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(The Freudian Thing)

Let’s dive into the dense and rich text of The Freudian Thing by Jacques Lacan, sentence by sentence, unpacking its layered meaning for a Lacanian psychoanalyst. Each sentence opens a portal to Lacan’s critique of psychoanalysis as a symbolic, political, and historical movement, rooted in the Freudian tradition yet displaced by time, culture, and institutional betrayal.

“In these days when Vienna, to make itself heard once again through the voice of the Opera, reprises in a poignant variation what has always been its mission at a cultural convergence point that it has managed to turn into a concert,”

Lacan opens with a poetic evocation of Vienna, characterizing it as a city that historically acted as a nexus for European culture, now reaffirming this role through the universal language of music—specifically, opera. For a Lacanian, this musical metaphor immediately resonates with the notion of the signifier and voice—the voix that operates in the Real but is mediated through the Symbolic. The “concert” metaphor can be read as a space where disparate signifiers come into structured resonance, echoing Lacan’s view of language as a structuring force. The idea that Vienna has made of itself a “concert” evokes the harmonization of differences into a symbolic order, which sets the stage for the dissonance Lacan will soon introduce.

“I do not believe I am out of season in evoking here the election by which it will remain, this time forever, linked to a revolution in knowledge on the scale of COPERNICUS’ name: understand, the eternal site of FREUD’s discovery,”

Lacan places Freud’s discovery alongside Copernicus’s heliocentric revolution. This is central to Lacanian thought: Freud displaces the human subject from the center of consciousness, just as Copernicus displaced Earth from the center of the cosmos. The “election” refers to Vienna’s privileged, though perhaps accidental, role as the cradle of psychoanalysis. To speak of this in seasonal terms—“out of season”—implies a temporality of discourse, aligned with his critique of history and cultural forgetting. For Lacan, this “revolution in knowledge” is epistemic and structural: Freud introduces the unconscious as a structured system—one which Lacan later reads through Saussure and Lévi-Strauss.

“if one can say that, through it, the true center of the human being is no longer located where an entire humanist tradition had assigned it.”

Here, Lacan foregrounds the decentering of the Cartesian subject. The “true center” of man—formerly located in consciousness, reason, or the soul—is dislodged by Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Lacanian psychoanalysis thrives on this de-centering: the subject is split, divided by language, and inhabited by an Other it cannot fully grasp. This is a challenge to humanist ideals which privilege autonomy, self-knowledge, and rationality. The “entire humanist tradition” is undermined by Freud’s insight that the subject is not master in its own house (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden), a phrase Lacan interprets as the call for symbolic integration of what is structurally repressed.

“Doubtless, even for prophets whose country was not entirely deaf to them, the moment must come when their eclipse is observed, even if this happens after their death.”

Here Lacan acknowledges the fate of intellectual prophets like Freud, whose message, though initially heard, eventually faces erasure or distortion. The “eclipse” suggests a temporary or cyclical obscuration—not total annihilation, but symbolic occlusion. In Lacanian terms, this reflects the fate of the truth in the Symbolic Order: always partial, always subject to foreclosure or misrecognition (méconnaissance). This prepares us for Lacan’s critique of how Freud’s legacy has been mishandled by the institutions that claim to preserve it.

“A certain reserve is appropriate for foreigners regarding the forces that bring about such a phase effect.”

This sentence introduces a subtle distancing. Lacan, as a Frenchman speaking in Vienna, signals that the critique to come is directed not at Austria per se but at the psychoanalytic community that has failed to sustain the Freudian rupture. “Phase effect” indicates a historical shift—perhaps a transformation in the Symbolic coordinates governing psychoanalytic discourse. The foreigner, for Lacan, always occupies a position of extimacy—simultaneously inside and outside the discourse they speak within. This is the structural position of the analyst: intimate with the discourse, but forever Othered by it.

“Moreover, the return to FREUD, of which I am here the harbinger, situates itself elsewhere: precisely where it is sufficiently summoned by the symbolic scandal that Dr. Alfred WINTERSTEIN, present here as President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was able to highlight as it unfolded—namely, at the inauguration of the commemorative plaque marking the house where FREUD elaborated his heroic work.”

Here Lacan makes his political gesture explicit: he claims the position of the one who announces the “return to Freud.” This return is not nostalgic; it is symbolic, structural, and critical. The “symbolic scandal” refers to the fact that the homage to Freud was not initiated by the psychoanalytic institution, but by the civic domain—revealing a symptomatic disavowal by the analytic community. This failure to properly commemorate Freud is not merely an oversight—it is a symptom, and one that speaks volumes about the unconscious of the analytic institution itself.

“The issue is not that this monument was not dedicated to FREUD by his fellow citizens, but that it was not due to the international association of those who live under his patronage.”

Lacan continues his critique of the analytic movement, pointing out that those who owe their entire theoretical and clinical existence to Freud failed to honor him. The international psychoanalytic associations, caught in the institutional and ideological compromises of the post-war period, have betrayed the symbolic debt owed to Freud. For Lacan, this betrayal is not merely organizational—it is theoretical. It speaks to a loss of rigor, a forgetting of the structural and ethical radicality of Freud’s discovery.

“This symptomatic failure betrays a renunciation that does not originate from this land, where FREUD, by virtue of its tradition, was but a passing guest, but rather from the very field he bequeathed to us, and from those to whom he entrusted its guardianship.”

Lacan shifts blame away from Vienna and places it squarely on the psychoanalytic movement. Freud, the guest of Austrian culture, becomes a permanent exile within his own legacy. The “renunciation” is one of the Real—of that unbearable kernel of truth that Freud uncovered. The “field” Freud bequeathed is psychoanalysis itself; the betrayal is structural, a turning away from the radical core of his theory. Lacan is positioning himself not as a reformer, but as a returner—a guardian of the Symbolic truth of Freud’s message.

“I mean the psychoanalytic movement, where things have come to such a point that the rallying cry of a return to FREUD signifies a reversal.”

This is a turning point in the text. For Lacan, the slogan “return to Freud” has become necessary precisely because what passes for psychoanalysis has veered so far from its source. The “reversal” is not simply political but epistemological: psychoanalysis has inverted itself, substituting adaptation and normalization for the structural insights into desire, repression, and the unconscious. Lacan’s return is not nostalgic but diagnostic—it seeks to recover the lack at the heart of the Freudian subject.

“Many contingencies are knotted in this history, ever since the first sound of the Freudian message resonated with its echoes in the Viennese bell, spreading its waves far and wide.”

Now Lacan evokes history as a chain of signifiers—contingencies knotted, suggesting both overdetermination and symbolic entanglement. The “Freudian message” begins in Vienna but is rapidly disseminated across geopolitical and symbolic borders. The bell metaphor invokes both religious and civic symbolism—a call to gather, a tocsin of truth. For Lacan, this is the function of the signifier: to echo beyond its origin, to structure a field retroactively.

“These waves seemed stifled in the muffled collapses of the First World War. Their propagation resumed with the immense human rupture fomented by the Second, which became their most powerful vehicle. Tocsin of hatred and tumult of discord, panic breath of war—it was on their pulse that FREUD’s voice reached us, as we witnessed the diaspora of those who carried it, whom persecution did not target by chance.”

Lacan here frames the dissemination of Freud’s thought within the seismic shifts of world history. The “waves” are the echoes of the Freudian message—disruptive, subversive, and expansive. The First World War functions as a muting force, not because Freud’s ideas lost validity, but because the global collapse suspended the Symbolic machinery necessary for their reception. The “muffled collapses” suggest not only death and destruction but also a breakdown in the Symbolic network—the silence of discourse under the roar of war.

But Lacan identifies the Second World War as paradoxically fertile ground for the spread of psychoanalysis. The “immense human rupture” brings with it a radical reorganization of global relations and subjectivities, creating a new field in which the Freudian voice, previously stifled, can resonate. The imagery—“tocsin,” “tumult,” “panic breath”—evokes the Real trauma of war, the encounter with death and unthinkable loss. It is on this affective and historical “pulse” that Freud’s message rides, carried by the diaspora of Jewish analysts and intellectuals.

Persecution, Lacan insists, was not arbitrary. Those who carried Freud’s voice were targeted precisely because their knowledge was disruptive. Psychoanalysis, rooted in an encounter with truth beyond ideology, becomes politically dangerous. The analyst here is both a historical subject and a carrier of the unconscious’s truth, rendered all the more visible (and vulnerable) under the gaze of fascist regimes. Lacan is implying a structural link between the content of Freud’s discovery and the political forces that sought to annihilate its bearers.

“This train was destined not to stop until the boundaries of our world, where it reverberated in places where it is not fair to say that history loses its meaning, since it finds its limit there; where it would be a mistake to think history is absent, since, already knotted over several centuries, it is even heavier with the abyss drawn by its too-short horizon. But it is where history is denied with a categorical will that lends its style to enterprises: a historical vacuum of culture, peculiar to the United States of North America.”

Now Lacan shifts to the trajectory of psychoanalysis as it travels—like a “train”—toward the so-called ends of the Western world, particularly the United States. The phrase “boundaries of our world” isn’t merely geographical; it’s symbolic. Psychoanalysis enters a culture in which the structuring function of historical discourse has collapsed into something else—something Lacan provocatively terms a “historical vacuum.”

Importantly, Lacan is not claiming the U.S. lacks history, but rather that it relates to history in a structurally different way. The “limit” of history here is a Lacanian limit—the point where the Symbolic fails, or becomes saturated. The “abyss” drawn by the “too-short horizon” suggests a flattening of temporality, a refusal to acknowledge the unconscious inscription of the past upon the present. This is the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the erasure of the structuring Law that binds the subject to its lineage.

This critique culminates in the phrase “a historical vacuum of culture,” which for Lacan characterizes the American reception of psychoanalysis. The categorical denial of history—be it through consumerism, pragmatism, or technocratic ideology—structures the symbolic style of the American analytic enterprise. It’s a culture where depth is replaced by function, where history is not interpreted but managed or ignored. Lacan is building toward his critique of how Freudian psychoanalysis was reinterpreted—and diluted—in the U.S. context.

“It is this historical vacuum that defines the assimilation required to be recognized in the society constituted by this culture. It was to this summons that a group of emigrants had to respond—emigrants who, in order to be recognized, could assert only their difference, but whose function presupposed history at its foundation, since their discipline was the one that had re-established the bridge uniting modern man with ancient myths. The conjuncture was too powerful, the opportunity too tempting, not to yield to the offered temptation: to abandon the principle and let the function rest on difference.”

In this passage, Lacan describes the double bind faced by émigré psychoanalysts in the U.S.—primarily those fleeing Nazi Europe. These analysts arrived in a culture structured by assimilationist demands. To gain legitimacy, they had to emphasize their difference (as Europeans, as intellectuals, as analysts), yet the very discipline they practiced—psychoanalysis—was founded on an historical consciousness and mythic continuity that contradicted the American cultural logic.

This is a key Lacanian moment: the distinction between function and principle. Psychoanalysis functions through interpretation, transference, the dialectic of desire—but its principle is the structured absence at the heart of the subject. In American culture, where assimilation often erases the subject’s link to historical lack, psychoanalysis becomes vulnerable to redefinition through difference (ethnic, linguistic, theoretical) rather than through its core principle—the unconscious structured like a language.

Lacan points to the immense temptation faced by analysts in exile: to adapt to the dominant Symbolic Order by giving up the structural truths of their practice. He doesn’t reduce this to opportunism but acknowledges it as an almost irresistible conjuncture. The sacrifice of principle in favor of function echoes the larger shift from structural psychoanalysis to ego psychology—a turn Lacan criticizes as a betrayal of the Freudian insight.

“Let us fully understand the nature of this temptation. It is not one of ease or profit. It is certainly easier to erase the principles of a doctrine than the stigmas of its origin, more profitable to subordinate its function to demand. But here, reducing its function to its difference means succumbing to an internal mirage of the function itself, one that grounds it in this difference. It means reverting to the reactionary principle that covers the duality between the one who suffers and the one who heals, the opposition between the one who knows and the one who is ignorant.”

Here Lacan offers his most direct critique of the transformation psychoanalysis underwent in the American context. He makes clear that this transformation was not necessarily cynical—it was not driven by greed or laziness. Rather, it was a profound ideological misrecognition: a méconnaissance of the function of psychoanalysis.

The “internal mirage” is crucial. It is the illusion that psychoanalysis functions because it offers expertise, healing, or difference—when in fact its power lies in its confrontation with the subject’s lack, its insistence on the Real beyond any imaginary mastery. By grounding the analyst’s function in “difference” (as expert, authority, European, Jew, intellectual), the movement reverts to the medical model Freud had ruptured—the old binary of doctor and patient, knower and sufferer.

This is, for Lacan, the ultimate betrayal: not only of Freud’s discovery, but of the structure of the subject itself. To re-establish the analyst as the one who “knows” over the one who “is ignorant” is to collapse psychoanalysis into pedagogy or social management. Lacan is warning that psychoanalysis becomes reactionary not when it loses influence, but when it forgets its own lack—when it becomes blind to the very unconscious that defines it.

These sentences outline a scathing, yet deeply structural critique of the way Freud’s legacy was distorted in its transatlantic passage. Lacan’s “return to Freud” is not a historical reenactment but a reactivation of the psychoanalytic act at its foundation—where the subject is divided, history is symbolic, and the analyst is not a master, but a witness to the lack that structures the speaking being.

“How can one not apologize for holding this opposition as true when it is real? How can one not slip from there into becoming managers of souls in a social context that demands such service? The most corrupting of comforts is intellectual comfort, just as the worst corruption is that of the best.”

