The great seducer

Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise taciturn psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, communicated. ‘He was convinced that the farts and burps which Lacan, as a free man, did not restrain in public, were meant to signal to Peyrot the two syllables of his name,’ recalls Catherine Millot. A translator’s footnote helpfully explains that in French pet means fart and rot burp.

I love this story as told in this beguiling memoir by Lacan’s last lover — and not just because it evokes a time when deference to Gallic intellectuals was such that even their airy nothings were submitted to bravura semiotic analysis. No, I love the story most for the light it throws on the man who some maintain to be the greatest psychoanalytical theorist since Freud but who others have called the shrink from hell. Public farter and unashamed burper, terrifying (to his passengers) flouter of speed limits, shrink who had affairs with patients and ex-wives of close friends, Lacan liked to remind people that his star sign was Aries, the ram.

Millot writes that her ram endlessly butted up against what he called the ‘real’, namely that which resisted his desire. That no doubt explains why he was arrested once for barrelling down the hard shoulder of an otherwise congested autoroute after hitherto stationary and angry French motorists swerved into his path to impede his progress.

Even though French road users hated him, Lacan was, to Millot, captivatingly lawless, someone who ‘paid no attention to prohibitions or conventions’. ‘He didn’t like closed doors any more than he liked red traffic lights,’ she adds approvingly. Well, nobody does, but only a few people — Lacan, sociopaths — don’t respect them.

Millot was being analysed by Lacan in 1972 when she became his lover.