London Times July 17, 1997, Thursday Analysing the analyst By John Weightman JACQUES LACAN. An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought. By Elizabeth Roudinesco. Polity Press, Pounds 25. ISBN 0 7456 1523 6 John Weightman lays Lacan bare Once, at a Parisian dinner party, I heard a lady remark: " Mon fils vient de sortir de son Oedipe " (My son has just got over his Oedipus complex), much as she might have said that he had recently had his appendix removed. This brought home to me the fact that for a surprising number of French intellectuals, Freudianism is not simply an interesting body of parascientific speculation, but a dogmatic system to be accepted as the truth. Consequently, its history, like that of all revealed religions, has been endlessly fraught with doctrinal disputes. No wonder, then, that this extraordinary book about the most flamboyant French neo-Freudian of the 20th century should read like an account of the schisms in the medieval Church and be redolent with odium theologicum . At first, one might take Ms Roudinesco for an anti-Lacanian, because she paints such a damning picture of Lacan, the man. An unfaithful husband to two wives and a neglectful, capricious father, he was "a womaniser and a libertine", "greedy", "snobbish", "devious" and possessed by "an immense desire to be recognised and famous". But she praises the professional: "Lacan towered over all the members of his own generation in terms of personal charisma, as well as clinical and theoretical genius". However, she is strangely schizoid, since her book contains ample evidence to contradict this positive view of Lacan's achievement. She doesn't seem to notice that she herself undermines her encomium by frequently demonstrating that he plays fast and loose with Freud and even, as she puts it, "massacres" him in translation. She also shows that many eminent people who came into contact with Lacan or tried to read his big, sibylline text, Ecrits , had a negative reaction. He claimed to have incorporated into Freudianism concepts derived from, amongst others, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ramon Jakobson and Martin Heidegger, but Levi-Strauss refused to comment on his work, saying ironically that he couldn't understand it. Jakobson was careful to keep his distance and Heidegger dryly remarked: "The psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist." I must declare a prejudice; I once attended a lecture he gave, and was so put off by his spasmodic, oracular delivery that I left before the end. But not everyone is allergic to gurus, far from it. Ms Roudinesco describes how the audience at his "seminars" (his teaching was mainly oral) gradually increased over the years, so that, by 1963, when he broke with mainstream Freudianism and founded his own Ecole Freudienne , he had an army of fervent, if quarrelsome, disciples. From being "a brilliant Socrates" in a limited context, he eventually allowed himself "to be worshipped like a god and his teaching to be treated as holy writ". She blames his followers for this, but was it not a consequence of his own colossal vanity? At an early stage, he developed the maniacal conviction that he was "the only person capable of listening to the true word of Freud". Being both a law unto himself and economical with the truth, he disregarded the rules of the International Psychoanalytical Society while claiming to respect them, and so fell foul of various members, including the three major female figures, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Marie Bonaparte. His own Ecole had a stormy existence under his dictatorial and erratic leadership; well before his death, it had begun to explode into what Ms Roudinesco calls "messianic sects". In his last phase, when he tried to combine Freudianism with Joycean word-play in the manner of Finnigan's Wake , he seems to have become definitely deranged, probably through some physiological deterioration of the brain, due to old age; certainly, the last texts quoted by Ms Roudinesco cannot be described as sane. Thanks to his celebrity and to the high fees he charged for analytical sessions, and even "non-sessions" (ie, a few minutes in the silent, or near-silent, presence of the Master), he had long been a rich man. In one respect, at least, he conformed to original Freudian symbolism; he preferred to keep his wealth in gold ingots. © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. ======================== London Times September 15, 1993, Wednesday Revisionists nail seductive shrink to the couch By Charles Bremner in Paris TIMES have been hard lately for the intellectual titans of postwar France as one after another they have bitten the posthumous dust. Sartre, we learnt, liked to scribble his pensees while high on speed; Louis Althusser, the communist philosopher, murdered his wife, though what really discredited him was news that he had not read his Marx. The star of Michel Foucault, the