Language and the unconscious

by Hermann Lang

Hermann Lang's Language and the Unconscious is the standard introduction to the "philosophical" psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan in Germany. His treatise advances the thesis that the unifying force behind the Lacanian oeuvre is the efficacy of the "talking cure" itself. This approach allows the reader to understand Lacan's relationship to Freud, to structuralism and to the philosophical concerns of Heidegger and Gadamer. Finally, Lang's interpretation of Lacan also has returns for students' of hermeneutics and literary theory; his correlation between hermeneutics and the Lacanian subject expands the language of the former, allowing an approach to subjectivity not compromised by the assumptions of post-Cartesian modern metaphysics.