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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 [[{{Y}}|1953]], the venue of these lectures moved to the [[Hôpital 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 [[Hôpital Sainte-Anne]], the [[seminar]] moved to the [[École Normale Supérieure]] in 1964, and to the Faculté 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]],<ref>{{E}} p. 40</ref> 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' were originally oral presentations, that is many ways the open-ended Seminar was his preferred environment."

As [[Lacan]]'s [[seminar]]s 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 [[seminar]]s. In 1956-9 [[Lacan]] authorised Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to publish a few summaries of sections of the [[seminar]] during those years, but this as 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 circulated among his followers in an almost clandestine way. Even during [[Lacan]]'s lifetime, the [[seminar]] circulated in the form of photocopies of diverse and unreliable written versions of the spoken text. Beginning in 1973, [[Lacan]] entrusted the transcription of the [[seminar]] to [[Jacques-Alain Miller]]. 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]]. In an editor's note to ''[[The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]'', the first of his publications of [[Lacan]]'s [[seminars]], [[Miller]] writes:

<blockquote>"My intention here was to be as unobtrusive as possible and to obtain from Jacques Lacan's spoken work an authentic version that would stand, in the future, for the original, which does not exist."<ref>{{S11}} p. xi</ref></blockquote>

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