Seminar XVII

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 XVI Seminar XVIII →

The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
Seminar XVII
Image associated with circulating editions of Seminar XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1969–1970 (academic year)
Session Count	c. 26 sessions
Location	École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Four discourses • Discourse of the Master • Discourse of the University • Discourse of the Hysteric • Discourse of the Analyst • Objet petit a • S1 • S2 (knowledge) • Plus-de-jouir
Notable Themes	Psychoanalysis and the social bond; discourse and power; knowledge and jouissance; the master and the slave; the dead Father; hystericization of discourse
Freud Texts	Totem and Taboo • Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria • The Interpretation of Dreams (dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife)
Theoretical Context
Period	Middle period (discourse theory)
Register	Symbolic/Real (discourse and jouissance)
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XVI
Followed by	Seminar XVIII

The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (French: Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse) is the seventeenth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris during the 1969–1970 academic year. The seminar is widely regarded as a major turning point in Lacanian psychoanalysis for its introduction of the four discourses—the Discourse of the Master, Discourse of the University, Discourse of the Hysteric, and Discourse of the Analyst—through which Lacan reconceives psychoanalysis as one discourse among other forms of social bond.

Seminar XVII is situated at “the reverse” or “underside” (l'envers) of psychoanalysis: it explores the ways in which psychoanalytic theory and practice are themselves knotted into wider structures of power, knowledge, and jouissance. Drawing on Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, Karl Marx’s critique of surplus value, and Sigmund Freud’s myths of the Father in Totem and Taboo, Lacan articulates a set of algebraic mathemes that locate the subject ($), the master signifier (S1), knowledge (S2), and the objet petit a (objet a, surplus-jouissance) in fixed structural positions.

The seminar also revisits hysteria and the hysteric’s discourse, returns to Freud’s case of Dora and the dream of the “beautiful butcher’s wife,” and thematizes the role of the hysteric in “making the man” (fait l'homme) or the master. Lacan proposes a new conception of the analytic cure as a “hystericization of discourse” introduced by the analyst at the structural level, while situating sexual difference and the place of woman in relation to these discourses.

Historical and institutional context

ENS, May 1968, and the crisis of the university

Seminar XVII was delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in the wake of the student and workers’ uprising of May 1968 in France, which had placed the university and its forms of authority in crisis. Lacan’s reflections on the Discourse of the University and on the relation between knowledge and power respond directly to this context. He examines the university not as a neutral institution but as a discourse in which “knowledge” (S2) occupies the dominant position and functions as an instrument of domination, especially under modern science.

The seminar thus continues a line of questioning opened in Seminar XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre about psychoanalysis and the university, while preparing Lacan’s later critiques of scientism and capitalism.

The École Freudienne de Paris and the discourse turn

By 1969 Lacan was firmly installed as the central figure of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), which he had founded in 1964. The mid- to late-1960s seminars (from La logique du fantasme through Seminar XVII) move progressively from structural linguistics toward a formal theory of discourse and social bond.

In Seminar XVII, this “discourse turn” becomes explicit: psychoanalysis is no longer addressed solely in terms of the relation between subject and Other, or of the Graph of Desire, but is situated among four structurally articulated discourses. The result is a re-politicization of psychoanalysis and a rethinking of the psychoanalytic act in terms of its place in a field of social forces.

Publication history

The French text of Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1991 as part of the Champ freudien collection. The English translation by Russell Grigg, titled The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, appeared with W. W. Norton & Company in 2006. As with other seminars, the published text is based on stenographic notes and edited materials; session dates and titles are drawn from archival documentation used within Lacanian institutions.

Conceptual framework and methodology

“The other side” (l'envers) of psychoanalysis

The French term envers in the title can mean the “underside,” “reverse,” or “flip-side.” Lacan plays on these senses to suggest that psychoanalysis has an “other side” that appears when one examines its place among other forms of discourse. Sometimes the envers of psychoanalysis is identified with the Discourse of the Master which provides a foil; sometimes with the unconscious as “knowledge in the real” where “right” and “wrong” sides cannot be cleanly separated, as on a Möbius strip.

