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Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes The broader psychotherapeutic literature has little or nothing to say about the effectiveness of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Though a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of
Latin America, Lacan's influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world is negligible,
where his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities.
A notable exception is the works of Dr. Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The
Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in
successfully treating sexually abused young women.

13.6 His Criticisms

Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their book Fashionable Nonsense have criticised Lacan's use
of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of
abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand. Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work
wholesale. François Roustang called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish," and
quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious
charlatan". Dylan Evans, formerly a Lacanian analyst, eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking
a sound scientific basis and for harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's
followers for treating his writings as "holy writ." Richard Webster has decried what he sees as
Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan". Richard Dawkins, in a review of
Fashionable Nonsense, said regarding Lacan: "We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal
and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he
speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to
the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things
that I don't know anything about."
Lacan's colleague Daniel Lagache considered that "[Lacan] embodied the analyst's bad conscience.
But... a good conscience in a psychoanalyst is no less dangerous". Others have been more forceful,
describing him as "The Shrink from Hell... [an] attractive psychopath", and detailing a long list of
collateral damage to "patients, colleagues, mistresses, wives, children, publishers, editors and
opponents... [as his] lunatic legacy". Certainly many of "the conflicts around Lacan's school and
his person" have been linked to the "form of charismatic authority which, in his personal and
institutional presence, he so dramatically provoked". Lacan himself defended his approach on the
grounds that "psychosis is an attempt at rigor... I am psychotic for the simple reason that I have
always tried to be rigorous".
Malcolm Bowie has suggested that Lacan "had the fatal weakness of all those who are fanatically
against all forms of totalization (the complete picture) in the so-called human sciences: a love of
system". Similarly, Jacqueline Rose has argued that "Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism
he described, just as his utterance constantly rejoins the mastery which he sought to undermine".
Feminists would then raise the question: "is Lacan, in claiming the law of the father, merely
himself in the grip of the Oedipus complex?"
While it is widely recognised that "Lacan was... an intellectual magpie", this was not simply a
matter of borrowing from others. Instead, "Lacan was so zealous in invoking other men's work
and claiming to base his own arguments on them, when in reality he was departing from their
teachings, leaving behind mere skeletons". Even with Freud, it is seldom clearly signposted when
Lacan is expounding Freud, when he is reinterpreting Freud, or when he is proposing a completely
new theory in Freudian guise. The result was "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas
of Freud... Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him",[88]
so as to leave Lacan himself the "master" of his (and everyone's) thought. "Castoriadis... maintained
that Lacan had gradually come to prevent anyone else from thinking because of the way he tried
to make all thought dependent on himself".
More personal criticism of his intellectual style is that it depended on a kind of teasing lure-
"fundamental truths to be revealed... but always at some further point". In such a (feminist)
perspective, "Lacan's sadistic capriciousness reveals the prick behind the Phallus... a narcissistic
tease who persuades by means of attraction and resistance, not by orderly systematic discourse".

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