Practice is a matter of art – Interview with Betty Milan
Betty Milan is a Paulista, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and the author of novels, essays, chronicles, and plays. Outside of Brazil, her works have been published in France, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and China. She has collaborated with major newspapers in Brazil. She has also worked for the International Parliament of Writers based in Strasbourg, France. She participated in the Paris Book Fair, Brazil, being guest of honor in 1998 and in 2015. In 2014, she represented the contemporary Brazilian literature at the Miami International Book Fair in Florida. In 2018, Milan gave a series of conferences in the United States on the theme Diaspora and Literature (Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, New York School of Arts). In 2019, she took part in an international meeting held in Beirut on the land of her ancestors (Lebanese Diaspora Energy) where she was honored for her contribution. One of her novels, Lacan’s Parrot, became a film, Adieu Lacan, which was released in 2022. The film can be streamed here: ADIEU LACAN | Richard C. Ledes Cinema. Before becoming a writer, Betty Milan studied medicine at the University of São Paulo and specialized in psychoanalysis in Paris with Jacques Lacan, of whom she was the assistant at the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Vincennes. This interview took place in May 2022.
Chris Vanderwees (CV): When did you first learn about psychoanalysis?
Betty Milan (BM): When I entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo at the age of eighteen. On that occasion, because of an anxiety attack, I went to consult a psychoanalyst of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis, linked to the International Association. I worked with him for four years and then I was asked to join the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis when I was in my fourth year at the faculty. I accepted to join but I didn’t finish the course for different reasons. One of them was the authoritarianism of the professors. It was the time of the military dictatorship in Brazil, which lasted 20 years.
CV: What was your impression of Lacan when you met him for the first time?
BM: I went to bring him a letter from other Brasilians that wanted to invite a Lacanian psychoanalyst to teach in Brazil. He welcomed me in a warm way and asked me questions about my history. Because of his way of receiving me, I desired to do an analysis with him. I recount all this in my book Pourquoi Lacan published in France by Eres and in the USA by Bloomsbury, which you have beautifully translated as Analysed by Lacan.
CV: You were in an analysis with Lacan beginning in 1974, but you also became his assistant and a translator of his work from French to Portuguese. How would you describe your experience and the challenges of translating his work into Portuguese?
BM: I started translating Freud’s Papers on Technique, the first seminar, because I wanted to go deeper into the theory, but also to work in my native language. As it was the first seminar translated into Portuguese, it was a great challenge to find the right words to introduce concepts such as the ça (id) and the parlêtre (speaking-being), for example. I exchanged a lot of work with Lacan, who gave me his opinion on the arguments that I presented to him.
CV: Richard Ledes’ film Adieu Lacan is inspired by your novel Lacan’s Parrot and your play “Goodbye Doctor.” What are your thoughts about the adaptation of your work to the film screen? What are your thoughts about the film?
BM: Richard and I met at the New York School of Arts when I went to give a talk for the Après Coup, the association directed by Paola Mieli. I had shown my play to Paola and she asked Richard to direct a reading with Edoardo Ballerini and Jane Malmo. It went very well and Richard, who is a director, had the idea to adapt the play for the cinema. At first I didn’t like the idea, but Richard came to Brazil, which he wanted to learn about and I realized that it could be good to have the film adapted by him. He then asked me to write the script, but I preferred that he did it and therefore he worked with complete freedom. I like the film very much. Ismenia Mendes is a wonderful Seriema and David Patrick Kelly is an excellent Lacan, even if he doesn’t have the physique for the role. “Goodbye Doctor” is now going to be played in New York at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theater. The director is Debora Belardini. Jerry Topitzer will play Lacan and Barbara Riethe will be Seriema.
CV: Several analysts have told me that what they find most incredible about Adieu Lacan is the depiction of Lacan’s style of practice, his technique, his way of responding to Seriema, and asking her to speak more. Can you tell us what stays with you as important about the way Lacan practiced psychoanalysis?
BM: Richard’s adaptation took into account all the dialogues I wrote in the play, which were inspired by my analysis with the Doctor. After writing a novel, Lacan’s Parrot and a play, “Goodbye Doctor,” I wrote a testimony, Pourqoui Lacan (Lacan Ainda), about the way Lacan worked. He did not interpret the speech of the analysand by attributing a meaning to it. He would cut the session at the moment when something that seemed essential to him had been said and then it was up to the analysand to analyze the reason for the cut. The analysis continued after the session in the street. Lacan proceeded in this way because he realized that the traditional way of interpreting provoked resistance.