Lacan here points to a dangerous conflation: when the analytic act is absorbed by the social demand for therapeutic reassurance, it risks becoming merely a moralizing or managerial function. The “opposition” in question is the binary between the one who knows and the one who does not—the analyst and analysand—an opposition that psychoanalysis is structurally tasked with deconstructing. Yet Lacan acknowledges how “real” this division can feel, especially in institutional settings that press the analyst to assume the role of master, healer, or moral guide.

When Lacan speaks of “managers of souls,” he evokes a religious function cloaked in secular garb. This is the analyst reduced to a social worker of the psyche, a technician of adaptation rather than a subject who listens for the truth of the unconscious. The critique lands particularly on the postwar American psychoanalytic establishment, where the analyst’s role was increasingly aligned with medical and normative social ideals. “Intellectual comfort” corrupts because it invites the analyst to settle into knowledge, into mastery—rather than dwelling in the lack that defines their ethical position. Lacan draws on a Spinozist tone here: the greater the good (psychoanalysis), the more terrible its corruption when it betrays its foundational truth.

“This is how FREUD’s words to JUNG, as reported directly from him, resonate. When both men, invited by Clark University, approached the port of New York and the famous statue lighting the universe: ‘They do not know that we are bringing them the plague.’”

This famous anecdote—Freud’s grim joke to Jung upon their arrival in America—serves for Lacan as a prophetic statement, freighted with irony, truth, and unconscious insight. The “plague” Freud refers to is, of course, psychoanalysis itself. Not a gift, not a cure, but a disruptive force that undermines the ideological coordinates of identity, morality, and mastery. This statement, in Lacanian terms, is a signifier of foreboding—a sign that the knowledge Freud brought would not be assimilated without distortion.

The Statue of Liberty, “lighting the universe,” becomes a phallic symbol here, representing the Enlightenment ideal of rational self-governance and freedom. Freud’s remark subverts this setting: what psychoanalysis brings is not liberation in the American ideological sense, but confrontation with the unconscious—an ethics of division, lack, and drive. For Lacan, this moment marks the original sin of psychoanalysis in America: it arrives as plague but is received as medicine, already misrecognized.

“…these words return to sanction a hybris whose antiphrasis and darkness do not extinguish its disturbing brilliance. Nemesis needed only to seize upon this word to entrap its author. We might fear that she included a first-class return ticket. In truth, if something of this nature occurred, we have only ourselves to blame. For Europe seems rather to have faded from the concern, the style, if not the memory, of those who departed from it, with the repression of their bitter memories.”

Lacan now deepens the tragic irony. Freud’s words, spoken with ironic clarity, return with a mythic weight. The reference to hybris and Nemesis casts Freud in the mold of a Greek tragic hero: one who speaks a truth whose consequences exceed intention. Lacan’s classical register elevates the stakes—this is not merely a political misstep, but a structural unfolding of fate through language. The “antiphrasis and darkness” refer to the double meaning of Freud’s statement: it is both a curse and a truth.

The “first-class return ticket” implies that the misrecognition of psychoanalysis in America produced a symbolic backlash—perhaps even a return of the plague to its origin. Lacan does not locate blame in external forces but within the analytic community itself. The analysts who emigrated left not only Europe, but also the very cultural memory, the symbolic heritage, and the historical trauma that structured their knowledge. Their repression of “bitter memories” mirrors the very psychic mechanisms Freud theorized—thus instituting a repetition compulsion at the collective level.

“We will not complain about this oblivion if it leaves us freer to present to you the project of a return to FREUD, as it is proposed by some in the teaching of the French Psychoanalytic Society. This is not about a return of the repressed but about leveraging the antithesis represented by the phase the psychoanalytic movement has traversed since FREUD’s death, to demonstrate what psychoanalysis is not, and to seek with you the means to restore what has continued to sustain it, even through its deviation—namely, the primary meaning that FREUD preserved through his mere presence and which it is now our task to elucidate.”

Here Lacan formally introduces his own position: the French “return to Freud.” But this return is not nostalgic, nor a resurrection of a lost object. It is not a “return of the repressed” in the usual psychoanalytic sense. Rather, it’s a dialectical return—using the deviation, the “antithesis” produced by post-Freudian psychoanalysis (particularly in the Anglo-American context), to clarify and recover what psychoanalysis is not.

The key concept here is the “primary meaning” that Freud sustained. Lacan is not referring to a fixed doctrine, but to Freud’s unwavering insistence on the rigor of the unconscious. The French Psychoanalytic Society, in Lacan’s framing, becomes a site not of fidelity to Freud’s conclusions, but of fidelity to Freud’s method—his ethical stance, his relation to the Real of the symptom, and his refusal to turn psychoanalysis into adaptation. Lacan casts his return as an act of elucidation—bringing to light what has persisted despite deviation, precisely because of its structural necessity.

“How could this meaning be lacking when it is attested to us in the clearest and most organic work imaginable? And how could it leave us hesitant when the study of this work shows us that its stages and turns are commanded by the concern—unfailingly effective in FREUD—to maintain it in its initial rigor?”

Lacan affirms here that Freud’s oeuvre remains coherent and internally structured, not by doctrine, but by a relentless ethical and conceptual discipline. The “most organic work imaginable” suggests that Freud’s writings do not merely contain theoretical propositions, but unfold like a living organism—each part functioning in relation to the whole.

The “initial rigor” is key. Freud did not drift from his foundations; rather, he constantly returned to and reworked them, always tethered to the ethical demand of listening to the unconscious. Lacan sees in this a model for psychoanalytic work: the analyst, like Freud, must remain faithful to the structure of the unconscious, even as theories evolve. Lacan’s insistence on rigor opposes any tendency toward therapeutic dilution or ideological compromise.

“Texts comparable to those which human veneration, in other times, has endowed with the highest attributes, in that they withstand the test of this discipline of commentary, whose virtue we rediscover by employing it according to tradition—not merely to replace a statement in the context of its time, but to measure whether the answer it offers to the questions it poses is or is not surpassed by the answer we find there to the questions of the present.”

Finally, Lacan elevates Freud’s texts to the level of canonical works—texts worthy of commentary, not passive consumption. This is an implicit parallel with scriptural hermeneutics, medieval exegesis, or rabbinic tradition: commentary becomes a way of keeping the text alive, of unfolding its layers in response to new historical and subjective questions.

But Lacan is clear: the purpose is not merely historical contextualization. Rather, it is to ask whether the text speaks to our own moment—whether Freud’s formulations still respond, or resist, our contemporary questions. This is the radical task of psychoanalysis: not to preserve Freud as a figure, but to let his texts function as subjects in their own right—insisting, contradicting, and demanding interpretation. In this way, Lacan anchors his own teaching not in authority but in commentary, in a return that is structured like a desire.

These passages of Lacan’s address do not offer a solution, but a position: to return to Freud is to return to the ethical act of listening—to the subject’s division, to the structure of language, and to the radical discontinuity at the heart of knowledge itself.

“Will I teach you anything by telling you that these texts…”

Lacan begins here with an ironic modesty, signaling that what follows may seem self-evident to a psychoanalytic audience but is, in fact, a profound assertion. The phrase “Will I teach you anything…” is less rhetorical than strategic—it invites a revaluation of something that might be presumed familiar: Freud’s texts themselves. Lacan is announcing that what appears known is in fact under-read, under-interpreted, or read through the wrong lens. For a Lacanian analyst, this marks the return not to content but to reading itself—as an act that is never completed, always bound to the objet a of interpretation, to the gap in knowledge that generates desire.

“…to which I have been dedicating a two-hour seminar every Wednesday from November to July for four years now, without having yet covered more than a quarter of them, even assuming that my commentary presupposes their entirety…”

Here Lacan places himself, and his seminar, within the time and labor of serious textual engagement. The scope—two hours per week, across the academic year, for four years—emphasizes the density and inexhaustibility of Freud’s writing. Yet even more telling is his assertion that even presupposing their entirety, only a quarter has been covered. That is, Lacan does not read Freud linearly or completely, but structurally—presupposing the system in order to work through its moments of rupture and truth.

This is not a confession of failure but a demonstration of the psychoanalytic position itself: there is no whole, no complete mastery of the text, only a traversing of the field of the Other. The “seminar” as such becomes a model of analytic work—persistent, circular, driven by the Real that cannot be symbolized in full.

“…have offered both me and those who follow me in this task the surprise of genuine discoveries?”

Lacan insists that Freud’s texts, far from being doctrinal relics, continue to produce discoveries—not by being mined for data, but by being read. The surprise signals a logic of objet a: the unexpected element that emerges not from the known content of the text, but from the structure of its enunciation. “Genuine discoveries” are those that were latent in the text but required a specific reading position to be made visible. They are not inventions, but revelations—an echo of how the unconscious reveals itself through symptoms or slips. The seminar becomes the site where knowledge emerges as a function of lack, not accumulation.

“These discoveries range from concepts left unexplored to clinical details uncovered through our exploration, testifying to how much the field FREUD experienced exceeded the avenues he undertook to open for us, and to what extent his observation—sometimes giving the impression of being exhaustive—was in fact little constrained by what he had to demonstrate.”

Lacan makes a crucial distinction here between what Freud theorized and what his clinical material implied. Freud’s “field”—the total space of his encounter with the unconscious—extends beyond his formalized concepts. There are paths in his texts that he opened only partially, or perhaps never followed, yet which Lacanian analysis can trace.

The suggestion that Freud’s “observation” was not limited by “what he had to demonstrate” speaks to the Freudian mode of theorizing as driven not by empirical necessity but by a structural logic—he listened and recorded, even when he could not yet conceptualize what he heard. For Lacan, this is what makes Freud’s work still fertile: it is full of unexploited implications, signifiers that remain to be reinscribed. These unexplored trails become the terrain for Lacan’s own metapsychological expansions—into jouissance, the object a, and the structure of language.

“Who among the practitioners of disciplines foreign to analysis, whom I have guided to read these texts, has not been moved by this research in action—whether it is the one we follow in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the observation of the Wolf Man, or in Beyond the Pleasure Principle?”

Lacan here testifies to the resonance of Freud’s method even beyond psychoanalytic circles. The texts cited are emblematic: The Interpretation of Dreams as the foundational deciphering of the unconscious structured like a language; the Wolf Man case as a singular construction of infantile sexuality, trauma, and fantasy; and Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the moment where Freud confronts the death drive and the limits of pleasure as an organizing principle.

What Lacan highlights is Freud’s research in action—not research as in science, but as in analytic praxis, where theory is generated through the encounter with the symptom, the case, the singularity. Those outside analysis are “moved” not by conclusions, but by the method, the structure of inquiry Freud pursues. This is the model Lacan advocates: not system-building, but the continuous elaboration of truth through the analytic situation and its transference effects.

“What an exercise in forming minds, and what a message to lend one’s voice to! What a validation, too, of the methodological value of this training and of the truth-effect of this message, when students to whom you transmit these texts bring you testimony of a transformation—sometimes occurring overnight—in their practice, which becomes simpler and more effective even before it becomes more transparent to them.”

This sentence touches the pedagogical dimension of Lacan’s return to Freud. He presents the reading of Freud not as scholasticism but as formation—the production of the analytic subject through engagement with the text. The “message” is not one of dogma, but of subjective transformation. That it can occur “overnight” testifies to the power of the signifier: something is heard, not merely understood, that restructures the analyst’s relation to their practice.

The practice becomes “simpler and more effective”—not because it is reduced, but because it aligns with the Real that analysis addresses. This is a fidelity not to a technique, but to a position of listening, a place within the discourse of the unconscious. Transparency follows transformation, not the other way around—highlighting the Lacanian idea that understanding comes after the act, as a retroactive effect of the signifying chain.

“I cannot give you a comprehensive account of this work in the brief address I owe to the kindness of Professor HOFF for offering me this space of high memory, to the agreement of my views with those of Dr. Dozent ARNOLD, who had the idea to present it now before you, or to my excellent and long-standing relations with Mr. Igor CARUSO, who could anticipate the welcome it would receive in Vienna. But I cannot forget the listeners I owe to the graciousness of Mr. SUSINI, director of our French Institute in Vienna.”

Here Lacan momentarily steps out of the theoretical register to acknowledge the institutional and interpersonal scaffolding that made his presence in Vienna possible. But this is not mere politeness—it is a nod to the Symbolic order that enables speech. The “space of high memory” invokes the weight of Vienna as Freud’s city, the locus of psychoanalysis’s origin, now reoccupied by Lacan’s return.

The gesture also aligns with Lacan’s ethics: he recognizes the Other that permits enunciation. His references to Professor Hoff, Dr. Arnold, Caruso, and Susini are acknowledgements of the institutional discourse within which he speaks—a necessary frame for any act of interpretation. This reminds the analyst that speech is never solitary; it is always addressed, always situated.

“And this is why, when it comes to the meaning of this return to FREUD, which I profess here, I must ask myself whether, given that they are less prepared than specialists to hear me, I risk disappointing them.”

Lacan returns to the audience—to the position of enunciation and its reception. The return to Freud is not merely a reading project, but a profession, an act of commitment within the transference to Freud’s legacy. But Lacan is acutely aware of the gap between what he says and what is heard—between the analyst’s speech and the Other’s ear.

The “risk of disappointing” stems not from inadequacy, but from the structure of transmission. The non-specialist is not unworthy, but differently positioned in relation to the discourse. This final hesitation is fully Lacanian: to speak is always to risk misrecognition, to risk becoming a master where one would be a subject. And yet, it is only in risking this disappointment that the return to Freud can be sustained as a living discourse—one that still has the capacity to surprise, to transform, and to structure desire.

“THE ADVERSARY.”

Lacan isolates this phrase to mark a pivotal turn in his discourse. It is both a rhetorical device and a conceptual summons. With this single word, he conjures not merely opposition, but the structural necessity of antagonism in psychoanalysis. The adversary is not simply a critic or institutional obstacle—it is, at a deeper level, the Real that resists symbolization, the unconscious as that which disrupts the ego’s mastery. It could just as well name the internal resistance of psychoanalysts themselves to the radical implications of Freud’s discovery. For a Lacanian reader, this sudden announcement functions like an analytic intervention—short, cutting, and pregnant with disquiet.

