王培军 | 也谈培根与陶渊明论读书及钱锺书的读书法 

钱先生读古今中外的“大经大典”，自都是“贯澈首尾”、从头通读的，这有其笔记作证；但是据他这里所说，我们又可揣而知之，他即于读“大经大典”之际，亦必时有“带草看法”，而不是像经师、注疏家那样，硁硁守章句，“一字不放过”的。

王培军

责任编辑 | 刘小磊

4月27日《南方周末》所刊胡文辉先生的《培根读书与陶渊明不同》，我是中午坐在自家阳台的帆布躺椅中读到的，那时我正在刷手机，就在手机上读了。文章写得很短，是商榷钱锺书先生《管锥编》中论陶渊明《五柳先生传》的“好读书，不求甚解”的，缘起则是傅杰先生在朋友圈中，征引了《管锥编》的那一段。胡文辉认为钱先生引培根的《谈读书》来与陶渊明参证，无此必要，因为二者的内涵不同，培根重在所读之书，而渊明意在读书之人，故不必牵合。按照我的理解，胡文辉的意思，是嫌钱先生在此处“跑野马”了。我当然同意他的说法，并且“车边痒技”，在后面又加了个“跟帖”，“试为更进一解”：

培根读书，在于用书，即以书为己所用；陶渊明读书，在于玩书，即以书消遣自己是也。用书所以有益智、长才云云，玩书所以“欣然忘食”，如小儿玩游戏不肯吃饭也。要言之，培根读书如吃饭，首在取其营养，滋益身体，以期于壮大，陶渊明读书如饮酒，以适情忘世虑，而不惜身体坏也。

简言之，培根的是“成长式读书”，渊明的则是“消费式读书”。后来杨焄教授见到了，认为我的话亦有所本，那就是吴乔《围炉诗话》卷一论“诗文之界”的：

意同而所以用之者不同，是以诗文体制有异耳。……意喻之米，饭与酒所同出。文喻之炊而为饭，诗喻之酿而为酒。文之措词必副乎意，犹饭之不变米形，噉之则饱也。诗之措词不必副乎意，犹酒之变尽米形，饮之则醉也。（据郭绍虞编《清诗话续编》，第一册479页）

我认为杨焄的“追本探源”是对的。不过，我在说那个话时，其实已经忘了吴乔，而意识中主要浮现的是《谈艺录》中引的《随园诗话》卷十三所云：

蚕食桑而所吐者丝，非桑也；蜂采花而所酿者蜜，非花也。读书如吃饭，善吃者长精神，不善吃者生痰瘤。（206—207页。其语见人民文学出版社本《随园诗话》，上册461页）

以及钱先生本人在《谈艺录》中挖苦张佩纶，说的“腹笥中有《唐书》两部，已撑肠成痞，探喉欲吐，无处安放”。钱先生在《谈艺录》（补订本）中，有一大段补订，考论“读书如吃饭”的比喻，尤为精彩：

子才谓“读书如吃饭”，为词章说法也。实则此乃道学家讲性理时常喻。《朱子语类》卷一百二十一：“或云：尝见人说，凡外面寻讨入来者都不是。曰：吃饭也是外面寻讨入来；若不是时，须是肚里做病，如何吃得安稳；读书亦然。”《阳明传习录》卷下：“凡饮食只是要养我身，食了要消化。若徒蓄积在肚里，便成痞了，如何长得肌肤。后世学者博学多识，留滞胸中，皆伤食之病也。”盖“长得肌肤”，必须饮食，而“肚里做病”，亦缘饮食。……黑格尔论人之学养，谓取见前事物为己有，犹吞嗜而消纳之，化无机体为有机体（";">Die Bildung in dieser Rücksicht besteht,von der Seite des Individuums aus betrachtet,dass es dies Vorhandne erwerbe,seine unorganische Natur in sich zehre und für sich in Besitz nehme—Phänomenologie des Geistes,“Vorrede”,hrsg．J．Hoffmeister,27）。亦取譬于饮食消化。诺瓦利斯径云：“学问之道与生理剧相类，不佳者与无用者徒成身心中积滞。故学犹食也”（";">Kenntnis und Wissenschaft sind völlig dem Körper analog;ist er nicht schön oder brauchbar,so ist er eine Last．Daher hat Lernen soviel Ähnlichkeit mit Essen—Fragmente，hrsg．E．Kamnitzer,173,§392）。当世论师以唯心论与唯实论均常拟致知于饮食，遂嘲为“口腹哲学”（";">Normally every datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested for the sake of its vital juices．Knowledge is not eating—G．Santayana,The Life of Reason,I,75,77;l’illusion commune au réalisme et à l’idéalisme,selon laquelle connaître,c’est manger．O philosophie alimentaire!—J．-P．Sartre,Situations,I,31）。（中华书局本，534—536页）

所谓的“当世论师”，一是钱先生年轻时曾戏译其名作“山潭野衲”的桑塔亚纳（Santayana），其说见《理性的生活》（The Life of Reason）；一是萨特（Sartre），其说见《处境》（Situations）。

不过，古之以饮食喻书，战国人已有之了。最有名的如《庄子·天道》轮扁语：“然则君之所读者，古人之糟魄已夫。”（中华书局本《庄子集释》，第二册490页）“糟魄”即糟粕。这当然是攻击读书的话。从正面说的，如《礼记·学记》：“虽有嘉肴，弗食，不知其旨也。虽有至道，弗学，不知其善也。”（上海古籍出版社本《礼记正义》，中册1425页）《说苑·建本》：“孟子曰：‘人皆知以食愈饥，莫知以学愈愚。’”（据中华书局本《说苑校证》，64页）都是。《说苑》引的孟子，不见于今本《孟子》。

更具体的以某食喻某书，则有钟繇的妙语，《三国志·魏书·裴潜传》裴松之注引《魏略》：“司隶锺繇不好《公羊》而好《左氏》，谓《左氏》为太官，而谓《公羊》为卖饼家。”（中华书局本《三国志》，第三册675页）太官是掌管宫廷膳食的官，此即指皇家御膳。这是无人不晓的典故。龚自珍《杂诗、己卯自春徂夏、在京师作、得十有四首》之六云：“从君烧尽虫鱼学，甘作东京卖饼家。”（上海古籍出版社本《龚自珍全集》，441页）就是用此。

段成式也有句话，与钟繇取譬类似，流传也很广。《酉阳杂俎序》：“无若《诗》《书》之味大羹，史为折俎，子为醯醢也。炙鸮羞鳖，岂容下箸乎？”（中华书局本《酉阳杂俎》，1页）“折俎”也是肉，《左传》亦谓之“殽烝”，就是折断骨节而置于俎上的肉（参见杨伯峻《春秋左传注》769页）。

古之以饮食为喻评诗论文，那是苏轼所最喜欢的，他的有名的《读孟郊诗二首》之一：“初如食小鱼，所得不偿劳。又似煮彭𧑅，竟日持空螯。”（上海古籍出版社本《苏轼诗集合注》，第二册767页）就是说读孟郊的诗集，好比吃小鱼，小鱼刺多肉少，所以吃起来费劲，不划算；彭𧑅字不经见，我认为当是彭蜞，苏轼一时误写，彭蜞是一种小蟹，没什么肉，苏轼意中必有《世说新语》中的蔡谟食彭蜞而委顿的故事。苏轼很喜欢用吃来作比，另如他评黄庭坚的诗，说的：“黄鲁直诗文，如蝤蛑、江珧柱，格韵高绝，盘飱尽废，然不可多食，多食则发风动气。”（见人民文学出版社本《苕溪渔隐丛话》前集，334页）这同样是非常妙的。蝤蛑是大蟹，据《酉阳杂俎》说，蝤蛑的两个大螯，能与虎斗。江珧柱是蚌类动物江珧的肉柱，苏轼以其味特佳，其《四月十一日初食荔支》有云：“似开江鳐斫玉柱，更洗河豚烹腹腴。”自注：“予尝谓荔支厚味高格两绝，果中无比，惟江鳐柱、河豚鱼近之耳。”（《苏轼诗集合注》，第五册2026页）“鳐”即“珧”字。

