BRUCE FINK: The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1995, 240 pp, $35. ISBN 0691037604. There are many Lacans. Each person seems to read into Lacan's prose whatever he or she wishes to find there. An entire voluminous literature has arisen as a response to Lacan's ambiguous, tortuous, esoteric pronouncements, many of which, as included in his seminars, have not been translated into English. There are numerous quarreling schools of interpretation of Lacan's work, and Jaques Alain Miller, his son-in-law, and appointed heir, has by no means received general acceptance as the correct interpreter of Lacan's seminars. Lawsuits abound in Paris on these matters. The Lacan of Bruce Fink, who is a psychologist from Duquesne University, and who he tells us, is a practicing psychoanalyst, would be approved of by Miller. Fink enjoys Lacan's obscure Mathemes, to which he even adds graphs of trigonometric equations. The chapters in this book are of uneven composition. Some can be understood by a reader with little knowledge of Lacan's work while others are extremely esoteric, and made esoteric by Fink's attempt to stick with Lacan's system of Mathemes. Fink admits this in his preface, suggesting that the first chapter aims at simplicity and that the other parts of the book become progressively complex-and that is certainly true. The chapters that might be of greatest interest to our readers if they are not familiar with Lacan's tortuous peregrinations, would be the first and the fifth chapter. One might ask to whom this book is addressed also. Beginners approaching Lacan will find it impenetrable. Therefore I would imagine that only Lacanians who are followers of Miller and who are intrigued by Lacan's Mathemes will truly enjoy this book. In spite of all this, certain ingenious ideas of Lacan pop up from time to time in all the pseudo-mathematical symbols and gibberish. For example, Children's endless whys are not, to Lacan's mind, the sign of an insatiable curiosity as to how things work but rather of a concern with where they fit in, what rank they hold, what importance they have to their parents (p. 54). The discussion of children's needs and the tasks that children set for themselves of trying to align themselves with every whim and fancy of the mother's desire is well delineated in this chapter. In the same chapter, there is a nice discussion of Lacan's practice of punctuating the analysand's discourse with a comment, a cough, a grunt, or a word or, in Lacan's notorious five-minute hour, the termination of a session that jolts analysands, suddenly bringing them back to the realization that they know not what their analysts want or mean, that the latter are looking for something else in their discourse than what the analysands intended, that they want something else from it, something more (p. …