Olga Cox Cameron – Lacan and Dali – An Anamorphic Encounter
 
THE LETTER 14 (Autumn 1998) pages 134-160
 
‘What fun I might have had Lacan’s half-mocking, backward look at his early years from the vantage point of 1966, pinpoints his much publicised connection with Salvador Dali as a stopover, left long behind in his own intellectual odyssey. On the occasion of the publication of a first extract from Paul Duquenne’s translation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, in the psychoanalytic journal Cahiers pour L’Analyse, Jacques Alain Miller invited Lacan to write an introduction. Lacan took advantage of this opportunity to review the trajectory of his own thought on psychotic structures and, typically, to flatten out the importance of ‘connaissance paranoïaque’, signalled as crucial in the article in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis of May 1951.
 
What a fine career as an essayist I could have made for myself using this theme which lends itself to all kinds of aesthetic variations! One has only to think of all that our friend Dali has done with it.