苏轼批评孟浩然的诗，又以酒为喻。陈师道《后山诗话》：“子瞻谓孟浩然之诗，韵高而才短，如造内法酒手而无材料尔。”（中华书局本《历代诗话》，上册308页）所谓“造内法酒手”，是指宫廷的造酒师，宫廷酒师的手段，不用说是好的。苏轼的意思是孟浩然的诗，手法固很高，但可惜没什么“料”，若借用张炎《词源》的话，那就是“清空”。我向来也认为作诗文须有“料”，“料”好，所作就不难好，没有“料”，那就是钱先生说的“巧妇能为无米炊”，虽也不失为一种本事，但总是不能使人十分满意的。苏轼称赞别人茶好，说“不用撑肠拄腹文字五千卷，但愿一瓯常及睡足自高时”（《试院煎茶》），虽是以书不及茶，可也流露所读书的多，所以他于孟浩然的短处，有那样的批评，是可以理解的。

与苏轼同时而为陈师道的姊夫的张芸叟舜民，批评本朝人的诗，亦以酒食为喻。魏庆之《诗人玉屑》卷十二“评本朝诸贤诗”条云：“芸叟尝评诗云：永叔之诗如春服乍成，酦醅乍熟，登山临水，竟日忘归。……郭功甫之诗如大排筵席，二十四味，终日揖逊，求其适口者少矣。”（中华书局本，下册371页）其语颇谑，其发为此论，可与苏轼相视一笑。

至于陶渊明的读书，我认为与其饮酒精神是相一致的，他不是为了“吃”，而只是为了快意，所以“不求甚解”，也就是自然的事了。《南史》中那位好内也好打猎的曹景宗说的“我昔在乡里，骑快马如龙，与年少辈数十骑，拓弓弦作礔礰声，箭如饿鸱叫，平泽中逐麞，数肋射之，……觉耳后生风，鼻头出火，此乐使人忘死”（中华书局本，第五册1357页）。渊明的好读书，从读书获得快乐，与曹景宗的好猎，实在并无二致。欧阳修有一首比读书于打仗的《读书》诗，亦以读书为天下最大的乐事：

吾生本寒儒，老尚把书卷。眼力虽已疲，心意殊未倦。正经首唐虞，伪说起秦汉。篇章异句读，解诂及笺传。是非自相攻，去取在勇断。初如两军交，乘胜方酣战。当其旗鼓催，不觉人马汗。至哉天下乐，终日在几案。……自从中年来，人事攻百箭。非惟职有忧，亦自老可叹。形骸苦衰病，心志亦退懦。前时可喜事，闭眼不欲见。惟寻旧读书，简编多朽断。古人重温故，官事幸有间。乃知读书勤，其乐固无限。少而干禄利，老用忘忧患。（中华书局本《欧阳修全集》，第一册139页）

欧阳修的老而好读，看起来亦颇似渊明，不是为了“成长”，而是意在“忘忧”。欧阳修这首诗很好，把渊明式的读书之乐，写得很尽致。此外，欧阳修读的书，可能也要比渊明读的高级，因为渊明好像并不喜学问，其所谓“不求甚解”，大概即是指不读“解诂及笺传”，而渊明的诗，又有十三首《读〈山海经〉》，可见其趣味是颇近于孩子气的。

关于读书之乐，有一位北魏的李谧，说得最简而隽，他说：“丈夫拥书万卷，何假南面百城。”（见中华书局本《全上古三代秦汉三国六朝文》，孔璠《上书言李谧学行》，第四册3760页）“南面百城”即是为南面王。此语的修辞，当本《庄子·至乐》：“髑髅曰：‘死，无君于上，无臣于下，亦无四时之事，从然以天地为春秋，虽南面王乐，不能过也。’”（中华书局本《庄子集释》，第三册619页）但此意在李谧之前，就有人说过，那是王充《论衡·佚文篇》：“玩杨子云之篇，乐于居千石之官；挟桓君山之书，富于积猗顿之财。”（中华书局本《论衡校释》，第三册864页）桓君山是桓谭，杨子云就是扬雄，二人均是博学方闻之士。王充的意思，与李谧实无不同，不过言语较冗而已，所以不能使人印象深刻，一见不忘。

古希腊的哲学家德谟克利特，也有一句名言，与中国的可以并传，其语云：“探得一物之所以然，虽波斯王不与易也。”据弗里曼（Kathleen Freeman）英译本，此句作：“（I would）rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.”（崇文书局影印本《前苏格拉底哲学家残篇》，104页。按，此语古希腊原文，见Hermann Diels & Walther Kranz编Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,1959,S.166.）这也是用王侯作比，在造语上，有中西同工之妙，但从意思上讲，我觉得德谟克利特要来得更警策，因为波斯王是当时最大的王，而哲人窥得天地造化的秘奥，意义重大，一般的藏书读书，是不能与之同年语的。

对于见道的快乐，培根在《论真理》（Of truth）中，引罗马大诗人卢克莱修说：“站在岸上看船舶在海上簸荡是一件乐事；站在一座堡垒底窗前看下面的战争和它底种种经过是一件乐事；但是没有一件乐事能与站在真理底高峰（一座高出一切的山陵，在那里的空气永远是澄清而宁静的）目睹下面谷中的错误、漂泊、迷雾和风雨相比拟的。”（据水天同译本《培根论说文集》，6页。其原文为：It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore,and to see ships tossed upon the sea;a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle,and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below:but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth,(a hill not to be commanded,and where the air is always clear and serene,)and to see the errors,and wanderings,and mists,and tempests,in the vale below. 据Spedding编订本The Works of Francis Bacon，1968，VI. p.378.）此说最为透辟，与德谟克利特语，可谓各极其妙。卢克莱修语，见《物性论》（De Rerum Natura）第二卷序诗（《物性论》有以剪刀自杀的方书春的中译本）。

柏拉图《理想国》第九卷中讨论三种快乐，亦认为：“哲学家不以彼二者（按，指好名、好利者）之快乐为快乐，而徒以求学与得真理为快乐。彼以金钱与荣誉上所得之快乐，均无价值，惟其无价值，彼弃之如敝屣。”“除哲学家之快乐外，无正当之快乐，哲学家之快乐为真快乐，馀皆快乐之影像耳。”（据《万有文库》吴献书译本，第五册23页、27页。Benjamin Jowett英译本：“And,lastly,the philosopher,I said,what worth are we to suppose that he ascribes to other pleasures in comparison with the pleasure of knowing the truth or of continual learning,which is a pleasure of the same order? Would he not think them far indeed from true pleasure? Does he not call the other pleasures necessary,under the idea that if there were no necessity for them,he would rather not have them?”“a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure—all others are a shadow only.”广西师大出版社本《柏拉图著作集》，第3册314—315页、317页）

亚里斯多德在《尼各马可伦理学》第七卷、第十卷中，也讨论了快乐问题，也有与其师相类的话：“德性活动的最大快乐也就是合于智慧的活动。所以，哲学以其纯洁和经久而具有惊人的快乐。……所说的自足，最主要须归于思辨活动。”（据《亚里士多德全集》苗力田译本，第八卷227页。David Ross英译本作：“but the activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities；at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvellous for their purity and their enduringness.……And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity.”2022年崇文书局影印本，1177a.）这都是真确的话。其他如伊壁鸠鲁、西塞罗、塞涅卡、波爱修斯等，也都持同样的见解。假如不是这样，第欧根尼就不能住在木桶里，斯宾诺莎也就不能磨光学镜片，康德也就不能一生只住在哥尼斯堡，桑塔亚纳也就不能辞去大学教职，维特根斯坦也就不能做园艺工人了。

