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A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader is one of a dying breed It is no overstatement to say that psychoanalysis is not only out of fashion and widely scorned but largely dismissed as an outdated discipline borne of a personality cult; Leader himself has described analysts today as ‘mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust’   What makes his position rarer still is that he is also a celebrated author; in the course of eight books Leader has established himself as an elegant and erudite voice of Lacanian theory in academic yet popular books commenting on love, the sexes, the history of psychoanalysis, the mind and the body Much fêted by the artworld he has also written numerous essays on the work of leading British artists such as Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn – many of whom he counts as friends – and is often presented ‘in conversation’ with artists   A remarkable feature of Leader’s writing is the seeming ease with which he can make complex and strange psychoanalytic concepts accessible to a general audience This arises in part from the clarity of his prose but also from his ability to illustrate his concepts with examples taken from cinema, art, literature, the public canonical case studies and the privacy of the session – moving between high and low culture whilst avoiding the pitfalls of that method, now so in vogue in our post-cultural theory era   This is no attempt at a showy parlour game of pop-deconstruction, but is a method merited because, as Leader explains, ‘What matters here is not the treatment of any one genre but rather fidelity to questions’ It is in this way that readers are able to find his writings on the psyche and the arts educational in the best sense: they provoke us to consider more carefully, move beyond appearances and question further Whatever the topic, we are invited to pursue Leader’s primary concern: the uniquely human capacity for meaning, and the questioning of it   In recent years, in What is Madness? and the newly released Strictly Bipolar, he has emerged as a savage critic of ‘Big Pharma’, a campaigning