ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to the volume of essays devoted to the study of Lacan’s Seminars IV and V spanning the years 1956–1958. The background to the volume is explained, and a frame for understanding the flow of the work is provided. There are 16 chapters from contributors who are psychoanalysts, and/or psychoanalytic scholars from around the globe writing about themes emerging from the study of the two seminars: Lacan’s critique of object-relations theory; Lacan’s conceptualisation of phobia and fetish; Lacan’s introduction to the concept of lack and its attendant operations of privation, frustration, and castration; Lacan’s theorisation of the phallus as signifier; Lacan’s commentary on comedy and Witz; Lacan’s development of the graph of desire; Lacan’s conceptualisation of obsessional neurotic desire.
