Welcome to Issue 1 of The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
 
Excerpt from the Editorial:
 
"Lacan, at a certain moment in his teaching, seized upon the story of a letter to illustrate how it is that, circulating before the mutism of some and the blindness of others, this letter is the original, radical subject of the unconscious. All of the characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter are carried along in an intersubjective game in which each is defined in relation to the most potent character in the plot, – a letter, a signifier, determining and dominating each in turn, subverting the illusion that possession of it entails mastery over it.
 
This is the scenario which Lacan constantly re-presents us with in his work, – a drama in which language is not an instrument which an autonomous subject grasps, as it were, from outside. Here language is, rather, that through which, and in which, subjectivity comes to manifest itself. It is we who are grasped by it.
 
It is in the spirit of that teaching that we now launch our letter, as the servants of language and not its masters. We, therefore, take as our subject the subject of the unconscious and language(s). As such, this letter too is purloined, – taken from the proceedings of the first congress of the European Foundation for Psychoanalysis."
 
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