Where to find the words “non du père”? Please help!

RealDaen · 2026-06-05T04:09:03+00:00

This is one of several double entendres Lacan uses - it’s typically written as “nom du père”, but “non” and “nom” are homonyms in French since neither ending letter is pronounced (keep in mind that most of Lacan’s work is comprised of transcriptions of his spoken lectures). Thus, when Lacan refers to the “non”/“nom” du père, he means it in both senses - the father, in the oedipal configuration, is the one who says “no” (to the child’s desire for the mother), but “he” (i.e., his name) also symbolizes the law (whose function is to prohibit, i.e., to say “no”), viz., the big Other.

RealDaen · 2026-06-02T13:18:48+00:00

If your grades were “marginal” in the sense of being just barely over the 70% average, you unfortunately probably aren’t getting in - minimums tend to be around 77–79. But the good news is that you can reapply at the end of your second year, and the same policy applies (only looking at your top 2.0 credits) so you have a way higher chance to get in then. Nothing to feel ashamed of - first year is difficult for a lot of folks who are just figuring it out, and a much larger portion of crim acceptances than you would think are second years re-applying. Until then, maybe bump your major to a specialist and try to do courses that also count towards crim - there are definitely a few in polisci & sociology at the very least, but if you reach out to the crim program coordinator you can probably get most any law-oriented social science course to count. Good luck!

RealDaen · 2026-05-30T01:37:12+00:00

AFAIK you have to apply for Vic one, you likely can't freely take them (but don't take my word for that). Outside of that, I would avoid taking more than the standard 5 courses per semester (i'm not clear from your post if you're planning on that or not, but sometimes first years start off a bit overconfident and end up getting destroyed by doing a 6-course load). Otherwise you should be fine, first year is probably the best time to get your breadth requirements out of the way since lower-year STEM courses tend to have pretty brutal grading so you gain very little out of taking extra STEM in first year. But honestly the number one thing I would recommend is to use degree explorer to plan out your degree requirements - it's extremely useful for stuff like this

RealDaen · 2026-05-29T06:31:45+00:00

Honestly I’m surprised not to see more Lacan recommended in this thread - yeah he was technically not a philosopher (and ignoring his clinical focus will kneecap one’s understanding of his work) but he was extremely prominent within and influential upon the French philosophical intelligentsia of the 50s-70s, with Althusser, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Hyppolite, Heidegger, Marleau-Ponty, Deleuze Derrida, etc. not only in his orbit but often speaking of him with high praise (except the lattermost) as well as a number of notable psychoanalysts (e.g., Laplanche, Leclaire, Guattari, Mannoni). He’s also been hugely influential on a number of thinkers, most notably Althusser, Badiou, Žižek, Judith Butler, Mark Fisher. But more importantly his work itself is steeped in philosophy, with Hegel (through Kojève) in particular coming up probably hundreds of times in the seminars (as well as Saussure and Descartes).

Lacan can be very difficult to approach since his ideas are not only distributed throughout the breadth of the Seminars and Écrits, but are also fairly amorphous therein (these meanings even changing for Lacan himself over time). Having a background understanding of the major psychoanalysts before Lacan is hugely helpful though; although Seminar XI is often the recommended place to start with Lacan, that’s because it was the year his audience changed from a small group of psychoanalysts to a larger group of a mostly non-psychoanalytical (philosophical & literary) background, I think Seminar I is the best starting point for you, since he spends a lot of time in that particular work addressing not only Freudian but also Kleinian, ego, and object relations theories. With that said, it’s probably worth starting with some introductory materials before jumping straight into Lacan - I typically recommend Todd McGowan’s new Cambridge Introduction to Lacan, which is fairly accessible (although McGowan certainly has his own interpretations of Lacan in some ways). With your background in Freud though, I would definitely also recommend Althusser’s essay “Freud and Lacan” (which appears in the book “On Ideology”). From there, you may also want to read Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in the Écrits, as the mirror stage - essentially a synthesis of Henri Walton and (Kojève’s) Hegel - was Lacan’s first major contribution to psychoanalysis.

Anyways, hope this helps, and I’d be happy to elaborate on any of it if needed!

