Seminar VIII

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 VII Seminar IX →

Transference
Seminar VIII
Cover image associated with the French edition of Le Séminaire, Livre VIII.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (dans sa disparité subjective)
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1960–1961 (academic year)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Transference • Transference love • Countertransference • Analyst's desire • objet petit a • Agalma • Subject supposed to know • Other • Phallus
Notable Themes	Structure of transference; love as resistance; subject–analyst disparity; Plato’s Symposium as model of the analytic relation; ethics of interpretation; training analysis and the analyst’s desire
Freud Texts	The Interpretation of Dreams • Dora case • Beyond the Pleasure Principle • Observations on Transference-Love
Theoretical Context
Period	Structural/ethical period
Register	Symbolic / Imaginary with orientation toward the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar VII
Followed by	Seminar IX

Le Séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (dans sa disparité subjective) (Transference (in its subjective disparity)) is the eighth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the 1960–1961 academic year. Often referred to simply as Seminar VIII, it offers a systematic reworking of the concept of transference at the intersection of love, knowledge, and desire, and elaborates the structural dissymmetry between analysand and analyst which Lacan calls its “subjective disparity.”

Seminar VIII is particularly known for its extended reading of Plato’s Symposium, especially the figures of Socrates and Alcibiades, as an allegorical model of the analytic relation and of transference love. Lacan introduces the Platonic term agalma—the hidden “treasure” supposed to be contained in the beloved—as a key to the logic of transference, articulating it with his emerging concept of objet petit a. At the same time, he revisits the question of countertransference and develops the notion of the analyst's desire as a structural function distinct from personal affect or empathy.

Historical and institutional context

Position in Lacan’s teaching

Seminar VIII follows immediately upon Le Séminaire, Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse (1959–1960), in which Lacan had reinterpreted Freud’s work in terms of an ethics of desire and jouissance. In this context, Le transfert can be read as an effort to translate ethical concerns about the analyst’s position and the subject’s desire into a more explicitly technical and structural reflection on the analytic relation itself.

The seminar continues Lacan’s long-standing polemic against ego psychology and against conceptions of the analytic situation centred on adaptation, empathy, or “real relationship.” Instead, transference is treated as a phenomenon of the Symbolic order—a structural effect of the signifier and of the subject’s relation to the Other as locus of speech and knowledge.

SFP, Sainte-Anne, and debates on transference

The seminar was delivered in the institutional setting of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), founded after the split from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. The period is marked by debates about training, training analysis, and standards for analytic practice, including the status of countertransference and the analyst’s “personal equation.”

In his 1958 text “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (included in Écrits), Lacan had already criticized the elevation of countertransference into a clinical tool, characterizing it as a form of the analyst’s resistance and raising the question of the desire proper to the analyst. Seminar VIII can be seen as a sustained elaboration of that problematic, articulated through the prism of transference love, Plato’s Symposium, and Lacan’s own structural vocabulary.

Composition and publication history

As with other early seminars, the text of Le transfert is based on stenographic notes and transcripts of Lacan’s weekly lectures at Hôpital Sainte-Anne. It circulated for decades in internal and unofficial versions before being established and published in French by Jacques-Alain Miller at Éditions du Seuil in 1991. A complete, authorized English translation appeared later, further consolidating Seminar VIII’s place within the canon of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Transference as symbolic and imaginary

Lacan had already addressed transference in earlier seminars, notably Seminar I and Seminar IV (La relation d'objet), where he distinguished between its symbolic dimension as repetition of signifying positions and its imaginary dimension as a relation of love and hate between ego images. Seminar VIII takes up this duality and radicalizes it.

On the one hand, as a phenomenon of repetition, transference “helps the cure progress by revealing the signifiers of the subject’s history.” On the other, in its imaginary aspect, transference love “acts as a resistance,” precisely because the subject’s affects towards the analyst can screen or block access to the unconscious formations that structure their speech.

Lacan insists that analysis must not reduce transference to an “intersubjective” relationship to be worked through at the level of interpersonal dynamics; rather, it must preserve the priority of the symbolic order and treat the love and hate invested in the analyst as effects of the signifier.

