Overcoming the Sokal Complex

Abstract

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was hailed, in his lifetime, as the most insightful reader of Sigmund Freud and a radical disseminator of Freudian discourse. However, responses to Lacan were not always positive as many also condemn(ed) him as an unoriginal mind, an intellectual impostor, a charlatan, a misogynist, and an arrogant obscurantist, among other things. This paper explains the clinical implications of such condemnation of Lacan and digs into the reasons for his dismissal. It proposes that the negative responses to Lacan – described as the Sokal Complex, a remarkable aspect of contemporary trends in reader response – are largely a product of a failure to overcome the hermeneutic challenges that his teaching poses to the reader. It analyzes four such challenges pertaining to Lacan’s works, i.e., unavailability, incomprehensibility, inapplicability and untheorizability. An exploration of these challenges demonstrates the politics/ethics at play in the publication of Lacan’s works, his discursive strategies as an analyst-teacher, his reservations about “applied psychoanalysis,” and his distancing from university discourses on theory. The apparent impasses of Lacan’s teaching, this paper claims, help establish the distinctness of psychoanalysis as an “epistemology of the clinical,” highlighting the radical differences between Lacan and poststructuralists, and offering valuable lessons in hermeneutics.

Full text

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OVERCOMING THE SOKAL COMPLEX: LACAN,
PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE LIMITS OF
UNDERSTANDING
Mahitosh Mandal
Abstract: The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
was hailed, in his lifetime, as the most insightful reader of
Sigmund Freud and a radical disseminator of Freudian
discourse. However, responses to Lacan were not always positive
as many also condemn(ed) him as an unoriginal mind, an
intellectual impostor, a charlatan, a misogynist, and an arrogant
obscurantist, among other things. This paper explains the clinical
implications of such condemnation of Lacan and digs into the
reasons for his dismissal. It proposes that the negative responses
to Lacan – described as the Sokal Complex, a remarkable aspect
of contemporary trends in reader response – are largely a
product of a failure to overcome the hermeneutic challenges that
his teaching poses to the reader. It analyzes four such challenges
pertaining to Lacan’s works, i.e., unavailability,
incomprehensibility, inapplicability and untheorizability. An
exploration of these challenges demonstrates the politics/ethics
at play in the publication of Lacan’s works, his discursive
strategies as an analyst-teacher, his reservations about “applied
psychoanalysis,” and his distancing from university discourses
on theory. The apparent impasses of Lacan’s teaching, this paper
claims, help establish the distinctness of psychoanalysis as an

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83
“epistemology of the clinical,” highlighting the radical differences
between Lacan and poststructuralists, and offering valuable
lessons in hermeneutics.
******
Introduction: Locating and theorizing the Sokal
Complex
Jacques Lacan, the charismatic French psychoanalyst, was hailed
by many of his contemporaries as an “intellectual hero” and was
honored as the most insightful reader and disseminator of
Freudian discourse (Schneiderman, 1983). Lacan’s teaching,
after his demise, has successfully been disseminated world-wide.
Its theoretical impact is noteworthy as well, given the frequent
evocation of his name in the field of critical theory and cultural
studies. Alongside these, there is, however, a long tradition of
negative responses to Lacan which has repeatedly condemned
him. In his lifetime, he was criticized as obscure, arrogant,
“obstinate” (even by his own admission, Roudinesco, p. 407), and
“phallocrat” (Mandal, 2018, pp. 177-179; Ragland-Sullivan, 1982,
p. 11, David-Menard, 1982, p. 94). Such condemnation continues
even today, a recent critic describing him as a “dick” and an
“asshole” (Wolters, 2014). If these are attacks on his personality,
his texts have been condemned as well. Two names stand out in
this regard – Noam Chomsky and Alan Sokal. Noam Chomsky
thought Lacan was an intellectual fraud. “We had meetings every
once in a while,” Chomsky remembered, “but quite frankly I

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thought he was a total charlatan, just posturing before the
television cameras the way many Paris intellectuals do.”
Furthermore, he passed a general remark on Lacan, Michel
Foucault, Julia Kristeva and other French thinkers of the 1960s,
claiming he found nothing substantial in their works. “I’ve
dipped into what they write, out of curiosity,” Chomsky observed,
“but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is
extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply
illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know
well…, argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary
self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed
up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain
gibberish.” “Why this is influential,” he added, “I haven’t the
slightest idea; I don’t see anything that should be influential”
(Wolters, 2013).
It was, however, Alan Sokal who launched a systematic
attack on Lacan in a series of texts which culminated in
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of
Science, a book written in collaboration with Jean Bricmont. In
this book, Sokal and Bricmont clubbed together a wide range of
French thinkers, including Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray,
Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilo, and
Jacques Derrida, describing them as “postmodern intellectuals,”
and condemned their misuse of ideas from mathematics and
physics in their theories. They accused these thinkers of “using
scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest
justification… or throwing around scientific jargon in front of

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their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or
even its meaning” (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998, p. x). According to
them, these thinkers simply intended to “exploit the prestige of
the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer
of rigor” (ibid., p. 5). They specifically condemned Lacan, arguing
that the analogies between mathematics and psychoanalysis
drawn by him are “unsupported by any argument” and that
Lacan’s “mathematical statements are devoid of meaning” (ibid.,
p. 24). Therefore, they attempted to “expose” Lacan, along with
others, whose philosophy, they thought, was “a lot of tosh” (ibid.,
p. ix). “In many cases we shall demonstrate that if the texts [of
Lacan] seem incomprehensible,” they added, “it is for the
excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing” (ibid., p. 6). It
is obvious that Chomsky’s words echo in the work of Sokal and
Bricmont.
Lacan indeed used a lot of mathematical analogies in his
psychoanalytic discourse, including the comparison of
topology/Mobius strip to the subject of the unconscious, of the
torus to the neurotic subject, of compact space to the space of
jouissance, and of square root of minus one to the phallus.
However, to claim that such analogies are nonsense and
unjustified is invalid. Some Lacanians, who are also experts in
mathematics, have engaged in detail with Sokal and Bricmont’s
objections against Lacan and have proved them wrong. Take, for
instance, Arkady Plotnitsky, who has disproved their claims and
demonstrated that in certain mathematical matters, like the idea
of imaginary numbers, “Sokal and Bricmont appear to be rather

