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This monumental and fascinating book, well translated from the French, leaves one in awe of its author, who was able to harness mountains of complex material and present it, not only with clarity, but with a storyteller's gift for the dramatic. Though an entity by itself, this book is the third volume of Elizabeth Roudinesco's History of French Psychoanalysis. The author's credentials as historian, psychoanalyst, and as a close member of Lacan's inner circle make her uniquely qualified to render a portrait of the most outstanding, controversial, denounced, and worshiped figure of twentieth-century intellectual France. Jacques Lacan, ever passionately subversive, created his own changing theoretical stream of concepts in critical discourse with lofty figures of the past—Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Freud, and others—as well as with prominent intellectual figures of his own generation: authors, philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, and some outstanding psychoanalysts. Lacan was an intellectual artist whose ideological and ideational creations were intimately connected with the intellectual as well as artistic trends of his time. Thus, Lacan's biography cannot but also be a cultural and intellectual history of twentieth-century France.
The author rises superbly to this challenge. The richness of her presentation includes an array of personages little known to American audiences, but they do not overwhelm, as her sense of drama and story never deteriorates into a mere enumeration.
The author sets the scene in her short preface, which I found meaningful only after I had experienced the book. She writes:
Jacques Lacan sought to bring plague, subversion, and disorder to the moderate Freudians of his time. It was a Freudianism that having survived fascism had adapted itself so well to democracy that it had almost forgotten the violence of its origin. Lacan's story is the story of a French passion, a passion out of Balzac's passion.
The reference to plague associates not only