The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

In 1973, Turkle travels back to France to conduct interviews with hundreds of French psychoanalysts for her research on the Lacanian village for her dissertation. She attends seminars at Lacan’s Freudian School and other schools that have split off from it. Turkle believes the interviews are successful because she is distanced from the subject as an American outsider. She is even invited to interview Lacan himself, who speaks to her warmly, eager to convey his ideas to an American audience.

Turkle is drawn to Lacanian thought through her personal experience of the idea of “les non-dupes errent” or “those who are not duped in error,” a play on words “le nom du père” or “[t]he name of the father” (210, 211). Lacan argues that the way a mother interacts with the father’s name constructs the meaning of the father for the child. Turkle makes sense of her feelings of insecurity, isolation, and loss of identity through her mother’s refusal to speak her biological father’s name.

From her studies of Lacan and his following in France, Turkle extracts three key takeaways for her own research. The first is that a liminal space is essential to new constructs of the self, as new ideas gain shape when old ideas lose their power.