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Le Séminaire #11
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
258 people are currently reading
6708 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Lacan
161 books1,217 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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April 6, 2021
So it's like this... Somewhere about halfway through my second reading of Lacan's seminar on Freud's fundamental concepts, I not only started experiencing more frequent moments of clarity and understanding, but a wider pattern started to emerge and make sense to me. Lacan's teachings and the way he presents them, parallel, or are similar to, the manner in which we find ourselves reading them and trying to understand his thoughts, while at the same time also similar to the path of discovery analysands find themselves traveling during analysis, and ultimately, and this is where it really all ties together, similar to desire's continual path out and around objet petit a and back without ever gaining its object but still all the while attaining its goal.
I'm not claiming this as an original thought, but I am claiming that I myself hadn't quite put it all together like this before.
Let me just say that I previously went through 2-3 years of therapy that was more psychoanalytic than it was any other style. And looking back at those sessions I can see now how they consisted of this circling around areas of desired knowledge about myself, circling and circling but never quite obtaining. And yet each circle brought more and more familiarity, more and more "wisdom" (for lack of a better word) about the nodes and navels that made me tick, for better and for worse, along with the paths twisting between them.
And as Lacan points out in this seminar, and even more in his seventh seminar on ethics, when I started therapy, whether I realized it or not, I basically was coming in with a demand for The Subject Who is Supposed to Know: "Tell me what is wrong with me. Tell me why I feel broken and how to fix myself and what I should do!" And of course, even if the analyst knew what was wrong and what to do (although really, how could they ever?) and told me right there on that very first day, it would have done little to no good. Because that object would have presented as "not this," because my desire was not the same as my demand. My desire was to have allowance to circle those nodes and navels and travel those paths over and over as I found some form of satisfaction in the act.
And reading Lacan has been a similar experience, which I have felt especially strongly while re-reading this seminar for the second time. I believe this was the very first work I read by Lacan and that initial experience was like trying to figure out why you keep doing something over and over again even though you don't really want to and it makes no sense. It was muddy and confusing, though with glimmers of clarity. Just enough glimmers I suppose to satisfy some desire and keep me coming back, reading more Lacan and Lacanian works, circling around them over and over, picking up more and more familiarity as my desire was satisfied in the journey itself.
I've come to believe Lacan is complicated because he wants to be complicated. Because he knows that if he just told everyone his ideas straight up, those ideas would never gain the power they do by having to wrestle with them, by circling around them over and over, to ultimately make them your own. In a way, his teaching forces you to learn the tools necessary to apply them not only to his teachings but to yourself, and ultimately, for his main audience which were analysts in training, to their future practice.
I am not sure if I will ever feel comfortable saying that I "understand" Lacan. But each time I read a work of his, or a work related to his ideas, I come away with a bit more knowledge of what he is trying to say, and more than a few tools and nuggets that I can apply to myself and the world around me.
I really can't ask for more than that.
And if I did, my demand would be lying to my desire again.
I'm not claiming this as an original thought, but I am claiming that I myself hadn't quite put it all together like this before.
Let me just say that I previously went through 2-3 years of therapy that was more psychoanalytic than it was any other style. And looking back at those sessions I can see now how they consisted of this circling around areas of desired knowledge about myself, circling and circling but never quite obtaining. And yet each circle brought more and more familiarity, more and more "wisdom" (for lack of a better word) about the nodes and navels that made me tick, for better and for worse, along with the paths twisting between them.
And as Lacan points out in this seminar, and even more in his seventh seminar on ethics, when I started therapy, whether I realized it or not, I basically was coming in with a demand for The Subject Who is Supposed to Know: "Tell me what is wrong with me. Tell me why I feel broken and how to fix myself and what I should do!" And of course, even if the analyst knew what was wrong and what to do (although really, how could they ever?) and told me right there on that very first day, it would have done little to no good. Because that object would have presented as "not this," because my desire was not the same as my demand. My desire was to have allowance to circle those nodes and navels and travel those paths over and over as I found some form of satisfaction in the act.
And reading Lacan has been a similar experience, which I have felt especially strongly while re-reading this seminar for the second time. I believe this was the very first work I read by Lacan and that initial experience was like trying to figure out why you keep doing something over and over again even though you don't really want to and it makes no sense. It was muddy and confusing, though with glimmers of clarity. Just enough glimmers I suppose to satisfy some desire and keep me coming back, reading more Lacan and Lacanian works, circling around them over and over, picking up more and more familiarity as my desire was satisfied in the journey itself.
I've come to believe Lacan is complicated because he wants to be complicated. Because he knows that if he just told everyone his ideas straight up, those ideas would never gain the power they do by having to wrestle with them, by circling around them over and over, to ultimately make them your own. In a way, his teaching forces you to learn the tools necessary to apply them not only to his teachings but to yourself, and ultimately, for his main audience which were analysts in training, to their future practice.
I am not sure if I will ever feel comfortable saying that I "understand" Lacan. But each time I read a work of his, or a work related to his ideas, I come away with a bit more knowledge of what he is trying to say, and more than a few tools and nuggets that I can apply to myself and the world around me.
I really can't ask for more than that.
And if I did, my demand would be lying to my desire again.
January 14, 2018
I am going to talk to you about the Lacan. Lucky for you, in this review I will demonstrate such an unquestionable comprehension of everything fundamentally psychoanalytical that not only will you finally be persuaded to read this book but also all debilitating misperceptions and insuperable aporias and smug dismissals and congenital ineptness will be rectified by the irresistible prowess of my lucidly sagacious yet easily digested and wholesomely uplifting discourse and you will then have been baptized in the fountain of knowledge to emerge forever purified of error.
September 21, 2019
First review - Rating:1 star
To say this is addressed to nonspeicalists, and relies on references to extremely obscure authors like Cornelius Agrippa and references work by Merleau-Ponty (which I doubt many nonspeicalists have read) is ridiculous! How is anybody going to understand this? Even the vague references to dreams sampled from Freud's magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams are mentioned in passing with very little semblance to their actual elucidation. Whilst authors like Zizek, Copjec, Bruce Fink and others seem to be able to pull apart the theory from the abstruse style, I cannot.
I will perhaps return to this work, but for now it's contents remains a mystery to me.
2nd Reading - "The art of listening is almost as important as that of saying the right thing" (123)
Okay, so Lacan is pretty fucking difficult, that's a given. Below I'll post my summary of the sections of the seminar, and I hope people can chip in in the comments and provide me with some help understanding the great master. I can only apologise for any vagaries and gaps in knowledge.
In this set of seminars, conducted in 1964, Lacan tries to get at the heart of what Psychoanalysis is. For Lacan, Psychoanalysis is rooted in four, Freudian concepts - the unconscious, repetition, transference and finally the drive. The lectures are then set out in these four themes, with a set of lectures devoted to one of the four aspects, all bar the first lecture, 'Excommunication'.
Excommunication - Lacan explains why psychoanalysis is a science, despite the analytic community oftentimes being similar to a religious community, which excommunicates heretics. Lacan of course was excommunicated by the IPA for his insistence on variable length sessions, and Lacan was also famously interrupted by Ernest Jones, when Lacan was delivering the early version of 'The Mirror Stage'. Unfortunately, for Lacan, despite this lecture, the Lacanian community has become more cultish than the community he was criticising, with the longstanding beef between Freudian revisionists of varying shades (characterised by the legacy of Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) and the classical Freudians (characterised by folks like Anna Freud) still brewing around this time. Lacan is reflective on his own excommunication in this essay however, drawing similarities between his expulsion from the IPA to Baruch Spinozas excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Whilst Lacan pushes back against the claim that the psychoanalytic community "is a church" (4), he does want to rescue the four concepts from the analytic community's abandoment of them, and instead carry the Freudian torch, by taking it and highlighting how Freudianism fits with modern linguistics.
The Unconscious and Repetition -"The linguistic structure assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable" (21)
"Man's desire is the desire of the Other" (36)
This set of lectures draws on the themes of the title, with Lacan pushing back against the accusations of him being a Heideggerian due to his linguistic focus. For Lacan, the unconscious "thinks in our place" and situates our subjectivity, in a very similar way to Heidegger's arguments about Being and its relation to language (remember Lacan's repetition of Heidegger's famous statement that "In language man dwells".
Lacan here wants to question our ideas around truth also, with him rejecting playing with the idea of there being "truth in lying" (38). He appears to be trying to reveal the truth inherent in speech, or the unconscious, which is expressed through language. For example, if I were to lie about my sexual performance, the 'truth' behind this statement is that unconsciously I hold a deep seated insecurity about my sexual performance, and this truth would only be revealed through analysis.
Whilst analysis gets at this Other, this 'unconscious' we speak of, it does so not in an idealist manner. In fact, Lacan aggressively rejects the notion of idealism in psychoanalysis, something which isn't helped by Freud's talk of mental representations (Vorstellungsrepresentanz), which reads almost Berkeleyan at times. No, analysis is not idealism for Lacan, because its praxis is "orientated towards... the heart of experience" (54). The real is an in itself, apprehended through analysis of signs, like unveiling a mask or filtering out a chemical from a mixture. This kind of claim I can only attribute to Lacan's interest in phenomenology, wherein experience is interpreted through a realist perspective, without the kind of mechanical materialist outlook, nor a leap of faith - a la Descartes, another figure which Lacan speaks through in these lectures.
One of the key ideas in this section of lectures is the idea of 'the tuche', which is an Aristotelian term for apprehending the Real. The Real is beyond simple 'return', as Freud's dictum of the return of the repressed tells us, things don't happen again as identical events. Rather, they return in a fragmented and confused manner.
On the Gaze as Object Petit a - "Man's desire is the desire of the Other"
Here, in this set of lectures, Lacan attempts to explain his ideas on the Gaze, and distance himself from Merleau Ponty's and Sartre's phenomenology. For Lacan, the gaze is not a literal, real gaze like that of Sartre's (think of the example of a peeping tom being caught in Being and Nothingness), but rather it is for Lacan an imagined gaze, a gaze "imagined in me by the Other" (84). Lacan then discusses his ideas around the gaze with some illustrations and discussions of geometry and topology. The gaze is represented through art, a theme which has been picked up on my film and art theorists in the Lacanian tradition (see Zizek and Copjec). The eye, for Lacan, may act as an object petit a, insofar as it involves "lack" (104). This objet a is a the object cause of desire, the Other which is evident through the gaze. Simply put, it is that which we cannot attain, the 'apple of the eye'.
Transference and the Drive - "I will ask analysts this: 'have you ever felt, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling a clay on influence?'" (126).
