Lacan as rhetorician

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément:

Lacan was […] a skillful rhetorician capable of translating the terminology of psychoanalysis into a language, other than “Freud.” (p. 44)

This statement is a good description of what Lacan was doing in Seminars I-VI. It seems to me that Lacan diverged from Freud a bit in Seminar VII when he started to theorize the real as something separate from reality. But then Lacan returns to redescribing Freud in Seminars VIII & IX. Then, there is another big departure from Freud in Seminar X, when Lacan starts to theorize the object a.

There is the excommunication from the IPA after Seminar X, and then Lacan starts to break completely original theoretical ground in Seminar XI.

(Note: I think what Lacan does in Seminar XI and thereafter continues to use Freud, but it goes beyond re-working Freud’s concepts.)