提起维特根斯坦，马尔康姆（Norman Malcolm）的《回忆维特根斯坦》（Ludwig Wittgenstein:A Memoir）中也记他说过：“我的思想的快乐即我自己的独特生活的快乐。”（原文为：“In a manuscript of 1931 he wrote:‘Die Freude an meinem Gedanken ist die Freude an meinem eigenen seltsamen Leben.’”据2001年本，p.84.）

中国的古之哲人，与古希腊罗马的哲人一样，也早知晓见道理的快乐。如《孟子·告子上》：“故理义之悦我心，犹刍豢之悦我口。”（据中华书局本《孟子正义》，下册765页）《淮南子》中有两处，尤足与西方书同参。《淮南子·泰族训》：“夫以一世之寿，而观千岁之知，今古之论，虽未尝更也，其道理素具，可不谓有术乎。……又况知应无方而不穷哉。犯大难而不慑，见烦缪而不惑，晏然自得，其为乐也，岂直一说之快哉。”（据中华书局本《淮南鸿烈集解》，下册690页）这仿佛近乎卢克莱修的议论。《俶真训》又云：“是故与其有天下也，不若有说也。”（上册67页）这个“说”字，高诱注云“乐也”，晚近学人认为解作“脱”（见何宁《淮南子集释》141页），我认为据上下文，应与《泰族训》的“一说之快”的“说”同义，均指“知识、学说”。如果这是对的，那么这就与德谟克利特笙磬同音了。

至于章学诚《文史通义·博约中》所说：“读书服古之中，有欣慨会心，而忽焉不知歌泣何从者也。”（中华书局本，上册161—162页）则是“读书的感动”，似乎也可包括进广义的“读书之乐”。“欣慨会心”，正语本陶渊明。陶的《时运》小序：“偶影独游，欣慨交心。”钱先生《谈艺录·引言》也用过：“诵‘卬须我友’之句，欣慨交心矣。”

最后要说的是，钱先生比较培根、陶渊明论读书的那一段，虽意在阐释渊明，但其实也逗露了他本人的“读书法”。《管锥编》论《全上古三代秦汉三国六朝文》第一四六则云：

仇兆鳌选林云铭《挹奎楼稿》卷二《〈古文析义〉序》：“陶靖节‘读书不求甚解’，所谓‘甚’者，以穿凿附会失其本旨耳。《南村》云：‘奇文共欣赏，疑义相与析’；若不求‘解’，则‘义’之‘析’也何为乎？”窃谓陶之“不求甚解”如杜甫《漫成》之“读书难字过”也；陶之“疑义与析”又如杜甫《春日怀李白》之“重与细论文”也。培根（";">Bacon）论读书（";">Of Studies）云：“书有祇可染指者，有宜囫囵吞者，亦有须咀嚼而消纳者”（";">Some books are to be tasted,others to be swallowed,and some few to be chewed and swallowed）；即谓有不必求甚解者，有须细析者。语较周密，然亦只道着一半：书之须细析者，亦有不必求甚解之时；以词章论，常祇须带草看法，而为义理考据计，又必十目一行。一人之身，读书之阔略不拘与精细不苟，因时因事而异宜焉。（中华书局本，第四册1229页）

“读书难字过”，钱先生在《林纾的翻译》（《七缀集》86页）中也引过，那该是他从小不学就会的“读书法”。“带草看法”，是从董说《西游补》第四回学来的。“十目一行”，是清代朴学家的“读书法”，见阮元《题严厚民杰书福楼图》：“严子精校讐，馆我日最长。校经校文选，十目始一行。”自注：“世人每矜一目十行之才，余哂之。夫必十目一行，始是真能读书也。”（中华书局本《揅经室集》，下册1109页）此语在当时颇流传，如桂文灿《经学博采录》卷五、梁章钜《退庵随笔》卷三、陆以湉《冷庐杂识》卷四等都征引过。

钱先生认为培根所说的读书“有不必求甚解者，有须细析者”，“只道着一半”，而更复推阐其语，补充说：“读书之阔略不拘与精细不苟，因时因事而异。”——这其实也是学者经常以及不得不采取的实际的读书法。所以他本人读书，不用说，亦必是有时“一目十行”，有时又“十目一行”的。钱先生读古今中外的“大经大典”，自都是“贯澈首尾”、从头通读的，这有其中外文笔记作证；但是据他这里所说，我们又可揣而知之，他即于读“大经大典”之际，亦必时有“带草看法”，而不是像经师、注疏家那样，硁硁守章句，“一字不放过”的。

钱先生在《中文笔记》第一册175页，论及威廉·汉密尔顿（Sir William Hamilton）时，有一节话，也涉及学人的“读书法”：

阅";">John Veitch, Memoir of Sir William Hamilton毕。亦旧经眼者。";">Hamilton 虽博览强识，而才思实钝，且颇有近日美国作博士论文者习气：讲求目录学（";">bibliography in its nobler sense），一也（pp. 94-5）；一题入手，必遍览前人成说（";">this totalising of the literature of a subject—p.379），硁硁然不敢缺一，然后立论，二也（pp.378-9）；读书每不贯澈首尾，而先求之书末之索引、书前之序目，绝似";">Edward Copleston所引为嘲谑之技俩（";">Advice to a Young Reviewer,p.7：“";">In works of science & recondite learning,tables of contents & indexes are blessed helps,but,more than all,the preface”etc.），而美其名曰剔抉书之脏腑（";">tearing out the entrails of a book），三也（p.45）。

威廉·汉密尔顿是19世纪英国的哲学家，为爱丁堡大学教授，生前有很高的学术声望，但去世后不久，就被边缘化为次要人物了。托马斯·卡莱尔对他评价极高。其弟子坎贝尔·弗雷泽（A. C. Fraser），称之为“或许是有史以来最博学的苏格兰人”（";">perhaps the most learned Scot that ever lived）。钱先生读的这本《追忆汉密尔顿爵士》的作者约翰·维奇，也是他的学生。钱先生认为汉密尔顿有“近日美国作博士论文者习气”，是极犀利的批评，同时也见出其不喜“美国博士作派”。钱先生所以不喜，自有其道理，这里姑不讨论。钱先生所特提的读书不“贯澈首尾”，与黄侃所诫人的“杀书头”（见1985年本《量守庐学记》43页、85页），在精神上是一致的，也就是都不从头通读。

其实，读书而“杀书头”“不能终卷”，在学者是颇难免的，有时甚至是常态，而最极端的例子可能是顾颉刚。《古史辨》第一册《自序》说：

我的痴心妄想，以为要尽通各种学问，只须把各种书籍都买了来，放在架上，随心翻览，久而久之自然会得明白通晓。……只为翻书太多了，所以各种书很少从第一字看到末一字的。这样的读书，为老辈所最忌，他们以为这是短寿促命的征象。……我曾对友人说，“我是读不好书的了！拿到一部书想读下去时，不由得不牵引到第二部上去，以至于第三部、第四部。读第二、第三部书时，又要牵引到别的书上去了。试想这第一部书怎样可以读得完？”这种情形，在当时确是很惆怅的，但在现在看来也可以说由此得到了一点益处，因为这是读书时寻题目，从题目上更去寻材料，而不是读死书。

