New Books In Psychoanalysis

How can Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” shed light on Lacan’s maxim, “The unconscious is structured like a language?” In Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), professor Derek Hook thoroughly investigates and explains a number of Lacan’s major concepts from his structuralist period, making them accessible to a wide-ranging audience with reference to entertaining examples from popular culture. Hook argues that, while the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis share certain questions and premises, we must, as Lacan insisted, remain alert to the radical disjunction between the objectifying aims of psychology and psychoanalysis’s unique attention to the subject, conceived as an event in language. In this interview, we hear Derek explain several of his book’s key arguments, explore the clinical dimensions of Lacanian theory, and, alongside Derek’s illuminating commentary, listen to Richard Nixon confess his respon