Talk:Seminar X

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 IX Seminar XI →

Anxiety
Seminar X
Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar X.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre X : L’angoisse
English Title	Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	14 November 1962 – 3 July 1963
Session Count	23 sessions
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne (Paris)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Anxiety • objet a • Desire of the Other • Lack (“lack of a lack”) • Phallus (Φ) • Jouissance • Acting out • Passage to the act • Transference • Drive • Gaze • Voice
Notable Themes	Anxiety as a privileged affect; object-cause of desire; limits of symbolization; anxiety and the Real; clinical distinctions (inhibition, symptom, acting out, passage to the act); the analyst’s desire and analytic position
Freud Texts	Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) • From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (“Wolf Man”, 1918) • texts on phobia, fetishism, and transference (as discussed across the seminar)
Theoretical Context
Period	Middle period (transition toward the “four fundamental concepts”)
Register	Real/Symbolic with intensified focus on objet a
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar IX
Followed by	Seminar XI

Anxiety ([Le Séminaire, Livre X : L’angoisse] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the tenth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the 1962–1963 academic year (14 November 1962 to 3 July 1963).</ref> Edited posthumously from notes and published in French in 2004 (text established by Jacques-Alain Miller), the seminar is widely regarded as a major turning-point in Lacan’s teaching for its sustained articulation of objet a as the object-cause of desire and for its thesis that “anxiety is not without an object” ([l’angoisse n’est pas sans objet] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)).</ref>

Across 23 sessions, Lacan re-reads Sigmund Freud’s 1926 text Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety while relocating anxiety from a primarily “signal” concept to a structural affect that marks the subject’s encounter with the Real—especially where the subject is confronted with the desire of the Other and with the enigmatic status of the object it may be for that desire.</ref>

Often read as a bridge between Lacan’s “structural” period and the conceptual consolidation of Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), Seminar X elaborates the relations among anxiety, fantasy, castration, and the analytic act, while developing clinically influential distinctions—most notably between acting out and passage to the act—as responses to anxiety and as indices of the subject’s position in relation to the Other’s desire.

Overview

In Seminar X, Lacan proposes that anxiety occupies a unique status among affects: rather than being simply a subjective feeling to be interpreted “as meaning,” anxiety is approached as a structural index of the subject’s relation to lack, objecthood, and the Other. In a formula frequently associated with this seminar, Lacan asserts that anxiety is “not without an object,” thereby challenging the common opposition (already present in certain receptions of Freud) between fear as object-directed and anxiety as objectless.

The seminar is also a decisive step in Lacan’s theory of the objet a. While fantasy ([fantasme] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) had already been formalized in Lacan’s teaching—especially in relation to the Graph of desire—Seminar X intensifies the claim that fantasy supports desire by staging the subject’s relation to a remainder that cannot be reduced to signifying representation. Lacan writes fantasy in the canonical form $ \langle\rangle a (the barred subject in relation to a), using it as a matrix for reading anxiety and its clinical derivatives.

A recurrent orientation of the seminar is methodological: anxiety is treated as a privileged “compass” for psychoanalysis precisely because it appears where symbolization falters and where the subject is forced into proximity with the Real. This emphasis anticipates Lacan’s later formulations of the Real as what resists symbolization and returns to the same place, as well as his later attempts to formalize analytic praxis via concepts such as discourse and act.

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne in the early 1960s

Seminar X belongs to Lacan’s long Sainte-Anne period, during which his weekly teaching drew a mixed audience of clinicians, philosophers, and intellectuals, and served as a central site for the dissemination of his “return to Freud.” The early 1960s were also marked by institutional conflict around analytic training, Lacan’s variable-length session, and the legitimacy of his teaching within French and international psychoanalytic organizations. This background is often taken to inform the seminar’s emphasis on the analyst’s position, the status of the act, and the problem of what “guarantees” analytic knowledge beyond institutional authorization.

While Seminar X precedes Lacan’s public “excommunication” from official psychoanalytic training circuits (a theme foregrounded in Seminar XI), it is situated in the immediate prelude to that crisis, and is commonly read as part of a sequence (Seminars VIII–XI) in which Lacan intensifies questions of desire, objecthood, and the analytic act in direct relation to issues of training and authorization.

