Seminar X

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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 IX Seminar XI →

Anxiety
Seminar X
Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar X: L’angoisse.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1962–1963 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions, November 1962 – June 1963
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Anxiety • Objet petit a • Jouissance • Lack • L’angoisse n’est pas sans objet • Phallus • Castration • Acting out • Passage à l’acte
Notable Themes	Anxiety and affect; object cause of desire; lack of lack; desire of the Other; uncanny and das Ding; acting out vs passage to the act; analyst’s desire and handling of anxiety
Freud Texts	Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety • The Interpretation of Dreams • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Theoretical Context
Period	Structural/topological, turn to the Real and jouissance
Register	Real / Symbolic
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar IX
Followed by	Seminar XI

1962–1963

Seminar X

L'angoisse Anxiety

Approximate cover design of Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse.

Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse (Anxiety) is the tenth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the 1962–1963 academic year. In it Lacan takes up the concept of anxiety (angoisse) as a privileged affect, re-reading Sigmund Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) and elaborating his own notions of objet petit a (object a), jouissance, and lack.

A central thesis of Seminar X is encapsulated in the often-quoted formula “l’angoisse n’est pas sans objet” (“anxiety is not without an object”). Against the common psychoanalytic view of anxiety as “objectless,” Lacan argues that anxiety has an object—objet petit a, the object-cause of desire—but an object of a fundamentally different kind, situated at the edge of the Real and resistant to symbolization. Seminar X is also crucial for Lacan’s distinction between acting out and passage à l’acte, for his formulation of anxiety as “the lack of a lack,” and for his reflections on how the analyst must handle anxiety in the analytic cure.

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne, the SFP, and the turn to the Real

Seminar X was delivered in the final years of Lacan’s teaching at Hôpital Sainte-Anne, before his exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association and the founding of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964. Within the milieu of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), debates over training analysis, clinical structure and the role of language in the unconscious were intense.

In preceding seminars Lacan had progressively foregrounded the signifier (Seminar II), psychosis and foreclosure (Seminar III), ethics and das Ding (Seminar VII), transference (Seminar VIII), and identification and the unary trait (Seminar IX). Seminar X marks a shift toward the Real and jouissance, partly in response to questions left open by these earlier developments: What is the status of affects in a theory centred on signifiers? How can psychoanalysis account for the experience of anxiety without falling back into a purely imaginary or phenomenological psychology?

Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

Lacan frames the year around a close reading of Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, to which he returns repeatedly. He notes that Freud “speaks of everything but anxiety” in order, paradoxically, to leave open a central emptiness in which anxiety is situated. For Lacan, Freud’s text indicates that anxiety is related to the structure of the subject and to the function of signals of danger, but it does not fully theorize the object of anxiety or its relation to desire and fantasy. Seminar X takes this as its task.

Composition, transmission, and publication

Like other early seminars, L’angoisse was originally transmitted orally and circulated for decades as notes and unofficial transcriptions. A critical French edition, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, appeared with Seuil in 2004. An official English translation, Anxiety, translated by A. R. Price and based on Miller’s French text, was published by Polity Press in 2014. Since then, Seminar X has become a standard reference in Lacanian training and scholarship on anxiety, objet petit a, and the clinic of borderline and transference phenomena.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Anxiety and affect

Lacan treats anxiety as an affect rather than a mere emotion. He is particularly interested in Freud’s claim that anxiety distinguishes itself from other affects by its “signal” function and by its relation to danger. In Seminar X Lacan radicalizes this: he asserts that anxiety is “the only affect that does not deceive,” precisely because it marks an encounter with something of the Real beyond imaginary misrecognition or symbolic reassurance.

Affects such as love, hate, or jealousy can mislead; they may be bound up with imaginary rivalry or with signifying formations that hide their cause. Anxiety, by contrast, arises at the point where the subject is confronted with the failure of such coverings—the point where the subject’s place as object for the Other’s desire becomes momentarily exposed.

“Anxiety is not without an object”

Against the idea of “objectless” anxiety, Lacan’s formula l’angoisse n’est pas sans objet insists that anxiety is always correlated with an object, but one of a special kind. It is not the ordinary object of fear (for example, a specific threat or situation), but the paradoxical object at the heart of psychoanalysis: objet petit a, the object-cause of desire.

