Seminar XIII
| The Object of Psychoanalysis | |
|---|---|
| Seminar XIII | |
 Image associated with L'objet de la psychanalyse (Seminar XIII). | |
| French Title | Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse |
| English Title | The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis |
| Seminar Information | |
| Seminar Date(s) | 1965–1966 (academic year) |
| Session Count | Weekly sessions |
| Location | École Normale Supérieure, Paris |
| Psychoanalytic Content | |
| Key Concepts | Objet petit a • Graph of Desire • Topology • Gaze • Voice • Partial object • Truth • Knowledge • Phallus |
| Notable Themes | The object of psychoanalysis; division of the subject between truth and knowledge; topological formalization; gaze and voice as objets a; status of science, religion, and analytic discourse |
| Freud Texts | Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • Instincts and Their Vicissitudes • Beyond the Pleasure Principle • The Interpretation of Dreams |
| Theoretical Context | |
| Period | Middle/topological period |
| Register | Symbolic/Real (object a, drives, topology) |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Seminar XII |
| Followed by | Seminar XIV |
The Object of Psychoanalysis (French: L'objet de la psychanalyse) is the thirteenth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan in Paris during the 1965–1966 academic year, generally referred to as Seminar XIII.[1] Conducted at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), it marks a crucial moment in Lacan’s so-called “topological” period and seeks to determine what, precisely, constitutes the *object* proper to psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Seminar XIII centres on the elaboration of objet petit a—the “object cause” of desire—as the specific object of psychoanalysis, situated at the intersection of truth and knowledge and formalized via topology and mathemes.[2] Lacan systematically links objet a to the four partial objects (breast, feces, gaze, voice), inscribes it in the Graph of Desire, and localizes it on a series of topological surfaces (the disk-with-a-hole, Moebius strip, torus, and Klein bottle). In doing so, he continues the reconfiguration of the unconscious around language, the Real and the drives initiated in Seminar X: Anxiety and Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.[3]
A recurrent theme is the division of the subject between the domain of scientific knowledge (the “subject of science”) and the domain of analytic truth (the subject of the unconscious). Lacan argues that psychoanalysis reveals a structural gap between truth and knowledge, and that objet a is precisely the object around which this gap is organized.[4]
Historical and institutional context
ENS and the École Freudienne de Paris
After his exclusion from the training functions of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) and the end of his teaching at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Lacan moved his weekly seminar to the École Normale Supérieure in 1964. Seminar XIII belongs to this ENS period, characterized by a mixed audience of philosophers, linguists, mathematicians and psychoanalysts, and by an increasing formalization of Lacan’s concepts through logic and topology.[5]
In 1964 Lacan also founded the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), consolidating an institutional project centred on his “return to Freud”. Seminar XIII is thus delivered at a moment when Lacan is explicitly reflecting on analytic training, the status of his teaching, and the distinction between psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and psychoanalysis as a formalizable discourse.[5]
Place in Lacan’s teaching
Seminar XIII is situated between Seminar XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse (1964–1965) and Seminar XIV: La logique du fantasme (1966–1967). Together, these three seminars form a tightly connected sequence that:
- revisits the Graph of Desire and objet a (Seminars XII–XIII),
- introduces topological devices as mathemes capable of inscribing the subject and the object (Seminars XII–XIII),
- and culminates in the explicit logical writing of fantasy as $ \lozenge a$ in Seminar XIV.[6]
Seminar XIII is often read as the central articulation of objet a as such: earlier seminars (La relation d'objet, Anxiety) prepare the concept, while later seminars (The Logic of Fantasy, Encore) use it to formalize fantasy and sexual non-rapport.[2]
Sources and publication status
Unlike several earlier seminars, L'objet de la psychanalyse has not been published in a canonical French edition. It is known through stenographic notes taken by participants, internal circulations, and partial audio recordings preserved within Lacanian institutions.[1] Scholarship therefore relies largely on these sources, as well as on references in later seminars and in secondary literature that reconstruct its principal lines.[4][6]
Conceptual framework and methodology
The object of psychoanalysis
Seminar XIII is organised around a deceptively simple question: *What is the object of psychoanalysis?* Lacan’s answer is neither the ego, nor “behaviour,” nor even the drives taken as biological forces. Rather, he argues that psychoanalysis has its own specific object, objet petit a, which is neither an empirical object of satisfaction nor a theoretical construct reducible to representation.[2][4]
Objet a is described as:
- the remainder or “product” of the operation by which the subject is constituted in and by the signifier;
- the “primal object” that is structurally lost when a primordial cut separates the speaking being from any imagined unity;
- the cause of desire, rather than its goal or content.[1][4]
In Seminar XIII Lacan develops these points by linking objet a to the topology of surfaces and to the division of the subject between truth and knowledge.
Subject divided between truth and knowledge
A key theme is the division of the subject between the register of knowledge (savoir) and that of truth (vérité). Psychoanalysis, Lacan insists, reveals that the speaking subject is never entirely where knowledge places it. On the one hand there is the “subject of science,” whose position is defined by an ideal, impersonal knowledge; on the other, the subject of the unconscious, whose truth emerges in slips, dreams and symptoms in ways that cannot be fully integrated into any system of knowledge.[7][4]
In Seminar XIII Lacan situates objet a at the very point where truth and knowledge fail to coincide: the “hole” or gap that appears when the subject confronts what escapes both scientific objectification and conscious self-knowledge. This is formulated in terms of the subject who, “at the moment of knowledge, is divided—and knows it,” as opposed to the subject of science, who “restores the prestige of méconnaissance by thinking that he unites knowledge and subject.”[1]
Topology as “rigorous montage”
Seminar XIII extends the explicit use of topology in Lacan’s teaching. Against the idea that mathematical models are mere metaphors, Lacan famously asserts that “topology is not a metaphor, but a rigorous montage with the objet a.”[1] Topology provides configurations whose structural properties (holes, continuity, non-orientability) are used to formalize the relations among subject, Other and object.
Four basic topological figures structure the seminar:
- Disk with a hole – representing a field (for example, knowledge) structured around a central lack.
- Moebius strip – a one-sided, non-orientable surface on which “inside” and “outside” are*
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse (1965–1966). Unpublished; known from French transcripts and recordings circulated within Lacanian schools.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966; English trans. Bruce Fink, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.