Lacan cautions that “the envers is assonant with truth; one moves to the envers, but the envers does not explain any right side.” The seminar thus stages a movement from psychoanalysis considered as a technique to psychoanalysis considered as one discourse among others, revealing its complicity and antagonism with existing social bonds.

Discourse as social bond

Lacan defines discourse (discours) not primarily as what is said, but as a structured social link that persists even when no one is speaking. Each discourse is a configuration that arranges four key terms—S1, S2, $, and a—in four positions. These arrangements determine how subjects are bound to each other through language, labor, knowledge, and jouissance.

The four constitutive elements are:

• S1 – the master signifier, “the marked circle of the field of the Other”: the signifier that represents the subject for other signifiers;
• S2 – the “battery of signifiers already there,” representing knowledge (savoir);
• $ – the divided subject (barred subject), marked by the unary trait (trait unaire);
• a – the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, “object-waste,” and correlate of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir).

At the outset Lacan presents a “fundamental starting relation” between these elements:

The fundamental relation between S1, S2, $, and a.

He then distributes them across four structural positions within each discourse:

The four positions in Lacan’s discourse matheme: agent (upper left), Other (upper right), truth (lower left), product (lower right).

• top left: **agent** (the position that initiates the discourse),
• top right: **Other** (the addressee or field addressed),
• bottom right: **product** (what the discourse produces),
• bottom left: **truth** (what supports the agent, but is “beneath the bar”).

Each discourse is obtained by a quarter turn of this configuration, such that the four terms circulate through the four positions. This circularity suggests that no discourse is absolutely primary, though Lacan often treats the discourse of the master as structurally “basic” in relation to which the others are derived.

Knowledge, truth, and jouissance

Methodologically, Lacan’s analysis of discourse is framed by the relations between knowledge (S2), truth (beneath the bar), mastery (S1), and jouissance. In each discourse, S2 has a particular relation to truth and to power:

• in the Discourse of the Master, knowledge is put to work under the command of S1;
• in the Discourse of the University, knowledge occupies the dominant position and functions as an instrument of domination;
• in the Discourse of the Hysteric, knowledge is demanded from the Other by a divided subject;
• in the Discourse of the Analyst, knowledge is produced in the place of the Other through the operation of the object a.

Seminar XVII also generalizes the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) introduced in Seminar XVI: in each discourse a surplus is produced—an excess enjoyment or remainder that cannot be reintegrated into the field of explicit meaning. This surplus is formalized by a, the object that is both produced and put to work by discourse.

The four discourses

General schema

Lacan’s algebra of the four discourses can be summarized as a set of mathemes, each placing S1, S2, $, and a in different positions. Although in the seminar these are drawn on the blackboard, they are now often reproduced in printed form. In each case the upper row (agent → Other) describes the manifest aspect of the discourse, while the lower row (truth → product) describes what is latent or produced.

Seminar XVII spends much of its course elaborating how these four discourses function, how they derive from each other by quarter-turn rotations, and how they relate to classic themes such as the master–slave dialectic, hysteria, and the analytic transference.

Discourse of the Master

Discourse of the Master:

The Discourse of the Master is treated by Lacan as the “basic” discourse from which the others derive. Its structure can be read as:

**Agent**: S1 → **Other**: S2

**Truth**: $ → **Product**: a

Here the master signifier S1 occupies the dominant position, addressing S2, the battery of signifiers that stands for knowledge. S1 represents the subject ($) for other signifiers; the subject is divided and placed in the position of truth, beneath the bar. The signifying operation produces a surplus: objet a as surplus-jouissance.

Lacan links this discourse to the structure of the master–slave relation: the master (S1) puts the slave (S2, knowledge put to work) to labor, extracting a surplus (a) that he attempts to appropriate. However, the master is dependent on the slave’s knowledge and is structurally separated from the knowledge that sustains his authority, which is why his truth is a divided subject.

The discourse of the master, for Lacan, structures traditional forms of authority and domination, including the paternal function in its “classical” guise, but also persists under modern political forms.