These lectures see Lacan shifting his focus to rejecting Szasz's attack on transference, with Lacan standing stubbornly in favour of the idea that transference doesn't require a subject-presumed-to-know. Here, we can see Lacan's idea of the analyst acting as a mirror for the analysand, and being a tool for the analysand, rather than an authoritative figure, like that of Winnicott's parent model of analysis, which is vital to the Lacanian approach, and provides a much more non-hierarchical approach which is too often overlooked.
Cormac Gallagher explains this very well in his summary notes of the seminar, noting "The concern with the scientific nature of psychoanalysis had occupied
many analysts since Freud and one of Lacan's principal interlocutors in this
and other Seminars, Thomas Szasz, argued that it could only achieve this
status by conforming to the objective norms of the physical sciences. In
particular Szasz felt that the whole notion of the transference, which
consisted for him in deliberately leading the analysand into error and then
correcting him on the basis of the analyst's superior knowledge, had to be
abandoned in favour of an honest reciprocity between the two people in the
analytic situation. Lacan's wager is that he can construct a science which does not
abandon the fundamental tenets of analysis, for example, that it involves one
person who is suffering coming to address himself to another subject who is
presumed to know. To accept Szasz's proposition that psychoanalysis is a
science only if it has objective realities against which there can be measured
the correctness of the analyst's as opposed to the analysand's statements is to
reduce psychoanalysis to some sort of cognitive-behavioural therapy and
eliminate any reference to the four concepts that ground its theory and
practice." (see LACAN'S SUMMARY OF SEMINAR XI* pg9 by Cormac Gallagher)
Part of the focus on transference through speech also leads Lacan to separating the "enunciation" from the "statement", wherein he spearates the signifiers from their Unconscious meaning.
I - Am lying to you. Again, think back to Lacan's critique of simplistic notions of truth as being different to the truth in analysis, and also Lacan's critique of the Cartesian 'I'.
Repeating his famous dictum that "the unconscious is structured like a language", Lacan attacks Carl Jung's desexualisation of the libido and his idea that the solution to the unconscious it to be found in history, with some primitive mental ideas.
Related to this, Lacan also takes aims at the translation of Freud's 'drive', which Lacan sees as problematising the actual idea itself in the minds of many analysts. This is something Lacan devotes a whole ecrit to in the full collection of the Ecrits.
The Field of the Other and back to Transference - "Not wanting to desire is wanting to not desire " (253).
This set of lectures has a very Hegelian focus, with Lacan exploring the notions of Being, alienation and separation in a way which holds a great (albeit acknowledged) debt to Hegel. Alienation occurs with the sliding of signifiers, and anaphinis is explored as a consequence of the death of the subject. Whilst signifiers are empty and have no relation to themselves, rather they take meaning when imbued with a "pure non-meaning" at the root (251).
Much of this section remains fairly impenetrable, and my deficiency in Hegel only adds to this.
Conclusion - Lacan concludes, circling back to largely the same things he said in the first couple of lectures, rounding up discussing the scientificity of Psychoanalysis which proceeds from, not science, but "science itself".
To say this is addressed to nonspeicalists, and relies on references to extremely obscure authors like Cornelius Agrippa and references work by Merleau-Ponty (which I doubt many nonspeicalists have read) is ridiculous! How is anybody going to understand this? Even the vague references to dreams sampled from Freud's magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams are mentioned in passing with very little semblance to their actual elucidation. Whilst authors like Zizek, Copjec, Bruce Fink and others seem to be able to pull apart the theory from the abstruse style, I cannot.
I will perhaps return to this work, but for now it's contents remains a mystery to me.
2nd Reading - "The art of listening is almost as important as that of saying the right thing" (123)
Okay, so Lacan is pretty fucking difficult, that's a given. Below I'll post my summary of the sections of the seminar, and I hope people can chip in in the comments and provide me with some help understanding the great master. I can only apologise for any vagaries and gaps in knowledge.
In this set of seminars, conducted in 1964, Lacan tries to get at the heart of what Psychoanalysis is. For Lacan, Psychoanalysis is rooted in four, Freudian concepts - the unconscious, repetition, transference and finally the drive. The lectures are then set out in these four themes, with a set of lectures devoted to one of the four aspects, all bar the first lecture, 'Excommunication'.
Excommunication - Lacan explains why psychoanalysis is a science, despite the analytic community oftentimes being similar to a religious community, which excommunicates heretics. Lacan of course was excommunicated by the IPA for his insistence on variable length sessions, and Lacan was also famously interrupted by Ernest Jones, when Lacan was delivering the early version of 'The Mirror Stage'. Unfortunately, for Lacan, despite this lecture, the Lacanian community has become more cultish than the community he was criticising, with the longstanding beef between Freudian revisionists of varying shades (characterised by the legacy of Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) and the classical Freudians (characterised by folks like Anna Freud) still brewing around this time. Lacan is reflective on his own excommunication in this essay however, drawing similarities between his expulsion from the IPA to Baruch Spinozas excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Whilst Lacan pushes back against the claim that the psychoanalytic community "is a church" (4), he does want to rescue the four concepts from the analytic community's abandoment of them, and instead carry the Freudian torch, by taking it and highlighting how Freudianism fits with modern linguistics.
The Unconscious and Repetition -"The linguistic structure assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable" (21)
"Man's desire is the desire of the Other" (36)
This set of lectures draws on the themes of the title, with Lacan pushing back against the accusations of him being a Heideggerian due to his linguistic focus. For Lacan, the unconscious "thinks in our place" and situates our subjectivity, in a very similar way to Heidegger's arguments about Being and its relation to language (remember Lacan's repetition of Heidegger's famous statement that "In language man dwells".
Lacan here wants to question our ideas around truth also, with him rejecting playing with the idea of there being "truth in lying" (38). He appears to be trying to reveal the truth inherent in speech, or the unconscious, which is expressed through language. For example, if I were to lie about my sexual performance, the 'truth' behind this statement is that unconsciously I hold a deep seated insecurity about my sexual performance, and this truth would only be revealed through analysis.
Whilst analysis gets at this Other, this 'unconscious' we speak of, it does so not in an idealist manner. In fact, Lacan aggressively rejects the notion of idealism in psychoanalysis, something which isn't helped by Freud's talk of mental representations (Vorstellungsrepresentanz), which reads almost Berkeleyan at times. No, analysis is not idealism for Lacan, because its praxis is "orientated towards... the heart of experience" (54). The real is an in itself, apprehended through analysis of signs, like unveiling a mask or filtering out a chemical from a mixture. This kind of claim I can only attribute to Lacan's interest in phenomenology, wherein experience is interpreted through a realist perspective, without the kind of mechanical materialist outlook, nor a leap of faith - a la Descartes, another figure which Lacan speaks through in these lectures.
One of the key ideas in this section of lectures is the idea of 'the tuche', which is an Aristotelian term for apprehending the Real. The Real is beyond simple 'return', as Freud's dictum of the return of the repressed tells us, things don't happen again as identical events. Rather, they return in a fragmented and confused manner.
On the Gaze as Object Petit a - "Man's desire is the desire of the Other"
Here, in this set of lectures, Lacan attempts to explain his ideas on the Gaze, and distance himself from Merleau Ponty's and Sartre's phenomenology. For Lacan, the gaze is not a literal, real gaze like that of Sartre's (think of the example of a peeping tom being caught in Being and Nothingness), but rather it is for Lacan an imagined gaze, a gaze "imagined in me by the Other" (84). Lacan then discusses his ideas around the gaze with some illustrations and discussions of geometry and topology. The gaze is represented through art, a theme which has been picked up on my film and art theorists in the Lacanian tradition (see Zizek and Copjec). The eye, for Lacan, may act as an object petit a, insofar as it involves "lack" (104). This objet a is a the object cause of desire, the Other which is evident through the gaze. Simply put, it is that which we cannot attain, the 'apple of the eye'.
Transference and the Drive - "I will ask analysts this: 'have you ever felt, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling a clay on influence?'" (126).
These lectures see Lacan shifting his focus to rejecting Szasz's attack on transference, with Lacan standing stubbornly in favour of the idea that transference doesn't require a subject-presumed-to-know. Here, we can see Lacan's idea of the analyst acting as a mirror for the analysand, and being a tool for the analysand, rather than an authoritative figure, like that of Winnicott's parent model of analysis, which is vital to the Lacanian approach, and provides a much more non-hierarchical approach which is too often overlooked.
Cormac Gallagher explains this very well in his summary notes of the seminar, noting "The concern with the scientific nature of psychoanalysis had occupied
many analysts since Freud and one of Lacan's principal interlocutors in this
and other Seminars, Thomas Szasz, argued that it could only achieve this
status by conforming to the objective norms of the physical sciences. In
particular Szasz felt that the whole notion of the transference, which
consisted for him in deliberately leading the analysand into error and then
correcting him on the basis of the analyst's superior knowledge, had to be
abandoned in favour of an honest reciprocity between the two people in the
analytic situation. Lacan's wager is that he can construct a science which does not
abandon the fundamental tenets of analysis, for example, that it involves one
person who is suffering coming to address himself to another subject who is
presumed to know. To accept Szasz's proposition that psychoanalysis is a
science only if it has objective realities against which there can be measured
the correctness of the analyst's as opposed to the analysand's statements is to
reduce psychoanalysis to some sort of cognitive-behavioural therapy and
eliminate any reference to the four concepts that ground its theory and
practice." (see LACAN'S SUMMARY OF SEMINAR XI* pg9 by Cormac Gallagher)
Part of the focus on transference through speech also leads Lacan to separating the "enunciation" from the "statement", wherein he spearates the signifiers from their Unconscious meaning.
I - Am lying to you. Again, think back to Lacan's critique of simplistic notions of truth as being different to the truth in analysis, and also Lacan's critique of the Cartesian 'I'.
Repeating his famous dictum that "the unconscious is structured like a language", Lacan attacks Carl Jung's desexualisation of the libido and his idea that the solution to the unconscious it to be found in history, with some primitive mental ideas.
Related to this, Lacan also takes aims at the translation of Freud's 'drive', which Lacan sees as problematising the actual idea itself in the minds of many analysts. This is something Lacan devotes a whole ecrit to in the full collection of the Ecrits.
The Field of the Other and back to Transference - "Not wanting to desire is wanting to not desire " (253).
This set of lectures has a very Hegelian focus, with Lacan exploring the notions of Being, alienation and separation in a way which holds a great (albeit acknowledged) debt to Hegel. Alienation occurs with the sliding of signifiers, and anaphinis is explored as a consequence of the death of the subject. Whilst signifiers are empty and have no relation to themselves, rather they take meaning when imbued with a "pure non-meaning" at the root (251).
