The only other time I came across Stuart Schneiderman was while reading Lacan's [b:The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|29277160|The Sinthome The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472826670s/29277160.jpg|2900394]. Schneiderman tries hopelessly to insert himself into the conversation by asking about Chomsky, but Lacan notes merely that his interlocutor is American and enters into a lament about how only Americans dare to ask him real questions anymore. Schneiderman repeats his query in more detail, finds himself totally ignored, and the seminar moves on without him getting a genuine reply.

My recent reading on the topic of Lacan has focused on authors who have actively - healthily - resisted his authority while still being able to acknowledge his value: Roustang, Turkle, Gallop, even Irigaray can be put in this camp. Schneiderman, on the other hand, is a guileless disciple through and through. A beta. A chump.

Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero is little more than a love letter to the author's recently-deceased master. Schneiderman makes an attempt to explain Lacanian theory to the reader, but these parts of the book are tedious. It quickly becomes clear that these attempted elucidations are "empty speech": what Schneiderman really wants to do, like any neurotic with an unresolved transference, is to mourn the lost object of his love by talking obsessively about him.

Because Schneiderman was actually there - he moved to Paris in 1973 to become a follower of Lacan - he does give some interesting historical insights into what life was like at the École freudienne. His explanation in Chapters 4 and 5 of the system of the "pass," for instance, which was the technique used to promote analysts to the position of Teaching Analyst, is interesting, especially for the way he avoids addressing just how controversial this practice actually was (see Turkle pp.123-129 for a very different take on this procedure). So too are his ruminations in Chapter 7 of his personal experience of being analyzed by Lacan, and his explanation of the benefits of the notorious "short sessions" that Lacan pioneered.

As the incident from Seminar XXIII mentioned above demonstrates, Lacan clearly had no genuine respect for Schneiderman. He bullies and belittles him, and Schneiderman, like a good little disciple, endures this abuse and rationalizes it all. He explains away Lacan's greed, his rudeness, his infidelities, his dishonesty, his tyranny, all with the wide-eyed innocence of a genuine sucker.

This whitewashing culminates with the ludicrous conclusion Schneiderman draws from an incident that happened during World War II, in which Lacan badgered the Gestapo to give up the file on his Jewish wife, Sylvie Bataille. "If it is true that we can tell a great deal about the character of a man by how he acts in situations of crisis, then we should recognize Lacan as a man whose personal ethical conduct was unimpeachable," affirms Schneiderman breathlessly, adding a little further on: "Lacan exhibited the kind of strength of character necessary for ethical heroism. When he faced down the Gestapo, when he stood by his wife and acted decisively on her behalf, he was honoring a commitment and following one his basic principles: to keep one's word" (pp.164-165). Lacan was many things, but he was not an ethical hero in the way he lived his life.

Schneiderman's feeble attempt at an intellectual portrait of Lacan was subsequently eclipsed, ten years later, by the publication Élisabeth Roudinesco's magisterial [b:Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|262580|Jacques Lacan An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|Élisabeth Roudinesco|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391656006s/262580.jpg|254522]. Like Schneiderman, Roudinesco has an enormous, unresolved crush on Lacan, but unlike him she has the sense both to try to account for that transference and face up to the many unsavory aspects of Lacan's life and character.

Schneiderman's book, ultimately, is an embarrassment - yet it is also a useful object lesson in the dangers of being an uncritical disciple, the very thing that psychoanalysis is supposed to teach you how to avoid. ( )