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Jacques Lacan
Originally published as part of Twayne's World Authors Series, Jacques Lacan offers a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the life and work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential and challenging thinkers of the twentieth century. Written by a philosopher with a deep engagement in both continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Jonathan Scott Lee traces the development of Lacan's theoretical project from his early psychiatric writings through the landmark Écrits and the renowned seminars that Lacan delivered over more than two decades.Lee's approach is distinctive in its philosophical clarity, making complex Lacanian ideas available to readers in the humanities and social sciences. His careful analysis of the mirror stage, the role of the Other, and Lacan's three fundamental registers―the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real― provides new insight into the ways they structure human subjectivity, language, and desire. This book situates Lacan within the broader intellectual currents of twentieth-century French thought, drawing connections to structuralism, post-structuralism, and the philosophical traditions that shaped and were shaped by Lacan's radical "return to Freud."Widely cited in scholarly literature across disciplines, including literary criticism, philosophy, theology, film studies, and cultural theory, Jacques Lacan remains a valued introduction for students, scholars, and general readers seeking a careful and comprehensive guide to one of the most formidable intellectual figures of the modern era.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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January 21, 2026
From a superb work of cultural history, Jacques Lacan (1990), Jonathan Scott Lee refers to a "decentering" process (73), in which the subject has for a center, not its consciousness, but the unconscious. The French psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, refers to the unconscious as "the Freudian Thing," from his title for a 1955 paper, "La chose freudienne, ou Sense de retour a Freud en psychanalyse" ("The Freudian Thing, or The Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis").
"Here Lacan maintains that as a result of Freud's discovery of the unconscious "the very center of the human being was no longer to be found at the place assigned to it by a whole humanist tradition" (Écrits, 401/114)." (Lee, page 73)
The Lacanian subject has a decentering effect, from which Lee derives the radical conclusion, that "there is no fixed center grounding the existence of anything in the human world." (141) There at the center, where consciousness imagines there is God, his central place stands empty. The centrality of lack or l'absence is a fundamental shibboleth of the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The universal absence has two upfront effects of deconstructing (1) authority as groundless, and (2) identity as arbitrary. A deconstruction of the subject is not new, since there has never been a stable center, around which identity could attach any permanent authority. The dream of a fixed center is the secret truth of Lacanian analysis, where "psychoanalytic dialogue has the effect of destroying this dream," (Lee, page 74). The false lure of stability was always imaginary.
“Psychoanalysis destroys the analysand’s illusions that his identity can be fully captured in the imaginary construct called the moi, and it does this quite simply by showing how this imaginary identity is riddled with gaps both created and covered over by the variety of symbolic systems into which he was born.” (74)
“The notion of totality is a dream of the imaginary moi, and the realization of the subject in the psychoanalytic dialogue has the effect of destroying this dream. This happens as a result of the analysand’s coming to realize the division within him, a division that Lacan suggests is fundamentally reflected in Hegel’s notion of the “unity” of universal and particular in the same subject.” (74)
It is the Hegelian influence on Lacan, center which is not one:
“Every positing of a “center” in a field of knowledge carries with it the implicit presumption that a “totality” can inevitably be arranged around such a center. In other words, to define a thing as having a center is to define a system in principle closed, within which that thing and its relations to other things can be exhaustively determined. It is precisely this assumption of totality with respect to the human subject that Lacan is attacking in the names of Freud and Hegel.” (74)
Jacques Lacan’s weekly or biweekly seminar began "informally" in 1951, in Rome in 1953, and until 1980 (31). In comparison with the time's dominant, philosophical trend in France, Lacan has what Lee calls “a stinging critique of Sartrean existentialism:"
"based on the central “illusion of autonomy” that the moi adopts as part of its misrecognized identity (E, 99/6). Lacan summarizes his position in a passage of remarkable directness: “Existentialism must be judged by the explanation it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder” (E, 99/6).” (page 24)
The knowledge of the analyst is "a learned ignorance" to avoid speaking. "Lacan goes further, however, to urge in a number of texts that the analyst make death (la mort) present in the analytic dialogue by playing dead." (93) Lee emphasizes the influence of Heidegger for emptiness and the nothing (90-91) and death as "ownmost" possibility (92). "It is death that gives human life meaning and that thus serves as the ex-centric center of our speaking and of our living." Denying death, "can be denied only imperfectly by its imaginary identifications with ideal images or by our acceptance of symbolic roles." (96) Identity involves this flight to the imaginary ego (96).
