Philip Hill. Illustrated by David Leach.

Jacques Lacan is probably the most influential psychoanalyst since Freud (of the roughly 20,000 psychoanalysts in the world, about half are ‘Lacanians’) yet most people know nothing about him. Lacan wrote with an obscure style that casually refers to philosophy, linguistics, biology, mathematics, etc.—and to make matters worse, his ideas changed over the years. Lacan For Beginners introduces the reader to Lacan’s theories and their relation to clinical practice. The book is designed around questions that clarify Lacan’s ideas and is written with insight and illustrated with examples from popular culture.