ABSTRACT
As if science and sex weren’t treacherous enough territories for psychoanalysis, the field of politics, political intrigues in the institutions that house it, appeared to be worse. I will take you through the arcane worlds of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real in my first encounters with Lacanian politics, and we will see how the battle over who should be the master and who would be the slaves operates here. There were some crucial and useful ways of conceptualising the place of the human subject in relation to language in these meetings, but the mirror-like personal power plays were very different from politics as I knew it should be, perhaps too close to political manoeuvring on the already existing left, and a warning to keep out.