Jonathan Scott Lee explains the rationale of Lacan’s short or "variable-length analytic session" as punctuating the experience of the analysand (33). Analysis is monologue and punctuation, an ending (90). The cure is to mourn the past, reducing faith in imaginary identifications and symbolic roles (90)
"Lacan stresses the need for the subject to be liberated from the moi's illusory identity, going so far as to encourage "the disintegration of the imaginary unity constituted by the ego [moi]."" (96)
Lacan inveighs against imitating the analyst as a model (97). From "Ethics of Psychoanalysis:" Conform only to desire because the only thing anyone can be guilty of is having given up on one's desire (98). The neurotic and the psychotic are distinct for betraying desire in different failures to identify with the self in its own alienation.
“The neurotic manifests “the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I {je}” (E, 99/7) and remains caught up in an identity that experiences but does not recognize the various levels of her subjective alienation. The psychotic subject remains rooted in a “captation . . . by the situation” (E, 99/7), essentially unable to frame an identity of any sort distinct from that of the environment that envelops him.” (21)
Desire already has this psychotic structure, the desire of the other, and from the other, which Lacan terms "an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own affliction" (E, 319/104)." (94)
Desire has this repetitive structure, "eternally unsatisfied." (Lee, 95) It is Hegel's influence on Lacan, where the symbol is a murder of the real (94).
Language is not communication (75-77):
“From the point of view of information theory, human language contains many elements that are simply redundant and unnecessary, and this is powerful evidence that the simple communication of information is not the primary function of language.” (77)
Code and speech are what Lee terms the "social bond:" “what linguists are concerned with is the “social bond” essential to communication, rather than the individual and fundamentally accidental acts of communication facilitated by this social bond.” (35)
The relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary, not intentional (36). For the ambiguity of language, Lacan refers to the gap between writing and speech. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis has speech for its medium:
“Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration, in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient’s speech. [...] I shall show that there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence [...]” (quoting Lacan on page 38-39)
The passage Lee interprets “the unconscious is the dynamic product of the analysand and his (censoring) environment” (44)
“Psychoanalysis thus creates a situation in which the analysand is able to come to recognize his alienation and to experience the frustrating gap separating him from this alienated identity. A consequence of this recognition is the parallel recognition that the object of his desire belongs to this imaginary other: in effect, the analysand comes to recognize his own desire as inherently distant from himself.” (39-40)
Lacan's interpretation of Fort-Da as a symbol (51)
The dialectic surpasses intentions (49).
The word has a double absence, the absent thing it names, and the background system of any meaningful language (53). The meaning of any sign is separated from the past and the system by a gap or béance (54). Between signifier and signified, the signifier never purely indicates what is signified, but always refers to another signifier. There is no “outside” of language (55).
Even dreams have the structure of a language (48) with displacements of metaphor and metonymy (56).
The Big Other is a condition of experience, not any one person. It speaks in the Other (60) whose words carry such a weight that even what goes unsaid are anchor points (61).
Decentering the subject has in terms of behavior without an agent (63).
