Talk:Seminar XII

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 XI Seminar XIII →

Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
Seminar XII
Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis Cover of the French edition (Éditions du Seuil, 2025).
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre XII : Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (unofficial title; no official English edition as of 2026).
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	December 1964 – June 1965 (academic year 1964–1965).
Session Count	16 sessions (public seminar), with an additional 8 sessions of a “closed seminar” included in the published volume.
Location	École normale supérieure (rue d’Ulm), Paris.
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Topology • Möbius strip • Torus • Cross-cap • Klein bottle • Hole (trou) • Signifier • Subject • Transference • Identification • Demand • Real
Notable Themes	Turn to topological formalization; subject and signifier; clinical “problems” of analytic praxis; critique of depth models of the unconscious; relations among identification, transference, demand, and the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XI
Followed by	Seminar XIII

Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis ([Le Séminaire, Livre XII : Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the twelfth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered during the 1964–1965 academic year at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. The seminar is widely read as a decisive moment in Lacan’s mid-1960s teaching, marked by an intensified effort to formalize psychoanalysis through topology—particularly figures such as the Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap, and Klein bottle—in order to articulate problems of clinical structure without relying on intuitive or purely metaphorical imagery.

First published in French in 2025 (text established by Jacques-Alain Miller), Seminar XII had long circulated in partial transcriptions and informal study editions. The published volume contains 16 sessions of the public seminar and additionally reproduces eight meetings of a “closed seminar” (séminaire fermé) in which invited participants intervened, along with editorial notes on Lacan’s topological diagrams and a report connected to his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études.

A recurrent point of departure is Lacan’s claim that the “fundamental problem” of psychoanalysis concerns the subject’s relation to language—a relation condensed in the canonical formula “the signifier represents the subject for another signifier.” In Seminar XII, however, this linguistic orientation is reworked through topological schematization, especially around the notion of the hole (trou) and the consequences of the Real for analytic theory and practice.

Historical and institutional context

After the “excommunication” and the ENS seminars

Seminar XII belongs to the first years of Lacan’s relocation of his main seminar to the École normale supérieure (ENS) after conflicts with the International Psychoanalytical Association and French institutional authorities over training and technique (especially Lacan’s variable-length session). The ENS period (beginning in 1964) is often described in scholarship as a phase of intensified formalization: Lacan continues his “return to Freud” while increasingly foregrounding logical, mathematical, and topological resources to reformulate the field’s basic concepts.

The title itself—[Problèmes cruciaux] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)—was retrospectively framed by Miller’s editorial apparatus as signaling a new pedagogical ambition: rather than presenting a sequence of commentaries on a single Freudian text, Lacan isolates a set of “crucial problems” for analytic praxis, linking conceptual issues (subject, signifier, truth, knowledge) to the technical field (transference, interpretation, act).

Publication history and editorial establishment

For decades, Seminar XII was not available in a standardized French book edition, in contrast to earlier volumes published by Seuil under Miller’s editorship. The Seuil publication in 2025 established a reference text (approximately 400 pages) and added editorial material clarifying Lacan’s diagrams and the seminar’s institutional documentation.

As of January 2026, no official English translation has been published. An unofficial English translation and study materials, associated with Lacanian reading groups, have circulated online (notably through “Lacan in Ireland”).

Conceptual framework and methodology

From linguistic structure to topological formalization

Lacan’s teaching in the 1950s and early 1960s is frequently summarized by the thesis that the unconscious is “structured like a language,” and by sustained use of structural linguistics to describe metaphor/metonymy, the signifying chain, and the distinction between statement and enunciation. Seminar XII does not abandon this orientation; rather, it seeks a form of inscription that can exhibit the structure of psychoanalytic relations without reducing them to intuitive spatial metaphors or psychologistic “depth” models of the mind.

In the editorial framing of the 2025 edition, topology is treated not as decorative imagery but as a means of writing structure itself—an attempt to “hold out” (maintain) a form adequate to analytic praxis in light of the Real. This move is continuous with Lacan’s broader critique of the opposition between “surface” and “depth” in psychology: the unconscious is not a hidden interior container but a structural effect that appears in the field of speech and its cuts, repetitions, and discontinuities.

The “hole” and the status of the Real

A central methodological motif is the hole (trou): the Real is approached less as a mysterious substance than as what is indicated by gaps, impossibilities, and failures of symbolization, which topology can formalize through surfaces and their cuts, edges, and torsions.

