Introduction

This book is about the clinical practice of psychoanalysis as catalyst of personal change and its intersection with social change. Psychoanalysis contains resources aplenty to enable us to produce a theoretical articulation of the historical constitution of its own practice, and I seize the opportunity Jacques Lacan offers to examine the implications for the place of the clinic as such. This introduction sets out some of the ground for that theoretical articulation; it includes a brief account of what we might expect to ®nd in a Lacanian psychoanalytic session, an extended metaphor for Lacan's divinely-comedic vision of the core of psychoanalysis, and then a review of some assumptions that we will need to make before we really get going on the journey into the book.