Publication history and editorial establishment

The seminar circulated for decades in transcriptions and privately compiled notes. The standardized French text was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 2004 in the Champ freudien series. An English translation edited by Miller and translated by A. R. Price was later published by Polity Press (2014), contributing to a renewed Anglophone reception of Lacan’s theory of anxiety and object a in clinical and interdisciplinary contexts.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Freud’s 1926 text and Lacan’s rereading

Lacan takes Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) as a principal point of departure, but he repeatedly insists that Freud’s text is structured around a conceptual gap: anxiety is approached through adjacent topics (inhibition, symptom formation, defense), as if anxiety were indicated by an “emptiness” or “hole” in the exposition rather than by a straightforward definition. In Lacan’s idiom, anxiety is not itself repressed; what is repressed are the signifiers that would “anchor” or stabilize it in the symbolic order, leaving the affect “adrift.”

From this premise Lacan develops a double thesis:

• anxiety has a structural relation to desire (and therefore to fantasy as the support of desire);
• anxiety signals an encounter with a remainder that is not reducible to meaning—an object that emerges at the limit of symbolization.

Anxiety, lack, and the Real

A central Lacanian formula developed in this seminar is that anxiety arises when “lack comes to be lacking”—often paraphrased as “anxiety is the lack of a lack.” In this framework desire depends upon lack (the structural incompleteness instituted by language and castration), while anxiety appears when the subject’s protective distance from the object-cause of desire collapses and something “fills” the place of lack too directly. Rather than nostalgia for a lost object, anxiety concerns the threat of an object’s intrusive presence and the subject’s uncertainty about what it is for the Other’s desire.

Lacan’s approach thus distinguishes anxiety from emotion as a psychological category. Anxiety is treated as a privileged affect that indexes the subject’s relation to the Real, precisely because it appears where the symbolic fails to provide mediation. In a compressed phrase associated with the seminar, anxiety is presented as the affect that “does not deceive” ([ce qui ne trompe pas] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), an assertion often interpreted as an ethical and clinical principle: anxiety is not simply a message to be decoded, but a marker of structural proximity to the object and to the Other’s desire.

Fantasy and the formula $ \langle\rangle a

Because anxiety is linked to desire, and fantasy supports desire, Lacan returns to the formalization of fantasy as the relation between the barred subject ($) and object a. In Lacanian theory, the subject is barred by the signifier and constituted in relation to the Other; object a designates a remainder produced by this operation, a partial and “separable” object that functions as the cause of desire rather than its goal. Within the seminar, the fantasy formula provides a grid for reading how anxiety emerges when the subject’s relation to a is no longer framed by fantasy—when the subject confronts the question of what it is for the Other’s desire without a stable fantasmatic support.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

“Anxiety is not without an object”

Lacan’s best-known thesis in Seminar X is that anxiety is not objectless. The “object” in question, however, is not a specular or empirical object available to ordinary representation; it is a structural object that appears as the correlate of the subject’s division by language. This object is objet a, the object-cause of desire. It is not the aim of the drive (a satisfying endpoint), but the cause that sets desire in motion and the remainder left by the subject’s entry into the symbolic order.

Lacan distinguishes object a from the mirror-stage “a” associated with specular identification: object a is not primarily visible in the image of one’s desire; rather, it concerns what is lost or extracted in the constitution of the subject and returns as a cause, a lure, or an invasive remainder. In later Lacanian vocabulary, object a is often described as “extimate” (both intimate and exterior), a foreign kernel within the subject’s experience.

The phallus (Φ), castration, and the “minus-phi”

In Seminar X, Lacan repeatedly returns to the function of the phallus (Φ) as a signifier of lack rather than as an anatomical object. Anxiety is linked to moments when the symbolic function of lack is disturbed. In this context Lacan uses notations that stage the relation between the phallus as signifier and object a as remainder. The “minus-phi” (often written −Φ) designates the phallus in its status as lack (or as missing signifier), a structural emptiness that supports desire by keeping the object at a distance. Anxiety appears when this support fails—when the subject no longer finds protection in the gap instituted by castration and confronts the Other’s desire in an unmediated way.

