The more I read of this guy, the less I like him. Harold Bloom once called him a "hypnogogue."
I just can't believe you can't write more clearly. And there are places where it's so obvious that he's striking a pose, putting on an act to get people to think he's cool. It makes me lose respect for French people, that they can be taken in by such obvious posturing...
He's definitely creative, though. There's a passage where he goes off talking about how maybe scientific laws change. Which if nothing else is a genuinely interesting idea, although I think it's much more relevant to psychology than to the hard sciences.*
And he has a line where he is puzzled by the popularity of Jungian psychology among Christians, which he quite rightly describes as "gnostic mysticism or rustic paganism." So I liked that...
Ultimately I didn't really have to read this book. I knew his views on things going in, but I just wanted to make sure.
Something undeniably likable about Lacan is his skepticism towards the historical durability of his own position.
He basically alludes somewhere to the immense destructive powers of science (basically predicting biological warfare) and says, in effect, that science will gradually make things so unbearable (it will give us or really force us to receive so much reality) that people will be forced back into religion—which he takes to be a system designed to create meaning out of meaningless phenomena.
Psychoanalysis, he says, was a little bit of truth that people stumbled into by historical accident, because they were at loose ends. Like a treasure chest revealed by a freakishly-low tide, it is (probably) soon doomed to be vanish under the waves of history...
His position resembles that of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov...
The only difference is that the Grand Inquisitor is more obviously in bad faith. He believes that it is religious truth—and the ensuing immense responsibility—is what people find so unbearable...
Neither one believes in institutional religion (rather, they both believe that the function it serves it to sooth people by keeping them from reality), but the inquisitor believes that there really is some religious truth, albeit one which must be kept, in a kind of weird moral self-sacrifice, from the common rabble. Deep down (I say deep down, but I guess I should say—when he's not trying to be a chic intellectual celebrity), Lacan is basically an Enlightenment-style atheist, albeit perhaps more rigorous than most. And I think it's pretty credible that modern science / enlightenment style thinking basically yields psychoanalysis as its most refined product.
I mean that the copernican/darwinian revolution is truly completed in psychoanalysis. Probably even taken too far, given that we do, in fact, have free will. But people always go too far...
There is undeniably truth in psychoanalysis, a whole lot of truth—truth that the American psychological establishment generally ignores (because of our collective stupidity and perhaps even the relative lack of mental sickness that comes from this**). But there's also a lot of stupid junk... a lot of nonsense, a lot of willfully obscure writing and messing around with confusing concepts. At its best, it's paradoxical, but it's often merely contradictory.
Nevertheless, I don't think we have any better means of actually receiving truth about the human soul—besides poetry, which is much less rigorous, and revelation, which is much more limited in scope.
* my personal theory is that the soul or the structure of human relations which conditions that soul is always progressing or at least changing, such that any working theory of human psychology, while true at a certain time, gradually loses its validity as collective human consciousness wises up to it and attempts to push truth forward—mainly by being even more screwed up than was hitherto acknowledged possible. Which again resonates with Dostoevsky, namely the passage in Notes from Underground where the narrator says that if you could scientifically predict a man's actions, he would do the opposite, partly to affirm his own freedom and partly out of spite.
** seriously, it sounds like an absurd point when so many Americans are diagnosed with mental illnesses, but from what I've seen of really effective modern American psychology, it's basically just the very slow, measured application of the golden rule vis a vis modern neoliberal individualism. "You don't like it when Jimmy spits in your face and hits you with bricks? I suggest you politely ask him to stop. If he doesn't stop, don't see him anymore..." It's not as if all of us couldn't benefit from such comparatively obvious insights... I guess my point is that the people who actually benefit from psychoanalysis are dealing with less silly issues. And moreover, it's not as if problems which present themselves as boundary issues or whatever (the problems with simple solutions) are not nevertheless bound up in (or originate in) a person's whole life story and internal psychic geography. You can't really blame Americans for being practical. There is something decent to solving a problem without going too deep into the weeds of the past. The downside is how easily it degenerates into willful stupidity. Anyway, as I wrote above, I think that the truth has a value in itself. So even if you can solve someone's problems fairly easy with a more superficial kind of therapy, I think that there is tremendous value to self-understanding, both as an individual and collectively.