Discourse of the University

Discourse of the University:

The Discourse of the University is obtained by an anticlockwise quarter turn of the master discourse. Its structure is:

**Agent**: S2 → **Other**: a

**Truth**: S1 → **Product**: $

Here knowledge (S2) occupies the dominant position as agent and addresses a, the object, which occupies the place of the Other. Behind S2, as its truth, stands S1, the master-signifier, now disavowed but operative. The product of this discourse is the divided subject ($), shaped and formed through institutional practices.

Lacan reads this discourse as characteristic of the modern university and of scientific discourse more generally. Under the guise of neutral, “objective” knowledge, the university discourse in fact works to dominate and manipulate subjects, treating them as objects (a) of evaluation, training, and management. An attempt at mastery can thus be traced behind the ostensibly disinterested transmission of knowledge.

Discourse of the Hysteric

Discourse of the Hysteric:

The Discourse of the Hysteric is effected by a clockwise quarter turn of the discourse of the master. It can be written:

**Agent**: $ → **Other**: S1

**Truth**: a → **Product**: S2

In this configuration, the divided subject ($) occupies the dominant position and addresses the master signifier S1, demanding that it produce knowledge. The truth of the hysteric’s discourse is the object a—the subject’s own surplus-jouissance and the cause of desire—while its product is S2, a knowledge about desire, body, and the Other.

Lacan insists that the hysteric’s discourse is not simply “what is uttered by the hysteric,” but a structural articulation in which any subject may be inscribed. The hysteric “makes the man” (fait l’homme): she constructs the master as “a man prompted by the desire to know,” pushing him to produce knowledge about her desire and about sexual difference.

One of the novelties of Seminar XVII is the “return of the hysteric,” via readings of Dora and of the dream of the “beautiful butcher’s wife” from The Interpretation of Dreams, already discussed by Lacan in “The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power” (Écrits). Lacan poses three questions in this context:

• the relation between jouissance and the desire for an unfulfilled desire;
• the hysteric’s function in “making” the master as one who wishes to know;
• a new conception of the cure as a “hystericization of discourse” introduced by the analyst.

The hysteric’s discourse is also the only discourse, in this seminar, where sexual difference explicitly comes into play, raising questions about the place of woman in the field of the signifier.

Discourse of the Analyst

Discourse of the Analyst:

The Discourse of the Analyst is obtained by a quarter turn of the hysteric’s discourse, just as Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis arises from giving an interpretive twist to the discourse of his hysterical patients. Its matheme is:

**Agent**: a → **Other**: $

**Truth**: S2 → **Product**: S1

Here the agent’s position is occupied by objet a'; the analyst assumes the structural place of the cause of the analysand’s desire. The Other is the divided subject ($), who addresses the analyst. The truth of this discourse is S2, the knowledge of the unconscious, while the product is S1, new master-signifiers that emerge through the analytic process.

Lacan presents this discourse as the “reverse” of the discourse of the master. This raises the question of whether psychoanalysis is an essentially subversive practice that undermines attempts at domination and mastery, or whether it risks being reabsorbed into other discourses (particularly that of the university and of the master). Seminar XVII does not resolve this question but formulates it in structural terms, emphasizing that the analyst’s position as object a is what prevents the immediate re-establishment of mastery.

The analytic discourse also underpins Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s formula Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. At the end of the seminar, Lacan proposes a new translation: work is for the analyst, and “plus-de-jouir is for you”. He reformulates: “Where plus-de-jouir was, the plus-de-jouir of the other, I, insofar as I utter the psychoanalytic act, must come.” This underscores that what is at stake in the analytic act is a displacement in the economy of surplus-jouissance.

Father, law, and jouissance

The Father in Totem and Taboo

Seminar XVII revisits Freud’s myth in Totem and Taboo of the primal horde and the murder of the Father. For Lacan, the Father of Totem and Taboo is “all love—or all jouissance”—and his murder generates love for the Dead Father. The primal Father enjoys all women and embodies an unlimited jouissance.