deconstructivist theorist has waned since he died of Aids and Paul de Man, his Belgian colleague, is now known to have been a Nazi. This autumn the revisionist finger has swung round to Jacques Lacan, the iconoclast psychiatrist whose obscure interpretation of Freud became gospel for the Left Bank and bequeathed a system of thought that continues to wreak havoc on the politically correct campuses of America. Thanks to a big biography and the bourgeois climate of Balladurian France, Lacan, who died in 1981 at 80, is now being cast as a money-grubbing, womanising liar whose system was based on an intellectual fraud. ''Was Lacan a charlatan?'' asked Le Point, a news magazine, hedging its bets. In an act that would once have been deemed sacrilege, Le Nouvel Observateur, bible of the Left Bank, wondered: ''Should Lacan be burnt?'' In no doubt about the import of its question, the magazine said: ''Thanks to Lacan and de Gaulle, France managed to hold on to its illusion of being the centre of the world.'' Lacan, Picasso's doctor, was always controversial, notorious for his arrogance and ''brilliantly subversive'' behaviour, such as abusing his patients and cutting short sessions after minutes, a habit which had him banned as a teacher by the International Psychiatric Association. But admirers put this down to genius. Even when he went deaf in old age, his patients believed he was engaging in a diabolical ploy to help them reveal their inner selves. Worshippers still while away the hours pondering his celebrated dicta. The less obscure ones include: ''The unconscious is structured like language'' and ''Woman does not exist.'' In the new climate, intellectuals are daring to suggest that Lacan may have been pulling their legs all along and are agreeing with his foreign enemies in the psychiatric wars that his post-structuralist abstractions may simply have been mumbo-jumbo. They are helped by the 750-page biography by Elisabeth Roudinesco, a psychiatric historian, which paints him as even more odious and deceitful than previously thought. Detailing his obsession with money, she calculates that in the 1970s he was consulting ten patients an hour simultaneously, running from one to the other, often muddling up their cases, for eight hours a day, five days a week. This enabled ''His Majesty'', as she calls him, to clock up about Pounds 500,000 a year. Some of this, he turned into gold ingots. When he lovingly counted his money in front of patients, however, they were given to understand that he was demonstrating the concept of the alienating ''signifier'', the buzz-word of the era. Mme Roudinesco makes much of his career as a seducer, beginning with the time when he made his mistress type his thesis and obtained money for the printing from her predecessor. Francoise Giroud, the editor and former minister who underwent long psychoanalysis with Lacan, confirmed his powers this week, calling him a ''devil'' irresistible to women. Disgraceful behaviour may often accompany genius, but the trouble in Lacan's case was that his whole system was devoted to revealing the truth. The biographer comes down on her subject's side, excusing his ''contradictions.'' But not so the chattering classes. Voicing their consensus, Michel Schneider, a leading cultural commentator, concluded that Lacan's theory was a ''reflection of the taste for constant lying, falsification and disguise which marked his life.'' The debate over Lacan is unlikely to shake the faith of the 34 competing groups and schools claiming they are the true inheritors of Lacanism. For these, the relics of the Maitre Penseur are objects of such reverence that his old consulting couch brought over Pounds 10,000 recently. For a glimpse of his enduring influence, you only have to look at the lonely hearts advertisements in the Nouvel Observateur riddled with his psychoanalytical idiom. One Lacanesque entry this week says: ''Young businesswoman too busy to take care of her 'me' seeks businessman to take care of his 'you'.'' © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. ========================== The New York Times April 3, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition THERAPEUTIC RUDENESS By Janet Malcolm; Janet Malcolm, a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author of "Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession" and "Diana and Nikon." JACQUES LACAN The Death of an Intellectual Hero. By Stuart Schneiderman. 