Together with Seminar I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, being published simultaneously with this volume, this early seminar of Jacques Lacan's renowned teaching forms the most accessible starting point for gaining access to his disturbing and profound thought, It includes lengthy discussion of Lacan's notions of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, the relation between the symbol and the machine, Lacan's theory of the other and the Other, the concept of repetition in psychoanalysis, and the Famous seminar on Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'.