Lacan and the Matter of Origins: Shuli Barzilai. Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1999,  300 pp.

Shuli Barzilai, a professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, starts her book with what she admits was an afterthought: an essay on Lacan's 1955 purchase of a famous painting by Courbet, titled The Origin of the World . It is a painting of a woman's foreshortened torso, including the genitals. The author's initial stress on an objet d'art in Lacan's possession suggests that she is going to proceed to psychoanalyze Lacan while critiquing some of his theories.

The book appears to be aimed more towards a literary academic audience than a clinical one. The nine chapters and epilogue, of which five were published previously in other contexts, are a mélange of styles of writing about Lacan's work. The major text, cited repeatedly, is Les complexes familiaux, which Lacan wrote in 1938 as an article in l'Encyclopédie française. The major value of Barzilai's book may be in raising awareness of this important early text of Lacan's, which is difficult to obtain in English or in French. Barzilai also raises questions about Lacan's critique of Ferenczi, about his work on the mirror stage, about identification in its relation to Wallon's earlier work in this area, and about Kristeva's critique of Lacan. Amid the scatter of ideas, reflections, puns, and interpretations, what stood out for me was the impression that Barzilai has a major bone to pick with Lacan about what she views as his progressive retreat from the maternal.

Barzilai appears to argue that Lacan's creation of the concept of the objet a was a defence against his own anxiety about the maternal body. This is a serious allegation, since Lacan considered the objet a to be his major contribution to psychoanalysis. A crucial part of Barzilai's argument is the fact that, over the years, Lacan came back repeatedly to an anecdote from St. Augustine's Confessions. To give the reader a better idea of what is at stake here, I will give the original anecdote from St. Augustine, then Barzilai's argument, and finally