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In discussing Lacan it is essential to be as frank about how his ideas are presented to us as about the ideas themselves, for it is his style that goes a long way toward blocking our comprehension of him. His claim that it is a deliberate style, intended to blind the philistines among us, rings true occasionally, when we come upon passages that for their clarity might have been written by the least tendentious. All the same it must strike most readers, as it did an earlier translator, Anthony Wilden, that Lacan has become the prisoner of his own style. If he once struck this pose for a purpose, that was a long time ago, and the habit has become fixed in perpetuity.
There are two opposing reasons to lament Lacan's style. The more weighty one is that it drives away almost everyone schooled outside his own École freudienne. His rebarbative personality might be enough to do that even if he had the tone, or pen, of angels, but the task of extracting his meaning, so that it can be stated in logical terms and rationally applied, is overwhelming. I call this a weighty reason for sorrow, because, as I hope to make clear in this review, I think that what Lacan has to offer is of immense value, and that it will grow more valuable as it is made available as part of the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought, even if it is a part that follows a new river bed. The more pity, then, to consider the second reason: that for his immediate followers and some others, the style is the indispensable vehicle of his thought,