always, for him, an imperfect representation of the realities of psychical life he believed he had discovered with psychoanalysis.

Lacan on ‘Planet Borromeo’



Lacan however, picked up this challenge. As we will see, he worked throughout his life with various topological forms, but it was towards the end of his life that his interest in topology intensified. Throughout the 1970s he busied himself with rings of string, weaving knots and lattices in an attempt to construct a topological model that represented the human soul. Referring to one topological form which especially fascinated him during these years – the Borromean knot – his biographer Elisabeth Roudinesco wrote that these were the years that Lacan lived on “planet Borromeo” (p.377).

Lacan surrounded himself with a small group of fiercely intelligent young mathematicians toconduct this work. Michel Thomé and Jean-Michel Vappereau both exchanged around two hundred letters with Lacan on the subject of topology, with Vappereau being invited by Lacan to give a lecture on the Borromean knot at his seminar in 1978.

But first among these collaborators was Pierre Soury, who Lacan credits in Seminar XXIV with providing the help he needed to pursue his topological adventures. Throughout the mid-seventies the pair also exchanged a huge volume of letters featuring diagrams of topological models, like a four-ring Borromean knot, that they were trying to construct:

Tragically, Soury killed himself in July 1981 having never been able to start an analysis with Lacan, despite his repeated requests. Before drinking three bottles of cyanide concoction, he left a suicide note that read ‘I am