"the fundamental structural idea” behind linguistics (64)
Double split subject (65)
“In his paper of 1958, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan introduces the key idea that the phallus is essentially a signifier and not an imaginary construct or a real bodily organ. [...] As such a signifier, the phallus is not anything that any man or woman could possibly “have” (hence, it must not be confused with the penis). Indeed, this is the key to Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s notion of castration. Precisely because no one can have the phallus, it becomes that which all want to be. The phallus then serves to signify as well that fullness of being, that complete identity, the lack of which is the fact of our ineluctable want-of-being.” (66-67)
Recognition as gift (67) and the psychotic refusal of it (70-71):
“Thus, we seek in the other’s speech some recognition of the fact that we exist [...] It is, for example, the analysand’s demand for recognition addressed to the analyst that motivates his continual willingness to engage in free association in accordance with the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. Recognition is held out as the promised “gift” to be presented on the occasion of the analysand’s full assumption of his history.” (67)
“In the delirium of a psychotic one finds, on the other hand, a form of speaking that “has given up trying to make itself recognized” (E, 279/68), a solipsistic exploitation of the reserves of language without regard for the intersubjective dialectic of speech.” (68)
“The paradox of the neurotic’s speech is that it is speech not only unconscious of its repressed content but also largely unconscious of the fact of its being spoken. It is the task of the psychoanalyst, then, to help the neurotic analysand unfold not only the hidden meaning of his symptomatic discourse but also the hidden fact that there is a rhetoric of these symptoms.” (68-69)
Neurotic speech as hieroglyphics of hysteria (69)
Loss of meaning as symptom of self as other
“This is the fate of most of us caught up in the objectifying jargon of contemporary “scientific civilization.” If asked to speak about ourselves - for example, in the context of a psychoanalytic session - we are at first likely to fall into the stereotypical, quasi-scientific psychological descriptions with which we are regularly bombarded by the media. We are in effect given by our culture a means of “communication” by which we can avoid a genuine “speaking” about ourselves. We are speaking about ourselves without speaking about ourselves: this is the paradox of modern “alienation.”” (69)
"the failure of his discourse to achieve any sort of fixed signification that is characteristic of the psychotic's delirium." (71)
“Body of the signifier” (70) Subject is unconscious, not the center of consciousness (73).
Analyst recognition (79)
Gap as debt (81)
Analyst as one supposed to know (85)
Transference charged with meaning (85)
Silence as dialectical punctuation (86)
Short session (89)
The non-dupé (89) is another pun from Lacan.
Purloined letter (101) as Poe's symptom and signifier. The seminar on Poe is the example which Scott calls "Lacan's distinctively linguistic reading of Freud.” (101)
"Here he describes the "lesson of this seminar" in terms of showing how imaginary features of experience manifest the human being's "capture in a symbolic dimension." (101)
Inconsistency as the ex-centric center of the consistent self because consistency is imaginary.
"it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject" (E, 12/29)." (102)
In his analysis of repetition within Poe's purloined letter, Lacan triangulates "drama, its narration, and the conditions of that narration" (E, 12/29) as found in Poe" (102).
"[...] suggests that the signifier is unlike any other object (S 2, 232/198), inasmuch as it is simultaneously real and symbolic." (106)
""Being by nature symbol only of an absence," a signifier is simultaneously present and absent wherever it goes, unlike real objects, which are inevitably in their places (E, 24-25/39-40)." (106)
Lee considers "the very concept of a missing letter" to be one of many "recognizably Lacanian preoccupations about the signifier. The paradoxes of the missing letter revolve around two questions: in what place does a letter exist (E, 23-25/38-40), and to whom does a letter belong (E, 27-29/41-43)?" (106)
To whom does a letter belong? Like a letter, the signifier "could be possessed either by its sender or by its recipient" (106)
"[...] it remains that the letter is the symbol of a pact, and that, even should the recipient not assume the pact, the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic chain [...]" (107)
