Talk:Seminar VII

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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 VI Seminar VIII →

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Seminar VII
Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar VII.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre VII : L'éthique de la psychanalyse
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	18 November 1959 – 6 July 1960
Session Count	27 sessions
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Ethics • Desire • Jouissance • das Ding (the Thing) • Sublimation • Superego • Guilt • Pleasure principle • Death drive • Real • Symbolic • Law • Castration • Antigone • Courtly love
Notable Themes	Psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire; critique of adaptationist “good”; enjoyment and the limits of pleasure; the Thing and the Real; sublimation and cultural forms; tragedy and the “between-two-deaths”; rereading Freud on morality, guilt, and civilization
Freud Texts	Beyond the Pleasure Principle • Civilization and Its Discontents • Totem and Taboo • Project for a Scientific Psychology • texts on the superego and unconscious guilt
Theoretical Context
Period	Early/structural period (transition toward explicit ethics and the Real)
Register	Symbolic with intensified articulation of the Real and jouissance
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar VI
Followed by	Seminar VIII

The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ([Le Séminaire, Livre VII : L'éthique de la psychanalyse] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the seventh annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan during the 1959–1960 academic year at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. Edited and published posthumously from notes and transcriptions, the seminar is widely treated as a major statement of Lacan’s claim that psychoanalysis entails an irreducible ethical dimension: not the application of a moral code, but an orientation to the subject’s desire and to what exceeds the pleasure principle.

Seminar VII is frequently credited with helping disseminate Lacanian ideas beyond clinical psychoanalysis into the humanities and social sciences, and it has remained an important reference point for later theorists, including Slavoj Žižek and a range of feminist critics, especially through its discussion of tragedy, enjoyment, and symbolic forms of love.

Across the year, Lacan re-reads Sigmund Freud on morality, culture, and the drives—particularly the problematic opened by the death drive—and develops three concepts that have become central in later Lacanian teaching: das Ding (the Thing), jouissance, and sublimation. The seminar is also known for Lacan’s extended reading of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone, which he treats as an exemplary staging of an ethical act oriented by desire and not by a calculus of goods.

Overview

Lacan’s guiding contention in Seminar VII is that psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to a psychology of adjustment, well-being, or moral education. The analytic experience—structured by speech, transference, and the unconscious—encounters the subject at points where normative ideals (“the good”, happiness, maturity) do not suffice to orient action, interpretation, or responsibility. As a result, Lacan frames psychoanalysis as an ethics indexed to desire and to the paradoxical satisfaction that appears beyond pleasure, later formalized as jouissance.

A frequently cited formulation from the seminar condenses this ethical reorientation: the only thing one can be guilty of is “having given ground relative to one’s desire.” Lacan does not present this as a permissive moral rule, but as a way of relocating guilt and responsibility at the level of the subject’s relation to desire—especially where the subject compromises desire in the name of externally guaranteed goods or ideals.

In the sequence of Lacan’s late-1950s teaching, Seminar VII is often read as a hinge. Seminars V–VI intensify the structural and linguistic account of desire (desire as articulated in the signifier and addressed to the Other). Seminar VII brings these resources to bear on the classical philosophical domain of ethics while sharpening the status of the Real via the concept of the Thing and the problem of enjoyment.

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne and the SFP

Seminar VII was delivered at Hôpital Sainte-Anne in the milieu of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), during the period in which Lacan’s weekly seminars served as a principal vehicle of his “return to Freud”: a sustained rereading of Freudian metapsychology and technique through structural linguistics and contemporary philosophy. The institutional backdrop includes ongoing disputes in French psychoanalysis over training and technique, in which Lacan repeatedly opposed therapeutic aims defined as adaptation or ego-strengthening, associating them with the clinical ethos of postwar ego psychology.