In this spirit, several figures used in or around the seminar—Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap, Klein bottle, and related constructions—are introduced as ways to write relations that resist ordinary Euclidean intuition: inside/outside, boundary/continuity, and the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion that psychoanalysis discovers in desire, fantasy, and transference.

Avoiding “imaginary capture”

Lacan’s turn to formal devices is often explained (by Lacanian commentators) as an attempt to avoid “imaginary capture”: the risk that compelling images (whether clinical narratives or philosophical pictures of the psyche) eclipse the structural relations at stake. Topological constructions, by contrast, can be manipulated according to explicit rules, and in that sense aim at a transmissible, non-intuitive rigor. This methodological aspiration also anticipates later Lacanian developments—such as the emphasis on the Borromean knot in the 1970s—though Seminar XII remains primarily focused on surfaces, holes, and the logic of cut rather than knotting as such.

Key themes, concepts, and formal objects

The signifier and the divided subject

A point repeatedly associated with Lacan’s mid-1960s teaching is the dislocation of the subject from any substantial self-identity: the subject emerges as divided ([divisé] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) by language and represented only by signifiers within a symbolic network. The library description of the Seuil edition foregrounds the programmatic formula:

“The signifier represents the subject for another signifier.”

In Seminar XII, this principle is pursued in tandem with topological writing: the question becomes how to formalize the subject’s “place” and the effects of signifying operations (substitution, displacement, cut) without reverting to a model in which the subject is an inner container of experiences. Instead, subjectivity is treated as structured at the level of the symbolic network and its points of rupture, with the Real appearing where the network fails to close.

Identification, transference, and demand

The seminar’s title refers to a cluster of problems frequently treated as “technical” in psychoanalysis—identification, transference, demand, and interpretation—but approached by Lacan as structural functions of language and desire rather than as psychological contents. In the framing inherited from earlier seminars, transference is not merely an emotional bond but an effect of the subject’s address to the Other; identification is not a simple acquisition of traits but a signifying operation; and demand articulates need in language while producing an excess that relates to desire.

Seminar XII reworks these themes by insisting on the Real’s implication: analytic praxis must account for what cannot be reduced to meaning or to imaginary coherence. The “problem” is thus how to write (and clinically handle) the points where demand, identification, and transference encounter impossibility—an impasse that topology is meant to clarify through the logic of the hole and the cut.

Topological figures

Möbius strip

The Möbius strip—a surface with only one side and one boundary component—serves as a paradigmatic illustration of how apparent oppositions (two “sides”) can be continuous. In Lacanian commentary influenced by this period, the Möbius strip is used to problematize binary oppositions such as inside/outside, conscious/unconscious, truth/appearance, and signifier/signified, by representing them as traversals along a single surface rather than as separate domains.

In discussions of technique, such continuity is often connected to Lacan’s insistence that analytic transformation is not achieved by moving from a “false” imaginary interior to a “true” hidden depth, but by changing the subject’s position in the signifying field—an operation that can be schematized as a traversal that does not admit a simple moment of crossing recognizable from within the experience itself.

Torus

The torus (ring-shaped surface) is commonly mobilized in Lacanian topology to formalize repetition, circuit, and the relation between a “central” void and peripheral circulation. The old, container-based picture of the mind is displaced: what matters is not an interior content but the structural role of a void around which signifying and libidinal circuits organize themselves. In secondary expositions of Lacan’s topology, the torus is frequently invoked to model the paradox that what is most “central” may be structurally “outside” ordinary intuitions of interiority—an idea aligned with Lacan’s later notion of extimacy ([extimité] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), the “intimate exterior.”

Seminar XII is one of the points at which topological surfaces are treated as a systematic tool for such paradoxes, rather than as occasional analogies.

Cross-cap and Klein bottle

More complex non-orientable surfaces—such as the cross-cap and the Klein bottle—appear in Lacan’s topological repertoire as ways to write self-intersection, inversion, and the impossibility of separating inside from outside by a stable boundary. In Lacan’s mid-1960s trajectory, these figures are part of an attempt to formalize the effects of signifying torsion and to conceptualize how the subject can be “caught” by structures that are not representable in ordinary space without paradoxical crossings.

Euler circles, spirals, and “maze” constructions

The published Seuil edition is noted for editorial attention to Lacan’s diagrams and to the difficulties of reconstructing them from spoken teaching. Commentarial traditions surrounding Seminar XII frequently emphasize that Lacan’s topological constructions are combinatory (built from simple operations) yet conceptually demanding, particularly where he uses spirals, “mazes,” and diagrammatic sets to connect repetition, demand, and the organization of analytic experience.

