Les formations de l'inconscient (Seminar V)

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 IV Seminar VI →

The Formations of the Unconscious
Seminar V
Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar V.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	November 1957 – June 1958
Session Count	26 sessions
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Unconscious • Witz (joke) • Dream • Parapraxis • Symptom • Signifier • Metaphor • Metonymy • Graph of Desire • Other • Demand • Desire • Name-of-the-Father • Paternal metaphor • Phallus • Oedipus complex
Notable Themes	“Return to Freud” via the formations of the unconscious; linguistics and the signifier; desire and its articulation; the paternal function and Oedipus; the social dimension of jokes and address; technique and interpretation
Freud Texts	Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious • The Interpretation of Dreams • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • texts on the Oedipus complex and dream-work (condensation/displacement)
Theoretical Context
Period	Early/structural period
Register	Symbolic with systematic articulation of Imaginary and the limits of the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar IV
Followed by	Seminar VI

The Seminar, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient) is the fifth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan during the 1957–1958 academic year at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. Edited and published posthumously, the seminar offers Lacan’s sustained re-reading of Sigmund Freud’s paradigmatic “formations” of the unconscious—the joke (Freud’s Witz), the dream, the slip (lapsus / parapraxis), and the symptom—in order to formalize the unconscious as an effect of the signifier and of the subject’s address to the Other.

Seminar V is widely treated as a major statement of Lacan’s mid-1950s structuralism. It develops the linguistic reformulation of Freudian mechanisms (condensation and displacement) as metaphor and metonymy, and it advances a topology of subjectivation culminating in early versions of the Graph of Desire, later canonized in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960) and published in Écrits (1966).

Overview

Freud grouped jokes, dreams, slips, and symptoms as privileged sites where unconscious processes become legible—places where the logic of substitution, distortion, and return can be observed with particular clarity. Lacan’s wager in Seminar V is that these formations do not merely express hidden meanings “behind” speech; rather, they display the formal operations of the signifier itself and thereby disclose the subject’s division within language (the barred subject).

A frequently cited programmatic formulation in the seminar condenses this orientation:

“The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows of the elementary is only the elements of the signifier.”

On this basis, Lacan treats jokes, dreams, and lapses as a laboratory for the structural laws of the unconscious—laws that concern differential relations among signifiers, the temporality of retroactive meaning (Nachträglichkeit), and the social scene of address in which meaning is recognized, refused, or misconstrued by the Other.

In addition, Seminar V deepens Lacan’s account of desire as something that is articulated in the signifying chain while remaining irreducible to any final statement. The seminar is thus a key source for later Lacanian formulae and diagrams concerning the relations among demand, desire, and jouissance (even if the latter term is not yet fully systematized in 1957–58).

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne, the SFP, and the “return to Freud”

Seminar V belongs to the period in which Lacan’s weekly teaching at Hôpital Sainte-Anne functioned as a primary vehicle of his “return to Freud”: a methodological re-reading of Freudian texts through structural linguistics, the emerging French reception of structuralism, and contemporaneous philosophy. The institutional backdrop includes Lacan’s post-1953 milieu in the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), founded after the split from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris amid disputes about training, technique, and the prominence of ego psychology.

Where earlier seminars—especially Seminar III on psychosis—stressed diagnostic structure and the fate of the Name-of-the-Father, Seminar V pivots to everyday speech (jokes told in company, mistakes in conversation, dream narration) in order to demonstrate that the same signifying laws apply across clinical formations. The shift is strategic rather than “non-clinical”: it treats the joke and slip as exemplary sites where interpretation can isolate the formal operations of substitution and displacement without reducing analysis to a psychology of conscious intentions.

Publication history and editorial establishment

As with many of Lacan’s seminars, the 1957–1958 teaching circulated for decades in notes, transcriptions, and compiled versions before standardized publication. The French text was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1998; a widely used English translation by Russell Grigg appeared with Polity Press in 2017. Scholarly citation typically relies on these editions, though pagination varies across printings and translations, and earlier unofficial translations continue to circulate in some academic settings.

Conceptual framework and methodology

The formations of the unconscious as a field of formalization

Freud’s classic investigations of jokes, dreams, and parapraxes emphasize formal mechanisms—condensation, displacement, representability, and secondary revision—rather than the recovery of a single latent “message” concealed intact behind the manifest text. Lacan radicalizes this emphasis: the “formation” is not merely a coded statement but an event in the signifying chain that demonstrates how meaning is produced by difference, substitution, and the constraints of address.

Methodologically, the seminar privileges:

• the materiality of the signifier (sound, homophony, segmentation);
• the retroactive stabilization of meaning through anchoring points (anticipating later treatments of the point de capiton);
• the “scene” of the Other in which an utterance is received as a joke, a mistake, a confession, or nonsense.

In this setting, Lacan’s interpretive practice is often described as a technique of punctuation (the cut, the scansion), designed to isolate the signifier’s insistence and to separate the subject of the unconscious from the ego’s narrative of intention.

