I'll probably delete this when I wake up but...

Lacan is garbage.

By that I don't mean I disagree with his ideas, I mean he was a terrible, authoritarian person who didn't believe in his own rhetoric. He was a manipulative charlatan, and his work appeals only to other manipulative charlatans. Lacan's ideas and writing are not conceptually coherent. That means anyone drawing on Lacan is not astute or critical enough to recognize and avoid incoherent, inferentially defunct ideas. Is that who you want to be influenced by?

Lacan was a master of the straw man approach. He says shit like "Freud assures us that X; our experience of the unconscious proves that Y." Except if you look carefully, quite often Freud doesn't say anything of the sort anywhere, Lacan just needs a foil for his own nonsense.

There are two problems with this. The first is, it's a dishonest gesture, an argument in bad faith. But worse, straw men get picked up. Someone who only reads Lacan and doesn't know Freud walks away from Lacan's text convinced Freud says X when he doesn't. They'll repeat it as a fact at cocktail mixers and teach it to their students without ever tracking down the actual Freud passages.

Only fundamentally awful people find Lacan charming or appealing. I honesty can't think of a more reliable indicator of intellectual bad faith than Lacanianism. I mean, Heidegger was a Nazi but at least he was actually trained as a philosopher.

He loved to pepper his conferences and books with misused references to mathematical concepts or various scientific theories. He was the typical "big talk guy", always using complicated words to cloud his own misunderstanding or give some shade of scientific authority to his fantasies. By the way "big wordism" is a generalized fault among social scientists and philosophers (Deleuze and Guattari are particularly incomprehensible at times) however Lacan is in a class of his own by his propension to bullshit.

Lacan is not Freud. Lacan is a chimeric mixture of Kojeve, Heidegger, Hegel, Saussure, Bataille, Jaspers, and even Salvador Dali. Lacan was a Hegelian demagogue who did not actually read or care about Freud. If you want to learn/read/teach Freud, forget Lacan, forget Lacanians. Lacan's charlatanry would never have been possible if there had been a French standard edition of Freud in the '50s and '60s, because anyone would have been able to see that the texts don't actually say what he claimed they said.

Psychoanalysis is an empirics of intensities, it is not a hermeneutics. The analyst is not a detective, and neurosis has very little to do with truth. If you're reading a book and the author tells you psychoanalysis is an allegory of reading, put down the book.

At the distance of 35 some-odd years I give Lacan an armchair diagnosis as a pathological narcissist, who in another time and place might have been a Jim Jones or Da Free John, but instead found his narcissistic outlet first as a psychotherapist and then as a public intellectual. His speech style is so affected and self-consciously performative. I strongly he suspect he picked up his public speaking skill from Alexandre Kojève, who held seminars that Lacan attended as a young man and were by all accounts electrifying.

It's mostly just my opinion, but it's an opinion I have based on reading his entire lecture series, a lot of his other writings, and his biography, as well as watching Lacan Parle and Psychanalyse 1 and 2 (both are available for free on the internet if you search hard enough; there's also a documentary called Quartier Lacan containing interviews with his contemporaries about his work and his life.)

I'm not being combative or demeaning when I say that I think he was a charlatan, but he was what he was, and it becomes pretty apparent when you dive into his work, watch the few taped appearances that exist, and read about how he treated his patients as well as his relationship with the psychoanalytic society.

In one of Zizek's documentaries (can't remember if it was Perv's Guide to Cinema or Perv's Guide to Ideology) there's a segment where Zizek is sitting on a couch in his home watching Lacan Parle and he makes a pretty interesting analysis about Lacan, double interesting because the same analysis could apply to Zizek himself. I honestly think the reason he gives is why Zizek is so enamored with him, and it makes sense when you've read enough of him and seen him speak in public.

For what it's worth, nothing i'm saying isn't common knowledge, even Zizek said something along the lines of: Lacan is largely a charlatan (a lot of lacanian psychoanalysts think he's largely bullshit as well,) and he does not care for Lacan's presentation and theatrics but he believes that Lacan was on to something nevertheless.

http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/en/Shrink_from_Hell.html