Much of this section remains fairly impenetrable, and my deficiency in Hegel only adds to this.
Conclusion - Lacan concludes, circling back to largely the same things he said in the first couple of lectures, rounding up discussing the scientificity of Psychoanalysis which proceeds from, not science, but "science itself".
October 22, 2015
Never having read a full text by Lacan, I was surprised at how accessible I found this particular collection. I later found out that his seminars are much more accessible than his actual books or formal writings. For this reason: 5 stars. One will get quite a bit from this text - enough to then make one's way through his theoretical writings and many texts that are written according to Lacanian theory (the gaze, transference, etc). Again, I was (and remain) very pleased at how much I personally took away from this book, having been intimidated to read him in the past.
December 25, 2020
Some words I think are in order.
(Probably could leave it at that. Says more than more says.)
Who do you think you are! "Unconscious"
Well what do you know! "Drive"
Says who! "Transference"
You can say that again! "Repetition"
These phatic interjections make nice shortcuts through the infinite tasks in the impossible profession of analysis. But it took me three years of deep diving to come up with them, three years of retracing the steps to get back to the beginning. Which is to say this Seminar drove the Lacanian spear through the wound of my mind and I've been digging at it ever since. Thinking with my instrument, as I hear Aristotle says.
Psychoanalysis is no use to the well-adjusted. Bully for you, you monsters of confidence! The wide straight path of thoughtless action successfully executed and commensurately rewarded is thine. May you never bear doubt's pall in the uninterruptible line of your light. For those not preternaturally endowed with certainty, there is the cold clarity that to doubt is nevertheless absolutely correct. Make no mistake, Lacan is a fiery partisan and scrupulous practitioner of the Enlightenment, though this is anything but blindingly obvious. It demands desire and interpretation, insistently. It provides the precious few clues needed to solve the riddle of belief, truth, meaning, science, and knowledge. I didn't say it gives the answer--to steal the divine fire that speaks in mortal tongues doesn't make an oracle--but it makes the question sensible. It carries it to term. Death drive is a life sentence. Read it and weep, for jouis.
Love,
A La Lettre
(Probably could leave it at that. Says more than more says.)
Who do you think you are! "Unconscious"
Well what do you know! "Drive"
Says who! "Transference"
You can say that again! "Repetition"
These phatic interjections make nice shortcuts through the infinite tasks in the impossible profession of analysis. But it took me three years of deep diving to come up with them, three years of retracing the steps to get back to the beginning. Which is to say this Seminar drove the Lacanian spear through the wound of my mind and I've been digging at it ever since. Thinking with my instrument, as I hear Aristotle says.
Psychoanalysis is no use to the well-adjusted. Bully for you, you monsters of confidence! The wide straight path of thoughtless action successfully executed and commensurately rewarded is thine. May you never bear doubt's pall in the uninterruptible line of your light. For those not preternaturally endowed with certainty, there is the cold clarity that to doubt is nevertheless absolutely correct. Make no mistake, Lacan is a fiery partisan and scrupulous practitioner of the Enlightenment, though this is anything but blindingly obvious. It demands desire and interpretation, insistently. It provides the precious few clues needed to solve the riddle of belief, truth, meaning, science, and knowledge. I didn't say it gives the answer--to steal the divine fire that speaks in mortal tongues doesn't make an oracle--but it makes the question sensible. It carries it to term. Death drive is a life sentence. Read it and weep, for jouis.
Love,
A La Lettre
August 6, 2021
My first direct encounter with Lacan. It's definitely difficult, but I still felt like I got *something* out of it. Subject Supposed to Know immediately struck me as an important and useful concept. I am looking forward to engaging more directly with his work in the future - but before going any farther with Lacan, I should do my own return to Freud...
September 19, 2017
kind of interesting ideas, terribly conceited delivery from a pompous windbag
May 22, 2022
I know less about Lacan now than before
March 25, 2022
God he's so annoying
July 13, 2022
I'm not sure I have anything to say that Goatboy's review doesn't already capture.... I will say that re-reading this I did notice the circling rhythm without ever grabbing the object, so to speak. He is highly allusive and any time I feel like I think I "get it", this feeling quickly evaporates when I try to bring what I think I know into speech. I am riddled with uncertainty, and it arrests my speech and prevents me from talking. How are people able to talk about anything at all? It is not so much that I feel like I have nothing at all to say, but that I am frozen by the realization that my sayings are always provisional and incomplete, able to be broken down, holes poked in it, by the Other. My subjectivity that emerged from the Other feels unsupported by it, or perhaps too wholly determined by it.
Isn't this the mark of true ignorance, though, to suture a thinker's thought to one's own? Doesn't Lacan want that though? I'm not sure what he wants, though... what does he want from me, what does he want from the reader? Is he telling me about myself? Or someone else? Are these opaque diagrams supposed to be elucidating? Because they're more like ancient Hieroglyphics found in the deserts of Egypt - I have no idea who they're addressed to, but surely someone, right? Not me, though. But I really wish I knew, I really wish I could grab onto Lacan's thought and make it my own, you know? I want to internalize it, assimilate it... but it feels like it will always be at least somewhat outside of me, always at least somewhat opaque, no matter how much I read.
:)
Isn't this the mark of true ignorance, though, to suture a thinker's thought to one's own? Doesn't Lacan want that though? I'm not sure what he wants, though... what does he want from me, what does he want from the reader? Is he telling me about myself? Or someone else? Are these opaque diagrams supposed to be elucidating? Because they're more like ancient Hieroglyphics found in the deserts of Egypt - I have no idea who they're addressed to, but surely someone, right? Not me, though. But I really wish I knew, I really wish I could grab onto Lacan's thought and make it my own, you know? I want to internalize it, assimilate it... but it feels like it will always be at least somewhat outside of me, always at least somewhat opaque, no matter how much I read.
:)
March 7, 2010
Basically - yes, Lacan lays down the gauntlet. Objet petit a represents a lack inherent to all human beings, whose incompleteness and early helplessness produce a quest for fulfillment beyond the satisfaction of biological needs - a fantasy that functions as the cause of desire; it determines whether desire will be expressed within the pleasure principle or 'beyond' in pursuitof unlimited jouissance, an impossible, and even deadly enjoyment.
Desire is mediated through language. The Real is beyond the scope of language. The Symbolic Order is constructed around the Big Other and constructs the non-positional disposition of the subject that forms an invisible unity with the positional consciousness. consciousness is directed toward an object other than itself - also called 'thetic' consciousness.
Reality is symbolically constructed through our usage of language we resolve to turn the Real into a hard kernel; and fail to express the trauma that can never be expressed in words. (Basically he deconstructs his own position - the talking cure is impossible...and the only way to 'cure' anyone is through anti-transferrence where the analysand stands up and walks out of the psycho-analysts office).
Desire is mediated through language. The Real is beyond the scope of language. The Symbolic Order is constructed around the Big Other and constructs the non-positional disposition of the subject that forms an invisible unity with the positional consciousness. consciousness is directed toward an object other than itself - also called 'thetic' consciousness.
Reality is symbolically constructed through our usage of language we resolve to turn the Real into a hard kernel; and fail to express the trauma that can never be expressed in words. (Basically he deconstructs his own position - the talking cure is impossible...and the only way to 'cure' anyone is through anti-transferrence where the analysand stands up and walks out of the psycho-analysts office).
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October 21, 2016Lacan okumak ciddi anlamda dikkat istiyor, okumakta en güçlük çektiğim kuramcı kendisi. Daha önce 6.45'den Fallus'un Anlamı'nı okumuştum, ondansa bu kitap benim için çok daha anlaşılır oldu- ki bence çeviri ile alakası var.
Lacan okumaya başlayacak olanlara tavsiyem okuyacakları sırayı bi bilene danışarak okumaları. Kullanılan kavramlara hakim olmak lazım, metni okumak ve anlamak zulüm haline gelebilir yoksa.
Lacan okumaya başlayacak olanlara tavsiyem okuyacakları sırayı bi bilene danışarak okumaları. Kullanılan kavramlara hakim olmak lazım, metni okumak ve anlamak zulüm haline gelebilir yoksa.
October 4, 2017
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
By Jacques Lacan
Reviewed by Mitchell Rhodes
If you haven’t yet read the "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" by Jacques Lacan, don’t bother. You’ll be better off. Let me explain:
In Kevin Smith’s film, "Dogma", when God (Alanis Morrissette) speaks, all those in the know, angles and such, cover their ears. They do this for good reason. In full harmonics, God’s voice is just a horrendous blast of noise that can’t be understood. It hurts the ears to listen and therefore it’s not worth listening to. The same might be said about Lacan.
In the 1950s and 60s, Lacan conducted a series of lectures, in French, to explain his psychoanalytical theories. "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" is a transcription of a series of lectures from 1964. In essence, it’s Lacan speaking. If I were able to read and understand the original French text, perhaps I would have a better impression of the work, but I highly doubt it.
Like God in the film "Dogma", when Lacan speaks it too is a horrendous blast of noise that’s not worth listening to, or in this case, reading. My intuition tells me that Lacan’s ego (yes, in the Freudian sense) would appreciate being compared to God—his "objet petit a", so to speak.
As God, or Lacan, you’re not required to explain yourself to anyone and even when you try, it’s only heard as noise anyway. Many scholars study the word of God and search for meaning in their interpretations—so too with Lacan. Butler, Copjec, Feldstein, Fink, Zezek and perhaps a dozen or so others have all tried. While many have tried, in my opinion, all have failed. And I like to believe that the both Lacan and God would agree with me. Because, really, how could any beings with such depth be ever completely understood with language? It’s too base a medium to even attempt it.
Since we are equating Lacan and God, I suggest that the Old Testament makes for the best comparison—a place where the power-over subjects is the preferred MO rather than offering the power-to. After all, isn’t this the place where God’s "jouissance" is at it’s best?
Turn the gaze toward the mirror and remove the mask. Who’s behind it? Is it Lacan as Freud or Freud as Lacan? Is it God as Lucifer or Lucifer as God? Or are they always one in the same depending where in the picture, I, as subject, am placed?
At this point all I have left to say is: good riddance to psychoanalytic blather such as Freud’s id, ego and superego and to Lacan’s Imaginary, Real, the symbolic order and the big Other. Just as the notion of a flat earth or the application of leaches as a cure-all came to be just crazy talk, so too will the theories of psychoanalysis. They enable and maintain power-over for some rather than providing the power-to for all. Such methods no longer serve humanity’s higher potential and it’s time to move on.
