Desire and its Interpretation (Seminar VI)

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 V Seminar VII →

Desire and its Interpretation
Seminar VI
Desire and its Interpretation Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar VI.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre VI : Le désir et son interprétation
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and its Interpretation
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1958–1959 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions (session count varies across transcripts and editions)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Desire • Interpretation • Fantasy • Graph of Desire • Other • Demand • Signifier • Phallus • Castration • Oedipus complex • Hamlet • Che vuoi?
Notable Themes	Desire as the axis of analytic experience; rereading of Freudian dream interpretation; articulation of fantasy and the subject’s division; limits and conditions of interpretation; critique of psychologizing readings of desire; literary case study (Hamlet)
Freud Texts	The Interpretation of Dreams • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • texts on the Oedipus complex and castration
Theoretical Context
Period	Early/structural period (transition toward the ethics of psychoanalysis)
Register	Symbolic with systematic articulation of Imaginary and the question of the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar V
Followed by	Seminar VII

The Seminar, Book VI: Desire and its Interpretation ([Le Séminaire, Livre VI : Le désir et son interprétation] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the sixth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan during the 1958–1959 academic year at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. The seminar places desire at the center of psychoanalytic theory and technique, arguing that analytic interpretation must be oriented not primarily toward conscious meaning or ego adaptation but toward the subject’s position in the signifying chain and the structural impasses through which desire is articulated.

Often read as a continuation and deepening of Seminar V (where Lacan formalizes the “formations of the unconscious” as effects of metaphor and metonymy) and as a prologue to Seminar VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Seminar VI elaborates a distinct thesis: desire is not a hidden substance “behind” speech but a structural function produced in the subject’s relation to language, law, and the Other. Its most widely cited cultural case study is Lacan’s extended reading of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, staged as a clinical and structural investigation into the impasses of desire, mourning, and action.

Overview

In Seminar VI, Lacan proposes that the analytic experience can be described as a practical logic of desire in speech. Desire is not reducible to biological need (besoin) or to articulated demand (demande); rather, it emerges in the gap introduced by the signifier: what remains when need is translated into demand and addressed to the Other. Because demand is always demand for recognition (love, presence, acknowledgment), it can never be wholly satisfied by an object; desire therefore persists as a metonymic remainder, a drift along the signifying chain that no single signified can exhaust.

The seminar’s title indicates a program rather than a juxtaposition: desire is approached through the question of interpretation, and interpretation is redefined as an act whose target is the structure of desire rather than the correction of beliefs or the strengthening of the ego. Lacan’s frequently cited formulation from this period—“desire is its own interpretation”—summarizes the wager that the subject’s desire is legible in the very distortions, substitutions, and impasses that interpretation brings into relief, rather than in a final explanatory meaning.

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne and the “return to Freud”

Seminar VI belongs to Lacan’s long Sainte-Anne period (1950s–early 1960s), during which his weekly seminar became a central platform for his “return to Freud”: a systematic rereading of Freudian theory through structural linguistics, rhetoric, and postwar French philosophy. The seminar follows the conceptual arc of the mid-1950s: from Lacan’s critique of ego psychology (Seminar II), to structural diagnosis of psychosis via foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (Seminar III), to renewed attention to the ordinary “laboratory” of speech and unconscious formations (Seminar V).

Within this trajectory, Seminar VI is often treated as a transitional work: it consolidates the primacy of the signifier while shifting emphasis toward desire and the structural function of fantasy, themes that later organize Lacan’s ethics and his account of jouissance.

Institutional tensions and the question of technique

The 1958–1959 academic year falls within a period of increasing institutional conflict around training and technique in French psychoanalysis, especially concerning Lacan’s distinctive practice of variable-length sessions and his theoretical polemics against adaptationist clinical aims. While Seminar VI is not a primarily institutional document, its emphasis on the direction of interpretation—how, when, and to what an interpretation is addressed—reflects these broader disputes about the aims of analysis and the status of the Other in the analytic setting.

Publication history and editorial establishment

Like many of Lacan’s annual seminars, Seminar VI circulated for decades in stenographic notes, private transcriptions, and partial publications before the appearance of a standardized, edited volume. Jacques-Alain Miller established the text for posthumous publication; selections—especially the Hamlet lessons—were published earlier in the journal Ornicar? and became a major entry point for Anglophone and Francophone reception of the seminar’s literary case study.

A complete French edition was published in 2013 in the Champ freudien context. An English translation (edited by Miller and translated by Bruce Fink) was published by Polity Press in 2019, contributing to the consolidation of Seminar VI as a standard reference for Lacan’s late-1950s theorization of desire and interpretation.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Desire, the signifier, and the divided subject

A guiding presupposition of Seminar VI is that the subject of psychoanalysis is not identical with the conscious ego but is produced through language and split by the signifier (often denoted as the barred subject). Desire is not a psychological “motive” housed inside the individual but a function of the subject’s insertion into the Symbolic: it appears at the point where the signifier introduces lack and where the subject confronts the Other’s demand and enigma.