“Here, I am certain of my answer: ‘Absolutely not, if what I am about to say is indeed as it must be.’ The meaning of a return to FREUD is a return to the meaning of FREUD.”

In the face of this adversarial position—be it from institutional inertia, ideological distortion, or personal misrecognition—Lacan responds not defensively but with a pointed affirmation. The structure of this statement is critical: “Absolutely not,” but only if what he says follows a certain necessary logic. He introduces a conditionality rooted in fidelity to structure, not opinion. Then, in a kind of tautology loaded with Lacanian resonance, he asserts: to return to Freud is to return to the meaning of Freud. That is, not to the man, nor to his historical figure, nor even to his literal texts alone, but to the symbolic function his work initiated—to the truth that his work opened up.

“And the meaning of what FREUD said can be communicated to anyone because, even addressed to everyone, each person will find themselves personally concerned: one word will suffice to make this felt—FREUD’s discovery puts truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally affected by truth.”

This is perhaps one of Lacan’s most democratic statements. He refuses the idea that psychoanalytic knowledge is esoteric or belongs only to specialists. Freud’s discovery—by implicating truth—touches every speaking subject. For Lacan, truth is not an objective correspondence, but a structural function: that which disrupts, that which insists, that which cannot be wholly assimilated. Everyone is affected by truth, not because they know it, but because it divides them. This is what the unconscious reveals—that truth is not external knowledge, but an internal rupture. It is not that psychoanalysis possesses truth, but that it stages its effects.

“Admit that this is a rather strange proposition—to throw at you this word that almost carries a bad reputation, as if it were proscribed from polite society. Yet I ask whether it is not inscribed at the very heart of analytic practice, since this practice continuously rediscover the power of truth within us, even within our very flesh.”

Here Lacan acknowledges the cultural marginalization of “truth” in a modern discourse saturated by pragmatism, cynicism, and relativism. To speak of truth today (and in Lacan’s moment, no less than ours) often seems naive, unfashionable, or even dangerous. But Lacan reclaims it, situating truth not in abstract ideals but in the body—in the symptom, in the formations of the unconscious, in jouissance. Truth in psychoanalysis is fleshy; it marks the subject, it interrupts speech, it leaves scars. That it reappears again and again in analytic practice confirms its Real presence—it is not a philosophical abstraction but a return, a pressure, a force.

“In what way, indeed, would the unconscious be more worthy of recognition than the defenses that oppose it in the subject, with a success that makes them appear no less real?”

This question unsettles a foundational hierarchy in psychoanalytic interpretation. Why privilege the unconscious as more true or real than the defenses that conceal it? Lacan is not denying the unconscious here, but reminding us that defenses are not secondary fictions—they are structural, they work, and they work because they also speak a truth, even if it is a truth of distortion. The symptom itself is a compromise formation; defense is not the enemy of the unconscious but its necessary correlate. To elevate one over the other risks slipping into a moralizing view of analysis: one where repression is “bad” and unconscious truth is “good.” Lacan disrupts this dualism. Both are Real.

“I am not here engaging in the trade of Nietzschean trinkets about the lie of life, nor am I amazed that one believes they believe, nor do I accept that mere willingness suffices to will.”

In distancing himself from Nietzschean romanticism, Lacan critiques the commodification of philosophical ideas—“trinkets”—that reduce serious conceptual tools to slogans or existential comforts. He is not interested in proclamations about illusion and authenticity unless they are structurally grounded. The repetition of “believe” highlights the gap between conscious belief and unconscious determination: one may “believe they believe,” but psychoanalysis teaches that belief often resides elsewhere—in the symptom, in the act, in the Other.

The final phrase, “mere willingness suffices to will,” is an attack on voluntarism, the fantasy that conscious will can override unconscious structure. In Lacanian ethics, the subject is not sovereign. Will is divided, structured by the desire of the Other. To will something is not merely to decide, but to traverse the fantasy that organizes one’s desire. Lacan returns to Freud here as the thinker who never reduced the psyche to will, and who revealed its fractures instead.

“But I ask: where does this peace come from, this peace that establishes itself in recognizing the unconscious tendency, if it is not truer than what constrained it in the conflict?”

Now Lacan takes up the question of transformation in analysis. Where does the sense of relief, of peace, come from when a subject recognizes an unconscious tendency? This peace cannot be explained merely as intellectual insight—it emerges because something Real is acknowledged. The unconscious, in being spoken, releases a pressure. Lacan proposes that this peace is a signifier of truth—it attests that what was previously constrained by conflict is now allowed to circulate. Recognition of the unconscious is not just understanding—it is an effect, a subjective shift.

“Is it not also true that this peace has, for some time, shown itself to be an incomplete peace, since not content with having recognized as unconscious the defenses attributed to the ego, psychoanalysts increasingly identify their mechanisms—displacement with respect to the object, reversal against the subject, regression of form—as part of the very dynamic FREUD analyzed in the tendency, which thus seems to continue there, with only a change of sign.”

Lacan identifies a significant development in psychoanalytic theory: the insight that the mechanisms of defense are not separate from the drives they repress, but rather variations of the same structure. Displacement, reversal, regression—these are not merely barriers to truth but expressions of it. Defense and desire share a grammar. The “change of sign” Lacan references is a semiotic transformation: what was once considered a negation (defense) is reinterpreted as affirmation (drive). The same signifier functions on both sides.

This complicates any simplistic notion of “truth versus defense.” Psychoanalysis becomes a reading practice where symptoms, slips, and defenses are not obstacles to meaning but are themselves texts to be deciphered. They mean, and they mean within the same structural dynamics that produce desire.

“Is it not the height of irony when one admits that the drive itself can be brought to consciousness by defense to prevent the subject from recognizing themselves in it?”

This is a devastating irony. Even the drive—often seen as the raw, Real kernel of the subject—can be revealed in order to be disowned. This is a structure of foreclosure through revelation: the subject can know the drive, even speak it, yet use that very knowledge to maintain distance from it. In this sense, revelation is not recognition. Consciousness of the drive does not guarantee subjective integration. The defense is so insidious that it allows the subject to say “yes, I know,” while still refusing what that knowledge entails.

This is a return to the Lacanian motto: “truth has the structure of a fiction.” Even the truth of the drive, once spoken, can be co-opted by the ego’s defenses. The subject must not merely know, but traverse their fantasy—to assume their desire in its contradiction, not merely acknowledge it. Lacan’s return to Freud insists on this: the analytic act is not the uncovering of facts, but the staging of a truth that implicates the subject in their own division.

In these reflections, Lacan crystallizes what’s at stake in the “return to Freud”: not fidelity to a master, but fidelity to a structure—where truth is not a possession but an encounter, always incomplete, always returned to, and always speaking, even in defense.

“I am still using, to translate the exposition of these mysteries into a coherent discourse, words that, despite myself, re-establish the duality that supports them.”

This is an admission of a structural impasse that is central to Lacan’s thought: that even in trying to communicate the logic of psychoanalysis—the Real, the truth, the unconscious—he must rely on language, which inevitably reintroduces the very Imaginary dualisms psychoanalysis seeks to subvert. The “duality” he refers to is not just grammatical or rhetorical, but epistemological. Language enforces binaries—subject/object, true/false, self/other—and these are precisely the coordinates that psychoanalysis unsettles.

He acknowledges, then, the paradox that psychoanalytic discourse cannot escape: the Symbolic medium through which it must pass already imposes a structure that risks covering over the Real it aims to touch. Even as Lacan tries to deconstruct dualities, the act of speaking, of writing, reinstates them. This is the bind of the analyst and the bind of theory itself.

“But it is not that I lament the trees of technical progression obscuring the forest of theory—it is that we are so close to believing we are in the Forest of Bondy, precisely because what slips behind each tree is the question of whether there must be trees truer than others, or, if you will, whether not all trees are bandits. Otherwise, one would ask: where are the bandits that are not trees?”

This is vintage Lacanian wit and metaphor. He plays with the idiom “can’t see the forest for the trees,” suggesting that the problem is not merely technical obscurity (i.e., losing sight of theory in the details of technique), but a deeper symbolic confusion. The “Forest of Bondy” refers to a legendary wood near Paris historically associated with thieves and outlaws—a symbolic site where appearances are deceptive and danger lurks behind every form.

Lacan jokes that we may think we are just looking at trees (i.e., particular technical terms or case details), but what we are actually navigating is a symbolic forest where the question is whether these trees—these concepts, signs—are “true” or deceptive. Are there trees that are “truer” than others? Or are all trees potentially hiding something? The quip “whether not all trees are bandits” flips the metaphor completely: if everything appears potentially misleading, then where is truth?

It’s a structural question of suspicion: not paranoia, but the psychoanalytic stance toward appearances. For Lacan, this line points to the Real behind the Symbolic: that what seems a tree might conceal the bandit—that is, the signifier might conceal the drive. Or rather, it’s not even concealment, but function: the bandit only appears through the tree. There is no bandit outside the tree. Hence the final joke: “where are the bandits that are not trees?”—an impossible demand for a Real truth with no symbolic mediation.

“This slight thing, then, on which everything depends in this occasion—perhaps it deserves to be explained? This truth, without which it is no longer possible to discern the face from the mask, and outside of which it seems there is no other monster than the labyrinth itself—what is it? In other words, in what way do they differ among themselves in truth, if they are all equally real?”

Here Lacan names the crucial stake: the “slight thing” is truth, the fragile yet decisive distinction without which psychoanalysis loses its orientation. The metaphor of “the face and the mask” returns us to the Imaginary—appearance, identity, misrecognition—but Lacan insists that without truth, this distinction collapses. If everything is equally “real” in the empirical sense (the symptom, the defense, the dream, the fantasy), then how do we discriminate meaningfully? What cuts through the labyrinth?

The “monster” is now the labyrinth itself—i.e., structure without truth. Psychoanalysis, without the question of truth, becomes lost in its own complexity. The Real is no longer the drive, but the system gone awry, without anchoring. Lacan insists that truth is not a metaphysical absolute, but a function within the analytic field—it is that which introduces a difference that matters. Without it, psychoanalysis dissolves into relativism or technicalism.

“Here the heavy boots advance to trample on the dove’s feet on which, as we know, truth walks—and perhaps, in passing, to swallow the bird whole: ‘Our criterion,’ they exclaim, ‘is simply economic, you ideologue.’ Not all arrangements of reality are equally economic. But at the point where truth has already flown, the bird escapes and emerges unscathed, along with our question: ‘Economic for whom?’”

This moment stages a confrontation with the dominant ideology—those Lacan calls the “heavy boots,” representing bureaucratic, managerial, or institutionalized psychoanalysis (or even broader social discourse). They trample on the delicate, slow-moving “feet” of truth (recalling Nietzsche’s image of truth as a woman), reducing everything to economic criteria: cost-benefit, adaptation, functionality. The “dove” is both a biblical and psychoanalytic symbol—fragile, elusive, a carrier of messages.

Their accusation—“you ideologue”—is an attempt to discredit Lacan’s position as abstract or philosophical. But he fires back: even the economic is not neutral. “Economic for whom?” is a political, psychoanalytic question. Every “economy” (of desire, discourse, institution) has a subject, a structure of power. Even the most “rational” frameworks serve unconscious investments. Lacan’s answer is not to deny economics, but to situate it within a symbolic structure.

“This time the matter goes too far. The adversary sneers: ‘We see what it is: Monsieur is dabbling in philosophy… Enter Plato and Hegel. These signatures are enough for us. What they endorse belongs in the wastebasket, and even if—as you said—it concerns everyone, it does not interest us specialists. It doesn’t even fit into our documentation.’”

Now Lacan imagines (or perhaps quotes) the response from his critics: they mock him for being “philosophical,” for invoking names like Plato and Hegel, and they dismiss these influences as irrelevant to the clinical, scientific work of psychoanalysis. The joke is in the phrase “does not fit into our documentation”—a bureaucratic reduction of theory to what can be filed, coded, processed.

This is a critique of the technocratic reduction of psychoanalysis: when theory is judged not by its rigor or clinical power, but by whether it fits within established protocols or empirical metrics. Lacan turns this sneer back on the “specialists”—who forget that psychoanalysis was born from a radical philosophical encounter with truth and subjectivity. Dismissing Plato and Hegel is, for Lacan, equivalent to repressing the very foundations that make analysis possible.

“You think I am mocking in this speech. Not at all—I agree. If FREUD brought nothing more to the knowledge of man than this truth that there is such a thing as the true, then there is no Freudian discovery.”

Lacan surprises here. He seems to agree with the critic: if Freud merely told us that “truth exists,” then he adds nothing essential to the humanist tradition. This is Lacan’s way of emphasizing that psychoanalysis is not reducible to a vague moral insight or philosophical maxim. It is a new structure of knowledge—a break, not a continuation.

Freud’s discovery is not that truth exists, but that it is structured by the unconscious—that it returns in symptoms, that it is missed in the act of speaking, that it is embedded in desire. Freud did not merely declare the importance of truth; he built a practice that exposes its contradictions.

“FREUD would then take his place among the moralists who embody a tradition of humanist analysis, a Milky Way in the sky of European culture where Baltasar GRACIÁN and LA ROCHEFOUCAULD shine as stars of the first magnitude, and NIETZSCHE as a nova, dazzling yet quickly receding into darkness.”

This is a poetic constellation. If Freud were merely a moralist, he would be one more star in the galaxy of European cultural critique. Gracián and La Rochefoucauld—masters of aphorism and moral psychology—are named here as brilliant but ultimately circumscribed thinkers. Nietzsche, the most dazzling of these, is cast as a “nova”—bright, explosive, but ultimately evanescent.

