In 1978 I went to Paris to study psychoanalysis, attending Jacques Lacan’s seminar for its three final years. Lacan’s seminar, by then very famous, had been running weekly then fortnightly for a quarter of a century. While the seminar was about the training—‘formation’, as the French say—of psychoanalysts, it attracted a broad audience of sometimes a thousand people interested in his teaching. Despite the size of the audience, for Lacan his seminar was never just a place for the transmission of a body of knowledge; it also acted as the crucible of his thinking. It is where he developed, elaborated and articulated his unique contribution to the field of psychoanalysis. The result of this is often a freshness and excitement about the seminars that comes through, even in reading, even in translation.

As a psychoanalyst involved in the teaching and transmission of psychoanalysis, I’ve read and studied the transcripts of his earlier seminars and I’ve also translated a couple for Norton: Seminar III, The Psychoses was published in 1992 and Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis will appear in 2006. The translations of Lacan available in English to date are somewhat scattered, the work of at least six different translators and a variety of publishers.