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less informed than they could have been and, even more
ironically, in some respects perhaps less informed than Lacan
was [sic]” (Plotnitsky, 2000, p. 252). Glynos and Stavrakakis
have demonstrated that Sokal and Bricmont miss Lacan’s
analogies because of their “(acknowledged) ignorance of
psychoanalytic knowledge” (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2001, p.
689). “Lacanians would want to insist,” they rightly add, “that
only something as simple as a basic ignorance of Lacan’s work
can serve to explain the perception of these mathematical
concepts as enigmatic” (ibid., p. 701).
Instead of engaging in a one-on-one rebuttal or personal
attacks, this paper tries to analyze the condemnation of Lacan as
constituting a pattern or a tendency that has its roots in the
challenges to interpretation that Lacan’s teaching poses to the
reader. One major challenge is incomprehensibility – which
produces both attraction and repulsion. Lacan believed that
people flocked to his seminars and that his book Ecrits sold like
hot cakes not in spite of, but because of the fact that the
audience/reader understood nothing. It is this enigma, in which
rests the possibility of knowing something radically new, that
made his work appeal to many. These challenges can also cause
repulsion and the argument proposed is that since one cannot
make sense of Lacan, one must throw his volumes away as trash,
i.e., an easy way out. But repulsion is just a reaction to cover up
one’s incapability. For those who are unable to digest Lacan’s
increasing popularity and acceptance, we can see this repulsion
expressed as an aggressive dismissal, which hides a certain

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“psychical crisis” to borrow a term from Lacan’s essay on “Family
Complexes”. In this paper, I define such repulsion as the Sokal
Complex. Obviously, the term takes its name from Alan Sokal,
the mathematical physicist who caused the so-called “Sokal
Hoax” or “Sokal Affair” and took upon himself the task of proving
that Lacan was an intellectual impostor. Of course, Sokal did not
attack Lacan alone. As such, we may describe this type of attack
on and uninformed dismissal of other French thinkers as a Sokal
Complex. However, insofar as Lacan devised a new style of
writing and speaking, grounded in the clinical, the Sokal
Complex would, in this paper, broadly refer to the baseless, non-
clinical dismissal, not only of Lacan, but of psychoanalysis in its
entirety. Thus, the Sokal Complex, though it takes its name from
Sokal, can imply a tendency or pattern in which Lacan and
psychoanalysis was received by some.
I argue that the Sokal Complex, an imaginary effect that
forces readers to evoke Lacan even through dismissal, is rooted
in the impasses and challenges to interpretation contained in
Lacan’s teaching. I also argue that Lacan poses not one but four
such challenges to a reader inclined to engage with him –
unavailability of his works, incomprehensibility of his teaching,
inapplicability of his ideas outside the clinical context, and
untheorizability of psychoanalysis. I claim that a study of these
“hermeneutic” challenges would help us understand the Sokal
Complex and put it in proper perspective. Hermeneutics, an age-
old concern among thinkers, is generally conceived as “the
methodology of interpretation” that offers guidance “for solving

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problems of human actions, texts and other meaningful material”
in terms of “solid empirical evidence” (Mantzavinos, 2016). It has
a long history comprising debates about the right interpretative
method, demands for plural methods of interpretation,
acknowledgement of fallibility of interpretation, and
advancement of new methods of interpretation. This paper
proposes that the works of Jacques Lacan offer new directions
into hermeneutics by way of theorizing interpretation as
psychoanalysis and by posing challenges to conventional
interpretation of psychoanalysis.
Unavailability as a challenge to reading Lacan
The first challenge to interpretation posed by Lacan’s works is
their unavailability. Following Jacques-Alain Miller, it is possible
to consider Lacan’s teaching, i.e., the seminars from 1953 to
1980, as comprising four stages, corresponding, respectively, to
the four psychical registers conceptualized by him, namely, the
imaginary, the symbolic, the real and the sinthome (Biswas,
2015, n.p.). Seminars I-X foreground the imaginary; Seminars
XI-XIX emphasize the symbolic; Seminars XX-XXIII accentuate
the real; and Seminar XXIV-XXVII theorize the sinthome. Not
just accentual shifts, some of the earlier formulations are largely
remolded by Lacan in later times. For instance, the popular
dictum, “The Unconscious is structured like a language” in early
Lacan is changed to “Unconscious is structured like lalangue” in
later Lacan. It is, therefore, important to have a strong grasp over
all the four stages of Lacan’s teaching, including their shifts and

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fissures. However, there is a serious obstacle to gaining a grip
over Lacan precisely because of the unavailability of Lacan’s
works. The situation had been worse a couple of decades ago and
it is not fully resolved even today. Although translations of the
bulk of Lacan’s seminars are available for private use, they are
unofficial and based on unedited and unestablished French
transcripts of Lacan’s seminars. On occasion, excerpts from
Lacan’s work have been published, which led to
misunderstandings and misinterpretation. For example, the
excerpts of Seminar XX, containing the phrase “The woman does
not exist” enraged the feminists. Publication of an incomplete
Lacanian text, similar to unreliable translations, is thus a great
risk. Unavailability of officially published complete texts of Lacan
is thus an obstacle to Lacan studies.
Lacan himself published very little. Despite delivering
innumerable lectures at various venues from the late 1930s, only
a few of his articles were published in anthologies and journals in
his lifetime. It may be argued that Lacan did not write any books,
except perhaps for one. In his lifetime, he had only five book-
length publications to his name. But none of these could be
considered books in the conventional sense because none of
these were written (as opposed to being spoken) by Lacan. All
these book-length publications were collections of lectures and
seminars. For instance, the first book-length work, Écrits, was
published in 1966. Although the title means “writings,” it is a
collection of thirty-five texts deriving from lectures delivered by
Lacan between late-1930s and mid-1960s. In addition to Écrits,

