What is there in language that is so dreadful that, most often, man assents to it only in order to chatter rather than to speak? This book proposes a radically novel approach to the enigma of the superego, one of the most relevant and least developed aspects of analytic practice. Continuing a private dialogue with Lacan (who made it public in his last seminars), Alain Didier-Weill articulates the relation between invocatory drives and music, dance and painting. The Three Times of the Law, first published in 1995 and reprinted many times in France and South America where it is considered a classic, appears now for the first time in English.