Seminar V
The Seminar, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient) is the fifth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan during the 1957–1958 academic year at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris.[1] Edited and published posthumously, the seminar offers Lacan’s sustained re-reading of Sigmund Freud’s paradigmatic “formations” of the unconscious—the joke (Freud’s Witz), the dream, the slip (lapsus / parapraxis), and the symptom—in order to formalize the unconscious as an effect of the signifier and of the subject’s address to the Other.[2]
| The Formations of the Unconscious | |
|---|---|
| Seminar V | |
 Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar V. | |
| French Title | Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient |
| English Title | The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious |
| Seminar Information | |
| Seminar Date(s) | November 1957 – June 1958 |
| Session Count | 26 sessions |
| Location | Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris |
| Psychoanalytic Content | |
| Key Concepts | Unconscious • Witz (joke) • Dream • Parapraxis • Symptom • Signifier • Metaphor • Metonymy • Graph of Desire • Other • Demand • Desire • Name-of-the-Father • Paternal metaphor • Phallus • Oedipus complex |
| Notable Themes | “Return to Freud” via the formations of the unconscious; linguistics and the signifier; desire and its articulation; the paternal function and Oedipus; the social dimension of jokes and address; technique and interpretation |
| Freud Texts | Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious • The Interpretation of Dreams • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality • texts on the Oedipus complex and dream-work (condensation/displacement) |
| Theoretical Context | |
| Period | Early/structural period |
| Register | Symbolic with systematic articulation of Imaginary and the limits of the Real |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Seminar IV |
| Followed by | Seminar VI |
Seminar V is widely treated as a major statement of Lacan’s mid-1950s structuralism: it develops the linguistic reformulation of Freudian mechanisms (condensation and displacement) as metaphor and metonymy, and it advances a topology of subjectivation culminating in early versions of the Graph of Desire, later canonized in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960) and published in Écrits (1966).[3][4]
Overview
Freud grouped jokes, dreams, slips, and symptoms as privileged sites where unconscious processes become legible—places where the logic of substitution, distortion, and return can be observed with particular clarity.[5][6][7] Lacan’s wager in Seminar V is that these formations do not merely express hidden meanings “behind” speech; rather, they display the formal operations of the signifier itself. On this basis, Lacan frames psychoanalysis less as a depth-psychology of contents than as a discourse analysis of the speaking being (parlêtre is a later term) caught in the consequences of language.[8]
The seminar also deepens Lacan’s account of how desire is structured by language and by the Other’s demand. A recurring thesis—later summarized in multiple Lacanian introductions—is that desire is “articulated” in the signifying chain while remaining non-totalizable as a statement: it appears as a gap, a metonymic drift, and as the effect of address and recognition.[2][4]
Historical and institutional context
Sainte-Anne, the SFP, and the “return to Freud”
Seminar V belongs to the decade in which Lacan’s weekly seminar functioned as a primary vehicle of his “return to Freud”, a methodological re-reading of Freudian texts through contemporary linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. The institutional backdrop includes Lacan’s post-1953 milieu in the Société Française de Psychanalyse, formed after the split from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris amid disputes about training, technique, and the status of ego psychology.[9]
While earlier seminars (notably Seminar II and Seminar III) foregrounded critique of ego psychology and a structural account of psychosis (e.g., foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father), Seminar V pivots to the “normal” or everyday field of speech: jokes told in company, mistakes in conversation, and dream narratives. This shift is not a retreat from clinical problems but a strategy: the formations of the unconscious, Lacan argues, provide a laboratory for formalizing psychoanalysis as a logic of signifiers and of address to the Other.[1][10]
Publication history and editorial establishment
As with many of Lacan’s seminars, the 1957–1958 teaching circulated for decades in notes, transcriptions, and privately compiled versions before its standardized publication. The French text was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1998; a widely used English translation by Russell Grigg appeared with Polity Press in 2017.[1][2] Scholarly citation typically relies on these editions, though pagination can vary across printings and translations.