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four collections of Lacan’s annual seminars – weekly lectures
held every academic session – were published in his lifetime.
These are Seminar Book XI (1973), Seminar Book I (1975),
Seminar Book II (1978), and Seminar Book III (1981). These
were not books written by Lacan but transcripts of his lectures
established by his disciple Jacques-Alain Miller. Obviously, five
such publications, representing only the first two stages of his
career, were just the tip of the iceberg, given that the great bulk
of Lacan’s teaching is contained in twenty-seven sets of annual
seminars.
Even forty years after Lacan’s death, only 16 out of 27
books of seminars have been published in French. Only 14 (I, II,
III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, X, XI, XVII, XIX, XX, XXIII) out of his 27
seminars have been officially translated into English so far. The
authenticity of the translations, moreover, has been questioned.
The first translation of Écrits, by Alan Sheridan, is unanimously
considered flawed. The official translations of the seminars have
also been criticized as not being reader-friendly, consistent and
standardized (Grigg, n.d., n.p.). Apart from écrits and seminars,
the rest of Lacan’s works include miscellaneous lectures and
addresses, talks and interviews, letters and case reports, and
occasional remarks and notes. A collection of Lacan’s writings
and interviews was published in 2001, in French, as Autres écrits,
containing forty-four articles. This book, which leaves out many
of Lacan’s miscellaneous texts, has not yet been officially
translated into English. The point is, unlike Freud, for whom we
may refer to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

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Works of Sigmund Freud, Lacan’s works still lie scattered. There
is no set of books available under the name of “collected works”
or “complete works” or even “complete seminars” of Lacan.
In the absence of any such published body of work, a
reader of Lacan is by default handicapped. This basic challenge
to accessing Lacan’s works is what makes Lacan categorically
different from any other thinker of his time. Some of the glaring
differences between Lacan and his contemporaries – like Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, with whom he is
frequently and mistakenly clubbed together as a
“poststructuralist” or “postmodernist”, are as follows. Firstly,
whereas the seminars of his contemporaries, who were university
professors, were part of their academic assignments, Lacan
delivered his seminars as a clinician dedicated to training the
analysts of his psychoanalytic schools. Secondly, whereas Lacan’s
teachings are almost entirely contained in his seminars, his
contemporaries did not use seminars as the only medium for
disseminating their ideas. They published several books which
were sufficient to make them internationally influential. Thirdly,
whereas the books of his contemporaries far exceeded their
seminars, Lacan did not, arguably, author any such books since
his teachings were disseminated orally and sometimes
impromptu. And fourthly, whereas the bulk of the seminars of his
contemporaries have already been published and even translated
into English, a great many of Lacan’s seminars are yet to be
established. In other words, unlike his contemporaries, Lacan
remains largely unread due to the unavailability of his works.

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Lacan insisted a thorough engagement with all his works
was required since his concepts are developed across the
seminars and picking a single text therefore gives one the
impression that he is theorizing things (let’s say, topology and
psychoanalysis) without proper justification. Given the
unavailability of Lacan’s seminars, the use and abuse of Lacan on
the basis of his partly available works is risky and dangerous.
Incomprehensibility as a hermeneutic challenge
If the unavailability of Lacan’s texts poses an interpretative
challenge to his reader, a second factor that causes the Sokal
Complex is certainly the inherent obscurity of his works. I
propose that Lacan was fully aware of the obscurity of his
teaching, that such obscurity was a part of his training of
analysts, and that he provided his students/audience with
invaluable clues regarding how (not) to unpack his rather dense
texts. In his lifetime, Lacan faced criticisms regarding the style of
his teaching. Once he quoted a critic who characterized his
lectures as “social events, incomprehensible for anyone who is
normally constituted” (Lacan, 1990, p. 115). He described this
comment as “sufficiently dubious to elicit laughter, not
necessarily at my expense” (ibid.) In other words, the joke was
not on him but on the person failing to adequately engage with
him! Lacan knew that his lectures might be difficult to follow. Of
course, he wanted to be understood (how and by whom is a
different question) and he repeatedly speculated on his apparent
obscurity (Lacan, 1992, p. 62; Lacan, 1998a, p. 187). In my view,

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Lacan’s obscurity can be analyzed by way of two questions – why
and for whom is Lacan obscure?
Lacan seems to indicate that not everyone finds/would
find his teaching obscure. The analysts-in-training did/do not
necessarily consider him incomprehensible. Only those who are
disqualified from being his implied addressees complain that
Lacan cannot be understood. Lacan consistently maintained that
only the clinically oriented, i.e., those responding as
analysts/analysands or those viewing psychoanalysis as a clinical
site for effective free association, were his implied addressees.
“Do not… get the idea,” he mentions, “that I address everyone at
large. I am speaking to those who are savvy, to the non-idiots, to
the supposed analysts” (Lacan, 1990, p. 4). In a crucial passage
in Écrits, he reiterates that his Écrits was meant solely for the
psychoanalysts and that these writings “had to do with their most
direct, most day-to-day, and most urgent experience” (Lacan,
2008, p. 61). Yes, his goal was to promote Freud but not at the
“general public level” because “the general public does not need
me to promote Freud” (Lacan, 2008, p. 106). There is no need to
promote Freud on a popular level because Freud is already there.
He adds “I don’t see why I should have made it my concern or
made the effort, if it were not addressed to psychoanalysts”
(Lacan, 2008, p. 107). It may also be argued that his writings are
of no use to laymen because these contain clinical instructions
for the experts. The unintended addressees of Lacan would by
default find him obscure. The fact that Lacan’s implied
addressees were analysts, however, did not deter the non-experts

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from buying his volumes. He was fully aware that Écrits,
immediately after its publication, was selling like hotcakes. He
argued that people are buying the book, not in spite of its
incomprehensibility but precisely because they do not
understand it (Lacan, 2008, p. 106). “Perhaps they need to have
a place,” he says, “from which they can see that they’re talking
about something they do not understand” (ibid.). However, he
did not imply that the experts fully understood his works while
non-experts alone complained of obscurity. He quite consistently
maintained that even for an expert it is important to engage with
his writings with patience and concentration. He even gave a
timeline for his readers – “Ten years is enough for everything I
write to become clear to everyone” (Lacan, 1990, p. 45).
Why is Lacan obscure? Two reasons can be delineated.
First, for him, obscurity is a strategy to train the analysts. Lacan
conceived psychoanalysis as an exercise in reading the
unconscious through listening to the analysand. As he
emphasizes, Freud fully corroborates this idea when he describes
the dream as a rebus (Lacan, 2006, pp. 393-394). A rebus is a
text made of pictures and words but appears as a puzzle waiting
to be solved by, for example, the recipient of the postcard
containing the picture puzzle. A dream is similarly a narrative
inscribed and articulated in an enigmatic language, waiting to be
unpacked by both the analyst and the analysand. All formations
of the unconscious (dreams, slips, jokes, symptoms), for Lacan,
are inscribed/structured in language and writing and therefore
yield themselves to psychoanalytic reading. It is also a fact that

