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Le Séminaire #10
O seminário, livro 10: a angústia
O autor propõe novos caminhos para a compreensão da angústia a partir do diálogo com as idéias de Freud. A esse respeito Freud afirma que o último termo a que chegou, intransponível para ele, foi a angústia de castração. Lacan propõe que o impasse supremo do neurótico não é constituído pela angústia de castração em si, e debate novos caminhos.
367 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
87 people are currently reading
1030 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Lacan
182 books1,222 followersJacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.
Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.
Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
January 10, 2015
Never mind those tales that Lacan's seminars are a lot easier to understand that his Ecrits, his Seminar X is tough enough. I am bound to be somewhat inaccurate (and tragically, I am not sure to what extent) in summarizing the argument as follows. Lacan builds his seminar on Freud's Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety. Not having read that book is not helping. Anyway, Lacan contests the claim that anxiety is without an object. He gives a new reading of Freud to bolster that claim. It remains to be seen what that object is but, knowing Lacan, it is no surprise that the object has to do with "object a". But how? Lacan explains that Freud did not see the difference between mourning and anxiety correctly although, in retrospect, Freud was not wrong either. Mourning, to paraphrase Lacan wildly, is to have lost an object (probably a loved one) but to be able to go on with one's life anyway because one understands that it is more important to know what (or whom) one wants than to actually have it/him/her/them (the latter being impossible in the state of mourning anyway). A maniac, on the other hand, cannot mourn correctly because instead of building more resolve he or she destroys him or herself in search of that object that he or she wants (to the point of eventually committing suicide). Anxiety, on the other hand, has nothing to do with what one wants (obviously, the opposite is true) but that does not mean it has no object, Lacan says. It has everything to do with the desire of the Other, which one is supposed to satisfy. Hence the anxiety.
Anxiety, in all its forms, comes down to the sexual act more or less remotely - and, more accurately, to castration anxiety. From the man's point of view, one loses, in a sense, one's organ in the act itself by burying it inside someone else. Sorry for the graphic content but this is what I gleaned from Lacan. It does not matter whether the organ is lost or not for good (and of course it is not, usually) because one can have anxiety of losing something (in this case, being castrated) only as long as one actually has it.
Lacan insists that anxiety is between desire and "jouissance". The vehicle for sexual desire (what it thus comes down to) is the phallus which will be lost in a sense anyway during the act because the male organ actually becomes part of the woman's body. However, that mini-castration has a "happy ending" and leads to jouissance. A woman gets her jouissance from having "it" as part of her - but also from participating in the man's victory over his castration anxiety in addition to any jouissance proper she might have (insofar as Lacan speaks about it at all). I am not quite sure how Lacan sees a woman's castration anxiety, though he does say it exists.
As I said, tough. There is no dearth of information in this book but, as always, the trouble with Lacan is that the reader has to connect the dots. I did it my way. But, as always, Lacan is a classic and deserving of five stars
Is Price's translation good? Yes, it is okay. I found the profusion of the word "disquisition" a bit disorienting, though. Neither does the translation really stand out, either, I thought, in terms of making the stuff easier to understand.
Anxiety, in all its forms, comes down to the sexual act more or less remotely - and, more accurately, to castration anxiety. From the man's point of view, one loses, in a sense, one's organ in the act itself by burying it inside someone else. Sorry for the graphic content but this is what I gleaned from Lacan. It does not matter whether the organ is lost or not for good (and of course it is not, usually) because one can have anxiety of losing something (in this case, being castrated) only as long as one actually has it.
Lacan insists that anxiety is between desire and "jouissance". The vehicle for sexual desire (what it thus comes down to) is the phallus which will be lost in a sense anyway during the act because the male organ actually becomes part of the woman's body. However, that mini-castration has a "happy ending" and leads to jouissance. A woman gets her jouissance from having "it" as part of her - but also from participating in the man's victory over his castration anxiety in addition to any jouissance proper she might have (insofar as Lacan speaks about it at all). I am not quite sure how Lacan sees a woman's castration anxiety, though he does say it exists.
