This entry considers students’ disregard for psychoanalytic theorists Freud and Lacan as well as their belief in free will and self-expression. First, the students rightly rejected what they perceived as claims to universalism in Freud and Lacan’s writings, given that its precepts are so patently derived from bourgeois European models. A second objection was posed to psychoanalytic theory’s purported claims to transhistoricity. Finally, the students were averse to the idea that human subjectivity is not characterized by agency and self-determination. The task then, the essay suggests, becomes to unravel the sticky problem of whether we believe in things like creative agency and free will or not, which is what the objections to psychoanalysis are ultimately about. It is a question not simply about identity, but about free will. The essay’s own understanding of free will is informed by Henri Bergson, which the entry explores.
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