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all the formations of the unconscious that exist in the life of the
analysand come to light through his articulation of the same in
the clinic. Meaning, the unconscious, the subject matter for
analysis, appears in the clinic through spoken language. This is
why Lacan suggests that the “acute” ear of the analyst must be
lent “to listen for sounds and phonemes, words, locutions, and
sentences, not forgetting pauses, scansions, cuts, periods, and
parallelisms” (Lacan, 2006, p. 394). In other words, the analyst,
and by implication the psychoanalytic reader, must have sharp
command over the functioning of speech and language and its
relation to the unconscious. Now, since a careful listening to the
words and their relation to the unconscious is key to developing
clinical efficiency, only an amount of obscurity, according to
Lacan, could elicit extra-attention and thus sharpen the ears of
his analyst-listeners. “For I often say very difficult things to you,”
he notes, “and I see you hanging on every word, and I learn later
that some of you didn’t understand” (my italics) (Lacan, 1991b,
p. 141). The less one understands the more attention one pays to
a given discourse. Obscurity thus served the greater purpose of
training the analysts. By implication, a reader of Lacan ought to
experience the obscurity and read him to the letter.
The second reason for Lacan’s obscurity is his radical
rejection of understanding as a means to knowledge. Lacan
variously warned the analyst/reader against understanding. One
could start with his warning against “understanding too much.”
“One of the things we must guard most against,” he notes, “is to
understand too much, to understand more than what is in the

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discourse of the subject” (Lacan, 1991a, p. 73). Metaphorically,
for an analyst, two ears are “already too many.” “May one of your
ears,” he remarks, “become as deaf as the other one must be
acute” (Lacan, 2006, p. 394). Lacan also warns against
understanding “too quickly.” He claims that “by understanding
too quickly, we don’t understand a thing” (Lacan, 2017, p. 22). To
elaborate, understanding too much or too quickly, or even
understanding in general is dangerous in psychoanalysis for at
least three reasons. a) For Lacan, “psychopathologies
characteristically deceive understanding” (Lacan, 1997, p. 21).
There is a common mistake in “general psychopathology” that
everything has a straightforward cause-effect relationship. For
instance, one might claim that “some things are self-evident,
that, for example, when someone is sad it’s because he doesn’t
have what his heart desires. Nothing could be more false – there
are people who have all their heart desires and are still sad”
(Lacan, 1997, p. 6). b) Understanding, in psychoanalysis, implies
that the analyst makes sense of what the analysand articulates in
the clinic by delineating what the analysand “demands.” Every
act of speaking, from a Lacanian standpoint, is an act of
demanding something. The analyst needs to go beyond what is
articulated because, given the training and skill of the analyst, he
knows that “demand is not explicit. It is even far more than
implicit – it is hidden for the subject as if it had to be interpreted”
(Lacan, 2015, p. 197). Every articulation of the analysand is thus
marked by an “ambiguity” insofar as demand is “unconscious”
which is articulated in, and needs to be answered through, a

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conscious, concrete discourse. To delineate the unconscious
demand from the conscious discourse is a risky job because one
may end up making inappropriate assumptions or suppositions
(ibid.). This is exactly why the analyst must be careful while
trying to understand the demand of the analysand. And c)
understanding is an obstacle in the path of truth. It is narcissistic
insofar as it satisfies the subject’s “anticipation of meaning”
(Lacan, 1997, p. 137). One understands what (or how) one wishes
to understand. Truth is attained only when such anticipation is
thwarted and the subject / reader/ analyst is forced to move
beyond one’s comfort zone or the coordinates of one’s fantasy. To
learn something new (some new knowledge about oneself or
about the world) is to hold one’s understanding “in abeyance”
(Lacan, 1990, p. xxvi).
As opposed to understanding, Lacan promoted
“interpretation.” For him, the task of the analyst is to interpret
the truth of the unconscious and understanding blocks
interpretation. “To interpret and to imagine one understands,”
puts Lacan, “are not at all the same things. It is precisely the
opposite” (Lacan, 1991a, p. 73). Understanding thus runs the risk
of “filling in the gap” in the discourse of the analysand. One
misses “the truth” when one claims that “this is what the subject
meant” even though the subject “didn’t say it” (Lacan, 1997, p.
22). To fill in the gap, i.e., to understand, is to fall into a trap
thrown at the analyst by the analysand. The analysand refuses to
say the most crucial things, in an analysis, and to pretend to
understand his discourse is to bring a closure to it and thus

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facilitate his resistance. Instead of understanding the analysand’s
discourse, it is important to ask why he wants the analyst to
understand something. “What it is, precisely, that has to be
understood is,” Lacan puts succinctly, “why there is something
there given to be understood” (Lacan, 1997, pp. 48-49). Thus,
putting “a question mark” to the analysand’s discourse rather
than filling in its gaps is what leads to “the valid interpretation”
(ibid., p. 22). In the analysis, “the important thing is not to
understand, but to attain the true [sic]” (ibid., p. 48). Truth for
Lacan resides outside the realm of understanding and analysis
depends on a sort of “refusal of understanding” (Lacan, 1991a, p.
73).
I claim that “refusal of understanding” is a key strategy
Lacan devised for the analyst-reader – not only for making sense
of the discourse of the analysand but also for engaging with his
works. Lacan’s works appear obscure because
incomprehensibility is an inherent strategy and an expected
response to them. He admitted to having deliberately made his
texts difficult. “Writing allows for the kind of tightening up that
must, to my taste, leave the reader no other way out than the way
in, which I prefer to be difficult,” he wrote (Lacan, 2006, p. 412).
This is because his texts are meant to be interpreted and not
understood. He also noted that if one does not understand his
Écrits (as many complained they did not), then it was a sign of
“hope.” Lacan added that “it is the sign that one is affected by
it…It is a good thing that they understood nothing about it!
Because one can never understand anything except what of

