Sarduy avec Lacan: The Portrayal of French Psychoanalysis in Cobra and La simulación

• Published in: Revista hispánica moderna Vol. 60; no. 1; pp. 34 - 60
• Main Author: Gallo, Rubén
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York University of Pennsylvania Press 01.06.2007
• Subjects: Collaboration; Conferences; Essays; French language; Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939); Kristeva, Julia (1941- ); Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981); Psychoanalysis; Sarduy, Severo (1937-1993); Seminars; Writers; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 0034-9593; 1944-6446; 1944-6446
• DOI: 10.1353/rhm.2007.0005

Lacan was so passionate in his reading of Poe's "Purloined letter" as a metaphor for psychoanalysis that Jacques Derrida once wrote an article titled "Le facteur de la vérité" accusing the analyst doing violence to Poe's text by forcing it into the mold of analytic concepts and ignoring the complexity of its literary devices.1 In this brief reference to the "Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter'," Sarduy suggests an analogy between Lacan and the stolen letter. According to Roudinesco, Lacan spent an average of half an hour with each patient, though as his fame and his fee increased his sessions shrunk to minimalist consultations lasting no more than a few minutes. (500) [Lacan stopped giving appointments at fixed hour and his apartment on rue de Lille became an asylum of sorts in which patients wandered among art magazines, books, and the collections of objects.] Ktazob's sadistic treatment of Cobra brings to mind another scandal that tarnished Lacan's practice: the suicides of many of his patients and trainees. According to his enemies, Lacan used unorthodox clinical procedures that only aggravated his patients' suffering-thus the rash of suicides; in a similar vein, Ktazob's experiments with "the transference of pain" fail, leaving Cobra a bloody wreck.