Seminar XXV

Jacques Lacan's Seminars : I · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X · XI · XII · XIII · XIV · XV · XVI · XVII · XVIII · XIX · XX · XXI · XXII · XXIII · XXIV · XXV · XXVI · XXVII I. Freud's technical writings II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis III. The Psychoses IV. The Object Relations V. The Formations of the Unconscious VI. Desire and its Interpretation VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis VIII. Transference IX. Identification The Names of the Father X. Anxiety XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis XIII. The Object of Psychoanalysis XIV. The Logic of Fantasy XV. The Psychoanalytic Act XVI. From One Other to the Other XVII. The Reverse of Psychoanalysis XVIII. On a Discourse That Would Not Be Semblance XIX. Or Worse XX. Encore XXV. The Moment of Concluding XXVII. Dissolution ← Seminar XXIV Seminar XXVI →

Le moment de conclure
Seminar XXV
Cover image associated with circulating transcripts and later editorial editions (varies by publisher/series).
French Title	Le moment de conclure
English Title	The Moment of Concluding
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1977–1978 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions (exact count varies by transcription tradition)
Location	Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	End of analysis • Interpretation • Act • Sinthome • Borromean knot • Lalangue • Jouissance • Real • Pass • Subject • Other
Notable Themes	Concluding as analytic operation; limits of sense; “know-how” (savoir-y-faire) with the symptom; knotting and stabilization; analyst’s position; rethinking truth and knowledge in the late teaching
Freud Texts	Freud on termination, repetition, and symptom formation (background orientation)
Theoretical Context
Period	Late period (Borromean/topological teaching)
Register	Primacy of the Real and the knotting of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XXIV
Followed by	Seminar XXVI

Le moment de conclure (English: The Moment of Concluding) is Jacques Lacan’s twenty-fifth annual seminar (Séminaire XXV), delivered during the 1977–1978 academic year in Paris. It forms part of Lacan’s late teaching, in which questions of interpretation, the end of analysis, and the status of the symptom are increasingly articulated through the logic of knot theory (notably the Borromean knot) and through a sustained focus on the Real.

The seminar is frequently read as a direct continuation of Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome) and Seminar XXIV (L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre), extending their late rethinking of the unconscious (via lalangue and equivocation) into a practical and ethical problem: what it means to “conclude” an analysis when interpretation no longer aims primarily at producing meaning, but at modifying a subject’s relation to jouissance and to the singular knot of their symptom.

Introductory overview

In the classical Freudian horizon, the conclusion of analysis is often framed in terms of resolving symptoms, loosening fixations, and establishing a more workable relation to desire, reality, and conflict. Lacan’s teaching reconfigures this horizon by distinguishing the ego from the subject of the unconscious, shifting the analytic aim away from adaptation and toward the effects of speech and signifier on the subject’s division and desire (a trajectory already explicit in early seminars).

By the late 1970s, Lacan’s emphasis has moved further: the unconscious is approached less as a reservoir of meanings to be decoded than as a set of insistences tied to the body and enjoyment—an “unknown knowledge” lodged in lalangue and in the subject’s repetitions. In this context, “concluding” does not simply mean reaching understanding or narrative coherence. It names a moment of decision and tying-off: a change in how the subject is knotted to the Other, to their symptom, and to jouissance.

Seminar XXV is thus often presented in Lacanian commentary as a seminar on the pragmatic edge of psychoanalysis: the point at which the analytic work must yield an effect in the subject’s mode of living and speaking—an effect that cannot be reduced to intellectual insight alone.

Historical and institutional context

Late Lacan and the “Borromean” turn

From the late 1960s onward, Lacan increasingly adopted formal devices—mathemes, logical schemas, and topological figures—as tools for articulating psychoanalytic structure without reducing it to psychology or hermeneutics. The Borromean knot becomes a privileged model in this late teaching: the registers of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real are conceived as rings whose linkage sustains subjective consistency, and whose failure or reconfiguration can illuminate clinical phenomena.

Within this late orientation, the symptom is no longer only a compromise formation interpretable as a message; it is also a mode of knotting—an arrangement that can stabilize a subject’s relation to the Real of jouissance.

Seminar XXV in the sequence of late seminars

Seminar XXV follows Seminar XXIV, which foregrounds the unconscious as *bévue* (blunder), equivocation, and the Real of lalangue, and it remains in close continuity with Seminar XXIII and its concept of the sinthome. In that sequence, Lacan repeatedly returns to a clinical question: what is the status of interpretation when meaning is not the final arbiter, and when the symptom functions as a support of being?

