That autumn, in September 1974, just before I began to teach at the Department of Psychoanalysis, I went with Lacan, Judith and Jacques-Alain and their children, as well as Gérard Miller and Jocelyne Livi, on a long holiday in Venice. In the course of this vacation, Livi took what are some of the finest photographs we have of Lacan. We see him striding down the quays, we sense his alertness of demeanour, his dynamism. He is elegant, he has a Punch Culebras between his lips, his ‘Lorenzetti’ in his hand. In other photos, he sits in the glass cabin of a motoscafo, with a smile and a sparkle in his eyes. Those Venetian holidays with his family were repeated over the following years. Laurence and her children soon started to come too. Lacan seemed happy with these breaks; he would drag everyone along with him in an intensive round of museum and church visits. His grandson Luc, who was five or six years old, kept up doughtily.

However, Lacan had just experienced a tragedy from which he perhaps never fully recovered. In July, he decided to try and visit Albania; he was curious about this almost inaccessible country, a small enclave of Maoism under the grip of Enver Hoxha. My father had been posted there, so it was a good time to go. To get to Tirana, you had to travel via Rome or Budapest. Budapest had tempted Lacan; he was intrigued by this country which was going through the early stages of a process of liberalization, but he was also keen to know a city which had been one of the main sites of psychoanalysis in Freud’s day. Sándor Ferenczi, one of his main disciples, had trained several analysts there, including Imre Hermann who still lived there and was more or less clandestinely practising psychoanalysis. Lacan wanted to meet him. He had been interested in the so-called ‘clinging’ drive or instinct. Jean-Jacques Gorog, a young Parisian psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin, who knew the language, accompanied us. For my part, I was going back to a place I knew: as a child, I had lived for three years in Budapest, where my father had been appointed an attaché at the embassy.

Budapest had changed. The first thing we visited was the Var, which had just been entirely restored. Another novelty was that you could now find shops selling household electrical goods and hi-fi equipment; they resembled warehouses. The women were often elegant. J.-J. Gorog reminded me recently that I had remarked on one of them in the street, wearing high-heeled shoes that I liked. I lusted after them and expressed a desire to find similar ones. At once Lacan began to run after the young woman and asked her where she had bought them. Gorog came to the rescue to act as an interpreter. The young woman said she had had them made after seeing a similar pair in Elle! Putting himself at the service of the desires of the other was part of the ethics of Lacan. For him, there were no small desires, the least wish was enough.

What had not changed was the political police. A relative of Imre Hermann, who drove us to his place, kept looking in his rear mirror, convinced that we were being followed. He had formerly been imprisoned for political reasons. Was it in the time of Rákosi or the repression that followed the insurrection of 1956? I don’t remember. Lacan suddenly told him that it was surely the period of his life when he had felt the freest. I was shocked and wondered whether this idea had been inspired by Hermann in particular or whether it was a more general observation. That prison has the virtue of freeing a person inwardly is something that Arthur Koestler confirmed for me when I later read his work.

The great novelty was cultural openness. It was amazing for me to find, at a meeting organized for Lacan with students and teachers, that they were familiar with the works of French intellectuals such as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Sollers and Kristeva … and Lacan too. In Hungary, as in France, this was a period of exceptional cultural efflorescence, which contrasted with the veiled terror which still reigned under János Kádár.

We were meant to spend three days in Budapest before leaving for Tirana. Lacan did not have the time to visit Albania. Two days after our arrival, he was told of the death of his eldest daughter, Caroline, who had been run over in Antibes. He was crushed, I saw him sobbing uncontrollably. He loved his daughter very much. He often dined at her home where he really enjoyed seeing his grandchildren. We immediately returned to Paris. Today, it is clear to me that there was for Lacan a period before, and a period after this bereavement. The general tenor of his mood changed. When I first met him, there was a gaiety in him that was part of his vitality. While this did not disappear altogether, his gaiety was shaken, he became darker in himself, more taciturn.