As I said, tough. There is no dearth of information in this book but, as always, the trouble with Lacan is that the reader has to connect the dots. I did it my way. But, as always, Lacan is a classic and deserving of five stars
Is Price's translation good? Yes, it is okay. I found the profusion of the word "disquisition" a bit disorienting, though. Neither does the translation really stand out, either, I thought, in terms of making the stuff easier to understand.
June 26, 2022
I've been at it with Lacan to procrastinate from finishing The Magic Mountain so here's some insight into Hamlet:
"It's what I called the identification with Ophelia. In point of fact, in the second phase, Hamlet is seized by the furious soul we can legitimately infer to be that of the victim, the suicide victim, manifestly offered in sacrifice to the paternal manes, since it's right after the killing of her father that she falters and succumbs.
This refers back to long-held beliefs pertaining to the aftermath of certain types of demise, when the funeral ceremonies can't be fully carried out. Nothing is appeased of the vengeance Ophelia is calling out for.
Identification with the bereaved object was designated by Freud in its negative patterns, but let's not forget that it also has its positive phase.
It's the entry into Hamlet of what I've called the fury of the female soul that gives him the strength to become this sleepwalker who accepts everything, up to and including - I've marked this sufficiently to become the one who in the combat fights for his enemy, the king himself, against his specular image, who is Laertes.
From that point on, things sort themselves out on their own and without him doing, all in all, anything other than exactly what he shouldn't, until he does what he has to. Namely, he will himself be mortally wounded by the time he kills the king.
There is a retroactive recognition of the object that used to be there.
Hamlet is a character of whom the least one can say need I remind you? - is that he doesn't draw back when faced with something and he's not easily fazed. The only thing he can't do is precisely the act he's cut out for and that is because the desire is wanting.
The desire is wanting because the Ideal has crumbled.
When the Ideal is contradicted, when it crumbles (when his idolised paternal figure dies and his maternal figure falters), we can see that the result is that Hamlet's power of desire vanishes.
It's down this path that Hamlet's return passes into the culmination of his destiny, of his Hamlet function, if I may put it like that, his Hamletic finish."
***
On Anxiety: from a Lacanian perspective, anxiety arises when the conditions of supporting the possibility of desire are themselves lacking. Importantly, desire here does not imply lust, but a desire-of-the-Other, desire as means of cognitive-mapping, of finding one's place in the symbolic network that allows us to experience ourselves. Anxiety is caused not so much from depravation or loss, but rather from a suffocating lack which undercuts the symbolic viability of the desiring subject as such. Anxiety is not caused by a pragmatic lack or desire but by the impediments to the desire. The lack of the lack.
Lacan is quite clear in his point: "Don't you see that it's not longing for the maternal breast that provokes the anxiety, but its imminence?"
"It's what I called the identification with Ophelia. In point of fact, in the second phase, Hamlet is seized by the furious soul we can legitimately infer to be that of the victim, the suicide victim, manifestly offered in sacrifice to the paternal manes, since it's right after the killing of her father that she falters and succumbs.
This refers back to long-held beliefs pertaining to the aftermath of certain types of demise, when the funeral ceremonies can't be fully carried out. Nothing is appeased of the vengeance Ophelia is calling out for.
Identification with the bereaved object was designated by Freud in its negative patterns, but let's not forget that it also has its positive phase.
It's the entry into Hamlet of what I've called the fury of the female soul that gives him the strength to become this sleepwalker who accepts everything, up to and including - I've marked this sufficiently to become the one who in the combat fights for his enemy, the king himself, against his specular image, who is Laertes.
From that point on, things sort themselves out on their own and without him doing, all in all, anything other than exactly what he shouldn't, until he does what he has to. Namely, he will himself be mortally wounded by the time he kills the king.
There is a retroactive recognition of the object that used to be there.
