The Waiter Does Not Know
When you go to a restaurant and stare at the menu, then ask the waiter what they think is best, it is rarely because they possess a deep insight into the secrets sitting behind the words on the menu. They may know a bit more than you, but despite the knowledge they do have they are hardly a wise sage guiding you through a culinary maze of taste, smells, appetisers and wine pairings. What you are really asking for is relief from the burden of choice and the responsibility of desire. You want someone to tell you what you want. In that moment the waiter is the guru and you have fallen at the feet their messianic presents. Lacan’s name for the figure in that position is the subject who is supposed to know. As soon as we believe that somewhere there is someone who knows, transference begins.
Sitting at the table hanging on each word the waiter explains to us gives us a sense that there is a correct way to move through the experience of the restaurant and dining experience. In this sense, there is a correct way to live, to act, to choose. Beneath all of this lies a more disturbing and more equalising truth: nobody really knows how to live. Nobody has a complete script for what to do with themselves. Even when you have a sense that you want to be a writer, a scientist or an athlete, you inevitably look to role models, mentors, heroes. You position them as subjects who are supposed to know how to live, so you can borrow a framework for your own existence. This is why we are told “never meet your heroes.” It is not because they will disappoint you morally, but because the discovery that they too are fumbling and improvising threatens the very function they serve for you. If you saw how confused they also are, their image would lose its power.
For Lacan, the subject supposed to know is the catalyst of transference, and transference is not limited to the analytic clinic. Think of a classroom where you go to learn from a professor. The relationship is initiated by the assumption that the professor knows, that they hold some secret that can be transmitted to you. In this frame, they occupy the place of the subject supposed to know, and you are the subject who is supposed not to know. The paradox is that education only “works” when this illusion fails. The moment you cease to see your teacher as a perfect sage, the moment you realise there is no one who can tell you exactly how to live, is the moment you have actually learnt something. You step into the gap yourself.
The same is true of your parents. As a child, you imagine they are all‑knowing and all‑powerful. Growing up is not just noticing their flaws, it is recognising that they never had a master plan either. They were improvising, afraid and limited, just like you. At that point it becomes your task to assume adulthood, to stop waiting for someone else to decide and to start making your own choices.
Something similar happens in politics. The cynic says that all politicians are frauds, that no political process can produce meaningful change, that the whole thing is theatre. But this is rarely where the cynic stops. They then fill that gap with another subject supposed to know: the market, the visionary CEO, the tech founder who will disrupt his way to a solution. Cynicism does not dissolve the structure, it just relocates it. Once you see that this substitution is the move, that the CEO and the politician are both fumbling through in the same way, the question becomes yours: do I step into the process, or do I keep searching for the next figure to fill the gap so that I do not have to.
Even in therapy it is easy to imagine that the therapist holds some deep insight into the core of our problem, that they are there to reveal the truth of our neurosis and pull our fractured existence into focus. But good therapy works in exactly the same way as good teaching. The therapist is not the answer. They are a temporary placeholder in the position of the subject supposed to know, someone you invest with enough authority that the work can begin. The real aim is to make that investment unnecessary. A successful analysis, for Lacan, ends not with the therapist handing you the truth about yourself, but with you no longer needing them to occupy that place.
The beginning of an authentic, mature subjectivity is precisely this disillusionment: the moment you realise that the subject who is supposed to know does not know. There is something both humbling and emancipatory about this. Humbling, because the person you invested with ideal knowledge turns out to be just as flawed and anxious as you. Emancipatory, because the gap they were covering is now available to you. When you stand in an art gallery and mutter “I could have done that,” the interesting response is not contempt but the realisation that this might be an invitation, perhaps you could. Perhaps you might decide to dedicate your life to making things rather than only consuming them.
The same holds for writing, teaching, organising, creating. There is a point at which reading others makes you think: I have something to say. There is a point at which learning from others pushes you to begin sharing what you know. Athletes grow up hero‑worshipping players and then, one day, find themselves on the same team. This circulation is transference: we invest others with the place of the one who knows in order to carve out a space in which to discover ourselves. Eventually, others will start doing this with you. People will ask about your routines, your habits, your “secret,” as if you have one. The temptation is to cling to that position, to go on playing the subject who is supposed to know. The more difficult move is to admit that you are also making it up and to encourage them to step into the gap for themselves.
If the ideology of our time tells us that somewhere there really is a subject who knows. Whether it’s the billionaire, the politician, the therapist, the parent or the waiter at the restaurant. Lacan’s reply is simpler and more unsettling. There is no such subject. There is only the place where we would like such a subject to be, and our endless attempts to fill it. Owning that is not a recipe for despair. It is the point at which the burden of desire, choice and responsibility finally returns to where it always was: with you.