ABSTRACT
Alireza Taheri delivers his message in the form of a play inspired by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor Despite Himself). The original piece by Molière satirises medicine by showing how an uneducated working-class man (Sganarelle) dupes people into thinking he is a learned doctor by feigning knowledge. In a similar vein, Taheri creates a play where Sganarelle is summoned to pretend to be a psychiatrist through a similar ruse of posturing erudition. The aim of the play is to parody not only the follies of modern American psychiatry but, more generally, the idiocies of what Lacan has termed the “university discourse”, namely the covert use of power in the guise of knowledge and science. A call is made in the play to move beyond the limitations of the university discourse not only in mental health but also in economics, metaphysics, ethics, and matters pertaining to justice. A thinking that places the notion of the symptom at its heart is heralded as the remedy freeing modernity from the clutches of the university discourse.
