Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture

(Literary/Cultural Theory Series, Orient BlackSwan, 2018)

Author: Mahitosh Mandal

Series Editor: Sumit Chakrabarti

About the Book

Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture offers a systematic and critically grounded engagement with the psychoanalytic thought of Jacques Lacan, tracing its movement from the clinical domain to its wider implications in literary and cultural analysis. Addressing both the conceptual complexity of Lacan’s work and its interdisciplinary reception, the book provides a structured introduction while remaining attentive to the specifically clinical orientation of psychoanalysis.

The study foregrounds a key tension that informs contemporary engagements with Lacan: the gap between the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and its academic circulation within the humanities. Rather than collapsing this distinction, the book insists on its importance, offering a mode of reading that preserves the specificity of psychoanalytic discourse while exploring its critical applications.

The opening chapter presents a detailed and systematic outline of Lacan’s teachings, drawing on the full range of his seminars and écrits. Subsequent chapters examine Lacan’s theorisation of the subject through the registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, alongside a sustained account of the clinical structures of psychosis, neurosis and perversion. These discussions are grounded in close textual engagement with Lacan’s own formulations and case-oriented analyses.

Extending beyond the clinic, the latter part of the book demonstrates how Lacanian psychoanalysis may be mobilised within literary and cultural criticism. A detailed reading of The French Lieutenant's Woman serves as a model for Lacanian literary analysis in practice, while further chapters explore Lacan’s relevance to film studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies and deconstruction.

By combining conceptual clarity with methodological caution, the book offers both an accessible introduction and a rigorous framework for engaging with psychoanalysis across disciplinary contexts.

Key Themes

Lacanian psychoanalysis and the question of the subject
Clinical structures: psychosis, neurosis, perversion
The imaginary, the symbolic, and the real
Psychoanalysis as a clinical vs academic discourse
Literary criticism and psychoanalytic method
Interdisciplinary applications: film, gender, postcolonial studies, deconstruction

Significance of the Book

This book addresses a central methodological problem in the reception of Jacques Lacan—the tendency to detach psychoanalytic concepts from their clinical grounding when applied within the humanities. By foregrounding this tension, it offers a more rigorous and critically self-aware framework for engaging Lacanian theory across disciplines. At the same time, it provides one of the most structured introductions to Lacan’s teachings available to students and scholars, combining comprehensive textual engagement with practical demonstration through literary analysis.

Academic Reception

The book has been cited and engaged in research publications across psychoanalysis, literary studies and cultural theory.

The book has received attention in international Lacanian forums. A feature on LacanOnline.com described it as “perhaps the first work of its kind to be published on the Indian subcontinent,” situating it within contemporary Lacanian scholarship. The post can be viewed here.

In “Muktibodh: Bhasha aur Avachetan ka Sawaal tatha Brahmarakshasiya Tragedy” (2022), Anup Bali draws extensively on Mandal's book to develop a Lacanian framework for reading the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. The article uses Mandal’s exposition of key concepts—such as the signifier, foreclosure, and the return of the Real—to interpret Muktibodh’s poetics and the figure of the Brahmarakshas. The article mobilises Mandal’s account of the relation between literature and psychoanalysis to read the Brahmarakshas not merely as metaphor, but in relation to the structuring of subjectivity and its disjunction from the Symbolic order. The full Hindi-language article is available here.

In “Mysticism or Militancy for Truth-Event: Reflections on Muktibodhian Fantasy” (2024), Anup Bali uses the book to further develop a Lacanian reading of Muktibodh’s poem 'Bramhrakshas.' The article employs Mandal's exposition of concepts such as foreclosure, the psychotic subject, and the return of the Real to interpret the figure of the Brahmarakshas in relation to psychosis, hallucination, and its disjunction from the Symbolic order. The PDF of the full article is available here.

The book has also informed a wider body of interdisciplinary work engaging with modern and contemporary literature, cinema, and cultural theory, including studies that apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to a range of literary and film texts. View the relevant citations here.

Accessing the Book

The book is available in paperback and eBook formats. Purchase/ access the book via:

How to Cite

Mandal, Mahitosh. Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture. Literary/Cultural Theory Series, edited by Sumit Chakrabarti, Orient BlackSwan, 2018.