Molly A. Wallace - From Cogito to Covid : Rethinking Lacan’s “Science and Truth”

In a 1994 article on science and psychoanalysis, Marc Strauss gives an account of his first encounter with Jacques Lacan. Standing in front of the Panthon in Paris, Lacan reportedly shouted, Psychoanalysis is to be taken seriously. It is to be taken seriously because it is not a science . It is not a science because it is irrefutable (Strauss , p. 19).

Perhaps no text or lecture of Lacans spends as much time on the distinction between science and psychoanalysis as Science and Truth, which was presented at the opening lecture, in December 1965, of Seminar XIII:The Object of Psychoanalysis (19651966) and later published in the first volume of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse . Two years prior, Lacan was famously ousted from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and shortly thereafter forcedat the behest of the IPAto split from the Socit Frainaise de Psychanalyse (SFP). These events prompted him to found his own school, cole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), which moved its practice (at Louis Althussers invitation) to the cole Normale Suprieure (ENS). For the first time, Lacans audience consisted not only of clinicians and analysts but also of people from across the intellectual and political spectrum. Although close analyses of Freuds texts still figured prominently in his seminars, Lacans separation from the clinic saw him engage with disciplines outside of the clinic far more frequently than before. Perhaps because he found himself no longer adhering as closely to Freud (who considered psychoanalysis a science ), Lacan felt it necessary to situate psychoanalysis and science with respect to each other. Of course, when we look back on Lacans effort in Science and Truth decades later, it seems all the more fraught considering the determined opposition from all sides to the notion of a psychoanalytic science , both by his defenders and by those who have condemned him as a fraud.