Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V

Le Séminaire #5

by Jacques Lacan, Russell Grigg (Translator), Jacques-Alain Miller (Editor)

When I decided to explore the question of Witz, or wit, with you this year, I undertook a small enquiry. It will come as no surprise at all that I began by questioning a poet. This is a poet who introduces the dimension of an especially playful wit that runs through his work, as much in his prose as in more poetic forms, and which he brings into play even when he happens to be talking about mathematics, for he is also a mathematician. I am referring to Raymond Queneau. While we were exchanging our first remarks on the matter he told me a joke. It's a joke about exams, about the university entrance exams, if you like. We have a candidate and we have an examiner.
- "Tell me," says the examiner, "about the battle of Marengo."
The candidate pauses for a moment, with a dreamy air. "The battle of Marengo...? Bodies everywhere! It's terrible... Wounded everywhere! It's horrible..."
"But," says the examiner, "Can't you tell me anything more precise about this battle?"
The candidate thinks for a moment, then replies, "A horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies."
The examiner, surprised, seeks to test him a little further and says, "In that case, can you tell me about the battle of Fontenoy?"
"Oh!" says the candidate, "a horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies." The examiner, strategically, asked the candidate to talk about the battle of Trafalgar. The candidate replies, "Dead everywhere! A blood bath.... Wounded everywhere! Hundreds of them...."
"But my good man, can't you tell me anything more precise about this battle?"
"A horse..."
"Excuse me, I would have you note that the battle of Trafalgar is a naval battle."
"Whoah! Whoah!" says the candidate. "Back up, Neddy!" The value of this joke is, to my mind, that it enables us to decompose, I believe, what is at stake in a witticism.
(Extract from Chapter VI)

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, France, Theory, 20th Century

527 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Jacques-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.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Formations of the Unconscious” are not self-evident objects. (Is anything in psychoanalysis?) The early Freud—the one guiltiest of perpetrating so-called depth psychology—postulated that the unconscious could only be glimpsed via the pre-conscious, hence the clinical salience of parapraxes and sundry other “mistakes.” As that rather vertical model came to be supplanted by the properly metapsychological topography of the id, ego, and superego, parapraxes retained their importance but the emphasis was shifted from revealing something ostensibly deeper to indicating something omnipresent and inescapable. The hackneyed, burlesque, and all-too-palatable myth of the hapless human creature motivated by dark, mysterious, chthonic forces regrettably still persists today, despite Lacan’s most stringent critiques, but the world in general and the 20th century psychoanalytic cabal in particular univocally did not give a shit. So, just to be clear, these “unconscious formations” have nothing to do your precious repressions of tawdry lusts, focusing rather on what happens on the surface, whether you know it or not: namely, witticisms, forgetting, and parapraxes.

Seminar V is a very uneven offering. The first section, “The Freudian Structures of Wit,” is admittedly more engaging than Freud’s own floundering attempt to “explain” humor, but not by much. It’s not Lacan at his trailblazing best; there’s a fair amount of treading water and idly floating through previous seminars. However the rendering of the joke-work through the combinatory of structuralist linguistics provides him an opportunity to rehash the twin triads of desire/displacement/metonymy and meaning/condensation/metaphor. It is also where the elementary cell of the graph of desire—the button tie or quilting point, as you please—begins to unfold. And, in fact, witnessing the evolution of The Graph (there are over TWENTY treatments!)* provides a potent dose of jouis-sense; it’s not exactly made lucid in Ecrits, even if the recalcitrant knots are there to help you hoist yourself up. What Lacan elsewhere refers to as the “imaginary wall” of the narcissistic relation in the L-schema finds a redeployment here as “the treadmill of idle chatter” running nonstop between the “I” and the metonymic object (spoiler: it’s the phallus) and fatefully interfering with the fully symbolic circuit whereby one receives the message from the same locus as the code, that is, the Other. A lot of juice is to be squeezed from this little fruit of anticipation and retroaction, so even if the first section isn’t the tastiest, consider it a recipe in the works.