"[...] "Should they pass beneath its shadow, they become its reflection. Falling in possession of the letter--admirable ambiguity of language--its meaning possesses them" (E, 30/44). [...] the heart of Lacan's analysis remains that it is the signifier's "priority" over the signified (E, 29-29,/42) that lies at "the very foundation of intersubjectivity" (E, 20/35)." (107)
"[...] the signifier is in its very essence "that presence of death which makes of human life a reprieve obtained from morning to morning in the name of meanings whose sign is your crook" (E, 39/51): " 'You think you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your desires. Thus do they grow in force and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your shattered childhood' " (E, 40/52). What the signifier is urging us to do is to confront the simple fact of our destiny as subjects permanently and unavoidably subjected to the signifier, and Lacan alludes playfully to Heidegger [...]" (108)
"Lacan explicitly attacks the kind of psychoanalytic criticism that reduces works of literature to symptoms of their authors' neuroses: "To seek in works of art traces that provide information about the author is not to analyze the bearing of the work as such" (D, 3:15). [...] rather, it is essential that the analyst come to understand the special character of the relation between the work and its audience." (108-109)
Lee describes the Lacanian rewriting of the Oedipus complex within Lacan's reading of Hamlet:
"At the beginning of the final session devoted to the play, he repeats this claim, but with the crucial addition that "from one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning" (D, 7:32/39). Indeed, the key to understanding Lacan's reading of the play lies in grasping the intimate connection between desire and mourning, a connection which he relates directly to the castration complex." (109)
Hamlet is all about mourning (131) as in moving on from loss to a substitute: "the child can move on from the parents as objects of desire to new objects of desire only by mourning adequately the loss of his own status as the unique focus" (111)
"More crucially, Hamlet is forced, through the course of the play, to encounter and tot come to grips with a form of death that lies at the heart of desire: the death of narcissism accomplished through the subject's giving up his claims to be or to have the phallus. It is the symbolic castration involved in this process--a castration marked by the phallus as a signifier being repressed (or "veiled") and replaced by "the name of the father"--that Shakespeare's play presents on the stage." (110)
The Oedipus complex copes with outgrowing a primary narcissism, something lost, which is "abandoned for desire." (111)
"The child's desire for his parents must ultimately be transformed into desire for other persons; narcissism can only serve as a stage along the way to the subject's authentic assumption of desire." (111)
"In short, the child dissolves the Oedipus complex by giving up his own claim to be the phallus, the imaginary object of the Other's (and the mother's) desire, that extraordinary object that fully satisfies all possible desire, but such a traumatic loss can be surmounted only through a rich and complete process of mourning." (111)
"[...] the "normal" result of mourning is a "displacement" of this libido to a new object with narcissism serving only as an intermediate stage." (112)
The play of Hamlet is a tragedy of desire "because it displays as well the terrifying consequences of the narcissism that results from mourning too long postponed." (112)
"However, where Ernest Jones, for example, argues that Hamlet is simply caught in the grip of the Oedipus complex, confronted by the fact that "the thought of incest and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne," Lacan stresses the idea that Hamlet is actually face to face with the unavoidable human reality of symbolic castration." (112)
"What is at stake, then, when Lacan identifies castration as the fundamental theme of Hamlet, is nothing less than the truth of human life. In the fourth session of the seminar Lacan summarizes this truth in the formula, "there is no Other of the Other," noting that this is "the great secret of psychoanalysis" (D, 4:30-33)." (115) because there is no non-castrated subject.
"The secret spilled by the ghost is, of course, simply that there is no such thing as the phallus in the real: if we look to imaginary Others for the filling of the want-of-being that we recognize in ourselves, we must come to realize that the Other is castrated as well." (116)
"Lacan sums up this dimension of his reading of Hamlet by stressing that the special value of Shakespeare's play is that it reveals to us the fact that even the Other to which we turn for our identity is castrated [...]" (116)
"[...] the Other has no more of an identity than does the subject: the Other, too, is essentially castrated" (141)
Refoulement originaire or the cut [coupure] of language (128).
