Talk:Seminar VIII

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 VII Seminar IX →

Transference
Seminar VIII
Cover image commonly associated with published editions of Seminar VIII.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre VIII : Le transfert (dans sa disparité subjective)
English Title	The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1960–1961 (academic year); sessions delivered Nov 1960 – Jun 1961
Session Count	27 sessions (as reconstructed in circulated transcripts)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Transference • Transference love • Repetition • Countertransference • Desire • objet petit a • agalma • Phallus • Castration • Subject supposed to know (anticipations) • Other
Notable Themes	Disparity and asymmetry in the analytic dyad; love as a function of lack; the analyst’s position and desire; interpretation and the logic of transference; rereading Freud through Plato
Freud Texts	“The Dynamics of Transference” (1912) • “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915) • Technique papers (1911–1917) • Beyond the Pleasure Principle (background on repetition)
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar VII
Followed by	Seminar IX

Transference ([Le Séminaire, Livre VIII : Le transfert (dans sa disparité subjective)] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is Jacques Lacan’s eighth annual seminar, delivered during the 1960–1961 academic year at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris. The seminar is a major statement of Lacan’s theory of transference as a structurally dissymmetrical relation—“subjective disparity”—in which love and knowledge are knotted to the place of the Other and to the analyst’s function as cause of desire. It is also famous for Lacan’s extended reading of Plato’s Symposium, especially the relation between Alcibiades and Socrates, and for the introduction of agalma as a privileged figure for the valued object presumed to be hidden in the other—an anticipation of later formalizations of objet petit a.

In Seminar VIII Lacan revisits Freud’s technique papers on transference while sharpening a distinctively Lacanian ethical and technical injunction: the analyst must not answer the analysand’s demand for love as if analysis were a reciprocal intersubjective therapy, but must sustain a position that allows the analysand to articulate desire through speech rather than enact it in the analytic relationship. A condensed maxim associated with this seminar—often cited in later Lacanian teaching—states: “In love one gives what one does not have.”

Overview

Seminar VIII is commonly situated as the immediate continuation of Lacan’s preceding year, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and as a preparation for later work on identification and the object cause of desire. In Seminar VII Lacan had argued that analytic ethics cannot be reduced to normalization or adaptation; Seminar VIII shifts the focus to the specific clinical site where ethics becomes operative: the management of transference and its passions—above all, transference-love. In Lacan’s formulation, repetition and transference are inseparable; what changes is the emphasis: repetition is now read through the prism of love and the analyst’s position in the analytic situation.

The seminar’s most widely discussed sequence is the commentary on Plato’s Symposium, where Lacan treats the “analytic couple” as structurally analogous to Alcibiades’ passionate address to Socrates. Alcibiades approaches Socrates as if he contained a hidden treasure—agalma—and demands it through love; Socrates refuses to be installed as the beloved object and redirects Alcibiades toward desire and speech. Lacan reads this refusal as a model for analytic technique: the analyst must not “play the good object,” but must allow the analysand to discover how desire is structured by lack, displacement, and the signifier.

Historical and institutional context

Sainte-Anne and the French psychoanalytic field

Lacan delivered Seminar VIII at Hôpital Sainte-Anne, continuing the long Sainte-Anne sequence (early 1950s–1963) that served as the principal teaching site for his “return to Freud”. By 1960–1961 Lacan’s position within French psychoanalysis remained institutionally contested, in part due to disputes over technique (including the variable-length session) and over the relation between Lacanian training and IPA standards. This context helps explain the seminar’s insistence that transference is not a domain of mutual empathy but a structural and ethical problem bound to the analyst’s position and to the handling of countertransference.

From “object relations” to transference-love

Lacan’s immediate background for Seminar VIII includes the prior seminars on the object relation and on ethics. In the 1950s Lacan had polemicized against versions of ego psychology that treat the analytic relationship as a corrective interpersonal bond. Seminar VIII continues this critique by focusing on the specific point where “relationship” becomes most seductive and most dangerous: love in the transference, including the tendency to treat the analyst as a providential object who would complete the subject. The seminar thus belongs to a broader Lacanian effort to distinguish analytic technique from moral pedagogy and from therapeutic reassurance.

Composition and publication history

Sessions and chronology

The 1960–1961 seminar is typically reconstructed as running from mid-November 1960 to late June 1961, with approximately twenty-seven sessions in circulated transcripts. As with many Lacan seminars, the textual record derives from stenographic notes and later editorial work, producing variations across editions and circulating versions.

