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(The Maternal Phallus in Science Fiction: Uncanny Mothers, Omnipotent AIs, and Totalitarian Nurture)

In Seminar XV (March 20, 1968), Jacques Lacan makes an unexpected and fascinating reference to “science fiction.” At first glance, this might seem like an ironic jab—perhaps a dismissal of certain theoretical fantasies. But on closer inspection, Lacan’s use of the term carries a rich and generative meaning. Rather than mere critique, science fiction becomes a way to reimagine the future of psychoanalysis, to explore its speculative horizon, and to acknowledge the creative, even visionary dimension of the psychoanalytic act.

“It is not a mere enigma that the psychoanalyst—who knows it better than anyone from experience—might come to conceive, in this form of ‘science fiction’ (the expression is apt), the fruit that he himself obtains from it.”

Here, Lacan points not to delusion or naivety, but to the imaginative leap required to think the outcome of analysis—something unprecedented, structurally unknowable in advance, and yet real in its effects.

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1. Beyond Mastery: Science Fiction as Radical Openness

Lacan’s primary concern in this seminar is with the qualification of the psychoanalyst—what allows one to occupy this position, and how that position is fundamentally tied to the object (a), the cause of desire. The analyst is not the master of knowledge, not the one who “knows” the analysand’s truth in a definitive way. Rather, the analyst is the instrument, the pivot through which a new relation to desire becomes possible.

And yet, Lacan imagines that the analyst, reflecting on this process, may try to envision the fruit of his labor. To do so, he turns to science fiction—not to mock it, but to name the speculative dimension inherent in the act. Just as science fiction dares to imagine what has never yet existed, the analyst too faces the task of thinking beyond the established, beyond knowledge as it currently stands.

The analyst’s relation to the end of analysis is, then, science-fictional in the best sense: not deluded, but creative, future-oriented, and open to the Real.

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2. Science Fiction and the Limits of Totalization

In Lacan’s critique of science, he emphasizes its exclusion of the subject: following Descartes, modern science was founded on a radical evacuation of the “I” that thinks and desires. Science produces extraordinary results, but remains mute on the act, on meaning, on the ethical or existential stakes of doing anything.

But science fiction, by contrast, is where science meets subjectivity—where the limits of the known spark imaginative extrapolation. And this is precisely where psychoanalysis belongs. The subject of the unconscious is not compatible with a closed, algorithmic system. Psychoanalysis does not yield a “user manual” for the mind. Instead, it opens onto a space where the undecidable, the singular, and the impossible come into play.

Science fiction, in this revised light, becomes the literary and conceptual space that mirrors psychoanalysis—a genre that dares to ask: what if? What if the subject is not whole? What if desire doesn’t resolve into satisfaction? What if truth lies in the cracks of knowledge?

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3. Science Fiction as Psychoanalytic Praxis

Lacan isn’t merely using science fiction metaphorically. He’s pointing to a structural affinity between the logic of science fiction and the logic of the analytic act. In both, there is a rupture with the status quo, a movement toward what has no prior model.

Just as science fiction creates possible worlds in which familiar laws no longer hold, the psychoanalytic act creates the conditions for a new subject position—one that recognizes its division, its lack, and its desire. This is a subject that cannot be predicted or scripted in advance. Like a sci-fi protagonist undergoing a transformation in contact with the alien or the unknown, the analysand, too, traverses a real beyond understanding.

The analyst’s role, then, might be seen not as that of the old-fashioned clinician, but rather as something like a navigator through speculative terrain, someone who helps the analysand confront the strangeness of their own structure—and emerge with a different orientation to the possible.

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4. From Tragedy to Speculation

Lacan draws analogies between the analytic act and tragic structure—particularly the figure of the hero who ends up as waste. But science fiction transcends tragedy. Where tragedy culminates in inevitable downfall, science fiction suspends finality. It allows for uncertain endings, open futures, alternate logics. In that sense, science fiction is a way out of the repetition compulsion, out of the closed loops of myth and identification.

Indeed, Lacan’s own theoretical work often bears a science-fictional flavor: objects that don’t exist but have effects (object a), the voice and the gaze as partial objects, the topology of the Real… These are not metaphors, but conceptual inventions—ways of formalizing that which escapes representation. In that sense, psychoanalysis is already a kind of science fiction: a rigorous, symbolic exploration of the impossible.

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5. The Analyst as Science-Fictional Figure

If the analyst is to occupy the place of object (a)—a placeholder for what is missing in the subject—then he must do so without guarantees, without a pre-given identity. This is a radical position. It demands a tolerance for ambiguity, for contradiction, for non-knowledge.

Science fiction offers a model for this. Think of the alien, the cyborg, the shapeshifter: these are not figures of mastery, but of transformation, of becoming-other. The analyst, likewise, is not the bearer of a unified self but a function—a vanishing point, a device through which the analysand may reconfigure themselves.

Lacan’s allusion to science fiction, then, is not a dismissal but an invitation—to embrace the inventive, open-ended dimension of psychoanalysis, to see it not as a dead repetition of Freud or a clinical protocol, but as an ongoing project of imagining new relations to the Real.

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Conclusion: Science Fiction as the Future of Psychoanalysis

Rather than seeing science fiction as a fantasy or error, Lacan invites us to recognize its epistemic courage. Like the analyst, the science fiction writer confronts the unknown, explores the limits of thought, and stages the effects of structural ruptures.

In invoking “science fiction,” Lacan marks a moment of possibility: the analyst, reflecting on the act, must speculate—not to control the process, but to honor its unknowability, to hold space for what cannot yet be thought.

Psychoanalysis, if it is to remain vital, must live in that speculative space: at the intersection of desire, truth, and the impossible. And in that sense, science fiction is not a detour from analysis—it is its future.

Prompt: Elaborate in an article what Lacan means by “science fiction” reference here: (Seminar 15.14: 20 March 1968 Jacques Lacan) / make revisions to this text: give sci-fi a positive spin!