In “The Logic of Castration,” Lacan continues to clear his throat and occasionally something novel comes up. Much of the material can be found in Seminars III and (the scandalously neglected) IV, but I’ll remind you again that accusations of Lacan’s inscrutability come from those who haven’t read (enough of) him. Not to flirt with Deleuzian heresy, but where there is repetition there is difference. None of the ideas or concepts spring fully formed, they are developed and redeveloped in stages across different contexts. So really, if adumbrations of foreclosure, castration, and the Name-of-the-Father have become rote, you’re on the right track. The two sessions dedicated to the three moments of the Oedipus complex are comprehensive summaries of Lacan’s contributions and provide much clarification. But I believe it is only within the session “From Image to Signifier—in Pleasure and in Reality” that a definitive pivot toward new challenges is made. To wit:

“What are we observing? A double movement. On the one hand, the experience of reality introduces, in the form of the image of the body, an illusory and deceptive element as the essential foundation for mapping the subject in relation to reality. On the other hand, the margin that this experience opens up for the child gives him the possibility of entering into another field and acquiring, in the opposite direction, his first ego identifications.”

(As an aside, I can’t wait for Seminar IX: Identification, because it is a strange and fascinating beast.)

And:

“What is the nature of this object insofar as the subject has a relationship with it? The subject imaginarily identifies with it in a totally radical manner, not with this or that of its object functions that supposedly correspond to this or that partial tendency, as they say. Something requires that somewhere at this level there be a pole that represents in the imaginary what is always evasive, what is induced by a certain tendency of the object to take flight into the imaginary, because of the existence of signifiers. This pole is an object. It's pivotal, central in the entire dialectic of perversions, neuroses and even, purely and simply, in subjective development. It has a name. It's called the phallus.”

Here is the oldest Lacanian keystone, the mirror phase, in articulation with the topic of the first two seminars, the ego, but what’s added is precisely what will be named the dialectic of desire and, the title of the next section, “The Significance of the Phallus.” I do find it strange that even at this point, with $<>a traipsing all over the place, Lacan’s concept of fantasy remains underdeveloped and objet petit a unspoken. Maybe next year…

The next section, “The Significance of the Phallus,” gives more of the good, gets better. I don’t know if Lacan maintains the notion of “insignias of the ideal” with regard to the formation of the ego-ideal through the process of identification, but it’s mesmerizing. “The Formulas of Desire” presents the components of The Graph in a compact linear manner, allowing Lacan to elaborate on their sordid relationships, functions, and exclusions. If you can’t swallow the mathemes but like the taste, it is here that they are smashed to pulpy explicative bits and dolloped on the spoon for you. The discussion of the laughter/scowl dialectic is ultimately too farfetched, in my opinion, but it’s inessential. The reminder—and bedrock of psychoanalysis—that symptoms are “satisfaction turned upside down” is always pertinent. From there the connection between various other quotable motifs becomes clearer: inasmuch as we “enjoy our symptom”—and remembering that the injunction to enjoy comes from the superego—we are confined to the miserable loop of empty speech, automatically repeating everything that keeps us at a distance from desire. And: “It is not the law that bars the subject’s access to jouissance, but pleasure.” Relations between the primary process and the pleasure principle are hardly transparent and reciprocal. What is beyond the pleasure principle is still very much part of the primary process, and much of jouissance is experienced as painful.

