... I'd recommend starting with "Seminar on The Purloined Letter,'""The Situation of Psychoanalysis in 1956," or "Function and Field" (Jacques Lacan Ecrits The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, 2006, p. xii)
No one in France comes to understand Lacan by reading his main written work, the Ecrits; as Lacan himself says, "they were not meant to be read" (Seminar XX, 29) ... French therapists learned about Lacan's work first hand --- as a practice. (A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Bruce Fink, p. xii)
And even lesser known fact is that Lacan alternated his Seminaire with clinical case-presentations, a practice which has now become largely obsolete but which was widespread within psychiatric training hospitals during Lacan's lifetime. (Day Nobus, 2000, p. xii)
With two exceptions (Lacan 1980a[1976]; 1998c[1976]) the minutes of his case-presentations have not been published and he himself did not produce any extensive case-studies.
Alternatively, patient-accounts of Lacan‘s analytic procedures could be consulted (Schneiderman 1983; Rey 1989; Gordon 1990; Ground 1990), yet these often strongly fictionalized testimonies lack reliability owing to the patients' emotional ties with their analysts and the singularity of their experiences. (ibid, p. xii)
... the importance of his contributions for the broad contemporary tradition of psychodynamic psychotherapy hinges less on some innovative concept or key proposition, and more on his overarching exploration of the effects of speech and language on the human condition. (ibid, p. xiii)
... it is virtually impossible to isolate Lacan's concepts and propositions from their global theoretical framework. (ibid, p. xiii)
... even more than the Freudian inspiration of his trajectory, Lacan‘s self-acknowledged intention to explain the relationship between the subject, speech and language serves as an excellent springboard for overcoming the difficulties of his work. (ibid, p. xiii)