Lacan thus distinguishes Freud’s place: not among the stars of moral insight, but as the founder of a scientific discourse on the unconscious—one that rewrites the very terms of what truth is, and how it speaks through the subject. Freud’s discovery is not a new “content” in the sky, but a shift in the coordinates of the symbolic itself.

This is the crux of Lacan’s “return to Freud”: not a return to the person, or the content, or the myth, but to a structural intervention in the relation between language, desire, and truth—an intervention that still demands to be heard, not by specialists, but by anyone who speaks.

“Last among them, and no doubt driven by a specifically Christian concern for the authenticity of the soul’s movement, FREUD precipitated an entire casuistry into a map of the tendre, where one has no need for orientation in the purposes it serves.”

This is a stunning blend of irony and reverence. He places Freud “last among them”—meaning after the great moralists, humanist philosophers, and figures of ethical reflection previously mentioned (like La Rochefoucauld, Gracián, Nietzsche). Freud, in this context, is framed as belonging to this lineage of thinkers who pursued the truth of human conduct. But what distinguishes Freud, according to Lacan, is his immersion not in moral generalities, but in the singular casuistry of the subject’s desire.

“Casuistry” refers to the meticulous, often Jesuitical parsing of individual moral cases—an art of exceptions. Freud converts this into a cartography of desire, what Lacan calls “a map of the tendre.” This phrase alludes to the 17th-century French literary invention Carte du Tendre, a fictional and romanticized map representing the geography of love. Lacan’s use here is cutting: Freud’s unconscious is not a space of rational navigation but a terrain of passionate disorientation—where the “purposes” of the psyche are not clear, and no orientation is guaranteed.

And yet, Freud’s map functions—despite its disorientation—because it exposes what lies beneath purpose: the structural impasses, the detours of libido, the failure of aims. It’s a Christian concern “for the authenticity of the soul’s movement” that gives Freud his peculiar seriousness, not moralism, but the radical commitment to follow desire wherever it goes—even into the murky, embarrassing, and abject recesses of the psyche.

“Psychoanalysis is the science of the mirages that form in this field. A unique experience, ultimately quite abject, but one that cannot be too strongly recommended to those who wish to grasp the principles underlying human madness. For, by demonstrating kinship with an entire spectrum of alienations, it sheds light on them.”

This is Lacan’s uncompromising definition of psychoanalysis: not the science of health, not the technique of adaptation, but the science of mirages—specifically those formed in the terrain of desire and fantasy. These “mirages” are not illusions in the simple sense; they are structuring fictions—they organize the subject’s reality. Psychoanalysis studies the way these mirages emerge and persist, and how they relate to the drives and the Other.

That the experience is “abject” is not a denunciation—it is a recognition that analysis leads to places that are humiliating, affectively raw, and morally ambiguous. It is “abject” because it confronts the subject with what has been expelled from the ego: shame, obscenity, loss of coherence.

And yet, precisely through this confrontation, psychoanalysis provides access to the “principles underlying human madness.” Lacan insists that the line between madness and ordinary subjectivity is not clear-cut. By tracking the kinship between neurotic structures and psychotic or perverse ones, analysis illuminates the entire spectrum of alienation. This approach redefines “madness” as something internal to subjectivity itself, not external pathology.

“This language is measured; I am not the one who invented it. A zealot of so-called classical psychoanalysis once defined it as an experience whose privilege is strictly tied to the forms that regulate its practice—forms that cannot be altered by so much as a line because, obtained by a miracle of chance, they hold the key to a transcendent reality that surpasses historical contingencies.”

Here Lacan turns his attention to the rigidified institutionalization of psychoanalysis—particularly within the Anglo-American tradition of “classical” or ego psychology. He cites a “zealot” (unnamed, but perhaps representing figures like Anna Freud or Hartmann) who treats analytic technique as sacred and untouchable—founded not in theory but in some miraculous historical accident. This “miracle of chance” becomes the retroactively sanctified origin of orthodoxy.

The “forms” (the setting, the abstinence rule, the interpretive frame) are treated not as clinically motivated structures, but as theological constants—as though tampering with them would undo the access to a “transcendent reality.” Lacan critiques this position for treating psychoanalysis like a religion that clings to ritual rather than risking theoretical elaboration. His issue is not with the value of form, but with its fetishization.

“In this reality, the love of order and the appreciation of beauty, for instance, find their permanent foundation—namely, in the objects of the pre-Oedipal relationship: excrement and horns up the backside.”

This sentence is razor-sharp, sarcastic, and utterly Lacanian. He exposes the contradiction in those who would ground transcendental ideals—order, beauty, even culture itself—in the psychosexual residue of pre-Oedipal experience. By naming “excrement and horns up the backside,” Lacan parodies the analytic focus on anal and early libidinal phases, particularly in developmental models that insist on their explanatory primacy.

If such sublime ideals are rooted in anality, Lacan implies, then let’s not pretend this grounding is noble. This isn’t to mock the drive, but to mock the disavowal of what such theories actually entail. The irony is that those who cling to a clean, classical vision of psychoanalysis are also the ones whose theories revolve around the dirtiness of the anal phase, while denying the structural implications of that dirt. The bourgeois ideology of cleanliness masks its own excremental roots.

“This position cannot be refuted because its rules justify themselves by their outcomes, which are held as proof of the rules’ validity. Yet our questions proliferate anew.”

This is the definition of circular logic—what Lacan would call suture in another register. The rules are held to be valid because they “work,” and they work because they are based on the rules. It is a closed circuit where critique is foreclosed. In such a frame, empirical validation replaces theoretical rigor, and the discourse becomes self-legitimating.

But Lacan insists that questions continue to proliferate—not because of failure, but because of desire. Analysis must open new questions, not close them. Once theory stops generating questions, it ceases to be psychoanalysis and becomes pedagogy, routine, or dogma.

“How did this extraordinary chance event occur?”

This question is not merely historical—it is structural. Lacan asks: how did psychoanalysis arrive at this point where an accidental formation of technique becomes sacred? It’s a critique of origin myths. What was once a creative response to a clinical situation becomes a law. The “extraordinary chance event” becomes a fetish.

“Where does this contradiction arise between the pre-Oedipal muddle in which the analytic relationship is now confined by our moderns and the fact that FREUD was never satisfied with it until he had returned it to the Oedipal position?”

This sentence identifies a key theoretical split. Lacan points out that modern psychoanalysis has become overly fascinated with the pre-Oedipal—pre-language, pre-structure, the symbiotic relationship with the mother. But Freud’s own movement, especially in The Interpretation of Dreams and Totem and Taboo, was always to return the material to the Oedipal frame: to the triangulation of desire, the law of the father, and the structuring function of prohibition.

The “muddle” of the pre-Oedipal is seductive—it offers a maternal plenitude, a regression to origins—but Freud insisted that analysis moves forward, toward the symbolic law. Lacan here reinstates the Oedipus complex not as a family drama, but as the name for the subject’s entry into language and difference.

“How can the sort of greenhouse osculation to which this new-look experience confines itself be the final term of a progress that initially seemed to open countless pathways across all fields of creation—or, posed in reverse, if the objects revealed in this elective fermentation were discovered by a method other than experimental psychology, is this discipline authorized to rediscover them by its own means?”

“Greenhouse osculation” is a brilliant metaphor. It suggests an artificial, enclosed environment of over-controlled, overly sanitized analytic practice—obsessed with tenderness, containment, and maternal fusion. This is what the “new-look” analysis has become: an incestuous microcosm of affective exchange, more pastoral than structural.

But Lacan remembers that psychoanalysis once promised to open up “all fields of creation”—literature, art, politics, science. The question he poses is whether the analytic field can reclaim this ambition. If the “objects” (love, desire, truth) that analysts work with are already named and shaped in the history of thought, can psychoanalysis pretend to rediscover them without reference to this broader symbolic lineage?

“The answers we receive from those involved leave no doubt. The driving force of the experience, even when described in their terms, cannot simply be this mirage of truth reduced to the truth of a mirage.”

Lacan’s conclusion is surgical. The worst reduction, he warns, is to accept a “mirage of truth” as the final word—to domesticate the unsettling power of truth into a comfortable illusion. Even when “truth” is spoken in current analytic discourse, it is often a simulation, a “truth of a mirage”—a narcissistic reflection that avoids the cut of the Real.

This is the essence of Lacan’s return to Freud: to restore the dimension of truth as that which divides, that which resists assimilation, and that which remains unanswered. Psychoanalysis is not a mirage that simulates meaning, but a practice that confronts the mirages, sustains the question, and insists on the subject’s impossible relation to truth.

“Everything originated from a particular truth, from a revelation that made reality no longer what it was before for us, and this is what continues to anchor the insane cacophony of theory at the heart of human affairs, just as it prevents practice from degrading to the level of those unfortunate souls who cannot find their way out (understand that I use this term to exclude cynics).”

This is a powerful declaration: the entire psychoanalytic enterprise, both theoretical and practical, originates in an event—a “particular truth” that changes the very coordinates of reality. This “revelation” is nothing less than Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, an event that, once it occurs, reshapes what we mean by truth, by subjectivity, by knowledge.

It is a break in the Symbolic Order, a rupture that produces both disarray and possibility. The “insane cacophony of theory” refers not only to the pluralism of post-Freudian schools, but also to the necessary proliferation of attempts to think the implications of this original revelation. Lacan isn’t troubled by theoretical discord—it is anchored by the truth that sparked it.

At the same time, this truth prevents practice from sinking into what he calls “the level of those unfortunate souls who cannot find their way out.” These are not the mad, per se, but the ones who are trapped in repetitive formations of suffering without symbolic articulation. Lacan pointedly excludes cynics from this group—they are not “lost,” but rather structurally foreclosed to truth. The cynic is armored by knowingness, by a refusal of lack, by an immunity to being touched by the symbolic force of truth. Hence, they are worse off than the ones still wandering.

“A truth, it must be said, is not easy to recognize once it has been accepted. Not that there are no established truths, but they so easily blend with the reality surrounding them that, for a long time, the only artifice found to distinguish them was to mark them with the sign of the spirit and, in paying them homage, to consider them as having come from another world.”

This is a brilliant Lacanian inversion. We often imagine that before a truth is recognized, it is difficult to grasp. But Lacan says the real challenge comes after—when a truth becomes accepted, institutionalized, normalized. Once a truth is integrated into the dominant discourse, it becomes indistinguishable from “reality,” and thus loses its power to disrupt.

This is precisely the danger that haunts psychoanalysis post-Freud: that the scandalous, disorienting force of the unconscious becomes routine—absorbed into manuals, training, techniques. Lacan notes that the historical strategy to safeguard truth was to treat it as transcendent, sacred—“from another world.” That attribution may have helped preserve its alterity, but it also mystified it. Lacan seeks neither domestication nor sacralization, but a structural account: truth as what punctures the Symbolic, what insists from the Real.

“It is not enough to attribute to some kind of human blindness the fact that truth is never so radiant as when the light raised by her arm in the proverbial emblem catches her naked.”

This image refers to the classical allegory of Truth personified as a naked woman bearing a torch or lantern—exposing what lies in darkness. Lacan plays with this image, pushing it into paradox. Truth is not radiant because we are blind; she is radiant because she is revealed in this charged moment of exposure. But that very exposure is symbolic, caught in the Imaginary of the emblem.

This ironic rendering invites the Lacanian critique of knowledge-as-vision. The truth that shines in the “proverbial emblem” does so in a space structured by fantasy. It is the moment where the Symbolic and Imaginary meet—truth becomes visible, naked, but this is also when it becomes most illusory. The radiance is real, but it is not truth itself—only its image.

“And one must play the fool a little to pretend to know nothing of what happens afterward. But stupidity remains brazenly honest in asking where one might have sought her before, the emblem scarcely helping to indicate the well—a place improper, even malodorous—rather than the treasure chest where every precious form should be preserved intact.”

Lacan deepens the allegory. After the image of radiant, noble truth, he now refers to the classical saying attributed to Democritus: truth lies at the bottom of a well. But this is no romantic well of wishes. It’s improper, foul-smelling—a Real site, not a sacred one. Lacan implies that to genuinely seek truth, one must abandon fantasies of purity or ideal beauty. It is not stored in a jewel box, but hidden in the abject, in the repressed, in the overlooked gaps of discourse.

The “fool” here is the analyst’s role: to be willing to seek truth where others would not, even in idiocy. “Stupidity” here, ironically, is more honest than intelligence that seeks beauty or order. It is willing to look where the Symbolic fails. This, too, is part of Lacan’s ethic: the analyst must accept being in the position of the fool, of the one who listens at the bottom of the well rather than theorizes from the heights.

[Truth lies at the bottom of a well (Democritus)]

This parenthetical functions like a citation and a key. The well as the site of truth is ancient, but Lacan reinterprets it through psychoanalysis. The well is not just deep—it is dirty, subterranean, removed from the gaze. This perfectly aligns with Lacan’s sense of the unconscious: it is not where truth is readily visible, but where it is hidden in plain sight, masked by repression and the Symbolic.

“THE THING SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.”

Here Lacan makes an enigmatic declaration that plays on a legal phrase (res ipsa loquitur)—but in psychoanalysis, The Thing (das Ding) is a key concept: the unassimilable core of the Real, the lost object, the Thing around which the subject’s desire circulates but can never reach.

To say The Thing speaks for itself is to position this Real core as not merely mute trauma, but something that makes itself felt in discourse—as the gap, the rupture, the moment of truth. This is not speech in the ordinary sense, but the return of the repressed, the way the symptom “speaks.” The Thing is what disrupts the chain of signifiers but leaves its trace.

