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Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners.

Article Excerpt
Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 301 pp., ISBN 978-0-393-70508-9, $35.00 (hardcover).

Lacan's psychoanalytic theory has often been left out of clinical practice in dominant psychoanalytic milieu, because his work is hard to read. Lacan's oeuvre, however, is rich, rigorous, and useful for psychoanalysts and practitioners of psychology, because it allows us to conceptualize the analysand based more on an in-depth structural perspective and to understand his or her specific symptoms (or presenting problems) in relation to the symbolic Other. Failing to theorize the analysand's relational structure to the symbolic Other, we also fail to listen effectively and connect his or her manifested symptoms with unconscious signifiers and with deeper theoretical formulations of his or her positions in regard to trauma, anxiety, guilt, and the fundamental fantasy. Whereas neo-Freudian practitioners shift their interests from the contents of the unconscious to the analyses of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors and transference issues, Lacan contends that the neo-Freudian school of thought misreads Freud and ignores analysand's unconscious discourses by reducing their desires to the analysts' own demands, identifications, and interpretations of what is real and unreal.

Bruce Fink's anthology, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioner, is a fervent, an appealing, and a unique...

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