Seminar III

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 II Seminar IV →

The Psychoses
Seminar III
Cover of the French edition (1981) / English edition (1993; reprint 1997)
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	16 November 1955 – 4 July 1956
Session Count	25 sessions
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Psychosis • Foreclosure (forclusion) • Name-of-the-Father • Symbolic order • Point de capiton (quilting point) • Delusion • Metaphor/Metonymy • Big Other • Schreber case
Notable Themes	Structural diagnosis (neurosis/psychosis/perversion); language in psychosis; paternal function and Oedipus complex; critique of psychiatric nosology; delusion as signifying construction; limits of ego psychology
Freud Texts	Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) • Negation • The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence • The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis
Theoretical Context
Period	Early/structural period
Register	Symbolic/Imaginary with emerging formalization of the Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar II
Followed by	Seminar IV

The Psychoses (Le Séminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses) is the third annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris during the academic year 1955–1956 (16 November 1955 to 4 July 1956). Edited posthumously from notes (and published in French in 1981, then in English translation in 1993), the seminar is widely regarded as a cornerstone of Lacanian psychoanalysis for its structural account of psychosis and its influential elaborations of foreclosure (forclusion) of the Name-of-the-Father, the role of language in psychotic phenomena, and the clinical logic of delusion.

Across the year, Lacan re-reads Sigmund Freud’s case commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber as well as key psychiatric traditions (notably Emil Kraepelin and French clinical psychiatry), arguing that psychosis cannot be understood as a mere deficit of “reality testing” but must be approached through the subject’s relation to the signifier and the Symbolic order. The seminar is also noted for early, programmatic formulations that would shape later Lacanian theory—especially the conceptual linkage between psychotic phenomena and disturbances of signification, including what Lacan calls the point de capiton (often translated “quilting point”).

Overview

Lacan frames Seminar III as addressing not simply the “treatment” of psychosis but the question of how treatment is even thinkable—an orientation later echoed in his contemporaneous essay “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”. Against both adaptationist accounts and purely descriptive nosology, he proposes a structural approach in which psychosis is distinguished from neurosis and perversion by a specific operation at the level of the signifier (foreclosure).

A frequently cited formulation associated with this seminar emphasizes the primacy of language for clinical intelligibility: in one condensed opposition, “If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed by language.”In a closely related programmatic statement (highlighted in later editions and paratexts), Lacan defines the analytic problematic as a science of the speaking being’s capture by language: “Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject … captured and tortured by language.”

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne and Lacan’s “return to Freud”

From the early 1950s until 1963, Lacan’s weekly seminars were conducted at Hôpital Sainte-Anne and became a major site for the dissemination of his “return to Freud”, a method of re-reading Freudian texts through linguistics, structural anthropology, and contemporary philosophy. Seminar III continues the polemical displacement of ego psychology and adaptationist technique—already prominent in Seminar II—but does so by shifting the clinical spotlight to psychosis, where Lacan argues that language phenomena appear in “exemplary” form and force psychoanalysis to clarify its basic concepts (subject, Other, signifier, law).

Dialogue with psychiatry and French clinical traditions

The seminar is structured as an extended confrontation with psychiatric descriptions of psychosis and delusion, including (among others) Kraepelinian classifications and French traditions associated with Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (whom Lacan elsewhere acknowledged as an important psychiatric influence). Rather than treating delusion as mere error, Lacan reads it as a structured production whose logic becomes visible when approached as a discourse—an approach summarized by contemporaneous reviews noting Lacan’s “definition” of psychosis through the signifying articulation of delusion.

Composition and publication history

Sessions and internal organization

Seminar III comprises 25 sessions delivered between 16 November 1955 and 4 July 1956. The sequence moves from preliminary methodological remarks (“introduction to the question of the psychoses”) through sustained engagement with delusion, the status of the Other, and Freud’s Schreber text, culminating in explicit formalizations of anchoring/quilting points and the paternal function.

Edited text and translations

The seminar was published in French in 1981 by Seuil in the Champ freudien series, with the text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. The first English-language edition (hardcover) appeared at Norton in 1993 in Russell Grigg’s translation, and it has been reprinted in paperback (notably 1997).</ref>

Conceptual framework and methodology

Structural diagnosis and the registers

A guiding assumption of the seminar is that clinical differentiation must proceed structurally: psychosis is not primarily defined by symptom lists but by the subject’s position in relation to the Symbolic, Imaginary, and (increasingly) the Real. While the Imaginary gives delusion its “form” (images, identifications, rivalries), Lacan insists that its dynamics are determined by symbolic operations—above all, the presence or absence of a key signifier that anchors signification.

Language, signification, and anchoring

Lacan’s method throughout is philological and structural: he reads clinical material (Freud, psychiatry, case vignettes) as a discursive production, focusing on how signifiers function (or fail to function) as points of stabilization. The term point de capiton (quilting/anchoring point) becomes central: it names those points at which signifier and signified are “knotted” so that meaning does not slide indefinitely. In later reception, Seminar III is often cited as an early locus where Lacan’s formal distinction between metaphor and metonymy is given decisive clinical stakes for psychosis and delusion (with delusion understood as a compensatory construction that can “stabilize” meaning).

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Psychosis as a clinical structure

Within Lacanian doctrine, psychosis becomes one of three major “clinical structures” (alongside neurosis and perversion), each correlated with a different fundamental operation at the level of defense and signification. In this framework, psychosis is linked to foreclosure (not repression), which produces a specific vulnerability to the “return” of a rejected signifier in the Real (for example, as hallucinated voices or imposed words).