Hamlet is a character of whom the least one can say need I remind you? - is that he doesn't draw back when faced with something and he's not easily fazed. The only thing he can't do is precisely the act he's cut out for and that is because the desire is wanting.
The desire is wanting because the Ideal has crumbled.
When the Ideal is contradicted, when it crumbles (when his idolised paternal figure dies and his maternal figure falters), we can see that the result is that Hamlet's power of desire vanishes.
It's down this path that Hamlet's return passes into the culmination of his destiny, of his Hamlet function, if I may put it like that, his Hamletic finish."
***
On Anxiety: from a Lacanian perspective, anxiety arises when the conditions of supporting the possibility of desire are themselves lacking. Importantly, desire here does not imply lust, but a desire-of-the-Other, desire as means of cognitive-mapping, of finding one's place in the symbolic network that allows us to experience ourselves. Anxiety is caused not so much from depravation or loss, but rather from a suffocating lack which undercuts the symbolic viability of the desiring subject as such. Anxiety is not caused by a pragmatic lack or desire but by the impediments to the desire. The lack of the lack.
Lacan is quite clear in his point: "Don't you see that it's not longing for the maternal breast that provokes the anxiety, but its imminence?"
June 3, 2020
Great! However, I did get quite anxious reading it as I could not understand a word this bloke was on about.
November 27, 2020
Seminars I-IX set the table; X juggles the cutlery. While serving the meal. Which is to say that bellying up fully prepared and knowing the menu up and down will neither reduce awe nor aid digestion. Absolutely everything Lacan had been teaching culminates here in an especially deft and precarious balancing act. The definition of any isolated term is impossible (or at least incomplete) without running through its whirling, ramifying articulations. I spent a few extra weeks with this one, have already read Lacan's Seminar On Anxiety: An Introduction and am going to begin Lacanian Antiphilosophy and the Problem of Anxiety: An Uncanny Little Object immediately, and am more loathe to summarize than usual. The slogans are already notorious: does not deceive, not without object, lack lacks. With patience and studious tenacity, they actually become not just meaningful, but helpful. Or did for me. Now, almost exactly three years later, I'm back where I started: S.XI.
July 22, 2019
Lacan’s seminars are full of blind alleys and tangents. One should also keep in mind that Lacan presupposes his audience to be analysts who have clinical experience to validate his claims.
That said, Lacan’s seminar on anxiety contains some worthwhile material to work through. Rather than anxiety being some variation of fear, or just some crippling feeling related to uncertainty, Lacan configures anxiety in relation to desire.
“Anxiety appears prior to desire.”
If desire is the lack which constitutes a person qua Subject, then anxiety is the lack of lack. The overbearing presence of desire. One should also keep in mind that for Lacan, desire is desire of the Other.
“Anxiety is only ever surmounted when the Other has been named.”
Lacan’s perspective on anxiety is refreshing given how ubiquitous the claims of anxiety have become throughout society today. The goal for working through anxiety is to work through desire. Anxiety does not deceive and anxiety is not without an objective.
That said, Lacan’s seminar on anxiety contains some worthwhile material to work through. Rather than anxiety being some variation of fear, or just some crippling feeling related to uncertainty, Lacan configures anxiety in relation to desire.
“Anxiety appears prior to desire.”
If desire is the lack which constitutes a person qua Subject, then anxiety is the lack of lack. The overbearing presence of desire. One should also keep in mind that for Lacan, desire is desire of the Other.
“Anxiety is only ever surmounted when the Other has been named.”
Lacan’s perspective on anxiety is refreshing given how ubiquitous the claims of anxiety have become throughout society today. The goal for working through anxiety is to work through desire. Anxiety does not deceive and anxiety is not without an objective.
January 24, 2025
vampiros!!!!
December 16, 2017
... need to read again. But anxiety is the knife edge between desire and jouissance. I wrote a lovely paper showing how this develops historically.