我是向来只知道翻书的，桌子上什么书都乱放。“汗漫掇拾，茫无所归”，这八个字是我的最确当的评语。（上海古籍出版社本，15—16页、23页）

这与黄侃、钱锺书正是一个对照。不过，钱锺书并不反对翻书，而且还可能认为乱翻书，也是可以翻成通人的。杨绛的《洗澡》中，就有一处写到男主许彦成在图书馆乱翻书，把学问翻通了的。与钱锺书同属博学睿智之典型的约翰生博士，在读书这件事上，也是倾向于顾颉刚的。鲍斯威尔《约翰生传》（The Life of Samuel Johnson）中，记有人谈到一本新书，问约翰生是否读过，约翰生答说“翻阅过”，那人很吃惊：

“什么？你没有从头至尾仔细读过？”约翰生，对这样子的逼问很恼火，只好承认他看书只是草草浏览一遍，并且反唇相讥：“没有，先生，你看书都是从头至尾仔细阅读的？”（上海译文出版社蒲隆译本，第2册591页）

另有一次，有人教诫年轻人读书，无论读什么书，只要读了，就该把它读完。约翰生竭力反对说：

“这肯定是种奇怪的劝告，你倒是可以打定主意无论你碰巧认识了什么样的人，你都应当一辈子对他们不离不弃。一本书也许毫无价值，或者也许里面只有一样东西值得了解；难道我们必须把它从头到尾通读一遍不成？”（第3册1432页）

亦以此故，坊间流传约翰生有如是的名言：“把一本书从头读到尾的，那是笨伯！”（据1989年三联书店译本《资本主义文化矛盾》作者Daniel Bell《一九七八年再版前言》，已有此语：“博学多才的塞缪尔·约翰逊说过，任何一个精神健全者都不会从头至尾读完一本书。”）那当然是不能作准的。约翰生也从头至尾读过书的，比如1783年，他已七十四岁，还连读了十二个晚上，把《埃涅阿斯纪》通读了一遍。 

 

Where Have All the Pithiatics Gone?

Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder on Lacan and French psychiatry

4 Dec. 2025

Reviewing Jacques Lacan’s early writings, Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder pull back the curtain on French psychiatry in the early twentieth century – a medical milieu that would prove pivotal for Lacan’s understanding of psychosis. 

Sometime in the mid to late 1920s, a woman arrived at St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris. This was not her first hospital visit; in fact, she was widely considered ‘a picturesque feature of the Paris hospital landscape’, as historian Élisabeth Roudinesco puts it. The woman had been traumatised by the War. On 22 June 1915, in the northern French town of Saint-Pol-sur-Mer, her house was destroyed by an artillery shell. She was discovered alive under the wreckage, her body in a ‘contorted position’ and her left leg trapped in the ‘collapsed floor’. She was taken to Saint-Paul de Béthune Hospital, where a medical officer issued her the following command: ‘Stand up straight, you will stand up straight, you are straight, stay straight’. She emphasised these words to every doctor she subsequently saw, as if they had pierced her skin like bullets, marking her body. 

From that point on, the woman could not walk straight, despite eventually recovering from the physical injuries she suffered in the blast. Her diagnosis: abasia, a term first used by nineteenth-century pathologists who worked alongside the influential neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at la Salpêtrière in Paris (Charcot’s work would be important for Freud’s theories on hysteria). Formalised by one of Charcot’s students, Paul Oscar Blocq, the symptoms of abasia included the inability to stand upright and walk straight. It would sometimes result in paralysis, jumping fits, tremors, and disturbances in movement. In this woman’s case, she was convinced that if she walked as she had before the explosion, she would immediately collapse, just as her house had collapsed around her. When she moved to Paris in August 1915, new abasiac symptoms emerged: she could, for example, walk forward only on tiptoes. In the following years, and following many hospital visits, her walk changed several times, becoming increasingly elaborate. Curiously, these changes seemed to occur because of, and not despite, the many attempts to treat her.  

After being discharged involuntarily from a facility in January 1923, the woman began walking in her most baffling way yet: backwards, on tiptoes, making 360-degree turns at regular intervals. She was given electric shock treatment, but to no avail. When the woman arrived at St. Anne’s, she was seen by Maurice Trénel, the one-time head of department of the now-abandoned Maison Blanche Psychiatric Hospital, and his junior colleague: a young psychiatrist named Jacques Lacan, who would later reflect that he left Trénel’s influence ‘too soon, in order to seek a position in the consecrated spheres of professional ignorance’. Together, they published this woman’s case in the 1928 edition of the Revue Neurologique de Paris, a small journal associated with the Paris Neurological Society. Incidentally, this was the same year that Marie Bonaparte and Rudolph Loewenstein, who would go on to become Lacan’s analyst, translated Freud’s landmark case of the young hysteric Dora into French. 

What explained this woman’s strange symptoms, the ‘singularity of [her] motor disturbance’, as Trénel and Lacan put it? Their answer referred to another arcane category lost to the history of psychiatry: Joseph Babinski’s controversial pithiatism. Despite being Charcot’s loyal student in the 1880s and, as Mark S. Micale writes, the ‘natural heir to the Salpêtrian tradition’ of neurological research, Babinski went on to distance himself from his one-time teacher, as many of Charcot’s students did after their teacher’s unexpected death in 1893. In 1901 – the year Freud published the Dora case – Babinski proposed replacing ‘hysteria’ with a more limited term that supposedly got to the essence of somatic disorders. The term he suggested was pithiatism, a portmanteau of the ancient Greek words for ‘persuasion’ and ‘curable’.  

Pithiatism brought to the fore the sense that hysterical symptoms were the result of suggestion. Just as the military officer’s commands to the abasiac woman led to pithiatic symptoms, so could they be cured by an especially persuasive doctor. This was a psychologically attuned notion of hysteria, but one that radically diverged from Freud’s own. Where Freud saw hysteria as a process of ‘somatic conversion’ – an unbearable unconscious thought, expressed through the body, that would find its resolution in the talking cure – Babinski thought that hysterical suggestibility could be cured by a doctor deploying all of the theatrical power of medical treatment. ‘A subject’, he wrote, ‘afflicted with an hysterical paralysis, for example, upset and disoriented by successive questions, by the multiple orders that are thrown at him, by the tests we subject him to, by all of the medical rituals shrouded in their mystery, will forget for a moment his paralytic role and execute a few movements’. If the traumatised woman was pithiatic, it was because she had convinced herself she couldn’t walk normally. A doctor was required to convince her otherwise. 

While hotly debated in Paris, pithiatism didn’t have legs anywhere else. A small taskforce from the Paris Neurological Society deliberated for six and a half years on the condition, reporting its findings in 1908. The results of the meetings were published in the same journal in which Trénel and Lacan’s case would later appear. Although pithiatism looked as though it was on the outs by the early 1910s, the outbreak of the First World War unexpectedly changed its fortunes. The War prompted debates about the state’s obligation to provide welfare to victims, as well as about how soldiers may have been feigning injury to escape military service. For some psychiatrists, pithiatism helped respond to these questions: in flattening the distinction between ‘genuine’ hysteria and advantageous fakery, both could be subjected to the same theatrical treatment.  

Yet if pithiatism could be cured by persuasion, then the abasiac woman’s repeated hospitalisations showed her doctors’ lack of persuasiveness. Despite their efforts, her symptoms not only persisted, they intensified – almost as if she were attempting to convince them of something, and not the other way around. Trénel and Lacan noted that she also suffered from auditory hallucinations of persecutory voices and the conviction that she had been covertly impregnated – symptoms perhaps more indicative of paranoia than hysteria or pithiatism. Indeed, her behaviour could be seen to match descriptions Lacan would give throughout the 1930s of ‘litigious’ paranoiacs: patients who, following an emotional trauma, are hell-bent on having the authorities recognise their suffering, even if recognition never comes in the desired form. The abasiac woman would eventually threaten to burn down the house of an eminent medical authority – reproducing the event that initially triggered her symptoms – perhaps as a message designed to induce recognition and understanding. But what is there to understand here? 