This orientation also reframes interpretation. Interpretation does not uncover a “true self” behind symptoms; it intervenes in the signifying chain—through punctuation, equivocation, and cuts—so that the subject hears the logic of desire as it is articulated in speech (including in jokes, slips, dreams, and repetitions). In this respect, Seminar VI continues the line of Seminar V while shifting the center of gravity from the “formations of the unconscious” to the structural scene in which desire takes shape: demand, fantasy, and the subject’s relation to the Other.

Rereading Freud: dreams and the logic of wish

A substantial portion of the seminar is occupied by Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Lacan treats dream interpretation as paradigmatic because dreams exhibit how wish (Freud’s wish fulfillment) is mediated by signifiers and by the censorship of demand and law; desire does not appear as a direct “message,” but as a displacement, a metonymic remainder, and a series of signifying substitutions that do not culminate in a final statement.

In Lacan’s structural reading, the dream does not merely conceal an already-formed meaning; it stages an operation in which desire is articulated while remaining non-totalizable. This claim aligns with Lacan’s broader thesis that the unconscious is “structured like a language,” and that analytic interpretation targets the signifier’s operations rather than a hidden interior content.

The Graph of Desire and the topology of interpretation

Seminar VI is closely associated with Lacan’s developing formalization of the Graph of Desire. While the graph reaches a canonical presentation in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), Seminar VI is often cited as a workshop where the graph’s stakes are clarified: interpretation concerns the subject’s position in relation to the Other’s demand and the points where meaning is retroactively stabilized, while desire persists as a remainder that eludes complete signification.

A frequently invoked shorthand for this problematic is Che vuoi? (“What do you want?”): the enigma of the Other’s desire that structures the subject’s own desire. In this perspective, interpretation does not provide the Other’s final answer; instead, it aims to shift the subject’s relation to the Other’s supposed knowledge and to locate the subject’s desire in the gaps where speech stumbles, repeats, or becomes enigmatic.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Desire, demand, and the Other

A central axis of the seminar is the distinction between need, demand, and desire. Demand is articulated in language and addressed to the Other; because it is articulated, it carries a demand for recognition that exceeds any satisfiable need. Desire emerges in the remainder produced by this translation into the signifier: it is what persists beyond the demand’s explicit content.

Lacan emphasizes that the Other is not merely another person but the locus of language, law, and the code that makes recognition possible. The subject’s speech is therefore structured by what the subject supposes the Other wants, knows, or authorizes. Interpretation is an act within this field of address: its effects depend on how it repositions the analyst as Other and how it modifies the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire.

Fantasy and the staging of desire

Seminar VI is frequently invoked in Lacanian teaching as a major step in theorizing fantasy as the scene in which desire is staged and stabilized. Fantasy is not treated as a mere daydream but as a structural support: it gives consistency to desire by providing a scenario that answers (however deceptively) the question of what the Other wants and where the subject is located in relation to that wanting.

In Lacanian terms, fantasy can function as a screen that simultaneously reveals and protects: it enables desire to appear by framing it, while also shielding the subject from the anxiety that would arise if the enigma of the Other’s desire were encountered without mediation. Interpretation, on this view, must be calibrated: it cannot simply dismantle fantasy without risking destabilization; it aims to make the fantasy legible as a structure and to shift the subject’s relation to it.

The phallus, castration, and the limits of guarantee

Seminar VI continues Lacan’s late-1950s emphasis on the phallus as signifier and on castration as the symbolic operation that structures desire and sexual difference at the level of signification rather than anatomy. The phallus is treated as a privileged signifier that organizes the symbolic field of desire—what can be demanded, what must be renounced, and what returns in displaced or symptomatic forms.

A notable formula associated with Lacan’s late-1950s teaching—often linked by commentators to Seminar VI and adjacent texts—is “There is no Other of the Other” (): the claim that the Other, as locus of truth and code, does not contain a final signifier that would guarantee meaning, law, or truth absolutely. In clinical terms, this introduces a limit to the demand for assurance: analysis cannot provide an ultimate guarantor, but can transform the subject’s relation to this structural lack.

Hamlet: desire, mourning, and the impasse of action

The seminar’s best-known case study is Lacan’s extended reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, including a sustained engagement with Ernest Jones’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the play. Lacan treats Hamlet as a privileged text for analyzing the structure of desire because the drama stages an impasse: Hamlet knows what must be done yet cannot act; he is caught in a network of signifiers—paternity, law, the mother’s desire, the dead father’s command—whose contradictions immobilize him.

