Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. Stuart Schneiderman. Cambridge and London:  Harvard University Press, 1983,  182 pp.

In 1981 Jacques Lacan, famous and controversial genius of French psychoanalysis, died. Stuart Schneiderman, who has the distinction of being Lacan's only American analysand, has written this fascinating and delightful work in warm tribute to his former analyst and teacher.

Lacan's theories and methods have not been well received and are little known in the United States. The author sees this as the result of Lacan's nearly incomprehensible style of discourse which, even when penetrated, does not tell the whole story. He seeks to remedy this by elucidating Lacan's thought as he recalls his experience of Lacan, his analysis, and the French psycho-analytic society in the years of his passage from Professor of English in Buffalo to Lacanian psychoanalyst in New York.

It was said of Lacan that he was an intellectual without emotion, all emotion and lacking in restraint, outrageous, immoral, boorish, arrogant and perverted. Schneiderman does not deny this, in fact, says these claims may all be supportable with true stories of Lacan's personal behaviors and misbehaviors.

And, if these offenses aren't exciting enough, Lacan was also an enormously successful psychoanalyst, master theoretician and clinician, a cult hero and public figure whose activities were reported in the French press.

Schneiderman tells us that he was a tragic hero who left the crowd behind to pursue his art alone and met the inexorable destiny of anyone who challenges the integrity of our intellectual and cultural heritage. For this he came to be shunned and suffered the