The master names an ideal, the university teaches conformity to the ideal, the hysteric questions the naming of the ideal, and the analyst focuses on the gap between the naming and the questioning (Žižek, TS, 165). The task of theory, and of the psychoanalyst in particular, is to show how every master identity is contingent and ideological. The theorist in this sense is like the analyst.

The master is the figure who leads and conducts. He is decisive and sure of himself in his role as master. In theoretical terms, he generates master signifiers, which consist of terms and slogans that represent his particular discipline. He is the model of autonomy and mastery in general. His signifiers guide the main agendas of society or groups within society at any given time. In the most obvious sense, the master is the leader who declares the war. He is the one who by definition says what he means, does what he says he will do; and what he does, as his followers believe, is immediately and perfectly efficient.

The individual subject finds self-identity in the form of these signifiers, which serve as ideological rallying positions. At the extreme, the master is the one you will die for. Words like “God,” “country,” “freedom,” “free market,” “pro-choice,” and so forth are examples of such master signifiers. Lacan indicates that the function of the master has weakened in modern society, especially in the sense that it functions less in the form of single human figures than in a collective way. Anything that the subject invests his or her identity in --that anything is a master signifier or a network of closely-knit master signifiers. Your rationale for any major act has to do with your identity with master signifiers.
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The discourse of the university promotes knowledge and values on behalf of the master.... Though acting on behalf of the master, the university pretends to be completely neutral and impersonal, as if merely carrying out its mission according to the basic facts and conditions of any given situation. ...Scientific knowledge is another example since it likewise promotes specific forms of autonomy and self-identity. Its law is the continuous quest for knowledge, which it often carries out regardless of the effect on social reality.

When we do as we are told as children, we are acting as the objects of the university discourse represented by our parents. We may not understand why, we may not entirely fit into the mold of the discourse, but we can only be members of society by adopting the positions and identities it provides us with.
...
The hysteric is engaged in radical doubt and questioning of his or her subjective position as dictated by the master. The hysteric is the alienated subject. She is divided and conflicted within herself between what she feels she is supposed to do and her resistance or failure to live up to what the order dictates. According to the discourses of the master and the university, the true subject should not be alienated and divided. One is supposed to conform easily and freely to the master discourse. Hysteria takes the form of resistance and protest, jealousy and rage, but also shame and sense of meaninglessness at one’s failure to live up to the ideals of the dominant discourse. In spite of her resistance, however, the hysteric is still in thrall to the demands of the master and university (Bracher, 123).

In Lacanian terms, all subjects are ultimately hysterics. The hysteric is the ultimate model of subjectivity. This gets back to the idea of split subject: no one escapes the condition of being split. The master is oblivious to this fact but is nevertheless just as “split” as anyone else. If anyone, the hystericized subject is the most aware that the emperor wears no clothes, that is, that the master is equally split. Still, the hysteric has not made the final step to act on that awareness, but remains subjected to the discourse of the master.

The analyst observes that the hysteric experiences subjection to the master only because she treats the master as a master. The analyst says that the master is such because people believe he is such. They grant him his authority. Equally, they can withdraw it. In purest form, the analyst represents a position that denies all acts of mastery, especially self-mastery. The analyst elicits hysteria from the subject in order to expose the subject’s state of subjection to the dominant order. The end of therapy arrives when the subject sees through the fantasy of subjection and discovers new possibilities. In this summary, however, I am not interested in the clinical techniques of the analyst, which can be found in other readings. I prefer to regard the analyst in philosophical terms as occupying the stance of the critical intellectual who, according to Žižek, always maintains “a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier,” thus always in order to “render visible [the] ‘produced,’ artificial, contingent character” of every Master-Signifier (TN, 2). Žižek says that “philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given (“It’s like that!”, “Law is law!”, etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this ‘step back’ from actuality to possibility ....” (Ibid.). The difference between actual and possible is such that whatever is actual or certain is only so because another possibility did not take place. Stepping back from the actual means looking at what might have been, though not in a wishful way as if to recover some lost past. It is to disbelieve that what is so is because it must be so. In this sense, the theory of the analyst is absolutely anti-fatalistic.

The analyst represents a different kind of knowledge than the master or university. The analyst’s knowledge is dialectical, which in simplest terms means that truth is dynamic and paradoxical. It is a knowledge which knows how to examine the surface of a master discourse and through its splits and fissures discover its unconscious. The analyst is a Daoist in the sense described by figures like Zhuangzi. The analyst occupies the position of the void that lies in all signifiers and at the back of all systems. The analyst as human being, of course, is no different from anyone else in being equally caught up in his or her own pathology of subjectivization. — http://kmcmahon.faculty.ku.edu//LacanZizeksum.html