“Subjective disparity” and structural dissymmetry

The subtitle “in its subjective disparity” refers to the structural dissymmetry between analysand and analyst. For Lacan, there is no symmetrical “dialogue” between two consciousnesses; the analytic situation is constituted by an asymmetry of knowledge and desire: the analysand supposes knowledge to the analyst, while the analyst occupies a position oriented by a specific form of desire, distinct from personal passion.

This dissymmetry is not a matter of prestige or authority but of structure: the analyst is installed in the place of the Other, as the locus of the subject supposed to know, while simultaneously refusing to embody the idealized, loving or loved ego that the analysand demands. Seminar VIII thus anticipates Lacan’s later formalization of the discourse of the analyst and of the subject supposed to know in Seminar XI, while anchoring these notions in a close reading of classical philosophy.

Plato’s Symposium as analytic text

Methodologically, Seminar VIII is remarkable for its long detour through Plato’s Symposium. Lacan treats this philosophical dialogue not as an object of historical scholarship but as a “clinical” text that stages the structure of love and the positions implicated in transference.

Particularly important are:

• Alcibiades’ drunken speech about Socrates, in which he compares Socrates to a sileni or a box that encloses a precious object, the agalma.
• Diotima’s mythic discourse on Eros as lack, mediating between poverty and resource.
• The shifting relations among Socrates, Agathon, and Alcibiades, which allow Lacan to model the analytic triad of subject, analyst, and Other.

By reading the Symposium alongside Freud’s reflections on transference love, Lacan articulates a theory in which love is grounded in a supposition of knowledge and in a fantasy of a hidden treasure in the Other.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Transference love and resistance

Lacan distinguishes sharply between “ordinary” love and transference love (amour de transfert). The latter is not to be treated as a genuine affective relationship between two individuals but as a structural effect of the analytic situation itself.

Reworking his earlier emphasis on repetition, Lacan notes that to focus exclusively on repetition is to risk neglecting the specific here-and-now phenomenon of transference love. Conversely, to treat the analytic situation merely as an intersubjective encounter is to forget that what speech constructed in the past can be deconstructed in the cure by speech: the analytic process is, for Lacan, a “pure symbolic experience” whose effects on the imaginary—reshaping identifications, ego ideals, and love relations—are derivative.

Transference love, then, is both indispensable and dangerous: indispensable because it sustains the analysand’s address to the analyst, and dangerous because it easily becomes a form of resistance, aiming to secure the analyst in the position of satisfying demand rather than exposing desire.

Agalma and objet petit a

From the Symposium Lacan borrows the term agalma, the small precious object Alcibiades believes to be hidden inside Socrates—“a treasure, admirable and divine.” The analysand, similarly, attributes to the analyst an enigmatic “something” that is supposed to hold the key to their desire.

Lacan articulates agalma with his developing concept of objet petit a, the object of desire which is not a concrete thing but the structural cause or support of desire. In transference, the analysand sees in the analyst the locus of this agalma:

“Just as Alcibiades attributes a hidden treasure to Socrates, so too the patient sees his object of desire in the analyst.”

Transference is thus not a relation between two full subjects, but between a subject and an “over-valued being” who has fallen, in fantasy, to the state of an object. The love addressed to the analyst is love for this supposed agalma, which allows Lacan to theorize why the analyst becomes the target of intense idealization, hatred, or disappointment.

The subject supposed to know

Seminar VIII is one of the key places where Lacan implicitly elaborates the notion of the subject supposed to know (sujet supposé savoir) as the structural correlate of transference. The analysand’s love, hatred, or rivalry toward the analyst presupposes that the analyst knows something about the subject’s unconscious truth and about the cause of their desire.

This supposition of knowledge is not a psychological attribution but a structural effect: transference appears wherever such a subject is supposed. Later, Lacan will formulate this explicitly in Seminar XI, but in Seminar VIII the logic is already clear: the analyst is loved because they are supposed to hold the agalma of knowledge; the work of analysis consists in dismantling this supposition so that knowledge is relocated in the subject’s own speech and in the unconscious.

Socrates, Alcibiades, and the analyst’s position

In Lacan’s reading of the Symposium, the position of the analyst is identified with that of Socrates, while Alcibiades occupies the position of the analysand. The analyst, like Socrates, does not present himself as wise or as in possession of the agalma; instead, he positions himself as desiring, oriented toward an absent object and toward the Other’s knowledge.

