ABSTRACT
Seminar 17 was a turning point in Lacanian theory. Instead of one symbolic register with its set of societal rules guaranteeing social cohesion based on the Oedipus complex, there have arisen a number of discourses. Lacan takes particular note of the shift from the Master discourse to the University discourse, the discourse of knowledge based in the universities, with student demonstrations erupting across the Western world. As Lacan says in the Ethics seminar, 'in our theory, the sole function of the father is to be a myth, to be always only the name-of-the-father, or in other words the dead father'. Thus, for Lacan, hedging his bets with the radicals within his midst, father is worth more dead than alive. Returning to Lacan's revisionism, what Oedipus, Moses and the primal father have in common is that they are part of Freud's dream. Lacan believes: 'what we propose is to analyse the Oedipus complex as being Freud's dream'.