This theme underwrites Lacan’s insistence on the primacy of symbolic castration for clinical practice. Castration is not merely a developmental story but an operator that institutes the subject’s relation to law, desire, and lack. Anxiety concerns the risk that the subject’s relation to lack becomes unstable: not the absence of an object, but the threatening imminence of an object where lack should be.

The “praying mantis” and the enigma of the Other’s desire

One of the seminar’s most cited examples is Lacan’s “praying mantis” ([mante religieuse] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) scene, in which the subject imagines itself before a mantis whose gaze and desire are opaque, while the subject does not know “what object” it is for the Other. The point of the example is not zoological but structural: anxiety arises at the moment when the subject is confronted with the Other’s desire as an enigma and loses the fantasmatic mediation that ordinarily stabilizes its position. In later commentary, this vignette is frequently used to illustrate that anxiety concerns the question “What am I for the Other?”—a question that becomes acute when the subject’s status as object is no longer veiled by the symbolic and the fantasy.

From the cosmos to the uncanny

Lacan links anxiety to the emergence of the uncanny ([unheimlich] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), revisiting motifs in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” and connecting them to the collapse of symbolic mediation. The uncanny is interpreted not simply as strange familiarity but as the return of what should remain veiled: the intrusion of the object in the place of lack, or the appearance of an over-proximate “Thing” ([das Ding] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) at the limits of the subject’s world. In this sense, anxiety is not opposed to meaning as such, but appears where meaning fails to keep the Real at bay.

Clinical distinctions: inhibition, symptom, acting out, passage to the act

The seminar is structured in part by Freud’s triad inhibition / symptom / anxiety, but Lacan expands the clinical map by developing distinctions that became central to Lacanian practice.

• Inhibition is treated as a restriction in function (often bound to the ego and to defensive compromise), frequently linked to the subject’s relation to demand and to the Ideal.
• A symptom is approached as a signifying formation that both expresses and masks desire, stabilized by symbolic substitution.
• Acting out is treated as a staged message addressed to the Other: a “showing” that appeals to interpretation, often occurring when speech is blocked and the subject attempts to produce a signifier in the Other’s field.
• Passage to the act is distinguished from acting out as a precipitous exit from the scene, a fall out of the symbolic frame rather than a message within it. In later Lacanian clinic, passage to the act is often linked to moments of subjective collapse in which the subject identifies with object a and evacuates itself from the field of the Other.

In Seminar X, these distinctions are explicitly tied to anxiety: acting out and passage to the act are analyzed as “last defenses” against anxiety, different ways of handling the subject’s proximity to the object-cause of desire and the unbearable enigma of the Other’s desire.

Partial objects and the emergence of gaze and voice

Seminar X also advances Lacan’s theory of partial objects in relation to object a. Building on Freudian drive theory (notably the partial drives), Lacan treats object a as a grouping term for separable objects and “parts” (breast, feces, phallic function) while also intensifying his interest in scopic and invocatory objects—gaze and voice—that will become decisive in later seminars. In this context, anxiety is connected to moments when the gaze or voice is experienced as intrusive, when the subject is “looked at” or “addressed” from a place that cannot be localized within ordinary reality, producing certainty and disturbance rather than interpretive ambiguity.

The seminar’s late sessions explicitly foreground the voice in relation to religious and ritual phenomena (for example, Lacan’s discussion of the shofar), treating such objects as paradigmatic of how an object can function as a remainder and cause, not as a meaningful content.

Case materials and references

While Seminar X is not organized around a single “great case” like Seminar III (Schreber), it repeatedly mobilizes clinical and cultural materials as conceptual laboratories. Frequently cited points include:

• Freud’s Wolf Man case, used for its scenes of shock, intrusion, and bodily remainder (including defecation and the relation of anxiety to an opening in the frame of reality).
• Lacan’s extended engagement with Hamlet and theatrical staging as a model for the “scene” of desire, where anxiety emerges when the subject’s position in the scene destabilizes.
• References to Ernest Jones on the nightmare and the incubus, interpreted as an opaque weight of foreign jouissance pressing upon the subject—an image Lacan uses to connect anxiety to the Other’s jouissance and to the invasive presence of the object.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Object a as cause (not aim)

One of the seminar’s most influential theoretical consequences is its clarification that object a is the cause of desire, not the object that would satisfy it. This distinction supports Lacan’s broader critique of adaptationist and “harmonizing” psychologies: desire is not oriented toward equilibrium but is sustained by lack and by a remainder that cannot be integrated into a complete object relation. In this view, anxiety becomes clinically crucial because it signals a disturbance in the subject’s relation to cause—especially when the cause appears too directly, without the mediation of fantasy.

