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Books

Anxiety by Jacques Lacan

Peter Caws critiques Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic obscurantism.

Some thirty years ago, at an academic retreat in the south of France, I met a young woman who announced herself as a lacanienne – a disciple of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). At that time Lacan’s so-called ‘seminars’ were being published one after another in French, as the Seminaires. However, they weren’t really seminars, more like meandering lectures transcribed by faithful followers. There were already a lot of them, and more to come. Reading them was obligatory for people like my new acquaintance, and I wondered how she managed to take it all in.

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