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course one has already in one’s head” (Lacan, n.d., p. 12). He
reiterates it elsewhere: “…what is written is not to be understood.
That is why you are not obliged to understand my writings. If you
don’t understand them, so much the better – that will give you
the opportunity to explain them” (Lacan, 1998b, p. 34). If one
does not understand something, this indeed offers an
opportunity for serious contemplation and interpretation. It is
the lack of understanding that triggers the act of questioning the
so-called obscure text. Given the Lacanian binary of
interpretation (truth) and understanding (fantasy), if one finds
his teaching obscure, one is on the right track to learning
something new. To experience Lacan’s incomprehensibility and
to interrogate it, rather than using it as an excuse to abuse him,
would be the appropriate Lacanian response to his teaching. No
doubt Lacan was very precise when he stated, “He who
interrogates me also knows how to read me” (Lacan, 1990, p.
xxxi).
Thus, incomprehensibility or obscurity is an
interpretative challenge Lacan’s teaching quite strategically
poses to the reader. He devised a new methodology of reading to
overcome this obscurity. Such Lacanian hermeneutics makes
several demands on the readers, including a command over the
mechanism of speech and language, training in the art of
clinically-informed listening/reading, and interpretation of texts
(his/analysand’s) through interrogation and a refusal of
understanding.

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Inapplicability as a hermeneutic challenge
The third hermeneutic challenge posed by Lacan’s teaching is the
inapplicability of his ideas in the non-clinical fields. One of the
use-values of psychoanalysis in the academic departments of
humanities, social sciences and cultural studies has been the
“application” of psychoanalytic theory to cultural situations and
texts. Use of psychoanalysis to read literary and cinematic texts
as well as the use of psychoanalytic insights to critique the
discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and even religion has
become commonplace since the time of Sigmund Freud. And yet,
such application of psychoanalysis has been interrogated and
can, indeed, be dismissed as incorrect for various reasons. This is
because the so-called “application” of psychoanalytic theory,
unlike other critical theories, namely, structuralism,
deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism etc., is
extremely challenging. This challenge can be described by
exploring the “why” and the “how” of psychoanalytic criticism.
Why apply psychoanalysis outside the clinic?
Lacan defined “applied psychoanalysis” as applied solely in the
clinical context. “Psychoanalysis is applied, strictly speaking,” he
remarked, “only as a treatment and thus to a subject who speaks
and hears.” He described the use of psychoanalysis in other
fields, for instance applying “the data of psychoanalysis to
Christian symbolism” as “untoward extrapolations” (Lacan,
2006, pp. 629-630, 108). Reasons for this are somewhat simple.
Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, has two aspects – training of the

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analyst and analysis of the patient (“analysand”), the first being
a mere preparation for the second. In a carefully constructed
space of the clinic, the analysand opens up to the analyst. The
clinical space is special because it is an uncensored space where
the analysand should ideally be able to freely associate and
articulate his thoughts while the analyst remains there as more
of a listener and punctuator than a moral judge. The
psychoanalyst, unlike a psychiatrist or a psychological
counsellor, is supposed to act more like an “object” to which the
discourse of the analysand is addressed than a “subject” who
advises the analysand about how he should live his life. Ideally,
as both the analyst and the analysand work through the latter’s
problems, the analysis should automatically help the latter “get
back a large amount of independence, awaken his interest in life,
and adjust his relations to people most important to him” (Freud,
1981, p. 217). By virtue of being a one-on-one therapeutic
encounter and given the fact that analytic sessions are multiple
in number (sometimes continuing for years), it is possible for
both the analyst and the analysand to explore the latter’s
psychical universe thoroughly and over a long period of time.
Diagnosis of the patient’s symptoms, identification of his clinical
structure (whether he is a psychotic, a neurotic or a pervert), and
possibilities of treatment and cure – all these are authentically
and effectively experienced within the clinical set-up. Therefore,
strictly speaking, psychoanalysis is impossible and absurd
outside the clinical space. For instance, a psychoanalytic reading
of literature can be a futile exercise because a) such a reading

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cannot reproduce the clinical situation wherein the analyst
(reader) and the analysand (character/author) meet one-on-one,
b) the reader of a literary work is not always a trained
psychoanalyst, c) the literary text is a written and published text
unlike the discourse of an analysand which is predominantly
oral, d) a literary text cannot be accepted as the author’s “free-
association” and one cannot psychoanalyze the author on the
basis of such scanty evidence, and e) one cannot psychoanalyze a
fictional character. What is true of literary criticism is also true
of cultural studies in general.
If application of psychoanalysis for studying cultural
representations is flawed, redundant, and futile, then what
explains the abundance of references to myths, literature,
painting, anthropology, critical theory, mathematics, natural
sciences, and other non-clinical disciplines in the works of Freud
and Lacan? Both Freud and Lacan repeatedly instructed the
analysts to engage in a wide reading of the humanities. For
instance, Freud maintained that “the analytical curriculum
would include subjects which are far removed from medicine and
which a doctor would never require in his practice: the history of
civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and literature.
Unless he is well oriented in these fields, the analyst will be
unable to bring understanding to bear upon much of his
material” (Freud, 1950, p. 118). In the same vein, Lacan stated,
“To be taught and to be learned, this technique [the
psychoanalytic technique] would require a profound assimilation
of the resources of a language...especially those that are

