Abstract
Over the past three decades, Jacques Lacan has repeatedly been accused of being a charlatan—not just that his ideas are wrong, but that his work is inherently unworthy of intellectual consideration. This chapter starts by tracing the genealogy of the ‘charlatan’ label, placing it in the context of a larger critique of psychoanalysis that has emerged during this time. Lacan’s own questions about the analyst’s authority are then foregrounded: does one’s standing as a psychoanalyst come from within, from self-mastery, or must it be conferred by an external qualification? Acknowledging earlier attempts by critics such as Jane Gallop and Malcolm Bowie to address the issue of Lacan’s mastery, the chapter closes by introducing six key figures who have accused Lacan of being a charlatan, each of whose arguments will be examined in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
See Todd Dufresne’s article ‘The Making of a “Freud Basher,” or Reflections of a “Supercilious Neurotic…”’ (Dufresne 2014, p. 81). Citing a private email from Borch-Jacobsen, Dufresne points out, in particular, Roudinesco’s use of the words ‘révisionniste’ and ‘négationniste,’ which he argues are terms that in French apply to Holocaust deniers, in her attacks on Le livre noir de la psychanalyse.
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Mathews, P.D. (2020). Introduction. In: Lacan the Charlatan. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45204-9_1
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