When I was born, my father was already no longer there.¿ Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of Lacan's first marriage: the fruit of despair (some will say of desire, but I do not believe them¿). Lacan abandoned his old family for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle. For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized child of Lacan¿even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father.
