Seminar IX

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 VIII Seminar X →

Identification
Seminar IX
Cover associated with the French edition of Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’identification.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’identification
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IX: Identification
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1961–1962 (academic year)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Identification • trait unaire (unary trait) • Signifier • Ego ideal • Ideal ego • Phallus • Name-of-the-Father • Objet petit a • Divided subject
Notable Themes	Types of identification; symbolic vs imaginary identification; unary trait and number; paternal identification; proper name and signifier; topology of the subject
Freud Texts	Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego • The Ego and the Id • On Narcissism
Theoretical Context
Period	Structural/topological period
Register	Symbolic with increasing formalization of the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar VIII
Followed by	Seminar X

Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’identification (Identification) is the ninth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the 1961–1962 academic year. Frequently cited simply as Seminar IX, it is devoted to a rigorous reworking of the concept of identification in psychoanalysis, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and The Ego and the Id while articulating Lacan’s own notions of the unary trait (trait unaire), signifier, and ego ideal.

Seminar IX occupies a pivotal place in Lacan’s teaching: it continues the structural emphasis of earlier seminars (especially Seminar II and Seminar III), extends the concerns with love and transference developed in Le transfert, and prepares the ground for the topological and matheme-based formalization of the subject that comes to the fore in Seminar X and Seminar XI. Its central thesis is that the psychoanalytic subject is instituted not by any substantial identity but by the mark of the signifier: identification is fundamentally an identification with a signifying trait rather than with a person or image.

Historical and institutional context

From transference to identification

Seminar IX follows directly upon Le transfert (dans sa disparité subjective) (1960–1961), in which Lacan rethought transference as a structural effect of the subject supposed to know and elaborated the analyst’s position through a reading of Plato’s Symposium. Whereas Seminar VIII focused on transference love and the dissymmetry between analysand and analyst, Seminar IX shifts the emphasis from love to identification, asking how the subject is constituted by the marks of language and how these marks support ego ideals, group formations, and clinical structures.

This shift continues Lacan’s “return to Freud”: in the mid-1950s he had re-read Freud through linguistics and structuralism in order to think psychosis (Seminar III), while Seminar VII and VIII had introduced a strong ethical and erotic inflection. Seminar IX brings these threads together under the heading of identification, situating the subject at the intersection of signifier, law, and desire.

The SFP and debates on training and structure

Institutionally, Lacan was still working within the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), in the tense period preceding his eventual exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and the founding of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964. Questions of training analysis, analytic technique, and the definition of clinical structure (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) were central concerns.

Seminar IX responds to these debates by grounding questions of ego-ideal, narcissism, and group belonging in the structural operations of identification. Rather than taking identification as a psychological fact or a developmental stage, Lacan treats it as a function of the signifier and as a mechanism that underlies both individual subjectivity and collective phenomena.

Composition and publication history

Like other early seminars, L’identification was delivered as a weekly oral teaching at Hôpital Sainte-Anne and initially circulated in the form of notes and transcriptions. A stabilized French text, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, was published by Éditions du Seuil in the Champ freudien collection decades after its delivery. While an official English translation has been slower to appear than those of some other seminars, Seminar IX has been widely discussed in Lacanian secondary literature, particularly around the concepts of the unary trait and the ego ideal.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Lacan’s reading of Freud on identification

Seminar IX is explicitly anchored in Sigmund Freud’s chapter on identification in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and in The Ego and the Id (1923). Freud distinguishes several modalities of identification, including:

1. A primary identification with the father as such, based on a single trait and forming the matrix of the ego-ideal.
2. A regressive identification in love relations, where the subject identifies with the lost or refused object of love.
3. A hysterical identification, in which the subject identifies with another person’s “global situation,” often through the adoption of a symptom.

Lacan adopts this tripartition but reinterprets it through his own distinctions between the imaginary, symbolic, and real. He emphasizes that primary identification is not with a person but with a trait—what he formalizes as the unary trait—and that the crucial question for psychoanalysis is the subject’s relation to the signifier as such, rather than to images or persons.

Symbolic identification and the signifier

Already in Seminar VIII, Lacan had described “symbolic identification” as identification with a signifier. In Seminar IX, he systematically explores the “rapport of the subject to the signifier” and asks how the subject is instituted by a mark that can be repeated and counted.