"[...] as speaking beings our castration lies precisely in this lack of a guaranteed truth or meaning." (116)
Lacan's discourse or “difficulty” comes from his accentuating the ambiguous fault lines in language, rather than clarifying these ruptures which appear naturally in speech. "His discourses on that which ruptures discourse quite precisely exhibit and even enact the very rupture in question." (134)
"Similarly, Lacan's concern with rupture leads to an ever-growing delight in multireferential and multilingual wordplay. The seminars of the 1960s and 1970s are punctuated with an astonishing number of neologisms, portmanteau words, and more or less spectacular puns." (134)
Love, death, and chance:
"L'amour is of course also la mort, and thus Lacan's title brings together the central psychoanalytic notions of love (l'amour), death (la mort), and chance (la mourre) in a punning definition of the unconscious: [...] that's love/that's death/that's chance!" (135)
Love itself is a primary symptom of "the inherently tragic character of human life." (132) Compared to women, in Lacan’s account, men occupy the weaker position (145) as "fundamentally useless objects" (146).
"Here Lacan maintains that as a result of Freud's discovery of the unconscious "the very center of the human being was no longer to be found at the place assigned to it by a whole humanist tradition" (Écrits, 401/114)." (Lee, page 73)
The Lacanian subject has a decentering effect, from which Lee derives the radical conclusion, that "there is no fixed center grounding the existence of anything in the human world." (141) There at the center, where consciousness imagines there is God, his central place stands empty. The centrality of lack or l'absence is a fundamental shibboleth of the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The universal absence has two upfront effects of deconstructing (1) authority as groundless, and (2) identity as arbitrary. A deconstruction of the subject is not new, since there has never been a stable center, around which identity could attach any permanent authority. The dream of a fixed center is the secret truth of Lacanian analysis, where "psychoanalytic dialogue has the effect of destroying this dream," (Lee, page 74). The false lure of stability was always imaginary.
“Psychoanalysis destroys the analysand’s illusions that his identity can be fully captured in the imaginary construct called the moi, and it does this quite simply by showing how this imaginary identity is riddled with gaps both created and covered over by the variety of symbolic systems into which he was born.” (74)
“The notion of totality is a dream of the imaginary moi, and the realization of the subject in the psychoanalytic dialogue has the effect of destroying this dream. This happens as a result of the analysand’s coming to realize the division within him, a division that Lacan suggests is fundamentally reflected in Hegel’s notion of the “unity” of universal and particular in the same subject.” (74)
It is the Hegelian influence on Lacan, center which is not one:
“Every positing of a “center” in a field of knowledge carries with it the implicit presumption that a “totality” can inevitably be arranged around such a center. In other words, to define a thing as having a center is to define a system in principle closed, within which that thing and its relations to other things can be exhaustively determined. It is precisely this assumption of totality with respect to the human subject that Lacan is attacking in the names of Freud and Hegel.” (74)
Jacques Lacan’s weekly or biweekly seminar began "informally" in 1951, in Rome in 1953, and until 1980 (31). In comparison with the time's dominant, philosophical trend in France, Lacan has what Lee calls “a stinging critique of Sartrean existentialism:"
"based on the central “illusion of autonomy” that the moi adopts as part of its misrecognized identity (E, 99/6). Lacan summarizes his position in a passage of remarkable directness: “Existentialism must be judged by the explanation it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder” (E, 99/6).” (page 24)
The knowledge of the analyst is "a learned ignorance" to avoid speaking. "Lacan goes further, however, to urge in a number of texts that the analyst make death (la mort) present in the analytic dialogue by playing dead." (93) Lee emphasizes the influence of Heidegger for emptiness and the nothing (90-91) and death as "ownmost" possibility (92). "It is death that gives human life meaning and that thus serves as the ex-centric center of our speaking and of our living." Denying death, "can be denied only imperfectly by its imaginary identifications with ideal images or by our acceptance of symbolic roles." (96) Identity involves this flight to the imaginary ego (96).
