Lacan while reading Freud felt that Freud had built a tower and that Lacan was merely repairing and expanding the tower. Lacan would not restate Freud but would rephrase, summarize, paraphrase, etc. In this way maybe Lacan was [[file:20200712110047-zettelkasten_note_taking_process.org][taking smart notes]].

I said that Lacan was doing repair work to the tower that Freud had constructed. While I still think that's a decent description of Lacan's early work, it does not give enough of a metaphorical description of how Lacan was simultaneously fixing up Freud's earlier conceptual work and creating his own new set of concepts that could fit into or replace some of the conceptual structures Freud had originally laid.

Lacan was a serious reader of Freud. Lacan did the work necessary to understand the radicality of the praxis of psychoanalysis that Freud had created. Additionally, Lacan was able to identify the most important concepts Freud used to build psychoanalysis. After Lacan had done the work to understand what Freud built, he started to teach other people how to understand what Freud built. As Lacan did this, he would not just repeat what Freud had written! Lacan would rephrase, redescribe, paraphrase, and elaborate on what Freud had left behind. In short: Lacan was engaged in the act of re-creating what Freud had previously created. I believe this can be metaphorically understood as removing the old decaying conceptual bricks Freud had laid and replacing them with newer (stronger!) brick that Lacan had made.

--- Neil Gorman, in a newsletter