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counterparts squired me around the city on a series of dizzying, dazzling adventures that consistently belied this claim. From all-day Godard film festivals in the Latin Quarter to all-night strolls along the Seine; from Berthillon ice cream cones on the rue des Deux Ponts to stolen kisses in the courtyards of the Musée Rodin, the Musée Picasso, and the Musée Carnavalet; from afternoons browsing through eighteenth-century tapestries at the Clignancourt flea market to evenings listening to Racine’s hypnotic
alexandrins
at the Comédie-Française, my boyfriends took me on dates so romantic, so memorable, so seemingly, quintessentially
French
that in retrospect I’m convinced they were all drawn from some secret handbook, issued to every Parisian man upon completion of his military service, on How to Impress and Seduce an Ignorant
Étrangère
.
    In fact, though,
ignorant
is the key term here, because notwithstanding the swath I had begun to cut through the City of Light, I hadn’t made much progress with the Lacanian framework that I hoped would help me make sense of my experience. Indeed, the sad truth is that without Professor J ——’s lucid and (I now realized) drastically simplified summaries, the father of French psychoanalysis proved almost impossible for me to understand. Granted, the man was notorious for his willfully obscure, intimidating prose: “Même plus difficile que Mallarmé!” warned my “philosopher” boyfriend Étienne, who suggested that I try someone less difficult: “Roland Barthes, par exemple!”
    Defying what I wrongly took to be Étienne’s unjust condescension,I declared a two-week moratorium on seeing him and everyone else. My next move was to select a “badge of courage”: a single article of clothing that I would wear every day, both to motivate and to punish myself, until Operation Lacan was done. My choice? A black turtleneck—just perfect, I thought, for the venue I had chosen for my studies, Saint-Germain’s legendarily literary Café de Flore. There, I avoided the hordes of tourists on the glassed-in terrace and the bustling crowds of regulars on the main floor, and holed up at a corner table upstairs, where my only regular company was a hatchet-faced, unsmiling waiter who did a double take at my daily reading material (Lacan’s
Écrits
, volumes one and two) every time I called him over to order more hot chocolate. In Boston, I would have taken his stares as an invitation to small talk and asked him why my books had caught his attention. But in Paris, I knew better than to try to engage a waiter in conversation, so I kept my head down and my mind focused on the secrets of the human psyche.
    After just nine of its fourteen prescribed days, however, Operation Lacan came to an abrupt and painful end. Although I had tried to take solace in one of the master’s many enigmatic axioms — “one’s unsuccessful acts are the most successful, and one’s failure fulfills one’s most secret wish” — the combination of his impenetrable prose, my own unwashed turtleneck, and my waiter’s pointed stares was wearing me down. Finally, it was the waiter himself who pushed me over the edge: the edge being a humiliating breakdown that caused me to flee the café in tears and to avoid the place for the remainder of my Paris sojourn. This happened one afternoon when, looking pointedly at my furrowed brow, he leaned over my book and brokehis silence to exclaim: “Ah, the ‘mirror stage’ essay? But that is his easiest one, mademoiselle!”
    Maybe you agree with the waiter. But in my own defense, I humbly submit the following sentence, where Lacan describes the moment when an infant sees himself in a mirror for the first time and thus becomes aware of himself as an
I
:
    It is this moment that decisively causes human knowledge in its entirety to be mediated through the desire of the other; constitutes the human subject’s love-objects in abstract equivalences through the other’s