Seminar XI

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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 X Seminar XII →

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Seminar XI
Cover commonly associated with published editions of Seminar XI.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1963–1964 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions, January – June 1964
Location	École Normale Supérieure (Rue d’Ulm, Paris)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Unconscious • Repetition • Transference • Drive • Real • Objet petit a • Gaze • Subject supposed to know
Notable Themes	Foundations of psychoanalytic theory; science and the subject; unconscious as discourse of the Other; automaton and tuché; subject supposed to know; partial drives and object a
Freud Texts	The Interpretation of Dreams • Beyond the Pleasure Principle • Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety • Instincts and their Vicissitudes
Theoretical Context
Period	Structural / turn to the Real
Register	Symbolic / Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar X
Followed by	Seminar XII

1963–1964

Seminar XI

Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

A French cover design of Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse.

Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis) is the eleventh annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered during the academic year 1963–1964, primarily at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. It is one of Lacan’s best-known and most widely translated works and has often been treated as an accessible introduction to his mature teaching, despite its formal and conceptual density.

In Seminar XI, Lacan organizes his exposition around four concepts that he regards as “fundamental” to psychoanalysis: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. These concepts are each rooted in Freud’s work, but Lacan re-articulates them within his own framework of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary; his thesis that “the unconscious is structured like a language”; and his theory of objet petit a (object a) as the cause of desire.

The seminar is also notable for its reflections on the status of psychoanalysis in relation to science and religion, the figure of Freud as “subject supposed to know”, and Lacan’s extended analyses of the gaze as a partial drive using Holbein’s The Ambassadors as a paradigm.

Historical and institutional context

From Sainte-Anne to the École Normale Supérieure

On 15 January 1964 Lacan opened a new cycle of seminars at the École Normale Supérieure on the Rue d’Ulm, in the presence of prominent intellectuals such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and the historian Fernand Braudel. This move followed his “excommunication” from official psychoanalytic circles: in 1963 the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) pressured the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) to remove Lacan from the list of training analysts because of his technical innovations (notably variable-length sessions).

At ENS Lacan encountered a younger audience of philosophers, historians and social scientists, and Seminar XI is marked by this new milieu: it is both a theoretical recasting of psychoanalysis and a public defence of its scientific and ethical status.

Lacan opens the seminar by explicitly addressing these institutional and political issues. He speaks about the censorship of his teachings and the conditions under which psychoanalytic training can legitimately be conducted outside IPA structures. These questions naturally raise broader theoretical problems: on what grounds is psychoanalytic knowledge valid? What is the status of the unconscious as an object of knowledge? And under what conditions can one speak of psychoanalysis as a “science of the unconscious” or a “conjectural science of the subject”?

Analysis, science and religion

Lacan is wary of the affinities between psychoanalysis, science, and religion. In Seminar XI he asks whether psychoanalysis risks becoming a kind of “religion of the unconscious”, with a founding father, quasi-sacred texts, and institutional guardians of orthodoxy. Throughout his career, he insists on his fidelity to Sigmund Freud as the founder of the discipline, yet transforms this fidelity into a critical question about transference and authority.

Freud appears as “legitimately the subject supposed to know,” at least concerning the unconscious: “He was not only the subject who was presumed to know, he knew.” At the same time Lacan underscores that Freud’s own desire was “not analysed”, making it the “original sin” of psychoanalysis and a continuing problem for questions of analytic legitimacy and training.

The seminar thus situates psychoanalysis at a complex intersection:

• In relation to science, Lacan asks how the “subject of science” (in the sense of modern Galilean science) relates to the subject of the unconscious, and what psychoanalysis can teach us about the limits of scientific objectivity.
• In relation to religion, he insists that psychoanalysis cannot be grounded on faith in a Master or the sacralization of a founding text; rather, its authority must derive from its praxis and from the specific knowledge it produces about desire, jouissance and the Real.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Psychoanalysis as discourse and praxis

Although Lacan will only fully formalize his notion of the discourses in Seminar XVII, Seminar XI already presents psychoanalysis as a specific discourse and a praxis rather than a speculative theory or a purely medical technique. Praxis is defined as an action that “places the subject in a position of dealing with the real through the symbolic.” This praxis, in turn, produces concepts.

In the case of analytic praxis, Lacan proposes four such concepts as “fundamental”:

• the unconscious,
• repetition,
• transference,
• the drive.

