Three lectures delivered between June 1967 and April 1968 in the provinces, before an open audience that consists not only of psychoanalysts: not a home game, but rather, as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, a mission impossible. Jacques Lacan, who became more famous than ever since the publication of the Écrits at the end of 1966, does not limit himself to explicating his writings but addresses the fundamental questions that have concerned psychoanalysis since Freud: What is the unconscious, and how can we know it? How should we conceive of a subject of the unconscious? Is there a specific logic to psychoanalysis? Starting from the knowledge he can assume his listeners have, he approaches these questions from various perspectives. This is done in gently circling movements, but becomes gripping where Lacan is challenged, for example.