Almost a century on, and with pithiatism relegated to the nosological archive, the case of Trénel and Lacan’s ‘strange patient’ remains interesting for several reasons. Firstly, their diagnosis is very much situated in a peculiar French psychiatric milieu, where broader questions about the nature of hysteria converge less on sexual repression and free association, and more on the French state and institutionalised psychiatry. (If Lacan would later become famous for his theatricality, it might in fact be traceable to this psychiatric milieu rather than psychoanalysis.) Secondly, the abasiac woman’s status as a fixture of the Parisian psychiatric scene – her constant appeals to doctors and the medical gaze’s equally intense fixation on her – could be seen to express the rhythms of her symptoms. Her relationship to the medical establishment takes the form of a game of proximity, repeated approaches and pullings away. In consulting numerous doctors, she would, as Lacan and Trénel aptly put it, attach the ‘utmost importance to every step she took’. Thirdly, there is a social and historical poignancy to the case. In Lacan’s early work as a psychiatrist, he wondered if symptoms were not themselves expressions of, or responses to, particular historical moments and contradictions. The final form her gait took – walking backwards on tiptoes while rotating regularly – could be read as a silent assessment of the impact the War had had not just on her, but on everyone: it was no longer possible to walk straight-forwardly into the future, now that it was wholly uncertain. One could only fix one’s eyes on the past, advance away from it carefully so as not to disturb it, and introduce one’s own regularities into a landscape bereft of clear, collective markers. While her doctors were marching ahead under the banner of science, the very same science that had facilitated the War’s industrial-scale devastation, this women’s walk seemed to attest to what the War actually laid bare: that history, both lived and political, never simply walks forwards. 

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‘Abasia in a Woman Traumatised by War’ is the first article in a recently published collection of essays by Lacan entitled First Writings, translated from French into English by the noted Australian philosopher and psychoanalyst Russell Grigg. First Writings is a slender volume consisting of just eight essays, which were written, sometimes with others, by Lacan from 1928 to 1934, when he was still an ambitious young psychiatrist working at St. Anne’s Hospital and not yet a psychoanalyst. The essays deliver a fascinating snapshot of Lacan’s work before he had encountered all the sources usually claimed as determining influences on him, such as Saussure’s linguistics and French Hegelianism. Some of these articles were written before Lacan had even spent any time on the couch (he entered into analysis with Lowenstein in 1932). Indeed, part of their interest is that they supposedly map Lacan’s burgeoning interest in analysis: the very earliest pieces from the late 1920s hardly engage with psychoanalysis at all, though this rapidly changes as Lacan begins to grapple with Freudian notions of the unconscious and identification by the early 1930s. Yet does Lacan’s career simply march forwards towards psychoanalysis in the way this collection implies, or does his walk eerily mimic that of the abasiac woman’s, sometimes going forwards, sometimes backwards and at others times in no particular direction at all?   

Unlike Lacan’s infamous collection Écrits (1966), First Writings (Premiers écrits in French) was never conceived, edited, or put forward by him for later publication. If the essays in the Écrits are infamously florid in style and literary in ambition, showing the Parisian psychoanalyst at the height of his theoretical sophistication, the essays collected in the First Writings are medical and circumspect. They are also generically diverse, featuring a selection of case studies, book reviews, a longer technical essay published in a little-known medical journal, commentary on the literary production of a paranoiac woman, and Lacan’s first pieces for the Surrealist journal Minotaure. However, not all of the essays that Lacan wrote in the years before he became a psychoanalyst are included in this collection – and the method behind what is included is curious.  

The published essays were chosen by Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, who has exerted an astonishing amount of editorial influence over Lacan’s published writing. In his ‘Foreword’ to the collection, Miller is anxious to claim Lacan as the sole author of three out of the eight pieces that are listed as being co-written, something disclosed to him via ‘personal communication’. But even insisting on the singularity of authorship is strange, as these essays typically follow the conventions of the early twentieth-century medical case presentation. They record observations that are intended to be made from a neutral, purely medical gaze; they also show the psychiatrists performing tests whose results are meant to be replicable by any medical practitioner. Unlike the Écrits, which in fact opens with an assertion of individual style, these essays have a medical quality that resists being assigned the stylistic authority a title like First Writings implies. They include large volumes of recorded or unattributed speech, literature reviews, and lengthy quotations from patient and medical writings. The Lacan of First Writings is developing his own unique theories, certainly, but he is also participating in the conventions of early twentieth-century psychiatry.  

The organisation of First Writings suggests an important set of interpretative editorial practices, which have been designed to chart a neat path from Lacan’s start as a precocious psychiatrist to world-famous psychoanalyst, heir to Freud himself. One of his biographers, Élisabeth Roudinesco, notes that the case of the abasiac woman constitutes an important moment in Lacan’s early career, but the article couldn’t exactly be said to constitute his first baby steps as a psychiatric researcher. The 1926 paper, ‘Fixity of the Gaze due to Hypertonia’, is absent from First Writings, even though it was Lacan’s very first presentation to the Paris Neurological Society. This paper details a sixty-five-year-old who fell off his bicycle and was hospitalised at la Salpêtrière, presenting with a fixed gaze and a tic. Lacan’s report is largely neurological, and so its exclusion could be attributed to the difficulty of drawing a straight line from what Lacan would become to what this article suggests he may once have been. Conversely, it is odd to see the absence of ‘Detective Novel: From the Chronic Hallucinatory Type of Delusion to the Delusion of the Imagination’ (1928) – a presentation co-authored with Joseph Lévy-Valensi, a psychiatrist who would die in Auschwitz, and Paul Meignant, and which was published in the psychiatric journal L’Encéphale. In this brief publication, the authors document a forty-year-old patient who thought himself in the middle of a detective novel thanks to a delusion according to which he telepathically communicated with the police in order to track down several thieves. Couldn’t we trace a path between this case, which shows the importance of literary genre to psychopathology, and Lacan’s later and well-documented interest in the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe? 

The essays in First Writings invite us to inhabit the remarkable world of early twentieth-century European psychiatry that Lacan was immersed in – a world that was distinct from yet helped to shape his later psychoanalytic theory. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of Lacan’s most absorbing and meticulous preoccupations: the psychoses. In 1955, when he was rapidly ascending in the psychoanalytic world, Lacan devoted the academic year to developing a unique linguistic account of psychosis, arguing that it is produced by a ‘foreclosure’ of what he calls the ‘name-of-the-father’, a process whereby the symbolic law has not been fully registered by the subject and where delusional content is liable to take its place. Lacan’s work here, like that of many contemporaneous American psychoanalytic psychiatrists, stood out in the psychoanalytic world because it pushed back against the common Freudian orthodoxy that psychoanalysis offered little in the treatment of psychotics. And yet Lacan’s ability to work with psychotic patients is sometimes thought to have originated with his earlier psychiatric training, where he spent a significant amount of time treating patients whose extraordinary symptoms pushed the human experience to its very limits. Lacan’s readers often take his doctoral thesis from 1932, published under the title Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations with Personality, as the origin of this interest. His thesis documents a young patient called Aimée (‘loved one’, after a character from a novel she had written) who was institutionalised in 1931 for attacking the famous French actress Huguette Duflos. The case clearly had a profound impact on Lacan. In 1970, almost forty years later, he would remark: ‘My patient, I called her Aimée, she truly was very touching’. 