Three of these (unconscious, repetition, transference) had been heavily reworked in Lacan’s teaching between 1953 and 1963; the drive, whose importance increased with the elaboration of objet petit a in L’angoisse, is here more clearly distinguished from desire.

Method: reading Freud, formalization, and cases

Seminar XI combines several modes of exposition:

• Close readings of Freud’s texts (including The Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”), which Lacan treats as a corpus to be structurally re-read rather than simply revered.
• Formalization, drawing on linguistics, topology, and logical schemas (especially the Graph of Desire) to articulate concepts such as the barred subject ($), the object a, and the circuits of the drive.
• Clinical and cultural examples, including the dream of the burning child (“Father, can't you see I'm burning?”), the fort/da game, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and analytic vignettes.

The four concepts

The unconscious

Unconscious as discourse of the Other

In his earlier essay “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” and in Écrits, Lacan famously defined the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other.” Seminar XI revisits and refines this thesis.

The unconscious is not a reservoir of representations or drives “inside” the subject; it is the effect of the signifier on the subject. What is repressed is the signifier; what returns in dreams, slips, symptoms and other “formations of the unconscious” are signifiers, whose effects articulate a discourse that is not reducible to conscious intention.

Thus, “one should see in the unconscious the effects of speech on the subject.” The unconscious is structured like a language, and its formations can be read as homophonies, puns, condensations and displacements—operations that Freud described under the headings of dream-work and symptom formation.

Temporal “pulsation” of the unconscious

Seminar XI also introduces the notion of the “pulsation” of the unconscious. The unconscious is not permanently “there”; it opens and closes in relation to the subject’s encounter with the Other’s discourse, and in relation to analytic interventions (interpretation, silence, session cuts).

This insight has technical consequences: analytic work is not a continuous excavation but a structuring of moments when the unconscious “insists” and can be made to resonate in speech. The subject emerges at these points as a divided subject ($), caught between signifiers and marked by a fundamental lack.

Libido, lamella and the Real

The question then arises: how can the unconscious as signifying structure be reconciled with the Freudian libido, which seems to name an energetic, quasi-biological dimension? Lacan addresses this by introducing (largely in Écrits but echoed here) the figure of the lamella, a fantastic organ representing the indestructible, undead dimension of libido, beyond any particular embodiment. In Seminar XI, the libido is increasingly related to the Real and to the object a, which is not reducible to signification but is produced through the subject’s insertion into the signifier.

Repetition

Automaton and tuché

Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduces a new conception of repetition. He distinguishes between:

• Automaton: the insistence of the signifying chain, the network of signifiers that repeats in accordance with its own differential structure (e.g. the repetitive patterns of discourse, symbolic substitutions and displacements).
• Tuché (from Aristotle’s tuchē): the “encounter with the Real,” the missed yet desired encounter with what cannot be fully symbolized—trauma, the Thing (das Ding), the point of impossibility that repetition seeks but never captures.

Repetition thus has a double structure: it is at once the automatic iteration of signifiers and a pursuit of an impossible encounter with the Real.

The burning child and the Real of the drive

Lacan’s famous analysis of Freud’s dream about the dead child crying “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” becomes, in Seminar XI, a paradigm of this double repetition. On one level, the dream obeys the mechanisms of the dream-work; on another, it confronts the father with a traumatic Real—his inability to prevent his child’s death, the burning of the body—against which the symbolic narrative is powerless.

Repetition is thus not merely the return of the same content but the structural attempt to approach a point of impossibility: what cannot be integrated into the subject’s symbolic universe but insists through symptoms, dreams and acts.

Transference

Transference as enactment of the unconscious

In Lacan’s formulation, transference is “the enactment (mise en acte) of the reality of the unconscious.” It is not simply a re-edition of past feelings or relationships projected onto the analyst; rather, it is the way the unconscious becomes present in the analytic situation, particularly through the subject’s love and hate for the analyst.

The analytic question is not how the analyst personally appears to the analysand but what function this appearance plays in relation to the unconscious discourse and desire at stake.

Subject supposed to know

Seminar XI is the classic source for Lacan’s notion of the subject supposed to know (sujet supposé savoir). Transference, he argues, is fundamentally linked to the supposition that the analyst possesses a knowledge about the subject’s unconscious truth. It is this supposition—not the analyst’s real knowledge—that grounds the transference relation and the authority of analytic interpretation.