Foreclosure (forclusion) and the Name-of-the-Father

The seminar’s signature concept is foreclosure (forclusion), Lacan’s rendering of Freud’s Verwerfung (repudiation). Foreclosure is presented not as a mere “absence” of the father as a person, but as the non-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father in the Symbolic order, producing a “hole” in the signifying chain that undermines the ordinary anchoring of meaning.

Secondary historical accounts often identify Lacan’s explicit introduction of the French term “forclusion” within this seminar’s concluding period (dated to 4 July 1956 in some reconstructions). In Lacan’s structural account, foreclosure is decisive because the Name-of-the-Father functions as a privileged signifier that supports the law of signification—allowing the subject to occupy a place within symbolic kinship, prohibition, and nomination.

The Schreber case and the logic of delusion

A major portion of the seminar is devoted to Freud’s reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and to the status of Schreber’s delusional system. Lacan treats Schreber not as an illustrative curiosity but as a paradigmatic case demonstrating how psychosis is organized around the subject’s relation to the Other’s discourse and to paternal signifiers (authority, paternity, nomination). The seminar repeatedly returns to the clinical question of triggering (onset): how a latent structure becomes manifest when the foreclosed signifier is “called” into symbolic opposition (for example, by an encounter with authority, office, or the question of paternity).

Within this reading, delusion can be approached as a construction that attempts to patch the hole in the Symbolic by producing a new ordering principle. Later Lacanian summaries will describe this as a “stabilization” achieved through a delusional metaphor (a substitute mechanism that compensates for the missing paternal metaphor).

Language phenomena: neologism, imposed speech, and hallucination

A recurring claim in Seminar III is that psychosis is legible through language phenomena. Lacan emphasizes neologisms, idiosyncratic uses of words, and experiences of “imposed” speech or voices as clinical clues to the subject’s relation to the signifier and to the Other’s discourse. In this view, hallucination is not merely sensory error but a return of a rejected signifier “in the Real,” producing an invasive character of language in which the subject is spoken rather than speaking.

Metaphor/metonymy and the “quilting point”

While Lacan’s well-known distinction between metaphor and metonymy is elaborated across multiple seminars and texts, Seminar III is often cited as an early site where this distinction is mobilized clinically: psychosis is associated with a disturbance in metaphorical substitution and in the anchoring points that normally stabilize meaning. The “quilting point” becomes a technical term for the moment where signification is momentarily fixed; conversely, a failure of quilting points corresponds to the experience of signified slippage and the proliferating, unstable meanings often reported in psychosis.

The paternal function and triangulation

The seminar repeatedly links psychosis to a malfunction of the paternal function (distinct from the empirical father), and to the fragility of triangulation associated with the Oedipus complex. The Name-of-the-Father is treated as a signifier that both names and institutes prohibition, thereby enabling the subject’s positioning in symbolic kinship and law. Seminar III’s clinical emphasis on the paternal signifier would become a key reference point for later Lacanian debates over the plurality of “Names-of-the-Father” and over differential stabilizations in psychosis.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Diagnosis as a question of structure

One of the seminar’s lasting clinical effects is the proposal that diagnosis concerns the subject’s structure—read from speech, transference, and the signifier’s functioning—rather than a checklist of symptoms. In this orientation, the analyst listens for how the subject is positioned in relation to the Other, how meaning is anchored, and whether metaphorical substitutions are operative or compromised.

Delusion as an attempt at stabilization

In contrast to views that treat delusion solely as deficit, Lacan’s approach allows delusion to be understood as a construction that can support a field of reality by providing new signifying coordinates. This point is often underscored in early reviews of the Seuil volume, which remark that Lacan “magnifies” the value of the symptom as a pivot of intervention and reads delusion in its signifying articulation rather than as mere irrationality.

Technique and the “question of treatment”

Although Lacan does not offer a standardized technique for psychosis in this seminar, he insists that the analytic act must be oriented by the subject’s relation to the signifier and by the position of the Other. This is one reason the seminar is frequently paired with (or read through) “On a Question Preliminary…”, which presents a more compact, programmatic statement of foreclosure and the prerequisites for thinking treatment at all.

Reception and legacy

Within psychoanalysis and psychiatry

Within Lacanian clinical communities, Seminar III is treated as foundational for structural diagnosis and for subsequent elaborations of the paternal function, including later debates about “ordinary psychosis” and about diverse modes of stabilization (symptom, delusional metaphor, identification, sinthomatic solutions). Outside Lacanian circles, reception has been mixed: some readers regard the seminar as a powerful reconceptualization of psychosis beyond descriptive psychiatry, while critics question its distance from empirical psychiatric research and its reliance on structural linguistics. The existence of professional reviews of the 1993 Norton edition in psychoanalytic venues indicates its early Anglophone uptake as a major clinical-theoretical statement.

In the humanities and cultural theory

Seminar III’s language-centered model of psychosis—especially foreclosure, the Name-of-the-Father, and the quilting point—has circulated widely beyond clinical psychoanalysis into literary theory, philosophy, and cultural analysis, often as part of broader receptions of Lacan’s theory of the signifier. Its Schreber reading, in particular, has become a reference point for discussions of paranoia, authority, and the subject’s relation to symbolic law in modernity.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar I
• Seminar II
• Seminar IV
• Psychosis
• Foreclosure
• Name-of-the-Father
• Symbolic order
• Big Other
• Point de capiton
• Daniel Paul Schreber
• On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis
• Écrits
• Metaphor and metonymy

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (1955–1956). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993 (pb reprint 1997).
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996.

• Bolzinger, André. Review of Lacan, Les psychoses. Bulletin de psychologie 35(356) (1982): 826–827.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Ordinary psychosis” (interviews/essays and later clinical discussions revisiting the Name-of-the-Father framework).
• Secondary clinical introductions discussing Seminar III’s psychosis theory and structural diagnosis (e.g., clinician-oriented overviews in Lacanian psychoanalysis).