The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Lacan's seminar of 1959–1960, established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1986 as Book VII of Le Séminaire. Lacan takes up Freud's das Ding as the lost and inaccessible Thing around which desire is organised, and on that basis redefines sublimation: no longer a change in the drive's aim, but the raising of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing. Art, in this account, is organised around the void that the Thing leaves. Through a reading of Antigone, the seminar asks what an ethics of desire would be for psychoanalysis. Commentators often read it as the point at which Lacan's teaching turns toward the Real, although whether there was such a turn is disputed.