Is someone radically different after an analysis? Since Freud, psychoanalysis has been questioned about what the psychoanalytic experience can change in someone's life beyond shedding light on symptoms. Drawing on literature, philosophy and a range of psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, Luis Izcovich addresses the effects of psychoanalysis on the individual who has the desire and the courage to enter an analytic treatment and take it to its endpoint. The subject bears the marks of his childhood and these have repercussions on the choices that he makes in life. Do these marks determine him or does he have a choice in making his destiny? How do the transformations brought about in the transference change the subject? And does the analysis leave a distinguishing and locatable mark? Luis Izcovich attempts to answer these questions from a Lacanian perspective.

'Strange as the word "mark" may be in the context of psychoanalysis, Izcovich employs it to ask (and answer) one of the most challenging and important questions: How does one know that someone has been through an analysis? Avoiding all simplistic responses, he takes the reader into a largely uncharted territory, where symptoms give way to desire, and where desire is bound up with subjective time. As an unprecedented exploration of psychoanalytic markers and marks, this book is nothing but a landmark and, as such, truly indispensable.'--Dany Nobus, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, and chair of the Freud Museum London

Luis Izcovich is a psychoanalyst, training psychiatrist, Doctor of Psychoanalysis (Paris VIII) and member of the International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field and of its School of psychoanalysis, the SPFLF, of which he is one of its founding members. He has taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris VIII, currently teaches in the College of the Psychoanalytic Clinic of Paris, and practises psychoanalysis in Paris.