In this perspective, Freud himself appears retrospectively as the paradigmatic “subject supposed to know.” Lacan comments that Freud “gave us this knowledge in terms that may be said to be indestructible,” yet at the same time stresses that any institutionalization of this position risks fossilizing psychoanalysis into dogma.

The analyst’s task, therefore, is ultimately to “fall” from the idealized position of the subject supposed to know, so that the analysand may assume their own divided subjectivity and desire. This falling is linked to the position of the analyst as the support of objet a.

Transference, desire, and the analyst’s position

If transference is the enactment of the unconscious, and desire is the nodal point where the motion of the unconscious and an “untenable sexual reality” are at work, the analyst’s role is to allow the drive “to be made present in the reality of the unconscious.” This means that the analyst must not occupy the place of an ideal ego or moral authority, but the structurally humbler place of the object a, the “separating object” that supports the analysand’s desire by not filling it.

The drive

Drive versus need

Lacan distinguishes drives (Triebe) from biological needs. Needs can, in principle, be satisfied by specific objects; drives, by contrast, “can never be satisfied” and are fundamentally irreducible to any natural function. The drive’s aim is not the attainment of a final object (goal) but the completion of its circuit: “the way itself,” which is to circle around its object, the enigmatic objet petit a.

Drawing on Freud’s “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” which defines the drive as a montage of four elements—Drang (thrust), Quelle (source), Objekt (object) and Ziel (aim)—Lacan remarks: “Such a list may seem quite natural; my purpose is to prove that the text was written to show that it is not as natural as that.”

Circuit and grammatical voices

Lacan integrates these elements into a topological circuit:

• The drive originates in an erogenous zone;
• It circles around an object (objet a);
• It returns to the same zone, deriving satisfaction from the very repetition of this circuit.

This circuit is structured by three grammatical voices:

1. **Active** (e.g. “to see”),
2. **Reflexive** (“to see oneself”),
3. **Passive** (“to make oneself be seen”).

The first two are auto-erotic; only in the passive voice a new subject appears—“this subject, the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to show its circular course.” The drive is always active, Lacan notes, which is why he writes the third instance as “to make oneself be seen” instead of simply “to be seen.”

Partial drives and objet a

Lacan rejects the notion that the “partial drives” can be fully organized into a harmonious genital sexuality. The primacy of the genital zone is always precarious. Drives are partial not in the sense of being parts of a whole (“genital drive”), but because they only represent sexuality **partially**: they convey the dimension of jouissance.

“The reality of the unconscious is sexual reality—an untenable truth,” inseparable from the proximity of death. Under the form of objet a Lacan groups the part-objects associated with the partial drives: the breast, feces, the phallus, the gaze and the voice. Each belongs to different levels:

• At the oral level, the corresponding object is the “nothing” of the breast’s absence/presence.
• At the anal level, the object is the locus of metaphor: “give the feces in place of the phallus”—the anal drive is the domain of the gift.
• At the scopic level, the object is no longer on the side of demand but of desire, of the desire of the Other.
• At the invocatory level (voice), the same holds: the voice functions as a detached object addressing the subject from the Other.

The first two (oral, anal) are more closely linked to demand; the second pair (scopic, invocatory) to desire. In both series, objet a functions as “something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as symbol of the lack, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking.”

Gaze, eye and Holbein’s Ambassadors

Seminar XI devotes particular attention to the scopic drive and the gaze. Lacan distinguishes between the eye (organ of sight) and the gaze (object a in the field of the visible). The subject is not simply a seeing subject; it is also **seen** by the world, “under the gaze.”

Lacan analyses Holbein’s The Ambassadors, focusing on the anamorphic skull that appears distorted in the foreground unless viewed from a specific lateral angle. For him, the painting is a “trap for the gaze” (piège à regards), a dompte-regard (the gaze tamed by an object) and a trompe-l’œil. The floating phallic “ghost object” (the skull) gives presence to the −Φ of castration and exemplifies how the gaze functions as object a that structures the field of desire and sight.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Consolidation of the Real, Symbolic, Imaginary

Seminar XI consolidates the triad of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, which had been developed in earlier seminars. Each of the four concepts is aligned with a specific register:

• The unconscious is linked to the Symbolic and the effects of the signifier;
• Repetition is the point where Symbolic automaton meets the Real (tuché);
• Transference involves the Imaginary relationship to the analyst, but is structurally grounded in a symbolic supposition of knowledge (subject supposed to know);
• The drive borders the Real of jouissance via the object a.