Hooray for neuroscience!
By Jacques Lacan
Reviewed by Mitchell Rhodes
If you haven’t yet read the "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" by Jacques Lacan, don’t bother. You’ll be better off. Let me explain:
In Kevin Smith’s film, "Dogma", when God (Alanis Morrissette) speaks, all those in the know, angles and such, cover their ears. They do this for good reason. In full harmonics, God’s voice is just a horrendous blast of noise that can’t be understood. It hurts the ears to listen and therefore it’s not worth listening to. The same might be said about Lacan.
In the 1950s and 60s, Lacan conducted a series of lectures, in French, to explain his psychoanalytical theories. "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" is a transcription of a series of lectures from 1964. In essence, it’s Lacan speaking. If I were able to read and understand the original French text, perhaps I would have a better impression of the work, but I highly doubt it.
Like God in the film "Dogma", when Lacan speaks it too is a horrendous blast of noise that’s not worth listening to, or in this case, reading. My intuition tells me that Lacan’s ego (yes, in the Freudian sense) would appreciate being compared to God—his "objet petit a", so to speak.
As God, or Lacan, you’re not required to explain yourself to anyone and even when you try, it’s only heard as noise anyway. Many scholars study the word of God and search for meaning in their interpretations—so too with Lacan. Butler, Copjec, Feldstein, Fink, Zezek and perhaps a dozen or so others have all tried. While many have tried, in my opinion, all have failed. And I like to believe that the both Lacan and God would agree with me. Because, really, how could any beings with such depth be ever completely understood with language? It’s too base a medium to even attempt it.
Since we are equating Lacan and God, I suggest that the Old Testament makes for the best comparison—a place where the power-over subjects is the preferred MO rather than offering the power-to. After all, isn’t this the place where God’s "jouissance" is at it’s best?
Turn the gaze toward the mirror and remove the mask. Who’s behind it? Is it Lacan as Freud or Freud as Lacan? Is it God as Lucifer or Lucifer as God? Or are they always one in the same depending where in the picture, I, as subject, am placed?
At this point all I have left to say is: good riddance to psychoanalytic blather such as Freud’s id, ego and superego and to Lacan’s Imaginary, Real, the symbolic order and the big Other. Just as the notion of a flat earth or the application of leaches as a cure-all came to be just crazy talk, so too will the theories of psychoanalysis. They enable and maintain power-over for some rather than providing the power-to for all. Such methods no longer serve humanity’s higher potential and it’s time to move on.
Hooray for neuroscience!
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July 10, 2017Psikanaliz adına herhangi bir okuma yapmadan önce Freud okumuş olmamız gerektiği su götürmez bir gerçek. Freud'un düşünüş biçimini, söylemlerini beğensek de/beğenmesek de, bu tür okumaların havada kalmaması açışından, Freud okumak elzemdir. Kaldı ki Lacan okuması yapacaksak bu okumalar daha da bir önem teşkil etmektir zira lakabı "Fransız Freud" olan -tabiri caizse- Freud'un Laciverti bir psikanalisttir. Kitabın "Bilinçdışı ve Tekrarlama" bölümü için (kitabın ilk bölümü) öncesinde Freud okumuş olmamızın dışında spesifik olarak Rüyaların Yorumu'nu da okumuş olmamızda fayda var. (2 yıl önce okumaya başlayıp bu sebepten ertelemiştim.)
Elimizdeki bu kitap Lacan'ın 1964 yılında gerçekleştirmiş olduğu seminerlerin kitaplaştırılmış hali olduğundan; spesifik olarak Lacan düşünüşü, kavramları/evreleri hakkında bir kitap okumak hevesindeyseniz bu kitap 'o kitap' değil. (Ayna Evresi hakkında bir okuma olur umuduyla aldığımdan ve Ayna Evresinin sadece "A"sını bulabildiğimden söylemekte yarar gördüm. Tamam zaten "Hoşgeldiniz. Bugünkü oturumumuzun konusu: Ayna Evresi." gibi bir şey beklemiyordum...) Lacan'ın da belirttiği üzere: "Seminerlerimin amacı analist yetiştirmekti, halan de öyle."(s244) "sana/bana" fayda sağlayacak bir kitap olduğunu düşünmüyorum. Bana kalırsa "bonus"okuma niteliğinde bir kitap yani; eğitiminiz bu yöndedir, psikanaliz ya da Lacan üzerine(...) araştırma yapıyorsunuzdur, 'hadi şu kitaplaştırılan 64 seminerine de bir göz atayım' derseniz, amacını karşılamış olur.
Elimizdeki bu kitap Lacan'ın 1964 yılında gerçekleştirmiş olduğu seminerlerin kitaplaştırılmış hali olduğundan; spesifik olarak Lacan düşünüşü, kavramları/evreleri hakkında bir kitap okumak hevesindeyseniz bu kitap 'o kitap' değil. (Ayna Evresi hakkında bir okuma olur umuduyla aldığımdan ve Ayna Evresinin sadece "A"sını bulabildiğimden söylemekte yarar gördüm. Tamam zaten "Hoşgeldiniz. Bugünkü oturumumuzun konusu: Ayna Evresi." gibi bir şey beklemiyordum...) Lacan'ın da belirttiği üzere: "Seminerlerimin amacı analist yetiştirmekti, halan de öyle."(s244) "sana/bana" fayda sağlayacak bir kitap olduğunu düşünmüyorum. Bana kalırsa "bonus"okuma niteliğinde bir kitap yani; eğitiminiz bu yöndedir, psikanaliz ya da Lacan üzerine(...) araştırma yapıyorsunuzdur, 'hadi şu kitaplaştırılan 64 seminerine de bir göz atayım' derseniz, amacını karşılamış olur.
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June 4, 2021This is about my third go at this, and I have to say I've never had to wrestle with a single book more. But what Lacan is constantly saying, and illustrating through even the ways that he communicates and explicates is that it's the form in which a thing arrives to you that makes it appealing - and something slippery and difficult to place always draws you in in a certain way.
Lacan's most famous seminar (i.e year long lecture series) is this one, his 'return to Freud', that sees him talking about the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. Along the way he breaks major ground by carving out the notion of object a - the object cause of desire, distinct from the object one 'desires' - and how this is manifested visually as 'gaze', that term which feels so talked about but often misinterpreted (though often to productive effect). This book also contains some of his most brilliant and puzzling aphorisms, and his usual ricochets between linguistics, contemporary science, Chinese philosophy, personal anecdotes and idiosyncratic readings of the great philosophers.
I've not been as awestruck by the ideas contained within a book as much as I was reading this one - part of that feeling is from knowing that at any one moment I'm probably still just skimming the surface of most of these concepts, it's feels like one where you're always feeling the edges, but the terrain inside also, gradually, is revealing itself.
Lacan's most famous seminar (i.e year long lecture series) is this one, his 'return to Freud', that sees him talking about the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. Along the way he breaks major ground by carving out the notion of object a - the object cause of desire, distinct from the object one 'desires' - and how this is manifested visually as 'gaze', that term which feels so talked about but often misinterpreted (though often to productive effect). This book also contains some of his most brilliant and puzzling aphorisms, and his usual ricochets between linguistics, contemporary science, Chinese philosophy, personal anecdotes and idiosyncratic readings of the great philosophers.
I've not been as awestruck by the ideas contained within a book as much as I was reading this one - part of that feeling is from knowing that at any one moment I'm probably still just skimming the surface of most of these concepts, it's feels like one where you're always feeling the edges, but the terrain inside also, gradually, is revealing itself.
June 6, 2018
Lacan really lays out his theory in this book. There is also this angry feeling behind it as he has just split from the IPA. I couldn't put it down and it has many parts that I will want to go back to as I continue my own pathway with analysis.
December 31, 2017
i find lacanianism interesting, but by now ive learned its graspable only through secondary literature......
May 1, 2024
Excommunication
• Likens his censure by International Psycho-analytical Association to Spinoza’s excommunication 1656. Why is the psychoanalytic community so like a religious practice?
• This is no longer a question of pudendum ( fundamentum). It is a question of knowing what may, what must, be expected of psycho-analysis, and the extent to which it may prove a hindrance, or even a failure. I ask the question—what are the fundamentals, in the broad sense of the term, of psychoanalysis? Which amounts to saying—what grounds it as praxis?
• Another question: is psychoanalysis a science? What specifies a science is having an object. There is certainly a corridor of communication between psychoanalysis and the religious register. But what of science. Science need not have a single trunk but, like Genesis, might have two.
o Science is not about experience, because this applies too well to mystical experience. Science pre-exists in the experience it is applied to.
• What is the analyst’s desire? This is not asked of scientists. But here, his desire cannot be left outside the question.
• Is science merely formula-making?
• The maintenance of Freud's concepts at the centre of all theoretical discussion in that dull, tedious, forbidding chain—which is read by no-body but psycho-analysts—known as the psycho-analytic literature, does not alter the fact that analysts in general have not yet caught up with these concepts, that in this literature most of the concepts are distorted, debased, fragmented, and that those that are too difficult are quite simply ignored
• Analysis is not a matter of discovering in a particular case the differential feature of the theory, and in doing so believe that one is explaining why your daughter is silent. Analysis consists precisely in getting her to speak.
• The fact that, in order to cure the hysteric of al her symptoms, the best way is to satisfy her hysteric’s desire—which is for her to posit her desire in relation to us as an unsatisfied desire ——leaves entirely to one side the specific question of why she can sustain her desire only as an unsatisfied desire. So hysteria places us, I would say, on the track of some kind of original sin in analysis. There has to be one. The truth is perhaps simply one thing, namely, the desire of Freud himself, the fact that something, in Freud, was never analysed.