Publication history and textual status

Like many of Lacan’s annual seminars, the lectures circulated for decades in notes and transcriptions before publication in standardized form. The French text was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1986; an English translation by Dennis Porter appeared with Routledge in 1992. Differences among circulating versions (stenographic notes, student transcripts, later editorial collation) are sometimes noted in scholarship, and academic citation typically relies on the Seuil/Routledge editions as reference points.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire

Lacan’s methodological wager is that psychoanalysis is not “applied ethics” but a practice whose technical operations (interpretation, punctuation, handling of transference) imply a distinctive ethical stance. The analyst does not occupy the place of a Good that would guide the analysand toward the proper life; rather, analytic work aims to clarify the subject’s position with respect to desire and to the signifiers that structure demand and guilt.

This orientation is encapsulated in the seminar’s recurrent question—posed as the ethical question proper—“Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” Lacan frames this not as an exhortation to gratification but as a challenge to moralizing substitutes for desire (ideals of happiness, “normal” sexuality, social adaptation) that may function defensively, displacing the subject’s responsibility onto external standards.

The Thing (das Ding) and the Real

A central innovation of the seminar is Lacan’s elaboration of das Ding (“the Thing”), a term he retrieves from Freud and uses to name a primordial exteriority at the heart of the subject’s world: an impossible object that organizes desire while remaining irreducible to representation. In secondary literature, Seminar VII is often described as Lacan’s only explicit sustained engagement with the Freudian term das Ding as such, in contrast to later Lacanian vocabularies for the Real and enjoyment.

Lacan introduces the Thing in part through a rereading of Freud’s early metapsychology (including the Project for a Scientific Psychology), and by revisiting the relation between the pleasure principle and the so-called “reality principle,” which he treats as a modification rather than a simple correction of pleasure. The Thing designates what is “outside” signification and yet central—an excluded kernel around which the symbolic network is woven.

Lacan also links the Thing to the logic of prohibition (notably the incest taboo), proposing that the forbidden object is not merely empirically unavailable but structurally posited as lost, thereby setting desire in motion as a detour around an impossible satisfaction.

Law, evil, and the superego

A distinctive thread of Seminar VII concerns the complicity Lacan identifies between the law and enjoyment. Drawing on Freud’s account of the superego and on religious and philosophical sources invoked in the seminar (including Saint Paul and Martin Luther), Lacan argues that moral law can generate the very temptation it prohibits and can become bound to a cruel imperative.

Within this context, Lacan proposes a provocative displacement (reported and discussed throughout the seminar): he “puts the Thing in the place of sin,” using this formulation to name the way the forbidden Real (the Thing) and the moral economy of prohibition can converge around what is experienced as “evil.” In Lacan’s usage, “evil” is not reduced to immoral intention; it is tied to the structural lure of transgression and to the paradoxical satisfaction that emerges where pleasure reaches its limit and turns into pain (jouissance).

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

The “promise” of analysis and the end of the cure

Lacan describes the analytic promise as austere and anti-idealizing. In formulations associated with Seminar VII’s close, analysis is said to entail an “entry into the I” (), echoing Freud’s maxim “Where It was, there shall I be.” Rather than an egoic mastery, Lacan frames this as the subject’s confrontation with desire “in its absolute nakedness,” beyond the compromises of demand and the consolation of moral ideals.

In this perspective, the “end” of analysis is not a reconciliation with a supreme good but a transformed relation to desire and to enjoyment. Lacan’s emphasis on “purifying desire” is not a moral purification but a clarification of what, in the subject’s speech and symptom, insists beyond rationalization and self-image.

Three ethical theses: guilt, the hero, and the good

Seminar VII is structured by a set of stark ethical theses, repeated and elaborated across different materials. Among the best known are:

• Guilt: the only thing one can be guilty of is ceding on one’s desire.
• The hero: the hero is one “who can be betrayed with impunity,” a formula Lacan uses to characterize tragic steadfastness beyond negotiation with the order of goods.
• The good: goods exist, but “there is no other good” than what pays the price of access to desire—an access Lacan links to truth and to a desire to know rather than to comfort or conformity.

These propositions are developed through Lacan’s critique of classical ethical traditions (e.g., Aristotle and Immanuel Kant) insofar as they presuppose that the ethical aim can be identified with a hierarchy of goods or an ideal of happiness. Lacan argues instead that psychoanalytic experience reveals the duplicity of pleasure and the persistence of enjoyment in suffering, calling for an ethics that does not take happiness as its measure.

