And Pauling lived a remarkably long life for someone who was hanging around in chemistry labs in the 1920s. Someone with that background dying at 93 is like a regular person dying at 113. So I would be careful to dismiss his ideas regarding health outright, even though most studies have been unable to confirm his claims. There is still plenty of serious research happening into Vitamin C megadoses, so clearly, not all scientists agree with the idea that this is quackery. And even if it indeed were completely and utterly wrong, it is still not even remotely comparable to the sheer audacity of Lacan's bullshit.

Lacan is one of the most famous psychologists of all time. Probably only Freud and Jung would rank above him in that regard. That in itself is a pretty big indictment of the field, since the latter two are not much better.

But the problem is not that Lacan was spouting garbage while being a psychologist. The problem is that other psychologists were tolerating that garbage, instead of ostracizing him. That's as if an immunologist who spreads conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips somehow continued to be invited to conferences, and have his peers listen to him and discuss and debate his "theories".

It's obvious that the field as a whole is incapable of cleanly separating itself from left-wing politics, philosophical intellectualism, and outright nonsense.