French edition and later printings

The seminar was established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in the Champ freudien series in 1991. Later commercial listings commonly describe subsequent Seuil printings (including early-2000s reissues) under the same series label and with updated identifiers (ISBN/EAN) and page counts.

English translation

A published English translation appeared much later than the French edition, contributing to a renewed Anglophone reception of Lacan’s technical teaching on love and transference in the 2010s.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Transference as structural dissymmetry

A guiding premise of Seminar VIII is that the analytic dyad is not symmetrical: the analyst is not a second subject who “relates” in the same register as the analysand, but occupies a function defined by the analysand’s address and by the place of the Other in speech. Lacan names this constitutive asymmetry “subjective disparity” (disparité subjective), and treats it as the condition of analytic efficacy. In this view, transference is not an accidental emotional overlay but the very medium through which interpretation becomes possible: “It is on the basis of transference and with the help of transference itself that transference is interpreted.”

This thesis develops Freud’s idea that transference is both obstacle and instrument: it intensifies resistance yet also stages the subject’s libidinal history in the analytic present. Lacan’s distinctive move is to treat “present” transference not as interpersonal immediacy but as a structure governed by signifiers, demand, and the subject’s relation to lack.

Repetition, signifier, and the “analytic situation”

Seminar VIII retains the Lacanian insistence that the analytic situation is fundamentally a “symbolic experience” in which speech produces effects by reconfiguring the subject’s relation to signifiers. Yet it also emphasizes that speech acts only under the condition of transference: interpretation requires the transferential frame in which the analysand attributes value, knowledge, and desire to the analyst. The seminar thus reframes repetition as inseparable from the love that installs the analyst in a privileged place—often as the one presumed to “have” what the subject lacks.

Critique of countertransference and the analyst’s desire

Lacan’s earlier polemics against a psychology of adaptation reappear here as a critique of approaches that privilege the analyst’s countertransference as a source of truth. Seminar VIII repeatedly treats countertransference as a form of resistance on the analyst’s side—an affective capture that risks collapsing analytic asymmetry into reciprocity. A sharply stated formulation in circulated versions declares: “Counter-transference … is the sum of the biases, passions, difficulties, even of the analyst’s ignorance … and which on this account would be enough to render the handling of the transference with him impossible.”

In place of countertransference-centered technique, Lacan foregrounds the “analyst's desire” as a technical-ethical operator: not the analyst’s personal wish, but the position that sustains lack rather than filling it, thereby allowing the analysand’s desire to be articulated rather than gratified.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

Transference-love (amour de transfert)

Seminar VIII is a central Lacanian text on transference love. Whereas some psychoanalytic approaches treat love as an inevitable therapeutic bond, Lacan reads it as a structural effect of the analytic setting: the analysand loves insofar as the analyst is installed as bearer of a hidden object and as locus of presumed knowledge. The question is therefore not whether love occurs, but how it functions—whether it becomes resistance through enactment, or whether it can be converted into speech that produces knowledge about desire.

A maxim frequently associated with this seminar condenses the paradoxical logic of love in analysis: “In love one gives what one does not have.” Lacan’s use of the paradox targets the idea that love is the exchange of possessed goods; instead, love is organized around lack and around the offer of what is missing—an offer that is inseparable from fantasy.

Plato’s Symposium: Socrates, Alcibiades, and agalma

The seminar’s best-known “case study” is its philosophical-literary reading of Plato’s Symposium. Lacan approaches the dialogue not as an illustration of timeless human psychology, but as a structured discourse on Eros and knowledge, staged through positions that can be mapped onto analytic functions.

In Plato’s dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to a sileni-box that encloses a precious treasure. Lacan seizes on this image to theorize the object presumed in the other: agalma—the “good object” that the lover believes is hidden inside the beloved. In transference, the analysand similarly approaches the analyst as if the analyst contained the object that would complete the subject’s desire. Commercial and archival summaries of the Seuil edition reproduce this pivotal motif directly, emphasizing Alcibiades’ attempt to subordinate Socrates to “the object of his desire … agalma.”

Lacan’s technical conclusion is that the analyst must not identify with the treasured object. Socrates’ refusal to respond to Alcibiades’ seduction is read as paradigmatic: the analyst avoids occupying the place of the lovable treasure and instead sustains a position that returns the analysand to the question of desire.

