#000513
Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
Shoshana Felman
A lucid, ambitious study of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan by the literary theorist Shoshana Felman. Rather than reduce Lacan's famously difficult teaching to doctrine, Felman reads it as an ongoing "adventure of insight"—a self-questioning practice of interpretation modeled on Freud's own restless method. She shows how Lacan renewed the very act of reading, then turns that lens on literature and culture, including a celebrated reading of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and the question of what difference psychoanalysis makes to how we understand ourselves. Compact at under two hundred pages and published by Harvard, it became an influential entry point to Lacan for readers in literary studies, more concerned with the movement of thought than with clinical technique. Demanding but rewarding, it speaks to anyone drawn to psychoanalysis as a way of reading the world.
more…less ▴
The author
Shoshana Felman (b. 1942) is a literary critic and theorist, long a professor at Yale and later at Emory, and a leading figure in bringing psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading into American literary studies. Her later work on testimony and trauma (notably with Dori Laub) is widely cited; this book belongs to her earlier, Lacan-centered phase.
The subject
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was among the most influential and most contested figures in twentieth-century psychoanalysis, famous for his "return to Freud," his notoriously opaque seminars, and ideas like the mirror stage and the unconscious "structured like a language." Admirers see genius; critics, including some outside the field, have questioned the rigor and clarity of his thought. Felman writes from within the admiring tradition.
How to read it
As a work of literary theory more than a clinical primer. It assumes patience with abstraction and some prior footing in Freud, but rewards it by making Lacan's method—reading as discovery rather than decoding—unusually graspable. It has aged into a respected secondary source, though readers should know it presents Lacan sympathetically rather than critically.
For more context
Pair with a general introduction to Lacan for balance, and with Felman's Testimony to see where her thinking went next.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Shoshana Felman
- Publisher
- Harvard University Press
- Place of publication
- Cambridge, MA
- Year
- 1987
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado