Seminar VI

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 V Seminar VII →

Desire and its Interpretation
Seminar VI
Cover image associated with the French edition of Le Séminaire, Livre VI.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation
English Title	Desire and its Interpretation
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1958–1959 (academic year)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Desire • Demand • Drive • Graph of desire • objet petit a • Fantasy • Phallus • Other • Castration
Notable Themes	Desire and interpretation; the structure of the unconscious; Symbolic law and Oedipus complex; Hamlet as clinical tragedy of desire; analyst’s desire and analytic ethics
Freud Texts	The Interpretation of Dreams • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • The Ego and the Id • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Theoretical Context
Period	Structural / transitional period
Register	Symbolic / Real (formalization of desire)
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar V
Followed by	Seminar VII

Desire and its Interpretation (French: Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation) is the sixth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the 1958–1959 academic year. Frequently referred to simply as Seminar VI, it develops Lacan’s early structuralist orientation into a sustained exploration of desire as the central category of psychoanalysis, articulating the relations between desire, demand, drive, and interpretation.

Situated between Seminar V (on The formations of the unconscious) and Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Seminar VI is often regarded as a pivotal text in which Lacan formalizes the graph of desire, refines his distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers, and prepares the way for his later notions of objet petit a and fantasy. It is also notable for an extended series of lessons on Hamlet, in which Lacan reinterprets the play as a “tragedy of desire” grounded in the coordinates of Oedipus, castration, and the failure of the Name-of-the-Father.

Historical and institutional context

Place within Lacan’s teaching

Seminar VI belongs to Lacan’s so-called “structural” or “classical” period, following his elaborations on the ego and Symbolic structure in Seminar II and his theorization of psychosis and foreclosure in Seminar III, as well as the discussion of object relations and transference in Seminar IV and Seminar V.

Where Seminar V focuses on the formations of the unconscious—dreams, lapses, jokes—as signifying structures, Seminar VI re-centres the question of their *interpretation* around desire. Lacan systematically explores how analytic interpretation both addresses and displaces desire, insisting that desire is not a pre-given psychological quantity but a structural function that emerges from the subject’s insertion into the network of signifiers.

Sainte-Anne, the SFP, and debates on technique

The seminar was delivered in the institutional context of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), founded after the 1953 split from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). During these years Lacan continued his critique of ego psychology and “adaptationist” technique, arguing that the aim of analysis is not ego-strengthening but a transformation in the subject’s relation to the Other, the unconscious, and desire.

Seminar VI takes up this polemic in a more technical register: rather than debating ego psychology directly, Lacan seeks to redefine interpretation itself. The analyst’s intervention is reconceived not as supplying meaning, but as cutting into the signifying chain so as to make appear the desire that is already at work in the analysand’s speech.

Publication history

As with many of Lacan’s seminars, Seminar VI circulated for decades in the form of stenographic notes and unofficial transcriptions before an authoritative French edition was established by Jacques-Alain Miller for Éditions du Seuil in 2013. Prior to this publication, selections—most notably the seven lessons on Hamlet—were edited and published in Ornicar? in 1983, contributing to the early reception of the seminar in Lacanian circles.

The absence (as of the early 21st century) of a complete official English translation meant that Seminar VI was often accessed via French editions, partial translations, and secondary commentaries, leading to a reception mediated by the interpretive work of later Lacanian authors.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Desire as central category of psychoanalysis

Lacan had already insisted, in his Écrits, that the subject of the unconscious is not reducible to the ego, and that the unconscious is “structured like a language.” Seminar VI radicalizes this by proposing that desire—rather than the ego, the drive, or affect—must be placed at the centre of analytic theory and clinical practice.

For Lacan, desire is not a biological need nor a purely subjective wish; it is a structural effect of the signifier. Desire arises at the point where demand (always articulated in language) fails to saturate the subject’s relation to the Other. The “surplus” that cannot be satisfied by any object of need is what constitutes desire as such.

From demand to desire: the signifying chain

Lacan’s method is explicitly structural and linguistic. Desire is read in the displacements and condensations of the signifying chain—in the equivocations, metaphors, and metonymies that organize an analysand’s speech. The seminar therefore pays close attention to the functioning of signifiers such as the phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, and the Mother as sites where desire is knotted to law and prohibition.

The analytic methodology in Seminar VI is thus less concerned with reconstructing “life history” than with charting the structural positions inscribed in speech: where does the subject locate the Other’s desire? Which signifiers are invested with enigmatic power? How does the subject’s discourse circle around a missing signifier or an impossible object?

Interpretation and the analyst’s position

Within this framework, interpretation is conceived not as the analyst’s delivery of hidden content, but as an intervention in the order of the signifier. Lacan emphasizes that a well-timed interpretation is a *cut* that interrupts the imaginary continuity of the analysand’s narrative, producing an effect of surprise or Witz that reveals the presence of an unconscious desire.

The analyst’s position is therefore not neutral: the analyst is implicated as a site where the analysand supposes knowledge of their desire. Seminar VI anticipates Lacan’s later formulation of the “analyst’s desire” as a structural function that conditions the possibility of analysis, while already warning against any temptation to identify with an ideal of mastery or understanding.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Desire, demand, and drive

A central set of distinctions in Seminar VI concerns desire, demand, and drive:

• Demand is articulated in language and thus always addressed to the Other. It is not limited to biological need, but asks for love and recognition.
• Desire emerges in the gap between demand and need, as that which no object can fully satisfy. It is preserved, even intensified, by the very success of particular satisfactions.
• Drive (pulsion) is not identical with desire but represents an insistence of jouissance that circulates around specific partial objects (e.g. oral, anal, scopic, invocatory).

Seminar VI refines these distinctions by showing how analytic interpretation can either reduce desire to demand—by answering it too literally—or keep desire open by pointing to its structural impossibility. The analyst’s task is to avoid becoming the object supposed to satisfy demand, thereby allowing the subject’s desire to be articulated in its singularity.

“Desire is its own interpretation”

One of Lacan’s programmatic statements in Seminar VI is the provocative claim that “desire is its own interpretation.” This does not mean that desire is transparent or self-evident; rather, that desire is only accessible in and through the signifying formations that already interpret it—dreams, symptoms, slips, and fantasies.

Analytic interpretation, on this view, consists in making explicit the ways in which the subject’s discourse already interprets desire, while also displacing the subject from any fixed identification with the content of these formations. The “truth” of desire is not an underlying meaning, but the structural movement that reveals itself through repeated patterns of signification.

The graph of desire

Seminar VI is a key locus for the elaboration of Lacan’s graph of desire, an increasingly complex diagram meant to formalize the relations among:

• the level of the enunciated (énoncé) and that of enunciation (énonciation);
• the chain of signifiers (S) and the subject ($) as divided by the signifier;
• demand, desire, and the signifier of the lack in the Other (S(Ⱥ)).

The graph of desire extends earlier devices such as Schema L by inscribing the subject’s position within intersecting signifying trajectories. It shows how the subject’s explicit statements (e.g. “I love X”) are traversed by an unconscious enunciation that may say something quite different (e.g. a desire for the Other’s desire, or for the phallic signifier). The graph makes it possible to distinguish the plane of conscious intention from the structural logic of desire that “speaks” through a discourse.

Hamlet as tragedy of desire

A particularly influential part of Seminar VI is the detailed reading of Hamlet, developed across several sessions and later published as “the seven lessons on Hamlet.” Lacan revisits Freud’s brief comments on Hamlet and Oedipus and proposes that Hamlet is not simply a drama of hesitation or melancholia, but a clinical text on desire.

Key points of Lacan’s reading include:

• Hamlet’s inhibition is linked to his position in relation to the desire of the Mother. The urgency of avenging the Father is overshadowed by the enigma of the Mother’s desire, newly invested in Claudius. Hamlet confronts a desire that appears insatiable, “engulfing,” beyond any idealized image of maternal love.
• On the Father’s side, the ghost of the murdered king circulates as a demand for justice that cannot be guaranteed by any signifier in the Other—anticipating Lacan’s later aphorism that “there is no Other of the Other.” The signifier that would secure the Father’s authority is missing, leaving desire suspended.
• Ophelia is read as an exemplary figure of the objet petit a in its nascent formulation: simultaneously the object of Hamlet’s desire and the “touchstone” against which desire is tested. Her death in the graveyard scene precipitates the final act as the moment when Hamlet comes closest to assuming his desire—at the price of his own death.

In Lacan’s reading, the oscillation of the phallic signifier (often marked by the minus-phi notation, –Φ) and the omnipresence of death tie desire to its structural impossibility: by the time Hamlet “finds” his desire, it is inseparable from the destruction of all the protagonists. This tragedy therefore sheds light on both the masculine drama of desire and the anxiety condensed in the question “To be or not to be.”

Oedipus, castration, and “there is no Other of the Other”

Seminar VI re-articulates the Oedipus complex in structural terms, focusing on the function of the phallus as a signifier rather than as an anatomical organ. The phallus is treated as the signifier of desire and of castration—that is, of the subject’s division and lack, rather than of any positive possession.

Within this framework, Lacan insists that the phallic signifier is itself lacking in the Other: the Other does not contain a final signifier that would guarantee the truth of desire or the consistency of law. This is what he formulates, in different places, as the impossibility of an “Other of the Other.” The disappointment on the side of the Father, dramatized in Hamlet by the ghost’s futile demand, underlines the structural non-existence of a complete Other.

Castration thus names not a contingent trauma but the structural fact that desire is grounded in a lack that cannot be filled. The analytic task is to bring the subject to assume this lack, rather than to search for some object that would abolish it.

Femininity, horror, and the object of desire

In his discussion of Hamlet, Lacan also touches on the question of femininity and the masculine horror before the enigmatic desire of the woman. Gertrude’s and Ophelia’s positions are interpreted as revealing the male subject’s confrontation with a dimension of desire that cannot be captured by the phallic signifier alone.

Ophelia functions as both object and phallic signifier: she embodies the object of desire while also standing in for the phallic value that circulates between men (Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes, Claudius). Her death is therefore mourned as a dual loss: the loss of the object and the loss of the phallic signifier that gave desire its support. Against Ernest Jones’s attempt to define a unified concept of “aphanisis” as fear of losing desire itself, Lacan maintains a radical asymmetry between the masculine and feminine relation to the phallus and to desire.

Towards objet petit a and fantasy

Although the term objet petit a is not yet fully stabilized in Seminar VI, the seminar is widely read as a decisive step toward its formulation. Lacan repeatedly points to a remainder that is produced by signification—an inassimilable object around which desire turns but which is never fully symbolized.

The readings of Hamlet and of clinical material show how this object both sustains fantasy (fantasme) and occasions anxiety when it approaches too closely. Subsequent seminars will formalize objet a as the object-cause of desire and will treat the traversal of fantasy as a key marker of the end of analysis, but Seminar VI already situates fantasy as a framework through which desire interprets itself and stabilizes the subject’s relation to the Other.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Reorientation of interpretation

Seminar VI redefines interpretation in ways that have been influential for Lacanian psychoanalysis and beyond. Rather than aiming to “make conscious the unconscious” in the sense of translating latent content into manifest meaning, interpretation is conceived as a punctual intervention that touches the subject’s desire.

This has several clinical consequences:

• Interpretations must be economical and oriented by the structure of the signifier, often taking the form of a brief, enigmatic formulation rather than an extended explanation.
• The aim is not to provide a satisfying answer but to provoke a question—for the subject to ask, “What do I really want?” or “What does the Other want from me?” in a new way.
• The analyst must resist the temptation to occupy the place of the subject supposed to know the “truth” of desire, maintaining instead a position that allows desire to be addressed to the Other of language itself.