Linguistics, rhetoric, and the signifier

Lacan’s approach draws on structural linguistics associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (signifier/signified; differential value) and on rhetorical analysis of tropes often linked to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy as axes of selection and combination. Lacan presents these not as external tools but as a vocabulary for formalizing what Freud already discovered: the unconscious operates through substitutions and displacements that are fundamentally signifying operations.

The seminar is closely connected to Lacan’s contemporaneous article “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud” (1957), which similarly argues that the unconscious is structured by the differential laws of the signifier rather than by a pre-linguistic content.

Address, recognition, and the Other

In jokes and witticisms, the presence of the Other is explicit: a joke “works” only if it is recognized as such. Lacan uses this to formalize a broader claim about psychoanalysis: truth effects are produced in speech situated in a field of address, where the Other functions as the locus of the code (what counts as a word, a sense, a rule) and the locus of demand (what is asked, prohibited, or permitted).

This emphasis distinguishes Lacan’s “return to Freud” from interpretive models that treat the unconscious as a private interior meaning. In Seminar V, the unconscious emerges as a structured effect of signifiers that operate “between” speakers—within and against shared codes—rather than as a hidden content owned by an ego.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Jokes (Witz) and the social economy of enjoyment

Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious treats the joke as a formation that yields pleasure through economy (saving expenditure of inhibition or representation) while depending on a third person who “gets it.” Lacan treats this third position as structurally decisive: the joke is a paradigmatic demonstration that the unconscious is bound to the scene of address and to the Other’s recognition (or refusal of recognition).

In Lacan’s account, the joke demonstrates the autonomy of the signifier: meaning (and pleasure) may arise from equivocation, homophony, and unexpected substitutions, such that “sense” can be generated out of “nonsense” by the play of signifiers. Rather than being merely decorative, this rhetorical logic is presented as homologous with dream-work and symptom formation.

Dreams: condensation/displacement as metaphor/metonymy

Freud’s dream-work describes the transformation of latent thoughts into manifest content through condensation and displacement. Lacan re-articulates this transformation linguistically: condensation corresponds to metaphor (a substitution that produces new meaning), while displacement corresponds to metonymy (a drift of meaning along contiguity within a chain).

This reformulation supports Lacan’s claim that interpretation must target operations rather than contents. The dream is not primarily decoded as a symbolic picture-book of hidden meanings; it is analyzed as a text whose truth emerges through signifying operations—cuts, substitutions, and displacements that can be traced in speech.

Slips (lapsus), parapraxes, and the insistence of the signifying chain

Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life makes slips and mistakes legible as meaningful events rather than accidents. Lacan reads the slip as a privileged site where the subject is “spoken” by the signifier: a chain insists, repeats, and returns at the level of sound, fragments, and substitutions, often contrary to conscious intention.

This emphasis links Seminar V to Lacan’s broader account of repetition and transference: what returns is not simply a buried representation but a signifying articulation that reappears in new contexts. The analytic session becomes a space for isolating these articulations—where the subject’s truth emerges through interruption, equivocation, or unintended phrasing rather than through coherent narrative alone.

Symptoms and compromise formations

Freud describes the symptom as a compromise formation: it both satisfies and defends, expressing desire while obeying censorship. Lacan retains this compromise logic but shifts emphasis from energetic models to signifying structure. A symptom is treated as a relatively stable knotting of signifiers—an addressed message that persists precisely because it provides a workable (if painful) solution to conflicts among demand, prohibition, identification, and desire.

Within this framework, symptom interpretation is not the one-time decoding of a hidden content; it is an intervention that shifts the subject’s relation to signifiers, especially at points where meaning is over-determined, equivocal, or fixed by symptomatic repetition.

Demand, desire, and the question of the Other

A central axis of Seminar V is the distinction between demand and desire. Demand is articulated in language and addressed to the Other; because it is articulated, it invariably asks for more than any object can provide (recognition, love, presence). Desire emerges in the gap between demand and need: it is what remains when demand has been spoken, satisfied, refused, or distorted. Desire is thus structured as lack and as metonymic drift along the signifying chain rather than as a single positive object.

In clinical terms, this distinction helps orient analytic listening: where the ego speaks in the register of needs and aims, Lacan encourages attention to what repeats, displaces, and equivocates—where desire appears most clearly as a gap in what the subject asks for and what can be given.

The Graph of Desire: topology of subjectivation

Seminar V is a principal source for Lacan’s development of the Graph of Desire, a diagrammatic formalization of relations among signifying chains, demand, and desire. In its canonical later presentation, the graph maps how a first line of signification—associated with message and code—intersects with a second line where desire is produced as an effect of the Other’s demand and the subject’s division ($).

A key claim attached to the graph is that desire is inseparable from articulation yet resists final articulation as a statement:

“It is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable.”

The graph is used to formalize how meaning is retroactively stabilized, how the subject is split between enunciation and statement, and how desire emerges at the intersection of signifiers and the Other’s enigma (later condensed in the question Che vuoi?—“What do you want?”).