The Unconscious and Repetition: The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
• The first two of the four Freudian major concepts: unconscious and repetition (others are transference and drive)
• Unconscious
o Structured like a language
o Levi-Strauss tells us that something precedes any experience. Before strictly human relations are established, certain relations have already been determined. Nature provides signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations.
o Kant talked of a gap that the function of a cause has presented to conceptual apprehension. Cause is a concept that is unanalysable, and so there remains essentially in the function of a cause a certain gap
o Cause is not a law (like law of action or reaction)—it lacks a single principle. Cause has something anti-conceptual, indefinite.
o Freudian unconscious is where, between cause and that which is affects, there is always something wrong.
o Unconscious does not determine neurosis—that would be too easy. Unconscious merely shows us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with ta real—a real that may well not be determined. In the gap, neurosis becomes something else (illness, scar).
o Unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area of the unborn.
o In actual fact, this dimension of the unconscious that I am evoking had been forgotten, as Freud had quite clearly foreseen. The unconscious had closed itself up against his message thanks to bad psychoanalysts. “I never re-open it without great care”
o In the unconscious, per Freud, there is nothing homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject.
o Impediment, failure, split. Dream, parapraxis, wit. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. What is produced in the gap—the discovery—is Freud’s first encounter with the unconscious. This discovery is always incomplete. The unconscious is the analyst’s Eurydice: always has a dimension of loss.
o Unconscious is not a non-concept (not non-conscious) but a concept of lack.
o We must feed the shades that emerge from the gap with blood
• Of the Subject of Certainty
o Gap of unconscious is pre-ontological. The only ontic thing about it is the split through which something, for a moment, slips into light of day.
o The status of the unconscious, so fragile on the ontic plane, is ethical (Freud: whatever it is, I must go there)
o None of this is about truth. It is about certainty.
The father dreams of his son, who says he is burning. The son is actually burning, dead, in the next room. This is not about the world of the beyond. This is about the Name-of-the-father, which sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law. Hamlet.
o Doubt is the sign of certainty; it is precisely the sign that there is something to preserve. It is a sign of resistance.
o This is not a Cartesian think-am kind of thing, wherein the thinking lurches the I am into the real. For Freud, the subject of the unconscious thinks before it attains certainty.
o The correlative of the subject is not the deceiving Other but the deceived Other. Subjects fear misleading analysts.
o Freud was mislead, deceived, only inasmuch as he failed to see the objects of desire (for Dora, for lesbians: to sustain or procure the desire of the father). Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.
• On the Network of Signifiers
o Unconscious pulsative function: its need to disappear
o The conjectural science of the subject
Unconscious is constituted essentially bu that which Is refused
o Colophon of doubt: (colophon as small hand printed in margin). Here it indicates that Freud places his certainty only in the constellation of the signifiers as they result from the recounting, the commentary, the association, even if they are later retracted
o Wo es war, soll Ich warden: where it was, so shall I be. The subject is placed here by Freud, in dreams. The I is the complete, total locus of the network of signifiers, that is to say, the subject.
o The subject is there to rediscover where it was—the real. We do this by mapping the network.
o Opposite Freud’s certainty, there is the subject, who, as I said just now, has been waiting there since Descartes.
o Recollection, in analysis, is not Platonic reminiscence, not a return of a form, an imprint, coming to us from beyond. IT is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way
o Wiederkehr = return. Field of unconscious is based on it. And Freud is certain of his field because of it, because of his self-analysis that leads him to return, because of the law of his own desire.
o Wiederholen =repeating. This is not reproduction for catharsis. It is not self-evident. It is a hauling of the subject
• Tuché and Automation
o Tuché, borrowed from Aristotle, who uses it in search of his cause. We translate it as the encounter with the real.
o The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.
o Repetition is not the return of signs, not an acted-out remembering. It is veiled in analysis bc of the identification of repetition with transference
o Freud says, though, nothing can be apprehended in effigie, in absentia—but is not transference given to us as effigy, in relation to absence?
o The tuche encounter appears first in the unassimilable, the trauma. The primary process (the unconscious) must be apprehended in its experience of rupture
o The encounter, though, is forever missed
o The place of the real: it stretches from the trauma to the phantasy—in so far as the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, some- thing determinant in the function of repetition
• The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze
o Repetition must be grounded, again, in split that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter/tuche.
o The eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.
Gaze: relation to things, ordered in figures of representations, with something always eluding
The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing.
In the waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In dreams, it shows.
• Anamorphosis
o Phenomenological reduction: The mode of my presence in the world is the subject in so far as by reducing itself solely to this certainty of being a subject, it becomes active annihilation.
o Psychoanalysis recenters the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that in which, at first sight, it presents itself as speaking. The interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it—namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real. Objet a.
o In the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze.
o From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it. The gaze is unapprehensible. Through it, subject recognizes his dependence in the register of desire. It is a privileged mode of accessing this register.
o The gaze: the locus of the relation between me (annihilating subject) and that which surrounds me. But the gaze scotomizes the subject. The gaze I encounter is not a seen gaze but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other
• The Line and Light
• What is a Picture?
The Transference and the Drive
• Presence of the Analyst
o Transference generally defined as affect, either positive (love) or negative (ambivalence). But Lacan says positive transference is soft spot for analysand, negative is when you have to keep your eye on him.
o Unable to separate the unconscious from the presence of the analyst. That presence is itself a manifestation of the unconscious
o Again the unconscious is not an archaic function, a primal thing, a metaphysical thing. It is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier. Psychoanalysis, in turn, rests on the recall of the field and function of speech and language
o DEF: Freud slides transference into repetition: what cannot be remembered is repeated in behavior. This behavior, in order to reveal what it repeats, is handed over to the analys’ts reconstruction. The subject transfers powers to the grand Autre (Other), the locus of speech and the locus of truth. he Other, latent or not, is, even beforehand, present in the subjective revelation, It is already there, when something has begun to yield itself from the unconscious. The analyst's interpretation merely reflects the fact that the unconscious, if it is what I say it is, namely, a play of the signifier, has already in its formations —dreams, slips of tongue or pen, witticisms or symptoms—proceeded by interpretation. The Other, the capital Other, is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious. Yet the transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again. This moment of closure is when analysis may begin in full force. The unconscious is not beyond the closure, but outside of it.
• Analysis and Truth or the Close of the Unconscious
o The problematic posture of: there are two reasons for transference 1. The analyst’s view is correct and considered reality and 2. The patient’s view is incorrect, and is considered ‘transference.’
o The difference between statement, the signifier (you can say “I am lying,” and enunciation (the analyst can say “you are deceiving me”)
o Statements map the subject towards reality. Enunciations map the subject towards signifiers I think?
o The subject sees himself in the space of the Other (the unconscious is a hoop net and it matters what we let in (that is, the objet a))
o Transference is the enaction of the reality of the unconscious.
• Sexuality in the Defiles of the Signifier
o Unconscious, again, is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject; it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the development of the effects of speech, and consequently it is structured like a language
o The signifier came into the world (that is, man learnt to think) through sexual reality. There is an affinity between the enigmas of sexuality and the play of the signifier
o So do we regard the unconscious as a remanence of that archaic junction between thought and sexual reality? Analysis must reveal the pulsation of unconscious, how it links to sexual reality. The nodal point that analysis reaches between these two is DESIRE
Desire DEF is situated in depdendence on demand—which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued, an element that is called desire.
The function of desires is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject.
o In terms of transference: we see there established the weight of sexual reality.
o The whole theory of the transference may just be a defence of the analyst, whose own desire is unruly here
• The Deconstruction of the Drive
o Drive (Trieb): not just essentially organix, not some storing away of inertia. Not a thrust. Drive is a fundamental concept. It’s not a myth. Something closer to a fiction. Something like a model.
o Freud: drive is a constant force. On one end is a thrust, on the other, a satisfaction. The emphasis is always on satisfaction: what is meant by it?
o Satisfaction is in the category of the impossible. By snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will be satisfied.
o Drives can be satisfied but cannot get satisfaction (the aim not met)
o The object of the drive is of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference.
E.g. oral drive: not about food but the pleasure of the mouth, of being stuffed. Of the breast. The breast would be the object a cause of desire. The drive moves around the object/ the drive tricks the object: la pulsion en fait le tour.
o Why are our drives centered on erogenous zones—breast, anal, lips and teeth. The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.
• The Partial Drive and its Circuit
o Drives are partial drives.
o The primal repressed is a signifier, symptoms are built onto it by a scaffolding of signifiers. Between these and the interpretation is sexuality. Sexuality, in the form of partial drives. And so the legibility of sex in interpretation of unconscious mechanisms is always retroactive.
o Drives merely represent, partially represent, the curve of fulfillment of sexuality in the living being.
o Drives can be satisfied but cannot get satisfaction (the aim not met)
o There can be no satisfaction: there is an objet a, the lost object. Not the origin of the drive
o Drive circuits can be interrupted (and drives can change in looks, an oral drive becoming an anal drive for example) by the intervention, the demand of the Other.
• From Love to the Libido
o Libido is an organ. Subject is divided by effects of language. So that the subject realizes himself more in the Other, but he is already pursuing there mor than half himself. He will simply find his desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech. That is why he must get out, get himself out, and in the getting-himself-out, in the end, he will know that the real Other has, just as much as himself, to get himself out, to pull himself free. SUMMARY SO FAR
o Partial drives are not love. Drives necessitate us in the sexual order. They come from the heart. Love come from the belly, the world of yum-yum.
o To conceive of love, we need a different structure: one with three levels. The real, the economic, the biological.
The difference between drive and love: I suggest that there is a radical distinction between loving oneself through the other—which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included—and the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the movement out and back shows a gap in its interval.
o Objet a’s emerge from libido (lamella)
o Real-ich, the ego, the subject, begins in the locus of the Other. The first signifier emerges there. Signifier DEF: that which represents a subject for another signifier.
o Libido represents the relation between living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. This explains why each drive has affinity for death
o The subject is an emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier.
o Sexual relation is handed over to the hazards of the field of the Other
o SUMMARY: the other is the locus in which a chain of signifiers makes present the subject and it is on this side, the side of the living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is manifested.
o No drive represents the totality of sexual tendency
The Field of the Other and Back to the Transference
• The Subject and the Other: Alienation; Aphanisis (16-17)
o In his psyche, the subject situates only equivalents of the function of reproduction—activity and passivity. And so performances of gender/sex are abandoned to the drama/scenario in the field of the Other (the Oedipus complex). Subject learns from scratch from the Other what he has to do, as man or woman. Essentially, sexuality is represented in the psyche by a relation of the subject that is deduced from something other than sexuality itself. Sexuality is lack. Two types of lack here though 1. My subject depends on the Other and 2. Real, earlier lack: I have lost something in reproducing myself through t
• Likens his censure by International Psycho-analytical Association to Spinoza’s excommunication 1656. Why is the psychoanalytic community so like a religious practice?
• This is no longer a question of pudendum ( fundamentum). It is a question of knowing what may, what must, be expected of psycho-analysis, and the extent to which it may prove a hindrance, or even a failure. I ask the question—what are the fundamentals, in the broad sense of the term, of psychoanalysis? Which amounts to saying—what grounds it as praxis?
