ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author aims to clarify Jacques Lacan’s views on modern science and how he articulates its relation to psychoanalysis. In this view, modern science is distinguished from non-science by virtue of the former’s foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic guarantee of Truth. The author begins by showing that Lacan regarded the birth of modern science as psychoanalysis’ necessary precondition. He focuses on Alexandre Koyre’s work on the philosophy of science, especially his account of the scientific revolution—an account Koyre appropriated and developed from the work of Bachelard. For Lacan, psychoanalysis occupies a peculiar place, wedged as it is between the rock of mathematical science and the hard place of ethics. Psychoanalysis wishes to maintain its aspiration to be scientific without, however, reducing itself to a (mathematical) science. Lacan approaches the relation between psychoanalysis and science by a double inquiry aimed both at the scientificity of psychoanalysis and the ‘‘psychoanalysis of science.’’
