A Courier for Jacques Lacan

Fortunately, I didn’t have to stand for long before the door was opened. The man who entered shook my hand and trained his bespectacled eyes on me. With one searing look, he had taken me in. He had learned what he wanted to know, had made his diagnosis. I, on the other hand, was trying to put together all I had heard about him—that he was a theoretician who rivaled Freud, that he was un cochon (meaning, in this case, not only ‘pig’ but ‘unprincipled person’ as well), a charmer and womanizer, a trouble-making paranoiac, a supremely gifted clinician, a genius. This bundle of contradictions had a disproportionately large head, graying hair brushed up from a high forehead, and heavy black eyebrows. If human ears can be said to look alert, his did. Was I imagining it, or was there something Mephistophelian about his appearance?

As we went into lunch, he apologized for the simple meal we were about to have: he was on a régime. If this opening remark on so personal a note was a bid for sympathy, it was successful. When I said I was sorry he was not feeling well, he made a gesture of weariness. I could imagine, could I not, that the turmoil of recent years had taken its toll? Seated opposite me, his face framed by the window and, behind it, a dove-gray mat of the soft autumnal day, he looked careworn and considerably older than his sixty-four years.

The bonne brought a platter, put it on a trivet between us, and left us to serve ourselves. Did I know this Middle Eastern dish, Baba Ghannouj? my host asked, coaxing me to take a more generous portion. During the courses that followed (the obligatory four of a French lunch), which he urged on me but took little of himself, “The Old Man” (as he was also called) talked about his separation from the International Psychoanalytic Association. He suggested that he had left, rather than been expelled, because its leaders, like his former colleagues in France, had moved so far from Freud’s teachings that they could hardly any longer be called Freudians. He, and he alone, was in the direct line.

Listening to French analysts, Freudians every one, talk about their relationship to the Master, I often imagined Freud as a Parisian papa who was attempting to assemble his large family for a Sunday drive in the family automobile. There was a noisy dispute as each child insisted that he was Papa’s favorite and therefore should sit closest to him.

Lacan was saying that in the preceding twelve years there had been almost continual warring among his colleagues. The strife that had surrounded him, all of which would have been unnecessary if the others had been able to follow his theoretical development of Freud’s texts, had drained his energy, all but broken his spirit. He was tired of these disputes. From now on he wanted to devote himself to educating the young, the cream of the arts and sciences students who attended his lectures at the Ecole normale supérieure. Others told him that he was having an enormous influence not only on analysts-in-training, but also on writers, Marxists, and the clergy.

Mention of the clergy led me to a question I wanted to ask of this Jesuit-educated analyst whose brother was a priest. It was thought in the United States that one reason psychoanalysis had taken hold so slowly in France was the repressive influence of the Catholic church. Was this so?

The apostate almost permitted himself to smile. It was not that psychoanalysis had taken hold too slowly in France, but rather too quickly in the United States. This haste had led to chaotic fracturing into groups, to eclecticism, to deplorable shortcuts, to popularization. No, in France analysts had no conflict with the church, such as his colleagues in Spain and Italy reported. In Paris there were priest-analysts, and frequently when a vocation was in question, a seminarian was sent to him for consultation.

In December his lecture series at the Ecole normale would begin again. He would give me a card to present at the door for admission. After he had done so, we left the apartment together. Going down the stairs, he held the banister with one hand, and asked if he might have my arm as a support for the other. As we descended slowly, he said my husband and I must come to visit him in the country so we could talk in a more leisurely way. I said he must come to see us on the rue de l’Université. I knew his invitation was not serious. He knew mine was.

Six weeks later, when I telephoned to invite him, he said he would be delighted to join us for dinner. At the table were the Wests (Mary McCarthy and Jim), the Wylies (Laurence, on leave from Harvard, was Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy), a French writer and her husband. Having learned by what I hoped was delicate questioning that the guest of honor would be coming without his wife (from whom, it was said, he had been separated for some time), I invited as the extra woman an Indo-Chinese divorcée-about-town.

The last to arrive, Dr. Lacan entered the living room with a buoyant step. In a well-tailored dinner jacket, the man who so recently had looked seventy now looked fifty. His hair was less gray (a blue rinse at Carita’s, gossip had it) and his somber expression had been replaced by one that was lively, even mischievous. There was no sign of a careful diet as he rollicked through the meal, accepting wine each time it was poured.

My husband, who had questioned the wisdom of my having lunch in the apartment of a man I had never met, a Frenchman, and one with an unsavory reputation, had been reassured by my report of the interview. If Lacan had his demonic side, the one he had presented to me had been benign, elderly, sad—the broken spirit, convalescent’s appetite, signs of premature aging in the face, and need for assistance going down the stairs. I was no less astonished than Bob, as I told him later, at this rejuvenation. I felt as though I had seen Faust before and after the bargain was struck.

Lacan had a reputation for being either charming or outrageous in social life, depending on the situation. Which would he be tonight? During the early part of the meal, playing the engaging dinner companion, he asked lightly about how my article was going with the air of a fond professor indulging a favorite student. Yes, I could feel the charm. Within a few minutes of his turning to talk to Mary McCarthy, however, I observed a sharp change in his manner. As Mary quizzed him about Freud’s study of Leonardo, I wondered how long it had been since anyone had challenged him as she was doing. Would he become irritable? Or, worse, commit the besetting sin of French intellectuals and attempt to patronize her? Sparks flew between them, but he listened judiciously to her criticisms and addressed them seriously (if, as she said later, unconvincingly). He joined the conversation I was having with Laurence Wylie and steered it to talk about Harvard. What he seemed most eager to know about was the caliber of the students there, how they compared with those at the grandes écoles in Paris. Remembering that I had said at lunch that I had lived in Princeton, he asked about the Gauss Seminars: who invited the speakers? how many attended? what was the level of the discussion?