• Another question: is psychoanalysis a science? What specifies a science is having an object. There is certainly a corridor of communication between psychoanalysis and the religious register. But what of science. Science need not have a single trunk but, like Genesis, might have two.
o Science is not about experience, because this applies too well to mystical experience. Science pre-exists in the experience it is applied to.
• What is the analyst’s desire? This is not asked of scientists. But here, his desire cannot be left outside the question.
• Is science merely formula-making?
• The maintenance of Freud's concepts at the centre of all theoretical discussion in that dull, tedious, forbidding chain—which is read by no-body but psycho-analysts—known as the psycho-analytic literature, does not alter the fact that analysts in general have not yet caught up with these concepts, that in this literature most of the concepts are distorted, debased, fragmented, and that those that are too difficult are quite simply ignored
• Analysis is not a matter of discovering in a particular case the differential feature of the theory, and in doing so believe that one is explaining why your daughter is silent. Analysis consists precisely in getting her to speak.
• The fact that, in order to cure the hysteric of al her symptoms, the best way is to satisfy her hysteric’s desire—which is for her to posit her desire in relation to us as an unsatisfied desire ——leaves entirely to one side the specific question of why she can sustain her desire only as an unsatisfied desire. So hysteria places us, I would say, on the track of some kind of original sin in analysis. There has to be one. The truth is perhaps simply one thing, namely, the desire of Freud himself, the fact that something, in Freud, was never analysed.
The Unconscious and Repetition: The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
• The first two of the four Freudian major concepts: unconscious and repetition (others are transference and drive)
• Unconscious
o Structured like a language
o Levi-Strauss tells us that something precedes any experience. Before strictly human relations are established, certain relations have already been determined. Nature provides signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations.
o Kant talked of a gap that the function of a cause has presented to conceptual apprehension. Cause is a concept that is unanalysable, and so there remains essentially in the function of a cause a certain gap
o Cause is not a law (like law of action or reaction)—it lacks a single principle. Cause has something anti-conceptual, indefinite.
o Freudian unconscious is where, between cause and that which is affects, there is always something wrong.
o Unconscious does not determine neurosis—that would be too easy. Unconscious merely shows us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with ta real—a real that may well not be determined. In the gap, neurosis becomes something else (illness, scar).
o Unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area of the unborn.
o In actual fact, this dimension of the unconscious that I am evoking had been forgotten, as Freud had quite clearly foreseen. The unconscious had closed itself up against his message thanks to bad psychoanalysts. “I never re-open it without great care”
o In the unconscious, per Freud, there is nothing homologous with what occurs at the level of the subject.
o Impediment, failure, split. Dream, parapraxis, wit. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. What is produced in the gap—the discovery—is Freud’s first encounter with the unconscious. This discovery is always incomplete. The unconscious is the analyst’s Eurydice: always has a dimension of loss.
o Unconscious is not a non-concept (not non-conscious) but a concept of lack.
o We must feed the shades that emerge from the gap with blood
• Of the Subject of Certainty
o Gap of unconscious is pre-ontological. The only ontic thing about it is the split through which something, for a moment, slips into light of day.
o The status of the unconscious, so fragile on the ontic plane, is ethical (Freud: whatever it is, I must go there)
o None of this is about truth. It is about certainty.
The father dreams of his son, who says he is burning. The son is actually burning, dead, in the next room. This is not about the world of the beyond. This is about the Name-of-the-father, which sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law. Hamlet.
o Doubt is the sign of certainty; it is precisely the sign that there is something to preserve. It is a sign of resistance.
o This is not a Cartesian think-am kind of thing, wherein the thinking lurches the I am into the real. For Freud, the subject of the unconscious thinks before it attains certainty.
o The correlative of the subject is not the deceiving Other but the deceived Other. Subjects fear misleading analysts.
o Freud was mislead, deceived, only inasmuch as he failed to see the objects of desire (for Dora, for lesbians: to sustain or procure the desire of the father). Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.
• On the Network of Signifiers
o Unconscious pulsative function: its need to disappear
o The conjectural science of the subject
Unconscious is constituted essentially bu that which Is refused
o Colophon of doubt: (colophon as small hand printed in margin). Here it indicates that Freud places his certainty only in the constellation of the signifiers as they result from the recounting, the commentary, the association, even if they are later retracted
o Wo es war, soll Ich warden: where it was, so shall I be. The subject is placed here by Freud, in dreams. The I is the complete, total locus of the network of signifiers, that is to say, the subject.
o The subject is there to rediscover where it was—the real. We do this by mapping the network.
o Opposite Freud’s certainty, there is the subject, who, as I said just now, has been waiting there since Descartes.
o Recollection, in analysis, is not Platonic reminiscence, not a return of a form, an imprint, coming to us from beyond. IT is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way
o Wiederkehr = return. Field of unconscious is based on it. And Freud is certain of his field because of it, because of his self-analysis that leads him to return, because of the law of his own desire.
o Wiederholen =repeating. This is not reproduction for catharsis. It is not self-evident. It is a hauling of the subject
• Tuché and Automation
o Tuché, borrowed from Aristotle, who uses it in search of his cause. We translate it as the encounter with the real.
o The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.
o Repetition is not the return of signs, not an acted-out remembering. It is veiled in analysis bc of the identification of repetition with transference
o Freud says, though, nothing can be apprehended in effigie, in absentia—but is not transference given to us as effigy, in relation to absence?
o The tuche encounter appears first in the unassimilable, the trauma. The primary process (the unconscious) must be apprehended in its experience of rupture
o The encounter, though, is forever missed
o The place of the real: it stretches from the trauma to the phantasy—in so far as the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, some- thing determinant in the function of repetition
• The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze
o Repetition must be grounded, again, in split that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter/tuche.
o The eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.
Gaze: relation to things, ordered in figures of representations, with something always eluding
The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing.
In the waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In dreams, it shows.
• Anamorphosis
o Phenomenological reduction: The mode of my presence in the world is the subject in so far as by reducing itself solely to this certainty of being a subject, it becomes active annihilation.
o Psychoanalysis recenters the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that in which, at first sight, it presents itself as speaking. The interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it—namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real. Objet a.
o In the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze.
o From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it. The gaze is unapprehensible. Through it, subject recognizes his dependence in the register of desire. It is a privileged mode of accessing this register.
o The gaze: the locus of the relation between me (annihilating subject) and that which surrounds me. But the gaze scotomizes the subject. The gaze I encounter is not a seen gaze but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other
• The Line and Light
• What is a Picture?
The Transference and the Drive
• Presence of the Analyst
o Transference generally defined as affect, either positive (love) or negative (ambivalence). But Lacan says positive transference is soft spot for analysand, negative is when you have to keep your eye on him.
o Unable to separate the unconscious from the presence of the analyst. That presence is itself a manifestation of the unconscious
o Again the unconscious is not an archaic function, a primal thing, a metaphysical thing. It is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier. Psychoanalysis, in turn, rests on the recall of the field and function of speech and language
o DEF: Freud slides transference into repetition: what cannot be remembered is repeated in behavior. This behavior, in order to reveal what it repeats, is handed over to the analys’ts reconstruction. The subject transfers powers to the grand Autre (Other), the locus of speech and the locus of truth. he Other, latent or not, is, even beforehand, present in the subjective revelation, It is already there, when something has begun to yield itself from the unconscious. The analyst's interpretation merely reflects the fact that the unconscious, if it is what I say it is, namely, a play of the signifier, has already in its formations —dreams, slips of tongue or pen, witticisms or symptoms—proceeded by interpretation. The Other, the capital Other, is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious. Yet the transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again. This moment of closure is when analysis may begin in full force. The unconscious is not beyond the closure, but outside of it.
• Analysis and Truth or the Close of the Unconscious
o The problematic posture of: there are two reasons for transference 1. The analyst’s view is correct and considered reality and 2. The patient’s view is incorrect, and is considered ‘transference.’
o The difference between statement, the signifier (you can say “I am lying,” and enunciation (the analyst can say “you are deceiving me”)
o Statements map the subject towards reality. Enunciations map the subject towards signifiers I think?
o The subject sees himself in the space of the Other (the unconscious is a hoop net and it matters what we let in (that is, the objet a))
o Transference is the enaction of the reality of the unconscious.
• Sexuality in the Defiles of the Signifier
o Unconscious, again, is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject; it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the development of the effects of speech, and consequently it is structured like a language
o The signifier came into the world (that is, man learnt to think) through sexual reality. There is an affinity between the enigmas of sexuality and the play of the signifier
o So do we regard the unconscious as a remanence of that archaic junction between thought and sexual reality? Analysis must reveal the pulsation of unconscious, how it links to sexual reality. The nodal point that analysis reaches between these two is DESIRE
Desire DEF is situated in depdendence on demand—which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued, an element that is called desire.
The function of desires is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject.
o In terms of transference: we see there established the weight of sexual reality.
o The whole theory of the transference may just be a defence of the analyst, whose own desire is unruly here
• The Deconstruction of the Drive
o Drive (Trieb): not just essentially organix, not some storing away of inertia. Not a thrust. Drive is a fundamental concept. It’s not a myth. Something closer to a fiction. Something like a model.
o Freud: drive is a constant force. On one end is a thrust, on the other, a satisfaction. The emphasis is always on satisfaction: what is meant by it?
o Satisfaction is in the category of the impossible. By snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it will be satisfied.
o Drives can be satisfied but cannot get satisfaction (the aim not met)
o The object of the drive is of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference.
E.g. oral drive: not about food but the pleasure of the mouth, of being stuffed. Of the breast. The breast would be the object a cause of desire. The drive moves around the object/ the drive tricks the object: la pulsion en fait le tour.
o Why are our drives centered on erogenous zones—breast, anal, lips and teeth. The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the unconscious.
• The Partial Drive and its Circuit
o Drives are partial drives.
o The primal repressed is a signifier, symptoms are built onto it by a scaffolding of signifiers. Between these and the interpretation is sexuality. Sexuality, in the form of partial drives. And so the legibility of sex in interpretation of unconscious mechanisms is always retroactive.
o Drives merely represent, partially represent, the curve of fulfillment of sexuality in the living being.
o Drives can be satisfied but cannot get satisfaction (the aim not met)
o There can be no satisfaction: there is an objet a, the lost object. Not the origin of the drive
o Drive circuits can be interrupted (and drives can change in looks, an oral drive becoming an anal drive for example) by the intervention, the demand of the Other.