In the autumn of 1974, the congress of the École was held in Rome. It was organized by Muriel Drazien, the pupil of Lacan on whom he counted most for his Italian ‘tripod’. She was assisted in this task by my friend Paola Carola, whom she had met on one of our Roman sojourns. She soon decided to come to Paris to train as a psychoanalyst with Lacan.

This congress was an anniversary; it marked ten years since the founding of his École. Moreover, in 1953, twenty-one years earlier, Lacan had inaugurated his teaching with his famous paper on the ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’. This time, he gave a fine presentation, entitled ‘The Third’. But he was not in the best of moods, viewing the large audience, as he often did, with disfavour, and (as he also often did) admonishing the psychoanalysts: ‘Be more relaxed, more natural when you receive someone who comes to you asking for an analysis. Do not feel so compelled to put on airs and graces. Even as jesters, your existence is justified. Just watch my Télévision. I come across as a clown. Learn from this and don’t imitate me.’

Jacques-Alain Miller echoed these words the next day, rather aggressively, simultaneously praising Lacan and lambasting the analysts whose fatuity he denounced (‘what is fatuity? never wanting to prove oneself’), as well as their nihilism and their pretentiousness. Shortly afterwards, Daniel Sibony denounced in turn ‘the noise of planks being nailed down and the pious claptrap’ of this encomium to Lacan.

In short, serenity was in short supply at this occasion. It contrasted with the good humour and enthusiasm that had enlivened the congress at La Grande-Motte, a year before. There was a conflict brewing between the psychoanalysts of the École and Miller, whose theatre of operations would soon be Vincennes.

This was also a turning point in Lacan’s relations with the École he had founded. The dissension that was coming to the surface would lead to the dissolution of the École six years later.

Lacan was unstinting in his support for Jacques-Alain. Thanks to the latter, the first volume of his seminar had just been published. Until then, his pupils had discussed making summaries or rewrites of them that they intended to sign. Miller was the first to feel that it had become editorially possible to publish them in full. In the past, indeed, it was not customary to publish courses and connected material. He took the decision not to rewrite them but to publish a transcription of the shorthand accounts, the only traces of Lacan’s oral teaching. This suited Lacan. In February 1973, the seminar on The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis came out. Two others, Freud’s technical writings, the earliest seminar, and the last, most recent, Encore, came out in January 1975, a few months after the congress of Rome. The famous Bernini sculpture of the ‘transverberation’ or ecstasy of St Teresa of Ávila was the illustration on the cover. During the congress in Rome, we went back to see it in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, together with Judith and Jacques-Alain, and the decision was taken with great enthusiasm.

That year, indeed, the enthusiasm was all focused on these questions: the publication of the seminars was a real event, and Lacan was also visibly counting on a new lease of life for the Department of Psychoanalysis. This was an experiment involving young people who were not yet analysts but mostly became analysts subsequently; for them, the teaching of psychoanalysis, its concepts, the texts that had marked the crucial stages of its history, was an adventure. I was part of it all and flung myself into it with all the studious ardour of which my youth was capable. Lacan, who had just before criticized ‘academic discourse’ and had viewed with suspicion the activities of Serge Leclaire in Vincennes in 1969, surprised the members of his École by this change of mind; it resembled a disavowal, as if he no longer believed in them to advance his teaching.

This did not prevent him from being fully involved in the discussions, during the ‘Days’ of discussion in spring 1975, when he often demonstrated his approval. Among his most enlightening interventions, I remember one in particular: ‘The only thing that counts’, he said, ‘is not the particular, it’s the singular. The basic rule means: it’s worth crawling through a whole series of particulars so that something singular won’t be left out … If you do come across something that defines the singular, it is what I have nevertheless called by its name: a destiny.’ He added that ‘bringing out’ the singular could only happen if you had a piece of good luck, and this could be seized only thanks to the rule of free association, insofar as it disturbs the principle of pleasure.

During the Christmas holidays, which we spent together at Guitrancourt, Jacques-Alain launched the idea of a journal whose title, ‘Ornicar?’, was selected during a game of portraits with Jean-Claude Milner and Alain Grosrichard. The first issue came out in January 1975, headed by a ‘proposal’ from Lacan called ‘Perhaps at Vincennes …’