Changes

The reader will find in this index, drawn up according to an order that I have established, the major concepts of Lacan's theory, referred to the contexts in which they occur - these contexts themselves providing their essential definitions, their functions and their principal pro­perties.

In the pages referred to after each term in the index, it is the concept, not the word, that is to be looked for. I have chosen to designate the classified concept by the expression that seemed to me most adequate and most comprehensive, usually proceeding by retroaction from the latest stage in the development of the theory.

I am well aware that with such an articulation what I was offering was necessarily an interpretation. It seemed to me, therefore, to be oppor­tune to explain it in a few words, so that one may, after following my reasoning, deduct it from the sum of the index.

I have chosen to isolate the concepts which, concerning the theory of the subject, are of interest, if only by denying them their names, to the human sciences as a whole, with the effect of stressing the specificity of the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition: the bringing into play of the reality of the unconscious, the introduction of the subject to the language of his desire).

If the signifier is constituent for the subject (1, A), one may follow, through its defiles, the process of transformation (of mutilation) that makes a subject of man, through the obliquity of narcissism (I, B). The properties of symbolic overdetermination explain why the logical time of this history is not linear (I, C).

One must then take again in their simultaneity the elements succes­sively presented (II, A, B, C). One will observe that the topology of the subject finds its statute only hy being related to the geometry of the Ego (II, B, 4 and II, C, 3). One is now in a position to grasp the functioning of communication: in its structure, all the pieces of the game find their place (II, D).

From the structure of communication, one will deduce what is the power of the treatment, with what ear to listen to the unconscious,

Jacques-Alain Miller