Desire and the end of analysis

While a fully elaborated doctrine of the end of analysis emerges later (especially in connection with the objet petit a and the “traversal of fantasy”), Seminar VI already sketches an orientation in which the end of analysis is linked to a transformation of desire rather than to adaptation or symptom relief.

In this view, the end of analysis would involve:

• a recognition that desire is structurally linked to lack and cannot be saturated by any object;
• an assumption of one’s own desire beyond the demands of the Other (for example, parental, social, or superegoic demands);
• a loosening of the subject’s identification with imaginary ideals, making room for a less alienated relation to the signifier and to the Other.

Seminar VI thus prepares the explicitly ethical reflections of Seminar VII, where Lacan will pose the question of how far one can go in wanting “one’s desire” and will read Antigone alongside Hamlet as figures of the limits of desire and jouissance.

Links to earlier and later seminars

The conceptual developments of Seminar VI are tightly interwoven with Lacan’s overall teaching:

• From Seminar II and Seminar III, it inherits the focus on the signifier, Symbolic structure, and the split subject.
• It uses the insights of Seminar IV and Seminar V on object relations and the formations of the unconscious to show how desire is inscribed in dreams and symptoms.
• It anticipates the later topological and formal elaborations of Seminar XI and subsequent seminars, where the notions of objet a, Real and sinthome will give further articulation to the questions of desire and its interpretation.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian institutions and schools, Seminar VI is regarded as a major text for understanding the place of desire in clinical practice and for grasping the transition from Lacan’s early Imaginary-centred work to his later focus on the Real and on formalization.

Its lessons on Hamlet in particular have become a touchstone for Lacanian readings of literature and tragedy, influencing later authors who explore the intersections between psychoanalysis, Shakespearean drama, and modern subjectivity.

The publication of the Seuil edition in 2013 further consolidated Seminar VI as a canonical reference, allowing for more precise citation and scholarly engagement with the original French text.

In clinical theory and technique

Clinically, Seminar VI has been mined for its elaborations of:

• the distinction between demand and desire as a guide to interpretation;
• the structural function of the graph of desire in orienting the reading of analytic material;
• the role of fantasy and the incipient concept of objet petit a in sustaining and framing desire.

These themes have been taken up and developed in the work of clinicians and theorists influenced by Lacan, who emphasize the importance of listening for desire rather than for narrative coherence or biographical “truth.”

In philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies

Beyond clinical psychoanalysis, Seminar VI has contributed to broader debates in continental philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies about the nature of desire, subjectivity, and interpretation. Its impact is especially evident in:

• Shakespeare studies, where Lacan’s reading of Hamlet has been controversially but fruitfully integrated into discussions of tragedy, mourning, and political authority;
• film theory and cultural theory, where the concept of desire as lack and as structured by the Other has been influential, particularly in works associated with Slavoj Žižek and other theorists who apply Lacanian concepts to ideology and contemporary culture.

Critics have sometimes questioned the opacity of Lacan’s formalism and the speculative character of his link between desire and interpretation. Supporters counter that Seminar VI provides a rigorous alternative to both reductionist biologism and purely hermeneutic approaches, insisting that desire can be thought only at the intersection of language, law, and enjoyment.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar V
• Seminar VII
• Seminar II
• Seminar III
• Desire
• Demand
• Drive (psychoanalysis)
• Graph of desire
• Objet petit a
• Fantasy (psychoanalysis)
• Hamlet
• Oedipus complex
• Castration complex
• Phallus (Lacan)
• Other (psychoanalysis)
• Symbolic order
• Imaginary order
• Real (psychoanalysis)
• Interpretation (psychoanalysis)
• Lacanian psychoanalysis

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Les sept leçons sur Hamlet de Jacques Lacan,” in Ornicar? (1983).
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996 (entries “desire,” “graph of desire,” “objet petit a”).

• 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.