After dinner, he talked French politics with Bob. Bob said that when the divorcée joined them in conversation, Lacan appreciated her décolletage. When it was time to leave, he gallantly offered to see her home.

It was not unusual in Paris for a guest to send flowers following a dinner party. The next morning when a delivery boy handed me Lacan’s card and a box, I felt certain it would not contain a predictable selection. Enfolded in tissue paper was a single, exquisite orchid of a species I had never seen before.

In December, I went to the opening lecture at the Ecole normale. The lecture hall was filling up when I arrived. There were fifty or sixty in attendance. Many were of student age, other older; there were also a few women and five or six clerics. (Marxists were more difficult to spot, so I couldn’t estimate their number.) There was a feeling of excitement in the air. Much hand-shaking. Animated conversation on all sides. At a certain moment conversation stopped abruptly. As the lecturer entered from the rear and walked down the right aisle, all eyes followed him. I can’t swear that he was wearing a cape, but whatever his outer garment, he divested himself of it with a flourish.

Pad and pen at the ready for note-taking, I listened carefully. The subject was the unconscious. Or was it? I had the impression I was following, but after fifteen minutes I realized I had understood nothing. Lacan’s prose style was so convoluted (where was that Cartesian clarity the French prized so highly?) that I had counted heavily on the lectures to help me to get a grip on his theories. After another half hour, I knew I was completely lost. As I looked around the room, it seemed to me that the audience was hypnotized. In Charcot’s city, there was a doctor at the lectern who, had he been a clinician in a turn-of-the-century hospital, would have been famous for curing hysterics. The question I asked myself in each encounter with Lacan was, Would I trust this man with my unconscious?

At the end of the lecture, I confessed to the man seated next to me that I had not understood. Could he tell me what it had been about? My neighbor asked how long I had been attending these classes. “Your first time? I’ve been coming for six years and I still don’t understand,” he said. Why, then, had he continued for so long? “For the theater. The Doctor is better entertainment than Barrault at the Odeon.” And then, making a gesture to take in the room, he added, “That’s why we’re all here.”

After the second and third lectures, I questioned others. They, too, admitted to being mystified. Or they said they came for the amusement to be had from Lacan’s verbal gymnastics—the puns, paradoxes, and epigrams. There were others undoubtedly, especially analysts-in-training, who, having familiarized themselves with the special vocabulary and become habituated to the style, were able to follow the labyrinthine theorizing, and followed it with excitement. They belonged to that race of Parisian intellectuals who, as Jane Kramer said in the New Yorker, “behave as though thinking is a swashbuckling and erotic art.”

During the seventies, which have been called “the glory days of Lacanism,” whenever I returned to Paris for a visit, I tried to catch up on what was going on. An American friend of mine who was in treatment with The Doctor described some of his sessions. One of the early criticisms of the way Lacan conducted his practice had been aimed at his innovation of shortening the hour to twenty or so minutes. By the time my friend Donald was seeing him, the short session had become what I thought of as the short­short. Donald reported that after an introductory period of some weeks at full time, he had arrived one day bursting to report a dream. At the end of his recital, he had been dismissed with the injunction to go away and work on it on his own.

Five minutes after the session had begun, Donald was out on the street. He walked in a daze, turned into a cul-de-sac, and found himself in front of the church of St. Thomas d’Acquin (a block away from 5, rue de Lille). An apostate (like his analyst), he entered and, seated in a rear pew, struggled to understand the riches his unconscious had tossed up the previous night. He expressed no resentment at having paid the full fee (in cash) and said he would pass on to Lacan my suggestion that he use the church as an annex, a kind of study hall for disoriented patients who reeled out of his office and were looking for a place to do their homework.

Junior analysts I questioned during these years said there had been a radical change in Lacan’s attitude toward the United States. From having been highly critical of this country in the sixties, he had become convinced that Americans would be more open to his writings than his countrymen. What I suspected was that even in 1965 he had been looking toward the New World for a larger audience than France could provide him with. I remembered that shortly before I left Paris for New York, he had telephoned me. He had a great favor to ask, he said. A reporter from Time had requested an interview, but this man didn’t seem to know who he was. Would I see the reporter before he did, explain to my compatriot? . . . It was important . . . He would be most grateful.

Lacan saw me as a courier. I would draw an attractive picture of him in my article. I would talk to the people at Princeton about his giving a Gauss Seminar (which I did) and perhaps even mention him to his old analyst, Dr. Loewenstein (which I didn’t). I would talk to the reporter from Time (“Who does this character Lacan think he is anyway?”), explain that even if the reporter didn’t understand Lacan’s importance as a thinker, he was worth paying attention to because he was on his way to becoming a media star.

Only a few years later, during the student revolution of 1968, he did become a star in France. And, as he suspected, America was indeed hospitable to his ideas, although just how hospitable I don’t think he could have predicted. Whenever I pick up a magazine of film criticism these days, or hear students use his vocabulary as they “think Lacan,” I imagine how gratified he would be. Or would he? I can also imagine the irritation in his voice as he protested, “No, no, no.” And then added—echoing the physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s astringent remark made in another context—“No, that is not even wrong.”