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concretely realized in its poetic texts” (Lacan, 2006, p. 244). In
other words, knowledge of cultural forms, which document the
dynamics of the human mind and relationships, enriches
psychoanalytic wisdom. As Lacan once put it, “…poets, as is well
known, don’t know what they’re saying, yet they still manage to
say things before anyone else…” (Lacan, 1991b, p. 7). This,
however, broadly implies that literature and other cultural
practices are of use to psychoanalysis but does not convince us
that psychoanalysis is useful for literary/cultural criticism. The
psychoanalytic readings of literature, mostly, have done nothing
other than help the analyst confirm and formulate the
psychoanalytic concept in clear terms. Literature becomes a site
where the truth of psychoanalysis – conceptual veracity of
Oedipus complex, desire, anxiety, sinthome, so on and so forth –
is tested. As Derrida once put it, psychoanalysis, for its own
purpose, reduces literature to a teleological discourse, as if the
“telos” of literature is to confirm some “pre-established truth” or
the clinical finding (Rabaté, 2012, p. 56). If anything, such
readings are narcissistic (psychoanalysis looking for its reflection
in literature and culture) and after some time boring, as Rabaté
puts it (ibid., p. 54).
The thrust of the hermeneutic challenge we are dealing
with here is, therefore, related to the difference between the
clinical and the cultural. This is best demonstrated by the debate
surrounding Lacanian discourse – whether it has merely a
clinical value or whether it is useful for cultural studies as well.
In my view, it is possible to formulate this debate in terms of the

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conflicting approaches to Lacan by Jacques-Alain Miller and
Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, a cultural theorist immensely popular in the
Anglophone world, has quite unhesitatingly applied Lacan’s
ideas to elucidate contemporary culture, politics, and society. His
justification is quite straightforward. According to him, the
clinical, as far as Lacan was concerned, could be demonstrated
through every field of knowledge, including philosophy and
literature. If the clinical is present everywhere, argues Žižek, then
it is alright to “short circuit” the clinical process and engage in
discovering the “effects” of the clinical in cultural forms or how
the clinical “colors everything that appears to be non-clinical.”
For him, “the true test” of the centrality of the clinical can be
conducted through such Lacanian cultural criticism (Žižek, 2007,
p. 5). However, Žižek’s argument seems unable to avoid the
hermeneutic trap being discussed here. First, popular culture, if
considered to be a site where the clinical proves its “ubiquity,” is
projected to be in service of the clinical discourse, and not vice
versa. Second, Žižek, himself trained as a psychoanalyst (he
studied under and was supervised by Jacques-Alain Miller), can
afford to short-circuit the clinical but such bypassing of the
clinical praxis is not possible for anyone not clinically trained.
Žižek can remain a Lacanian but a Žižekian, lacking adequate
clinical knowledge, would end up with misguided psychoanalytic
readings of culture.
Žižek thus runs the risk of reducing Lacan to a cultural
phenomenon. And his popularity among American and
Anglophone audience is alarming. Lacanian psychoanalysis has

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been particularly unwelcome in America and the American
psychologists and psychiatrists have resisted the use of clinical
insights of Freud and Lacan (Brousse and Jaanus, 2013, p. vii).
Against the backdrop of such historical neglect of
Freudian/Lacanian discourse, the popularity of “cultural Lacan”
can further divert people’s attention from Lacanian clinical
analysis. This is why Miller condemned the American reception
of Žižek, in the following words.
I have another question, which has been troubling me for
years, which is – ‘What do Americans want?’ I have the answer!
A partial answer. They want Slavoj Žižek! They want the Lacan of
Slavoj Žižek. They like it better than the Lacan of the Freudian
Field, for the time being perhaps. The question is, do they want
very definite concepts? Or do they want some room to wrangle?
Some negotiating space? And that is the case with the concepts
of psychoanalysis (J-A Miller, 2008, p. 145).
For Miller, an orthodox Lacanian analyst from France,
Lacanian concepts have a precise clinical meaning but to take
these away from the clinical into the field of the cultural is to lose
this precision and render Lacan a matter of fashionable
theoretical debate by some non-experts. For Miller, as for Lacan,
there is no room for “wrangling” or “negotiating” as far as
psychoanalytic concepts are concerned. These concepts are
scientific insofar as they derive from clinical data – hence, there
is no room for debating these, unless there are clinical counter-
data. Cultural texts and situations cannot be considered clinical
data and thus cannot be used to challenge or demonstrate Lacan.

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How to apply psychoanalysis?
In spite of the challenges of applicability of psychoanalysis,
psychoanalytic criticism constitutes a discourse which is over
hundred years old. It may be noted that even though Lacan
objected to the application of psychoanalysis in non-clinical
contexts, he repeatedly engaged in reading psychoanalysis in
conjunction with science, arts, literature, religion, and cultural
practices. It is worth remembering that both Freud and Lacan
gave us some of the finest theories of art. Freud, in The Uncanny,
developed a theory of aesthetics of anxiety (that category of art
that frightens us or makes us anxious) as opposed to the
conventional aesthetics of pleasure (art as beauty that makes us
happy). Lacan, in “Lituraterre,” theorized a category of literature
that foregrounds the real, i.e., highlights an experience that can
be experienced but not articulated and a language that fails to
refer to a referent. Thus, what is important, in my view, is not to
scrap the tradition of psychoanalytic criticism but to assess its
flaws and discuss the possibility of a responsible, self-critical and
effective psychoanalytic criticism. I propose that such an
approach would include four elements. First, a Lacanian critic,
alongside extensive knowledge of literature and culture, ought to
acquaint himself with the clinical aspects of psychoanalysis. This
involves a) undergoing psychoanalysis under the supervision of
an analyst to experience, first hand, the mechanisms of the
unconscious, and b) a strict clinical reading of Freud’s and
Lacan’s writings on the interface between clinic and culture to

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devise an appropriate framework for psychoanalytic criticism.
Second, whichever element is foregrounded in a given
psychoanalytic reading – reader, author, character, or textual
form – it runs the risk of being equally flawed but contains equal
potential to generate new and substantial interpretations of clinic
and culture. As far as Lacan was concerned, he engaged in all four
modes of psychoanalytic reading even though he was critical of
each of them. A responsible psychoanalytic criticism, in my view,
ought to weigh and consider the potential of each of these four
methods of application. And third, any and every form of
psychoanalytic criticism ought to include a discussion of the
limits of applicability of psychoanalysis in that specific context.
It is important to remember the distinctness of the clinical and
the cultural and to value their mutual benefit whether to
demonstrate how psychoanalysis “misfires” or to theorize
literature/culture anew (Bayard, 1999, p. 214).
Untheorizability as a hermeneutic challenge
The fourth and the final hermeneutic challenge posed by
Lacanian psychoanalysis is untheorizability. There is a tendency
among literary and cultural critics to describe Lacan as a theorist
of poststructuralism or even postmodernism. While Sokal
describes Lacan as a “postmodern intellectual,” P. A. Miller in an
oft-cited article, brings together Derrida, Lacan and Foucault
under the umbrella term “poststructuralism” (P.A. Miller, 1998).
Eli Zaretsky, borrowing the notion of indeterminacy and
polyvalence from Derrida, claims that Lacan’s emphasis on the

