Notes on the London Review of Books 41/12 (20 June 2019)

Say what many will about Freud, he seems, relative to Jung and Lacan, to have been a far more faithful husband and far less destructive father. Indeed, I would put that more strongly, based on reading, inter alia, Paul Roazen's invaluable books: Freud seems to have had a very charming domestic life as a rather conservative member of the upper middle-classes of Vienna. Lunch times were, many reported, including Oskar Pfister, a warm, languid opportunity to indulge in unhurried and wide-ranging conversation about all manner of topics without embarrassment. All the hoary ideas of him as some kind of sexually libertarian revolutionary find no support in how he lived his life.

Not so Lacan. I've tried off and on to read him over the years, but never with any success. What little I have read of and about him has consistently made him sound like an over-rated wanker who mistook obscurity for profundity, and recondite jargon and graphics for any serious or concrete insight.

He does not improve after reading the most recent London Review of Books, where we find L.O. Rowlands' review of A Father: Puzzle, written by Sibylle Lacan and translated by A.N. West (MIT Press, 2019), 92pp., This odd memoir of sorts makes Lacan appear by now completely unattractive. It seems impossible to understand his relationship to her other than a lifelong sadistic dangling of interest, affection, and attention that was quickly retracted, slowly driving her mad. He eventually recommended she go into analysis, but then ended up sleeping with his daughter's analyst. In the end, Sibylle killed herself.

Andrew Preston has a long and fascinating review of Michael Cotey-Morgan's new book The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2018), 424pp. The negotiations dragged on for so long and were so complicated, requiring the presence of so many people, that they ended up moving from Helsinki, judged to have inadequate and insufficient facilities for all the delegations, to Geneva. Precisely because of their complexity and length, most governments in the West and Soviet bloc alike seem to have taken their eyes off the ball, and misjudged what ought to have been top priorities for each vis-a-vis the other. In the end, it is suggested that both sides underestimated the consequences of several of the agreements, and that doing so would prove costly to the Soviets in ways they never expected.

Along the way there are amusing anecdotes, not least about the chef de mission for France. His government, like apparently all the others, lost interest in the endlessly complicated discussions, and apparently begged for far fewer documents to be sent home regularly. So he devised an ingenious method for making things work: at the end of the week, he would send, each Friday, a list of questions for further instruction back to Paris. Then he got on a plane from Geneva, flew to Paris, went into his office Monday morning, answered all his own questions with fresh instructions on how to proceed, and returned to Geneva!