Lacan distinguishes between:

• Fear (peur), which is oriented toward a specified object (a dog, a height, a person).
• Anxiety (angoisse), which concerns the imminence or intrusion of something whose status cannot be clearly located or named: the appearance (or disappearance) of the object a, the subject’s uncertain status in relation to the Other’s desire.

In this sense, anxiety is not about the absence of an object but about something filling the place of lack too directly. It signals, as Lacan will say, “a lack of a lack.”

Method: close reading, graphs, and clinical vignettes

Seminar X combines several methods:

• Close readings of Freud (especially Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and parts of The Interpretation of Dreams).
• Structural diagrams (particularly the Graph of Desire) and mathemes such as the formula for fantasy: $ \diamond a, where the barred subject ($) is related to a, the object cause of desire.
• Clinical vignettes involving nightmares, uncanny experiences, acting out and passage à l’acte, including references to the Wolf Man case and to Ernst Jones’s analysis of the incubus.

Through these, Lacan seeks to locate anxiety at the articulation of desire, fantasy, and the object a.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Objet petit a and the cause of desire

Seminar X is often considered the decisive elaboration of objet petit a. While the object a had appeared earlier in Lacan’s work, here it becomes the central pivot of the theory of anxiety and desire.

Lacan defines objet a as the cause of desire, not its aim or goal. It is:

• The **remainder** or “residue” left over from the division of the subject by the signifier. When the subject is inscribed in the Other’s field by the “unbroken line” of the signifier (the unary trait), something is lost; this leftover is a.
• A partial object, imagined as separable from the body: breast, faeces, voice, gaze, sometimes placenta or what Lacan playfully calls l’hommelette, an “omelette-man” evoking an amorphous embryonic remainder.
• Distinct from the imaginary a of the mirror stage: it is not simply the specular ego image or its counterpart, nor is it directly “visible in what continues for the subject the image of his desire.”

For Lacan, objet a is what is lost in the original constitution of the subject, where the Father and Name-of-the-Father play a primary role. If we consider the body, this object is not created by mere separation from the mother, but by a separation from the body proper as such: it is what is cut off, detached, or set aside in the process by which the subject enters the symbolic order.

Anxiety and the lack of a lack

One of the seminar’s most cited formulations is that anxiety arises when lack itself comes to be lacking. All desire, in Lacan’s view, springs from lack—from the structural incompleteness introduced by the signifier, and from the subject’s division ($).Lack The symbolic phallus (Φ) functions as the signifier of this lack; the notation −Φ designates the phallus as lacking, or the structural place of castration.

Anxiety appears when this structural lack is threatened with being filled in too directly, when the protective “screen” of −Φ is disturbed. It is “not the absence of the breast,” Lacan suggests, “but the threat of its imminence” that provokes anxiety: the possibility that the object might appear too close, that the Other’s jouissance might bear down on the subject without mediation.

In other words, the possibility of the object’s absence—the fact that it can be missing—is what stabilizes desire and protects against anxiety. Anxiety emerges where that regulating absence seems to vanish, where lack lacks.

Jouissance, the Other’s desire, and the command “Enjoy!”

Anxiety, like desire, is linked to the Other—to the Other’s demand, enjoyment, and enigmatic desire. Lacan explores anxiety in relation to the Other’s jouissance, often in a religious or mythic register. He evokes the “terrible commandment” of the Father-God: « Jouis ! » (“Enjoy!”), a superegoic imperative that produces more anxiety than pleasure.

Anxiety arises when the subject does not know what object they are for the Other’s desire—when, faced with the Other’s jouissance, they cannot situate themselves as desired, loved, or rejected in any stable way. The object a names the place where the subject might stand as the cause of the Other’s desire; anxiety is the affect that arises when this place is exposed or called into question.

The uncanny, the Thing, and clinical examples

Drawing on his earlier reflections on das Ding in Seminar VII, Lacan links anxiety to the “horror of the Thing” (la Chose), the terrifying alterity that law and desire usually keep at bay. He revisits Freud’s Wolf Man case, asking: what, or whose apparition, corresponds to the sudden opening of the window in the Wolf Man’s childhood scene? The experience oscillates between uncanny strangeness and a deeply familiar intimacy, exemplifying how anxiety involves both estrangement and a too-close proximity of the Thing.

Lacan also borrows Ernst Jones’s analysis of the nightmare and the incubus—“this being who weighs on the chest with his opaque weight of foreign jouissance, who crushes the subject under that jouissance, and who is a questioner.” The incubus figures anxiety as an encounter with an alien enjoyment pressing on the body, interrogating the subject’s place.