The basic idea is that identification is a function of the signifier's difference: a signifier is “one” only in that it is what all the others are not. The subject is represented by one signifier (S₁) for another signifier (S₂); identification is a fixation to one such signifying mark that functions as the support of the ego ideal.

By insisting on identification with the signifier and on the structural identification of the signifier (as pure difference), Lacan brings about a new category centred on the subject’s relation to the Name-of-the-Father and to the phallus as symbolic marks.

Method: logic, language, and topology

Seminar IX intensifies Lacan’s engagement with formal logic, the theory of the proper name, and emerging topological models. He uses logical formulae, schemas, and at times playful examples to show how repetition of a mark produces a “count” before number in the strict mathematical sense, and how identification is tied to this primordial counting.

At the same time, Lacan returns to questions raised in The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious (L’instance de la lettre, in Écrits): how do inscriptions in the unconscious function like letters or marks, and how does the subject emerge as an effect of such inscriptions?

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

The three Freudian identifications reworked

Lacan re-examines Freud’s three types of identification, reconfiguring them in structural and signifying terms:

1. **Primary identification with the father.** This is a “primitive” identification with the Father as such, based on a single feature—“a single trait,” the matrix of the ego ideal. It implies a symbolic introjection of the father’s mark. Lacan paraphrases the Freudian idea that “an identity of body links the Father of all times to all those who descend from him,” but he insists that this “identity” is in fact the effect of a unary trait that can be repeated across generations.
2. **Regressive identification in love.** In love relations, when the object of love refuses itself or is lost, the subject may identify with that object: the subject becomes what the beloved was for them. This type of identification is centred on objet petit a and the phallic function; it is crucial for understanding the transformations of desire in transference and loss.
3. **Hysterical identification.** In hysterical structures, the subject identifies not with a particular trait but with the “global situation” of another: they adopt a symptom, complaint, or position that they perceive in the other. Here identification is bound up with the hysteric’s demand addressed to the Other and with the subject’s question about their own desire.

By asserting both the identification of the signifier (its identity as difference) and identification with the signifier, Lacan shows that these three Freudian forms are not merely psychological variations but configurations of the subject’s relation to the unary trait and to key signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus.

The unary trait (trait unaire)

One of Seminar IX’s most influential contributions is the elaboration of the unary trait (trait unaire), sometimes glossed as the “unbroken line.” In The Agency of the Letter, the signifier was described as an inscription or a seal in the unconscious; in L’identification this becomes the unary trait, a simple mark that can be repeated and counted.

Although the trait may originate as a sign (e.g., a mark on the body, a distinguishing characteristic), it becomes a signifier when incorporated into a signifying system—when it enters into relations of difference with other traits. Identification raises the question of the identical: can one say that A = A? Lacan answers “no,” because the moment a trait is repeated—A, A, A—a difference emerges due to repetition itself. Hence the subject appears not in the identity A = A but in the relation of a signifier that represents the subject for another signifier:

A → A (a mark representing the subject for another mark).

Against any conception of the One as closed totality, Lacan posits the 1 of the unary trait—a single mark produced by mere repetition. The signifier has unity only insofar as it is “that which all the others are not,” pure difference. The One as such is the Other.

This leads Lacan to question expressions like “war is war” or “Lacan is Lacan”: there is no real tautology here, but a signifying operation in which the same signifier functions to connote pure difference (opposition to all that is not-war, not-Lacan). In repetition, the signifier does not represent the subject for some person but for another signifier; identification with a trait is thus inseparable from the structural play of difference in the symbolic order.

Ego-ideal, Ideal ego, and the father’s mark

In Freud, the primary identification with the father supports the formation of the ego ideal and is linked to group phenomena and leadership. Lacan reinterprets these notions via the unary trait: the ego-ideal is the internalization of a signifying mark representing the gaze of the Other, while the ideal ego is an imaginary image of completeness and narcissistic perfection.