Lacan stages the analytic situation as follows:

“To isolate oneself with another so as to teach him what he is lacking, and, by the nature of transference, he will learn what he is lacking insofar as he loves: I am not here for his Good, but for him to love me, and for me to disappoint him.”

The analyst’s “disappointing” function is central: by refusing to embody the object that would fill the subject’s lack, the analyst allows the subject to encounter their own desire. When Socrates declines Alcibiades’ offer and points him instead toward Agathon as the “true” object of his love, he exemplifies the analyst’s refusal to mask his own lack with a fetish or to answer the subject’s demand for completion.

From Imaginary object to phallic signifier

In Seminar VIII, Lacan also clarifies the status of the phallus in relation to objet a. Initially treated as an imaginary object, the phallus here emerges as a signifier—“the signifier of signifiers,” and “the only signifier that deserves the role of symbol.” It names the “real presence” that makes possible identifications and the formation of the Ideal of the ego (Ichideal) on the side of the Other.

Within the logic of transference, the phallus is linked both to the agalma and to the analyst’s refusal to occupy the place of the beloved object: rather than posing as the one who “has” the phallus, the analyst must show that he too is marked by lack, thereby displacing the phallus to its rightful place as signifier rather than substance.

Diotima, love, and “giving what one does not have”

There is also a significant feminine presence in Lacan’s reading: Diotima, the woman who teaches Socrates the truth of Eros. Lacan takes up Diotima’s teaching on love as lack and reworks it into the famous formula that in love one “gives what one does not have.”

In Diotima’s fable, feminine lack is first confronted with masculine resources; but a reversal occurs when love is understood as offering precisely what cannot be possessed—lack itself. Lacan uses this to show that the “active” position in love belongs to the one who assumes their desire and their lack, rather than to the one who appears to possess the desirable object.

Seminar VIII thus anticipates Lacan’s later characterization of Socrates as model for both hysterical discourse and analytic discourse: he provokes desire, interrogates knowledge, and refuses to present himself as the complete object of love.

Training analysis and the analyst’s desire

Building on his earlier critique of countertransference, Lacan argues in Seminar VIII that training analysis does not place the future analyst “beyond passion.” To believe that an analyst is beyond love and hate simply because they have undergone analysis would be to assume that all passion stems from the unconscious, a notion Lacan rejects.

On the contrary, “the better analysed the analyst is, the more likely he is to be in love with, or quite repulsed by, the analysand”—in other words, he remains susceptible to passion. What changes is not the presence of affects but the economy of desire: in training analysis there must occur a mutation such that the analyst’s desire is “stronger than passions,” enabling him not to act out his love or repulsion.

Lacan calls this transformed orientation the desire proper to the analyst (désir de l’analyste): it is not a desire for the patient, but a desire for the unfolding of the analytic process, for the subject to confront the truth of their desire. This desire of the analyst is what anchors his interventions in transference and prevents countertransference from becoming the guiding principle of treatment.

Between-two-deaths and the analytic experience

Connecting back to themes from Seminar VII, Lacan evokes the notion of the “between-two-deaths” (entre-deux-morts) and suggests that the analyst, like Socrates, has confronted the desire for death and reached a certain relation to the signifier. Having “placed the signifier in the position of the absolute,” the analyst abolishes “fear and trembling” and is able to set aside personal desire to preserve “what is most precious, the phallus, the symbol of desire.”

In this perspective, desire at the end of analysis appears as a kind of structural emptiness: “Desire is only its empty place.” The analyst occupies this place of the empty cause, rather than filling it with his personality or beliefs. Seminar VIII thereby links the clinical logic of transference to the ethical stance elaborated in Lacan’s work on tragedy and ethics.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Transference as condition and object of analysis

For Lacan, transference is both the condition of possibility of psychoanalysis and one of its principal objects. “Speech has an effect only after transference”: it is because the analysand supposes knowledge to the analyst and invests him with love that the analytic word can produce structural change.

At the same time, the analytic task is to interpret transference itself—to read the way in which the subject’s love, hatred, jealousy, or indifference towards the analyst condense their relation to desire and to the Other. This yields Lacan’s well-known maxim that “it is from the position that transference bestows on the analyst that he intervenes in transference itself,” and that “transference is interpreted on the basis of and with the aid of transference itself.”