182 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $14.95. FOR an ordinary literate person, reading the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is like being trapped in a cave whose entrance is blocked by a huge rock. Outside, one hears the hammerings and heavings of the rescue mission that has rushed to the scene - the explicators and annotators of Lacan's texts, who wield the heaviest of modern intellectual equipment (the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, the philosophy of Hegel and Heidegger, the metapsychology of Freud) - but which makes no headway against the monolith of Lacan's magisterial hermeticism. For if the general reader hasn't the omniscience to read Lacan unaided, neither has he the will to follow Lacan's explicators in their slow and hesitant unknottings of the enigma of his beautiful and meshuggeneh prose. At the end of John P. Muller and William J. Richardson's ''Lacan and Language: A Reader's Guide to Ecrits,'' one of the more approachable of the textual analyses, the authors themselves nervously concede that if understanding Lacan ''is not exactly guesswork,'' it is ''nonetheless, a highly precarious business, and sharing our impressions with the reading public may be utter folly. After all, it exposes us to the embarrassment of being told how wrong we are, especially when the master's many disciples are there to say, 'that's not what he meant at all.' '' IN this context of doubt and difficulty, Stuart Schneiderman's brilliant and confident book about Lacan, which one reads in a single avid and effortless sitting, comes almost as a shock. Mr. Schneiderman writes like someone who has arrived in a room slightly out of breath, with so much to say that he doesn't even take off his coat. He is a former academic who in 1973 did what no other Lacanstruck American had thought to do: He picked up and went to Paris to be analyzed by Lacan and to receive analytic training at Lacan's Ecole freudienne. ''I decided that it would be contradictory for me to continue explicating texts when I knew nothing of the experience from which the texts were drawn,'' Mr. Schneiderman writes. ''Thus I left Buffalo and a career as professor of English to become a Lacanian psychoanalyst.'' Mr. Schneiderman stayed in Paris for four years, and returned to America even more enamored of Lacan and Lacanism than he had been as a mere befuddled reader of ''Ecrits.'' His book has some of the enthusiasm common to analytic patients in the first fine, careless rapture of early analysis, before the dog days - or, rather, the dog years - of analysis proper set in. The exalted and excited vision of psychoanalysis that Mr. Schneiderman derived from his analysis with Lacan is in some respects no different from the vision he might have derived had he stayed in Buffalo and gone into analysis with a drab local practitioner. Analysis is a profound imaginative experience, and for a professor of literature it is apt to have special poignancy; the lunatic, lover, and poet present in every analysand are doubtless specially vivid to the analysand who has taught Shakespeare. In blurring the distinction between what was uniquely Lacanian in his analysis and what is common to every analysis, Mr. Schneiderman gives a somewhat exaggerated notion of Lacan's unearthly potency in the consulting room. He makes Lacan sound more like an enchanter than like an analyst. (When writing of Lacan's inability to establish an orderly succession, he calls him a failed Prospero.) One can't help wondering whether Mr. Schneiderman's perception of his late analyst isn't somewhat skewed by his continuing transference. Anticipating this suspicion, Mr. Schneiderman writes, ''In normal circumstances and according to psychoanalytic common sense, this would be a valid objection. With Lacan, though, there are no normal circumstances, and common sense, psychoanalytic and otherwise, is thoroughly unreliable.'' For, evidently, Lacan ''was not an analyst just like the others; he was an aristocrat, even a tyrant, possessing a theoretical mind the likes of which the psychoanalytic world had not seen since Freud.'' Moreover, Mr. Schneiderman writes, he was ''strange, bizarre, insolent, and at times outrageous,'' adding, ''He was prone to making scenes in public, to being abrupt and rude, to expressing his amorous intentions toward women in flagrant ways. (Once, it is told, a taxi driver was so impressed by a love scene between Lacan and a woman in the back seat of his cab that he called for an appointment the next morning and went on to spend several years in analysis with Lacan.)'' The story would seem to reveal more about Paris taxi drivers than about Lacan. MR. SCHNEIDERMAN reports that ''on the one occasion when Lacan appeared on television, he said that he would not alter his notoriously impenetrable style because he simply did not care to speak to idiots: my discourse, he said, is for those who are not idiots.'' Mr. Schneiderman nevertheless believes that ''if his theory has validity, one should be able to articulate it with clarity and precision,'' and he does a remarkable job of placing Lacan's thought, if not exactly within the grasp of the nonspecialist reader, at least within waving distance. He does this partly by writing like an American or an Englishman (that is, by tempering theory with analogy, rather than, as the French do, with more theory), and partly by giving an idiosyncratic version of Lacanian theory. He