Seminar IX insists that narcissism and incorporation “should be located in the direction of the Father and not in the direction of the parasitized mother’s body.” In other words, what gives consistency to the subject’s narcissistic image is ultimately the symbolic mark of the father—the unary trait linked to the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus. This is why Lacan can say that the phallus, as symbolic mark, is “at the origin,” designating the real presence that permits identification and that anchors the ego-ideal on the side of the Other.

Language, animality, and the “non-human”

To underline the difference between the preverbal and the verbal, Lacan gives the example of his dog, Justine, to whom he attributes something like “speech” but not language. Justine can emit signals and respond to calls, but “insofar as she speaks, she never takes him for an Other; she is not capable of transference and lives entirely in demand.”

In The Agency of the Letter, Lacan had referred to the “language of the affect and of the body” as the “nonhuman” aspect in those who “do not have language.” Seminar IX radicalizes this by asserting that the only “salvation” lies in signifying identification—that is, in articulating the preverbal and bodily dimension within the subject’s relation to the word, to the signifier. Without such a signifying capture, there is no subject of the unconscious, only living organisms governed by demand and affect.

Proper names, negation, and logic

Seminar IX devotes significant attention to proper names and to the logic of negation. Lacan asks what is at stake in saying “Lacan is Lacan” or “God is God.” These apparent tautologies are not expressions of simple identity but operations in which a signifier is posited as “the One” against a background of difference.

Formal logic, the grammar of negation, and the study of proper names all serve to clarify the unary trait as “a return, the seizing of the origin of a counting before the number.” The subject is situated at the point where this counting counts “one” as a mark of difference, not as a substance. This orientation foreshadows Lacan’s later development of mathemes and of the formal schema S₁ – S₂ (master-signifier and knowledge) in the theory of the four discourses.

Object a, phallus, and the second identification

The second (regressive) form of identification, where the subject identifies with the lost object of love, is tightly bound to Lacan’s concept of objet petit a and to the phallic signifier. When the love object withdraws or refuses itself, the subject may seek to become that object, to embody what they take to be the cause of desire for the Other.

In this movement, the subject shifts from identification with an ideal trait to identification with the “leftover” or remainder of desire, the object a. Seminar IX shows how such identifications can structure symptoms and fantasy, and how they differ structurally from both primary paternal identification and hysterical identification with another’s “situation.”

Hysterical identification and global situation

In the third Freudian form—hysterical identification—the subject recognizes in the other their own “global situation.” Rather than copying a particular trait, they identify with the overall position of the other in relation to the Other’s desire and demand.

Lacan understands this as a way for the hysteric to ask questions about their own desire: by adopting the symptom of another, they challenge the Other to say what they are for it. This hysterical identification plays a key role in the analytic situation, where the analysand often attempts to adopt the position they fantasize the analyst occupies—an echo of Seminar VIII’s analysis of transference love.

Origin, rooster, and signifier

In a playful aside, Lacan revisits the classic question of origin—“the chicken or the egg?”—and answers with “the rooster”: the signifier that makes the rooster, the letter or unary trait. In other words, the priority is not given to biological sequence but to signifying inscription: what first establishes a lineage, a name, a “family,” is the mark that counts as one and repeats across generations.

This anecdote illustrates Lacan’s broader project in Seminar IX: “to create a topological structure of the subject,” one that does not rely on substantial origin but on the structural effects of signifiers and their repetition.

Truth, discourse, and the analyst’s position

Seminar IX also touches on the status of truth in analytic discourse. To the imagined question, “What is the truth of your discourse?” Lacan responds, in a formulation reported in the seminar:

“I am an analyst, and as such I have to disappoint you: I do not tell the truth about truth. I can take you very far on the path of the ‘who am I’ without the truth of what I am telling you being guaranteed; nevertheless, in what I am telling you, it is still a matter of truth.”

Here Lacan links the analyst’s discourse to a truth that is partial, non-totalizable, and bound up with the subject’s identifications. The analyst does not reveal a final identity but facilitates the subject’s traversal of the identifications sustained by unary traits, ideals, and fantasies.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Identification and clinical structure

Seminar IX contributes to Lacan’s doctrine of clinical structure (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) by specifying how different structures involve different patterns of identification. For instance, the role of primary paternal identification and of the unary trait is central for understanding how the Name-of-the-Father operates in neurosis and how its foreclosure operates in psychosis.

