Changes

This is a dense and difficult text to read, but it is unquestioonably the pivotal seminar of Lacan's career and one that you will read over and over again. It is an immensely rich text, packed with ideas and formulations that Lacan will return to throughout the second half of his career. Lacan differentiates his work from orthodox Freudianism on some of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, transference, the drive and the subject. He also begins to rformulate many of his earlier concepts and to elaborate what we now recognize as a specifically Lacanian theory of psychoanalysis. Most importantly, Lacan stresses the centrality of the 'drive' as the distinguishing feature of psychoanalysis. He reformulates his understandingg of the subject from the subject of the signifier to the subject of the drive and replaces some of the linguistic terminology, such as metaphor and metonymy, with alienation and separation. Lacan also develops the ''objet petit a'' - as the object cause of desire and remainder of the real - in relation to the split between the eye and the gaze. Finally, the seminar develops a notion of transference as a relation to 'the subject supposed to know'.

French: (texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller), Paris: Seuil, 1973.

English: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller), New York: Norton, 1978.