Lacan distinguishes several figures of the father:

• the Father of Totem and Taboo, all-jouissance and all-love, whose murder inaugurates law and guilt;
• the Father of the first idealization, deserving love, a father who is loved;
• the Father who enters the Discourse of the Master and is thereby “castrated ab initio:” a father whose authority is always already limited by the symbolic law.

For Lacan, “the death of the father is the key to supreme jouissance, later identified with the mother as aim of incest.” Psychoanalysis “is not constructed on the proposition ‘to sleep with the mother’ but on the death of the father as primal jouissance.” The “real father” is not the biological progenitor, but “he who upholds the Real as impossible”: the operator of the impossibility that structures desire and law.

From the Oedipus complex Lacan claims to retain only the paternal metaphor and the Name-of-the-Father. The Name-of-the-Father “is positioned where knowledge acts as truth”; psychoanalysis, in this view, “consolidates the law” rather than abolishing it.

Hysteria, sexual difference, and the absence of woman

In his discussion of the Discourse of the Hysteric, Lacan addresses hysteria as a structure often attributed to women, though the hysteric’s discourse can be occupied by any subject. He notes that hysteria is the only discourse where sexual difference openly enters the scene, and that castration appears as “the deprivation of woman”—insofar as “she would fulfill herself in the smallest signifier.”

Lacan remarks that “woman is absent from the field of the signifier,” foreshadowing later formulas such as “woman does not exist” (La femme n’existe pas) developed in Seminar XX: Encore. In Seminar XVII, these reflections remain linked to the hysteric’s interrogation of the master and to the demand addressed to S1 to account for sexual difference and desire.

Impossibility and impotence

At the end of the seminar, Lacan introduces a distinction between impossibility (impossible) and impotence (impuissance). “The impossible is the real where speech, as objet a, functions like a carrion,” he states, whereas “impotence protects truth.” The analytic discourse is conceived as one that confronts the impossible real of jouissance (for example, the non-existence of a sexual relation) while preserving a function of impotence that protects the subject from collapse.

These notions anticipate later developments in Lacan’s work on the Real and on the structural impossibility of a complete sexual relation.

Capitalism, colonization, and the master discourse

Seminar XVII contains a brief but notable anecdote about Lacan’s analysis of three Congolese patients shortly after the Second World War. He comments that “their unconscious functioned according to the rules of the Oedipus complex; it was the unconscious that had been sold to them at the same time as the laws of colonization, an exotic form of the discourse of the Master, a regression before imperialist capitalism.”

This remark raises the question of whether colonial and imperial discourses are merely metamorphoses of the discourse of the master, or whether capitalist discourse has specific structural features. Although the notion of a distinct “capitalist discourse” will be developed more explicitly in later Lacanian teaching (especially by Jacques-Alain Miller), Seminar XVII already situates colonial law and imported Oedipus myths within a matrix of mastery and exploitation.

Radiophonie and the unconscious as discourse

During the period of L'envers de la psychanalyse, Lacan participated in an interview broadcast on French radio, later published as “Radiophonie” and collected in Autres écrits. This text is often read as a companion to Seminar XVII because it elaborates on the relation between language, the unconscious, and linguistics.

In “Radiophonie” Lacan declares that “if language is the condition of the unconscious, the unconscious is the condition of linguistics.” Freud, he argues, anticipates Saussure and the Prague School by attending to the patient’s words, jokes, slips of the tongue, and by isolating condensation and displacement in the production of dreams.

The unconscious is the fact “that the subject is not the one who knows what he says. Whoever articulates the unconscious says that it is either that or nothing.” Linguistics, Lacan notes, has no hold on the unconscious because it leaves blank what produces effects in the unconscious: the objet a, which is the focus of the analytic act and, more generally, of any act. “Only the discourse that defines itself in terms given by psychoanalysis manifests the subject as other,” whereas science, by making the subject a master, conceals him, such that “the desire that gives way to him bars the subject for me without remedy.”

