Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII

Le Séminaire #8

by Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink (Translator), Jacques-Alain Miller (Editor)

"Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire - ágalma, the good object.

I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.

It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates's desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other - the object, ágalma - was at his mercy.

Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed - its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a."

Jacques Lacan

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Love, Theory, France

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Lacan's Transference, he is at his most delightfully erudite, rattling off close readings of other psychoanalysts, Greek philosophers, and his own earlier work. Some of my colleagues say that Lacan only "becomes himself" in his 11th seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, delivered after his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. While I don't think that is exactly true, even by that standard we see Lacan becoming himself in Transference. Lacan's perspective on transference is unique, making this one of the more interesting seminars for clinical practitioners. It is, despite its length, profoundly readable in comparison to some of his other material. Much of that is due to the nature of his various close readings he engages in throughout and the excellent discursive footnotes from Jacques-Alain Miller and Bruce Fink.

There's not a point to writing these reviews, really. Who is going to come to a Lacan seminar, seminar 8 of all things, and read it based on a review posted on Goodreads? But perhaps this review and others like it are something like partial blueprints, something to make it a little less likely one might bang their head upon a wall.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's the transference and "S.VIII Transference." What do you want to know?

I'll say a little about the latter and next to nothing about the former. The text's four sections alternate between literary forays (Plato and Claudel) and clinical expositions (castration and I/a). Lacan dwells on the Symposium in almost unbearable detail, not all of it self-evidently fruitful or rewarding. After Plato, Lacan on Plato, and Fink on Lacan's Plato, I feel inoculated against lovesickness, but also entertained and edified. The sessions on Claudel are not essential; you may safely rely on your favorite contemporary commentator's summary. I greatly prefer the heady theorizations to be found in the clinical sections. Almost every Seminar thus far has had several sessions dedicated to the objects and dialectics of desire and castration, yet even when Lacan claims to be repeating himself it sounds different. To me.

As for the transference, if you labored over "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principle of its Power" then little will be added to the definition of clinical dynamics, but Lacan does go into greater detail situating the phenomenon of transference in its relations to castration, desire, and the signifier. As the number 8 should reveal to you, it sits right between Ethics and Identification. Prolapsing just a bit, a familiarity with the desire/discourse of the analyst will also render much of S.VIII redundant. The patient seeks something (agalma), the analyst must know how to allow it to appear (phallophany) and still hold the last word in abeyance:

"This means that, regarding anyone, you can raise the question whether desire is totally destructive. With anyone, you can try to determine how far you will dare to go in questioning a being - at the risk to yourself of disappearing."

[Paulo · Rating 5 out of 5]

O final desse aqui me proporcionou dano cerebral permanente.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, Lacan's 8th seminar is an absolutely outstanding treatise on Plato's The Symposium, but the real surprise was that Lacan could actually be rather funny.

"You merely take
as your point of departure something as easy as pie, as clear as day:
intersubjectivity. I intersubjectivize you, you intersubjectivize me
by my chinny chin chin - the first one who laughs will get a well deserved slap."

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

rewarding myself for finishing this book by never reading a book again

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent the whole year reading this book, and have grown tremendously with it as a subject. The dangers of turning people into objects seems to be central to this book. Starting with the excellent reading of the Symposium, this book tied it all together. It exposes the Socratic power within the relationship of the analyst/analysand. I'm very glad I took this journey.

[Paresse McPearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I spoke of a ‘mirror [that] shows him a surface in which nothing is reflected’. At the time, this enigmatic comment led people to confuse what I was saying with some kind of more or less mystical ascetic exercise. You should now realize what I meant, or more precisely, you should begin to sense that in the analyst’s function as a mirror, it is not the mirror of specular assumption that is involved. I am speaking of the place that the analyst must occupy, even if it is in the mirror that the specular, virtual image must be produced.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar (except for the Claudel portion… sorry Lacan I’m uncultured and don’t know who Paul Claudel is). The sequential chapters on the speakers in Plato’s Symposium leaves a different interpretation of “love”that builds up to the meeting between Alcibiades and Socrates, which forms the basis of transference love. I also love that he calls the Symposium a meeting of “aging fairies” lmfao. The seminar also does a great job in clearly (for Lacan) re-elaborating on complex but central concepts such as the oral/anal stages, castration complex, ego-ideal vs ideal ego, and that like flower-vase-mirror diagram that he introduced in seminar 1 or 2.

Reading his seminars sequentially, I will say he really just does not finish the thoughts he sets out in the beginning of the chapters or sections, always commenting that he’s running out of time, but I guess that is somewhat his analytical theory in practice. Also maybe I just do not understand, and maybe that’s the point.

[Billie Pritchett]

More enigmatic Lacan.

