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Jacques Lacan: The Basics
Jacques The Basics provides a clear and succinct introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan, one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century.
Lacan's ideas are applied in the study of the humanities, politics, and psychology as well as contemporary media and the arts, but their complexity makes them impenetrable to many. This book is unique in explaining the key concepts and context, from Lacan's understanding of psychoanalysis to drive and desire, in an accessible way without diluting them beyond meaning. Examples from popular culture are used throughout to emphasise the ideas being discussed and a full glossary and list of resources for further reading encourages additional exploration.
This engaging and accessible text is essential reading for all those interested in Lacan and his work, as well as students of psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, politics, cultural studies, film studies, and more.
Lacan's ideas are applied in the study of the humanities, politics, and psychology as well as contemporary media and the arts, but their complexity makes them impenetrable to many. This book is unique in explaining the key concepts and context, from Lacan's understanding of psychoanalysis to drive and desire, in an accessible way without diluting them beyond meaning. Examples from popular culture are used throughout to emphasise the ideas being discussed and a full glossary and list of resources for further reading encourages additional exploration.
This engaging and accessible text is essential reading for all those interested in Lacan and his work, as well as students of psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, politics, cultural studies, film studies, and more.
168 pages, ebook
Published June 27, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 23, 2024
This is a really useful book for people who want to know more about Jacques Lacan. Now, I can't claim to know and understand all that Lacan put forward having read the book, but I'm certainly closer to understanding some things.
What this book does really well is explain the ideas of OTHER people in the areas of language and pyschoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure who have influenced Lacan and whose ideas he has built and expanded upon.
Slavoj Zizek is a strong believer in Lacan's theories and like Zizek Calum Neill introduces modern-day cultural references into his book including the TV series Succession, the film Spider-Man No Way Home, and the children's book The Missing Place.
I enjoyed reading this again and I will keep this book, to use as a reference. At the end of every chapter is a chapter summary with bullet points outlining the important parts, should the reader have not understood.
The aim of psychoanalysis is not to be 'cured' or 'made whole', the aim is to overcome the fantasy that we might or could ever be made whole, which entails undoing the idea that we have constructed of ourselves.
What this book does really well is explain the ideas of OTHER people in the areas of language and pyschoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure who have influenced Lacan and whose ideas he has built and expanded upon.
Slavoj Zizek is a strong believer in Lacan's theories and like Zizek Calum Neill introduces modern-day cultural references into his book including the TV series Succession, the film Spider-Man No Way Home, and the children's book The Missing Place.
I enjoyed reading this again and I will keep this book, to use as a reference. At the end of every chapter is a chapter summary with bullet points outlining the important parts, should the reader have not understood.
The aim of psychoanalysis is not to be 'cured' or 'made whole', the aim is to overcome the fantasy that we might or could ever be made whole, which entails undoing the idea that we have constructed of ourselves.
March 11, 2024
A really good starting point for understanding Lacan.
June 2, 2025
My favourite idea was the "objet petit a". The object we all seek. The objet petit a is the magical other that will complete us. It was described with a story.
The story goes 'Once upon a time there was a circle with a segment missing. Like a pizza with a piece cut out. It wanders around looking for the piece that will complete this gap.
As it does, it enjoys the world.
It enjoys rolling down hills, encountering a butterfly, stopping to talk to a worm, smelling a flower.
But its goal is always to find its missing piece.
It finds a piece that looks just right, but the piece doesn't want to be its piece. It finds a piece that is a bit too small, and a piece that is a bit too big. It finds a piece that fits just right, but it loses it. It finds a piece that fits, but it breaks it.
Eventually it finds a piece that is just right, and it is finally complete. But now with its gap filled, it rolls too fast and can no longer enjoy the things it enjoyed before!' It is complete in one sense, but its life remains incomplete in others.
Lacan's most important point is that incompleteness is embedded in the structure of the human experience. Everything we desire has something inaccessible about it. And nothing we desire can completely complete us. The solution is that there is no solution to this.
It's like that Nietzschean point about marriage "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.". Kierkegaard said something similar: do it or do it not, you will regret it either way.
I am convinced these paradoxes that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Lacan point out are created by the intellect, which can never merge fully into reality. Words and concepts can describe what is, but they can never BE what is. Words are just fingers pointing at the moon. The intellect stares only at the finger, the object within consciousness. Not even that – it stares at the concept that points to the object within consciousness. Isn't this so far away from your whole, complete conscious field? In other words, far away from your reality?
As a result, the egoic mind with a reliance on thought is incomplete. A character on a screen is not the whole screen. Beyond the intellect, there is the world of experience, which is already complete, whole, timeless and indestructible. Conceptual world vs experiential world.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about." – Rumi
I don't know how to connect the idea of true love to this. In the deepest states of meditation, love is indiscriminate. I had experiences on silent meditation retreat where I was overwhelmed with loving compassion in a way that was entirely nonpartisan and not tied to my own ego or the lifepath my shell has taken. In the world beyond concepts, the world of experience, you are already complete, and feel loving towards everything in your awareness.
