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Was he a genius? A charlatan? Was he mad? This lively account of the life of Jacques Lacan, the so-called French Freud, by Elizabeth Roudinesco, Parisian journalist and historian of psychoanalysis, provides reason, at one time or another, to think of him as each of these—and more.
Arguably the most creative speculative mind the psychoanalytic movement has produced since Freud himself, Lacan described his project as a return to the fundamental insight of Freud, namely, that the unconscious is structured like a language, as this may be discerned in Freud's decisive early works: The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. This much is straightforward enough, but the enterprise unfolded in so serendipitous a fashion and was expressed in so baroque a style that Anglo-Saxon readers, at least in the psychoanalytic (as opposed to the literary) community, have been slow to accord Lacan's work the recognition it may well deserve. Recent secondary literature has ameliorated the situation, but great difficulty remains for the uninitiated to gain a sense (however incomplete) of the enterprise as a whole. What unity is to be found in it is perhaps to be discovered more easily in the bizarre coherence of Lacan's own colorful life, and this is what Roudinesco provides.
Jacques Emile Lacan (1901–1981), firstborn son of Albert Lacan and Emilie Baudry, came from petit bourgeois stock: the scion of successful vinegar merchants on his father's side and of a long line of conventional Roman Catholics on the mother's. Memories of his childhood were deeply unhappy, scarred by the odious influence of the paternal grandfather, Emile, hatred of whom taught the young Jacques (who bore Emile as his middle name) how to perform the essential act of cursing God. Apparently, the grandfather tyrannized the father, who became so intimidated that he allowed himself to be dominated by the mother as well. Lacan's brother Marc, who bec