Lacan asserts that there is only one myth in his discourse: the Freudian Oedipus complex. “In psychoanalysis, as well as in the unconscious, man knows nothing of woman, and woman nothing of man. The phallus epitomizes the point in myth where the sexual becomes the passion of the signifier.” There is, however, no algebraic formula for the unconscious discourse: “the unconscious is only the metaphorical term designating the knowledge only sustained when presented as impossible, so that it can conform by being real—real discourse.”

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Psychoanalysis among the discourses

Seminar XVII is often read as inaugurating a new phase in Lacan’s work in which psychoanalysis is explicitly situated among other discourses—political, academic, hysterical, and analytic. The Discourse of the Analyst is no longer conceived as a purely intra-psychic relation but as a social bond with its own structural effects.

This re-situation has implications for the ethics of psychoanalysis. It suggests that the analyst must continually guard against slipping back into the discourse of the master (through authoritarian interpretations) or that of the university (through the position of expert knowledge), and must instead maintain the position of objet petit a as cause of desire.

Hystericization of discourse and the cure

Seminar XVII also provides a structural definition of the analytic cure in terms of the hystericization of discourse. “The cure involves the structural introduction of the discourse of the hysteric by way of artificial conditions”: the analyst “hystericizes” the analysand’s discourse by occupying the position of object a and provoking questions about the subject’s desire and about the Other’s knowledge.

This means that even though analysis is oriented by the Discourse of the Analyst, it deploys the hysteric’s discourse as a motor: the analysand is placed in the position of the hysteric who interrogates the master-signifiers organizing their life. Interpretation is thus less about revealing hidden meanings than about rearranging discursive positions so that new knowledge (S2) can emerge and new master-signifiers (S1) can be produced.

Law, castration, and consolidation of the symbolic

By emphasizing that psychoanalysis “consolidates the law” and retains from the Oedipus complex the Name-of-the-Father and the paternal metaphor, Seminar XVII can appear to some critics to be conservative. However, Lacanian commentators often argue that “law” here refers not to empirical legal systems but to the structural laws of language and desire—especially castration as the inscription of lack.

In this sense, the analytic discourse does not abolish symbolic law but reconfigures the subject’s relation to it, displacing mastery and linking truth to the subject’s division rather than to a positive knowledge.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools, Seminar XVII is a canonical reference for the Four discourses and for subsequent discussions of discourse analysis in psychoanalysis. It is regularly studied alongside Seminar XVI (for the introduction of surplus-jouissance) and Seminar XX (for the elaboration of sexual difference and Other jouissance).

The algebra of S1, S2, $, and a has become a central teaching tool in Lacanian training, used to situate the analyst’s position and to reflect on the institutional forms of psychoanalysis itself, including supervision, training, and institutional power.

In philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies

Beyond strictly clinical circles, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis has exerted a significant influence on continental philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies. The four discourses have been used to analyze ideological formations, institutional power, and the place of critique in contemporary societies. The distinction between the discourse of the master and that of the university, in particular, has informed critiques of academic knowledge and of the commodification of education.

Critical theory and Marxist-inspired readings have made extensive use of Lacan’s linkage between discourse, surplus-jouissance, and surplus value, often drawing on Seminar XVII in conjunction with Seminar XVI and with later writings on capitalism and enjoyment.

Criticisms and debates

Critics of Lacan’s discourse theory have raised questions about the empirical adequacy of the four discourses as models of complex social relations, and about the risk of reifying them into rigid typologies. Others have argued that the discourse of the analyst is idealized and that in practice psychoanalytic institutions more often reproduce the discourses of the master and of the university.

Nevertheless, Seminar XVII is widely regarded as a crucial text for understanding Lacan’s late work, especially his attempts to think psychoanalysis not only as a theory of the subject but as an intervention in the field of social bonds.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XVI
• Seminar XVIII
• Four discourses
• Discourse of the Master
• Discourse of the University
• Discourse of the Hysteric
• Discourse of the Analyst
• Objet petit a
• Surplus-jouissance
• Master signifier
• Name-of-the-Father
• Hysteria
• Psychoanalytic act
• Radiophonie

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse (1969–1970). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.

• 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.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.