Book
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse
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.
Main ideas
- Psychoanalysis rests on four fundamental concepts, the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive, and the question is not only whether it is a science but what science could include it.
- The unconscious first shows itself in the dream, the joke and the parapraxis, as a stumbling or a crack in what is said, a gap in which something else seeks to be realised; Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli is reread as the disappearance of the signifier 'Signor', the absolute master.
- Condensation is restated as a signifying operation with the effect of metaphor, which is essential for showing where the unconscious appears.
- Transference is located in the analyst's position as the 'subject supposed to know'.
- Jones's aphanisis is turned from the loss of desire into the fading of the subject, who disappears beneath the signifier that represents it.
- The gaze is treated as objet petit a, in the split between the eye and the gaze.
- Projection and introjection are not simply the reverse of each other: one belongs to a field dominated by the symbolic, the other to the imaginary.
What it shows
- 1964
Jacques Lacan reworked Transference
Locates transference in the analyst’s position as the ‘subject supposed to know’ (Seminar XI, given 1964, published 1973).
- 1957
Jacques Lacan reworked Condensation
Reads condensation as the superimposition of signifiers in which metaphor has its field, and displacement as metonymy (‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’, 1957). In Seminar XI (1964) he restates condensation as a signifying operation with the effect of metaphor and refers back to that article.
- 1957
Metaphor derives from Condensation
Lacan's metaphor is his linguistic reformulation of Freud's condensation. In Seminar XI he says his formula of metaphor is essential for showing where the unconscious appears, because signifying condensation is fundamental to it.
- 1964
Jacques Lacan reworked Aphanisis
Lacan took Jones's word but turned it from the loss of desire into the 'fading' of the subject, who disappears under the signifier that represents it.
- 1964
Jacques Lacan reworked Parapraxis
In Seminar XI Lacan groups the parapraxis with the dream and the witticism as the formations in which the unconscious first shows itself, as a stumbling, a failure, a crack in what is said or written: a gap in which something else, apparently intentional, seeks to be realised. In the same session he rereads Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli as the disappearance of the signifier 'Signor', the Herr or absolute master, which he links to death.
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Parapraxis derives from Unconscious
The parapraxis is defined by its source in the unconscious: an apparently accidental slip or act is the tolerated expression of thoughts and impulses that consciousness does not know of or will not know of. For Freud slips are, with dreams, the everyday evidence that the unconscious exists in the healthy; Lacan treats them as the very place where Freud went looking for it.
- 1964
Jacques Lacan critiqued Projection
Lacan lists projection with identification, idealisation and introjection as terms analysts handle loosely, as if their sense were self-evident. He rejects the common view that projecting and introjecting are simply the reverse of each other: he had long pointed out that one belongs to a field dominated by the symbolic and the other to the imaginary, so that in one dimension at least they never meet. In his earlier seminars it is projection that belongs to the imaginary.