When the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist: on Jacques Lacan's 'mirror-reading' of James Joyce (original) (raw)
Neohelicon 43 (2016): 159-180
Like Jung before him, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan advances the view (especially in the seminar from 1975-76 entitled Le sinthô me) that Joyce's writing is an individual symptom of Joyce's latently psychotic mind, which he used in his own quasi-psychotic art that secured him against an actual outbreak. In this reading of Joyce, Lacan is guilty of what I label a mirror-reading: On the one hand, he unconsciously (being spellbound by the allurement of identification) iterates motifs and gesticulations of Joyce's own text, whereby a hermeneutical intervention does not come off (i.e. he does not add anything to the text). On the other hand, Lacan grossly misreads Joyce's biography and work from an unformulated projection of his own life story, whereby a hermeneutical intervention does not come off either, since the text remains untouched. The synthesis of text and reader does not occur, and Lacan's tautological misreading is striking, yet highly interesting as a symptom of the madness of any interpreter ready at any moment to break out in any interpretive situation as such. Lacan remains caught up in his own symptom, whose name rightfully is given and must be understood as 'Joyce'-or more generally put: The interpretation of a text always contains the danger that the interpreter unceasingly-and without knowing it-stages his own 'mad' (self-contradictory) symptom. A symptom I have chosen to call mirror-reading.
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