Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater Sergio Benvenuto,  Routledge, 2024,  136 pp., paperback, ISBN 9781032482330

Published online: 25 March 2025

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025

At this point of the interpretation I was waiting for the patient’s reaction. The patient was silent and the very length of the silence had a special significance. Then, as if reporting a sudden insight, he said: “Every noon, when I leave here, before luncheon, and before returning to my office, I walk through X Street [a street well known for its small but attractive restaurants] and I look at the menus in the windows. In one of the restaurants I usually find my preferred dish––fresh brains.” (Kris, 1951, p. 23)

In the above scene, the psychoanalytic ego psychologist Ernst Kris brings a clinical vignette, showcasing ego-psychological methodology, to its dramatic conclusion. This vignette became a key point in a debate on psychoanalytic technique between Lacanians and ego psychologists in the late twentieth century. Even today, the controversy over Kris’s account of a young academic obsessed with the idea of being in danger of stealing the ideas of others forms an important basis of psychoanalytic orientations. Sergio Benvenuto has now published Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater , a 120-page study that sheds new light on this controversy by tracing in detail the inconsistencies and contradictions, especially in Lacan’s interpretations of Kris’s vignette.

Benvenuto counts a whopping seven times in which Lacan discusses Kris’s account between 1954 and 1967 (see footnote 2, p. xii), and he follows Lacan’s interpretations into their—often telling—inaccuracies and contradictions. In a total