Interpretation, desire, and disappointment

Seminar VIII refines Lacan’s conception of interpretation. Rather than aiming at reconciliation or mutual recognition, analytic interpretation is oriented toward the subject’s desire and often takes the form of a judicious disappointment of transference love.

By refusing to gratify the analysand’s demand for love or knowledge, the analyst allows desire to appear in its “purified” form—as the gap that no object or answer can fill. This is why Lacan can say that in analysis “one learns to talk instead of making love”: the shift from imaginary love-relationship to symbolic speech is what allows the subject to access desire as a structural function rather than as an attribute of the ego.

Countertransference and the limits of empathy

Seminar VIII consolidates Lacan’s critical stance toward countertransference. While he does not deny that the analyst has feelings, he insists that making the analyst’s affective reactions into a central clinical instrument risks obscuring the structural asymmetry of the analytic situation and collapsing it into a “two-body psychology.”

By contrast, the analyst’s desire functions as an orientation that allows him to endure and interpret transference without reducing it to his own psychology. The proper response to transference love is not reciprocal love or rigid neutrality, but an intervention guided by the desire that analysis proceed—an ethical desire, aligned with the subject’s encounter with their own lack.

Relation to earlier and later seminars

Conceptually, Seminar VIII stands at a crossroads in Lacan’s teaching:

• It extends the structural emphasis of Seminar II and Seminar III by treating transference as an effect of the signifier and of the subject’s relation to the Other.
• It translates the ethical issues raised in Seminar VII into the technical language of transference and the analyst’s desire.
• It anticipates later elaborations of the subject supposed to know, the discourse of the analyst, and the function of objet petit a in Seminar XI, Seminar XVII and subsequent work.

For many commentators, Seminar VIII is therefore indispensable for understanding Lacan’s mature conception of transference, as well as the later topology of the four discourses and of the analytic act.

Reception and legacy

Canonical status in Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools and training programmes, Seminar VIII has become a reference point for the doctrine of transference, transference love, and the analyst’s desire. Its reading of Plato’s Symposium is often taught alongside Lacan’s writings in Écrits (“The Direction of the Treatment…”, “The Subversion of the Subject…”) as a key text for thinking the analytic position.

The concepts of agalma, objet petit a, and the subject supposed to know have been widely integrated into Lacanian clinical practice, where they orient the handling of transference and the evaluation of the analyst’s interventions.

Influence in philosophy, literature, and theory

Beyond clinical psychoanalysis, Seminar VIII has had significant impact in philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies. Its reading of the Symposium has influenced interpretations of Plato and the history of love in Western thought, while the Lacanian notion of love as “giving what one does not have” has become a frequently cited formula in broader theoretical discussions.

The figure of Socrates as proto-analyst, and the triadic relation Socrates–Alcibiades–Agathon, have also been mobilized in analyses of education, politics, and the structure of teaching, especially in contexts that draw on Lacan’s theory of discourse.

Critiques and debates

Critics of Seminar VIII sometimes point to the apparent remoteness of its Platonic detour from day-to-day analytic practice, or question whether Lacan’s highly formalized account of transference neglects the complexity of attachment, trauma, and relational patterns emphasized in other psychoanalytic traditions.

Others argue that Lacan’s insistence on the analyst’s desire and on structural dissymmetry has been a crucial counterweight to trends that psychologize or “humanize” the analytic setting at the expense of its specificity. The continuing centrality of Seminar VIII in Lacanian training and scholarship attests to its enduring theoretical and clinical importance.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar VII
• Seminar IX
• Transference
• Transference love
• Countertransference
• Analyst's desire
• Subject supposed to know
• Objet petit a
• Agalma
• Plato
• Symposium
• Socrates
• Alcibiades
• Diotima
• Phallus (Lacan)
• Oedipus complex
• Symbolic order
• Imaginary order
• Real (psychoanalysis)
• Psychoanalytic technique
• Écrits

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (1960–1961). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966; English trans. in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996 (entries “transference,” “analyst’s desire,” “subject supposed to know,” “objet petit a”).

• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• 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 transference and Plato’s Symposium).