The title “the moment of concluding” condenses this late problem as a temporal and logical punctum: not merely the end of a process, but the point where a structure is *cut* and *tied* in a new way.

Transmission and textual status

As with several late seminars, Seminar XXV circulated for years through notes, transcripts, and editorial compilations, and scholarly citations may refer to different session breakdowns depending on the version used. This transmission history is relevant to interpretation of the seminar because Lacan’s late style often depends on oral rhythm, equivocation, and improvised formalization—features that can be rendered unevenly across transcriptions.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Concluding as logical operation, not merely chronological ending

The seminar’s title invites a distinction between an analysis that *stops* and an analysis that *concludes*. A stop may be contingent (time, money, institutional constraint); a conclusion implies a structural change in the subject’s relation to the analytic experience, and in particular to the supposed knowledge of the Other.

In Lacanian terms, the analyst’s position is tied to transference: the analysand addresses the analyst as if the analyst knows something about the analysand’s truth. A “moment of concluding” therefore concerns how this supposition is altered—how the analysand’s relation to knowledge, truth, and authority is reconfigured so that the analytic work does not remain dependent on the Other’s guarantee.

From interpretation as meaning to interpretation as cut

Lacan’s earlier emphasis on the signifier already implies that interpretation is not explanation but an intervention in speech—an operation that produces effects of truth by punctuating the signifying chain. In the late teaching, this becomes sharper: interpretation is increasingly described in terms of *cut*, *equivocation*, and the targeting of jouissance rather than the delivery of hidden meanings.

A common late-Lacanian formulation in secondary literature is that interpretation aims at the real point where meaning fails—where the subject repeats and enjoys beyond sense. The “conclusion” would then be marked by a modification of that repetition and by a different “handling” (savoir-y-faire) of the symptom.

Knotting, stabilization, and the role of the sinthome

The sinthome (a deliberate archaic spelling of “symptom”) is central to the late seminars as a concept that designates the singular, non-universal way a subject knots the registers together. While the symptom can be interpreted, it also functions: it anchors the subject’s consistency, sometimes preventing disintegration or psychotic invasion. In this framework, analysis does not necessarily aim at removing the sinthome, but at transforming the subject’s relation to it—shifting from suffering and compulsion toward a workable, assumable mode of enjoyment.

This shift introduces a technical and ethical complexity: a symptom may be both a problem and a solution. “Concluding” must therefore be understood not as “curing away” the symptom in general, but as producing a new arrangement (a new knot) that supports the subject without the analyst’s continuous mediation.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

The “moment” (moment) as time of decision and cut

The emphasis on “moment” indicates that concluding is not a gradual fading-out but can involve an abrupt logical shift—analogous to the analytic cut of a session. Late Lacan often treats time in analysis not as a neutral container but as structured by cuts, scansion, and discontinuities that produce meaning-effects and jouissance-effects.

In this perspective, the end of analysis is not defined solely by duration or by completion of a program. It is oriented by a transformation in the subject’s relation to the signifier and the Real, crystallizing in a moment that can be described as concluding.

Knowledge, truth, and the dismantling of the “subject supposed to know”

A crucial axis of Lacanian technique is the transference figure known as the subject supposed to know: the analysand’s supposition that the analyst holds the key to the analysand’s truth. Secondary clinical literature treats the end of analysis as requiring a shift in this supposition—so that knowledge is no longer located in the Other as guarantee, but is assumed in a different way by the subject (often as knowledge of how they are determined by their signifiers, and how they can do something with that determination).

Seminar XXV belongs to this late effort to rethink knowledge: not simply “knowledge about oneself,” but a practical knowledge of one’s symptom and one’s jouissance.

The symptom, jouissance, and “know-how” (savoir-y-faire)

A widely circulated gloss of late Lacan is that analysis culminates in a “know-how with the symptom” (savoir-y-faire avec le symptôme). This does not imply mastery in the ego-psychological sense; rather, it indicates a changed relation to repetition and enjoyment. The subject is less at the mercy of the symptom as enigmatic command and more able to situate it, limit it, or even make use of it.

In this late frame, “concluding” can be described as a shift from asking the Other to supply meaning (“What does it mean?”) to taking responsibility for a singular arrangement (“How does it work for me, and what can I do with it?”).