While Lacan’s thesis is often taken as his ‘first writing’, the ‘Structure of the Paranoiac Psychoses’, the longest essay in First Writings, was published in La Semaine des Hôpitaux de Paris a year earlier, in 1931. Here, Lacan attempts to distinguish psychosis from more transitory mental phenomena or physiological conditions like dementia. He polemicises against the prevalence of biological psychiatry more broadly, criticising the idea that psychosis is the product of an organic lesion or deficit. Against this tendency, Lacan attempts to outline a psychiatric method, one favouring a careful descriptive approach, which he sometimes described as ‘phenomenological’, that requires the psychiatrist to see the patient as a unique whole. It also requires recognising that symptoms only take on a meaning in relation to this broader whole: they cannot be isolated, as they so often are in today’s psychiatric landscape, from a subject’s ‘personality’. However, Lacan’s psychiatry was not diagnostically relativist. In fact, in a review of the French phenomenological psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski’s Le temps vécu (1936), reprinted in First Writings, he criticises Minkowski for abandoning the ideal of phenomenological precision, and for using this descriptive science instead as a vehicle to advance Minkowski’s own personal reflections. On the contrary, Lacan believed that careful description revealed formal essences – typical structural arrangements that give shape to the proliferating details. Symptoms should not be confused with their underlying productive structure. 

‘Structure of the Paranoiac Psychoses’ goes on to delineate several distinct clinical forms of paranoia. Those with a ‘paranoiac constitution’ are paranoiacs for whom delusional constructions are so deep-seated that they shape the paranoiac’s world with a consistency that is not obviously incompatible with ostensible periods of good mental health. Paranoiacs of this nature are mistrustful of the world, but they have also a developed system of delusional judgement built on a kind of logical construction, making them ‘reasoning madmen’. ‘Should fortune place him in line with events’, Lacan writes, ‘he may become a reformer of society or sensibilities, or a “great intellectual” [...] who on rare occasions may manage to occupy the place of leader, [yet] is almost always an outlaw: despised and punished as a schoolboy, a poor soldier, rejected at every turn’. At the other end of the spectrum are the psychotics Lacan thinks have a ‘delusion of passion’. These are paranoiacs whose driving force is emotional, rather than intellectual, whose world is mapped according to the passions, rather than sophisticated theorisation. At the extremes of this structure, Lacan notes, ‘one finds political assassins and magnicides who struggle for years with their murderous project before resolving to carry it out’. Passionate psychotics can also be hypochondriacs who assault their doctors, jealous partners, or what Lacan’s one-time mentor Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault called ‘erotomaniacs’, patients who believe that someone they have never met is in love with them. 

What Lacan’s early article ultimately suggests is that while he maintains a difference between sanity and madness, he also believes that there is no single objective world that supposedly ‘sane’ people happen to know. Psychiatric reason consists in being able to grasp the reason of others, not in subjecting the so-called mad person to a universal model of sanity. And yet there is a tension in First Writings between Lacan’s humane approach to treating psychotics and a very developed sense of social conservatism. Lacan’s interest in the paranoiac is counterbalanced by a concern for protecting the social order. However much the paranoiac’s world is self-sufficient for Lacan, he still judges it legitimate and necessary to prevent paranoiac content from spilling over into the ‘real’ social order, with all of its laws preventing harm to others and sanctioning confinement and punishment – including, at this time in France, the death penalty. Lacan’s commitment to this ‘real’ world is quite extensive: at one point he even goes so far as to offer advice to military recruiters who seek to weed out deserters and provocateurs. As in the case of the paranoiac psychotic with the potential to become a great reformer or revolutionary leader, Lacan worries about the uptake of paranoiacs’ ideas by ordinary neurotics, those who are supposedly not mad. The early Lacan is a kind of ‘humanist’ or ‘reformist’ conservative, interested in giving dignity to psychotics but also anxious about how they might lead people astray, fraying the social order. 

First Writings not only shows how Lacan’s early questions about the nature of reason, madness, ideology and cure find differently configured answers later in his career, it also presents the dynamic and often-forgotten psychiatric milieu where these questions were able to be asked in the first place. A striking example of this is another of Lacan’s famous early essays reprinted in First Writings: ‘Motives of Paranoiac Crime: The Papin Sisters’ Crime’, which was published in Minotaure in 1933 (if there were any doubt about Lacan’s reading of the legal nature of the case, then the repetition of ‘crime’ in the title should settle the question). Christine and Léa Papin were maids working for a bourgeois family in Le Mans. They were considered model housekeepers, though they barely spoke with their employers. On 2 February 1933, an electrical failure in the house triggered an event that would come to shock the French public. When the mother and daughter returned home, the two sisters attacked them in a manner that was ‘sudden, simultaneous and from the outset carried to a paroxysm of fury’. The sisters ripped the mother and daughter’s eyes from their sockets, knocking them unconscious, then smashed their faces and mutilated their bodies with various household instruments. After soberly cleaning the instruments and themselves, they lay down together in the same bed. 

What was most disturbing about this crime, and perhaps most morbidly fascinating to the public, was that it seemed to come from nowhere. The two sisters were more-or-less ordinary, though unusually close, eccentric but without any history of violence. They were also initially unrepentant, at least until a period of separation in prison, after which Christine began to experience horrific hallucinations, eventually attempting to tear out her own eyes. The two were found guilty. Léa, the younger, meeker sibling, was sentenced to ten years; Christine was given the death penalty, later revised down to a life sentence. Léa went on to serve only eight years, relocating to Nantes under a new name and working again as a hotel maid. For Christine, however, her separation from Léa proved too much. She starved herself to death in 1937. 

The case attracted an extraordinary amount of commentary from the French psychiatric and philosophical intelligentsia, though explanations diverged. Some thought the Papin sisters were too mad to stand trial; others that their crime was the inevitable expression of a violent class antagonism. Lacan’s explanation mobilised the newfound psychoanalytic theory of paranoia he developed in his doctoral thesis, one which began to shift away from the classificatory approach found in ‘Structures of the Paranoiac Psychoses’ and towards a reliance on the unconscious and notions of identification. The theory was based in part on Freud’s 1922 paper ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’, which Lacan had translated into French in 1932. According to Freud’s explanation of paranoia, the ‘enmity which the persecuted paranoiac sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them’. Lacan drew out the developmental aspect of Freud’s theory, noting the centrality of what he calls the ‘sibling complex’ in the constitution of a paranoiac. In undergoing the very first stages of infantile sexuality, a sibling must quell the feelings of hostility they have towards their other sibling. One option available to them is inversion (a characteristic move in Freudian analyses), where that hostility is transformed into desire or, to put it more subtly, an affective ambivalence of love and hate towards the other is generated. In the paranoiac, this ambivalence transfers onto subsequent people who embody that original relation in new iterations of the same foundational image. In striking the mother and the daughter, the sisters were thus striking the part of their sibling they hated. 

Lacan’s humanist conservatism is perhaps more understandable in an extreme case like this, where his theory aimed to account for why the Papin sisters could not accede to what he soberly calls ‘socially effective morality’. Roudinesco puts it nicely in her summary of the case: the Papin sisters may have ‘seemed to reflect the social reality of class hatred, but in fact it reflected another reality: that of paranoid alienation’. The paranoiac’s failure to move beyond their initial affective ambivalence impedes their ability to internalise properly the norms and practices of social life. But despite the violence of the case, Lacan’s essay also hints at why he was so touched by paranoiacs and why his writings on the psychoses continue to have widespread influence. Like everyone who finds themselves on the analyst’s couch, the paranoiac displays an enduring and deeply human preoccupation with what it means to be a part of a family. Working with psychotics involves being sensitive to the ways that their symptoms might actually be attempts at answering very fundamental questions about familial life, questions raised by the fact that we just so happen to wake up in a world where we are dependent on other people. Lacan’s interest lies in what he calls ‘the human enigma of sex’: the way in which so much of one’s life revolves around the mystery of what it means to be a child for a parent (and vice versa), a brother or sister for another, or indeed a partner for a lover. Whereas a neurotic might work their hardest to defend against confronting or even articulating these questions, a paranoiac’s delusion seems to earnestly place them on the surface. 

