The Name of the Father: In the Shadow of Jacques Lacan

This volume brings together two books by Sibylle Lacan—“The Father” and “Ellipsis.” The younger daughter of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, from his first marriage, tries to reconstruct the portrait of a man who never became for her a support, based on fragments of memory. She calls her birth “the fruit of despair,” and her own life—marked by a strange illness that no French psychoanalyst was able to fully ease.

While Jacques Lacan was developing the concept of “the Name-of-the-Father,” his daughter sought that name within herself—in a letter, in silence, in the pain she had endured. Her text is neither a confession nor an act of accusation, but an attempt to hear and give voice to her own words, to emerge from the shadow of a famous figure.

“Ellipsis” continues this internal work: here Sibylle reflects not only on her father, but also on herself, on her mother, and on a reality that never became a home for her.

One of the most powerful books about what it means to be the child of a genius—and how not to lose yourself when your fate is determined by someone else’s name.