Abstract
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way to say it all.
––Jacques Lacan
One of the unsettling aspects of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is that he wrote and spoke with his own peculiar style, one which is destined to evoke a response in the reader, and all too often a premature dismissal of his work as incomprehensible. In this, he reflects the obstacles confronted by anyone who attempts to hear or read the unconscious as it arrives in the speech of a patient. Free association comes at the cost of angst on the side of the analyst. As Lacan said, he preferred the way in to be difficult, a difficulty that no doubt has more to do with the lack of increased interest in his work in the English-speaking world than with the problems of translation.
This book joins a growing list of texts that purport to offer an introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan via a synopsis of its development: a more approachable account of his concepts. Let me say that it is my personal prejudice to prefer to read an author in the original. Nobody suggests we consider the work of an author such as Shakespeare via a summary, without recourse to the original, as if we could more easily enter the complexities by another path. Nonetheless, a text that is well referenced can provide the initiate with an introduction that, at the least, has a bibliographic status.
The majority of this book consists of a historical account of the major names in ‘child psychoanalysis’ including Freud, both the father and the daughter, Klein and Winnicott, among others, but, in line with the selfprofessed aspirations of the author, it is clearly promoting a Lacanian approach. The longest chapter in the book contains an overview of the fundamental analytic concepts that Lacan reworked from his important dictum, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. As such, it presents little that is better or worse than a number of other attempts to summarize the Lacanian corpus. In the book there is a lack of interpretation of what Lacan has written, which leaves it unclear as to how the author perceives the important distinctions that can be made between Lacan and other theorists. There is little of the author's own clinical work presented to explicate his views, perhaps reflecting the usual problems of confidentiality, but also possibly the origins of this book, which was written essentially as a PhD thesis, thus deriving from academic or university discourse.
Although entitled Pschoanalysis with Children, the author is of the opinion (with which I agree) that the difference in working with children compared with adults is a question of technique rather than method. The child can present a demand for analysis and be analysed according to the principles that guide any analysis. This opens the question as to what purpose is addressed by specifying the ‘child’ in the title when the theory presented is not directed towards ‘child analysis’ as essentially distinct from work with adults.
In attempting to imagine what a reader naive to Lacan would make of a precis of his work, I would hope that an introduction would comply with its inherent task and lead the truly interested back to the original texts. I am not convinced that this book will produce that effect. I would suggest that unless the empty space in one's bookshelf is adjacent to the works of Freud and Lacan (his Ecrits for example) there exists a lack this book will not fill.