While these might be universal questions, there’s also a peculiar uniformity to all the paranoiac patients Lacan examines: they are women who lived in what would then have been considered ‘non-standard’ familial or intimate relations. The abasiac woman is apparently unmarried and without any close family or friends: her main social relations are with her many doctors. Another case that appears in First Writings concerns a set of socially isolated mother-daughter couples where the daughters are all said to be ‘unacknowledged illegitimate child[ren]’. The Papin sisters are also unmarried and socially isolated, having formed a kind of incestuous couple with one another. Even Aimée has a tenuous relation to her husband and her role as a mother: she desperately seeks some kind of social ascension as a writer in Paris at a time before the scope of women’s independence was enlarged in the following decades. If Lacan’s theory of paranoiac psychosis is supposedly developmental, could it also be informed by sociological factors? For example, do the reported delusions respond to something particular about the experience of these women and their unique familial arrangements? And how do they differ from the possibly more ‘masculine’ delusional models of the ‘great intellectual’ or the ‘outlaw’ that Lacan mentions in ‘Structures of the Paranoiac Psychoses’? 

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We can leave these questions hanging to examine another thread that runs through First Writings: the relationship between psychosis and writing. Lacan’s 1933 article ‘The Problem of Style and the Psychiatric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience’, published in the very first edition of Minotaure, attests to his increasing interest in modernism and the avant-garde, foreshadowing the very stylistic creativity for which he would later become known. Here, he insists that the writings of the so-called ‘mad’ present a naked truth that is eschewed in the writings of the sane, despite culture’s common-sense that it is the sane who are supposedly in touch with ‘reality’. Lacan introduces a newfound and short-lived quasi-Marxist language to suggest that contemporary scientific psychiatry is a kind of bourgeois ideology, a position that seems at odds with his previous social conservatism (it is likely that he was attempting to play up to the counter-cultural tendencies of the Surrealists, most of whom were nominally Marxist and invested in valorising madness, rather than curtailing it). As he argues, psychiatry has produced a view of the mind as a machine whose value – or degree of rationality even – is measured by its relative efficiency in producing profit. Ideology is thus mistaken for science; a political image of the human subject for psychiatric knowledge. Along similar lines, Lacan notes that psychiatry has produced a model of the mind as metaphysically individualist based on the bourgeoisie’s new-found self-conception as ‘free’. This second conception of mind may seem to contradict the mechanistic determinism of the first, but it is perfectly consistent with a historical materialist account of capitalist ideology, which Lacan adopts here: the ideology of freedom works to obscure the mechanical compulsion of the capitalist economy. 

Predictably Lacan suggests that his own phenomenological psychiatry bypasses the ideology that underpins the work of his contemporaries, as his vision of psychiatry is sensitive to the fact that a paranoiac does not merely misrecognise, or fail to adapt to, the one and only ‘real’ world. Rather, the paranoiac has their own world with all the hallmarks of objectivity – a world briefly glimpsed in their writing. But ‘The Problem of Style and the Psychiatric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience’ spends more time examining the ideology of the sane than the writings of the mad. The closest First Writings comes to showing how Lacan interacts with the writings of a psychotic is in an earlier piece, ‘“Inspired” Writings: Schizography’ (1931),  co-written with Lévy-Valensi (again) and Pierre Migault. When she encounters Lacan, ‘Marcelle C.’ is thirty-four and works as a primary school teacher, though she has changed jobs twelve times in the past four years. Although she appears relatively well-adjusted, she feels persecuted by her colleagues, displaying a deep distrust of men in particular (‘I do not wish to submit to anyone. I have never wanted to let myself be dominated by a man’, she tells her psychiatrists). At the time of her interviews with Lacan and his colleagues, Marcelle C. believes she has been unjustly failed in an important examination and that another woman, whom she hates with a passion, has been given the place that should rightfully be hers. This persecutory delusion is supplemented by erotomania of an unusual kind: its object – an education inspector who used to be one of her superiors – is dead. She also has a sense of her own election and is on a mission to enlighten and reform mankind, one important enough to concern not only the government but also the military. 

Although Marcelle C. says she does not hear voices, she does feel that certain words are imposed on her, words that possess a great, albeit mysterious, value. The article is largely made up of quotations and readings of her letters, which record these verbal impressions. While Lacan’s 1933 article in Minotaure romanticises psychotic writing by positioning it as revealing a truth that eludes rational society, here he and his colleagues seem, well, unimpressed by Marcelle C.’s work. They are dismissive of the idea that her writings are at all ‘inspired […] in the spiritual sense’, noting that there is practically nothing in their content that would recommend them to a wider audience, let alone suggest a transcendent source. Marcelle C.’s letters do not hint at a kind of profound truth; rather, being devoid of content, they function more like an artificial language, whose principle of generation is above all language’s own materiality. As words are strung to more words, sentences to more sentences, what creates and then connects them are the productive powers of assonance, homophony, rhythm, and rhyme, as well as the syntactic and grammatical patterns of poetry and proverbs. With no content to transmit, Marcelle C.’s writing relies on language’s infinite capacity to create more language, including language without meaning. While Marcelle C. is convinced of the importance of her writing, Lacan and his colleagues remain skeptical: her writings ‘are no more important than the interchangeable lyrics of a song in couplets’. For them, she has nothing to say, for nothing grounds her delusions. 

The gap here between Lacan’s 1933 theory and his 1931 practice is curious, but it also invites us to position ourselves in relation to his own writings, his own first attempts to enlighten and reform psychiatric science. In thinking about this collection, we might draw a parallel between Lacan’s youthful ambition and that of the ‘first’ psychoanalyst: Freud himself. One of his professors had commented on Freud’s remarkable handwriting at the age of seventeen. Young and obviously eager to please, Freud wrote to his friend Emil Fluss: 

I was suitably impressed by this amazing fact and do not hesitate to disseminate the happy event, the first of its kind, as widely as possible – to you, for instance, who until now have probably remained unaware that you have been exchanging letters with a German stylist. And now I advise you as a friend, not as an interested party, to preserve them – have them bound – take good care of them – one never knows.  

Are the essays collected in First Writings a bit like this letter, juvenilia that become important after the fact, essays that we preserve because their author would go on to become France’s most famous psychoanalyst? From one perspective, they are; we encounter in these articles a genuine work in progress from one of the most remarkable figures in the history of psychoanalysis. But this is not the only way to read First Writings. The essays allow us to access a psychiatric milieu that we no longer inhabit; a milieu full of rigour and debate, competing theories, distinctions, and inventions – where nothing seems settled or taken for granted. It is a milieu where the very definitions of reason, madness, ideology, care, and cure were still up for grabs. But even more so, the essays from First Writings also allow us to hear, often in their own words, about the lives of some of the strangest, most extraordinary patients – the many psychotics whose singular forms of reason lead them to walk down so many unexpected paths. Where did they all go? 

 

Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block

New Republic · Briallen Hopper · January 8, 2026

First published in the spring of 1994, two months before the birth of Amazon and one month after the death of Kurt Cobain, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has far outlasted the era of its origin, becoming one of the most influential writing guides of all time. During its 31 years in print, it has sold over a million copies. Its title has taken on a life of its own, referenced in TikToks and pep talks. On Ted Lasso, Ted yells, “Bird by bird!” to encourage struggling football players.

The phrase comes from a childhood memory that Lamott recounts early in the book. Her 10-year-old brother had to write a report on birds and procrastinated until the night before. Near tears, he was “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Their father cut through his paralyzing despair by telling him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” The anecdote is classic Lamott. It conveys “some instructions on writing and life” (the book’s subtitle) in a way that’s quirky, a little bit cheesy, and hard to forget.