• From Love to the Libido
o Libido is an organ. Subject is divided by effects of language. So that the subject realizes himself more in the Other, but he is already pursuing there mor than half himself. He will simply find his desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech. That is why he must get out, get himself out, and in the getting-himself-out, in the end, he will know that the real Other has, just as much as himself, to get himself out, to pull himself free. SUMMARY SO FAR
o Partial drives are not love. Drives necessitate us in the sexual order. They come from the heart. Love come from the belly, the world of yum-yum.
o To conceive of love, we need a different structure: one with three levels. The real, the economic, the biological.
The difference between drive and love: I suggest that there is a radical distinction between loving oneself through the other—which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included—and the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the movement out and back shows a gap in its interval.
o Objet a’s emerge from libido (lamella)
o Real-ich, the ego, the subject, begins in the locus of the Other. The first signifier emerges there. Signifier DEF: that which represents a subject for another signifier.
o Libido represents the relation between living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. This explains why each drive has affinity for death
o The subject is an emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier.
o Sexual relation is handed over to the hazards of the field of the Other
o SUMMARY: the other is the locus in which a chain of signifiers makes present the subject and it is on this side, the side of the living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is manifested.
o No drive represents the totality of sexual tendency
The Field of the Other and Back to the Transference
• The Subject and the Other: Alienation; Aphanisis (16-17)
o In his psyche, the subject situates only equivalents of the function of reproduction—activity and passivity. And so performances of gender/sex are abandoned to the drama/scenario in the field of the Other (the Oedipus complex). Subject learns from scratch from the Other what he has to do, as man or woman. Essentially, sexuality is represented in the psyche by a relation of the subject that is deduced from something other than sexuality itself. Sexuality is lack. Two types of lack here though 1. My subject depends on the Other and 2. Real, earlier lack: I have lost something in reproducing myself through t
September 3, 2023
DID NOT FINISH
This is my second attempt to read this book. This book is very difficult. I’ll read 10 pages and it’ll strike me as pure gobbledegook except for a sentence or two.
Another issue is that you need to have at least some background in Freud before reading Lacan. The first time I tried to read this, 3 years ago, I really could not make sense of any of it at all for this reason. Now I have some more background in Freud so it makes a little bit more sense.
It’s really strange to me though because I’m currently reading Bruce Fink’s “The Lacanian Subject” and it is like 1000x clearer and easier to read. Unless Fink just totally gets Lacan wrong, it seems that Lacan is not actually that difficult, but rather he’s just an absolutely terrible speaker and writer.
Perhaps I’m not enough of a wordcel. I get the sense that people like reading Lacan because his style mirrors the his content, in terms of the linguistic-associative nature of the unconscious. I guess this makes sense if you think of it as a seminar for psychoanalysts, it is in a way like Lacan is presenting himself as the analysand.
This is my second attempt to read this book. This book is very difficult. I’ll read 10 pages and it’ll strike me as pure gobbledegook except for a sentence or two.
Another issue is that you need to have at least some background in Freud before reading Lacan. The first time I tried to read this, 3 years ago, I really could not make sense of any of it at all for this reason. Now I have some more background in Freud so it makes a little bit more sense.
It’s really strange to me though because I’m currently reading Bruce Fink’s “The Lacanian Subject” and it is like 1000x clearer and easier to read. Unless Fink just totally gets Lacan wrong, it seems that Lacan is not actually that difficult, but rather he’s just an absolutely terrible speaker and writer.
Perhaps I’m not enough of a wordcel. I get the sense that people like reading Lacan because his style mirrors the his content, in terms of the linguistic-associative nature of the unconscious. I guess this makes sense if you think of it as a seminar for psychoanalysts, it is in a way like Lacan is presenting himself as the analysand.
April 14, 2023
Read it for a seminar (ironic, isn't it). Although the topic of the seminar was misrepresentation of women in popular schools of thought the amount of misogyny Lacan perpetrated and taught is horrifying
March 21, 2019
This seminar has the misleading title "the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis," which, coupled with Lacan's name, seems to mislead many into thinking this is a friendly introduction to post-Freudian psychoanalysis. It is not, and it never markets itself as such. In fact, this is not even a book: these are transcripts of Lacan's seminars delivered to a group of psychoanalysts who have been closely following his research, and in this seminar in particular, Lacan lays out his highly technical and revolutionary revisions to key psychoanalytic concepts.
Thus, the prerequisite for this seminar is far from trivial, and really, anyone who doesn't already have a solid grasp on psychoanalysis will be at a profound loss. By the I mean, you should know most of the Freudian program (and not just some pop culture familiarity with the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, or penis envy), Saussure's work and the structuralist movement, as well as the early Lacan writings (for example, the Rome report and the Instance of the Letter).
This is an academic book and the reader should come in with the correct expectations. Is it, at some times, unnecessarily convoluted? Yes! A pronoun such as "it" can easily refer to something last mentioned a paragraph before, and he goes on elaborate tangents that are apparently irrelevant. He sentences are long and awkward, and his use of words not exactly idiomatic or precise. But remember: this is a transcript of a oral lecture and unlike contemporary American academics who literally reads off a script during "talks," these lectures were organic and dynamic, and these transcript can often be better understood read out loud: you'll see how the awkward written sentences make much more sense in a spoken discourse.
That said, the book is profoundly rewarding for the prepared reader, but anyone who reads and understands this seminar probably don't need me reiterating its value, but I'll make a short list anyway: in here he first delineates his understanding of the unconscious from the naive position, and in doing so firmly grounds the UC in language. He describes the relationship between the encounter (tuché), trauma, petit a, and the (re)formation of the subject. He then gives the most worked out example of the petit a as of yet by studying the gaze, and touches on the value of art and performativity toward the end of that discussion. He then revisits the phenomena of transference, importantly defining it as correlative to the subject who is supposed to know. He then goes on a tangent discussing the drive and desire (differentiating them for the first time, I think), as well as binary relationship (alienation and separation) between the subject and the field of the Other, before returning to the subject of transference as a manifestation of desire.
Thus, the prerequisite for this seminar is far from trivial, and really, anyone who doesn't already have a solid grasp on psychoanalysis will be at a profound loss. By the I mean, you should know most of the Freudian program (and not just some pop culture familiarity with the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, or penis envy), Saussure's work and the structuralist movement, as well as the early Lacan writings (for example, the Rome report and the Instance of the Letter).
This is an academic book and the reader should come in with the correct expectations. Is it, at some times, unnecessarily convoluted? Yes! A pronoun such as "it" can easily refer to something last mentioned a paragraph before, and he goes on elaborate tangents that are apparently irrelevant. He sentences are long and awkward, and his use of words not exactly idiomatic or precise. But remember: this is a transcript of a oral lecture and unlike contemporary American academics who literally reads off a script during "talks," these lectures were organic and dynamic, and these transcript can often be better understood read out loud: you'll see how the awkward written sentences make much more sense in a spoken discourse.
That said, the book is profoundly rewarding for the prepared reader, but anyone who reads and understands this seminar probably don't need me reiterating its value, but I'll make a short list anyway: in here he first delineates his understanding of the unconscious from the naive position, and in doing so firmly grounds the UC in language. He describes the relationship between the encounter (tuché), trauma, petit a, and the (re)formation of the subject. He then gives the most worked out example of the petit a as of yet by studying the gaze, and touches on the value of art and performativity toward the end of that discussion. He then revisits the phenomena of transference, importantly defining it as correlative to the subject who is supposed to know. He then goes on a tangent discussing the drive and desire (differentiating them for the first time, I think), as well as binary relationship (alienation and separation) between the subject and the field of the Other, before returning to the subject of transference as a manifestation of desire.
January 4, 2014
There's a lot I don't understand here. But what exactly? How have I not understood this text? How is this misunderstanding structured? If the unconscious is structured like a language, one might ask, what is it Lacan hasn't said--and what might this mean?
I can't say that I came to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis from a particularly analytical perspective. Lacan's ideas, for me, are a kind of poetry--a series of approximations. I've heard Lacan's style of expression is an attempt to engage the unconscious. I don't know that the unconscious can be manipulated as such: it isn't any one thing to be manipulated--at least according to Lacan; or what I understand of Lacan. However, it's a nice idea; the sort of thing one might like to attribute to Lacan--which is why, for me, his work is so compelling.
I can't say that I came to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis from a particularly analytical perspective. Lacan's ideas, for me, are a kind of poetry--a series of approximations. I've heard Lacan's style of expression is an attempt to engage the unconscious. I don't know that the unconscious can be manipulated as such: it isn't any one thing to be manipulated--at least according to Lacan; or what I understand of Lacan. However, it's a nice idea; the sort of thing one might like to attribute to Lacan--which is why, for me, his work is so compelling.
Read
August 22, 2022Lacan remains for me just so difficult I've read a whole bunch on him now and I'm getting there! In dribs and drabs but it's still so gradual & it's a series of lectures designed for practising psychoanalysts with doctorates and so on so we Are Complicated. Anyway not all there for me but maybe rereads would help. Loving the writing on Love and the famous 'gift of shit' near the end. Also very plausible unravelling of the Unreal. Amazing melodrama of 'Hegeliano-Marxism' [thus!] producing a 'dark god'. Nice aside on Spinoza on the same page.
for how can one name a desire? One circumscribes a desire. There's a sense in which reading this book feels like circumscription but perhaps it will agglutinate for me I'm still going. Reminded me to read the Wolf-Man if nothing else
for how can one name a desire? One circumscribes a desire. There's a sense in which reading this book feels like circumscription but perhaps it will agglutinate for me I'm still going. Reminded me to read the Wolf-Man if nothing else
July 8, 2024
My first-time reading Lacan, actually. Went as well as you'd expect.
I mean, how is the "gaze" supposed to be a partial object? Is it to be understood as some sort of imaginary capture that is 'lost' by, for example, the non-human organism, similar to how the human being emerges as a subject in the symbolic order with one signifier missing?
A battery of non-sequiturs ensues (i wouldn't be at all surprised if Lacan is a non-squirter. The dude seems too tense to ever bring himself to ejaculate)
That being said, the commentary on Real-Ich and how it relates to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle was surprisingly insightful even though I ended up having to google some technical definitions, proving that Lacan, if he wants to, can communicate his ideas relatively lucidly
I mean, how is the "gaze" supposed to be a partial object? Is it to be understood as some sort of imaginary capture that is 'lost' by, for example, the non-human organism, similar to how the human being emerges as a subject in the symbolic order with one signifier missing?