Tragedy: Sophocles’ Antigone and the “between-two-deaths”

The seminar’s most famous extended reading concerns Sophocles’ Antigone. Lacan treats tragedy as a privileged site where desire becomes ethically legible: the tragic figure does not exemplify moderation or prudence, but an insistence that pushes beyond the order of socially recognized goods.

Lacan’s analysis elaborates the notion of the “between-two-deaths” (entre-deux-morts), a limit-zone where biological life and symbolic life (recognition, kinship, law) no longer coincide. Antigone’s act—burying her brother despite the city’s prohibition—is read as placing her at this threshold, where the subject’s ethical position appears as a refusal to “give way” on desire.

In adjacent tragic material, Lacan also invokes Oedipus at Colonus, pairing Oedipus’ final stance with Antigone’s, as figures who renounce the ordinary “right to live” in order to enter the threshold-space of tragedy and its peculiar immortality (the persistence of a name, an act, a curse).

The paradox of jouissance

Lacan defines jouissance as a paradoxical satisfaction obtained at the limit of pleasure—where transgression of the pleasure principle yields suffering rather than well-being, yet nevertheless carries satisfaction and insistence. This concept allows Lacan to reframe the persistence of symptoms, guilt, and punitive moral demands: what appears irrational from the standpoint of “happiness” may be intelligible as a satisfaction structured by law, prohibition, and the superego’s cruelty.

Seminar VII links jouissance to the attraction of transgression and to the ethical ambivalence of the law: the law does not simply block enjoyment, but can help produce it by staging an interdiction around which desire and enjoyment circulate.

Sublimation and creation “ex nihilo”

Seminar VII contains one of Lacan’s best-known formulations of sublimation: “sublimation raises an object to the dignity of the Thing.” Sublimation is treated not merely as the redirection of libido toward socially valued aims, but as a structural operation by which a cultural object comes to occupy the place of the impossible object, thereby organizing desire without collapsing it into direct satisfaction.

Lacan links sublimation to the idea of creation “ex nihilo” (out of nothing): cultural forms can be understood as constructions around a void—the void of the Thing—producing a symbolic frame that localizes the Real and renders it bearable without claiming to represent it fully.

Courtly love and feminine sexuality

A prominent case study is courtly love (amour courtois), which Lacan treats as an exemplary symbolic construction of desire: the beloved is elevated, distanced, and often rendered inaccessible, so that the discourse of love organizes longing and prohibition rather than consummation. Lacan relates this formalization to questions of sexual difference and to the ways in which “woman” can function in cultural discourse as a privileged site for the staging of the Thing and of desire’s impossibility.

Commentators have noted Seminar VII’s importance for later feminist engagements with Lacan precisely because it connects symbolic forms of love, prohibition, and enjoyment to questions of sexuality and the place of “the feminine” in cultural fantasy—while also inviting critique of the seminar’s provocations and the risks of reifying “woman” as emblem of alterity.

Comic failure and the ethics of action

Although tragedy dominates the seminar’s reception, Lacan remarks near the end that the comic, too, concerns the relation between action and desire, emphasizing action’s structural failure to “catch up” with desire. He writes, in a late session:

“...it is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter.”

This remark functions as a methodological reminder: Seminar VII is not only a theory of heroic steadfastness, but also an account of how ordinary action repeatedly misses desire—how moral projects, self-narratives, and even “good intentions” can fail to grasp what structures the subject’s truth.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Against adaptationist ethics

A major clinical implication of Seminar VII is its rejection of an analytic telos defined as adaptation to reality or conformity to social goods. Lacan does not deny the value of symptom relief or practical change, but he argues that analytic work cannot be justified by reference to a general ideal of happiness or normality. The analyst’s position is defined by an ethical refusal to occupy the place of the Good and by a technical attention to desire as it emerges in speech, repetition, and impasse.

