Matheme

The matheme is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. They are formulae, designed as symbolic representations of his ideas and analyses.

They were intended to introduce some degree of technical rigour in philosophical and psychological writing, replacing the often hard-to-understand verbal descriptions with formulae resembling those used in the hard sciences, and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both Freud and Lacan. For example: $ <> a is the matheme for fantasy in the Freudian-Lacanian sense.

"Matheme", for Lacan, was not simply the imitation of science by philosophy, but the ideal of a perfect means for the integral transmission of knowledge. Natural language, with its constant "metonymic slide", fails here, where mathematics succeeds. Contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.

Though sometimes disparaged as a case of "physics envy" or accused of introducing false rigor into a discipline that is more literary theory than hard science, there is also something of a sense of humor in Lacan's mathemes, and Lacan himself has declared that they are "designed to allow for a hundred and one different readings" (see Écrits, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious").