Colette Soler - What Lacan said about women: A Psychoanalytic Study

Series Editor: Frances Restuccia, Professor of English, Boston College

Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture

Muriel Dimen and Virginia Goldner, eds.

Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory

Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic, eds.

Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan

Luke Thurston, ed.

Art: Sublimation or Symptom

Parveen Adams, ed.

Lacan and Contemporary Film

Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, eds.

What Lacan Said about Women: A Psychoanalytic Study

Colette Soler

Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect In and Beyond Psychoanalysis

Karyn Ball, ed.

We are honored and thrilled to include the work of such a dazzling, erudite Lacanian as Colette Soler in Other Presss Contemporary Theory Series. Solers What Lacan Said about Women takes refreshing risks in broadening the field of psychoanalysis, especially by entering the cultural studies arena. With the exquisite prose and penetrating insights that she is famous for, Colette Soler, in this candid new text, shares her psychoanalytic, theoretical, and clinical expertise as well as her astute perceptions about social issues now throwing our world into turmoil.

Winner of the Prix Psych for the best work published in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis in 2003, What Lacan Said about Women addresses cultural critics, especially those in gender and womens studies, along with anyone involved in clinical practice and/or contemporary theory. This study has the ability to transform neophytes within the field of Lacanian theory into informed thinkers; and it can substantially supplement and refine the knowledge of those who think of themselves as Lacanian veterans.

Soler spins out a seductive explication of Lacans thought on the controversial questionwhich never fails to intrigueof sexual difference. She takes up other steamy Lacanian topics as well, again with the subtlety that these topics deserve: Lacans conception of Woman and her relation to masochism, femininity and hysteria, love and death, and the impossible sexual relation. Pushing beyond what has already been established, What Lacan Said about Women also addresses more down-to-earth topics such as depression in Lacan, why depressives are unloved, and the mother in the unconscious after the empire of the father has fallen. Solers analysis teases out the implications of the texts that Lacan produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, linking them to pertinent cultural preoccupations such as the effects of science on contemporary conceptions of the feminine and transformations of the institutions of the family and marriage.

Solers genius lurks in the details, however. It is due to its delicacy and precision that What Lacan Said about Women opens up psychical spaceat a time when such fragile space is critically threatened by multiple forces of robotic banalization operating within our increasingly virtual society. As a result Solers writing, like great art and literature, can have the crucial impact of enabling its readers to rediscover interiority as constitutive of the world.

With this new study, elegantly translated by John Holland, Other Presss Contemporary Theory Series once again presents rich Lacanian work. We reiterate that our interest is in smart theoretical writing of all stripes and that we put a premium on studies with vital practical consequences that expose the overlap of theory with the mundane. This series welcomes all theory being done currently in, for example, film studies, aesthetics, and feminist, queer, and other political contexts.

Frances L. Restuccia

Series Editor