A compact route into Lacan’s notoriously difficult body of work.

Here we have some essays from him about subjectivity, language and psychoanalysis; mostly compulsory to bump into at least superficially if you enjoy reading or engaging with twentieth-century theory. Here are the famous arguments around the mirror stage, aggressivity, the unconscious structured like a language, speech, desire, our 'self'; through the symbolic systems through which the self becomes thinkable at all.

Lacan’s recurring provocation is that the subject is never simply master of their own meaning: language precedes us, desire arrives entangled with others, and the ego itself is partly an artefact of misrecognition. Dense, combative and frequently very funny in the peculiar way only an extremely serious French psychoanalyst can be, these essays became foundational across psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary theory, feminism, film studies and structuralism/post-structuralism. Translated by Alan Sheridan, this remains one of the standard English entry points into Lacan.

Tavistock Publications, 1980 paperback edition; first English translation published 1977. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. Good. General shelf and edge wear, light creasing and rubbing to covers; internally clean and firmly bound.