The Treachery of Images

The scene was the mass uprising of students and workers across France in 1968. Famously, Lacan engaged with some of the students involved in the attempt at revolution. Two IPA analysts, writing under a pseudonym, denounced the students as would-be Stalinists acting out their infantile Oedipal problems. The IPA analysts, however, were not merely expressing a political opinion, but explicitly articulated their position in terms of the psychoanalytic jargon of their school, lending it a veneer of ‘scientific’ authority. It is a good example of University discourse, in other words, in that it places (psychoanalytic) knowledge at the centre of what in fact is a thinly-veiled partisan political intervention. (This great piece by Rabaté discusses the episode at length).