Talk:Seminar XIII
| The Object of Psychoanalysis | |
|---|---|
| Seminar XIII | |
Cover image used in announcements for the French edition (Éditions du Seuil; publication announced 2026).[1] | |
| French Title | Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse |
| English Title | The Object of Psychoanalysis |
| Seminar Information | |
| Seminar Date(s) | 1 December 1965 – 22 June 1966[2] |
| Session Count | 23 sessions[2] |
| Location | École normale supérieure (Paris)Template:Efn |
| Psychoanalytic Content | |
| Key Concepts | objet petit a • topology • Graph of Desire • gaze • voice • drive • fantasy • subject supposed to know • truth/knowledge • phallus |
| Notable Themes | The “object” specific to psychoanalysis; division of the subject between knowledge and truth; topological formalization of lack; scopic and invocatory objects; art, perspective, and the gaze; relations between psychoanalysis, science, and religion |
| Theoretical Context | |
| Period | Middle period (formalization of objet a and topology) |
| Register | Symbolic/Real with topological formalization of the Imaginary |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Seminar XII |
| Followed by | Seminar XIV |
The Object of Psychoanalysis (Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse) is Jacques Lacan’s thirteenth annual seminar, delivered in Paris between 1 December 1965 and 22 June 1966.[2] The seminar develops a sustained inquiry into what Lacan calls the “object” specific to psychoanalysis—above all the objet petit a—and links this object to problems of truth and knowledge, the subject supposed to know, and the formalization of lack through topology.[3]
The seminar is especially associated with (1) Lacan’s attempt to treat topology as a rigorous mode of construction rather than as a metaphor; (2) the articulation of “partial objects” (notably gaze and voice) in relation to drive and desire; and (3) an engagement with contemporary debates in structuralism and the human sciences, including references to Michel Foucault’s discussion of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas.[1]
An official French edition has been announced by Éditions du Seuil for publication in 2026, edited from archival materials and transcriptions; prior to that announcement, Seminar XIII circulated primarily in typed transcriptions and unofficial translations, including an English translation by Cormac Gallagher that is widely used in Anglophone Lacanian study groups but lacks official publication status.[1][4]
Historical and institutional context
The ENS period and the École freudienne de Paris
Seminar XIII belongs to Lacan’s mid-1960s teaching, after the establishment of the École freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964 and after the relocation of his public seminar to the École normale supérieure milieu.[5] In this period Lacan intensifies two interlinked projects: the formalization of analytic concepts (mathemes, schemas, and topological figures) and a polemical “return to Freud” that aims to distinguish psychoanalysis from adaptationist clinical models and from the epistemic self-confidence of the human sciences.[5]
Structuralism, science, and the “subject of science”
The early sessions of Seminar XIII are frequently read alongside Lacan’s essay “Science and Truth” (La science et la vérité), which is commonly dated to 1965–1966 and is often identified as the opening lesson or a closely related formulation produced in the same teaching moment.[6] In these texts Lacan contrasts psychoanalysis with the modern “subject of science” (associated with René Descartes and the cogito) and argues that psychoanalysis introduces a distinct problematic of truth—one that is not reducible to scientific knowledge, measurement, or verification.[6][7]
Composition and publication history
Session sequence
The seminar comprises 23 sessions delivered weekly (with interruptions) from 1 December 1965 through 22 June 1966.[2] Public listings reproduce the session calendar with dated entries (December 1965; January–June 1966), providing a stable reference for the seminar’s internal chronology and for the placement of key discussions of topology, the gaze, and the status of the object.[2]
Transcriptions, unofficial circulation, and announced Seuil edition
Like several Lacan seminars of the 1960s, Seminar XIII circulated for decades in typed notes and transcriptions, often reproduced for internal use by Lacanian schools or study groups. Unofficial French versions and “working editions” were commonly consulted in the absence of an authorized publication.[3]
In 2025–2026, Éditions du Seuil announced an official French edition of Le Séminaire, Livre XIII (Champ freudien), in association with Jacques-Alain Miller and with a projected publication date in 2026 (as listed by the publisher and major booksellers).[1][8]
No official English-language edition has been announced as of January 2026. A widely used unofficial English translation by Cormac Gallagher is referenced in academic bibliographies and circulates online in PDF form; it is generally treated as a study aid rather than as a citable critical edition.[4]
Conceptual framework and methodology
Knowledge and truth; the divided subject
A recurring claim in Seminar XIII is that psychoanalysis addresses a division within the subject that cannot be reconciled by appeals to knowledge alone. Summaries of the seminar emphasize the theme of the subject “divided” between knowledge and truth, and the consequences of this division for the analytic experience—especially in relation to the transference and the subject supposed to know.[3]
In this connection, Lacan distinguishes between (1) the analyst’s position as structurally implicated in the split between knowledge and truth and (2) the social prestige of the “subject supposed to know,” often aligned with scientific rationality, which imagines that knowledge can unify the subject and thereby restores a form of méconnaissance (misrecognition).[3] Seminar XIII thus continues Lacan’s critique of any clinical or epistemological model that identifies truth with transparency, self-knowledge, or the consolidation of the ego.
