Lacan in 90 Minutes/The Seminars Begin

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In 1953, Jacques Lacan began what would become the defining feature of his intellectual life: the weekly seminar. Over the next twenty-seven years, these seminars would evolve into one of the most unusual and influential bodies of teaching in twentieth-century thought.

Lacan did not write his seminars in advance, and he did not treat them as lectures designed to transmit settled knowledge. They were spoken, provisional, and often difficult. Above all, they were events.

Why the Seminars Mattered

Unlike academic courses or clinical training sessions, Lacan’s seminars were public. They attracted psychoanalysts, philosophers, writers, students, and intellectuals from across disciplines. Attendance was not restricted to specialists, and the tone was not pedagogical in the conventional sense.

This mattered because Lacan did not believe psychoanalysis should be reduced to professional technique. For him, it was an intellectual practice with consequences for how subjects understand themselves, how language operates, and how meaning circulates in culture.

The seminar became the space where these questions could be explored live.

Speaking, Not Publishing

For much of his career, Lacan published relatively little. Instead, he spoke—at length, repeatedly revisiting the same texts, problems, and formulations. This choice was deliberate.

Spoken teaching allowed Lacan to revise himself, contradict earlier claims, and respond to his audience. It also resisted premature closure. Ideas were not finalized; they were tested.

This performative dimension is one reason Lacan’s work feels different from that of other theorists. His ideas unfolded over time, in dialogue with listeners, rather than appearing as a finished system.

Difficulty as Method

Lacan’s seminars quickly developed a reputation for difficulty. This was not accidental. He believed that psychoanalysis could not be taught as a set of clear instructions without betraying its object.

Rather than simplifying ideas for accessibility, Lacan often complicated them—using unexpected examples, detours, and rhetorical shifts. Listeners were required to work, to listen closely, and to tolerate uncertainty.

This approach frustrated many, but it also created a distinctive intellectual atmosphere. The seminar was not a place to receive answers. It was a place to encounter problems.

Freud on the Table

Throughout the seminars, Freud remained central. Lacan read Freud aloud, commented on specific passages, and returned repeatedly to the same texts across years.

This sustained engagement reinforced Lacan’s claim that psychoanalysis advances through interpretation, not accumulation. Freud’s writings were not relics to be revered or superseded. They were texts to be reopened.

By teaching Freud publicly, Lacan transformed psychoanalysis into a shared intellectual enterprise rather than a closed professional discourse.

An Unstable Institution

The success of the seminars also intensified tensions with psychoanalytic institutions. Lacan’s teaching style, his views on training, and his refusal to conform to established norms placed him increasingly at odds with official bodies.

What began as an innovative pedagogical experiment would soon become a political problem.

The next page turns to that conflict—and to the consequences of teaching psychoanalysis differently.

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