CV: From what I understand, Philippe Sollers once asked you to write about your experience with Lacan, but you didn’t do this at the time and decided to follow the path of fiction with your novel and your play.1 And now there is also the film. What motivated you to write your memoir, Pourquoi Lacan (Lacan Ainda), so many years later about your experience with Lacan?
BM: When Sollers asked me to write a testimony, I didn’t have enough distance to do so and I was more interested in myself than in Lacan. The fiction inspired in my analysis allowed me to make discoveries about myself that I had not made before. But during the confinement of the covid-19 pandemic, I realized that it was important for the transmission of psychoanalysis to tell how it really happened and I was able to do it. I wrote first in Portuguese and then the book was translated into French. I hope it will be translated into English soon so that English speakers can read it.
CV: Your work has now been translated into many languages but I gather especially from the original Brazilian Portuguese into French. There is another translation that happens when someone performs your work as a theatrical production as Barbara Riethe has done in New York or as Richard Ledes did with the film Adieu Lacan. How do you experience the transformation of your words into another language or medium?
BM: “Goodbye Doctor” is my seventh play. It is a genre I have loved since childhood. When the director asked me to make a film of it, I hesitated. I was afraid the film would not be faithful to the spirit of my text. But when I got to know Richard Ledes better, I wanted the film to be made. Richard knows Lacan’s work very well and I wrote all the film’s dialogue myself. The result is very rich adaptation. Thanks to the film, Bloomsbury published my account of my analysis with Lacan, which you translated. As for the staging of the play in New York, I am delighted: the actress who will play the role of Seriema is Brazilian, and she worked with me for ten years in Brazil. Jerry Topitzer comes from a family of psychologists, and is a familiar Broadway actor. I worked on this play with Robert McKee, the author of Story, who is very well known in Hollywood.2 He made me realize that the style is as important as the plot, so I rewrote the play several times. It was with this play that I learned to become a playwright. Knowing that it has been staged in New York is a great joy. I would love to see it staged in France…
CV: When we last spoke, we talked about how your experience with Lacan generated a sublimation for you, a creative working-through process in many aspects of your writing. How you would describe this?
BM: With psychoanalysis, I learned how to listen – the language that I write is a stylization of spoken language. With Lacan, I learned how to cut. As a result, my writing does not require the reader to reread a passage several times to understand it. I do not impose a struggle upon readers to enter my world. Such efforts reinforce the reader’s resistance, just as the analyst’s interpretation can reinforce the analysand’s resistance. In this sense, I do the opposite of Lacan, who could be unintelligible at times. But he had his reasons for being this way. He wanted to emphasize enigma and decipherment. And he certainly did not want us to imitate him as most analysts do. To the extent that some of them cannot do without gallicisms in other languages, so dependant on their master. As if you could only be Lacanian in French! I have claimed to be Lacanian in my own language, too.
I separated myself from the Doctor with thanks to literature, which cannot be upheld with wooden language. My novel, Lacan’s Parrot, is also a critique of the imitation of his disciples. It is not through imitation that psychoanalysis can develop and be transmitted. On this point, moreover, I do not share Lacan’s view that psychoanalysis cannot be transmitted. On the contrary, I think it can be, and I believe that I have conveyed some of the particularities of his practice in my testimony.
I was able to write my testimony because I had already translated Lacan, written a novel and a play. As Fernando Pessoa says, translation is a serious parody in another language. In writing this parody, I had to reinvent Lacan and escape the tyranny of gallicisms. After escaping them, I was led to write a satirical novel. This is one of the reasons why Lacan’s Parrot was censored in different ways in France. Judith Miller, who was the psychoanalysis editor at Le Seuil, told me that the novel was “too Brazilian” for her to publish. This element of being “too Brazilian” probably had something to do with the mocking nature of Brazilians, and also with the fact that the heroine, Seriema, tells the Doctor that she did not want to seek analysis from him for what he knew, but rather for what he did not know, for instance, Portuguese. This was not because Seriema was mocking him, but because she was of Arab origin and her father wanted her to be veiled. I wrote this theme into the play. In this way, I was able to better understand my novel and also my analysis.