The final section, “The Dialectic of Desire and Demand in the Clinical Study and Treatment of the Neuroses,” has a strong focus on hysteria and obsession, as the ponderous title suggests. Desire may be the preeminent unconscious formation, constructed as it is through the discourse and desire of the Other, in relation to which the position we assume thoroughly determines us as subjects. The 22nd and 23rd sessions regarding desire and obsessional structure are the densest and most rewarding in the Seminar. If the previous sessions were a mixture of putting his cards on the table and misdirection, this is when the magic is performed. I’ll leave you with a long summative extract in lieu of abracadabra:

“The fact is that desire is organized by signifiers - but, of course, inside this phenomenon the subject tries to express, to manifest in an effect of signifiers as such, what is happening in his own approach to the signified... Freud's work is an attempt at a pact between the being of man and nature... The subject's relationship to nature comes to be formulated internally to the experience he has of speech. His relationship to life comes to be symbolized by the phallus signifier, this lure he extracts from forms of life... It's the signifier par excellence of man's relationship to the signified and is in a privileged position as a consequence. Man's insertion into sexual desire is destined to a special problematic, the primary feature of which is that it has to find a place in something that preceded it, which is the dialectic of demand, insofar as demand always demands something that is more than the satisfaction which it's appealing to, something that goes beyond. Hence the problematic and ambiguous character of the place in which desire is located. This place is always beyond demand inasmuch as demand aims for the satisfaction of need, and it lies on this side of demand inasmuch as the latter, by virtue of being articulated in symbolic terms, goes beyond all the satisfactions to which it appeals, inasmuch as it's a demand for love, which targets the being of the Other and aims to obtain from the Other this essential presentification, inasmuch as the Other gives his very being, which lies beyond all possible satisfaction and is precisely what is aimed at in love.”
______________________
*I collected the graphs in the sequence they were presented into 2 pages with session and page number references. Enjoy. https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/...

[Peter Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacques Lacan's seminars have always been published in a sporadic, out-of-sequence manner. The first seminar to be published in both French and English was Seminar XI, for instance. The English translation of Seminar XIX only came out in August 2018, on the heels of Seminar V in 2017. Establishing a sense of the development of Lacan's ideas can be hard, given both this random choice of publication dates and the gaps in the record. How nice it will be when everything is available to read in its proper sequence.

I should start by saying that this work beautifully translated and produced. While many readers like Bruce Fink's translations of Lacan into English, I tend to regard Russell Grigg as the best. Both are excellent when it comes to clear and readable prose, but I feel that Grigg's theoretical grasp of Lacan's work as a whole is superior, and that this is reflected, in turn, in how he presents Lacan in translation.

One thing that is immediately noticeable about Seminar V is just how incredibly long it is. Lacan's other seminars usually clock in at somewhere between 150 and 300 pages, whereas this one is a massive 500 pages long. The reason is that so much of the seminar is taken up not only with commentary on Freud's work, but also a myriad of other contemporary psychoanalysts - Klein, Jones, Bouvet, etc. - that are now mainly of interest only to clinicians and historians.

At the heart of Seminar V is Lacan's exploration of the subject and Other, particularly how these connect through the symbolic order. Part 1, for instance, shows how intertwined this pair really is through a consideration of jokes and comedy: for a joke to work, Lacan points out, it ultimately has to be acknowledged by the Other. Part 2 explores how this idea relates to the Oedipus complex, with Lacan increasingly transforming this Freudian idea into something symbolic and formal. Part 3 looks at the difference between a demand (what is expressed through signifiers) and desire (what the subject actually wants), and how human desire is always mediated through language. Part 4 focuses more attention on the Other, especially in light of neurotic obsession.

Seminar V contains some important ideas that belong to what turns out to be the end of the "early" Lacan period, of the Lacan who is heavily influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss's linguistic structuralism. There are rumblings in Seminar VI that something is about to change, resulting in the dramatic rupture that is Seminar VII on the topic of ethics and psychoanalysis, probably Lacan's greatest and important work. That will lead, in turn, to Seminar XI, in which Lacan returns to the questions of subject and Other presented here in order to begin a profound questioning of the viability of psychoanalysis itself. For that reason alone, Seminar V is important.

