Conclusion

It is impossible really to conclude — as Flaubert said, silliness consists in wishing to conclude — but I would like briefly to recapitulate a number of major issues. Lacan, as we have seen, created a war machine against applied psychoanalysis, especially when applied to art and literature. Under the guise of a ‘return to Freud’, he was the first to criticise what passes as ‘psychobiography’ and ‘deep psychology’, even if this was the mode in which Freud himself worked. Can we say that ‘Lacan’ should sound like the name of a Trojan horse, of a virus that attaches itself to current psychoanalytic theory — so as to erase as much of it as possible, to let it devour itself until something radically new emerges? Is that how he wished to teach us to read?