Stuart Schneiderman

Out of the many books I have read about Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis, I can unreservedly say that The Last Psychoanalyst is the absolute worst. It is full of weak logic and spiteful reprisals that are driven by a mixture of personal revenge and perverse ideology.

Schneiderman has an impressive pedigree on paper. He moved from America to Paris in the 1970s to train as a psychoanalyst under Lacan, and in 1983 published a widely-read book mourning the death of his former master, Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero. Returning to the U.S., Schneiderman worked as a psychoanalyst for thirty years, before abruptly announcing that he was renouncing psychoanalysis in order to become - get this - a "life coach." Despite his renunciation, Schneiderman displays this history on his online profile, because there is nothing like boosting your image by hypocritically sucking prestige from things you have since disowned.

If you read my review of Schneiderman's earlier book, you will know that I don't have any respect for the guy. He is a hanger-on, a disciple, a wannabe whose transparent obsequiousness Lacan obviously saw through in a second. Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero is one of the most shameless acts of uncritical hero worship ever committed to paper, but it at least has the virtue of being historically useful - Schneiderman knew Lacan personally, underwent analysis with him, and attended his seminars.

The Last Psychoanalyst purports to be a critique of psychoanalysis, but it is so void of any substance that it cannot be taken seriously. One might wonder what kind of publisher would accept such drivel, and the answer is "none" - Schneiderman chose to self-publish this piece of ideological nonsense.

Anyone who has been following the recent history of psychoanalysis will know that there has been a strong backlash against the field from a number of different angles, from the scientific to the biographical. The so-called "Freud Wars," for instance, have been raging over the past three decades, looking at everything from the apparent ineffectiveness of its clinical value to the personal moral failings of Freud the man. Highlights include Frederick Crews's Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017) and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse (2005), both of which provide well-documented critiques of the man. I have no problem with such criticism, for even in cases where it is politically or ideologically motivated, it at least has some basis in scholarly rigor.

Schneiderman's approach, by contrast, consists mostly of a series of hysterical, ad hominem attacks that read more like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist than of a reasoned critic. The central charge against Freud is that he designed psychoanalysis as a cult, a false religion in which victims were socially engineered to bring down the foundations of Western civilization.

Since there is no coherent structure to Schneiderman's book, just a 268-page rant, so let me give you an overview of his main points. Essentially, Schneiderman mistakes psychoanalysis for a kind of Sadism. Its basic strategy, he argues, is to abolish all rules, especially with regard to sexuality, in order to create a kind of libertine utopia. Really, though, this carrot of sexual permissiveness was just a trick, a way of entering into the psychoanalytic "script" in which we are all just players in the fictional drama of Oedipus. Once the patient enters into this mindset, argues Schneiderman, they will simply accept the interpretation of their fate handed to them by their controlling analyst.

In contrast to this culture of permissiveness and decadence, Schneiderman sets himself up a cultural conservative who is defending the values of Western civilization (especially Anglo-American culture, which is held up as inherently superior to both the decadence of Catholic/Jewish Europe or those poor deluded South Americans who still follow Lacan out of colonial simplemindedness (yes, he actually says this)), the traditional family (including a bizarre rant late in the book about Confucius and the value of "filial piety"!), and the rule of law. This is a question of decency and morality, damn it, and he will not see these precious values violated!

There are so many bizarre aspects to Schneiderman's discourse that I don't have time to touch on, but one of the superlative moments of insanity comes from his characterization of Freud's attitude toward Jewishness. I agree, for instance, that Moses and Monotheism is one of Freud's more bizarre fantasies, but Schneiderman's conclusion is seriously over-the-top:

"Having articulated the myth of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo Freud later applied it to the founding of the Jewish religion. He might have thought that Biblical history would show how right he was. Or, he might have thought that, by attacking Moses, he could subvert a major foundation of Judeo-Christian civilization. As unpleasant as it is to say, Freud was undermining Judaism at a time when German-speaking Europe was indulging an especially virulent form of anti-Semitism." (p.220)

So... Moses and Monotheism means that Freud is an enabler of anti-Semitism, a collaborator with Hitler?! That certainly appears to be what Schneiderman is implying here, as "unpleasant as it is to say."

This same extraordinary charge is made a little earlier in the book, when Schneiderman is taking on the broad resemblance between psychoanalysis and Heideggerean thought. Schneiderman takes the not-so-uncommon position that Heidegger's philosophy cannot be disentangled from his Nazi politics, but he then uses that position to make the charge that psychoanalysis essentially shares this relationship. He writes:

"Like Freud before him Heidegger found a way to absolve people of responsibility. And he did it long before he forgave himself for his Nazi past." (p.206)

This crazy moral equation is made even more explicitly a few pages later.

