Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction

Elizabeth Grosz focuses on the controversial texts of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, analysing and assessing them from a feminist point of view. Designed as an introductory text for students of psychoanalysis and feminism, it places Lacan’s work in the context of Freud’s writings and contemporary debates generated in French intellectual and political life. In particular the back outlines Lacan’s subversive conceptualisation of the human subject as a fundamentally divided being; split bilogically, sexually, linguistically and socially. Lacan’s account of the genesis of the ego, his understanding of the sexual drives and his notion of the ‘unconscious structured like a language’ provide the background needed to conceptualise how he understands relations between the sexes, especially love relations. The book also provides a background for understanding the contributions of the French ‘feminists of difference’, particularly Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, to contemporary debates within Feminist theory.