To summarize, Lacan explains in the most roundabout way that in the clinical setting, the therapist has to, from the outset, efface his or her own personality, and naturally this leads to several problems related to what is called transference. Transference in the clinical setting is all the baggage the patient puts on his or her therapist, good or bad. But rather than being bad in terms of outcome, the transference that develops in the therapeutic relationship allows the patient to realize he or she is the person who manifests his or her desires and becomes the occasion for the therapist to indirectly get the patient to take seriously his or her own wants and to take responsibility for them.

Perhaps the cutest thing in the book is when Lacan reinterprets Christ's injunction "to love your neighbor as yourself." In a clinical setting, this means for the therapist letting himself or herself become the object of transference so that the patient can come to love himself or herself. In other words, the most loving, caring thing the therapist can do is this self-effacement that allows the patient self-discovery.

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nesse seminário, Lacan fala sobre transferência, e, consequentemente, sobre amor. Para isso, ele analisa com profundidade O Banquete, de Platão, que é um dos textos de referência sobre o amor até hoje, e constrói a tese do amor como uma metáfora. Para ele, no amor você oferece, principalmente, a sua falta. É neste seminário que estão alguns dos aforismos mais famosos de Lacan, como "Amar é dar o que não se tem".

Depois de passar mais de um ano me debruçando sobre ele, posso dizer que esse é um dos meus seminários favoritos, junto com o quinto, que foi o primeiro que eu li. Foi um dos seminários em que eu senti que o Lacan mais se ateve ao assunto que se propôs a falar, e falou de maneira mais clara. O texto de Platão a que ele se refere constantemente também é muito bom, vale a pena ler os dois juntos. Me ajudou imensamente na dissertação.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lacan begins with a reading of Plato's The Symposium, except that he ultimately has nothing new to say: "What the one is missing is not what is hidden in the other" is about as boilerplate as Lacan gets. (Though there are some interesting claims: first, that the third-hand nature of the account is in order to generate the "illusion of authenticity;" second, that Aristophanes has the hiccups because him and Plato have been laughing ("splitting [their] sides") throughout Pausanias' speech.) Also unclear: whether Lacan is discussing love in general, or transference in particular, or whether he collapses the two due to viewing them as equivalent. But if the upshot of the entire discussion is merely to return us to the objet a in any case, then we have learned nothing new, and this seminar thus sits awkwardly as nearly superfluous within Lacan's œuvre.

[Owlseyes]

"Socrates claims to know nothing, except to be able to recognise what love is and, he tells us (I come to a testimony of Plato, specifically in the Lysis) namely to recognise infallibly, wherever he encounters them, where the lover is and where the beloved."
On page 4

[Sergey Kochergan]

agalma

[Brenda Lopes]

Caps. lidos para curso de Filosofia da Psicanálise:
I / II / V /X / XI

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great re-reading! I learned so much - love his disquisition on Plato and Socrates.







This was another one I struggled with. I loved his reading on Plato’s Symposium, which taught me how to read Plato from here on out and the Paul Claudel trilogy sounds interesting, but I found his style to be too much in the middle and near the end. I’m somewhat bummed out that I needed supplementary material to help me grasp what he said overall and how that supplemental material revealed how little I was grasping from the seminar, in regards to the transference itself. The analyst’s desire must remain an enigma - I do find this as a good tip for many symbolic titles that come with “phallic” authority. I’m definitely glad to have found some Lacanian psychoanalysts in my city and will be undergoing a psychoanalysis sometime soon in the future woohoo! I truly wonder how many people apprehend his “inverted vase schema” and how many just “understand it for the sake of it” because my eyes glaze over for most of the “situated within the cone of barred S, we find the function i(a) - synonymous with the ideal-ego - which finds its mainspring at the point of S(barred A). This is to illustrate for you all the Other’s own lack in the eyes of the subject that comes to pave over this lack with the specular image of the other’s ego as well as their own alongside its fantasy supplement”.

4 stars because even though the lack isn’t usually from my reading, but from his style, but this time it seems I may have missed much of the plot.

I’m looking forward to reading Bruce Fink’s explication before moving on to Seminar X. Did y’all read the unpublished Seminar IX from LacaninIreland.com or just skip it?

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Key takeaway of the first and best part of the book: To love is to give what you don't have, the same way Penia, who is the incarnation of poverty in Plato's Symposium, got pregnant with Poros, who is the incarnation of opulence, while he was asleep, as he symbolizes the figure of the erômenos (the one who receives love) while she plays the role of the erastès (the one who gives love). As you don't have what you give and expect to receive from the other something you lack but which he most probably doesn't have, you start building up phantasms that make it up ('agalmata', defined as the point up to which the subject of love disappears behind the phantasm it creates). Finishing reading this, I just felt sad Lacan never wrote anything about Proust.