Plagued by the Self

Abstract

Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliott, London, Verso, 2014.As anyone who has attempted to teach Lacan's work will recognise, there are perhaps as many different Lacans as there are readers of Lacan. The tendency of his concepts to be at once so evocative and yet ultimately evasive makes him a perfect tool for the literary critic, but perhaps not so useful for the medical practitioner. Elisabeth Roudinesco, head of research in history at University of Paris VII and author of three books on the renowned neo-Freudian, would probably reject such an assessment of the situation. Her new work seeks to defend Lacan's reputation as a mental health professional even as she reveals some of the more intimate details of his occasional small madnesses. Lacan: In Spite of Everything (2014) provides a compelling and insightful, if occasionally frustrating, reading experience. Food for thought which, unusually for anything Lacan-related, is also eminently readable.Roudinesco's previous works on Lacan, translated as Jacques Lacan & Co.: a history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 (1990) and Jacques Lacan (1999), approach the man respectively as an infl uential fi gure in the history of psychoanalysis and then as a great individual thinker in his own right. Now, in Lacan: In Spite of Everything (2014), Roudinesco returns to Lacan in light of his confl icted legacy and, in setting herself up to correct some fl awed interpretations, reveals a range of unexpected and eccentric biographical details in the process. Much like some of Plato's treatment of Socrates, Roudinesco's compelling depiction of Lacan's character emotionally connects the reader to his intellectual propositions as they are expounded. The subject (with a barred S) crouches at the centre of the text daring you to try and know more about him. Yet, all along, we are also reminded of a Lacan who 'embodied the ideals of an institutional psychotherapy and a humanist psychiatry today in disarray' (p152), who was 'the only psychological thinker to consider the legacy of Auschwitz in Freudian fashion' (p7), and whose own reading of Freud was not clinical, but 'deployed as a new humanism promoting individual liberties and an exploration of the irrational side of human nature' (p9). In spite of everything, Lacan remained a 'doctor of the sick' (p152), and we are clearly to respect this. Although this respect does end up making some of his unusual personal habits all the more juicy as gossip.As Roudinesco writes, 'Lacan felt sorry for fathers and hated mothers and families, while himself being an actor in the intra-familial humiliations he denounced' (p37); leaving his pregnant wife for his pregnant mistress, among other tabloid-friendly affaires de coeur. Yet it is Thanatos rather than Eros who we are most often to see haunting his decisions. He seems at once driven and paralysed by a fear of death and a fear of fi nality. Terrifi ed of naming, his published letters are titled writings [Ecrits], his seminars The Seminar, and his television appearance Television. He would 'sleep fewer than fi ve hours a night [and] drive his car without observing basic safety rules' (p97) to maximise his work-time. At work, his analytic sessions got shorter and shorter until 'certain people were doing ten a day, one minute every half-hour' (p114). When we read that, in 1953, he wanted to 'persuade the Pope' (p106) of his theories, the old stereotypes of the patient running the asylum start to come to mind in some of their more cliched forms. Yet, as with any good psychoanalytical case study, it is the method behind the madness which provokes the most interest and moves us beyond the banal task of checking-off symptoms towards a systematic and nuanced appreciation of the condition in which we fi nd ourselves.The linguistic component of Lacan's theory 'the signifying chain: a subject is represented by a signifi er for another signifi er' (p66) - is translated into Roudinesco's core organising metaphor: the 'Plague'. …