Clinically, this thesis reorients interpretation: the analyst does not aim to provide the patient with a “true object,” but to locate how object a functions as cause in the subject’s discourse, fantasy, and symptom formations.

Anxiety as a “signal of the Real”

If Freud treats anxiety as a signal of danger, Lacan reframes anxiety as a signal of the Real—an affect that appears where the symbolic and imaginary supports fail. This has implications for technique: anxiety is not merely an obstacle to be eliminated but can serve as an index of the analytic process, indicating where the subject approaches the object-cause and where interpretation risks either covering over the Real (by premature meaning) or precipitating acting out/passage to the act (by destabilizing the frame).

The analyst’s desire and the handling of anxiety

Seminar X is also a key locus for Lacan’s concept of the desire of the analyst. Anxiety raises the practical question of how the analyst measures what anxiety the analysand can bear and how the analyst handles the analyst’s own anxiety in the analytic situation. Lacan’s answer is not a psychology of “countertransference management,” but an ethical and structural positioning: the analyst must occupy a place that does not saturate the lack in the Other, and must avoid becoming an ideal or a reassuring presence that would foreclose the subject’s encounter with desire and cause. In later Lacanian vocabulary, the analyst is oriented toward sustaining the gap (−Φ) and allowing object a to function as cause rather than as an overwhelming presence.

Acting out, passage to the act, and the limits of interpretation

The seminar’s clinical distinctions became influential in later Lacanian practice and in dialogue with psychiatry and psychotherapy. In many Lacanian clinical discussions, acting out is treated as interpretable insofar as it is addressed to the Other and staged within the symbolic scene, while passage to the act is treated as requiring particular caution because it involves a rupture of the scene and a potentially dangerous “exit.” Theoretically, these distinctions also contribute to Lacan’s later work on the act and on the analyst’s intervention as a cut or punctuation rather than as a supply of meaning.

Reception and legacy

Canonical place within Lacanian teaching

Within Lacanian schools, Seminar X is canonical for the thesis that anxiety is not without an object and for its systematic articulation of object a as cause of desire. It is frequently taught as the immediate prelude to Seminar XI, where Lacan will formalize the four “fundamental concepts” (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and intensify the conceptual status of the Real. In this retrospective mapping, Seminar X is often read as the point at which object a becomes the pivot linking anxiety, drive, and transference, thereby reorganizing Lacan’s account of clinical praxis.

Anglophone uptake and interdisciplinary influence

The English publication (Polity, 2014) contributed to an expanded Anglophone discussion of Lacan’s anxiety theory, particularly in clinical writing attentive to affect, embodiment, and the limits of signification. In the humanities and cultural theory, the seminar’s mantis vignette, its account of the uncanny, and its distinctions between acting out and passage to the act have been cited in discussions of spectacle, agency, and the subject’s relation to the gaze and to invasive address. The seminar’s emphasis on cause (rather than meaning) has also been linked to broader debates about psychoanalysis as neither a hermeneutics of depth nor a behaviorist technique, but a praxis oriented by structural lack and the Real.

At the same time, critical discussions note a persistent difficulty: because Lacan’s “object” is not a common-sense object, misunderstandings can arise that reduce his thesis either to a biological account (as if anxiety were a “thing in the body”) or to a purely linguistic account (as if anxiety were merely a signifier). Seminar X is often read precisely as resisting both reductions by treating anxiety as an affect that marks the subject’s encounter with a remainder irreducible to either meaning or organism.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminars of Jacques Lacan
• Seminar IX
• Seminar XI
• Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
• Anxiety
• Objet a
• Graph of desire
• Fantasy
• Desire of the Other
• Castration
• Phallus
• Jouissance
• Acting out
• Passage to the act
• Gaze
• Voice
• Wolf Man

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre X : L’angoisse (1962–1963). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004.
• Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.
• Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), Standard Edition, vol. 20.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Jones, Ernest. On the Nightmare. Hogarth Press, 1931.