“But here comes truth, and in FREUD’s mouth, she takes the beast by the horns: ‘So, I am for you the enigma of the one who disappears as soon as she appears, you who are so eager to conceal me beneath the tatters of your conventions. Nonetheless, I admit that your embarrassment is sincere, for even when you make yourselves my heralds, you are no more worthy to bear my colors than those garments which are yours—garments as ghostly as you yourselves are. Where then have I passed within you? Where was I before this passage? Perhaps one day I shall tell you. But for you to find me where I am, I shall teach you how to recognize me. Men, listen, I give you the secret: I, truth, speak.’”

This is a magnificent personification of Truth—as if she herself were speaking through Freud. This is an allegorical monologue, but it is also an ethical injunction. Truth is not a passive object to be uncovered—it is an active force, speaking, demanding recognition. And yet, this truth is also paradoxical: she disappears the moment she appears, like the unconscious revealed through the symptom—fleeting, elusive, structural.

Those who think themselves her “heralds”—the analysts, the theorists—are no more authentic than anyone else. They wear “ghostly garments”—symbolic trappings that obscure rather than illuminate. Truth questions them: Where was I before? Where did I pass?—questions the subject cannot answer with certainty, only with interpretation.

And then comes the final declaration: “I, truth, speak.” This is not just a poetic flourish. It is Lacan’s entire doctrine condensed into a single utterance. Truth speaks—not from outside, but within the signifier. Truth is not something to be seen or possessed, but something that insists in speech, in the cracks of language, in the act of interpretation. The analyst listens not to what the subject says, but to how truth speaks through them.

This passage—like Lacan’s whole return to Freud—reminds us that the analytic act is a wager on the speech of truth: not as content to be mastered, but as an encounter that divides the subject and reconfigures their relation to desire. And it is only by listening in this way that psychoanalysis can remain faithful to its singular, scandalous origin.

“Should I point out that you did not yet know this? Certainly, a few among you, who took it upon themselves to be my lovers—no doubt following the principle that in such boastful claims, one is never better served than by oneself—had ambiguously asserted, not without the maladroit pride that exposed their self-interest, that the errors of philosophy (understand: their errors) could not persist without my support.”

Here, Lacan lends voice once again to Truth personified—a voice both seductive and sharply ironic. Truth accuses those who claim to serve her—“her lovers”—of being motivated more by narcissism than fidelity. The critique targets those within intellectual circles (likely including certain psychoanalysts) who try to fashion themselves as defenders or exclusive interpreters of truth. But in doing so, they mistake their own errors, ideologies, or theoretical constructs for eternal truths and then justify these constructs by asserting their closeness to “Truth” itself.

This passage critiques the self-referential loop of academic or philosophical arrogance, especially when one’s own theories are retroactively legitimized by invoking truth—as if to say: “Because I speak truth, what I say must be true.” Lacan skewers this with surgical precision, exposing how such a claim is not a mark of fidelity but a symptom of “maladroit pride.” The “errors of philosophy,” in this context, are not simply missteps in reasoning—they are egoic investments disguised as intellectual rigor.

“But by persistently embracing these offspring of their thoughts, they eventually found them as insipid as they were vain and returned to mingling with common opinions, following the habits of ancient sages who knew how to put these opinions in their proper place—be they storytellers, advocates, cunning tricksters, or even liars. Yet they also knew where to seek them: at the hearth, in the forum, at the forge, or in the marketplace.”

Those who once claimed the mantle of truth eventually grow disillusioned with their own constructs, which reveal themselves as “insipid” and “vain.” The metaphor of “offspring” again links intellectual production to narcissistic reproduction—a child of one’s ego rather than of a true encounter with the Real. And so, these disillusioned “lovers” of truth return not to high theory, but to the space of “common opinions”—doxa, the everyday sayings, beliefs, and circulating speech of ordinary life.

But Lacan does not mock this return. On the contrary, he aligns it with the practice of the “ancient sages,” who did not scorn common discourse but knew how to listen to it, situate it, and extract its function. The list—“storytellers, advocates, tricksters, liars”—is not a condemnation, but an acknowledgment of the discursive roles that shape the symbolic order. The locations—hearth, forum, forge, marketplace—are metaphorical and literal spaces of speech, production, and exchange. It is in these places, not only in universities or clinics, that the unconscious reveals itself.

“They then realized that by not being my parasites, these opinions seemed to serve me far better—who knows? Perhaps they were my militia, the secret agents of my power. Several cases observed in the game of pigeon vole—sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to owe nothing but to the effect of perseverance—put them on the trail of this discovery.”

In this continuation, Truth muses that opinions—not institutionalized philosophy or overconfident theory—may serve her best. When thinkers stop trying to possess truth (i.e., stop being her “parasites”), they paradoxically become better vehicles for it. Truth does not emerge from domination, but from letting go, from allowing the symbolic network to do its work. The mention of “militia” and “secret agents” casts these doxa as operating covertly, infiltrating the symbolic and disrupting false certainties from within.

The “game of pigeon vole”—a children’s game involving sudden surprise—becomes a metaphor for how error flips into truth, not through mastery, but through sustained engagement. Lacan’s notion of “perseverance” here aligns with the analytic process itself: a slow working-through where something unexpected, even silly, suddenly reveals a deeper truth. The point is not correctness, but the structural unfolding of speech.

“The discourse of error, its articulation in action, could bear witness to the truth, even against self-evidence itself.”

This is a crucial Lacanian thesis. The discourse of error—the way people speak wrongly, misspeak, contradict themselves—is precisely what bears witness to the unconscious. Error is not a deviation to be corrected, but a structural trace of truth. This is what Freud discovered in slips of the tongue, jokes, and symptoms. Truth does not announce itself as “correct.” It is what disrupts self-evidence.

Here, Lacan is placing psychoanalytic method in direct opposition to empirical or positivistic models of knowledge. Whereas modern science privileges transparency, replicability, and evidence, psychoanalysis listens to the point where evidence falters, where language breaks down, where something else speaks. The truth appears in the error, not in spite of it.

“It was then that one of them attempted to elevate the cunning of reason to the status of an object worthy of study. Unfortunately, he was a professor, and you were all too happy to turn against his words the donkey ears you had been adorned with at school, which since then have been fitted with horns for those among you whose pages are a little stiff.”

Now Lacan takes a jab at the figure who tried to formalize this insight—perhaps a reference to Hegel, or possibly a more contemporary “professor” who took up the “cunning of reason” as a formal object. But this figure is dismissed, not necessarily because his insight was false, but because of the academic context that absorbed it. The students or readers—“you”—reject the professor not out of understanding, but out of resentment. The “donkey ears” (a symbol of ignorance or shame) are now replaced by “horns”—the sign of those who betray themselves through rigidity, those “whose pages are a little stiff.”

This dig operates on multiple levels: it critiques intellectual laziness disguised as critical distance, the reflex rejection of theory due to prior institutional trauma (the school system), and the transformation of misunderstanding into reactive “knowledge.” Lacan suggests that even the right ideas, when taught in the wrong mode or context, will be cast aside—mocked rather than worked through.

“So stick to your vague sense of history and leave the clever ones to build, on the guarantee of my future firm, the global market for lies, the commerce of total war, and the new law of self-criticism.”

Lacan, through the voice of Truth, offers a bleakly ironic prophecy: those who cannot engage seriously with truth will cling to their “vague sense of history”—a kind of cultural memory without rigorous symbolic anchoring. Meanwhile, the “clever ones” (those with technical mastery but without ethical orientation) will use their intellect not to seek truth, but to manufacture ideology: “the global market for lies,” “the commerce of total war,” and the new pseudo-ethic of “self-criticism”—a systematized auto-surveillance that hides repression beneath progressive slogans.

This line reads like a devastating critique of technocratic modernity, where knowledge is decoupled from truth, where intelligence is employed in the service of cynicism, and where critique becomes institutional performance rather than structural transformation. Lacan warns that in abandoning the difficult path of truth, we hand ourselves over to a symbolic order that sells war and calls it peace.

“If reason is as cunning as Hegel said, it will carry out its work just fine without you.”

Lacan makes a caustic dismissal. The cunning of reason—die List der Vernunft, Hegel’s idea that history moves through rational contradictions—does not need our understanding or consent. It operates through us, with or without our awareness. This is also how the unconscious works: as a structure that speaks through the subject, regardless of their knowledge or intention.

This line is not defeatist—it’s a challenge. If truth and reason do not need us to fulfill their function, the analyst’s task is not to master them, but to listen, to occupy a position where their effects can be heard, interpreted, and transmitted. That is what Lacan’s return to Freud insists upon: that the subject of the unconscious cannot be known in advance, but must be approached through the rigor of a discourse that is not ours, but speaks through us—often, and especially, in error.

“But you have neither made obsolete nor indefinite your deadlines concerning me. They are dated from yesterday and before tomorrow.”

In these lines, Truth—continuing to speak through Lacan’s oracular tone—establishes herself as temporally ungraspable yet persistently insistent. Her “deadlines” are not bound to chronological logic; they belong to a temporality proper to the unconscious: après-coup (nachträglich), the Freudian notion that an event’s meaning is retroactively constituted. Truth always arrives belatedly and too early—it is “from yesterday and before tomorrow,” never present in the moment it seems to be. Lacan shows that truth is not a static datum but a structural effect, always operating at a temporal slant. You cannot schedule its encounter.

“And it matters little whether you rush forward to honor them or to evade them, for in either case, they will seize you from behind.”

This echoes Freud’s description of the return of the repressed. Whether one tries to fulfill the demands of truth or avoid them, truth finds its way back—not directly, but obliquely, symptomatically. The subject’s intentions are irrelevant; what matters is the structure they inhabit. This is also the logic of desire: one can never “catch up” with desire head-on. It finds you through detour, ambush, and misrecognition. The image of being “seized from behind” recalls the Real—what arrives where we least expect it, without warning or mastery.

“Whether you flee me in deceit or think you can catch up with me in error, I meet you in the misunderstanding against which you have no refuge.”

Truth’s dwelling place is misunderstanding. For Lacan, méconnaissance is not an accidental flaw in cognition but the very condition of subjectivity. We are subjects because we misrecognize ourselves in the mirror, in language, in the Other. Truth meets us not in knowledge, but where knowledge fails. You may lie or be mistaken, but you cannot avoid the encounter with truth—it is structured into the very mechanisms of your speech. In analysis, this is the moment when the patient says more than they know, when the symptom speaks beyond intention.

“Where even the most cautious word stumbles slightly, it is in its treachery that it falters—I declare it now, and from this point on, it will be a little trickier to pretend as if nothing happened, whether in good society or bad.”

Every utterance, no matter how guarded, is subject to slippage. Language betrays the speaker. This is not a failure of communication—it is its structural condition. Treachery is not an ethical lapse, but a linguistic inevitability: the signifier always says more than we intend. And now, Lacan says, we can no longer pretend otherwise. Psychoanalysis has exposed this; there is no return to innocence. The rupture has occurred—truth has been spoken, and it destabilizes both bourgeois politeness and vulgar denial alike.

“But there is no need to exhaust yourselves trying to be more vigilant.”

Vigilance—surveillance over speech, moral self-monitoring—is futile. The unconscious will always find its way through. Lacan is mocking the fantasy that one could master meaning through careful self-discipline. Whether you are a moralist or a technician, your speech will betray you. This is why analysis doesn’t aim for control but for listening, interpretation, and the traversal of fantasy.

“Even if the joint jurisdictions of politeness and politics were to decree inadmissible everything that claims to come from me when presented in such an illicit manner, you would not be off the hook so easily, because even the most innocent intention is unsettled when it can no longer deny that its failed acts are its most successful ones and that its failure rewards its most secret desire.”

Here Lacan points to a deeper scandal: even if society represses truth (declaring it “inadmissible”), the unconscious remains operative. The subject’s “most innocent intention” is already compromised—not because of a moral flaw, but because desire speaks through failure. The acte manqué, the parapraxis, the slip: these are not accidents, but revelations. What appears as failure is often the success of a desire that cannot speak its name.

This subversion of intentionality is at the heart of psychoanalysis. You are not in control of what you mean. Desire is not located in what you say you want, but in what your symptom insists upon.

“Besides, is it not enough to judge your defeat by seeing me first escape from the dungeon of the fortress where you thought you held me most securely—not within you, but within being itself? I wander in what you hold to be the least true by essence: in the dream, in the defiance of the sharpest Gongoric point, in the nonsense of the most grotesque pun, in chance—not in its law but in its contingency.”

Lacan moves here into the poetic sublime. The attempt to ground truth in metaphysics—in “being itself”—is precisely what allows it to escape. Truth doesn’t reside in ontological essence. It appears in dreams, in baroque metaphors (the “Gongoric point” refers to Luis de Góngora, the ornate Spanish poet), in wordplay, puns, jokes—in all the forms language misses its object.

Contingency, not law, is its vehicle. This is what separates psychoanalysis from philosophical rationalism: it looks not for laws of the mind but for ruptures, cuts, slips. Truth is not found where things are solid, but where they come undone. She “wanders” in the places the rational subject rejects—nonsense, chance, the grotesque.

“And I never proceed more surely to change the face of the world than by giving it the profile of Cleopatra’s nose.”

This striking metaphor evokes Pascal’s famous claim: “If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed.” The world’s destiny hinges on a contingent, meaningless detail. Lacan deploys this reference to show that truth, far from being grounded in necessity, alters reality through contingency.

What transforms the world is not rational planning, but the unplanned event—the overlooked accident. The “profile” of Cleopatra’s nose becomes an emblem of the Real: that which resists symbolic integration but shapes history. The unconscious is just such a nose—absurd, excessive, erotically charged—and yet world-changing.

“You may therefore reduce traffic along the paths you exhausted yourselves in illuminating with the rays of consciousness, which were once the pride of the ego, crowned by Fichte with the insignia of its transcendence.”