has singled out for special emphasis the symbolization of death in psychoanalysis - a subject that engaged Lacan's attention, but not nearly as obsessively as it engages Mr. Schneiderman's. Mr. Schneiderman sees death everywhere: in the ''deathlike silence of the analyst''; in the ''death mask'' the analyst wears during sessions; in a dire rite of passage called ''the pass,'' which Lacan instituted at the Ecole freudienne to separate the men from the boys and which Mr. Schneiderman likens to the Last Judgment; in the case of Anna O., whose hysterical neurosis began at the bedside of her dying father; in Lacan's notorious innovation, the short session (it was one of the reasons he was thrown out of the International Psychoanalytic Assocation), which had ''something of the horror of death'' for Mr. Schneiderman, when he experienced it during his analysis. Although he allows that Lacan ''did not shrink before theorizing about death ...and was one of the few post-Freudian analysts who did not write off the death drive,'' Mr. Schneiderman believes that he ''did not take things far enough,'' adding, ''To do so he would have run up against the medical juggernaut with its passion for life, for saving life, for prolonging life, for beating death. The great advantage ...to making symbolism sexual is that it favors the production of life, and even the advancement of the quality of life.'' Mr. Schneiderman firmly maintains that ''psychoanalysis ought to get out of the business of thinking about how people live their lives, about how they behave.'' He goes on, ''What this means, perhaps unexpectedly, is that analysis has as its major task the repairing of the relationships people have, not with other people, but with the dead.'' If Lacan did not go as far as Mr. Schneiderman would have liked him to go in transforming psychoanalysis into a thanatology, he did not disappoint his exactingly radical disciple's expectations in the area of analytic technique, which he transformed - some people would say mauled - almost beyond recognition. Lacan behaved quite as oddly during his analytic sessions as he did outside them. For example, he would sit at his desk arranging piles of banknotes - a gesture Mr. Schneiderman construed to mean just the opposite of what most people would think it meant, seeing it as a sign of Lacan's indifference to the patient's money (since he already had a lot of it) and as his way of pointing the patient ''beyond signs'' to the question of desire. AS for the infamous short session, Mr. Schneiderman devotes a long, dense and ultimately unsatisfying chapter to it. He begins with an amusing account of his own first experience with the short session. He had been coming to see Lacan for leisurely preliminary afternoon sessions, during which Lacan behaved like a friendly and gracious host (once he even went so far as to serve his supine guest a glass of Jack Daniels), lulling him into a state of pleasurable selfabsorption. One day, all unsuspecting, Mr. Schneiderman arrived for his session full of interesting things to tell his analyst, and after delivering himself of a little prologue, proceeded to speak of the matter close to his heart on which he had prepared to discourse that day. At that moment, Lacan abruptly rose from his chair and pronounced the session to be over. ''And he did this unceremoniously with a total lack of the good manners to which one (was) accustomed,'' Mr. Schneiderman writes, evidently still feeling a little outraged. He adds, ''The ending of the session, unexpected and unwanted, was like a rude awakening, like being torn out of a dream by a loud alarm. (One patient likened it to coitus interruptus.)'' Analysis is a bizarre human encounter, and the short session greatly accentuates its ''Otherness,'' as they say in Lacan-speak. It removes analysis from everyday life more decisively than does the traditional analytic hour and imparts to the relationship between analyst and patient an extra dimension of alienation. When the analyst says at the end of fifty minutes, ''I'm afraid that our time is up,'' he is behaving like an ordinary human being, whereas, as Mr. Schneiderman points out, when he suddenly and whimsically ends the session after five minutes, he ''adopts a role like that of a god.'' The problem of the ''real,'' or non-transference, relationship between patient and analyst, which has engaged some of the ablest minds in contemporary psychoanalysis, simply doesn't arise when the analyst persists in behaving like a somewhat mad Assyrian minor deity. After his initial shock and disbelief, Mr. Schneiderman came to appreciate the short session enormously, and is now a big apologist for it. He feels that it expedites access to the unconscious, forcing the patient out of the trite, long-winded discourse of everyday life into the witty ellipses of dreams, jokes and aphorisms. ''The combined pressure of the shortness of the sessions and the unpredictability of their stops