The Dark Legend of Jacques Lacan
Nathalie Jaudel
A polemical book to set the record straight.
Over forty years after the death of Jacques Lacan, the ‘dark legend’ continues to circulate in common perception – Lacan the tyrant, Lacan the unscrupulous, Lacan the rapacious, Lacan the deranged.
The sole biography published to date on the greatest French psychoanalyst proffers a sounding board for this dark legend, and does so under the cover of objectivity. Overlooking how one cannot become the historian of one’s own history, allowing herself to be overtaken by her negative transference, turning a blind eye to what Lacan said about himself and to the practice to which he was devoted, Elisabeth Roudinesco allows both the man and his teaching to slip through her fingers. And not without departing from the very rules of historical method that she claims to espouse.
Nathalie Jaudel lays out her reply and paints a portrait of Lacan that sets its compass by Roland Barthes’ remark that a biographer should strive to be at once ‘amicable and jaunty’.
Nathalie Jaudel, a graduate of Sciences-Po Paris and a former lawyer, is a psychoanalyst based in Paris. She is a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
The Dark Legend of Jacques Lacan is a title from the World Association of Psychoanalysis Libretto Series. Text first published in French as La légende noire de Jacques Lacan, Navarin éditeur, Paris 6e, 2014. Translated into English for this edition by A.R. Price.