Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38: The Other, the One

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, we are all talking about the One. Everyone is talking about the concept of the One.

Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38 joins the conversation, offering an array of accounts of the One that Lacan elaborated to orient us in our practice.

Lacan’s earliest teaching started with postulating the primacy of the signifier as the primacy of the Other. All speech and language pass through and come from the Other, the Other of language the subject is born into. The Other was for Lacan the source and the depository of signifiers that are external to a subject’s articulations, leading it to alienation.

In his later teaching Lacan was not satisfied with this circularity of speech. He sought a different answer to the question of the subject’s destiny as forged by the formula of alienation. This led him to construct a discourse where dissatisfaction could be inscribed. Dissatisfaction is one of many signs of jouissance of the body - whose exteriority and alterity are directly opposed to the symbolic dyad of S1 and S2 as responsible for sense production - Lacan’s One: Yad’lun.

It is not without a surge of enthusiasm in the new editorial team that we make one more effort to serve our English-speaking community with this double issue.