Studying Lacan’’s Seminar VI: Dream, Symptom, and the Collapse of Subjectivity

The second volume in the Studying Lacan’s Seminars series, this book is the first comprehensive study of Lacan’s Seminar VI: Desire and its Interpretation. A natural companion to Bruce Fink’s recent translation of the seminar into English (2019), this book offers a genuine opportunity to delve deeply into the seminar, and a hospitable introduction to Lacan’s teachings of the 1950s.

This important book brings together various aspects of Cox Cameron’s teachings and systematic, careful, and critical readings of Seminar VI. Lacan’s theorizing and conceptualizing of the object a, the fundamental fantasy, and aphanisis, as well as the ambiguous treatment of the phallus in his work at the time, are all introduced, contextualized, and explored in detail. The trajectories of his thinking are traced in terms of future developments and elaborations in the seminars that follow closely on the heels of Seminar VI - Seminars VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis), VIII (Transference), IX (Identification), and X (Anxiety). Consideration is also given to how certain themes and motifs are recapitulated or reworked in his later teachings such as in Seminars XX (Encore), and XXIII (The Sinthome). Also included in this volume are two further essays by Cox Cameron, a most valuable critique of the concept of the phallus in Lacan’s theories of the 1950s, and an overview of Seminar VI originally presented as a keynote address to the APW congress in Toronto 2014.

The book is of great interest to Lacanian scholars and students, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts interested in Lacan’s teachings of the 1950s and in how important concepts developed during this period are treated in his later work.

Dr. Olga Cox Cameron’s first career was in literary studies, having written an M.A. thesis on Proust, worked as a tutor in the Department of French at University College, Dublin, and started - but not completed - a Ph. D. on Beckett at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Following a decade of working with homeless people in Dublin she trained as a psychoanalyst at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and has been in private practice for the past thirty-two years. She lectured in Psychoanalytic Theory and in Psychoanalysis and Literature at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and Trinity College from 1991 to 2013 and has published numerous articles on these topics in national and international journals. She is the founder of the annual Irish Psychoanalytic Film festival, now in its twelfth year.

Dr. Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and Lacanian scholar in Dublin. She is the founder of the Dublin Lacan study group. She has published widely on the theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: on and off the couch with Stephanie Swales. She is series editor for Studying Lacan’s Seminars published by Routledge. The first volume in the series Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire was published in 2019.