Anxiety, phallus, and castration

Throughout the seminar Lacan examines the difficult relation between −Φ (the signifier of castration, the phallus as symbol of lack) and objet a. The phallus can appear as the agalma, a hidden treasure in the Other (as in Le transfert’s reading of Alcibiades and Socrates), or as a kind of libidinal reserve that protects the subject from the fascination of the part-object.

Symbolic castration—the acceptance of −Φ—becomes crucial in the face of “the father’s opaque and ungraspable desire.” Castration institutes the law, limiting the Other’s jouissance and the subject’s exposure to it. Anxiety appears where this limit is uncertain or collapses; the clinic of anxiety thus places special emphasis on how the subject is positioned in relation to castration, phallic signification, and the circulation of objet a.

Anxiety as affect, not emotion

Lacan explicitly distinguishes anxiety from common psychological notions of emotion. Emotions, he suggests, are subject to imaginary misrecognition and cultural codification; they can be feigned, displaced, or socially regulated. Anxiety, by contrast, is an affect tied structurally to the subject’s division and to the object a.

This is why Lacan calls anxiety the affect “beyond all doubt,” the one that cannot be entirely simulated or misrecognized. It marks the moment where the subject’s usual defences—fantasy, ego identifications, narrative rationalizations—are short-circuited.

Freud distinguished between fear (with a known object), anxiety (without a known object), and dread. Lacan accepts this tripartition but reformulates it: anxiety is not without an object; it is simply that the object in question cannot be symbolized as other objects can. It is the unspecifiable object a.

Acting out and passage à l’acte

Seminar X is also a major source for Lacan’s distinction between acting out and passage à l’acte (passage to the act). Both are conceived as “last defences” against anxiety, but they function differently.

• Acting out occurs within the field of the Other—it is staged as a message addressed to the Other, even if obliquely. The subject remains within the symbolic theatre, attempting to manage anxiety by exhibiting a scene (“acting out” something) that calls for interpretation.
• Passage à l’acte involves a radical exit from the scene, a literal stepping out of the symbolic frame (for example, in certain suicides, sudden breaks, or violent gestures). Here the subject no longer addresses the Other but seeks to escape the anxiety-provoking situation entirely.

Lacan links both phenomena to failures or overloads of the fantasy structure $ ◊ a$. When the fantasy no longer supports the subject’s relation to the Other and to a, anxiety can spike; acting out or passage to the act may then function as attempts—however risky—to resolve or evade that anxiety.

Anxiety in the analytic cure

A recurrent practical question in Seminar X is: how should the analyst measure and handle the analysand’s anxiety? How much anxiety can a patient bear? How does the analyst’s own anxiety enter the situation?

Lacan argues that, in the cure, anxiety is not simply a symptom to be eliminated but a structural indicator to be read. The analyst’s interventions can heighten or reduce anxiety; the ethical challenge is to bring anxiety to the point where it clarifies the subject’s relation to the object a and to the Other’s desire, without overwhelming the subject’s capacity to work with it.

The desire of the analyst is central here. Lacan insists that the analyst must “institute, along with anxiety, −Φ, an emptiness whose function is structural.” The analyst’s desire must not fill the subject’s lack, nor impose an object; instead, it must sustain a place of emptiness in which the subject’s own desire and object a can be articulated.

The analyst must also confront their own anxiety. Lacan suggests that the analyst’s training (training analysis) does not place them “beyond passion”; to think so would reduce all passion to the unconscious. Rather, the analyst must undergo a “mutation in the economy of desire” such that their desire as analyst—distinct from personal passions—can withstand and work with the anxiety manifested in the cure.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

From signifier to object a and the Real

Seminar X is often read as a turning point in Lacan’s oeuvre from a primary focus on the signifier and the Symbolic order to an emphasis on the Real and jouissance. While earlier seminars had already glimpsed the Real (e.g. Irma’s throat in Seminar II or das Ding in Seminar VII), Seminar X systematically anchors the Real in the object a and in anxiety.

This has far-reaching consequences. The unconscious, “structured like a language,” is now understood as not only a network of signifiers but also a field in which certain points (objet a) resist symbolization and carry the weight of the subject’s relation to enjoyment and loss. Anxiety becomes an index of this non-symbolizable kernel.

