Žižek as analyst joke
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 5 talks
A student told Žižek: 'Your knowledge of Lacan convinced me, would you accept me as your patient?' Žižek's double reply: first, if you think an obvious madman like me could be your analyst, you need psychiatry; second, with me talking all the time, can you imagine me just listening to someone for more than a minute?
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“if you think i could be your analyst with my obvious madness, then you really need psychiatric”
“I tried to lie all the time. I invented dreams and so on, and my analyst just laughed at me... through my lies I betrayed myself much more than I would have by telling the truth.”
“I talked all the time. Why? Because I was afraid that if I shut up for a second, he may ask me a really difficult question.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 1 jobsuses
obsessional neurosis
×3
Its cast and sources
populated by
David Koresh1John Stuart Mill1Jonathan Haidt1Georgi Dimitrov1Isaac Deutscher1Remi Adekoya1Sam Neill1Rob Reiner1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
A student told Žižek: 'Your knowledge of Lacan convinced me, would you accept me as your patient?' Žižek's double reply: first, if you think an obvious madman like me could be your analyst, you need psychiatry; second, with me talking all the time, can you imagine me just listening to someone for more than a minute?, illustrating self-deprecating humour,psychoanalysis
Žižek confesses that he tried to lie to his psychoanalyst, inventing dreams, and the analyst laughed, saying the lies revealed more about Žižek than the truth would have, illustrating the psychoanalytic principle that truth erupts in error and deception., illustrating truth and deception in psychoanalysis,obsessional neurosis
Žižek confesses that during his psychoanalysis he talked incessantly to prevent his analyst from asking him a truly difficult question, a perfect illustration of Zwangsneurose logic and its parallel to ecological discourse., illustrating Zwangsneurose logic,obsessional neurosis,ecological cynicism
When an unknown voice asks for 'Mary' on his phone (clearly a wrong number), Žižek is tempted to cause panic by announcing Mary has had an accident, because in that brief moment he is a voice without symbolic identity and therefore free from all responsibility for his words, illustrating the subject prior to subjectivization., illustrating interpellation prior to identification,subject prior to symbolic identity,l'entre-deux-morts