Now Lacan dismantles the entire edifice of ego psychology and transcendental philosophy. The Enlightenment dream of a fully conscious subject—master of its thoughts, transparent to itself—is over. The “rays of consciousness” no longer lead to truth. The ego’s pretensions—its desire to be coherent, autonomous, transcendent—have been exposed as fantasy.

Fichte, the idealist philosopher who placed the ego at the center of all meaning, is here ironically dismissed. That model of the subject collapses in light of Freud’s discovery. The ego is no longer the crown of subjectivity, but a surface effect—a fiction sustained by defense and misrecognition.

“The long-haul commerce of truth no longer passes through thought: strangely enough, it now seems to pass through things—rebus, it is through you that I communicate, as Freud formulates it at the end of the first paragraph of the sixth chapter devoted to the dream work, his work on dreams, and what dreams mean.”

Lacan points to a profound return to Freud. Truth no longer travels through philosophical “thought” in the traditional sense—it is not conceptual mastery that carries it. Instead, it passes through things: the rebus, the dream-image, the symptom, the fragment. In chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explains that dreams function like rebuses—not directly representational, but metaphorical, associative, structured like language.

Truth, Lacan says, speaks in this code. It is not hidden behind the dream, but in the dream, structured by condensation, displacement, substitution. The unconscious speaks in rebus—pictures, puns, slips—because the subject cannot say their desire directly.

So it is not through the grandeur of philosophy or the ego’s clarity that truth moves—it is through the joke, the pun, the symptom, the failed act. That is the pathway Lacan opens in this seminar: a return to Freud that is not nostalgic, but radical—a plunge into the linguistic machinery of the unconscious, where truth does not shine, but stammers.

And it is here, in these stammerings, that psychoanalysis finds its ethical and epistemological ground—not in what the subject knows, but in what their desire causes them to say.

“‘But here, pay attention: the difficulty this man had in becoming a professor will perhaps spare him your negligence, if not your confusion,’ says Truth.”

Lacan, still speaking in the voice of personified Truth, shifts focus to the figure of Freud himself—“this man”—whose struggle to be recognized institutionally (e.g., never securing a university professorship in his lifetime) ironically protects his teaching from the complacency and misunderstanding of academic canonization. Freud’s marginality, his outsider status, becomes a structural safeguard: he wasn’t subsumed by the prestige of the university, and thus his discourse maintains a disruptive, outsider edge.

Lacan is inviting us to consider that truth often emerges from the margins—not because the margins are virtuous, but because they escape the sedimentation of recognition. Where institutional acknowledgment brings in inertia and habit, Freud’s exclusion preserved the radical core of his thought. The real danger is not misinterpretation, but negligence—that his teaching would be taken for granted, reduced to cliché, no longer interrogated.

“Understand well what he said, and, as he said of me—the Truth who speaks—the best way to grasp it is to take it literally. Undoubtedly, here, things are my signs, but I repeat to you, they are signs of my speech.”

This is a crucial Lacanian turn: the directive to take Freud “literally.” Lacan’s own reading practice is built on this principle. Unlike those who psychologize or reduce Freud to metaphor, Lacan insists that Freud means what he says—especially when what he says appears strange, excessive, or poetic. “Taking it literally” in a Lacanian context means respecting the materiality of the signifier: the pun, the slip, the syntactic detour, the polysemy that structures unconscious discourse.

Things are not just things—they are signs, but signs not of abstract metaphysical truths, but of speech: of a speaking subject, of a discourse in which truth erupts. Lacan reiterates that truth does not reside in the object as such, but in the symbolic network that renders the object meaningful. Truth speaks through things, through misrecognition, through language’s failures and excesses.

“Cleopatra’s nose, if it changed the course of the world, did so because it entered discourse, for to change it—whether long or short—it sufficed, but it had to be a speaking nose.”

Lacan returns to Pascal’s famous line about Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, the history of the world would be different. Lacan radicalizes the claim—not only does the nose matter as a contingent detail, but what makes it world-changing is that it became a signifier—it “entered discourse.” The nose must become a “speaking nose.” This is not about physical causality but about symbolic inscription.

Contingency alone does not change the world; contingency that is spoken, remembered, symbolized does. The “speaking nose” becomes a metonym for how the trivial becomes charged, how the Real enters the Symbolic. Cleopatra’s nose is not world-historical in itself, but as an event within discourse. It is because people speak of it—make it mean—that it shapes history. This is exactly how the unconscious operates: not through physical facts, but through signifiers that loop desire.

“‘But now you will have to use your own, though for more natural ends. Let an instinct more certain than all your categories guide you in the race where I provoke you: for if the cunning of reason, however disdainful it may have been of you, remained open to your faith, I—Truth—will be the great deceiver against you, because it is not merely through falsehood that my paths pass, but through the fault line, too narrow to be found in the flaw of pretense, through the inaccessible cloud of the dream, through the unmotivated fascination of the mediocre, and the seductive dead-end of absurdity.’”

Truth now provokes the listener directly. You must now use your own nose—your own capacity to sniff out meaning where categories fail. Rational systems, logical analysis, philosophical taxonomies—these will not help you. Only a kind of guided instinct (which, in Lacanian terms, might be akin to an attunement to the unconscious) can orient you in this pursuit.

The passage is also a parody of the Hegelian List der Vernunft (the cunning of reason), which Lacan has already referenced. Where Hegelian reason ultimately leads to truth through the dialectic, Lacan’s Truth is more perverse: it deceives through detour. She doesn’t just pass through falsehood (as dialectic might), but through the fault line—a much more delicate crack, a Real impossibility that doesn’t correspond to any simple illusion. Truth appears in the dream, the mediocre fascination, the absurd joke.

This is the terrain of psychoanalysis: not high ideality, but the detritus of daily speech. Truth dwells in banality, in what appears senseless, in the laughable or grotesque. This is precisely where the unconscious inserts itself—not in philosophical certainty but in the broken surfaces of discourse.

“Search, you hounds that you have become by hearing me, bloodhounds that Sophocles preferred to unleash on the hermetic traces of Apollo’s thief [Hermes] rather than on the bloodied trail of Oedipus, certain as he was to find, with him, at the sinister meeting point of Colonus, the hour of truth. Enter the arena at my call and howl at my voice.”

Now Lacan escalates the mythopoetic register. Those who have heard truth (read: been subjected to the analytic experience) are turned into “bloodhounds”—beasts of scent, not sight, attuned not to clarity but to trace, odor, residue. This is a different kind of epistemology: not seeking Truth in its full presence, but pursuing it as something elusive, hinted at, always already receding.

The Sophocles reference sets up a contrast between Hermes (trickster, thief, god of language and boundaries) and Oedipus (the one who seeks truth and finds it in horror). Sophocles, Lacan suggests, preferred the chase of Hermes—perhaps because that is where truth hides: in theft, in cunning, in the trace rather than the act. The “meeting point of Colonus” is where Oedipus dies—the place of final revelation, or symbolic death. And Lacan now calls on the reader to enter that arena, to participate in the agon of psychoanalytic inquiry—not as a scholar, but as a howling bloodhound, guided not by sight but by sound, by the call of truth that cannot be seen directly.

“Already you are lost—I contradict myself, I challenge you, I slip away: you say that I am defending myself.”

This is Lacan’s moment of self-dissolution, where the voice of Truth exposes its paradoxical structure. She contradicts herself not because she is incoherent, but because truth itself is not consistent. The Real resists consistency. If you think you’ve caught her, she slips. If you accuse her of defending herself, you miss the point: she is not a subject, she is a structure. Truth’s defense is her disappearance, her retraction. This is the analyst’s experience with the unconscious: it cannot be pinned down. Each interpretation changes the coordinates of the field.

“PARADE.”

A new act begins. With the single word “PARADE,” Lacan shifts to a theatrical register. A spectacle is about to begin—but this is not entertainment, it’s a misdirection. “Parade” here names the masquerade of truth, the performance that hides as much as it reveals. It’s a symptom in public form. We are invited into a scene of social theater—where what is most real is what is being disavowed under the spectacle.

“The return to darkness, which we consider anticipated at this moment, gives the signal for a murder party initiated by forbidding anyone to leave, since, from then on, everyone can hide the truth under their cloak—or even, as in the gallant fiction of ‘The Indiscreet Jewels’ [Diderot], in their belly.”

The lights go out—the scene turns noir. A “murder party” is announced: a game of intrigue where everyone becomes both suspect and potential victim. Truth can now be hidden, but not destroyed—it slips under cloaks, into bellies. The Diderot reference—Les Bijoux indiscrets—is telling: a satirical novel where women’s genitals speak the truth of their desires, betraying their social masks. Lacan invokes this to remind us: the Real speaks through the most intimate, obscene, and repressed zones of the body.

We are now in a scene where truth is everywhere and nowhere—masked, internalized, grotesquely displayed. The social order tries to hide it, even as it circulates. No one can leave the scene—this is the psychoanalytic field itself, where once the question of truth is posed, there is no going back.

In these final movements, Lacan brings us to the edge of a vertigo. We are no longer in a philosophical seminar, nor a clinical manual. We are in a mythic-theatrical unfolding of what it means for the truth to speak. And not to be possessed, but to be heard, pursued, and misrecognized—in dreams, in jokes, in slips, in the things we say that say us. That is what the return to Freud ultimately demands: not a doctrine, but an ear.

“The general question is: ‘Who is speaking?’—and it is not without relevance.”

This is the fundamental question of psychoanalysis: not “what is said,” but who is saying it. This echoes his dictum, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. In psychoanalytic speech, the speaker is never unified; speech emerges from multiple levels—conscious intention, unconscious desire, social discourse. The analyst must listen not just to what the analysand says, but to where and who the speech is coming from structurally. This question—who speaks?—is not easily answered, precisely because subjectivity is divided.

In the clinic, this is the analyst’s fundamental orientation. The subject does not speak as a whole; language speaks through the subject. There is the I who speaks and the I who is spoken. Lacan insists on this split, because locating “who speaks” is the work of the analysis itself—it is never evident at the start.

“Unfortunately, the answers come a little too hastily. Libido is first accused, which points us in the direction of the jewels, but we must realize that the ego itself, while placing obstacles in the way of libido’s satisfaction, is sometimes the object of its endeavors.”

Here Lacan criticizes the reductionist tendency to quickly name the libido as the guilty party—too quick an answer, too simple a cause. The reference to “the jewels” is a continuation of the Diderot metaphor from earlier (The Indiscreet Jewels), where sexual organs betray their owner’s secrets—thus, the libido gets linked to the voice of truth, the scandal of desire.

However, Lacan deepens the picture. The ego, often positioned as the controller or barrier to libido, is not just an obstacle—it is also an object of libidinal investment. This reflects Freud’s theory of narcissism, where libido is withdrawn from external objects and invested in the self. The ego is thus not outside of the drive economy, but deeply implicated in it. This destabilizes the clear moral story of who is guilty: the ego both resists and desires. In Lacan’s structural terms, the ego is part of the Imaginary—it offers an image of unity, but that image is always haunted by the libidinal underside.

“At this point, one feels it is about to collapse at any moment when the crash of breaking glass alerts everyone that an accident has just occurred at the grand mirror in the drawing room—the golem of narcissism, hastily summoned to assist, having thereby made its entrance.”

Lacan uses theatrical imagery to dramatize the moment when the illusion of egoic unity is shattered. The “grand mirror in the drawing room” is the stage of narcissism—the Imaginary construction where the subject misrecognizes itself as whole. The crash of breaking glass marks the moment of rupture: the mirror stage collapses, and the Real erupts.

The “golem of narcissism” evokes a monstrous creation—artificial, animated by language, yet beyond control. It is the ego as a defensive construction, now summoned in panic to rescue coherence. But it arrives too late and in monstrous form. The subject is no longer master of the house; the mirror—symbol of self-certainty—is broken. This is where analysis begins: in the ruin of the Imaginary, in the failure of the self-image to contain desire.

“The ego is then generally assumed to be the murderer, unless it is considered the victim, whereby the divine rays of the good President SCHREBER begin to spread their net over the world, and the sabbath of instincts grows significantly more complex.”

This sentence plunges us into the ambiguity of psychoanalytic interpretation. Once the ego’s illusory position is exposed, there’s a scramble to assign blame. Is the ego the criminal (for repressing the truth)? Or is it the victim (shattered by the violence of desire)?

Lacan evokes Schreber—the paranoid judge from Freud’s famous case—whose delusions became a metaphysical system involving divine rays and cosmic persecution. To invoke Schreber is to show how fragile the boundary between psychic reality and delusion is, once the ego’s stability is compromised.

The “sabbath of instincts” (a term borrowed from Freud’s Totem and Taboo) suggests a wild, excessive revelry—a breakdown of order in the instinctual realm. Once the ego is no longer sovereign, the drives lose containment. But this chaos is not outside knowledge—it is its drama. The “comedy” begins here, a comedy in the classical sense: a revelation of disorder that holds the potential for truth.

“The comedy, which I am suspending here at the beginning of its second act, is kinder than one might think, since by casting upon a drama of knowledge the buffoonery that belongs only to those who play it without understanding it, it restores to them the authenticity from which they always fall further.”

Lacan suspends the act, but he does not abandon the scene. The “comedy” is psychoanalysis itself—an engagement with the subject’s misrecognitions, repetitions, slips, and failures. It is “kinder” because it treats these not as moral failings but as structures of truth.

The “buffoonery” refers to the subject’s unconscious complicity in their suffering—the way we play out scenes without knowing their script. Psychoanalysis does not mock this; it works with it. By letting the subject play their part, even absurdly, analysis offers the chance to recover “authenticity”—not in the romantic sense, but as a structural alignment with one’s divided desire. The subject who falls further with each repetition may, through the analytic process, touch the truth of that fall.