So maybe romantic love, the life partner, is just a play-thing for the egoic mind. A trick of our evolutionary programming. I mean, romantic love has to be contingent on the kind of psychology our evolutionary programming created our minds for: egoic thought. Egoic thought chops up reality into concepts. "*I* want *her* to choose *me*", "*I* love *her*".
This kind of love can only exist in the conceptual world. Where discrimination and categories exist. That doesn't diminish it. I don't care if it's all genetic programming. I don't care if it's arbitrarily determined by my shell's personal lifeline. And I don't care if I don't understand it. Isn't it beautiful that my shell has felt true love so deeply?
When I finished this book I couldn't help but conclude that a lot of Lacan's thought is hyperintellectual ivory tower BS. What's the endgame to this thought? How does this help a person? Is it grounded in any empirical evidence?
At the core of my criticism is that Lacan's ideas reek of a weak and unhelpful worldview. I'd rather understand reality and the mind by reading Tony Robbins. And I don't even like Tony Robbins. But at least his understanding of the mind is practical and it looks forward. Lacan looks in a million different directions and goes nowhere. Is calling him a nerd too harsh? He does what nerds do. They are so identified with their intellect that they jerk themselves off creating lofty arguments and forget the point of the intellect in the first place.
It's Goodhart's law: As soon as something becomes the measure, it becomes a target, and so stops being a good measure. For example, measuring knowledge by test scores means that teachers start teaching for the tests, rather than to widen the students knowledge base. Nerds are people who have identified with their intellect so much that "feeling smart" becomes the target, to the exclusion of other things that matter in life. In school these other things include athletic prowess, leading to the trope where they get bullied by jocks. But later in life, nerds still exist. Like Lacan. He is optimising for convoluted manipulation of concepts rather than moving psychology towards a practical endgoal.
Compare Lacan to Jung. Jung's writings were coherent and generative. You can infer what Jung's endgoal was by reading a single book. I have no idea what practical outcomes Lacan was aiming for. For example take the "mirror stage". The mirror stage is when supposedly infants realise their incompleteness by looking in the mirror and feeling a gap between their scattered physical sensations and their "whole" reflection. Only a nerd would write something like that.
So yes I loved one of Lacan's ideas but I can't help but feel this is simply because Lacan said a lot rather than because he was on the right path. A broken clock is right twice a day
The story goes 'Once upon a time there was a circle with a segment missing. Like a pizza with a piece cut out. It wanders around looking for the piece that will complete this gap.
As it does, it enjoys the world.
It enjoys rolling down hills, encountering a butterfly, stopping to talk to a worm, smelling a flower.
But its goal is always to find its missing piece.
It finds a piece that looks just right, but the piece doesn't want to be its piece. It finds a piece that is a bit too small, and a piece that is a bit too big. It finds a piece that fits just right, but it loses it. It finds a piece that fits, but it breaks it.
Eventually it finds a piece that is just right, and it is finally complete. But now with its gap filled, it rolls too fast and can no longer enjoy the things it enjoyed before!' It is complete in one sense, but its life remains incomplete in others.
Lacan's most important point is that incompleteness is embedded in the structure of the human experience. Everything we desire has something inaccessible about it. And nothing we desire can completely complete us. The solution is that there is no solution to this.
It's like that Nietzschean point about marriage "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.". Kierkegaard said something similar: do it or do it not, you will regret it either way.
I am convinced these paradoxes that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Lacan point out are created by the intellect, which can never merge fully into reality. Words and concepts can describe what is, but they can never BE what is. Words are just fingers pointing at the moon. The intellect stares only at the finger, the object within consciousness. Not even that – it stares at the concept that points to the object within consciousness. Isn't this so far away from your whole, complete conscious field? In other words, far away from your reality?
As a result, the egoic mind with a reliance on thought is incomplete. A character on a screen is not the whole screen. Beyond the intellect, there is the world of experience, which is already complete, whole, timeless and indestructible. Conceptual world vs experiential world.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about." – Rumi
I don't know how to connect the idea of true love to this. In the deepest states of meditation, love is indiscriminate. I had experiences on silent meditation retreat where I was overwhelmed with loving compassion in a way that was entirely nonpartisan and not tied to my own ego or the lifepath my shell has taken. In the world beyond concepts, the world of experience, you are already complete, and feel loving towards everything in your awareness.
So maybe romantic love, the life partner, is just a play-thing for the egoic mind. A trick of our evolutionary programming. I mean, romantic love has to be contingent on the kind of psychology our evolutionary programming created our minds for: egoic thought. Egoic thought chops up reality into concepts. "*I* want *her* to choose *me*", "*I* love *her*".