Topology as formal construction (not metaphor)
Seminar XIII is a major locus for Lacan’s insistence that topology should not be treated as illustrative imagery. In a frequently quoted formulation, he argues that “topology is not a metaphor” but a rigorous construction (montage) articulated with the objet petit a.[3] The seminar repeatedly uses topological surfaces and figures—summaries mention the disk with a hole, the Möbius strip, the torus, and the Klein bottle—to formalize the logic of lack, cut, and the “hole” around which desire and drive are organized.[3][9]
In the seminar’s own framing (as reported in synopses), the “hole” corresponding to the lack of the object is located at the intersection of the fields of truth and knowledge—a point that becomes, for Lacan, the distinctive contribution of psychoanalysis and a reason it can interrogate both science and religion at the level of the truth each tends to exclude or “forget.”[3]
Mathemes, diagrams, and the Graph of Desire
Seminar XIII extends Lacan’s reliance on mathemes and on the Graph of Desire as instruments for stating relationships among demand, desire, and the Other. Synopses indicate that Lacan “returns” to the Graph of Desire and relates its articulation to the topological constructions used to situate the object.[3] This methodology exemplifies Lacan’s broader wager: psychoanalysis can be transmitted (and debated) through formal relations and operators rather than by reliance on therapeutic narrative or metaphorical intuition.
Key themes, concepts, and case studies
Objet petit a as the “object” of psychoanalysis
For Lacan, the “object” at stake in psychoanalysis is not the empirical object of perception nor the object of biological need, but the objet petit a—the “object-cause” of desire and a remainder produced by the subject’s entry into language and the field of the Other. Seminar XIII places this object at the center of both theory and technique, treating it as a structural operator that accounts for the persistence of desire beyond satisfaction, and for the ways in which the subject is implicated in the Other’s demand and enjoyment.
In Lacanian terms, the analytic process turns on how the subject is positioned as (or in relation to) this object—particularly in transference formations where the analyst may function as a support for the object, or as a screen that allows the subject’s fantasy to be articulated rather than acted out. While Seminar XIII does not yet present the later doctrine of the analyst as “semblance of object a” in its fully systematized form, it belongs to the sequence of seminars that prepare those formulations by clarifying what “object” means in the Freudian field.
Four “partial objects”: breast, feces, gaze, voice
A distinctive feature of Seminar XIII is the emphasis on multiple “partial objects” (Freud’s partial objects plus Lacan’s additions) and their placement within a structured field of demand and desire relative to the Other. A commonly reproduced schema situates the objet petit a on “four sides”:
- the demand of the Other (object a as feces)
- the demand on the part of the Other (object a as the breast)
- desire on the part of the Other (object a as the gaze)
- desire of the Other (object a as the voice)[3]
This list is important historically because it consolidates Lacan’s claim that the object is not a single thing but a structural function that can be “embodied” in different partial objects depending on the drive and on the signifying coordinates of the fantasy. Later Lacanian teaching frequently treats gaze and voice as decisive additions to the Freudian partial objects, precisely because they disclose how the object can be located “in the field of the Other” and not simply on the side of bodily need.
The gaze: scopic drive, the picture, and the “trap”
Seminar XIII develops the thesis that the gaze is not equivalent to the eye or to conscious looking. Instead, the gaze is treated as the object of the scopic drive—an object that belongs to the side of what is seen rather than to the seeing subject. Lacan’s discussion of painting and perspective frames the picture as a “trap for the gaze,” in which what “falls” is the object a.[3]
A well-known episode in the seminar connects this claim to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, a painting that had also become a focal object in contemporary French theory through Foucault’s analysis (published in 1966). Publisher descriptions of Seminar XIII emphasize that “Foucault, present at the seminar, has just published his reading of Las Meninas,” and that Lacan responds by reworking the painting as a demonstration of the gaze as object.[1]
In a passage attributed to the lesson of 25 May 1966 (frequently cited in curatorial and scholarly contexts), Lacan focuses on the Infanta and on the perspectival “gap” in which the object’s looking is staged:
“In this gap … where there is nothing to see … ‘it looks at me’.”[10]
This formulation condenses a core claim: the object’s “looking back” is not an added psychological effect but a structural feature of the scopic field that marks the subject’s division and the impossibility of a fully coincident viewpoint.
The voice: invocatory object and address
Alongside the gaze, Seminar XIII treats the voice as an object a. In Lacanian theory, the voice is not merely the acoustic carrier of meaning but an object implicated in invocation and address—what remains when signification and communication are subtracted. Seminar XIII’s pairing of gaze and voice anticipates later Lacanian engagements with the “acousmatic” voice in art and cinema, and supports a broader thesis: the object a is often encountered as something that interrupts transparency (of seeing, of understanding) from within the scene itself.
Sexual difference, the phallus, and the “screen”
Synopses of Seminar XIII also stress Lacan’s return to the Freudian coordinates of desire and castration, and his attempt to articulate the object a in relation to sexual difference. In particular, Lacan treats the phallus not as an anatomical organ but as a signifier that functions as a “screen” or operato
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Éditions du Seuil (publisher page), “Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse” (announcement and description; publication announced January 2026; Jacques-Alain Miller named in association with the edition).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 “Seminar XIII”, No Subject: Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (session calendar listing 1 December 1965 through 22 June 1966).
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 “The Seminars of Jacques Lacan (1965–1966), Livre XIII: L'objet de la psychanalyse”, lacan.com (seminar overview and synopsis).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Cite error: Invalid
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<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedRoudinescoBio - ↑ 6.0 6.1 Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. See the bibliography and references to “Science and Truth” as an opening session for Seminar XIII (with note on Bruce Fink’s English translation in Newsletter of the Freudian Field).
- ↑ Bibliographic records for “La science et la vérité” (in Écrits and related collections) identify its standard publication context and pagination across editions.
- ↑ FNAC listing for “Le Séminaire, Livre XIII : L'objet de la psychanalyse” (Seuil; publication date and bibliographic metadata; accessed via listing information).
- ↑ Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996. Entry “Topology” (on Lacan’s use of topological figures such as the Möbius strip, torus, Klein bottle, and cross-cap in formalizing subject and object relations).
- ↑ Centre Pompidou / exhibition guide material reproducing and attributing a quotation from Lacan’s Seminar XIII lesson of 25 May 1966 on Las Meninas and the “gap” (béance).