Lalangue, equivocation, and the limits of sense

Continuing the themes of Seminar XXIV, Seminar XXV presupposes Lacan’s notion of lalangue: the pre-communicative, affective and sonic material of one’s language, where signifiers are enjoyed and repeated. Interpretation by equivocation targets this level, producing effects not by clarifying but by displacing the subject’s attachment to certain signifying fragments.

This emphasis also clarifies why concluding cannot be reduced to “understanding one’s story.” The decisive points are often those where speech touches the Real—where a signifier sticks, returns, and produces jouissance beyond narrative.

The pass and the problem of testimony

In Lacanian institutional history, the pass is a procedure designed to formalize and transmit something of the end of analysis. While details of the pass belong to institutional debates and differ across schools, secondary histories treat it as part of Lacan’s attempt to connect the question of concluding to a problem of testimony: what can be said about an end that is not simply therapeutic improvement, but a structural change in relation to the Other and to jouissance?

Seminar XXV is often placed in the same late constellation of concerns: concluding as an act that resists standardization, yet demands some form of articulation if psychoanalysis is to be transmissible.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Rethinking termination beyond adaptation and “cure”

From Seminar II onward, Lacan polemicizes against approaches that define analysis as strengthening the ego for adaptation. The late teaching intensifies this critique by redefining the endpoint in terms of the Real: not a harmonious self, but a subject who can assume division and handle the symptom’s jouissance differently.

In this context, symptom relief may occur, but it is not the sole criterion. The criterion is structural: a changed relation to the Other, to knowledge, and to jouissance.

Clinical caution: the symptom as stabilizer

A major clinical implication of the late knotting framework is that interpretation can destabilize as well as liberate. If the symptom functions as a stabilizing knot, dismantling it through interpretive enthusiasm can risk producing unmooring, anxiety, or psychotic-like phenomena in vulnerable cases. Late Lacanian clinicians frequently cite this as a reason to treat “making sense” as insufficient: the analyst must consider the symptom’s function as support and the subject’s capacity to re-knot differently.

This implication parallels lessons derived from Lacanian work on psychosis (e.g., the importance of stabilization) while extending them to a broader clinic: the symptom is not simply an error to be corrected.

The analyst’s act and the ethics of ending

The “moment of concluding” also highlights the analyst’s responsibility: ending is not merely the analysand’s choice or the analyst’s administrative decision, but an ethical and technical act that concerns the structure of transference and the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire. The analyst must avoid turning the end into a moral victory (mastery, normality), and must instead orient the conclusion toward the subject’s singular solution and the reduction of dependence on the analyst as knowing Other.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian circles, Seminar XXV is typically treated as a key document of “late Lacan” on the end of analysis, often taught alongside Seminar XXIII and Seminar XXIV as a sequence devoted to the sinthome, lalangue, and concluding. Its conceptual vocabulary—knotting, sinthome, savoir-y-faire—has become central to many later Lacanian discussions of clinical direction and analytic termination.

Because textual transmission relies in part on transcripts and editorial variants, debates sometimes arise over emphasis and formulation; however, the seminar’s broad legacy is clear in the way late-Lacanian practice often frames interpretation and the end of analysis in terms of jouissance and singular stabilization rather than meaning and normalization.

In academic theory and interdisciplinary reception

In the humanities and theory, Lacan’s late emphasis on writing and topology has attracted attention both for its conceptual ambition and for its resistance to straightforward paraphrase. Discussions of concluding have influenced readings of psychoanalytic ethics, the limits of hermeneutics, and the role of discontinuity and decision in subject formation. The seminar’s proximity to the Joyce-oriented Seminar XXIII also supports interdisciplinary interest in invention, style, and the symptom as a creative support.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XXIII
• Seminar XXIV
• Seminar XXVI
• End of analysis
• Interpretation
• Transference
• Subject supposed to know
• Sinthome
• Symptom
• Borromean knot
• Imaginary
• Symbolic order
• Real
• Lalangue
• Jouissance
• Pass
• Écrits

Further reading

• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.

• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), in Standard Edition.

French

Date	HTML
15 novembre 1977	link	link
13 décembre 1977	link	link
20 décembre 1977	link	link
10 janvier 1978	link	link
17 janvier 1978	link	link
14 février 1978	link	link
21 février 1978	link	link
14 mars 1978	link	link
21 mars 1978	link	link
11 avril 1978	link	link
18 avril 1978	link	link
09 mai 1978	link	link