In Lacan’s structural approach, the question is not a psychological deficit of will but the subject’s position in relation to the Other’s desire and the signifiers that organize mourning and identification. The dead father’s return, the mother’s remarriage, and the demand for vengeance configure a scene in which desire is both summoned and blocked. Hamlet’s celebrated hesitation (“To be or not to be”) is read less as philosophical abstraction than as a symptom of the subject’s division: the subject cannot simply “want” because wanting is mediated by the Other’s demand and by the signifiers that confer place and legitimacy.

A decisive pivot in Lacan’s reading is mourning. Hamlet’s relation to Ophelia is not treated primarily as romantic psychology but as a structural knot: Ophelia becomes a point where desire, loss, and signification converge. In many Lacanian receptions of the seminar, the graveyard scene—where Hamlet confronts Ophelia’s death and engages Laertes—is highlighted as a moment when desire is disclosed in proximity to death and loss, underscoring the thesis that desire is structured by lack and cannot be reduced to possession of an object.

Perversion and the orientation of interpretation

Toward its concluding movement, Seminar VI addresses perversion not simply as a catalog of behaviors but as a structural position with respect to law, desire, and the Other. In Lacanian structural theory, perversion is typically distinguished from neurosis and psychosis by its specific relation to castration and the law (often described through mechanisms such as disavowal). In this context, the seminar’s concern is technical as well as theoretical: interpretation must take account of structure, because the same interpretive maneuver can have different effects depending on the subject’s position in relation to the Other and to castration.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Interpretation as an act in the field of the Other

A lasting implication of Seminar VI is the redefinition of interpretation as an act within the field of address. Interpretation is not primarily explanatory; it is performative in the sense that it produces effects in the subject’s discourse by reconfiguring the signifying chain and the subject’s suppositions about the Other’s knowledge and desire. This is one reason Lacan insists that interpretation often operates through equivocation, punctuation, and strategic brevity rather than through pedagogical elaboration: it aims at the points where desire is articulated as a break, not where the ego narrates coherence.

Desire and the ethics of analysis

By centering desire, Seminar VI is commonly read as preparing Lacan’s subsequent ethical turn in Seminar VII. The question is not whether the subject conforms to norms of adaptation but how the subject assumes the consequences of desire and the lack of guarantee in the Other. The seminar thus contributes to a Lacanian clinical ethos in which the analyst avoids occupying the position of moral authority or ultimate meaning-giver, and instead works to transform the subject’s relation to demand, fantasy, and the Other’s supposed knowledge.

Continuity with Seminars V and VII

In the sequence of late-1950s seminars, Seminar VI is frequently treated as a hinge:

• From Seminar V, it inherits the focus on signifying operations (metaphor/metonymy; formations of the unconscious) and the early elaborations of the Graph of Desire.
• Toward Seminar VII, it intensifies the question of what orients analytic action when the Other does not guarantee truth (“no Other of the Other”), thereby setting the stage for Lacan’s explicit articulation of psychoanalytic ethics and the relation between desire and law.

Reception and legacy

Canonical status within Lacanian teaching

Within Lacanian schools and commentaries, Seminar VI has been canonical for three interlocking reasons: (1) its systematic centering of desire as the axis of analytic practice, (2) its elaboration of fantasy and the subject’s division in relation to the Other, and (3) its influential reading of Hamlet as a structural case study of desire, mourning, and action.

The earlier circulation of the Hamlet lessons in journal form contributed to the seminar’s influence beyond strictly clinical contexts, particularly in literary studies and cultural theory, where Lacan’s reading offered a structural alternative to characterological or purely Oedipal interpretations of the play.

In the humanities and cultural theory

In literary theory, Seminar VI has been cited as an exemplary instance of Lacan’s method: a reading that treats a canonical text as a structured discourse in which desire is articulated through signifiers, substitutions, and impasses rather than through interior psychology alone. The seminar’s engagement with Shakespeare, mourning, and the problem of action has intersected with broader theoretical debates about subjectivity, agency, and the limits of meaning—especially in post-structuralist receptions of psychoanalysis.

Clinical debates and interpretive technique

Clinically, the seminar’s emphasis on interpretation as an act has been influential in debates about analytic technique—especially regarding the function of the analyst as Other and the risks of interpretive overexplanation. Readers sympathetic to Lacan emphasize that interpretation must aim at desire and the signifier’s logic; critics argue that such an approach can appear opaque or under-specified in comparison to more explicitly procedural schools of psychotherapy. In Lacanian clinical writing, the seminar is frequently invoked to justify a technique oriented by speech effects, the handling of transference, and the differentiation of structure (neurosis/psychosis/perversion) as conditions for the direction of the cure.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar V
• Seminar VII
• Desire
• Interpretation
• Fantasy
• Graph of Desire
• Che vuoi?
• Other
• Demand
• Phallus
• Castration
• Oedipus complex
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Hamlet
• Ernest Jones

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VI : Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Champ freudien, 2013.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and its Interpretation (1958–1959). Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. Polity Press, 2019.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 4–5.

• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. (Includes “The Agency of the Letter…” and “The Subversion of the Subject…”.)
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.