July 29, 2021
I've been piecing my way through various Lacan lectures this summer to get a better grounding in critical theory and psychoanalytic thought. The actual content itself is quite dry but ultimately enlightening. Lacan describes neatly the profound alienation at the core of the self and how this misrecognition sits at the base of so many of our neuroses and delusions. Beyond this fundamental truth, I don't actually think I learned that much new from these lectures. But, the literary experience of reading lectures in a quaint and novel one. Lacan's digressions into the true meaning of Hamlet or what is represented by Catholic iconography of saints with their sex organs cut off are pleasant object lessons on notoriously unapproachable topics. The little ironic asides and inside jokes the analyst shares with his audience make the reading experience less stultifying than you'd expect from straight-up psychoanalysis. All in all, a satisfying way into a famously unapproachable school of thought.
June 27, 2024
marcando aqui o fim da leitura, mas jamais o fim da investigação
November 24, 2019
En este seminario Lacan nos plantea muchos tópicos que luego retomará en sus siguientes seminarios. Empezando por la angustia como aquel único afecto que no engaña y su relación con la demanda. Pasando por la clara definición del Objeto a y los 5 niveles en los cuál el lo ubica (oral, anal, falo, escopico y la voz) y la relación de estos con el Otro (con mayúsculas) y la posición que ocupa éste Otro en cada nivel (demanda en el otro, deseo en el otro, etc) También nos plantea la diferencia crucial entre Acting out y Pasaje al acto, en su relación con el duelo y el fantasma del suicidio.
Dando gran importancia al fantasma y la explicación de su formula ($<>a) y cuál es la relación del "a" con el fantasma. Fantasma y pasaje al acto, fantasma, angustia y demanda, etc.
Innumerables temas de gran importancia que son cruciales para el entendimiento de la teoría lacaniana se desarrollarán a lo largo de todo el seminario.
También retoma a la angustia como aquello que está entre el goce y el deseo, puntualizando sobre cada uno de ellos.
Inflatable leerlo con paciencia y lectura focalizada. Se requiere si o si acompañamiento analítico para poder retomar muchos temas que son (más aún para un estudiante) inentendibles a simple lectura.
Dando gran importancia al fantasma y la explicación de su formula ($<>a) y cuál es la relación del "a" con el fantasma. Fantasma y pasaje al acto, fantasma, angustia y demanda, etc.
Innumerables temas de gran importancia que son cruciales para el entendimiento de la teoría lacaniana se desarrollarán a lo largo de todo el seminario.
También retoma a la angustia como aquello que está entre el goce y el deseo, puntualizando sobre cada uno de ellos.
Inflatable leerlo con paciencia y lectura focalizada. Se requiere si o si acompañamiento analítico para poder retomar muchos temas que son (más aún para un estudiante) inentendibles a simple lectura.
May 4, 2025
Not an easy one to wrestle through, and I feel like I understood maybe 30%, and also not a seminar which comes with many conclusive answers. However, Lacan does have a few core aphorisms he repeats multiple times as yardsticks, and those were quite helpful in structuring the text. PS. Great that Lacan comes with a small summary of his point on p. 311-314 without announcing it as such.
The phenomenologists understand anxiety in relation to objects (like Husserl's intentionality or Heidegger's relationship to a big Nothingness), but Lacan believes this is too consciousness-focussed (the psychoanalytic unconscious is lacking). For Sartre, anxiety is a zero point, but Lacan understands it as less-than-zero: you expect there to be a zero, but you find something else (often uncanny). Where Freud defines anxiety as objectless - which is similar to a contemporary medical view on anxiety - Lacan emphasises that anxiety is never without an object (this object is obv object a, a non-empirical object which can be better understood of form instead of content, an object of nothing). In particular, anxiety arises when object a - what you project on an object of desire - comes too close and it overbearing.
The parts on why women struggle less with their desires ("on account of her bond with the knot of desire being much looser" p. 183) and are superior to men when it comes to enjoyment (jouissance) was beautiful and could be read in a feminist light. Basically women are less obsessed with what Others think and much more in tune with their enjoyment, in other words with their bodies and drives.