Conceptual framework and methodology
The formations of the unconscious as a field of formalization
Freud’s analysis of jokes, dreams, and parapraxes emphasizes formal mechanisms—condensation, displacement, representability, secondary revision—rather than the direct recovery of a single latent content.[5][6][7] Lacan radicalizes this formal focus. For him, the “formation” is not simply a disguised message; it is an event in the signifying chain that reveals how meaning is produced by difference, substitution, and the constraints of address.
A frequently cited programmatic formula associated with Lacan’s mid-century teaching is that the unconscious is not a reservoir of instincts but a logic of signifiers:
“The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows of the elementary is only the elements of the signifier.”[2]
In Seminar V, this claim underwrites a methodological preference: interpretive attention goes to equivocation, homophony, metaphorical substitution, and metonymic drift, not only to narrative coherence or conscious intention.
Linguistics, rhetoric, and the signifier
Lacan’s approach draws on structural linguistics associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (signifier/signified; differential value) and on the rhetorical and linguistic analysis of tropes, including resources often linked (in Lacanian reception) to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy as axes of selection and combination.[11][12]
Lacan does not treat these sources as external “applications” of linguistics to psychoanalysis. Instead, he argues that Freud already discovered the primacy of signifying operations, and that linguistics offers a vocabulary to formalize what psychoanalysis encounters clinically: substitutions, displacements, and the insistence of signifying chains beyond conscious mastery.[1][13]
Address, recognition, and the Other
In jokes and witticisms, the presence of the Other is explicit: a joke “lands” only if it is recognized as such; a slip is heard as a slip; a pun functions as an event only within a shared (yet uneven) code. Lacan uses this to formalize a broader claim: meaning and truth in analysis are not properties of an interior ego, but effects of speech situated in a field of address. The big Other is the locus that “ratifies” the code and makes recognition possible—though the Other is also the locus where demand and law are inscribed, shaping what can be said and what must be distorted.[4][8]
Key themes, concepts, and case studies
Jokes (Witz) and the social economy of enjoyment
Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious treats the joke as a formation that yields pleasure through economy—saving expenditure of inhibition or representation—while depending on a third person who “gets it.”[5] Lacan takes the third person as structurally decisive. The joke is an emblem of how the unconscious is intersubjective in form: it is an effect of the signifier in a scene of address, not a private content hidden inside an individual.
In Lacan’s account, the joke demonstrates the autonomy of the signifier: a witticism may produce meaning (and pleasure) precisely by exploiting equivocation, homophony, and unexpected substitutions. This logic aligns the joke with the dream-work and symptom formation: what appears as nonsense can generate sense by the play of signifiers, while simultaneously pointing to the subject’s truth in the form of distortion.[2]
Dreams: condensation/displacement as metaphor/metonymy
Freud’s dream-work describes how latent thoughts are transformed by condensation and displacement into manifest content.[6] In Seminar V, Lacan gives this transformation a linguistic articulation: condensation corresponds to metaphor (substitution that produces new meaning), while displacement corresponds to metonymy (meaning sliding along contiguity within a chain).[1][13]
This reformulation is not merely terminological. It supports Lacan’s claim that the unconscious “speaks” through tropes, and that interpretation targets the signifier’s operations rather than reconstructing a stable “original” message. Lacan’s emphasis on metaphor/metonymy also connects dream interpretation to broader questions of poetic language, symptom formation, and the structure of desire as a drift that no single signifier can saturate.[8]
Slips (lapsus), parapraxes, and the insistence of the signifying chain
Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life makes slips and mistakes legible as meaningful—structured, not random—events in speech and action.[7] Lacan reads the slip as a paradigmatic point where the subject is “spoken” by the signifier: the chain insists, repeats, and returns at the level of sounds, fragments, and substitutions.