This kind of love can only exist in the conceptual world. Where discrimination and categories exist. That doesn't diminish it. I don't care if it's all genetic programming. I don't care if it's arbitrarily determined by my shell's personal lifeline. And I don't care if I don't understand it. Isn't it beautiful that my shell has felt true love so deeply?
When I finished this book I couldn't help but conclude that a lot of Lacan's thought is hyperintellectual ivory tower BS. What's the endgame to this thought? How does this help a person? Is it grounded in any empirical evidence?
At the core of my criticism is that Lacan's ideas reek of a weak and unhelpful worldview. I'd rather understand reality and the mind by reading Tony Robbins. And I don't even like Tony Robbins. But at least his understanding of the mind is practical and it looks forward. Lacan looks in a million different directions and goes nowhere. Is calling him a nerd too harsh? He does what nerds do. They are so identified with their intellect that they jerk themselves off creating lofty arguments and forget the point of the intellect in the first place.
It's Goodhart's law: As soon as something becomes the measure, it becomes a target, and so stops being a good measure. For example, measuring knowledge by test scores means that teachers start teaching for the tests, rather than to widen the students knowledge base. Nerds are people who have identified with their intellect so much that "feeling smart" becomes the target, to the exclusion of other things that matter in life. In school these other things include athletic prowess, leading to the trope where they get bullied by jocks. But later in life, nerds still exist. Like Lacan. He is optimising for convoluted manipulation of concepts rather than moving psychology towards a practical endgoal.
Compare Lacan to Jung. Jung's writings were coherent and generative. You can infer what Jung's endgoal was by reading a single book. I have no idea what practical outcomes Lacan was aiming for. For example take the "mirror stage". The mirror stage is when supposedly infants realise their incompleteness by looking in the mirror and feeling a gap between their scattered physical sensations and their "whole" reflection. Only a nerd would write something like that.
So yes I loved one of Lacan's ideas but I can't help but feel this is simply because Lacan said a lot rather than because he was on the right path. A broken clock is right twice a day
October 31, 2024
Mostly clearly written and explained-mostly, except when it came to the chapter on the unconscious and there the author is very unclear on the relationship between Saussure's paradigmatic axis and syntagmatic axis in relationship to metonymy and metaphor which is central to Lacan's view on dreams and symptoms. It wouldn't have taken much for the author to write a few more words regarding the paradigmatic axis as being concerned with substitution/metaphor and this in turn being Lacan's equivalent Freud's condensation mechanism. Similarly it would have been fairly easy for the author to write about Saussure's syntagmatic axis and it's relationship to contiguity and displacement/metonymy, this being the equivalent of Freud's displacement mechanism. Nor was there any material on Lacan's clinical structures i.e. psychotic, perverse and neurotic.
Overall the book is a 'good enough' introduction though it certainly doesn't provide enough material on Lacan's clinical theories. I recommend a text like Bruce Fink's excellent ' A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Analysis' as an appropriate follow up.
Overall the book is a 'good enough' introduction though it certainly doesn't provide enough material on Lacan's clinical theories. I recommend a text like Bruce Fink's excellent ' A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Analysis' as an appropriate follow up.
April 13, 2025
Understanding Lacan is like busting a nut in a dream; you wake up sticky with meaning, but can’t remember what got you off. This book is that wet fever dream: a pornographic séance where each sentence fingers your brain, unzipping you thought by thought, until you're gasping, brain-fucked, begging for more. And it’s a theoretical cunt—hot, unreadable, and smug as hell—where every damn word spreads its lips just enough to tease you with some half-truth, then clamps down like a dom with a safe word you’ll never learn, never letting you in.
July 26, 2025
Callum Neill’s book Jacques Lacan: The Basics is a clear and helpful introduction to Lacan’s work. It explains his difficult ideas, like the mirror stage and the symbolic world, in a way that’s easier to understand, without losing their depth. Neill shows how Lacan’s thinking connects to Freud, language, and philosophy, helping you see why his ideas matter. It’s a great starting point if you want to learn more about Lacan and how he helps us understand the human mind.
June 22, 2025
Book was a good and short introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis that was written in a way that was very concise and accessible. Although I felt that it reduced it down more then was necessarily and even without a good understand of the topic I felt like some content was lost/misrepresented in the simplification. Over all definitely good, enjoyed the chapter summaries.
March 26, 2024
Lacan e spännande asså
January 6, 2025
Came for the structuralism, stayed for the analysis of Spider-Man films
June 29, 2025
Good voice
November 19, 2025
te pup, lacane
December 8, 2025
a must-read for anyone who comes across lacan
February 1, 2024
"Arnold Schopenhauer"
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews