The matheme (, from "lesson") is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French

psychoanalyst PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk th ...

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, ; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Sigmund Freud, Freud", Lacan gave The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, year ...

. The term matheme "occurred for the first time in the lecture Lacan delivered on November 4th, 1971 ..Between 1972 and 1973 he gave several definitions of it, passing from the use of the singular to the use of the plural and back again".

Characteristics

David Macey David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) was an English translator and intellectual historian of the French left. He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and ...

writes in his introduction to the translation of Lacan's ''

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis'' is the 1978 English-language translation of a seminar held by Jacques Lacan. The original () was published in Paris by Le Seuil in 1973. The Seminar was held at the École Normale Supérieure in ...

'' that "Lacan saw his "matheme" as something that would ensure the integral transmission of his teachings ... proof against the "noise" or interference inherent in any process of communication". They are

formula In science, a formula is a concise way of expressing information symbolically, as in a mathematical formula or a ''chemical formula''. The informal use of the term ''formula'' in science refers to the general construct of a relationship betwe ...

e, designed as

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

representations ''Representations'' is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It ...

of his

idea In philosophy and in common usage, an idea (from the Greek word: ἰδέα (idea), meaning 'a form, or a pattern') is the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophe ...

s and analyses. They were intended to introduce some degree of technical rigour in philosophical and psychological writing, replacing the often hard-to-understand verbal descriptions with formulae resembling those used in the hard sciences, and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both

Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...

and Lacan. For example: "$<>a" is the matheme for fantasy in the Lacanian sense, in which "$" refers to the subject as split into the subject of utterance and uttered subject (hence the matheme is a barred S), " a" stands for the object-cause of desire, and "<>" stands for the relationship between the two. A more complex set of mathemes are Lacan's "formulae of sexuation" which he outlined in the March 13, 1973, session of his '' Seminar XX''. Composed of two pairs of propositions written in a unique logico-mathematical shorthand inspired by

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philos ...

, one pair was dubbed 'masculine' and the other 'feminine.' These formulae Lacan originally constructed from

Aristotelian logic In logic and formal semantics, term logic, also known as traditional logic, syllogistic logic or Aristotelian logic, is a loose name for an approach to formal logic that began with Aristotle and was developed further in ancient history mostly b ...

over the course of an entire year of study. The "matheme", for Lacan, is not simply the imitation of science by philosophy, but the ideal of a perfect means for the integral transmission of knowledge. Natural language, with its constant "metonymic slide", fails here, where mathematics succeeds. Contemporary philosopher

Alain Badiou Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault ...

identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.

Criticism

Though sometimes disparaged as a case of "

physics envy The term physics envy is used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as " softer sciences", philosophy, liberal arts, business administration education, humanities, and social sciences. The term argues that wr ...

" or accused of introducing false rigor into a discipline that is more literary theory than hard science, there is also something of a sense of humor in Lacan's formulas: of one 'sigla which I have introduced in the form of an algorithm', Lacan himself has declared that 'it is created to allow for a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as the spoken remains caught in its algebra'.

Serge Leclaire Serge Leclaire (; born Serge Liebschutz; 6 July 1924 – 8 August 1994) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Initially analyzed by Jacques Lacan, he 'became the first French " Lacanian"'. Subsequently, he developed into 'one of the most re ...

, who is one of the most respected and distinguished of all French analysts, remarked in 1975, for example, that whilst the mathemes might have a certain pedagogic utility, they were basically no more than "graffiti"'.Macey, p. xxxii

References

{{Reflist

External links

Lacanian Matheme Fonts
provided by the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis
Lacan's Sexuation Formulas
by Jack W. Stone. Psychoanalytic terminology Jacques Lacan Post-structuralism Structuralism