The emphasis on insistence links Seminar V to Lacan’s broader account of repetition and transference. What returns is not simply a repressed content, but a signifying articulation that reappears in new contexts, often misrecognized by the ego as accident. This is one reason Lacan treats the analytic session as a privileged space for attending to equivocation and interruption—moments where the subject’s truth emerges in the break rather than in fluent narrative.[10]
Symptoms and compromise formations
Freud’s symptom is a compromise: a formation that simultaneously satisfies and defends, expressing desire while obeying censorship. Lacan retains the compromise logic while shifting emphasis from energetic models to signifying structure. A symptom is a message addressed to the Other, yet coded and distorted; it is also a stable knotting of signifiers that can persist precisely because it provides a workable (if painful) solution to the subject’s conflict with demand, law, and desire.[10][4]
Within this frame, symptom interpretation is not the decoding of a hidden “meaning” once and for all, but an intervention into the subject’s relation to signifiers, identifications, and the Other’s demand. The symptom is thus both a clinical phenomenon and a theoretical bridge: it shows how the Symbolic inscribes itself in the body and in repetitive suffering, anticipating later Lacanian developments around jouissance and the body (though those later terms are not yet fully systematized in Seminar V).[8]
Demand, desire, and the question of the Other
A central axis of Seminar V is the distinction between demand and desire. Demand is articulated in language and addressed to the Other; because it is articulated, it inevitably asks for more than any object can provide—recognition, love, and presence. Desire emerges in the gap between demand and need: it is what remains when demand has been articulated, satisfied, refused, or distorted. In Lacan’s formula, desire is not reducible to a specific object; it is structured as lack and as metonymic drift along the signifying chain.[4][2]
This framework is also used to formalize clinical listening. Where the ego presents a narrative of needs and aims, Lacan directs attention to the displacements, equivocations, and repetitions by which desire appears—often where the subject least intends it. The analyst’s position, in this context, concerns the locus of the Other: interpretation is an act in the field of address, not a pedagogical correction of beliefs.[10]
The Graph of Desire: topology of subjectivation
Seminar V is a principal source for Lacan’s development of the Graph of Desire, a diagrammatic formalization of the relations among signifying chains, demand, and desire. The graph (in its various versions) maps how a first line of signification—associated with message and code—intersects with a second line where desire is produced as an effect of the Other’s demand and the subject’s division.[3][1]
In later presentations (notably in “Subversion of the Subject”), the graph becomes a canonical device for expressing that the subject is split (sujet barré; barred subject), that meaning is retroactively stabilized (via points of anchoring), and that desire is produced at the intersection of signifying operations and the subject’s relation to the Other’s enigma (often summarized by the Italian phrase Che vuoi?—“What do you want [from me]?”).[3][4]
Oedipus, the paternal function, and the paternal metaphor
While Seminar III famously links psychosis to the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, Seminar V elaborates the paternal function within a broader theory of desire and signification. Lacan distinguishes the empirical father from the symbolic function that institutes law, naming, and prohibition. In this perspective, the paternal signifier intervenes not as moral authority but as an operator that reorders the subject’s relation to the mother’s desire and to the signifying chain of kinship and law.[2][9]
A key formalization in this period is the paternal metaphor: a substitution by which the Name-of-the-Father takes the place of the mother’s desire as signifier, producing a new signification—often associated with phallic signification—that reconfigures the child’s position within desire and prohibition. Lacan frames this as the structural pivot of the Oedipus complex: not a developmental story about family roles alone, but a logical operation in the Symbolic that reorganizes desire through naming and law.[1][4]
The phallus as signifier
Seminar V culminates in a heightened emphasis on the phallus as signifier—an emphasis that is closely associated with Lacan’s contemporaneous text “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958).[14] In this framework, the phallus is not an anatomical organ but a privileged signifier that marks how desire is symbolized—how lack is introduced and how sexual difference is structured at the level of signification rather than by direct biological complementarity.