Jonathan Scott Lee explains the rationale of Lacan’s short or "variable-length analytic session" as punctuating the experience of the analysand (33). Analysis is monologue and punctuation, an ending (90). The cure is to mourn the past, reducing faith in imaginary identifications and symbolic roles (90)
"Lacan stresses the need for the subject to be liberated from the moi's illusory identity, going so far as to encourage "the disintegration of the imaginary unity constituted by the ego [moi]."" (96)
Lacan inveighs against imitating the analyst as a model (97). From "Ethics of Psychoanalysis:" Conform only to desire because the only thing anyone can be guilty of is having given up on one's desire (98). The neurotic and the psychotic are distinct for betraying desire in different failures to identify with the self in its own alienation.
“The neurotic manifests “the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I {je}” (E, 99/7) and remains caught up in an identity that experiences but does not recognize the various levels of her subjective alienation. The psychotic subject remains rooted in a “captation . . . by the situation” (E, 99/7), essentially unable to frame an identity of any sort distinct from that of the environment that envelops him.” (21)
Desire already has this psychotic structure, the desire of the other, and from the other, which Lacan terms "an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own affliction" (E, 319/104)." (94)
Desire has this repetitive structure, "eternally unsatisfied." (Lee, 95) It is Hegel's influence on Lacan, where the symbol is a murder of the real (94).
Language is not communication (75-77):
“From the point of view of information theory, human language contains many elements that are simply redundant and unnecessary, and this is powerful evidence that the simple communication of information is not the primary function of language.” (77)
Code and speech are what Lee terms the "social bond:" “what linguists are concerned with is the “social bond” essential to communication, rather than the individual and fundamentally accidental acts of communication facilitated by this social bond.” (35)
The relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary, not intentional (36). For the ambiguity of language, Lacan refers to the gap between writing and speech. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis has speech for its medium:
“Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration, in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient’s speech. [...] I shall show that there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence [...]” (quoting Lacan on page 38-39)
The passage Lee interprets “the unconscious is the dynamic product of the analysand and his (censoring) environment” (44)
“Psychoanalysis thus creates a situation in which the analysand is able to come to recognize his alienation and to experience the frustrating gap separating him from this alienated identity. A consequence of this recognition is the parallel recognition that the object of his desire belongs to this imaginary other: in effect, the analysand comes to recognize his own desire as inherently distant from himself.” (39-40)
Lacan's interpretation of Fort-Da as a symbol (51)
The dialectic surpasses intentions (49).
The word has a double absence, the absent thing it names, and the background system of any meaningful language (53). The meaning of any sign is separated from the past and the system by a gap or béance (54). Between signifier and signified, the signifier never purely indicates what is signified, but always refers to another signifier. There is no “outside” of language (55).
Even dreams have the structure of a language (48) with displacements of metaphor and metonymy (56).
The Big Other is a condition of experience, not any one person. It speaks in the Other (60) whose words carry such a weight that even what goes unsaid are anchor points (61).
Decentering the subject has in terms of behavior without an agent (63).
"the fundamental structural idea” behind linguistics (64)
Double split subject (65)
“In his paper of 1958, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan introduces the key idea that the phallus is essentially a signifier and not an imaginary construct or a real bodily organ. [...] As such a signifier, the phallus is not anything that any man or woman could possibly “have” (hence, it must not be confused with the penis). Indeed, this is the key to Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s notion of castration. Precisely because no one can have the phallus, it becomes that which all want to be. The phallus then serves to signify as well that fullness of being, that complete identity, the lack of which is the fact of our ineluctable want-of-being.” (66-67)
Recognition as gift (67) and the psychotic refusal of it (70-71):
“Thus, we seek in the other’s speech some recognition of the fact that we exist [...] It is, for example, the analysand’s demand for recognition addressed to the analyst that motivates his continual willingness to engage in free association in accordance with the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. Recognition is held out as the promised “gift” to be presented on the occasion of the analysand’s full assumption of his history.” (67)
“In the delirium of a psychotic one finds, on the other hand, a form of speaking that “has given up trying to make itself recognized” (E, 279/68), a solipsistic exploitation of the reserves of language without regard for the intersubjective dialectic of speech.” (68)
“The paradox of the neurotic’s speech is that it is speech not only unconscious of its repressed content but also largely unconscious of the fact of its being spoken. It is the task of the psychoanalyst, then, to help the neurotic analysand unfold not only the hidden meaning of his symptomatic discourse but also the hidden fact that there is a rhetoric of these symptoms.” (68-69)
Neurotic speech as hieroglyphics of hysteria (69)
Loss of meaning as symptom of self as other
“This is the fate of most of us caught up in the objectifying jargon of contemporary “scientific civilization.” If asked to speak about ourselves - for example, in the context of a psychoanalytic session - we are at first likely to fall into the stereotypical, quasi-scientific psychological descriptions with which we are regularly bombarded by the media. We are in effect given by our culture a means of “communication” by which we can avoid a genuine “speaking” about ourselves. We are speaking about ourselves without speaking about ourselves: this is the paradox of modern “alienation.”” (69)
"the failure of his discourse to achieve any sort of fixed signification that is characteristic of the psychotic's delirium." (71)
“Body of the signifier” (70) Subject is unconscious, not the center of consciousness (73).
