WITH such an intriguing title, this sounded as if it might be an interesting book. Slim, hardbacked, with an elegant cover, it even looked like it might be one of those little gems that this publisher often produces. But my heart sank when I saw that Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst in the French tradition of the late Jacques Lacan.
Let me declare my prejudice. Maybe Camille Paglia goes too far when she describes Lacan as "the French fog machine ... a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso". Maybe. But she has a point. However, let's be fair. in Leader we have a writer whose other book was Lacan for Beginners. Surely he had managed to cut through the thicket of the difficult, obscure and often circular discourse that is the hallmark of so much Lacanian theorising?
The blurb was not reassuring. It started off steadily enough, posing the question: if a letter is written, but not posted, at whom is it really directed? This question, we are told, goes to the heart of sexual desire, which, according to Darian Leader, is never addressed to our flesh and blood companion, but always to something beyond him or her. So far so good. But attempting to explain, or even signal, how the author reaches such a conclusion, or indeed why he even thought it worthwhile to pose the question in the first place, the hapless blurb writer gets hopelessly bogged down. I fared no better myself.
I read - and reread - the 159-page essay (not a chapter heading in sight). I sought desperately for a train of thought, a conceptualisation, for an over-arching argument that would make sense of the whimsical anecdotes, the references to Audrey Hepburn and Sharon Stone films, Agatha Christie's disappearance, and Freudian theory. But I was treading water. The nearest one gets to logical continuity in this Lacanian theorising is Darian Leader's use of the word "now". "Now" he announces gaily, having just finished interpreting a Sharon Stone film, "Now, Freud continues to discuss the problem of doubling one's object in the case of women." Or, "Now, let's return for a moment to Lacan's patient who proposes to his mistress that she sleep with another man." it is then up to the reader to try to figure out, by yet another re-reading of the preceding four pages, where this discussion is leading or even how it got to where it is.
Undoubtedly, Lacanian theory has its insights. This book tries in its own tortuous way to grapple with ideas about female identity, about a woman's complex relationship to her own desire, routed through her relationships with other women, and their relationship with men. But one of the characteristics of a good theory is that, its explanations are elegant, parsimonious. In this book, I failed to find any explanations of the different ways women and men think about themselves, construct desire, communicate, or try to resolve their problems that were better, or even as good, as those found in mainstream psychology, feminist studies or classic psychoanalysis.
I still don't know why women write more letters than they post, or even if they do. But I came across one Lacanian insight that I could identify with in a heartfelt way. In the book, there is a story about Lacan, the master himself, who one day, in the course of listening to the continuous, self-preoccupied stream of consciousness and "free association" of a particularly obsessional patient, decided to leave the room, remarking as he left: "Don't hesitate to continue the session during my absence", thereby letting the patient know that the purpose of his free association was not to communicate with the therapist, but to put him to sleep, to avoid ever getting to the point where things might become clear to himself or anybody else.
Having suffered through yet another stream of Lacanian consciousness in this book, I'm almost tempted to say the same to all Lacanians.