Oedipus, the paternal function, and the paternal metaphor

While Seminar III foregrounds the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in psychosis, Seminar V develops the paternal function within a broader theory of desire and signification. Lacan distinguishes the empirical father from the symbolic function that institutes law, naming, and prohibition. In this perspective, the paternal signifier intervenes as an operator that reorders the child’s relation to the mother’s desire and to the signifying chain of kinship and law.

A key formalization of this period is the paternal metaphor: a substitution by which the Name-of-the-Father takes the place of the mother’s desire as signifier, producing a new signification (often associated with phallic signification) that reconfigures the subject’s position within desire and prohibition. Lacan treats this as the logical pivot of the Oedipus complex—a symbolic operation rather than a purely developmental narrative about family roles.

The phallus as signifier

Seminar V culminates in a heightened emphasis on the phallus as signifier, closely associated with Lacan’s contemporaneous lecture “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958). In this framework, the phallus is not an anatomical organ but a privileged signifier that marks how desire is symbolized—how lack is introduced and how sexual difference is structured at the level of signification rather than by direct biological complementarity.

The thesis became a focal point of later debates, particularly in feminist and gender-theoretical receptions of Lacan, which often distinguish between Lacan’s claim about symbolic function (a thesis about signification and culture) and any alleged claim about anatomical superiority (which Lacan explicitly rejects).

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

From meanings to signifiers: the direction of interpretation

A lasting contribution of Seminar V is its articulation of interpretation as an intervention at the level of the signifier. Because formations of the unconscious exploit equivocation, condensation, and displacement, the analyst does not simply translate a hidden message into conscious understanding; rather, the analyst punctuates, cuts, and interprets so that the signifying chain can be heard—especially at points where it breaks, repeats, or becomes impossible to say straightforwardly.

This orientation supports Lacan’s critique of technique aimed primarily at ego adaptation or narrative coherence. In Lacan’s view, coherence can function as a defence that masks the subject’s division; the formations of the unconscious disclose how truth appears through distortion. Interpretation thus targets the points where speech stumbles, jokes, or slips—where the Other is implicitly addressed and desire appears as the remainder beyond demand.

Desire, ethics, and the analyst’s position

By centring desire rather than adaptation, Seminar V contributes to what later becomes Lacan’s explicit “ethics of psychoanalysis” (systematized in Seminar VII). Even before that later seminar, Seminar V treats analytic work as oriented by the subject’s relation to desire and to the Other’s demand, not by normalization. The formations of the unconscious are privileged precisely because they stage truth as surprise, misrecognition, and rupture—effects that cannot be reduced to conscious intention.

Clinically, this implies a specific attention to transference as a phenomenon of address: the analyst is positioned as an Other, and the analysand’s speech is shaped by what the analysand supposes the Other knows or wants. Interpretations are therefore evaluated by their symbolic effects—how they shift the subject’s position in relation to demand and desire—rather than by their persuasive content.

Structural continuity with Seminars IV and VI

Seminar V is often read as a hinge in the sequence from Seminar IV (object relations) to Seminar VI (Desire and its Interpretation). In this arc, the paternal metaphor and the phallus function less as a doctrine about family authority than as a theory of signification: how desire is symbolized and how the subject is positioned within language and law.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

In Lacanian teaching traditions, Seminar V is frequently treated as a foundational reference for:

1. the claim that the unconscious is structured like a language (formalized through jokes, dreams, slips, and symptoms);
2. the metaphor/metonymy articulation of Freudian dream-work;
3. the early development of the Graph of Desire and the distinction between demand and desire.

It is often read alongside Lacan’s 1957 “Agency of the Letter…” and 1958 “Signification of the Phallus,” which condense several seminar arguments into canonical essays in Écrits.

In the humanities and theory

Beyond clinical psychoanalysis, Seminar V has been influential in literary theory and philosophy for its account of rhetoric (metaphor/metonymy) as constitutive of subjectivity rather than as stylistic ornament. Its focus on jokes and wordplay has also informed accounts of language as a site where social recognition and unconscious truth intersect, resonating with wider structuralist and post-structuralist currents in twentieth-century theory.

At the same time, the seminar’s strong claims about the phallus as privileged signifier have remained controversial. Scholarly reception has often focused on whether this privilege is best read descriptively (as an analysis of a cultural-symbolic function) or normatively (as reinforcing a gendered hierarchy), with Lacanian commentators typically arguing for the former reading within Lacan’s own conceptual distinctions.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar IV
• Seminar VI
• Unconscious
• Witz
• Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Parapraxis
• Symptom
• Signifier
• Metaphor and Metonymy
• Graph of Desire
• Demand
• Desire
• Other
• Name-of-the-Father
• Paternal metaphor
• Phallus
• Écrits

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient (1957–1958). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–1958). Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2017.
• Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), SE 8.

• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 4–5.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.