrepressible Truth opens up the universe of Lacanian psychoanalysis to much wider audiences by furnishing a sentence-by-sentence interpretive unpacking of this pivotal 1955 essay. In so doing, Johnston reveals the precision, rigor, and soundness of Lacan s teachings.

Introduction: Returning to the Vienna of Freud. - 1. Situation in Time and Place of this Exercise. - 2. The Adversary. - 3. The Thing Speaks Itself. - 4. Parade. - 5. The Thing s Order. - 6. Resistance to the Resisters. - 7. Interlude. - 8. The other s Discourse. - 9. Imaginary Passion. - 10. Analytic Action. - 11. The Locus of Speech. - 12. Symbolic Debt. - 13. The Training of Analysts to Come. - Conclusion: Taking it to the Dogs.