Analyst recognition (79)
Gap as debt (81)
Analyst as one supposed to know (85)
Transference charged with meaning (85)
Silence as dialectical punctuation (86)
Short session (89)
The non-dupé (89) is another pun from Lacan.
Purloined letter (101) as Poe's symptom and signifier. The seminar on Poe is the example which Scott calls "Lacan's distinctively linguistic reading of Freud.” (101)
"Here he describes the "lesson of this seminar" in terms of showing how imaginary features of experience manifest the human being's "capture in a symbolic dimension." (101)
Inconsistency as the ex-centric center of the consistent self because consistency is imaginary.
"it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject" (E, 12/29)." (102)
In his analysis of repetition within Poe's purloined letter, Lacan triangulates "drama, its narration, and the conditions of that narration" (E, 12/29) as found in Poe" (102).
"[...] suggests that the signifier is unlike any other object (S 2, 232/198), inasmuch as it is simultaneously real and symbolic." (106)
""Being by nature symbol only of an absence," a signifier is simultaneously present and absent wherever it goes, unlike real objects, which are inevitably in their places (E, 24-25/39-40)." (106)
Lee considers "the very concept of a missing letter" to be one of many "recognizably Lacanian preoccupations about the signifier. The paradoxes of the missing letter revolve around two questions: in what place does a letter exist (E, 23-25/38-40), and to whom does a letter belong (E, 27-29/41-43)?" (106)
To whom does a letter belong? Like a letter, the signifier "could be possessed either by its sender or by its recipient" (106)
"[...] it remains that the letter is the symbol of a pact, and that, even should the recipient not assume the pact, the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic chain [...]" (107)
"[...] "Should they pass beneath its shadow, they become its reflection. Falling in possession of the letter--admirable ambiguity of language--its meaning possesses them" (E, 30/44). [...] the heart of Lacan's analysis remains that it is the signifier's "priority" over the signified (E, 29-29,/42) that lies at "the very foundation of intersubjectivity" (E, 20/35)." (107)
"[...] the signifier is in its very essence "that presence of death which makes of human life a reprieve obtained from morning to morning in the name of meanings whose sign is your crook" (E, 39/51): " 'You think you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your desires. Thus do they grow in force and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your shattered childhood' " (E, 40/52). What the signifier is urging us to do is to confront the simple fact of our destiny as subjects permanently and unavoidably subjected to the signifier, and Lacan alludes playfully to Heidegger [...]" (108)
"Lacan explicitly attacks the kind of psychoanalytic criticism that reduces works of literature to symptoms of their authors' neuroses: "To seek in works of art traces that provide information about the author is not to analyze the bearing of the work as such" (D, 3:15). [...] rather, it is essential that the analyst come to understand the special character of the relation between the work and its audience." (108-109)
Lee describes the Lacanian rewriting of the Oedipus complex within Lacan's reading of Hamlet:
"At the beginning of the final session devoted to the play, he repeats this claim, but with the crucial addition that "from one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning" (D, 7:32/39). Indeed, the key to understanding Lacan's reading of the play lies in grasping the intimate connection between desire and mourning, a connection which he relates directly to the castration complex." (109)
Hamlet is all about mourning (131) as in moving on from loss to a substitute: "the child can move on from the parents as objects of desire to new objects of desire only by mourning adequately the loss of his own status as the unique focus" (111)
