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Sergio Benvenuto ends his recent monograph, Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater, at what is arguably its beginning. This is a book about writing: about analysts' writing (about their work with patients; about each other's work), about a patient's writing (or rather difficulty with writing), about how the figure of writing as both symptom and as form of transmission gets refracted and theorized in the psychoanalytic field. It centers on the case of Professor Brain (as Benvenuto calls him), the subject of Ernst Kris's case study (and a former patient of Melitta Schmideberg, Melanie Klein's daughter) that Lacan made much of in several of his works of the 1950s; ostensibly centering Kris's case study in order to distinguish his own clinical and theoretical position from the ego psychology of the day, Lacan proceeded, at various points (and as Benvenuto documents), to misread Kris's text in order to promote these distinctions. This, then, about a case of a patient whose symptom involves certain troubles with reading and writing, with attribution and misattribution, with whose ideas are whose. Benvenuto is sensitive to the transferential scene of reading and writing throughout a work that parses these complex narrative jostlings in order to suggest what the psychoanalytic theory of language means about its own transmission, and in its last pages, he explains his method:
I wanted this text to be an example of what we can take to be a deconstructive reading of psychoanalytic texts, to reconstruct what shows itself in a psychoanalytic theory—to indicate its object a—is to deconstruct it, because that is the way to lay bare a need that does not show but inspires thought. We should ask ourselves: “By opting for this way of seeing things, what does this analyst want to show? Does he want to show his personal way of doing analysis? Or does he want to show and implicit
Page 576metaphysics about the humans in which he believes? Or does he want to propose a certain