"As Darrin McMahon noted, Joseph Goebbels saw Hitler as a genius and a demiurge:

'Joseph Goebbels claimed to have known from his first encounter with Hitler that he was a “genius,” “a natural, creative instrument of divine fate,” who would shape the German Volk into a political-artistic masterpiece. “The people are for the statesman what stone is for the sculptor,” Goebbels observed in his novel Michael, first published in the 1920s.'

Many psychoanalysts find it difficult to associate Freud, a man they consider a great liberator with thinkers who have promoted despotism and tyranny." (p.209)

I've never seen Godwin's law - the principle that people arguing on the internet will eventually degenerate to comparing one another to Hitler - in a book about Lacan before, but here you go!

Throughout The Last Psychoanalyst, Schneiderman almost completely obscures his own past history with the "cult" of psychoanalysis. He does mention in passing that he attended Lacan's lectures, for instance, but not once does he reveal his authorship of a book worshiping the memory of Lacan, that Lacan was his "intellectual hero." He doesn't reveal, either, that he was not only once a paid-up member of this "cult," but that, in becoming an analyst himself, he practiced its deceits and manipulations for thirty years. Where is Schneiderman's sense of responsibility for his collaboration with this supposed evil? His silence on the topic suggests that, like Heidegger, he refuses all responsibility and has chosen instead to forgive himself.… (mer)

The only other time I came across Stuart Schneiderman was while reading Lacan's [b:The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|29277160|The Sinthome The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472826670s/29277160.jpg|2900394]. Schneiderman tries hopelessly to insert himself into the conversation by asking about Chomsky, but Lacan notes merely that his interlocutor is American and enters into a lament about how only Americans dare to ask him real questions anymore. Schneiderman repeats his query in more detail, finds himself totally ignored, and the seminar moves on without him getting a genuine reply.

My recent reading on the topic of Lacan has focused on authors who have actively - healthily - resisted his authority while still being able to acknowledge his value: Roustang, Turkle, Gallop, even Irigaray can be put in this camp. Schneiderman, on the other hand, is a guileless disciple through and through. A beta. A chump.

Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero is little more than a love letter to the author's recently-deceased master. Schneiderman makes an attempt to explain Lacanian theory to the reader, but these parts of the book are tedious. It quickly becomes clear that these attempted elucidations are "empty speech": what Schneiderman really wants to do, like any neurotic with an unresolved transference, is to mourn the lost object of his love by talking obsessively about him.

Because Schneiderman was actually there - he moved to Paris in 1973 to become a follower of Lacan - he does give some interesting historical insights into what life was like at the École freudienne. His explanation in Chapters 4 and 5 of the system of the "pass," for instance, which was the technique used to promote analysts to the position of Teaching Analyst, is interesting, especially for the way he avoids addressing just how controversial this practice actually was (see Turkle pp.123-129 for a very different take on this procedure). So too are his ruminations in Chapter 7 of his personal experience of being analyzed by Lacan, and his explanation of the benefits of the notorious "short sessions" that Lacan pioneered.

As the incident from Seminar XXIII mentioned above demonstrates, Lacan clearly had no genuine respect for Schneiderman. He bullies and belittles him, and Schneiderman, like a good little disciple, endures this abuse and rationalizes it all. He explains away Lacan's greed, his rudeness, his infidelities, his dishonesty, his tyranny, all with the wide-eyed innocence of a genuine sucker.

This whitewashing culminates with the ludicrous conclusion Schneiderman draws from an incident that happened during World War II, in which Lacan badgered the Gestapo to give up the file on his Jewish wife, Sylvie Bataille. "If it is true that we can tell a great deal about the character of a man by how he acts in situations of crisis, then we should recognize Lacan as a man whose personal ethical conduct was unimpeachable," affirms Schneiderman breathlessly, adding a little further on: "Lacan exhibited the kind of strength of character necessary for ethical heroism. When he faced down the Gestapo, when he stood by his wife and acted decisively on her behalf, he was honoring a commitment and following one his basic principles: to keep one's word" (pp.164-165). Lacan was many things, but he was not an ethical hero in the way he lived his life.

Schneiderman's feeble attempt at an intellectual portrait of Lacan was subsequently eclipsed, ten years later, by the publication Élisabeth Roudinesco's magisterial [b:Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|262580|Jacques Lacan An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|Élisabeth Roudinesco|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391656006s/262580.jpg|254522]. Like Schneiderman, Roudinesco has an enormous, unresolved crush on Lacan, but unlike him she has the sense both to try to account for that transference and face up to the many unsavory aspects of Lacan's life and character.

Schneiderman's book, ultimately, is an embarrassment - yet it is also a useful object lesson in the dangers of being an uncritical disciple, the very thing that psychoanalysis is supposed to teach you how to avoid.… (mer)