"More crucially, Hamlet is forced, through the course of the play, to encounter and tot come to grips with a form of death that lies at the heart of desire: the death of narcissism accomplished through the subject's giving up his claims to be or to have the phallus. It is the symbolic castration involved in this process--a castration marked by the phallus as a signifier being repressed (or "veiled") and replaced by "the name of the father"--that Shakespeare's play presents on the stage." (110)
The Oedipus complex copes with outgrowing a primary narcissism, something lost, which is "abandoned for desire." (111)
"The child's desire for his parents must ultimately be transformed into desire for other persons; narcissism can only serve as a stage along the way to the subject's authentic assumption of desire." (111)
"In short, the child dissolves the Oedipus complex by giving up his own claim to be the phallus, the imaginary object of the Other's (and the mother's) desire, that extraordinary object that fully satisfies all possible desire, but such a traumatic loss can be surmounted only through a rich and complete process of mourning." (111)
"[...] the "normal" result of mourning is a "displacement" of this libido to a new object with narcissism serving only as an intermediate stage." (112)
The play of Hamlet is a tragedy of desire "because it displays as well the terrifying consequences of the narcissism that results from mourning too long postponed." (112)
"However, where Ernest Jones, for example, argues that Hamlet is simply caught in the grip of the Oedipus complex, confronted by the fact that "the thought of incest and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne," Lacan stresses the idea that Hamlet is actually face to face with the unavoidable human reality of symbolic castration." (112)
"What is at stake, then, when Lacan identifies castration as the fundamental theme of Hamlet, is nothing less than the truth of human life. In the fourth session of the seminar Lacan summarizes this truth in the formula, "there is no Other of the Other," noting that this is "the great secret of psychoanalysis" (D, 4:30-33)." (115) because there is no non-castrated subject.
"The secret spilled by the ghost is, of course, simply that there is no such thing as the phallus in the real: if we look to imaginary Others for the filling of the want-of-being that we recognize in ourselves, we must come to realize that the Other is castrated as well." (116)
"Lacan sums up this dimension of his reading of Hamlet by stressing that the special value of Shakespeare's play is that it reveals to us the fact that even the Other to which we turn for our identity is castrated [...]" (116)
"[...] the Other has no more of an identity than does the subject: the Other, too, is essentially castrated" (141)
Refoulement originaire or the cut [coupure] of language (128).
"[...] as speaking beings our castration lies precisely in this lack of a guaranteed truth or meaning." (116)
Lacan's discourse or “difficulty” comes from his accentuating the ambiguous fault lines in language, rather than clarifying these ruptures which appear naturally in speech. "His discourses on that which ruptures discourse quite precisely exhibit and even enact the very rupture in question." (134)
"Similarly, Lacan's concern with rupture leads to an ever-growing delight in multireferential and multilingual wordplay. The seminars of the 1960s and 1970s are punctuated with an astonishing number of neologisms, portmanteau words, and more or less spectacular puns." (134)
Love, death, and chance:
"L'amour is of course also la mort, and thus Lacan's title brings together the central psychoanalytic notions of love (l'amour), death (la mort), and chance (la mourre) in a punning definition of the unconscious: [...] that's love/that's death/that's chance!" (135)
Love itself is a primary symptom of "the inherently tragic character of human life." (132) Compared to women, in Lacan’s account, men occupy the weaker position (145) as "fundamentally useless objects" (146).
September 4, 2026
Excellent
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