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When I first met John Forrester at King's College, Cambridge, in 1982, his book on Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Forrester, 1980) had already become a classic. Published just two years earlier, it did something that no other English-language publication to date had even attempted. Through its detailed exploration of the place of language in Freud's early work, it constituted not only a vital piece of historical research but also a platform for Lacanian studies. Lacan was so often identified with the project of showing how language mattered to psychoanalysis, and now here was a study that came out of history and philosophy of science that demonstrated that language was indeed central to the early Freud. Although it was primarily about Freud, because of this association, it was also a book about Lacan.
There had been hundreds of studies of Freud and the early generation of analysts that at least aimed at some sort of critical rigour, yet there was just nothing that matched the standards of research when it came to Lacan. John's book changed that. It appeared at a time when Lacan was corralled with Barthes, Derrida and Foucault as a continental poststructuralist rather than as a clinician or as a serious reader of Freud. The interminable accusations of abstraction made his work seem fanciful to many who had not engaged directly with the writings or seminar transcripts, yet John's book provided a foundation, or even, for some, a justification, for taking Lacan seriously.
In the early 1980s, Lacan was considered a poststructuralist by most of the English-language commentators, yet John's careful and arduous work during this time would help to change that. His translations, with Sylvana Tomaselli, of Lacan's ‘Seminar I’ (Lacan, 1988a) and ‘Seminar II’