Weird link, but hence why I start to believe more that the contemporary crisis of 'masculinity' does not require better masculine role models, but should help men to form themselves in a more open and feminine way (because role models might simply have them copying a good man instead of copying a bad man). Women tends to need less role models, as they feel more free to be a little bit of everything (masculine in some aspects of life, and feminine in others). Women are able to desire instead of identify.
The phenomenologists understand anxiety in relation to objects (like Husserl's intentionality or Heidegger's relationship to a big Nothingness), but Lacan believes this is too consciousness-focussed (the psychoanalytic unconscious is lacking). For Sartre, anxiety is a zero point, but Lacan understands it as less-than-zero: you expect there to be a zero, but you find something else (often uncanny). Where Freud defines anxiety as objectless - which is similar to a contemporary medical view on anxiety - Lacan emphasises that anxiety is never without an object (this object is obv object a, a non-empirical object which can be better understood of form instead of content, an object of nothing). In particular, anxiety arises when object a - what you project on an object of desire - comes too close and it overbearing.
The parts on why women struggle less with their desires ("on account of her bond with the knot of desire being much looser" p. 183) and are superior to men when it comes to enjoyment (jouissance) was beautiful and could be read in a feminist light. Basically women are less obsessed with what Others think and much more in tune with their enjoyment, in other words with their bodies and drives.
Weird link, but hence why I start to believe more that the contemporary crisis of 'masculinity' does not require better masculine role models, but should help men to form themselves in a more open and feminine way (because role models might simply have them copying a good man instead of copying a bad man). Women tends to need less role models, as they feel more free to be a little bit of everything (masculine in some aspects of life, and feminine in others). Women are able to desire instead of identify.
Read
January 29, 2024At least for my own sake, I feel it's incumbent on me to summarize this book. In this seminar, Jacques Lacan says that the phenomenon of anxiety is that feeling when we're estranged from the world in its totality. When anxiety arises, everything and everyone loses the ordinary, everyday sense of significance and manifests a number of symptoms that signal a real problem. Mostly what the symptoms indicate to us is that we're lacking something very humanly essential. But the idea that there is a specific object that will satisfy this feeling of lack is imaginary. In our mortality, stretched out here between birth and death, and porous as we are as living beings, we will never be able to locate anything that will satisfy our desires.
Another additive way Lacan conceives of the uncanniness of anxiety is "as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other." Here, we relate our experience of anxiety to the desire of some other illusory figure trying to burden us with that desire. The way out of this anxiety is through love.
"Love is the sublimation of desire," Lacan says. In love, we confess our feelings of lack to the person we love. Of course, there are unhealthy and healthy forms of love. In the unhealthy form, the relationship generates more unnecessary anxiety. In healthy relationships, there is a mutual recognition of the insistent lack.
Fair warning. Lacan's seminars are cryptic, fortunately less so than the texts he actually wrote. If you're going to bother to read the seminars, go into it like listening to a jazz performance.
Another additive way Lacan conceives of the uncanniness of anxiety is "as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other." Here, we relate our experience of anxiety to the desire of some other illusory figure trying to burden us with that desire. The way out of this anxiety is through love.
"Love is the sublimation of desire," Lacan says. In love, we confess our feelings of lack to the person we love. Of course, there are unhealthy and healthy forms of love. In the unhealthy form, the relationship generates more unnecessary anxiety. In healthy relationships, there is a mutual recognition of the insistent lack.
Fair warning. Lacan's seminars are cryptic, fortunately less so than the texts he actually wrote. If you're going to bother to read the seminars, go into it like listening to a jazz performance.
November 15, 2022
"[...] convém que o analista seja aquele que, minimamente, não importa por qual vertente, por qual borda, tenha feito seu desejo entrar suficientemente nesse a irredutível para oferecer à questão do conceito da angústia uma garantia real"
June 23, 2021
The number of stars corresponds to the percent of my comprehension of Lacan’s disquisition.
