Nathalie Jaudel’s The Dark Legend of Jacques Lacan: Élisabeth Roudinesco & Her Historical Method offers a critical examination of Élisabeth Roudinesco’s biographical portrayal of Jacques Lacan. The key points of Jaudel’s work include:
1. Critique of Roudinesco’s Portrayal: Jaudel challenges the depiction of Lacan as a tyrannical figure, arguing that such representations contribute to a ‘dark legend’ that distorts his legacy.
2. Examination of Historical Methodology: The book scrutinizes Roudinesco’s historical methods, questioning the accuracy and objectivity of her narrative about Lacan’s life and work.
3. Advocacy for a Balanced Perspective: Jaudel emphasizes the need for a more nuanced and balanced understanding of Lacan, moving beyond sensationalist accounts to appreciate the complexity of his contributions to psychoanalysis.
Overall, Jaudel’s work seeks to rectify misconceptions and encourage a more accurate appreciation of Jacques Lacan’s legacy.
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 doolally.
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