“But if a graver metaphor is appropriate for the protagonist, it is the one that would show us FREUD as an ACTAEON perpetually pursued by hounds, detected from the outset and relentlessly driven to renew the chase, unable to slow the pursuit led solely by his passion for the goddess.”

Lacan now repositions Freud as a tragic figure, invoking the myth of Actaeon. Actaeon, having glimpsed the goddess Diana bathing, is transformed into a stag and hunted by his own hounds. The metaphor captures the analyst’s impossible position: Freud, having seen something forbidden (the truth of sexuality, of the unconscious), is condemned to be pursued by the very forces he unleashed.

The “hounds” are the drives, the institutions, the disciples, the theory itself—all of which demand more from Freud than he can fully master. He is “detected from the outset”—there is no innocence, no neutral observer. His “passion for the goddess” is the drive for truth, but it is also a passion that leads to his undoing.

“A passion that drives him so far that he cannot stop until he reaches the caves where the chthonic DIANA, in the damp shadows that merge them with the emblematic dwelling place of truth, offers to his thirst, along with the smooth surface of death, the almost mystical boundary of the most rational discourse the world has ever known.”

In the final movement of this passage, Lacan pushes the metaphor to its limit. Freud’s pursuit leads him to the deepest place: the cave of chthonic Diana, the underworld goddess, the guardian of death and truth. This is where desire meets its limit—not in fulfillment, but in symbolic transformation.

The “smooth surface of death” is the Real: that which ends the subject, the impossible, the non-representable. But instead of stopping there, Freud articulates the symbolic substitution—he forges a rational discourse out of his passion, out of the chaos. Psychoanalysis becomes the “most rational discourse the world has ever known” not because it makes everything clear, but because it sustains the proximity to the irrational without succumbing to it.

“This is where we recognize the place where the symbol substitutes itself for death to seize the first swelling of life.”

This is a formulation that crystallizes Lacan’s entire teaching. Where death threatens to silence the subject, the symbol intervenes—not to eliminate death, but to speak it. The symbol—language, the signifier—creates the space for desire to emerge, for life to swell where otherwise there would be only the void.

This is psychoanalysis: the insertion of the signifier into the Real, the creation of meaning not to mask the trauma, but to circumscribe it. Freud, in Lacan’s Actaeonic metaphor, reaches this edge, and instead of annihilation, he finds the threshold of a discourse that can speak the unspeakable. This is the space analysts are called to enter—not to master, but to hold open.

Thus ends the chase. Not in capture, but in a place where symbol meets Real, and where truth, far from being owned, continues to speak.

“This boundary and this place, as we know, are still far from being reached by his disciples—if indeed they do not refuse to follow him there.”

Lacan acknowledges a kind of resistance among Freud’s successors, a hesitation—or even outright refusal—to follow him to the most radical edge of his thought. The “boundary” and the “place” referenced are not physical locations, but the symbolic and epistemological limit Freud approached: the point where the symbolic (language, law, structure) meets the Real (death, trauma, the unspeakable). This is the cave of chthonic Diana evoked earlier, the space where desire confronts its end, and where language’s function becomes clear only through its failure.

Freud ventured to this place through his work on the death drive, repetition, the beyond of pleasure, and the structural implication of castration. Many analysts, Lacan suggests, stop short of this place—they refuse to follow, whether from theoretical caution, clinical orthodoxy, or institutional conservatism. The return to Freud is not only a reading project but an ethical confrontation: to dare follow Freud to where his discourse starts to break down is to stand at the threshold of the Real.

“And so, the ACTAEON who is torn apart here is not FREUD himself, but rather each analyst, according to the measure of the passion that inflamed him and that—following the meaning that Giordano BRUNO drew from this myth in his ‘Heroic Furies’—has made him the prey of the hounds of his own thoughts.”

Now Lacan returns to the Actaeon myth, previously used to figure Freud, but repositions its tragedy: it is no longer just Freud who is devoured by the consequences of having seen too much—it is each analyst. That is, anyone who enters the analytic path must confront the dismembering forces of their own unconscious.

Giordano Bruno’s Heroic Furies reframes Actaeon’s dismemberment not as punishment, but as the consequence of a mystical pursuit—an encounter with divine truth. For Lacan, this pursuit is not religious, but analytic: the passion for truth inevitably turns back on the subject, tears them apart, drives them mad. The analyst is no mere technician; they are structurally caught in what they interpret. Their thoughts—the hounds—circle back, not just on the analysand, but on themselves.

“To grasp this tearing apart, one must hear the irrepressible clamor that rises from the best as well as the worst, trying to call them back to the beginning of the hunt with the words that truth gave us there as provisions for the journey: ‘I speak,’ followed by: ‘There is no speech except through language.’”

This passage is key to Lacan’s ethics of listening. To “grasp this tearing apart” means to recognize the structural division of the subject, revealed in speech. At the origin of psychoanalysis is not the Ego, not even the drives, but a voice—the truth that speaks, even through suffering. The two phrases—“I speak” and “There is no speech except through language”—are foundational Lacanian axioms. The first signals the moment of subjectivation: the emergence of the speaking subject. The second underscores that speech is never pure intention or affect; it is always mediated through the Symbolic.

But there is a “clamor” rising—voices from within the analytic field itself, trying to pull us back, to derail this structural listening. The clamor is not only opposition—it is confusion, a struggle to define what psychoanalysis listens to. This is the “noise” that haunts analytic discourse: the pull to misrecognize the object of analysis.

“These words are immediately drowned out by the chorus: ‘Logomachy!—such is the stanza on one side—What do you make of the pre-verbal, of gesture and mimicry, of tone, of the air of the song, of mood and of affective contact?’”

Here Lacan stages the critique often levied at structural psychoanalysis: that it is all words, that it ignores the body, affect, the non-verbal. The chorus cries “logomachy!”—a battle of words—and demands attention to “gesture,” “mood,” “affective contact.” These are not false objects, but Lacan is warning us: these phenomena are not outside of language—they are structured by it, even when they appear pre-verbal.

The mistake is to posit a pure zone of immediacy, affect, or presence that stands outside language. Psychoanalysis listens to gesture, affect, and tone—but as elements already caught in the chain of signifiers, already invested with unconscious meaning. The problem with this chorus is not what it attends to, but its refusal to theorize these forms as structured.

“To which others, no less animated, reply with the antistrophe: ‘Everything is language: language is my heart beating faster when fright grips me, and if my patient faints at the roar of an airplane at its zenith, it is to speak of the memory she kept of the last bombardment.’”

The “antistrophe” (the counter-chorus) defends Lacan’s position but veers into its own excess. It asserts that “everything is language”—even physiological responses like a racing heart or fainting. These are meaningful not in themselves, but as signifying events—they function like speech, they speak of trauma. The patient’s fainting is not just somatic; it is symbolic: a reactivation of the unconscious memory, tied to a chain of signifiers—war, bombs, fear, loss.

Lacan uses this back-and-forth not to pick sides, but to show that both poles—one which reduces language to logos, and one which expands it to everything—miss the point. Language is neither everything nor nothing; it is a structure that determines how everything becomes meaningful.

“‘Yes, eagle of thought, and when the shape of your mechanical semblance appears in the illuminated oval of the night, painted by the beam of the spotlight, it is heaven’s reply.’”

This poetic line continues the defense of the Symbolic: the airplane—initially a traumatic object—becomes a signifier in the night sky. The “eagle of thought” elevates the discourse into the Imaginary and poetic registers, transforming terror into metaphor, into meaning. Heaven “replies” not through revelation, but through the re-inscription of trauma into discourse. This is sublimation: the process by which the Real is made speakable through symbolic transformation.

“Yet no one was disputing, in attempting these premises, the use of any form of communication to which anyone could resort in their endeavors—not signals, not images, neither background nor form, not even if that background were one of sympathy, and the virtue of no good form was ever questioned.”

Lacan clarifies that psychoanalysis does not dismiss non-verbal communication. It does not deny tone, gesture, or sympathy. But what matters is how these are read—how they are embedded within the Symbolic. The analyst is not forbidden from attending to form, image, or mood; what matters is that these phenomena are not taken as transparent, self-evident expressions. They must be interpreted—located within a structure.

This line is also a subtle critique of certain forms of psychotherapy that valorize empathy or emotional resonance as sufficient. Lacan is not against these experiences—but he insists they are not enough on their own. The virtue of “good form” may be present, but it does not guarantee access to truth.

“One simply kept repeating, after FREUD, the word of his discovery: ‘It speaks.’ And undoubtedly where it was least expected—there, where it suffers.”

This is the core of the analytic ethic. It speaks—ça parle. This is not the subject speaking voluntarily, but the unconscious speaking through symptoms, slips, dreams, acts. The speech of the unconscious emerges where the ego fails—where it suffers. Pain is not meaningless; it is where the signifier insists. This is why the symptom is the privileged site of analysis: it is the place where meaning and suffering coincide.

Freud’s “discovery” is not a theory of drives, nor a map of childhood, but the realization that the unconscious speaks. And more radically, that speech happens despite the subject. This is the scandal that Lacan returns us to.

“If there was once a time when it was enough to respond by listening to what it said—for in hearing it, the answer was already there—then let us assume that the great figures of the origins, the giants of the armchair, were struck by the curse promised to titanic audacity, or that their seats ceased to conduct the good word with which they had been invested by sitting there before.”

This is a reflection on the founding analysts—Freud’s successors and interpreters. There was a moment, he suggests, when simply listening to the unconscious—without theoretical distortion—was enough. To hear the speech of the symptom was already to respond. But something changed. The “giants of the armchair”—those who institutionalized Freud’s insights—were struck by the “curse” of ambition, hubris, or theoretical inflation.

Their seats—their positions of analytic power—ceased to conduct the truth. They became insulated, no longer resonant with the unconscious speech that founded the discipline. This is not only a critique of ego psychology and institutional analysis—it’s a warning. The analyst must remain attuned to what speaks where it suffers, not where theory consolidates.

Thus, Lacan’s return to Freud is not only a methodological correction—it is an ethical insistence. Listen where it hurts. Let the speech of the symptom surprise you. And never forget: the truth of the subject is not to be possessed, but to be heard—always in language, and always in the place where language breaks down.

“In any case, since then, between the psychoanalyst and psychoanalysis, meetings have multiplied in the hope that the Athenian might encounter ATHENA, emerging fully armed from FREUD’s brain.”

This is an ironic allusion to the myth of Athena’s birth—sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus. He transposes this onto the scene of psychoanalysis, positioning FREUD as a modern Zeus and ATHENA as the ideal, rational offspring: psychoanalysis itself, pure and complete. The “Athenian” stands for the analyst, or more precisely, for the hopeful inheritor of psychoanalytic knowledge who awaits the moment of encounter with its full clarity and truth.

But Lacan treats this fantasy with ironic distance. He is critiquing the idea that psychoanalytic knowledge can ever be fully transmitted, wholly rational, or entirely born from one head (Freud’s). This kind of mythical thinking places the analyst as a passive recipient of a self-contained system, and psychoanalysis as a complete doctrine, rather than an open, structure-bound, desire-ridden field. The multiplication of “meetings” suggests institutional settings—conferences, trainings, discussions—that seek to stage this impossible encounter.

“Shall I mention the jealous fate, always the same, that thwarted these meetings? Beneath the mask where each came forward to meet their counterpart, alas! thrice alas!—and a cry of horror at the thought—another had taken her place, and he who was there was no longer himself either.”

The “jealous fate” that Lacan evokes refers to the structural impossibility of recognition within discourse—especially when it comes to the truth of the subject. These meetings fail not because of bad intentions but because of the inherent misrecognition (méconnaissance) that structures every encounter. The “mask” is a direct reference to the Imaginary: where subjects relate to ideal images, not to each other in their division.

By the time one appears before the Other, neither is what they were. Truth has shifted. Desire has intervened. Lacan names the horror of this recognition as the Real—where the subject is forced to face that the Other is not the complete Other, and the self is not unified. The tragic comedy of psychoanalysis unfolds here: just as we arrive to meet psychoanalysis (Athena), we find not the goddess of reason, but something else—perhaps castration, perhaps the failure of full knowledge.

“Let us therefore calmly return to spelling out, with truth, what it has said about itself. Truth said: ‘I speak.’”

In the aftermath of this failed scene of mythical recognition, Lacan invites us to return—calmly and methodically—to the very foundations of psychoanalytic discourse. That foundation is not an image or system, but a voice: truth says, I speak. This is Lacan’s central axiom. The unconscious is not a repository of content; it is structured like a language. It speaks. Not I as subject of full knowledge or autonomy, but an I fractured by language—split, divided, a subject of the signifier.

This is not a metaphor. Lacan insists we take Freud literally. The unconscious speaks, and speech implies subjectivity. But this “I” is not fixed—it emerges at the moment of enunciation, only to disappear again.

“For us to recognize this ‘I’ by the fact that it speaks, perhaps it was not the ‘I’ that we should have seized upon, but rather the edges of speaking where we should have stopped.”

This line introduces one of Lacan’s most subtle insights: the error lies in trying to grasp the I—the ego, the identity, the stable speaker—when in fact we should attend to the edges of speech. That is, the points where language fails, where it breaks down, where it cracks open to reveal the unconscious.

These “edges” are where psychoanalysis operates: slips, jokes, dreams, symptoms—moments that don’t “make sense” but speak nonetheless. It’s not about decoding who the speaker is, but listening to what their speech does. Analysis doesn’t seek the truth of the subject, but the truth in their speaking.

“‘There is no speech except through language’ reminds us that language is an order constituted by laws, from which we could at least learn what they exclude.”

Language is not a transparent medium—it is a structure, governed by laws. This structure determines what can be said, how it can be said, and—crucially—what must be excluded. Lacan points to the necessity of attending not only to what language expresses, but to what it represses. Every speech act is shaped by a symbolic order that includes by excluding.

