The Course in General Linguistics played a significant role for the establishment of scientific structuralism in the 1950s' and 1960s' France. The structuralist readers tended to gloss over the complications befalling this posthumously edited text by receiving it reverently as the Vulgate, a popular scripture upon which the school of structuralism can be based. Foucault's analysis of the authorial function helps to explain how the Course functioned ideologically as Saussure's work, despite the empirical complications regarding its historical provenance and authorship; Foucault's analysis also sheds light on the concurrent neglect of Saussure's Nachlass. Lacan's psychoanalysis provides a representative example of how structural scientists tended to appropriate the Course in the humanities.