Jacques Lacan

"Lacans writings, in addition to being bad or lunatic psychiatry, are also bad mathematics."

"As I became more familiar with Lacans teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacans bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacans own thought. But whereas most of Lacans commentators preferred to ape the masters style, and perpetuate the obscurity, I wanted to dissipate the haze and expose whatever was underneath – even if it meant seeing that the emperor was naked."

"The Lacan phenomenon is a bizarre one. Attempts to understand it have not been helped by the insistence of many of Lacans apologists that the pure theoretical issues can be separated from Lacans therapeutic practice and the extraordinary manner in which he behaves towards his disciples. Such an attitude is no more defensible in the case of Lacan than it is in the case of Freud himself. Indeed, perhaps the only real resemblance between Lacan and Freud is that both played the role of prophet or messiah with extraordinary effectiveness and both attracted disciples who treated their person as sacred and their word as law."

"On the principle of credo ut intelligam his disciples still believed [Lacan] even when, in his last few years, he was manifestly suffering from multi-infarct dementia."

"[Lacan’s] clients committed suicide at a rate that would have alarmed a man armed with less robust self-confidence. He claimed that it was due to the severity of the cases he took on but it may also have had something to do with the way he would start and stop analysis at whim and would sometimes cast aside, at very short notice, people who had been under his ‘care’ for years."

"Saussure was trying to de-psychologize linguistics. But Lacan re- psychologizes Saussures linguistics. Lacan is using a formal theory of language to explain empirical events in the mind. Saussure was trying precisely not to say what goes on in your or my mind when we understand a word or make up a sentence, and, within the limits of his theory, he succeeded. Lacan, however, applies Saussures carefully apsychological theory to describe precisely what it avoided describing."

"Lacans synthesis of Freud, Hegel and structuralism was often held to contain deep truths about the nature of desire in general and the way women live, or have lived, should or should not live in particular."

"Like all British children, I had been given a smattering of physics, chemistry and biology at school, but this consisted solely of isolated facts and figures, without any overall view. Even worse, my high school science gave me no understanding of the process of scientific discovery, the dialectic of evidence and argument. I went on to study languages and linguistics at university, but even here the emphasis was just as much on literature as on the scientific study of language. It is hardly surprising, then, that when I came across the ideas of Jacques Lacan, shortly after finishing my first degree, I was unable to spot their serious defects. Now I understand more about how science works, those defects are so crashingly obvious that I sometimes feel ashamed of myself for being so naïve."

"Whether used in the clinic or the seminar room, Lacans ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature."

"The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."

"Lacan goes wrong by relying (quite uncritically!) on Saussures signifier-signified conception of language. It is understandable that Lacan, when he began to write in the 1930s, should learn Saussures turn-of-the-century linguistics. But even at the end of his life he and now his followers write about signifiers and signifieds as though the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics had never happened. Contemporary literary theorists tirelessly quote Saussure. But why? Todays linguists no more use Saussures model than todays physicists use the concept of phlogiston. I do not mean to suggest that linguists have all adopted Chomskys views. They are still controversial, and he would be the first to acknowledge that they are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Linguists who reject Chomskys ideas, however, are trying to offer alternatives or to go beyond Chomsky. They are not turning back to Saussure. My point is not that Chomsky is right but that Saussure and Lacan are wrong."

"Lacan portrayed this break [of his psychoanalytic school from the International Psychoanalytical Association] as the result of an ideological conflict between the old school and the progressive, true Freudians represented by himself. Actually it was about his greed. He needed to maximise his throughput of patients in order to finance his lavish lifestyle. (He died a multi-millionaire.) He started to shorten his sessions, without a pro rata reduction of fee, to as little as ten minutes. Unfortunately, Freudian theory fixes the minimum length of a session at 50 minutes. Lacan was therefore repeatedly cautioned by the IPA."