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One of Lacan's major theses with regard to knowledge states that the desire to know can be a transvestite of the horror to know. According to Lacan, the search for and the accumulation of knowledge can be nothing but an attempt to run from truths the subject does not want to know. Indeed, it is an attested clinical fact that the truth can be kept hidden—that is can be kept unconscious—through a body of theoretical knowledge (Ecrits 358). This mechanism works in the two directions: by means of knowledge, one can run from one's own truth as well as from the truth of somebody else.
Concerning the first case, Lacan demonstrated that a number of theories come down to recycled unanalysed unconscious material, meaning that unconscious psychical contents have been recycled into theoretical knowledge. To quote Lacan:
I could do an analysis of Abraham for you simply on the basis of his theory of part-objects…. Abraham, we might say, wanted to be a complete mother. Then I might also amuse myself by punctuating the fringes of Ferenczi's theory with a famous song by Georgius ‘I am son-father.’ Nunberg, too, has his own intentions, and in his truly remarkable article on love and transference, he shows himself to be in the position of arbiter between the powers of life and death, in which one cannot fail to see an aspiration to the Divine position. (Four 158-159)
According to Lacan, knowledge might very well be the symptom of one's ignorance. As a matter of fact, Lacan points out the mechanism of symptom formation in the heart of the elaboration of a theory. This means that he recognises the mechanisms of repression and the return of the repressed in the constitution of the theory as such. More particularly: a psychic content is repressed and it reappears in an unrecognisable form. In this case, the return of the repressed has taken the form of a theory.
The same mechanism can be traced easily within an analysis too, and especially within a so-called d