Lacan’s claim is not that psychoanalysis reduces sexuality to a single symbol, but that the symbolic organization of desire in a given culture produces a privileged signifier around which demand, prohibition, and identification are ordered. This thesis became central to subsequent Lacanian debates on sexual difference, the Name-of-the-Father, and the later formula “there is no such thing as sexual rapport” (which is formulated explicitly in later seminars).[14][8]
Theoretical significance and clinical implications
From meanings to signifiers: the direction of interpretation
A lasting theoretical contribution of Seminar V is its articulation of interpretation as an intervention at the level of the signifier. Because formations of the unconscious exploit equivocation, condensation, and displacement, the analyst does not merely “explain” the patient to themselves; rather, the analyst punctuates, cuts, and interprets so that the signifying chain can be heard in its insistence and in its points of impossibility.[10]
This orientation supports Lacan’s critique of therapeutic models that prioritize ego adaptation or narrative coherence. In Lacan’s view, the ego’s coherence may be precisely what masks the subject’s division; the formations of the unconscious disclose how truth emerges through distortion. Interpretation therefore targets the points where speech stumbles, repeats, or jokes—where the Other is implicitly addressed and where desire appears as a gap in demand.[8]
Desire, ethics, and the analyst’s position
By centering desire rather than adaptation, Seminar V contributes to what later becomes Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” (explicitly thematized in Seminar VII). Even before that later seminar, Seminar V treats analytic work as oriented by the subject’s relation to desire and to the Other’s demand, not by normalization. The formations of the unconscious are privileged precisely because they stage the subject’s truth in the form of misrecognition and surprise—an encounter that cannot be reduced to conscious intention.[2][9]
Clinically, this supports a particular emphasis on transference as a phenomenon of address: the analyst is positioned as an Other, and the subject’s speech is shaped by what the subject supposes the Other knows or wants. Interventions must therefore be calibrated to the symbolic effects they produce—how they shift the subject’s position within the graph of desire—rather than to their persuasive or educational content.[10]
Structural continuity with Seminars III, IV, and VI
Seminar V is often read as a hinge between (a) the psychosis-centered elaborations of foreclosure and the paternal function (Seminar III), (b) the focus on object relations and the maternal function in Seminar IV, and (c) the explicit turn to desire and interpretation in Seminar VI (Desire and its Interpretation).[1][4] In this sequence, the paternal metaphor and the phallus become less a doctrine about family authority than a theory of signification: how desire is symbolized and how the subject is positioned within language and law.
Reception and legacy
Within Lacanian psychoanalysis
In Lacanian teaching traditions, Seminar V is frequently treated as a foundational reference for (1) the doctrine that the unconscious is structured like a language, (2) the metaphor/metonymy reformulation of dream-work, and (3) the early formalization of the Graph of Desire. It is often paired with Lacan’s 1957 essay “The Agency of the Letter…” and with the 1958 “Signification of the Phallus,” which together condense several of the seminar’s key claims into canonical articles of Écrits.[13][14]
Clinically oriented Lacanian authors commonly cite Seminar V when discussing the direction of interpretation (equivocation, cutting, the function of the signifier) and the role of demand/desire distinctions in the transference.[10]
In the humanities and theory
Beyond clinical psychoanalysis, Seminar V has been influential in literary theory and philosophy for its account of rhetoric (metaphor/metonymy) as constitutive of subjectivity rather than as mere stylistic ornament. The seminar’s focus on jokes and wordplay has also contributed to accounts of language as a site where social recognition and unconscious truth intersect—an emphasis that resonates with broader structuralist and post-structuralist currents in twentieth-century theory.[15]
At the same time, the seminar’s strong claims about the phallus as privileged signifier have been a focal point of debate, particularly in feminist and gender-theoretical receptions of Lacan. Such debates often distinguish between Lacan’s claim about symbolic function (a thesis about signification and culture) and any purported claim about anatomical superiority (which Lacan explicitly denies).[14][15]
See also
Notes
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre V : Les formations de l'inconscient (1957–1958). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–1958). Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2017.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960), in Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966; English trans. in Écrits trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE), vol. 8. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE vols. 4–5. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), SE vol. 6. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
- ↑ Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. (Posthumous compilation; standard French/English editions.)
- ↑ Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956), in Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle). The Hague: Mouton, 1956.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud” (1957), in Écrits (1966); English trans. in Écrits (Norton, 2006).
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958), in Écrits (1966); English trans. in Écrits (Norton, 2006).
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Further reading
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