Ethics, technique, and the handling of guilt

Seminar VII repeatedly returns to guilt and the superego. Lacan argues that the analyst must take guilt seriously, not by endorsing moral condemnation but by locating guilt in relation to the subject’s desire and to the punitive satisfactions of the superego. This has consequences for interpretation: moral reassurance can become a defense, while interpretive interventions that ignore enjoyment may fail to touch the symptom’s satisfaction.

The Thing, psychosis, and the Real

In a formulation that became influential in later Lacanian teaching, Seminar VII also connects the rejection of the Thing to its return in the Real, linking this logic to Lacan’s broader account of psychosis as a structural disturbance in symbolic mediation (developed earlier around foreclosure and the Name-of-the-Father). In this register, the ethical and the structural converge: denial of the Real kernel can intensify its intrusive return, whereas sublimation and symbolic framing can function as ways of localizing and negotiating the Real without claiming to eliminate it.

Reception and legacy

Dissemination beyond psychoanalysis

Seminar VII has been crucial for the dissemination of Lacanian concepts in the humanities and social sciences, partly because it addresses an established philosophical domain (ethics) while providing compelling close readings of canonical cultural texts (notably Antigone) and by offering a vocabulary—Thing, jouissance, sublimation—that traveled easily into literary theory, cultural studies, and political philosophy.

The seminar has been a consistent reference point for Slavoj Žižek’s synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis with German idealism and political theory, particularly in discussions of enjoyment, law, and ideology; and it has been widely engaged by feminist critics for its accounts of sexuality, love, and the symbolic place of “woman,” both as resource and as object of critique.

Lacan’s later returns to the “ethics” problematic

Lacan returned repeatedly to problems first systematized in Seminar VII—desire, law, enjoyment, and the ends of analysis—in subsequent teaching, including the immediately following year (Transference) and later works that revisit the relation between truth and enjoyment. In later paratexts and commentary, Seminar VII is sometimes described as the one seminar Lacan particularly wished to rewrite as a fully authored written text, a claim often repeated in connection with references in his late teaching (e.g., around Encore).

Debates and criticisms

Critical responses to Seminar VII often focus on the normative and political implications of an “ethics of desire”: whether Lacan’s emphasis risks romanticizing transgression, and how to distinguish ethical fidelity to desire from destructive acting-out. Lacanian commentators typically respond by stressing that desire is not equivalent to impulse or demand, and that Lacan’s claims concern structural responsibility rather than moral license.

Feminist and gender-theoretical receptions have likewise debated the seminar’s treatment of the Thing and of “woman” as a figure of alterity and prohibition. These debates frequently turn on whether the Thing is treated as a universal structural function or becomes entangled with culturally specific imaginaries of femininity and purity/impurity, especially in Lacan’s deliberately provocative examples and formulations.

Structure and contents

The published text is commonly organized into a sequence of thematic blocks that develop from the Thing to sublimation, jouissance, tragedy, and the clinical-ethical stakes of the analytic cure. One frequently reproduced outline groups the year as follows:

• Introduction to the Thing: pleasure and reality; rereading the Entwurf; das Ding.
• The problem of sublimation: drives and lures; the object and the Thing; creation ex nihilo; courtly love (including the figure of anamorphosis).
• The paradox of jouissance: the “death of God”; love of one’s neighbor; jouissance of transgression; the death drive; the functions of the good and of the beautiful.
• The essence of tragedy: sustained commentary on Sophocles’ Antigone; “the splendor of Antigone”; Antigone “between two deaths.”
• The tragic dimension of analytic experience: the demand for happiness and the promise of analysis; moral goals of psychoanalysis; the question of acting in conformity with desire.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar VI
• Seminar VIII
• Ethics
• Desire
• Jouissance
• das Ding
• Sublimation
• Superego
• Civilization and Its Discontents
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Death drive
• Antigone
• Sophocles
• Oedipus at Colonus
• Courtly love
• Real
• Symbolic
• Other

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VII : L'éthique de la psychanalyse (1959–1960). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. London/New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18.

• Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), SE 21.
• Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo (1913), SE 13.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.

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