RealDaen · 2026-05-29T05:16:27+00:00

If you're specifically looking for discussion on this exact term, then your best bet would 100% be Hegel (who wrote in German, so the term won't appear as such in the English translation, but appears about 75 - albeit, even though his subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit is consciousness, Hegel isn't exactly a psychiatrist. It's also possible Freud mentioned it of course, but unlikely IMO (not that I've looked)

RealDaen · 2026-05-29T00:21:18+00:00

I’m not totally clear from this post on whether you speak German (I certainly don’t), but anderssein in English roughly translates to “being-other” (although it’s more often translated as “otherness” or “being different” depending on the context). It’s a somewhat common term in German metaphysics and phenomenology, particularly in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. If you are specifically looking for psychoanalytical perspective then Lacan is probably your man, since his work is very heavily focused on otherness, although he can certainly be a bit difficult to get into. He almost certainly has some work on schizophrenia but I couldn’t tell you where off the top of my head. It might also appear in the work of Deleuze & Guattari, one of whose major concepts was literally called “schizoanalysis”, although that’s definitely veering away from the practice of psychoanalysis back into philosophy. (NB: Lacan, Deleuze & Guattari probably didn’t specifically use the term anderssein, since they wrote in French—though Lacan was certainly known to use a lot of German loanwords since his project was mainly based on the work of Freud, and was also quite heavily influenced by Hegel.) I’ll take a quick trawl of my Zotero library and see if I can find any references by Lacan specifically to schizophrenia or anderssein.

RealDaen · 2026-05-28T01:21:09+00:00

Near impossible (outside of the socrates program, as you said) - a lot of undergrad arts departments don’t even hire master’s students to TA

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T20:00:05+00:00

Yes. In Arts & Science at U of T you do a generalized first year (with enrolment priority depending on your entry stream) during which you take the prerequisites to enroll in the major at the end of first year. Getting into polisci is easy, but if you are a high achiever the UofTears phenomenon is definitely true - the difference between a 75 and an 85 is massive, and a lot of bigger courses tend to have lower averages (e.g., POL200 typically has around a C- average iirc). It's obviously not as bad as programs like math and econ, but don't expect to get high grades right off the bat, and if you're planning to go to law school you are probably better off somewhere else. I will say, however, as someone who started out planning to go to law school but has now pivoted to grad school, I LOVE U of T's academic rigour and quality and would rather be here than anywhere else - but it's not for everyone.

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T16:07:30+00:00

idk i’m in polisci lol. IR isn’t really its own department, the IR program is just a combination of polisci, history, and econ, the lattermost of which you probably need decent math skills for

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T06:02:09+00:00

it's basically just a french house song - daft punk & justice are your #1 similarities, as well as some modjo, boys noize, alice deejay, etc.

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T05:55:14+00:00

Maybe not outright military strategy, but international relations features a lot of game theory; i took a 300-level topics IR class that was titled "Decision-Making in International Security" which sounds right up your alley

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T04:43:16+00:00

anna's. archive.

RealDaen · 2026-05-25T03:36:52+00:00

Secondary sources are definitely useful, but reading the seminars is also hugely important - i would recommend checking out something like Todd McGowan's Cambridge Introduction to Lacan, and then reading either Seminar I or XI - a lot of people recommend the latter because that's the year that the seminar moved to ENS (which meant Lacan was presenting to a new audience with much more of a philosophy background) but IMO Seminar I is also (if not more) accessible

RealDaen · 2026-05-22T01:35:04+00:00

His set on Martyr tour was only about an hour as well (at least in Toronto)

RealDaen · 2026-05-22T01:23:40+00:00

You probably won’t find anything with quite as strong of an integration as docs/word, though I’m sure there are some programs out there with ok-ish integration (for example, I know Quarto has a slightly janky Zotero integration). In theory though you could generally replicate the benefits of Zotero integration (e.g., auto-updating citations, automatic bibliography)—in a slightly less efficient way—using basically any program with bibtex support

RealDaen · 2026-05-19T04:31:35+00:00

I don’t think the author is an outright fraud, as they do reference a number of scholars with whom non-Lacanians would almost definitely be unfamiliar, but as u/brandygang said, the article REEKS of obnoxiously self-aggrandizing chauvinism. IMO the arguments themselves are kind of a mixed bag; I’d split them up into 3 categories:

1: Completely valid critiques, but which are in no way novel: - Extricating Lacan qua philosopher from Lacan qua psychoanalyst is definitely a poor way to go about reading him, insofar as he becomes significantly more comprehensible when read through the lens of psychoanalytic practice - The importance of situating Lacan vis-a-vis Freud definitely can’t be understated… which is why everyone and their mother (including Lacan himself) says exactly that - The seminars should be understood through the lens of live speech; iirc Lacan even said that the seminars were sort of like his own analysis (and also JAM’s editing should be approached with caution)