From agalma to objet petit a

Seminar VIII is often read retrospectively as a crucial step toward the formal concept of objet petit a as “object cause of desire”. Lacan does not simply equate agalma with an empirical object; rather, agalma names the overvalued remainder that appears as the cause of desire and that organizes fantasy. Later Lacanian teaching will specify the analyst’s function as occupying the place of this cause (as “semblance” of object a), but Seminar VIII already frames analytic efficacy as depending on how the analyst is positioned in relation to what the analysand presumes the analyst to “have.”

Phallus, castration, and the signifier

A major thread in Seminar VIII concerns the articulation of phallus and castration as principles of desire, especially as they are mobilized in the dynamics of love and demand. Lacan distinguishes the phallus as a signifier from any anatomical or imaginary object, linking it to the way desire is signified and circulated through the Other. Archival commentary on the Seuil edition notes that the second part of the seminar explicitly focuses on “the object of desire and the dialectic of castration,” and derives from this articulation the analyst’s place in transference.

Within the Symposium reading, phallic signification is implicated in Alcibiades’ demand (the beloved is imagined to “have” a treasure) and in Socrates’ refusal (the analyst does not cover over lack with a fetishized object). Seminar VIII thereby links the clinic of transference to Lacan’s broader account of symbolic castration and the subject’s relation to the signifier.

Diotima and the discourse of love

Lacan also highlights the dialogue’s internal break in authority: Socrates claims to repeat the teaching of Diotima, who presents love in a mythic register. Diotima’s speech allows Lacan to explore how love is articulated through discourse and how desire is mediated by signifiers rather than reducible to instinctual need. In later Lacanian reception, this sequence is sometimes read as a precursor to the formalization of discourses (hysteric, master, university, analyst), insofar as it stages knowledge, desire, and authority as positions rather than inner traits.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Technique: disappointing love without humiliating the subject

A clinical “moral” often drawn from Seminar VIII is that analysis does not consist in gratifying the demand for love, nor in cynically dismissing it, but in sustaining the analytic position so that the analysand can move from acting-out love to speaking desire. Lacan suggests that analysis teaches the subject to “speak instead of making love” within the analytic setting—i.e., to treat the transferential passion as material for interpretation rather than as a reciprocal relationship to be fulfilled.

This orientation has practical consequences: the analyst’s interventions are not neutral “information,” but derive their effect from the position conferred by transference. Interpretation therefore aims at the signifiers and fantasies that organize the demand, rather than at the interpersonal content of affection or hostility.

Handling resistance and the place of the analyst

Because transference is both engine and resistance, Seminar VIII insists on distinguishing the imaginary register of rivalry and seduction from the symbolic register of the analysand’s address to the Other. The analyst’s task is to avoid being drawn into an imaginary duet (love/hate, admiration/resentment) and instead to operate from the place that transference itself bestows—so that transference can be interpreted “with the help of transference itself.”

Countertransference revisited

Seminar VIII remains a key reference for Lacanian skepticism toward countertransference as a privileged tool. By treating countertransference as the analyst’s resistance—biases, passions, and ignorance—it reframes the ethical demand on the analyst: training analysis does not eliminate passion, but aims at a mutation in the economy of desire such that the analyst can sustain the analytic function rather than act from personal gratification or repulsion.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools, Seminar VIII is canonical for transference as structural dissymmetry and for the Symposium reading as a paradigm of analytic love. It is frequently taught alongside Freud’s transference papers and Lacan’s programmatic essay “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (in Écrits), which similarly emphasizes the analyst’s position and critiques therapeutic moralism.

Seminar VIII also became increasingly important in later Lacanian debates about the analyst’s function as cause of desire (object a) and about how the analyst’s desire structures the end of analysis. In this sense it is often read as a bridge between the ethics of desire (Seminar VII) and later formalizations of the analytic act and discourse.

In philosophy, classics, and cultural theory

Because of its sustained engagement with Plato, Seminar VIII has circulated beyond clinical psychoanalysis into philosophy, classical studies, and literary theory as an influential rereading of the Symposium through desire, lack, and discourse. Commentators in the humanities often cite the seminar for its account of love as a function of lack and for the figure of agalma as an object presumed to be hidden in the beloved—an account that has been taken up in discussions of fetishism, idealization, and the politics of desire.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar VII
• Seminar IX
• Transference
• Transference love
• Countertransference
• Analyst's desire
• objet petit a
• Object cause of desire
• Phallus
• Castration
• Other
• Plato
• Symposium
• Socrates
• Alcibiades
• Diotima of Mantinea

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VIII : Le transfert (1960–1961). Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil (Champ freudien), 1991.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference (1960–1961). Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity, 2015.
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912) and “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.