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For those who admire or revile Lacan there is much to ponder in Elisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan.
Roudinesco's presentation of Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan, human being, and Lacan, originator of psychoanalytic thought, put me in
mind of Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Both books achieve the complex task of weaving together the story of a man's life and his intellectual voyage. Roudinesco brings the reader a rich panorama of facts, anecdotes, interviews, and analysis, both psychoanalytic and historical, from her perspectives as a Lacanian trained analyst and a historian. Lacan's capacity to engage, albeit on his own terms, with the likes of Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre gave a strong voice to psychoanalysis among the philosophers. He was involved in the major intellectual movements of the twentieth century: Freudianism, surrealism, existentialism, structuralism, and postsructuralism.
Born into a conservative bourgeois Catholic family, Lacan always walked a line between conservatism and radicalism. Roudinesco believes Lacan's concern about the “father” in his theories was in part a response to his cold, austere mother and his warm but intellectual father. She gives a vivid portrait of the young Lacan:
His hunger for fame and knowledge made him insatiably curious, assailing with question after question anyone whose learning he might hope to absorb. He looked at people so intently they often took him for some sort of diabolical being possessed himself and trying to possess them. Yet there was nothing diabolical about him. The fascination he exercised on others came from the extreme swiftness with which his mind worked, combined with the extreme slowness of his bodily movements. Always deep in thought he was at once tyrannical and attractive, inquisitorial and anxious, a show-off and a man haunted by the truth… (p. 137).
If one reads Lacan's seminars, it is amazing to see the depth and breadth of his reading of a myriad of aut