‘[truth] is the medium in which the subject is spoken of, and the bearer of this medium is not primarily the analysand but, as Quinn and Nobus make clear, the analyst.’

Joseph D. O’Neil, ‘The Shame of the Political: Truth as Vocation in Garcián, Lacan and Badiou’  Angelaki 17:1 (2012) 95

In this book, Professor Dany Nobus and I worked through a set of methodological issues in the application of psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge.  We argued that psychoanalysis has no knowledge that can be applied in straightforward way by academic disciplines and that it should be understood as knowledge ‘in check’. Professor Nobus examined the status of psychoanalytic research through a reading of Freud’s late essay ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ of 1932, in which Freud argues that psychoanalysis is not a worldview and that all worldviews that profess to achieve coherence are idealistic and illusory. Through a reading of Jacques Lacan’s seminar XVII, I argued that psychoanalysis is not a theoretical model that is applied to a real world situation but is best defined as a form of the social bond in which stupidity and the fall of knowledge become productive.  I later developed some of these themes into a chapter on psychoanalysis and research in the arts for The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts.   Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid is now frequently cited in a variety of disciplinary contexts from management studies to art education.