This alignment allows Lacan to re-articulate Freud’s metapsychology within a structural and topological framework.

Science, truth and the subject

By raising the question “Is psychoanalysis a science?”, Seminar XI places psychoanalysis in dialogue with the modern scientific discourse. Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis emerges historically together with the modern subject of science, but that it reveals something irreducible to scientific objectification: the subject as divided by the signifier, and the Real of jouissance that resists knowledge.

Thus, psychoanalysis can be described as a “science of the unconscious” only if science is rethought to include a subject that is not master of its own knowledge and that is caught in a relation to truth that is never fully knowable.

Clinical orientation: transference and drive

Seminar XI has enduring clinical implications:

• It emphasizes that transference is not a mere obstacle or “resistance” but the very medium through which the unconscious becomes present. The analyst must work with transference by interpreting the subject’s supposition of knowledge, rather than by denying or gratifying it.
• It clarifies that the drive is not simply a quantity to be discharged (as in energetics) but a circuit to be read. Symptom formations and repetitive acts are understood as attempts to obtain a certain jouissance by circling around the object a.

The seminar also underlines that the analyst’s interventions (interpretation, session cuts, handling of silence) should be oriented by the structural “pulsation” of the unconscious and by the aim of bringing the subject to assume their division relative to desire and jouissance.

Ethics and the desire of the analyst

While the explicit theme of ethics had been developed in Seminar VII, Seminar XI returns to the ethical problem under the heading of the desire of the analyst. The analyst must maintain their desire in a position that supports the object a—that is, a desire not to fill the subject’s lack but to maintain the place where lack can be articulated and traversed.

This orientation distinguishes Lacanian psychoanalysis from approaches that treat the analytic aim as adaptation, ego-strengthening, or symptom removal. Instead, the end of analysis is conceived as a transformation in the subject’s relation to desire, to the Other’s demand, and to the object a.

Reception and legacy

Canonical status in Lacanian psychoanalysis

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis was the first of Lacan’s seminars to be published in book form (1973) and quickly became a central reference for Lacanian psychoanalysis worldwide. It is often used in training programmes as a gateway to Lacan’s teaching because it offers a systematic treatment of key concepts while remaining closely tied to Freud’s texts.

Within Lacanian schools, Seminar XI is regarded as a hinge between the “early” seminars (with their emphasis on the Imaginary and Symbolic) and later work focused on the Real, jouissance and discourse theory. Many later developments—such as the further elaboration of objet petit a, the formalization of the four discourses in Seminar XVII, and the discussion of sinthome and Name-of-the-Father in the 1970s—are retrospectively read through the lens of Seminar XI.

Influence in the humanities and cultural theory

In the Anglophone world, the 1977 English translation contributed to a wide dissemination of Lacan’s ideas beyond clinical psychoanalysis, particularly in literary theory, film studies, philosophy and cultural studies. The distinctions between automaton and tuché, the concept of the gaze as object a, and the notion of the subject supposed to know have been extensively used in analyses of spectatorship, ideology, and the production of subjectivity in modern culture.

Commentary volumes such as Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis have further cemented the seminar’s status as a central text for interdisciplinary Lacanian studies.

Criticisms

Critics of Lacan have sometimes argued that Seminar XI’s formalization of psychoanalytic concepts risks distancing psychoanalysis from empirical clinical practice, or that its reliance on structural linguistics underestimates the role of affect, embodiment and developmental history. Others question whether the claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language” and the centrality of the signifier can adequately account for psychotic or neurodegenerative phenomena.

Lacanian analysts respond that Seminar XI precisely introduces a stronger emphasis on the Real, the drive, and jouissance, and that its concepts (object a, gaze, repetition as tuché) are designed to address what escapes purely symbolic or imaginary accounts. From this perspective, the seminar is seen not as an abstraction away from the clinic but as an effort to formalize what clinical practice already encounters in its most resistant phenomena.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar X
• Seminar XII
• Unconscious
• Repetition
• Transference
• Drive
• Real
• Symbolic order
• Imaginary order
• Objet petit a
• Gaze (Lacan)
• Subject supposed to know
• Desire of the analyst
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI). Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Standard Edition, vol. XVIII.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Feldstein, Richard; Fink, Bruce; Jaanus, Maire (eds.). Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.