Affects in psychoanalysis

Seminar X contributes a distinctive theory of affect in psychoanalysis. Rather than considering affects as secondary to representations or as mere derivatives of drive, Lacan treats anxiety as structurally primary in relation to the subject’s being. It is the affect that marks the breakdown of the usual mediations (imaginary and symbolic) and thus provides a privileged access to the Real.

This reorientation has clinical implications: analytic work with anxiety cannot be reduced to reassurance, adaptation, or cognitive restructuring. Instead, it must be oriented by the subject’s relation to the object a and by the place they occupy in the Other’s desire.

Clinic of limits and borderline phenomena

Seminar X has been influential in discussions of so-called borderline or “limit” structures in Lacanian circles. Anxiety appears here not merely as a neurotic symptom but as a sign of structural instabilities in the subject’s relation to castration, to the Other’s demand, and to the fantasy frame.

The distinction between acting out and passage to the act, and the idea of these as last defences against anxiety, have become crucial tools for clinicians working with self-harm, suicidal gestures, or sudden breaks in treatment. Seminar X thus helps articulate a Lacanian clinic that goes beyond the classical neurosis–psychosis–perversion triad, without abandoning structural thinking.

Desire of the analyst and analytic ethics

Seminar X deepens Lacan’s conception of the desire of the analyst first articulated in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (1958, in Écrits). The analyst’s desire should be oriented toward object a—not as something to be owned or enjoyed, but as what must be maintained as cause, not filled in. The analyst’s task is to sustain the structural emptiness of −Φ rather than to provide reassuring objects or identifications.

In this sense, the ethics of the analyst involves a precise handling of anxiety: neither avoiding it nor provoking it indiscriminately, but using it as a compass for interpreting the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire and to their own fantasy.

Preparation for Seminar XI

Seminar X also prepares the way for The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). The elaboration of anxiety and object a feeds directly into the four “fundamental concepts”: unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive. Object a becomes central to the drive, to the notion of gaze and voice, and to the formalization of psychoanalysis as a science of the subject of the unconscious and of jouissance.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools and institutions, L’angoisse is regarded as canonical. It is widely studied in training programmes and reading groups, especially on the topics of objet petit a, affect, and passage à l’acte.

The seminar’s formulations—“anxiety is not without an object,” “anxiety is the lack of a lack,” anxiety as the affect that “does not deceive”—have become touchstones in Lacanian discourse. Many later developments, including discussions of “ordinary psychosis,” borderline phenomena, and contemporary symptoms (self-harm, eating disorders, addictive behaviours) draw on Seminar X’s conceptual apparatus.

In clinical and theoretical literature

Clinically oriented authors such as Bruce Fink and others regularly cite Seminar X when discussing how to distinguish acting out from passage à l’acte and how to work with anxiety in the analytic setting. The seminar is also central to Lacanian analyses of trauma, the uncanny, and the relation between fantasy and the Real.

In more theoretical fields—literary theory, film studies, philosophy—Seminar X has been drawn upon to analyze scenes of anxiety, horror, or uncanny enjoyment, particularly around the gaze and the voice as partial objects. The notion of objet a as an elusive cause of desire has proved influential in cultural studies and political theory as well.

Criticisms and debates

Some critics have argued that Lacan’s theory of anxiety, centred on object a and castration, risks obscuring the diversity of clinical presentations and the role of biological or social factors in anxiety disorders. Others have expressed concern that the highly formal and abstract language of Seminar X may distance analysts from the lived experience of patients.

Defenders counter that the seminar’s emphasis on structure and on the subject’s position relative to the Other’s desire provides a framework for understanding why and how anxiety arises, beyond descriptive psychopathology. They argue that the abstraction of objet a and −Φ clarifies, rather than replaces, the clinician’s encounter with the particular speech and affects of each analysand.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar IX
• Seminar XI
• Anxiety
• Objet petit a
• Jouissance
• Lack (Lacan)
• Phallus (Lacan)
• Castration
• Acting out
• Passage à l’acte
• Graph of Desire
• Das Ding
• Uncanny
• Desire of the analyst
• Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse (1962–1963). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.
• Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In Standard Edition, vol. XX (1926).
• Jones, Ernest. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth Press, 1931.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996 (entries “anxiety,” “objet petit a,” “acting out,” “passage à l’acte”).
• 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. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (chapters on the Real, object a, and anxiety).