Reading Order
ÉcritsÉcrits Reading Order
Écrits (1966) by Jacques Lacan is the collected version of Lacan's major papers and seminars from 1936 to 1966 — the foundational document of Lacanian psychoanalysis and one of the most difficult, most influential, and most contested texts in twentieth-century French thought. Lacan was the dominant figure in French psychoanalysis from the 1950s until his death in 1981, and his seminars at the École Normale Supérieure attracted the most important French intellectuals of the period: Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Kristeva all attended or engaged with them. Lacan's central contribution was the 'return to Freud' — a reading of Freud through Saussurean linguistics (the unconscious is structured like a language) and through Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology (the Oedipus complex as a kinship structure) — that transformed psychoanalysis into a structural and eventually post-structural discipline. The most important individual texts in the Écrits include: 'Le stade du miroir' (the mirror stage, 1936/1949), the essay 'L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient' (1957), and the 'Séminaire sur La Lettre volée' (the analysis of Poe's purloined letter).
Where to start
Read the Écrits after reading introductions — Lacan's prose is genuinely difficult and requires preparation. Dylan Evans's An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996) and Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis are excellent preparations. Start with 'Le stade du miroir' (the shortest and most accessible text), then 'L'Instance de la lettre.' The Seminars (especially Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis) are generally more accessible than the Écrits.
Complete Écrits Book List
- 1Buy
Écrits
Jacques Lacan·1966·The collected papers — genuinely difficult; read 'Le stade du miroir' first; then 'L'Instance de la lettre'; an introductory dictionary is essential preparation - 2Buy
Le Séminaire XI: Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse
Jacques Lacan·1973·The Four Fundamental Concepts — the most accessible Lacan Seminar; the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive; the best entry after the Écrits introduction - 3Buy
Le Séminaire VII: L'Éthique de la psychanalyse
Jacques Lacan·1986·The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — the most philosophically rich seminar; Antigone, Das Ding, the ethics of the real; read after Seminar XI - 4Buy
Encore: Le Séminaire XX
Jacques Lacan·1975·Encore — the feminist and post-structuralist Lacan; sexuation, jouissance, the not-all; the late Lacan that Irigaray and Kristeva both responded to; read last - 5Buy
The Language of the Self
Jacques Lacan·1968·Anthony Wilden's translation with commentary of 'Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse' — the best introduction to the single most important text in the Écrits
Écrits — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the mirror stage?
The mirror stage ('Le stade du miroir,' 1936/1949) is Lacan's account of the moment (between six and eighteen months) when the infant, who experiences its body as fragmented and uncoordinated, encounters its image in a mirror and identifies with it — producing a sense of totality and unity that precedes and forms the basis for the ego. The mirror stage is the founding moment of alienation: the subject identifies with its image (the Imaginary), which is always already outside itself, always a fiction of wholeness. The real body — fragmented, lacking, inchoate — is covered over by the mirror image, and this covering-over is the structure of the ego. The mirror stage establishes the three registers of Lacanian theory: the Imaginary (the register of the image and the ego), the Symbolic (the register of language and the law of the father), and the Real (the register of what cannot be symbolized).
What does 'the unconscious is structured like a language' mean?
Lacan's most famous formula — 'l'inconscient est structuré comme un langage' — is a reinterpretation of Freud's theory of the unconscious through Saussurean linguistics. Freud described two mechanisms of the unconscious: condensation (one image or idea representing many) and displacement (affect transferred from one idea to another). Lacan identifies these with the Saussurean linguistic mechanisms of metaphor (substitution of one signifier for another) and metonymy (association by contiguity). The unconscious does not contain repressed content (desires, memories, images) that psychology can uncover; it is a structure of signifiers, whose meaning is always deferred, always metonymic, never arriving at a final signified. The subject is constituted by this structure — the subject is what is represented by a signifier for another signifier.
What is the Lacanian Real?
The Real (not to be confused with 'reality') is the third of Lacan's three registers, alongside the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Real is what resists symbolization — what cannot be represented in language or image. It is not the external world (which is always already mediated by language) but the dimension of experience that language and image cannot capture: trauma, jouissance, the Thing (Das Ding), death. The Real is encountered only in its effects: in symptoms, in the breakdown of symbolic meaning, in the repetition compulsion that Freud identified as the death drive. In Lacan's later work, the Real becomes increasingly important and the ethical question becomes how to orient oneself in relation to it — how to act in a way that acknowledges rather than evades the impossibility at the heart of the subject.
What was the controversy around Lacan?
Lacan was one of the most controversial figures in French intellectual life. His seminar teaching method (which involved theatrical performances, obscure wordplay, mathematical formulae, and deliberate obscurity) was celebrated by his followers as the appropriate form for transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge and denounced by his critics as a cult. His dissolution in 1980 of his own institution, the École Freudienne de Paris, by letter ('Je fais École, on peut dire' — 'I make a School, one might say') was both a theatrical gesture and a genuine organizational disaster. He was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963 for his controversial teaching techniques (shortened sessions, variable-length sessions). His influence on French intellectual life was enormous — Althusser, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray, and many others were formed in dialogue with his seminars.
What is the analysis of the purloined letter?
The 'Séminaire sur La Lettre volée' (Seminar on The Purloined Letter, 1955/1966) is Lacan's analysis of Poe's detective story — his most accessible and most discussed piece of literary criticism. Lacan argues that the story is not about a letter (whose content we never learn) but about the letter as a signifier: the point is that whoever possesses the letter is possessed by it — the Queen, the Minister, and eventually Dupin are all determined by their position in relation to the letter, regardless of what the letter says. The analysis illustrates Lacan's claim that the subject is a position in a symbolic structure rather than an autonomous agent, and it generated one of the most celebrated debates in French theory when Derrida challenged Lacan's interpretation in 'Le Facteur de la vérité' (1975).
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