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three-dimensional subjectivity (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) is at
the root of “postmodern” subjectivity (Zaretsky, 1996, p. 163).
Terry Eagleton claims that Lacan speaks the language of
poststructuralism. He gets ecstatic while describing Lacan’s
notion of the child’s encounter with the name-of-the-father.
“With the entry of the father,” Eagleton notes, “the child is
plunged into post-structuralist anxiety. It now has to grasp
Saussure’s point that identities come about only as a result of
difference that one term or subject is what it is only by excluding
another” (Eagleton, 1996, p. 144).
However, a couple of Lacanians have opposed the
inclusion of Lacan in the popular list of poststructuralists. J-A
Miller, for instance, has explained that Lacan does not fit into the
popular list of poststructuralists because he emphasized the
“beyond of the signifier” (J-A Miller, 2005). Here Miller refers to
the later Lacan, whose accent was on the real or the beyond
of/gaps in language and who highlighted the “affects,” like
trauma, anxiety, jouissance and sexual non-rapport that could be
experienced but not articulated in language. For Žižek, on the
other hand, Lacan’s theorization of truth and the Real can be
considered a rejection of the basics of poststructuralism. Lacan
conceived of psychoanalysis as a “truth-experience” and his
notion of truth is entirely different from poststructuralist
consideration of truth as plural and relative and as textual. This
can be explained in three ways. First, many analysands will speak
of experiencing their truth as singular in their analysis – the
specific moment of trauma or the particular cause of ecstasy that

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defines their life. Second, truth (vérité) a feminine noun, has, as
such, a relation of alterity with respect to the symbolic order.
From a Lacanian standpoint, the symbolic is phallocentric –
made of law, logic, and language which serve patriarchy – and
the woman does not exist in the symbolic insofar as she poses
limits to, and exposes the vanity of, masculinity. Truth eksists in
the symbolic in the sense that woman is excluded from, or exists
in the periphery of, patriarchy (Mandal, 2017, p. 280). And third,
truth whether in the sense of trauma or ecstasy (jouissance) is
fundamentally an inarticulable experience, i.e., one can
experience truth but cannot (fully) articulate it because of the
limits and incapability of language. Thus insofar as Lacan’s idea
of truth and limits to articulation is concerned he is opposed to
plurality and textuality of truth generally promoted in
poststructuralism.
In my view, the debate regarding whether Lacan is a
poststructural theorist or not (he was not) becomes completely
irrelevant insofar as psychoanalysis itself resists theorization.
The so-called theory of psychoanalysis is based on clinical
experiences and it gets somewhat invalidated when a counter-
experience is generated. While it is possible to talk about several
“theories” of Lacan and even of Freud, one must note that such
theories resist being designated as such because they are fluid,
unstable, alterable and even contradictory. Miller, one among the
earliest to have thought in this direction, rightly stated that “the
word ‘theory’ is not adequate… [in the context of psychoanalysis],

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because it is a word which implies appropriateness, suitability,
harmony of thought with its object” (J-A Miller, 2003, n.p.).
The fluidity of psychoanalytic formulations was
advocated by Freud himself. Every single conclusion Freud
arrived at was derived from his clinic, i.e., from the case histories
of his patients. Given clinical experiences could vary and counter
earlier clinical encounters, Freud was open to modifications of
his conclusions by himself or by others. It was not a set of
conclusions producing a system of thought however aesthetically
beautiful or politically convenient that mattered to Freud. What
actually mattered was the recovery of the patients whose entire
treatment depended on what they spoke and how they spoke
things on the couch. If the particularity of the clinical case
demanded rethinking of a rather fascinating theory already in
existence, Freud was absolutely ready to discard the latter. As
Lacan notes, Freud asserted that “he [Freud] would rather give
up the entire stability of his theory than misrecognize the tiniest
particularities of a case that might call his theory into question.
This means that even if the sum total of analytic experience
allows us to isolate some general forms, an analysis proceeds only
from the particular to the particular” (Lacan, 2006, p. 322).
Building an eternally binding theory was not Freud’s concern at
all; rather, he was keen to highlight psychoanalysis’s resistance
to theorization.
This explains the shifts and breaks in Freud’s own career
which can broadly be divided into two phases – the early Freud
and the later Freud. Early Freud formulated the human mind as

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comprising three areas (“topos”), i.e., perception-consciousness,
preconscious, and unconscious. Later Freud replaced this model
by defining human mind as having three “agencies” – id, ego, and
superego. It is also notable that in early Freud sexuality and
pleasure principle dominate the psychoanalytic discourse while
the later Freud engages with death, anxiety, and the beyond of
the pleasure principle. Arguably, later Freud rejected some of the
formulations of early Freud. This triggers the question – when
we talk about Freud, which Freud do we talk about? Freud has
conventionally been condemned as having explained everything
in terms of sexuality. There is no reason why he should be
condemned even if he had reduced everything to the sexual –
isn’t it that the bulk of human problems derive from how we
engage or fail to engage with sexual desire? On the other hand, to
reduce Freudian discourse to sexuality is to completely ignore the
later Freud. It is precisely due to such risks of reductionism that
Freudian ideas resist conventional theorization.
This instability and dynamism of psychoanalytic theory,
I would call it “non-theory,” is best reflected in the teaching of
Lacan. As mentioned, Lacan’s teaching can be divided into four
stages corresponding to his formulation of four psychical
registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Sinthome). Lacan not only
changed the accentual focus of his teaching across various stages,
he reformulated many concepts and even abandoned some
earlier ones. The contrasts between early Lacan (Imaginary,
Symbolic) and the later Lacan (Real, Sinthome) are a case in
point. Thus, when we talk about Lacan, as in the case of Freud,