A battery of non-sequiturs ensues (i wouldn't be at all surprised if Lacan is a non-squirter. The dude seems too tense to ever bring himself to ejaculate)
That being said, the commentary on Real-Ich and how it relates to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle was surprisingly insightful even though I ended up having to google some technical definitions, proving that Lacan, if he wants to, can communicate his ideas relatively lucidly
May 30, 2025
Certainly the most difficult thing I have read and also understood (more or less). The first 100 or 150 pages of this really made me seriously question how Lacan can be appreciated at all and treated as gospel for such a huge number of people.
I know that he says something in I think the introduction to the Écrits about how his style is purposefully obscure and that the point is that Freud wrote in a really fun, silly, popular kind of way (relatively) and it is for that reason that his work has been so widely misunderstood and bastardized. And while yeah, maybe if Freud had been less entertaining we would be spared a lot of the "you want to have sex with your mother" coworker jokes or the facebook memes, printed coffee mugs, and graphic onesies that place his portrait next to the words "mama's boy" in 72-point impact font, we also probably wouldn't have gotten the classic song "Ego" by singer-songwriter Charles Manson, so who's to say...
The point is that reading Lacan is surreal. His shadow looms so large in like the entirety of humanities but any genuine understanding of his work is unattainable no matter how much Žižek you read or undergraduate essays on "poststructuralism" you write. And who's to say also how much can actually be gleaned from the notoriously terrible English translation of this seminar. Regardless...
Ok actually my point is that nobody understands Lacan and especially I think only very few people understand this seminar. At least in my education. Which is valid—I also don't count myself in this number. This book sucks to read. I read every chapter twice and each one could take like up to four hours. And still, there obviously remain little navels of non-sense (to put it charitably) that are unable to be grasped even after the most intense scrutiny. Maybe that's part of the fun, but also I think that the density of his writing (and speaking, here) and its resistance to proper translation is probably not that helpful. Like it becomes a fetish and a taboo. English departments love saying "the unconscious is structured like a language" to be this revelation though the line is absolutely meaningless out (and also maybe inside) of context. Also perhaps if Lacan wasn't impossible to read nobody would have to think about whatever the hell "object relations" or "ego-psychology" is in anno domini 2025.
Ok all that being said… it is still difficult to pinpoint what exactly this seminar is about. The four fundamental concepts, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive, are laid out in the first chapter but to be totally frank I did forget what exactly they were by the time they finally returned on page 263 of 276. This is as, while these concepts are like in the text, a full quarter of the seminar around halfway through is devoted to the gaze as objet a and once you arrive at the genuinely perspective-altering recasting of the drive, you have spent so much time staring at “The Ambassadors” and trying to figure out what the objet petit a actually is that you have forgotten what was said regarding repetition and drive in the first 50 pages. I also, of course, read this book very slowly along the artificial sections inserted by Jacques-Alain Miller over the course of months, so maybe that’s my fault.
The most important part, however—the outline of the partial drive circuit, the final explication of what the objet a like actually is after repeated drillings, and the myth of the lamella—does not come until the second half of the text and is not really built upon anything offered in the first half. If anything, the partial drive circuit is probably fundamental to understanding the explication of the gaze which precedes it. Reading this specifically to understand drive, loss, and reapproach Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. ≈ 250-320 were enormously helpful. I came across the lamella in Alenka Zupančič and immediately was gravitated towards it and it features heavily in the thesis I am putting off writing at the moment. I also think that it’s possible to dismiss it because basically Lacan takes the biology of August Weismann which is represented with quite a bit of skepticism by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as gospel. But I think that’s fine it’s cooler if asexual amoeba are genuinely immortal and it is only through sexual difference that we are able to die. Like that’s a cool fact and I, just as Lacan before me, doesn’t care about science, even if Freud kind of rejected it in BPP and also in the nearly 20 years of writing that followed that shows that he never took it as fact.
There’s also a strong argument—that I’ve heard a lot—that this is a seminar on subjectivity. That’s also true, especially in the first and last 50 pages. the first few chapters see Lacan grounding Freud in Kant in the way that I can’t believe that other psychoanalytical schools ignore, and the final few chapters are kind of reliant especially on Hegel. I say kind of only because this really only surfaces in the lord-bondsman dialectic to explain the subject’s alienation w/r/t the field of the Other/signification/desire/etc. and like… yeah that is Hegel but also I know that it is less than serendipitous that the only major references to Hegel come from the exact like four pages of the Phenomenology of Spiritthat I have read. I guess he really was talking to a popular audience.
Ok the point is… this was awesome, regardless of what fundamental concepts you think its about (objet a, the partial drive, subjectivity, and the transference make more sense for me). Also… anybody who tells you that you can’t read Lacan thinks you’re stupid. And you’re almost definitely not that stupid. Psychoanalysis probably needs to be understood from a Lacanian perspective to mean anything in our glorious Chinese century. Put down the Žižek and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Or your stimulant of choice. Whatever works.
I know that he says something in I think the introduction to the Écrits about how his style is purposefully obscure and that the point is that Freud wrote in a really fun, silly, popular kind of way (relatively) and it is for that reason that his work has been so widely misunderstood and bastardized. And while yeah, maybe if Freud had been less entertaining we would be spared a lot of the "you want to have sex with your mother" coworker jokes or the facebook memes, printed coffee mugs, and graphic onesies that place his portrait next to the words "mama's boy" in 72-point impact font, we also probably wouldn't have gotten the classic song "Ego" by singer-songwriter Charles Manson, so who's to say...
The point is that reading Lacan is surreal. His shadow looms so large in like the entirety of humanities but any genuine understanding of his work is unattainable no matter how much Žižek you read or undergraduate essays on "poststructuralism" you write. And who's to say also how much can actually be gleaned from the notoriously terrible English translation of this seminar. Regardless...
Ok actually my point is that nobody understands Lacan and especially I think only very few people understand this seminar. At least in my education. Which is valid—I also don't count myself in this number. This book sucks to read. I read every chapter twice and each one could take like up to four hours. And still, there obviously remain little navels of non-sense (to put it charitably) that are unable to be grasped even after the most intense scrutiny. Maybe that's part of the fun, but also I think that the density of his writing (and speaking, here) and its resistance to proper translation is probably not that helpful. Like it becomes a fetish and a taboo. English departments love saying "the unconscious is structured like a language" to be this revelation though the line is absolutely meaningless out (and also maybe inside) of context. Also perhaps if Lacan wasn't impossible to read nobody would have to think about whatever the hell "object relations" or "ego-psychology" is in anno domini 2025.
Ok all that being said… it is still difficult to pinpoint what exactly this seminar is about. The four fundamental concepts, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive, are laid out in the first chapter but to be totally frank I did forget what exactly they were by the time they finally returned on page 263 of 276. This is as, while these concepts are like in the text, a full quarter of the seminar around halfway through is devoted to the gaze as objet a and once you arrive at the genuinely perspective-altering recasting of the drive, you have spent so much time staring at “The Ambassadors” and trying to figure out what the objet petit a actually is that you have forgotten what was said regarding repetition and drive in the first 50 pages. I also, of course, read this book very slowly along the artificial sections inserted by Jacques-Alain Miller over the course of months, so maybe that’s my fault.
The most important part, however—the outline of the partial drive circuit, the final explication of what the objet a like actually is after repeated drillings, and the myth of the lamella—does not come until the second half of the text and is not really built upon anything offered in the first half. If anything, the partial drive circuit is probably fundamental to understanding the explication of the gaze which precedes it. Reading this specifically to understand drive, loss, and reapproach Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. ≈ 250-320 were enormously helpful. I came across the lamella in Alenka Zupančič and immediately was gravitated towards it and it features heavily in the thesis I am putting off writing at the moment. I also think that it’s possible to dismiss it because basically Lacan takes the biology of August Weismann which is represented with quite a bit of skepticism by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as gospel. But I think that’s fine it’s cooler if asexual amoeba are genuinely immortal and it is only through sexual difference that we are able to die. Like that’s a cool fact and I, just as Lacan before me, doesn’t care about science, even if Freud kind of rejected it in BPP and also in the nearly 20 years of writing that followed that shows that he never took it as fact.
There’s also a strong argument—that I’ve heard a lot—that this is a seminar on subjectivity. That’s also true, especially in the first and last 50 pages. the first few chapters see Lacan grounding Freud in Kant in the way that I can’t believe that other psychoanalytical schools ignore, and the final few chapters are kind of reliant especially on Hegel. I say kind of only because this really only surfaces in the lord-bondsman dialectic to explain the subject’s alienation w/r/t the field of the Other/signification/desire/etc. and like… yeah that is Hegel but also I know that it is less than serendipitous that the only major references to Hegel come from the exact like four pages of the Phenomenology of Spiritthat I have read. I guess he really was talking to a popular audience.
Ok the point is… this was awesome, regardless of what fundamental concepts you think its about (objet a, the partial drive, subjectivity, and the transference make more sense for me). Also… anybody who tells you that you can’t read Lacan thinks you’re stupid. And you’re almost definitely not that stupid. Psychoanalysis probably needs to be understood from a Lacanian perspective to mean anything in our glorious Chinese century. Put down the Žižek and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Or your stimulant of choice. Whatever works.
May 7, 2015
I think I'm too dumb for Lacan.
September 9, 2021
Why did he write like this. Why did he write like this. To ask the question is to already have the answer, but why the fuck did he write like this.
March 5, 2021
agabaga aabbullubelblbelbelbeblele= minha mente lendo 75% do que o lacan diz
nota: ler muito mais freud antes de querer interagir com isso e ler bruce fink tambem
nota: ler muito mais freud antes de querer interagir com isso e ler bruce fink tambem
March 5, 2021
Thank God there are people out there who have undertaken the task of making Lacan legible. Props to Bruce Fink, Slavoj Zizek, Plastic Pills on YouTube, and the podcast Why Theory for making the ideas appealing, because the writing certainly isn't. Lacan is an important thinker, but you could be forgiven for not believing it if you only ever read Lacan himself.
On a scale from Freud to Deleuze I give this seminar a Deleuze+. And this is supposed to be one of the easier ones.
On a scale from Freud to Deleuze I give this seminar a Deleuze+. And this is supposed to be one of the easier ones.
August 18, 2017
Wie Lacan wil beginnen lezen, begint best met dit seminarie. In dit seminarie herkadert Lacan Freuds basisconcepten het onbewuste, de herhaling, de drift en de overdracht. Wat is er van aan? In deze periode, nadat Lacan is buiten-gebonjourd uit de IPA, ondervraagt hij wat psychoanalyse nu eigenlijk is en wat er misloopt met de dogmatische en pseudo religieuze benadering van de postfreudianen. Hij ondervraagt op welke manier de psychoanalyse in intiem verband staat met moderniteit, en toch niet samenvalt met de wetenschappen.
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