November 14, 2022
Tal y como su título lo amerita, seminario que me dejó mucha angustia y frustración ante mi falta y la no compresión.
January 22, 2024
Excelente
December 17, 2024
One of the most readable of the Seminars and, obviously, a natural companion to Seminar XI.
April 30, 2025
pra mim é a magnum opus dele
May 14, 2025
impecable. de las temáticas más interesantes que aborda y lo hace de una forma espectacular.
June 5, 2025
Really helpful to have a seminar focused on a single, pretty narrow topic (although Lacan always moves in kind of broad concentric circles around his topics).
Want to read
March 15, 2025me estás haciendo sufrir Lacan.......... :(
Leídos:
• La angustia en la red de los significantes
• Pasaje al acto y acting out
• La angustia, señal de lo real
Leídos:
• La angustia en la red de los significantes
• Pasaje al acto y acting out
• La angustia, señal de lo real
August 2, 2023
Great second reading!
We see the full development of the object a here and it is very exciting. I finally see the revolutionary step (philosophically) taken by this discovery. Hegel talks smack about “causes” and Lacan is able to return the cause of desire (the cause of everything) as the object a to its rightful place, positioning the human subject firmly in the inescapable real of the Real - truly dialectic materialism.
One element that really came to life for me in this reading was finally comprehending one form of the object a as the gaze of the Other - or the omnipresence of the gaze - as a source of anxiety. When the fantasy structure’s efficacy fades and the Real comes forth, it is not always a closeness to the objective world that is a source of angst but instead the infinite distance from it; when the fantasy stops operating and we see the gaze all around us - faces and eyes appear everywhere, on the walls, in piles of clothes, on the concrete - anywhere there are spots and stains a face can appear. This is the Real that shines through in certain modes of anxiety, not a proximity to the objective world but a fundamental alienation where the true fantasy of our existence is revealed, the fantasy that we do not live in a fantasy but have a grasp of the real as a reality.
We see the full development of the object a here and it is very exciting. I finally see the revolutionary step (philosophically) taken by this discovery. Hegel talks smack about “causes” and Lacan is able to return the cause of desire (the cause of everything) as the object a to its rightful place, positioning the human subject firmly in the inescapable real of the Real - truly dialectic materialism.
One element that really came to life for me in this reading was finally comprehending one form of the object a as the gaze of the Other - or the omnipresence of the gaze - as a source of anxiety. When the fantasy structure’s efficacy fades and the Real comes forth, it is not always a closeness to the objective world that is a source of angst but instead the infinite distance from it; when the fantasy stops operating and we see the gaze all around us - faces and eyes appear everywhere, on the walls, in piles of clothes, on the concrete - anywhere there are spots and stains a face can appear. This is the Real that shines through in certain modes of anxiety, not a proximity to the objective world but a fundamental alienation where the true fantasy of our existence is revealed, the fantasy that we do not live in a fantasy but have a grasp of the real as a reality.
March 26, 2022
I began this work enjoying it quite a bit. All the philosophical references lead me to believe I was in for a rewarding and well articulated reflection... Big mistake. By the middle of it I was going to give this work three stars ("I liked it"). By the end, well, only one ("I did not like it"). Why not? In the midst of a few good and indeed insightful ideas (the minus phi status of the object that produces desire and leads to anxiety, how we do not know what we are for the other and thus do not know what the other desires from us, etc.) there was an F-ton of counterproductive diagrams and sexual verbiage. "Oh, because the phallus this, and the castrated person that", and so on and so on (Zizek)... Simply put: no more Lacan for me.
August 17, 2025
This was a long, tough read, and i would need an even longer and more careful reread to have anything remotely intelligent to add about this seminar, but it did crystallize a few concepts for me; very methodical while also being massively packed with digressions and turns, the objet a is painstakingly constructed here between subject & Other, anxiety & desire, as both a niggling remainder and a sacred offering.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews