An exhaustive, partisan, and clinical treatment of the
psychoanalyst who became one of France's most famous intellectuals
by flamboyantly combining Freudianism, linguistics, and
structuralism. Roudinesco, of Paris's Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, suggests reading this work as the third volume
in her History of Psychoanalysis in France; this intellectual
biography shares with her earlier volumes a broad sweep and
authoritative dissertation-like style, as she tracks Lacan's orbits
among the era's great minds and squabbling psychoanalytic schools.
Despite her nearly smothering respect for Lacan, she has discovered
some unpleasant revelations and embarrassing facts. It's no
surprise that Lacan - whose version of the Oedipal struggle is
labeled le nom du pere (the name-of-the-father, or, punningly, the
no-of-the-father) - had a father who was mostly absent. But it is
startling to discover that the married Lacan fathered an
illegitimate daughter with Georges Bataille's ex-wife and carried
on a double life with his two families. If Lacan's personal life
was complicated by his romantic affairs, his intellectual life was
positively profligate, with ties to the structuralist
anthropologist Levi-Strauss, the existentialist Heidegger, the
decadent Bataille, the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the Marxist
Louis Althusser (later declared criminally insane). Roudinesco also
uncovers Lacan's early intellectual influences, including his brief
infatuation with Spinoza and his fruitful encounter with Salvador
Dali's "paranoia-critical method." Roudinesco capably traces how
this network of intellectual borrowings and Lacan's reworkings of
Freud eventually led him to set up his own renegade school of
psychoanalysis in Paris. Heidegger, himself no paragon of virture
or readability, remarked after reading Lacan's often dizzying
magnum opus, Ecrits, that "the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist."
An encyclopedic biography most likely to appeal to experts, but
enlivened by portraits of Lacan's mercurial personality and
behavior. (Kirkus Reviews)
Elisabeth Roudinesco gives us a life Balzacian in its sweep: the
story of a young man from the provinces determined to leave his
family fortune and its old-fashioned values behind; the young
doctor in Paris who set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and
ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality
and the culture that shapes it all.
Roudinesco follows the development of Lacan's career from his
early clinical practice and conflicts with the establishment, as he
constantly pushed the boundaries of psychoanalysis from its roots
in biology and neurology to a powerful critical tool that resonated
in fields ranging from literary theory to feminist politics.
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