Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) is the most prominent thinker of French psychoanalysis after World War II. Like no psychoanalytic scholar since Freud, he has influenced beyond the boundaries of his field and opened psychoanalysis to linguistics, ethnology, and philosophy. Lacan significantly shaped French structuralism and its most prominent representatives (Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, Levi-Strauss, among others). His radical reinterpretation of Freud's teachings revolves around a theory of the unconscious as a language of desire. Since the 1970s, the significance of Lacan's philosophical psychoanalysis has also been recognized in the Federal Republic of Germany. Gerda Pagel provides in her introduction a clearly written, first access to Lacan's often cryptic, highly complex work.