The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was hailed, in his lifetime, as the most insightful reader of Sigmund Freud and a radical disseminator of Freudian discourse both in theory and practice. However, responses to Lacan were not always positive as many also condemned him, both in his lifetime and after his death, as an unoriginal mind, an intellectual impostor, a charlatan, a misogynist, and an arrogant obscurantist, among other things. This paper explains the clinical implications of such condemnation of Lacan and digs into the reasons of his dismissal. It proposes that the negative responses to Lacan are largely a product of a failure to overcome the hermeneutic challenges that his teaching poses to the reader. It analyzes four such challenges pertaining to Lacan's works, i.e., unavailability, incomprehensibility, inapplicability and untheorizability. An exploration of these challenges demonstrates the publication politics/ethics of Lacan's works, his discursive strategies as an analyst-teacher, his reservations about “applied psychoanalysis,” and his distancing from university discourses on theory. The apparent impasses of Lacan's teaching, this paper claims, help establish the distinctness of psychoanalysis as an “epistemology of the clinical,” highlight the radical differences between Lacan and poststructuralists, and offer valuable lessons in hermeneutics