Lacanian Treatment: Psychoanalysis for Clinicians

Secret wishes, forbidden pleasures, and painful memories hide below the false bottom of consciousness. How do we decipher the desire and pleasure located between the words spoken in psychotherapeutic treatment, and how can we identify and interpret them? This book, following the author’s previous work which focused mainly on Lacanian theory, is dedicated to the practice of psychological treatment. Given its general clarity, the book can also be useful to those who are not deeply versed in Lacanian thinking.

How does one interpret symptoms, dreams, and other expressions of the unconscious? What is transference, and how is it put to work in treatment? How do we work with anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies and other types of distress? What is the Lacanian approach to these things? How does diagnosis relate to how we orient the treatment? And, finally, what is the secret of termination of the treatment, which happens to coincide with the analyst’s training process? Though this book primarily addresses therapists (and not necessarily psychoanalysts), and patients, as well, will recognize themselves, and find something of use, in these pages.