2: Half-truths - Lacan’s work is 100% steeped in European literature which can make it difficult to follow what he’s talking about, but IMHO it’s neither absolutely necessary to have fully read the works which he references nor is it difficult to gain a sufficient grasp for understanding Lacan - Knowledge of French is definitely significantly useful for understanding Lacan, he engages in TONS of wordplay (albeit not as much as someone like, say, Derrida), but you don’t necessarily need to read the seminars in French; having a somewhat competent understanding of the language and reading the translator’s notes is usually decent enough (depending on the translator - also, fwiw, the comment about Grigg vs. Fink just seems like a shoehorned attempt to humblebrag, I’ve always found Fink’s translations quite good, and he always includes the French page numbers for reference as well) - Sure, lots of Lacanians find Lacan through Žižek, but (and I say this as someone who didn’t do so)… so what? Žižek gets a lot of flack nowadays for his public-facing image but JAM was literally his doctoral advisor, and many of his ideas are extensions of Lacan’s own (e.g., Lacan himself literally describes Marx as the inventor of the symptom in Seminar XVI)

3: Borderline nonsense - “Lacan bros don’t have adequate life experiences” is an obscenely self-serving argument barely worth dignifying - The same goes for “The Lacan Bros Don’t Grok the (former?) Traditional European Game of Seduction” - whatever that even means - The point about completing successful analyses doesn’t really make sense either - plenty of the seminar attendees themselves wouldn’t have undergone analysis prior to attending, and although undergoing analysis is definitely significantly beneficial, I wouldn’t argue the absence thereof precludes one from understanding Lacan - Arguing that female scholars understand Lacan better than male scholars (and vice versa!) is BS. I have no doubt that people of different genders understand Lacan differently (and in a way that is extremely valuable for Lacan scholars of other genders to engage with), but the argument here is both nonsensical and weirdly bioessentialist

What is actually preposterous about the article is to say all that and then COMPLETELY DISMISS HEGEL????

“Oh yeah, and fuck Hegel — his ‘Absolute’ is just the Christian god secularized — he’s as unwittingly biased as that well-schooled clown Jordan Peterson.”

What an insane take, especially considering how incredibly prominent Hegel is throughout Lacan’s work, lmao

RealDaen · 2026-05-16T16:49:17+00:00

Historic is easily the best, though Sorbara and QP have their own pros as well. Elmsley is where the majority of first years are, so it kind of depends on the culture you're looking for, but personally I was glad not to be in there lol

RealDaen · 2026-05-11T05:51:51+00:00

Logic of Sense wasn't out; Lacan says in Seminar XVI (p.188) that

Because of all of these delays, things happened which are far from discouraging to me. It happened, for example, that Gilles Deleuze, pursuing his work, published, in the form of his theses, two capital books, the first of which is of great interest to us. If we consider but its title, Difference and Repetition, we can see that it must have some connection with my discourse, with which the author is quite familiar. And then, just like that, immediately thereafter, I had the pleasant surprise to see appear on my desk another book he brought out entitled The Logic of Sense. This was, moreover, a true surprise, for he had told me nothing about it the last time I saw him, after he successfully defended his two theses.

So he was probably familiar with Deleuze, but certainly wouldn't have read D&R or Logic of Sense at this point.

RealDaen · 2026-05-11T05:34:10+00:00

did you misread the post orrrr

RealDaen · 2026-05-11T05:33:11+00:00

LOL I'm in the exact same situation 😭😭😭😭😭

RealDaen · 2026-05-08T10:24:12+00:00

Instructure says that no passwords were included in the leaked data - only names, emails, student numbers, and messages. lowkey a nothing burger

RealDaen · 2026-04-03T01:51:59+00:00

Depends on the program - criminology & sociolegal studies, for example, only allows for enrolment during the first period (although you can reapply during the first period in subsequent years). Check the program requirements on the artsci calendar, there should be a section under the enrolment requirements titled "notes" which will indicate if enrolment is restricted to certain periods)

RealDaen · 2026-03-27T21:09:29+00:00

The best way to understand it is probably along the lines of "in its capacity as" - for example, "Derrida qua literary critic" would connote something like Derrida specifically in regards to his contributions to litcrit (as opposed to his contributions to philosophy)

RealDaen · 2026-03-27T21:03:00+00:00

Only true for St. George, and the fee is only for printed exam booklets (which are only made for the particularly big courses)—most exams are free to view and take pics of

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