Fantasy and “traversal”

While the celebrated formula of “traversing the fantasy” ([la traversée du fantasme] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is most closely associated with Lacan’s later 1960s teaching (and especially Seminar XIV, The Logic of Fantasy), discussions of Seminar XII often treat its topological turn as preparing that later theme: topology provides a way to write the structural function of fantasy as a frame that supports “reality” for the subject, and the possibility of altering that frame in analysis.

Because such claims can blur the distinction between Lacan’s text and later theoretical synthesis, scholarship typically treats them as retrospective: the Möbius-like continuity between inside and outside is taken as a formal analogue for the difficulty of locating a definitive “moment” at which fantasy is left behind, even if analytic change is registered as a reconfiguration of desire and position.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

A redefinition of “structure” and analytic praxis

Seminar XII is often taken to radicalize Lacan’s claim that psychoanalysis is not a psychology of inner states but a theory of structural relations enacted in speech. By treating topology as a way to write structure, Lacan challenges two widespread assumptions: (1) that “observable contingencies” are neutral givens (as opposed to theory-laden), and (2) that structure is a distant “deep level” behind experience. Instead, structural relations are taken to be immanent to experience—on its “surface”—where they can be read in discontinuities, repetitions, and points of impossibility rather than in hidden mental content.

Clinically, this stance supports a view of interpretation less as the delivery of meanings and more as an intervention in the subject’s relation to the signifier—an intervention that must take account of the Real (what does not yield to meaning) and of the way analytic effects are organized around gaps and failures of signification.

Transference and the problem of knowledge

A recurring issue in Lacan’s mid-1960s teaching is the relation between transference and knowledge: the analyst is positioned as “subject supposed to know” ([sujet supposé savoir] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), and this supposition structures the analytic situation even when the analyst does not “possess” the knowledge attributed to them. While this concept is classically associated with Seminar XI, Seminar XII is often read as extending the problem by exploring formal conditions under which knowledge is produced, attributed, and disrupted in the analytic field—especially when the Real introduces impasses that knowledge cannot master.

In this context, topology functions as a way to write the limits of knowledge: not merely as epistemic uncertainty, but as structural impossibility—what cannot be said in the chain, what returns as a gap, and what organizes the circuit of repetition.

Toward later formalizations

Although the seminar is not primarily presented as a “bridge” text, many histories of Lacan’s work place Seminar XII between the canonical 1964 seminar on fundamental concepts and the later seminars on the object a, fantasy, and the increasingly explicit mathematical writing of discourse and knotting. The 2025 edition’s presentation underscores the seminar as an “important turning point” in Lacan’s teaching, precisely because it systematizes topology as a privileged instrument of transmission and conceptual rigor.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian schools

Within Lacanian institutions and reading traditions, Seminar XII has long occupied a distinctive status: frequently cited for its topological ambition, yet historically less accessible than other volumes due to the absence (until 2025) of a standard French edition. With publication, it has become newly central for teaching the genealogy of Lacan’s topology and for clarifying the sequence by which surfaces and holes precede the later emphasis on knots in the 1970s.

Because the Seuil edition includes sessions of a “closed seminar” with interventions by participants, it also offers historical documentation of Lacan’s pedagogical milieu and the collective elaboration of his concepts in institutional contexts (ENS, EPHE, and Lacanian circles).

In academic theory and intellectual history

In the humanities and history of ideas, Lacan’s topological turn has been read in relation to broader mid-20th-century developments: structuralism, formalism, and the prestige of mathematics as a model of rigor. Seminar XII is a primary locus for studying how Lacan sought to secure psychoanalytic transmission through formal writing while resisting both empiricist psychology and purely speculative philosophy.

Reception remains divided regarding the status of these formalizations. Supporters argue that topology supplies a precise language for psychoanalytic paradoxes (inside/outside, cut/continuity, lack/object) and thereby clarifies clinical practice. Critics counter that topological writing risks becoming esoteric or detached from clinical evidence. The 2025 edition has prompted renewed discussion of these debates by providing a stable textual basis for citation and critique.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XI
• Seminar XIII
• Topology
• Möbius strip
• Torus
• Cross-cap
• Klein bottle
• Extimacy
• Signifier
• Subject
• Transference
• Identification
• Demand
• Real
• The Logic of Fantasy
• Object a

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XII : Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse (1964–1965). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil (Champ freudien), 2025.
• Vanier, Alain. Review of Le Séminaire, Livre XII. En attendant Nadeau, 2025.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.