In this interview, Slavoj Žižek discusses his engagement with psychoanalysis, particularly his “critical” approach to Jacques Lacan, which he describes as an attempt to make Lacan’s ideas more concrete and to expose the inconsistencies and radical shifts in his thought.
Žižek uses the notorious Josef Fritzl case as a primary example to illustrate Lacanian concepts, such as père-version (the father’s deviation) and the notion of the Id or das Ding (the Thing). He argues that this “perversion” is not a unique pathology but a structural possibility inherent in the symbolic position of the father, connecting it to cultural phenomena like the film The Sound of Music and the architecture of Ceaușescu.
He also challenges the idea of a “mother’s law,” arguing it risks being a simplistic, uncritical mirror of the father’s law without a proper structural theory.
Žižek further explores the political function of psychoanalysis, asserting that it is not a prescriptive program for social change but rather a unique discourse that allows us to precisely articulate the “discontents of culture” or Unbehagen. He rejects the idea of a psychoanalyst as a social mechanic who fixes individuals, instead seeing the discipline’s role as revealing the fundamental gaps and failures within the social order.
He concludes by defining the intellectual’s role as one of throwing messages “in a bottle” into the sea, without knowing who will receive them. He also playfully identifies himself as an “obsessive neurotic” who produces new truth by speaking, while the “hysteric” is the true catalyst for new ideas.
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