By emphasizing the signifying basis of identification, Lacan distances psychoanalysis both from biologizing accounts of inheritance and from purely phenomenological descriptions of empathy or imitation. Diagnosis becomes a question of how the subject is knotted to specific marks (names, traits, ideals) and how these marks organize symptoms, fantasies, and group relations.

Ego-ideal, transference, and the end of analysis

Seminar IX has important consequences for how one conceives the end of analysis. If the ego ideal is grounded in identification with a unary trait linked to the Other’s gaze, then analytic work implies a modification of this identification: the subject must come to see how their “ideal” is a function of signifiers and not a natural or moral essence.

In transference, the analyst is often placed in the position of ego-ideal or ideal ego; Seminar VIII analysed this as transference love. Seminar IX adds that the analysand’s identifications with the analyst (as trait, as position, as object) are central phenomena to be interpreted. The end of analysis would involve a certain destitution of these identifications, a loosening of the subject’s attachment to the “One” that guarantees their identity, and the emergence of the subject as divided, represented by the signifier but not reducible to it.

Implications for group phenomena and social bonds

Lacan’s return to Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in Seminar IX also has implications for understanding social bonds and group dynamics. If group formation relies on shared identification with a trait—often embodied by a leader, but structurally independent of any particular person—then the politics of ideals, names, and insignia can be analysed in terms of unary traits and ego-ideals.

This perspective has been taken up in later Lacanian-inspired work on crowd behaviour, nationalism, and the symbolic power of names and slogans, where the “One” that unites is understood as a signifier rather than as an intrinsic property of a group.

Toward topology and mathemes

Finally, Seminar IX is widely seen as a bridge toward Lacan’s later topological work and the introduction of mathemes. The unary trait prefigures the later emphasis on S₁ (master signifier) and the circuits of S₁–S₂ in the four discourses. The interest in counting, repetition, and inscription anticipates the use of topological surfaces (torus, Möbius strip, cross-cap) in Seminar X and Seminar XI to model the subject’s relation to jouissance, fantasy, and the Real.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools, L’identification is regarded as a key seminar for understanding the function of the ego ideal, the Ideal ego, and the unary trait. It is frequently studied in conjunction with Seminar II (on the ego), Seminar III (on psychosis and foreclosure), and Seminar XI (on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis).

Its concepts have been particularly influential in training contexts, where questions of the analyst’s first identifications (with their own analyst, with the school, with certain names or traits) are reflected upon through Lacan’s framework.

In the humanities and theory

In the wider humanities, Seminar IX has contributed to debates about subjectivity, identity, and the politics of naming. The notion that there is no pure “identity” but only effects of signifying inscription—that there is no tautology of the real in “Lacan is Lacan”—has resonated with post-structuralist and deconstructive approaches to the subject.

The unary trait has also influenced readings of literature and political theory, where the focus shifts from substantial identities to the marks, labels, and signifiers that support collective identifications (party names, slogans, brand logos, etc.).

Critiques

Critics of Seminar IX sometimes argue that Lacan’s increasing formalization risks abstracting psychoanalysis away from lived clinical experience and from empirical research. The emphasis on logic and topology can appear distant from the everyday practice of listening to symptoms and affects.

Lacanian commentators generally respond that these formalizations are meant to clarify, not replace, clinical work: they provide a conceptual framework for understanding the effects of language and identification that manifest in concrete analysis sessions. The continued use of Seminar IX in Lacanian teaching suggests that many practitioners find its formalism clinically illuminating rather than obstructive.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar VIII
• Seminar X
• Identification
• Trait unaire
• Signifier
• Ego, Ego ideal, and Ideal ego
• Name-of-the-Father
• Phallus (Lacan)
• Objet petit a
• Symbolic order
• Imaginary order
• Real (psychoanalysis)
• Transference
• Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• Écrits

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’identification (1961–1962). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Champ freudien.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966; English trans. Bruce Fink, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006 (esp. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”).
• Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In Standard Edition, vol. XVIII.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996 (entries “identification,” “unary trait,” “ego-ideal,” “ideal ego”).
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (chapters on the signifier, the subject, and identification).