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we need to ask which Lacan we are talking about. It is remarkable
how the great bulk of critical theories influenced by Lacan as well
the primers in literary and cultural theories have almost
exclusively picked up on the first two phases of his teaching
(Barry, 2002; Bhabha, 1994; Eagleton, 1996; Fanon, 2008;
JanMohamed, 1985). To celebrate, neglect or dismiss him on the
basis of a couple of texts is to encourage a reductionist take on
his intellectual output.
In my view, Lacan believed psychoanalysis to be a non-
theory. This is why even though he called himself a Freudian until
he breathed his last, he did not consider Freud to have given
absolute and eternally binding theories in light of which clinical
practice had to happen. Lacan’s “return to Freud” was an attempt
to study the impasses, inconsistencies and contradictions found
in Freud’s works. On the one hand, Lacan demonstrated the
revolutionary potential of Freud’s discourse which helped him
formulate some original notions including three psychical
registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) or discern the unconscious
(as opposed to the “ego” and the “object”) as the foundational
concept of psychoanalysis. On the other, in a Freudian spirit, he
moved beyond Freud through his clinical discoveries regarding
psychosis, a category of patients Freud considered untreatable.
It is the notion of psychosis, in fact, that can best
demonstrate the dynamism of psychoanalytic non-theory. It is
well-known that Lacan, in his doctoral thesis (1932), studied
paranoiac psychosis and went to the extent of inventing a new
clinical category called “self-punishment paranoia” (Evans, 1996,

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p. 137). Psychosis remained a special area of Lacan’s and in spite
of many psychoanalysts, including Freud, wondering if/how
psychosis could be treated through psychoanalysis, Lacan
discussed at length the broken relation of the psychotic to
language and how this relation could be restored. Clinically
speaking, Lacan’s venture into psychosis was innovative but it
was also, initially, grounded in Freud (particularly Freud’s case
history of Daniel Paul Schreber). Following Lacan, Miller went
on to develop the notion of “ordinary psychosis,” whereby he
demonstrated the presence of psychotic symptoms in every
individual, irrespective of clinical category
(neurosis/psychosis/perversion). This demonstrates that a
psychoanalytic theory of psychosis evolved through a series of
resistance to theorization – Freud considered psychosis
impossible to treat psychoanalytically, Lacan went all hands on
deck to demonstrate psychosis could be treated, and Miller made
it almost a commonplace clinical experience.
Arguably, Lacan fully embraced the dynamism of
psychoanalysis. He went on pushing the boundaries of
psychoanalysis (with techniques like variable length sessions)
even at the risk of cutting relations with the IPA. He dissolved his
own schools time and again, implying he was opposed to
dogmatization of psychoanalysis, even at the risk of alienating his
disciples. As indicated earlier, dissolution was one of the various
ways Lacan invented to let psychoanalysis, as a praxis-inspired
thinking, take new directions instead of getting rusted as a
system of thought. The struggle for psychoanalysis was thus to

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keep questioning its existing formulations and stay focused on
the new and particular clinical encounters. Only this way could
psychoanalysis remain relevant.
Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus different from literary
and cultural theories in that it is a non-theory. Put differently,
untheorizability becomes a hermeneutic challenge posed by
Lacan because his works resist theorization.
Conclusion
The challenges to interpretation posed by Lacan’s texts, as I have
analyzed in this paper, refer to Lacan’s resistance to the
appropriation of psychoanalytic discourse by conventional
hermeneutics and his insistence on interpreting his works
through a new methodology of interpretation. Given that clinical
specificity, dynamism and innovation are at the root of his works,
the new hermeneutics that Lacan devises as the interpretative
framework of his teaching can be described as an “epistemology
of the clinical.” Lacanian psychoanalysis both promotes and
practices this hermeneutics of the clinical and it is Lacan’s
clinical concerns that explain the incomprehensibility,
inapplicability and the untheorizability of Lacan’s discourse. It is
obvious by now that the aggressive condemnation of Lacan
derives from a complete ignorance of Lacanian hermeneutics.
This ignorance or the “Sokal Complex” as I have defined it –
enhanced by the unavailability of his works – derives from a
failure to think beyond the existing forms of knowledge (the
political, the scientific, the artistic, and the philosophical – as

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different from the clinical). Calling Lacan names is an
articulation of such failures.
We are now in a better situation to revisit the notion of
the Sokal Complex as introduced at the outset of this paper. I
have defined the Sokal Complex as a reader’s resistance to and
dismissal of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and practice when
confronted with a lack in their own knowledge. The tone in which
such manifestation happens is typically marked by anger and
aggression, sometimes disguised under sarcasm. The attacks on
Lacan are usually out of proportion – denouncing the whole of
French philosophy or denouncing Lacan in his entirety and so on.
In fact, such detractors suffer from a fallacy of essentialism. They
do not consult the bulk of Lacan’s works, let alone his entire
works (which are unavailable), and based on excerpts from Lacan
or from secondary sources on Lacan they dismiss Lacanian
theory and ridicule those who work from the modality. Ignoring
the distinctness of psychoanalytic experience, they also club
together thinkers and discourses which are marked by mutual
differences, and lump them all together. Furthermore, such
readers unwittingly reveal that they do not know the basics of
psychoanalysis and this ignorance is carefully hidden under their
aggression. They miss the fundamental thrust of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, i.e., the centrality of the clinical in it. Lacan’s
works, one ought to remember, go by the name of “teaching.”
This means that everything that Lacan spoke or wrote was to
serve the purpose of training psychoanalysts and expanding the
scope of clinical treatment. Lacan’s teaching – both in terms of

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its form and content – is shaped accordingly and demands a
serious, patient, and clinically oriented readership. For Lacan,
reading or interpretation was a serious business for the analyst
and he admittedly expected such seriousness from the readers of
his works. In other words, Lacan’s detractors, manifesting in
what I have termed the Sokal Complex, suffer from a lethargy, a
reluctance or resistance and an inability to acknowledge and
overcome the interpretative challenges that Lacan’s teaching
poses to the general reader. Whether the Sokal Complex can be
used to interpret the resistance to non-clinical forms of
knowledge can be an interesting research question but does not
fall within the purview of this article.
Acknowledgement
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), India on 29
November 2019. I remain indebted to Priyanka Das, Karthick
Ram Manoharan, Maidul Islam and the members of the audience
for their feedback.
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