ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan dominates modern psychoanalytic literary theory; and there are competent people – in the post-structuralist tradition that descends from his work – who regard him as the most important psychoanalyst of the twentieth century, after Freud himself: a philosophical sophisticate who introduced Freud to Hegel and Heidegger and saved him from mechanism and positivism; a grand unifying theoretician who brought together anthropology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics; and of course a spell-binding lecturer, who dazzled several generations of Parisian intellectuals. There are equally competent people – including, probably, most cognitive scientists – who agree with Noam Chomsky that he was a conscious charlatan, trying to see what he could put over on the Parisian public. 1 They complain that none of his theories work, or even make scientific sense; and that some of his claims are fraudulent.
