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JACQUES LACAN

HIS LIFE AND WORK

An exhaustive, partisan, and clinical treatment of the psychoanalyst who became one of France's most famous intellectuals by flamboyantly combining Freudianism, linguistics, and structuralism. Roudinesco, of Paris's Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, suggests reading this work as the third volume in her History of Psychoanalysis in France; this intellectual biography shares with her earlier volumes a broad sweep and authoritative dissertation-like style, as she tracks Lacan's orbits among the era's great minds and squabbling psychoanalytic schools. Despite her nearly smothering respect for Lacan, she has discovered some unpleasant revelations and embarrassing facts. It's no surprise that Lacan—whose version of the Oedipal struggle is labeled le nom du päre (the name-of-the-father, or, punningly, the no-of-the-father)—had a father who was mostly absent. But it is startling to discover that the married Lacan fathered an illegitimate daughter with Georges Bataille's ex-wife and carried on a double life with his two families. If Lacan's personal life was complicated by his romantic affairs, his intellectual life was positively profligate, with ties to the structuralist anthropologist LÇvi-Strauss, the existentialist Heidegger, the decadent Bataille, the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the Marxist Louis Althusser (later declared criminally insane). Roudinesco also uncovers Lacan's early intellectual influences, including his brief infatuation with Spinoza and his fruitful encounter with Salvador Dal°'s ``paranoia-critical method.'' Roudinesco capably traces how this network of intellectual borrowings and Lacan's reworkings of Freud eventually led him to set up his own renegade school of psychoanalysis in Paris. Heidegger, himself no paragon of virture or readability, remarked after reading Lacan's often dizzying magnum opus, Ecrits, that ``the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist.'' An encyclopedic biography most likely to appeal to experts, but enlivened by portraits of Lacan's mercurial personality and behavior. (22 photos, not seen)

Pub Date: April 17, 1997

ISBN: 0-231-10146-5

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997

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THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.

Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”

The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5

Page Count: 580

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

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HALLUCINATIONS

A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.

Acclaimed British neurologist Sacks (Neurology and Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.; The Mind’s Eye, 2010, etc.) delves into the many different sorts of hallucinations that can be generated by the human mind.

The author assembles a wide range of case studies in hallucinations—seeing, hearing or otherwise perceiving things that aren’t there—and the varying brain quirks and disorders that cause them in patients who are otherwise mentally healthy. In each case, he presents a fascinating condition and then expounds on the neurological causes at work, drawing from his own work as a neurologist, as well as other case studies, letters from patients and even historical records and literature. For example, he tells the story of an elderly blind woman who “saw” strange people and animals in her room, caused by Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition in with the parts of the brain responsible for vision draw on memories instead of visual perceptions. In another chapter, Sacks recalls his own experimentation with drugs, describing his auditory hallucinations. He believed he heard his neighbors drop by for breakfast, and he cooked for them, “put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room—and found it completely empty.” He also tells of hallucinations in people who have undergone prolonged sensory deprivation and in those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, migraines, epilepsy and narcolepsy, among other conditions. Although this collection of disorders feels somewhat formulaic, it’s a formula that has served Sacks well in several previous books (especially his 1985 bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and it’s still effective—largely because Sacks never turns exploitative, instead sketching out each illness with compassion and thoughtful prose.

A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-95724-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

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