Nonetheless, I can't give this book more than three stars, because while it hints at the aforementioned breakthroughs, they have not yet even close to breaking the surface of Lacan's thought. What is striking about Seminar V is just how much this Lacan remains an avid disciple of Freud (and Lévi-Strauss) rather than a true innovator, so that while there are numerous glimmers of something more, they are draped in a language of psychoanalytic convention that I found really tedious to slog through, especially in the latter parts of the book.

Overall, then, Seminar V is one of those books you read mainly for historical purposes, to see where the seeds of what will become great ideas originated from, before they truly germinated and came into their own.

[George]

This seminar is huge and diffuse. It's mostly held together by the phallus, as it were; the phallus is the signifier of signification, the point that makes signification possible, the signifier of desire qua a relationship to signification. "The phallus is the signifier of the signified in general" (223). And Lacan never wants us to forget that this is Freud's discovery: "Freud is positing there a pivot-signifier around which the entire dialectic of what the subject must conquer in himself, in his own being, revolves" (222). There are many modest moments here.

The text also moves through the topics that Lacan covered in a number of the central écrits, starting with "The Instance of the Letter" and moving through "Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire;" that second one was written four years after the conclusion of this seminar, but it is where Lacan definitively formulates (and where most people encounter) the graph of desire, whose actual genesis is recorded step by step in this seminar (from a simpler graph of message, code, self, and other; the folding of the desire of the other over the signifying chain) and in a valuable appendix that records one of Lacan's late night sessions patiently re-explaining the graph.

It contrasts dense structuralist expositions with beautiful vignettes and memorable aphorisms. I really love the discussion of Dora: "For a subject to expect such things from the mouth of an analyst, there has to be an entire cultural atmosphere and none of this had been formed as yet. In actual fact, Dora does not know what to expect, she is taken by the hand, and Freud tells her, 'Speak,' and there is nothing else on the horizon of an experience conducted in this way – unless implicitly, for, merely by virtue of the fact that she is told to speak, something of the order of truth has to come into play" (303–304). That was a precious moment in the history of the formation of the discipline of listening (psychoanalysis), which Lacan laments somewhat, but the implication is that we should always be trying to recapture that kind of openness, an openness to what happens when you are told to speak, when you are asked for your truth.

Merely a page later, Lacan offers up a choice and provocative aphorism: "What I am calling a symptom is anything that is analysable" (305). For a moment it seems like this opens up symptomatology outside of language, but mostly Lacan seems to be interested in just how much in our world should really be understood as entering into a signifying chain. Here are some more examples that I extract from the text to line them up:

"Repression can be conceptualised only insofar as it's linked to an articulated signifying chain. Whenever you have repression in neurosis, it's insofar as the subject does not wish to recognise something that it would be necessary to recognise – and this term 'necessary' always carries an element of signifying articulation that cannot be otherwise conceived than as internal to the coherence of a discourse" (217).

"All the little electrical signals, the little buzzers and little bells which are drummed into the poor animals so as to make them secrete, on command, their various physiological productions, their gastric juices – they are all actually signifiers, really, and nothing but. They are the fabrication of experimenters for whom the world is very clearly constituted by a number of objective relations – a world an important part of which is formed by what one can rightly single out as properly signifying" (319).

"It doesn't seem that one dwells enough on the fact that properly speaking there is only one kind of thing that, in general terms, can be annulled [i.e. in sublation], and that is a signifier" (323).

"One doesn't undo anything that is not a signifier. There is not the slightest conceivable undoing at the animal level, and if we did find something that resembles it, we would say that it's the beginnings of symbolic formation" (459).

There are all these things that are really signifiers, but in the end the point is to see how they are grounded in the structures provided by the phallus, which is somehow a signifier without being any of these other things, or indeed any 'thing' at all. It is "not a form ... neither a fantasy, nor an image, nor an object, not even a part object, not even an internal one. It's a signifier ... It's the signifier of desire" (352–353). He spends a significant amount of the rest of the seminar worrying about what 'desire' can mean after offering it as the content of the phallus, and one substantive answer might be this:

"Every desire in its pure state is something that, uprooted from the soil of needs, assumes the form of an absolute condition in relation to the Other. It's the margin or result of the subtraction, as it were, of the requirements of need from the demand for love. Conversely, desire presents itself as what, in the demand for love, rebels against being reduced to a need, because in reality it satisfies nothing other than itself, that is, desire as an absolute condition" (362).

