Seminar

seminar (sÈminaire)

In 1951, Lacan began to give private lectures in Sylvia Bataille's apartment at 3 rue de Lille. The lectures were attended by a small group of trainee psychoanalysts, and were based on readings of some of Freud's case histories: Dora, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In 1953, the venue of these lectures moved to the HÙpital Sainte-Anne, here a larger audience could be accommodated. Although Lacan sometimes refers to the private lectures of 1951-2 and 1952-3 as the first two years of his 'seminar', the term is now usually reserved for the public lectures which began in 1953. From that point on until his death in 1981, Lacan took a different theme each academic year and delivered a series of lectures on it. These twenty-seven annual series of lectures are usually referred to collectively as 'the seminar', in the singular.

After ten years at the HÙpital Sainte-Anne, the seminar moved to the …cole Normale SupÈrieure in 1964, and to the FacultÈ de Droit in 1973. These changes of venue were due to various reasons, not least of which was the need to accommodate the constantly growing audience as the seminar gradually became a focal point in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of

the 1950s and 1960s.

    Given Lacan's insistence that speech is the only medium of psychoanalysis

(E, 40), it is perhaps appropriate that the original means by which Lacan

developed and expounded his ideas should have been the spoken word.

Indeed, as one commentator has remarked; 'It must be recalled that virtually

all of Lacan's "writings" (…crits) were originally oral presentations, that in

many ways the open-ended Seminar was his preferred environment' (Macey,

1995: 77).

     As Lacan's seminars became increasingly popular, demand grew for

written transcripts of the seminar. However, apart from a few small articles

that he wrote on the basis of some lectures delivered in the course of the

seminar, Lacan never published any account of his own seminars. In 1956-9

Lacan authorised Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to publish a few summaries of

sections of the seminar during those years, but this was not enough to

satisfy the growing demand for written accounts of Lacan's teaching. Hence

unauthorised transcripts of Lacan's seminar began increasingly to be circu-

lated among his followers in an almost clandestine way. In 1973, Lacan

allowed his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, to publish an edited transcript

of the lectures given in 1964, the eleventh year of the seminar. Since then,

Miller has continued to bring out edited versions of other years of the

seminar, although the number published is still fewer than half. Miller's

role in editing and publishing the seminar has led to some very heated

arguments, with opponents claiming he has distorted Lacan's original.

However, as Miller himself has pointed out, the transition from an oral to

 a written medium, and the editing required by this,                  means that these

published versions of the seminar could never be simple transcripts of the

lectures given by Lacan (see Miller, 1985). So far only nine of the yearly

seminars have been published in book form, while authorised extracts from

others have appeared in the journal Ornicar? Unauthorised transcripts of the

unpublished years of the seminar continue to circulate today, both in France

and abroad.

     The titles of each year (or each 'book') of the seminar, are listed on p. 177.

The original French titles and publication details are listed in the bibliography

at the end of this dictionary.