Goodbye Doctor
On the couch with ‘the most controversial analyst since Freud’
By Peter Salmon
For those on the outside of psychoanalysis the actual analytic session can seem rather opaque. What happens in the small room stays in the small room. Betty Milan’s Analyzed by Lacan:A personal account (translated by Clifford E. Landers and Chris Vanderwees) is therefore an absorbing attempt to draw back the curtain by someone for whom analysis was pivotal, and whose analyst was one of the most provocative of all practitioners -Jacques Lacan.
Milan, herself a psychoanalyst, left her native Brazil several times in the 1970s, originally simply to talk to Lacan about bringing someone to Brazil to teach a seminar on his work, but later to be analysed: after a first meeting she declared herself “no longer the same”. She is also a playwright, novelist and essayist, and conveys a vivid sense of her encounters with the (always capitalized) “Doctor”.
The book is in three parts: an account of Milan’s sessions with Lacan; the script of her play Goodbye Doctor, which formed the basis of the film Adieu Lacan (2022); and an interview with the author that recaps the contents of the book and does not add very much. The first third is perhaps the most valuable. Lacan’s eccentricities are brought amusingly to life – the shock of hair, the dandyish wardrobe (“The Doctor wore a velvet-and-silk-striped jacket and pink shorts, reminiscent of the cotton candy sold at the entrance of circuses.”) – but the prevailing tone is that of a serious investigation.
For Milan the process of psychoanalysis is built around, as Lacan puts it, “punctuation not interpretation”. He was thrown out of the Sodete Française de Psychanalyse for cutting sessions short rather than adhering to the statutory fifty minutes. Milan’s book is a powerful defence of his practice, however, and a fascinating exploration of it. Lacan argued that psychoanalysis happens between sessions, not at them. Milan recalls that he would suddenly end sessions with a vaguely avuncular “see you tomorrow” in order to “have me listen to myself”. That these moments could be disorientating was, for Lacan, part of their purpose. “We must not”, he said, “understand too quickly.” By exploring the moment of cessation the analysand does the work of analysis away from the analyst.
These interruptions lead Milan to explore her origins as a Lebanese exile living in Brazil. She thinks about identity and dislocation as she walks around Paris, that place “made for the eyes … [in which] it is an invitation to see and to be seen”. She grapples with three languages, both on her own and with Lacan: French (“words like objects”), Portuguese (“translucent, light as veils”) and Arabic, the language of her childhood family home. Each vie for importance, perhaps because, as Lacan puts it, “the unconscious can manifest itself in any language”.
Lacan also has what we might call the gift of interruption. While much of what he says seems, to the reader, gently encouraging (“Tell me”, “What else?”, “Go ahead”), for Milan he is a master of finding the moment to intervene. She calls this “the precipitation of desire … through a well-timed interruption”. Each session “was a surprising event”. She rings Lacan to tell him she is in Paris, and his response, “So what?”, sets the template for theirrelationship, inexplicable from the outside as so many are. It was Lacan who suggested that she come to France, but for Milan his dismissiveness forces her to acknowledge her own desire to be analysed. It is something to fight for. “By hanging up the phone with a snap, he had made me hear my desire … he had made abruptness a terribly effective analytical spring.” Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit (translated into French as “apres-coup” and English as “afterwardness”) is a mode of belated understanding, but this isn’t quite that, because Milan seems to understand the effects of her analysis at the time.
Her willingness to accept anything that Lacan says or does as a masterful way to get at her unconscious occasionally jars. He takes her money, and that is brilliant psychoanalysis; he doesn’t take her money, and that is equally brilliant. One thinks of Karl Popper’s “falsification principle” argument against psychoanalysis as a science: lacking conditions where something can be shown to be false, its truth claims are unsustainable.
Also, Milan sometimes seems too much like the model analysand. Apart from her desire to become a psychoanalyst, she chooses to learn French not by studying a primer or listening to the radio and TV, but by reading Proust and Celine. She recalls that her father hung a whip near the front door to discourage her from going outside. In dreams she sees her mother writing Spirochaeta pallida – Latin for the syphilis bacterium – in the desert sand. The reader may wonder what Lacan would have done with a more banal set of symptoms.
But Milan is telling her own story, and for her analysis was revelatory. It changed her life and produced the person she has become – someone who translated Lacan into Portuguese, for example. In fact she translates one of his seminars while being analysed, but he seems unimpressed when she puts the manuscript on his desk, and doesn’t look at it.
“It is not my language”, he calmly tells her. She later finds out that he was delighted with the translation, but that it wasn’t his role to say so, and “like all the greats … he never left his role”. The subject of psychoanalysis is “not the subject of thought, but the subject of the unconscious.”
Analyzed by Lacan is the first time Milan has written factually about her experiences with Lacan, though she explored analysis in the play Goodbye Doctor (2015) and the novel Lacan’s Parrot (1997). The two were combined in the film Adieu Lacan, with the sessions in Lacan’s office shot in claustrophobic black-and-white. The play and the film are themselves fascinating documents of a strange coming together of two desiring humans: one with a desire to speak, the other with a desire to listen.
Towards the end of her analysis Betty Milan decides that she must return to Brazil and tells Lacan she is going to stop the sessions, as she has nothing left to say. Anyway, she chides him, “You are not interested in what I say. Only in what there still is to say”. “That’s it”, he replies. “See you tomorrow.”
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By Peter Salmon
Analyzed by Lacan – Times Literary Supplement, 08/03/2024
Translated by Clifford E. Landers and Chris Vanderwees