But this problem (the dialectic of demand and desire) is endlessly (interminably) thorny and motivates a series of interesting reflections that spin out and out without resolving on the theoretical level in this early Lacanian text. There are multiple references to Hegel and some slightly quieter ones to Heidegger (who is explicitly present in "The Instance of the Letter") as well as some badmouthing of utopian socialists, detailed analysis of nineteenth-century French novelistic realism and a wondering aloud about whether Islam would provide as elegant an account of "obsessional phenomenology" as Christianity's Logos (477). I can't believe it was only translated in 2017.

[Billie Pritchett]

Not the best way to log this, writing off the cuff, but here goes, based on impressions. Lacan sets out to tell a story about the constitution of the unconscious, the inroad being jokes and how they rely on the Other (in Lacan's language) recognizing meaning beyond the literal meaning. Lacan attests the fact that metaphor and metonymy, relations which are veiled in witticisms, show that the unconscious itself has a linguistic structure, albeit, as with jokes, one that is not immediately revealed to us and which, to uncover, necessitates psychoanalysis.

Lacan doesn't just want to get at the structural features of the unconscious. He wants to describe how it emerges. According to him, it happens when we move through the various developmental stages until we arrive the earliest stages of sexual development, where we're confronted with how familiar relations function in our understanding of how the world works. At this point, either a person develops a healthy disposition regarding the fact that lack and need are essential to human being or else this person develops a pathology, a form of neurosis on the lighter side, psychosis on the heavier side.

All that I've written is far too brief. I could have done the text better justice. About the text's usefulness, however, don't take my word for it. If you're interested, check it out for yourself.

[Dries]

Lessen van 7, 14 en 21 mei 1958

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just when I thought I was out, he pulled me back in.

Lacan tends to do this in his seminars. Midway through I don’t understand half of what he is saying because I lose interest as it gets heavily clinical and centered on the training of actual psychoanalysts (even though much of his audience were philosophers and other “cultural studies”- type academics). But the beginning took me to some very interesting places giving me a chapter for my book and the end hit me with some heavenly speculative “nonsense”. The “margin of deviation” was strong with that last section.

What if the commandment “thou will love thy neighbor as thyself” wasn’t just a commandment, but instead a judgement or conviction, “thou will inhere thyself to the code of the Other”.

To be chosen by God is not a blessing, it is an infinite sentence. Thou shalt follow me. But why me?!

[Paulo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eu devorei esse seminário. Que experiência incrível acompanhar o que foi a experiência intelectual do lacanismo em sua origem. Os anos de 1957 e 1958 foram provavelmente uns dos mais importantes para a psicanálise: não apenas foram aqueles em que as bases do ensino de Lacan foram lançadas (só pensar que o seminário é acompanhado de um total de quatro textos dos Escritos), mas os anos mais inspirados para a crítica dos modos de se fazer clínica. Enfim, bora pro próximo.

[Joaquin Altamiranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaja. Estaba loco este francés.

[Adam Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-blowing. Obviously.

[Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

No sé que opinión merece esta lectura: ¿Apasionante? ¿Complicada? ¿Esclarecedora? ¿Analítica? ¿Lógica? ¿Sencilla? ¿Oscura? ¿? Lo que me queda claro es que es exigente y sobre todo de una calidad intelectual, crítica y analítica que no puede ser dejada de lado por cualquier amante del saber; está a la altura de cualquier texto filosófico que se precie de ser invaluable. Si la lectura es realizada con fines de "formación psicoanalítica", lo importante es estudiarla en francés y directamente en las estenografías para no vérselas con las dificultades que presentan las traducciones nacionales de dudosa calidad.