I first encountered Bird by Bird when I was a stressed-out teenager looking for someone to teach me how to turn my amorphous literary aspirations into an actual writing career. It helped and (at times) horrified me in a way that still lingers all these years later.

Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose. I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s William Zinsser’s These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which advised me to “avoid slovenliness of form” and “eschew surplusage.”

All these authors write with robust confidence about the importance of direct, efficient, streamlined writing. They abominate vague ideas and messy sentences, seeing them as an insult to readers, or worse. And with the exception of Twain, who has a rollicking time trashing an author he clearly enjoys, their attitude toward writing is as serious and dignified as the prose style they praise.

It’s no wonder that Bird by Bird was a shock to my system. Lamott’s authorial persona is a neurotic mess—anxious, envious, disorganized, and depressed. She keeps joking about suicide. And her dozens of lurid descriptions of the creative process make sitting at a desk and trying to write seem like a cross between a body horror film and an Alcoholics Anonymous bottoming-out story. A sample:

every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.…

after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live in a car.…

you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.

For Lamott, writing is a high-stakes struggle with personal demons. She devotes entire chapters to perfectionism, jealousy, and writer’s block. But she also encourages writers to write no matter what, and to learn to regularly excrete “shitty first drafts”—another phrase that has entered the popular lexicon. (Ever committed to memorable metaphor, Lamott compares a productive writing day to having amoebic dysentery!)

She’s irreverent, but she’s reverent too, in the style of a hippie aunt. There’s a mystical quality to a lot of her advice—so much so that she jokes about seeming too “California” or “Cosmica Rama.” She approvingly cites the Dalai Lama, Rumi, Wendell Berry, Ram Dass, Tibetan nuns, her Presbyterian pastor, and a Catholic priest named Tom. The flip side of writing misery, it turns out, is occasional writing-induced ecstasy produced by committing to daily writing as a devotional practice. At one point she says, “You don’t have to believe in God, but it’s easier if you do.” She turns “Trust the process” into an entire philosophy of life.

Readers of many religious persuasions—or none—have appreciated the spiritual aspects of the book. One commenter on Goodreads describes it as their “new bible.” Another says, “I pull it off the shelf now and then and read whatever page I land on—and always find my way back to my own writing.” When I asked the writer Pooja Makhijani about Bird by Bird, she said, “I love the self-help-y/religious nature of the book, especially because I’m not particularly religious in the conventional sense, but find a sense of comfort and awe from reading and writing. I know what it feels like to be in a flow state while writing, which feels otherworldly in nature; every time I sit down to write, I’m chasing that high.”

Bird by Bird is not that kind of sacred text for me. Still, it has reassured me by taking for granted that psychological barriers are a common part of the writing process and can be overcome. And it has helped me set aside impossible standards long enough to get some writing done.

Anne Lamott didn’t invent rough drafts, of course. Nor did she invent writing instruction as religion-infused self-help. She was writing in a long tradition of books that blend writing advice, life advice, and spirituality, including Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. In recent years, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Suleika Jouad’s The Book of Alchemy have developed the mystical aspects of this genre, while Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words is a new riff on the down-to-earth, just-do-it, butt-in-chair approach.

What sets Lamott apart from most of these writers is her insistence on writing’s inherent grotesque indignity. Ueland promises to take the pain out of the writing process, Dillard often makes it look glamorous, but Lamott insists it will always be at least somewhat ugly and embarrassing.

She also has a gift for catchy phrases, offbeat metaphors, and practical writing exercises that amounts to a kind of pedagogical genius. When I asked some writers and writing teachers about Bird by Bird, I got a slew of positive responses. Pooja published an essay based on the “School Lunches” prompt. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich frequently uses the “One-Inch Picture Frame” exercise and also imagines “making naysayers really tiny and plopping them into a jar (with air holes).” Similarly, Catherine Osborne still thinks about “Radio KFKD,” the imaginary radio station that plays in your ear all day telling you how much you suck. (You have to learn to turn it down.) Several teachers reported that whenever they assign the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter of Bird by Bird, students say it’s their favorite thing they read all semester.

It’s clear that Bird by Bird holds up as a set of practical aphorisms and discrete chapters, but does it hold up as a book?

Rereading Bird by Bird now, it’s clear that some things haven’t aged well. Lamott’s jokes about how she has to be a writer because otherwise she’d be totally unemployable are grating in an economy where even prolific published writers have to support themselves with nonwriting jobs. Her eye-rolling exasperation with students who ask her how to get published feels mean-spirited too when opportunities are so scarce for newcomers and have come comparatively easily to her; she is a nepo baby who grew up watching her father write and inherited his agent. The least she could do is to try to open the door for writers without those advantages, and to take their ambition seriously.

In addition to her many cultural references that were dated even at the time (Tricia Nixon, Charlie McCarthy, the Gabor sisters), Lamott has an uncomfortably glib way of treating Special Olympics competitors and people with cancer as fonts of wisdom or occasions for her own personal writing epiphanies. Perhaps my least favorite passage in the book is when she watches a documentary about people dying from AIDS and her takeaway is that life’s too short to stay friends with a successful writer she envies: “Finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird.”

This kind of self-absorption pervades Bird by Bird. It’s why Lamott dismisses her students’ desires for publication while indulging her own. And it’s what causes her to respond to criticisms from an editor by literally showing up at his house and pacing back and forth in his living room explaining how and why he was wrong, a move that she seems to think is gutsy and admirable, but one that could quite possibly end a career. (An editor I know was particularly appalled by this story.)

I love Bird by Bird’s attention to the difficulty of the writing process, but I don’t love how it frames it primarily as a struggle with ego, as opposed to a struggle with words, images, ideas, thought. Writing isn’t hard just because it’s a confrontation with yourself. It’s hard because it’s a skilled craft and a complex art and an undercompensated form of real-world labor. Lamott obviously knows this, but she spends so much time on the other stuff.

Perhaps it’s perverse to say this, but after 20 years as a writing teacher, I’ve come to believe that many writers could stand to be more perfectionist, not less. I’ve observed that for every writer who is stymied by perfectionism, there is a writer who is held back by the lack of it: who is phoning it in (or ChatGPT-ing it in) and doesn’t understand why that’s a problem. And for every writer who is eaten up by jealousy, there is a writer who could be helped by learning to admire and pay attention to other writers more.

Lamott’s instructions were life-giving to me when I was a young perfectionist dealing with writing-related panic attacks. But now, as a middle-aged writer and writing teacher, I’m no longer stuck in the exact same writing psychodramas that I was when I was young. (It turns out I’ve got some new ones that Bird by Bird can’t help me with.) I also don’t want to presume that my students’ struggles are the same as mine or Anne Lamott’s. Still, despite some reservations, I continue to cite Bird by Bird in my teaching, and I appreciate its obsession with process and difficulty more than ever.

In the last chapter, Lamott takes a brief break from offering advice to contemplate the state of the world. “The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead,” she writes. “I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising.… But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes.”

Three decades later, the dark side has risen, and the tradition of artists is threatened in unprecedented ways that were unimaginable in 1994. For the first time in history, the writing process is optional. An essay can be produced with a few simple prompts. And as writing becomes increasingly automated, the inefficient, irreplaceable human practice of writing is arguably becoming ever more precious. In the words of novelist and Bird by Bird fan Jessica Penner: “In a time when AI has invaded every spectrum of life with its glossy EZ-bake tendrils, we need to reinforce that permission to be shitty—because it’s through the shittiness that we make discoveries about ourselves and others.”

These days, “shitty first drafts” produced one bird at a time are more than just a writing exercise. They are an antidote to corporate, algorithm-generated “enshittification.” And although creativity without effort may initially feel like a blessing, I suspect that someday soon, readers will turn to Bird by Bird with nostalgia for the days when trying to write was a struggle demanding everything we had to give.