creates a condition that greatly enhances one's tendencies to free-associate,'' Mr. Schneiderman writes. ''Almost by definition, the ego can never be the master of the short session.'' An even more compelling advantage of the short session is that it spares the analyst hours of listening to things that bore and irritate him. According to Mr. Schneiderman, ''When Lacan talked about why he invented the short session, he referred in particular to this question. He said that some analysands, knowing that they were guaranteed fifty minutes no matter what, used their sessions to discuss things that did not interest them in the least. If they had something important to say, they would wait for the last few minutes of the session to broach it. Lacan reasoned that such analysands were using the fifty-minute hour as a resistance, as an excuse to waste time - in particular to waste the analyst's time, to make him wait for them. This is a neurotic form of abuse that finds a home in the fifty-minute hour. It is also called procrastination. The short session responds that the time being wasted is the analyst's and that he has some say in how he spends his time.'' IN traditional analysis, the analyst has no say in how he spends his time. He has leased it - all fifty minutes of it - to the analysand, and has given him carte blanche to do what he likes with it: to be as dull, witless, verbose, evasive, phony, sleepy, uncooperative, uptight or silent as he pleases. On his side, the analyst has the privilege of studying the patient from a special and not uninteresting point of view known as analysis of resistance. According to this perspective, the patient's elaborate and inevitable attempts to circumvent the fundamental rule of analyis - to say whatever comes to mind without premeditation - are no less expressive of his unconscious motives than are his (rare) compliances with the rule. When Freud switched from hypnosis to psychoanalysis, he understood that what he had done was to obstruct the pathway to the unconscious that he had opened with the earlier talking cure. It was his genius to see that it is in the very area of the falling short of the ideal of free association - in the resistance - that the big payoff lies for the investigator of unconscious conflicts. This insight of Freud's, coincident with his discovery of the transference, has been a cornerstone of analytic therapy since the turn of the century. The short session, in eliminating the resistance, does away with a fundamental structure of analysis. Lacan's self-proclaimed ''return to Freud'' would seem to be a return to the clinician of the prehistorical period of analysis. Mr. Schneiderman tries to address himself to the analytical issues raised by the short session, but quickly becomes distracted. He plunges, instead, into a discourse on procrastination and ''death's desire,'' culminating in an existential analysis of Hamlet. During this discourse, the mild intellectual discomfort that one has experienced throughout the book becomes more pronounced. The gap that one has felt to exist between Lacanian and non-Lacanian thought widens, and the unwelcome suspicion that the non-Lacanians are talking about horses (resistance) while the Lacanians are responding about oranges (existence) can be suppressed no longer. Lacan once told a seminar, ''If they knew what I was saying, they would never have let me say it.'' Perhaps Mr. Schneiderman's game attempt to extract the plain meaning of Lacan's thought from the murky poetry of his style was bound to come to grief. When brought out into the light of day - at least as Mr. Schneiderman brings them out - Lacan's ideas seem to have little real bearing on psychoanalysis. In fact, they often irreverently remind one of the solemn metaphysical absurdities expounded by the characters in Thomas Love Peacock's novels. Earlier in the book, discussing the ''theoretical wasteland'' that psychoanalysis threatens to become through its exclusion of nonmedical people, Mr. Schneiderman disdainfully writes, ''Bringing a group of physicians together to discuss questions that have for centuries been posed and debated by philosophers might produce some amusing moments, but it is inconceivable that such untrained people will say anything new and original about these questions, unless they are in constant interraction with people whose preanalytic training is broader and more intellectually oriented.'' From Mr. Schneiderman's book, the nekulturny M.D.'s of American psychoanalysis will comprehend the full measure of their intellectual insufficiency. They will marvel at the bigness of the thinking of the Lacanians, in contrast to the pettiness of their own theoretical concerns. In an effort at self-betterment, they may even be driven to attempt to grasp the writings of the master himself. But to negotiate this feat they will probably have to follow Mr. Schneiderman to Paris. © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
