The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, is a year-long, fortnightly deliberation on psychoanalysis and the contemporary social order. Lacan here discusses Freud, Marx and Hegel; patterns of social and sexual behavior; and the nature and function of science and knowledge in the contemporary world. These deliberations take place at the time of the foundation of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (Vincennes), an event that acutely raises for Lacan the question of the place that psychoanalytic knowledge might occupy in the university; just as it raised the inverse question: what is the impact of "university knowledge" upon psychoanalysis? Lacan, fully aware that unlike psychology or psychiatry, psychoanalysis operated outside the university system, founded The Freudian School of Paris in 1964 with the function of training psychoanalysts and transmitting psychoanalysis. Is this tradition, which goes back to Freud, of an extra-mural nature of psychoanalytic training purely contingent? Or are there reasons intrinsic to the practice of analysis that have to do with the place of knowledge and the way it functions in the university? Both the new Department of Psychoanalysis and the aspirations of a radical student movement are the immediate causes of this reflection.

Lacan's response to this issue is to set it in a broader context. The introduction and discussion of the four discourses forms a kind of reference point by which Lacan orientates himself throughout the year, even as he discusses issues as varied as thermodynamics, Marxism, Hegelian philosophy, Freud's cases, the Oedipus complex, and the university.