The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.