Above the Consulting-Room

John Sturrock

• Le Séminaire, Vols VIII and XVII by Jacques Lacan
  Seuil, 464 pp, frs 190.00, March 1991, ISBN 2 02 012502 1
• Lacan by Malcolm Bowie
  Fontana, 256 pp, £5.99, February 1991, ISBN 0 00 686076 1
• Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis by Samuel Weber
  Cambridge, 184 pp, £30.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 521 37410 3

Sessions with Dr Jacques Lacan were famously short, but none I dare say as short as mine. We met professionally not as doctor and patient, but as author and editor, and over the telephone, voice to voice. Newly taken on at the TLS, I was the one appointed to give Lacan the bad news, that an article he had been commissioned to write could not be used. He had sent in an absurdly knotted French text which had been turned by a translator into a blankly unmeaning English one, and it was not thought sensible for the paper to publish something that none of its editors could understand. Lacan was incensed at knowing that he had been spiked, on what to him seemed insultingly practical grounds. He thought it was enough that his name should be on the piece for it to have to be published, I that unintelligibility was a ground for rejection, irrespective of whose unintelligibility it was. Since the disputed article was not echt-Lacan but only Lacan in translation, the argument from authorship was strong but not irresistibly so: the article did not appear.