Wkikpedia has a section on Lacan's 'legacy and criticism' which basically suggests that any legacy will be drivel in academic backwaters of no interest:
In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian
David Maceydescribes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since
Freud".
[2] His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism,
critical theory,
linguistics,
20th-century French philosophy,
film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.
[117]
In
Fashionable Nonsense (1997),
Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as
topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are
not even wrong.
[118] However, they note that they do not want to enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work.
[119]
Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale.
François Roustang [
fr] called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist
Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious
charlatan".
[120] The former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans (who published a dictionary of Lacanian terms in 1996) eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ".
[121] Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan".
[122] Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell"
[123][124] and listing the many associates—from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors—left damaged in his wake.
Roger Scrutonincluded Lacan in his book
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.
[125]
His type of
charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with.
[126] His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources,
[127] Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others.
[128] Thus his "return to Freud" was called by
Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him".
[129] Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.
[130]
Many feminist thinkers have criticised Lacan's thought. Philosopher and psychoanalyst
Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.
[131] Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very
phallocentricmastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine.
[132] The result—
Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.
[133]
Their difficulties were only reinforced by what
Didier Anzieu described as a kind of teasing lure in Lacan's discourse; "fundamental truths to be revealed . . . but always at some further point".
[134] This was perhaps an aspect of the sadistic
narcissism that
feminists especially accused Lacan of.
[135] Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fueled when his wife Sylvia Lacan refers to her late husband as a "domestic tyrant," during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt.
[136]
In a 2012 interview with
Veterans Unplugged,
Noam Chomsky said: "quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential."
[137]
