Lacan: A Second Chance in America, November 1975

It was fall 1975 and Jacques Lacan was coming to America. He wanted to give seminars at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and MIT. I was to be his point person in Cambridge, not because I was famous or well-connected (I was twenty-seven and still writing my dissertation on the history of French psychoanalysis), but I was available and in his debt.

For several years before this visit, I had been in France, studying what I termed the French “infatuation” with Freud. I framed my work as an intellectual history mystery. Why did a country that didn't even have a standard edition of Freud in the early 1960s come to have a vibrant psychoanalytic culture by the mid-1970s? I interviewed analysts and analysts in training. And I also interviewed a collection of philosophers, doctors, journalists, political activists, social workers, teachers, and psychologists taken up by the psychoanalytic enthusiasm that was sweeping the professions. In France, massage therapists and high school students wanted to be in psychoanalysis. In the United States, classical analysis was considered passé. In France, psychoanalysts were in demand—but only a linguistic, Cartesian brand of psychoanalysis embodied in the person and ideas of seventh arrondissement Jacques Lacan, head of L'École Freudienne de Paris.

But for me, there was more to Lacan's popularity than the idea that the French had found a Catholic and French Freud. My working hypothesis: In the aftermath of the failed student uprising of May 1968, Lacan's notions about the centrality of what he called the symbolic order became a way to think through the political ideas of May. May ideology insisted that there was no line between the political and the personal. Lacan

insisted that people and society are constituted through language. There is no “natural man” prior to life through language. Lacan's