When I wrote Lacan’s Parrot, Seriema’s incestuous relationship with her father was not sufficiently established for me. It became so with the play. Literature illuminated analysis, so to speak. This illumination could only take place through writing, because the writer can more easily evade censorship than the analysand. The analyst’s presence facilitates free association, but it can also hinder it. The writer, on the other hand, connects spontaneously with his unconscious, and has only the text as censor, the written text must then be rewritten to arrive at a suitable form.
My analysis led me to translate, write a novel as well as a play so that I could separate myself from the one I called the “great man” and arrive at a degree zero of narcissism (let’s say almost zero) before writing a testimony whose sole object is to clarify Lacan’s practice and the reasons for it being as it was.
CV: You have now written a play, a novel, a memoir, and have seen a movie created from your work with Lacan. It is quite incredible. When you reflect on this trajectory, what comes to mind?
BM: I am not sure whether I am a psychoanalyst trained by literature or a writer trained by psychoanalysis. But I can say that I had to investigate until I understood my history and discovered its epic dimension in a way. This is to say that I had to become greater than myself in my smallness. I am first and foremost the granddaughter of immigrants, and my identity is made up of several identifications including the rejection of the status of women in the culture of my ancestors. I belong to the generation that created the sexual revolution, and freedom has always been essential to me. My independence comes from this history and my cosmopolitanism comes from immigration. We are complex beings and to be able to apprehend this complexity is a privilege. It is worth devoting your life to it.
CV: When we met in Paris, we spoke about the Surrealists and automatism, automatic writing, and free writing. What are your thoughts about the relationship between self-analysis [l’auto-analyse] and writing?
BM: In my case, the relationship between writing and self-analysis is obvious. All my fictional work with Lacan is autofiction. Nevertheless, Lacan’s Parrot is a novel and “Goodbye Doctor” is a play. I have done a lot of work in literary and theatrical fields to learn about conventions and to challenge them both in Brazil and abroad. In Brazil, I was very close to our greatest man of the theater, Zé Celso. He pushed me to write my own plays and asked me to be the scribe during rehearsals of his plays. In France, I worked with Jean-Luc Paliès of Influenscènes, who directed the first reading of “Goodbye Doctor” at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, and Antoine Bourseiller, who staged Jean Genet’s plays. As far as literature is concerned, I took several courses from the Literature Department at the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Letters in Brazil. When I was in the United States, I took a creative writing course in Iowa. I also worked for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest daily newspaper where I interviewed important writers and even Nobel Prize winners. I learned from listening to Octavio Paz, Michèle Sarde, Nathalie Sarraute, Claudio Magris, Gao Xingxian, and Jean-Claude Carrière, among others.
CV: Do you think about the relationship between clinical psychoanalysis and writing?
BM: In both situations, you must free yourself from deliberate concentration if you wish to succeed. The psychoanalyst listens with floating attention before intervening and before thinking and concluding. The writer stays connected with the Other world of oneself, the unconscious. Nathalie Sarraute once told me that the writer must be his own scribe before reflecting on his text and rewriting it in its final form, but without losing a spontaneous sensibility.
CV: What would you tell a new generation of psychoanalysts about Lacan’s work? What is important for us to remember about Lacan?
BM: That we must study the texts of our predecessors. But we must not forget that Freud invented psychoanalysis and Lacan reinvented it by taking linguistics into account. Psychoanalysis supposes reinvention and it is necessary to take into account other knowledges and art because if the theory is a matter of science, the practice is a matter of art as Lacan said so well.
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Interview “9. Practice is a Matter of Art: Interview with Betty Milan”, published in Vanderwees, Chris. On the Theory and Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Speaking of Lacan. England: Ed. Routledge, 2026. 220 p. [This book presents conversations with clinicians about their research interests, and their experiences in relation to psychoanalytic practice, focusing particularly on clinical and theoretical issues surrounding Lacanianism.]
1 Philippe Sollers (1936-) is a French writer who founded the journal Tel Quel, which ran from 1960 to 1982. Sollers contributed to the publication of writers including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes.
2 See Mckee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Reagan Books, 1997.