On Essay Writing: Academia versus Analytica

I wanted to write a quick note about the differences that I’ve observed in the essay writing of scholars (e.g., students, professors, researchers) versus psychoanalysts of the School of Lacan and Freud.

I work as a professor and I regularly read essays from students and researchers. More often than not, I find that my students, and even some researchers, are using artificial intelligence. There are obvious signs, and they can be confirmed. However, it is enough to highlight the fact that one remains suspicious. It is this suspicion that is important. It has become increasingly difficult to reward students whose work does not rise up to the level of those who make use of artificial intelligence for their essay writing. This raises all sorts of new thorny problems for academic assessment. I sense that many students whose work has received a lower grade are being punished for avoiding the usage of Artificial Intelligence.

However, as a copy-editor for psychoanalytic texts, especially texts written by psychoanalysts of the School, this suspicion is not present. At times, to be honest, it can be quite painful to read the writing of psychoanalysts. I have even had the thought that my 13 year old son could probably write a better essay. Why? Psychoanalysts use language in a different, sometimes awkward, way. They use “scare quotes,” incomplete sentence clauses, inappropriate punctuation marks, … which are all strategies that I used to encounter, before the advent of Artificial Intelligence, in the writings of first year university students. It occurred to me that this erases the suspicion that I have of the essay being written by Artificial Intelligence.

So, what can we say about psychoanalytic writing? There is one point only which I want to add to the discussion: it is clear that psychoanalyst’s do not write with their gadgets, and that, moreover, the scientific discourse has not got the upper hand on them.