This is why psychoanalysis must be linguistic: not because it is about semantics, but because the unconscious is regulated by the laws of language. The repressed, the symptom, the fantasy—all are structured in accordance with the differential order of signifiers.

“For example: – that language is different from natural expression and is not a code either; – that it does not merge with information—you’ll understand this if you study cybernetics; – and that it is so far from being reducible to a superstructure that even materialism itself was alarmed by this heresy—‘bubble’ of STALIN to see here.”

Lacan now takes aim at misconceptions. Language is not reducible to “natural expression” (like cries or gestures), nor is it merely a code (as in cryptography or information theory). It is not just a system for transmitting fixed content. Nor is it a superstructure, as some Marxist thought would have it—an ideological overlay on top of material base. Language is constitutive. It is not a tool used by the subject, but the structure that forms the subject.

The reference to Stalin’s 1950 intervention on Marxism and linguistics (where Stalin denied that language was part of the ideological superstructure) is used sarcastically—Stalin balked at the idea that language wasn’t materially grounded. For Lacan, the point is not Stalin’s heresy, but the deeper truth: language isn’t reducible to biology, infrastructure, or function. It exceeds materialism, even as it structures reality.

“If you want to know more, read SAUSSURE. And since a bell tower can sometimes hide even the sun, let me clarify that this is not the signature one encounters in psychoanalysis, but Ferdinand, who can rightly be called the founder of modern linguistics.”

Here, Lacan nods to Ferdinand de Saussure, whose distinction between signifier and signified, and between langue and parole, provided the foundational concepts for structuralism. Lacan humorously warns us not to confuse this Saussure with some other version—he’s not invoking Saussure as a guru, but as a thinker whose work allows us to rigorously grasp the structural laws of language.

The “bell tower hiding the sun” is an elegant metaphor: institutions, or loud dominant figures (perhaps psychoanalytic ones), can obscure the conceptual clarity of thinkers like Saussure. But for psychoanalysis to return to Freud, it must also return to Saussure—not to repeat him, but to understand language as a system of differences without positive terms, which is precisely how Lacan theorizes the unconscious.

“THE ORDER OF THE THING.”

This subheading announces a critical shift. We are entering into Lacan’s theory of the signifier—not just as a linguistic unit, but as that which structures the thing, the Real, the subject, and desire. The “order” is both the symbolic order and the way in which meaning is distributed and deferred. “The Thing” (das Ding) is the lost object, the unattainable Real around which desire is organized. Language gives order—but it also veils the Thing it orbits.

“A psychoanalyst should easily be able to grasp the fundamental distinction between the signifier and the signified and begin to apply it with the two networks they organize in different dimensions.”

This is Lacan’s foundational semiotic principle: the signifier (the material component of language) and the signified (the concept) are not fused, but structurally distinct. Their relationship is arbitrary, differential, and shifting. For the analyst, this is not just a linguistic point—it is clinical. The symptom, fantasy, and subject are all effects of the play of signifiers. The subject does not express a hidden meaning; the subject is what is produced through the chain of signifiers.

There are two dimensions: one synchronic (structure at a given moment) and one diachronic (meaning as it unfolds). Analysts must grasp both to understand how the unconscious is formed and how it speaks.

“The first network, that of the signifier, is the synchronic structure of the material of language, in which each element takes on its precise function by being different from the others. This principle of distribution alone governs the function of the elements of language at its various levels, from phonemic oppositional pairs to compound phrases, whose stable forms it is the task of modern research to uncover.”

Here Lacan lays out the Saussurean principle that language is a system of differences. A signifier has no meaning in itself; it only has function by virtue of not being the others. The analyst must understand that meaning is not located in the signifier but in the position it occupies in a structure.

This applies at every level: from phonemes (basic sounds like /p/ vs /b/) to syntax. And this is not just linguistics—this is how the unconscious is structured. The symptom, the slip, the dream—they all work by displacements and condensations within the network of signifiers. To hear the unconscious is to trace this network. It is not to interpret what it means, but to locate how it functions—where it shifts, where it insists, where it resists.

Lacan is giving us here the methodological groundwork of the return to Freud: not by content, not by empathy, but by structure—by following the signifier where it speaks, and where it fails. The analyst’s work is not to restore wholeness, but to map the subject’s division, structured through language, haunted by the Thing, and voiced—always—by a truth that says, I speak.

“The second network, that of the signified, is the diachronic collection of concretely spoken discourses, which reacts historically upon the first, just as the structure of the first dictates the pathways of the second.”

In this line, Lacan completes the structural dyad introduced previously: the first network (the signifier) is synchronic, existing in a moment as a system of differences; the second (the signified) is diachronic, developing across time through speech acts and discourse. This second network is composed of actual utterances, narratives, expressions—the historical unfolding of meaning.

But crucially, the two are not symmetrical. The signified is shaped and constrained by the laws of the signifier—those rules of difference and structure that determine what can be said and how it can be said. At the same time, these historical discourses—the evolving field of meaning—react back on the signifier, shifting how signs are used and understood in lived communication. This recursive relationship is foundational in Lacanian psychoanalysis: the unconscious is not static but speaks in a historically mediated way, through language that is always already structured.

“Here, what dominates is the unit of meaning, which proves never to resolve itself into a pure indication of the real but always refers to another meaning.”

This sentence expresses the Lacanian critique of referential models of language. The “unit of meaning”—what we think of as a concept or definition—never coincides with a direct, pure contact with reality (the Real). Meaning, rather than pointing to a fixed object, always refers to another meaning—a signifier referring to another signifier. This is the principle of metonymy in Lacan’s reading of Freud: meaning is produced through chains of associations, never through direct representation.

For psychoanalysis, this matters because the symptom—like any utterance—is never self-contained. It refers beyond itself. The meaning of a symptom is not a hidden content to be uncovered, but a point in a signifying chain that must be traced and interpreted. Analysis works not to locate a final meaning, but to open up this chain—to allow the subject to reconfigure it.

“In other words, if meanings grasp things, it is only by constituting their whole by enveloping them in the signifier, and if their weave always covers this whole enough to overflow it, it is because the signifier, in its entirety, signifies nothing.”

Lacan here touches the structuralist heart of his teaching: meaning arises only through the signifier’s grasp—but this grasp is always excessive and incomplete. We “grasp” the real not directly, but by wrapping it in language. This wrapping always overflows—there is always more or less than what the signifier captures.

And yet, the paradox is that the signifier as such signifies nothing. A single signifier has no meaning in itself. It gains function only through its differential position within the structure. So while signifiers create the possibility of meaning, they themselves are empty—pure difference. This gap is central to Lacan’s logic of the unconscious: the unconscious speaks in slips and symptoms because its truth lies not in what is said, but in how it is structured—in the gap between signifiers.

“This confirms that language is never a signal but a dialectical movement.”

Lacan now distinguishes language from a signal-based model of communication (e.g., from cybernetics or behaviorist psychology). A signal is immediate, one-to-one, informational. But language is dialectical—it unfolds through contradiction, mediation, negation. Speech is never neutral; it produces and is produced by desire, history, and structure. The subject of the unconscious is not a sender of signals, but a divided being caught in a dialectical relation to the Other, to meaning, and to their own speech.

“From this point alone, one can notice that any verbal denunciation of disorder participates in the disorder against which it protests, in that disorder has established itself through its discourse.”

Lacan now introduces a crucial ethical insight: even the act of naming or condemning disorder (e.g., a social or moral problem) is already complicit in the very structure of that disorder. Why? Because disorder is not outside language. It is produced and sustained by discourse. This is a direct application of his structural theory to the symbolic order: once disorder is named, it has already been symbolized, and thus integrated into the very logic of the system it supposedly violates.

For the analyst, this reveals the limits of moralism and the need to work with what is said, rather than against it. Even protest, resistance, or critique becomes a function of the discourse it inhabits.

“HEGEL, in his dialectic of the beautiful soul, had already shown that this observation is tautological only if one fails to recognize the tauto-ontic effect in which it is rooted.”

Lacan now brings in Hegel to reinforce his argument. The “beautiful soul” in The Phenomenology of Spirit is the figure who criticizes the world from a position of moral purity, believing itself outside of corruption. But Hegel shows that this is an illusion: the soul is part of the world it denounces. The critique becomes empty, tautological—unless one recognizes what Lacan calls the tauto-ontic effect: the idea that being and saying are interlinked, and that the subject cannot speak from outside the system it critiques.

This has direct relevance to the analytic setting: the analysand is not outside their symptom, and the analyst cannot be outside the structure of transference. There is no pure position—only structured speech.

“In other words, being is primary to the disorder from which the beautiful soul lives in all the senses (including the economic sense) that one can attribute to the term ‘from which to live’.”

Lacan here plays on the double meaning of “living from.” The “beautiful soul” lives from disorder—not only morally (as it defines itself against it), but structurally and even economically. In other words, its being is parasitic upon what it denounces. This has a psychoanalytic parallel: the neurotic lives from the symptom. Their very structure depends upon the thing they claim to want to be rid of.

This is also a veiled critique of certain forms of analytic ideology—where the analyst or school sees itself as the guardian of purity, of true Freud, of ideal method—while this purity is sustained only by positing disorder elsewhere.

“And in denouncing disorder, the beautiful soul engages in a mediation of conduct through which it subsists, even though it remains unacknowledged.”

Hegel shows—and Lacan affirms—that this denunciation is not just a statement but a mediation. The beautiful soul constructs itself as a moral subject through its denunciation. This is not false; it is structurally necessary. But it must be acknowledged. In the analytic setting, the same logic holds: the subject constructs themselves through their complaint, through their story, through the Other they invoke.

The analyst listens not to verify the truth of the statement, but to locate the subject in its speech—to find how the subject emerges in the form of the complaint. Denunciation is part of the symptom.

“This dialectic did not seem able to penetrate beyond the delusion of presumption to which HEGEL applied it—that is, beyond the trap offered by the mirage of consciousness to the ‘I’, infatuated with its sentiment and assuming it as the ‘law of the heart.’”

Here Lacan revisits Hegel’s critique of the “I” who believes its inner feelings constitute truth. The “law of the heart” is the idea that one’s internal passion justifies one’s actions. This “delusion of presumption” is precisely the fantasy that what I feel is what is true. Hegel—and Lacan after him—see this as a trap: a structure of misrecognition that cloaks desire in sentiment and morality.

In psychoanalysis, this is a frequent phenomenon: the patient claims a moral high ground, or a victim position, or a purity of feeling that conceals their complicity in the structure. The analyst’s task is not to debunk, but to interpret—to expose the structural function of the sentiment.

“But precisely, the ‘I’ that HEGEL critiques is a legal being, and as such, it is more concrete than the real being in which one had previously sought to ground it by abstraction, as becomes immediately apparent when one recognizes that this being implies a civil status and an accounting status.”

This is a brilliant and subtle point. Lacan observes that the “I” critiqued by Hegel is not merely abstract—it is legal, institutionalized, already embedded in systems of recognition. It has a “civil status” (subject of law, citizen, bearer of rights) and an “accounting status” (subject of debts, exchanges, responsibilities). In short, it is a symbolic position.

Psychoanalysis must therefore not try to ground the subject in some “real” nature (biological, emotional, or otherwise), but in the symbolic order. The subject is produced through language, law, naming, and responsibility. The analysand who speaks is not simply a self—but a subject of enunciation, already entered into the world of signifiers.

This is where Lacan’s structuralism meets his ethics: analysis must locate the subject not in sentiment, not in pre-verbal affect, but in the position they occupy in discourse. To return to Freud is to return to the speech of the unconscious, and to the Real it reveals—not as content, but as structure, lack, and desire.

“It was left to FREUD to demonstrate that it is within this legal being that certain disorders manifested by man in his real being—that is, in his organism functioning as a totality without any graspable relation between its elements—finally found their counterpart.”

Lacan emphasizes Freud’s unique intervention: showing that the subjective disorders—neuroses, symptoms, repetitions—do not originate merely in the biological organism, the “real being,” but rather find their meaning and structure in the symbolic order. Specifically, in what Lacan calls “legal being”—that is, the subject’s position within the law, language, social structure, and symbolic economy.

The “real being” here is defined as the body in its wholeness, yet paradoxically, this totality offers no “graspable relation between its elements.” This means that from a purely biological or empirical standpoint, the human organism provides no unified map for the meaning of psychic symptoms. The symptomatic formations of the subject are not reducible to somatic dysfunction or neurological misfiring. Instead, they find their counterpart—their logic, their structure—in the field of the symbolic: where the subject is spoken, named, and inscribed into a world of signifiers.

Freud’s major insight, then, was that psychic suffering is not fundamentally somatic or organic, but symbolic—and that it must be understood as such.

“And he explained the possibility of this by the congenital gap presented by man’s real being in his natural relations, and by the reappropriation, sometimes for ideographic use but also phonetic or even grammatical, of the imaginary elements that appear fragmented within this gap.”

Here, Lacan develops his idea of the congenital gap—a central notion in his theory of the subject. Man, unlike animals, is born prematurely, without a fixed or instinctual relation to his body or environment. This results in a fundamental “gap” or lack at the heart of human being, which the Imaginary (the realm of images, identifications, and the mirror stage) attempts to cover.

The child identifies with fragments—images, gestures, sounds—that provide a semblance of unity, but this unity is imaginary and always incomplete. These fragmented images are later reappropriated by the symbolic system, not merely to express ideas (ideographically), but as elements of sound (phonetic), and even structure (grammatical). That is, the raw material of the Imaginary is taken up and reworked within the laws of language.

This is the process through which the subject becomes a speaking subject: not through biology, but through insertion into a chain of signifiers that reshapes fragmented images into linguistic structure.

“The insights that immediately emerged regarding the omnipresence of the symbolic function in the human being made intuitively evident what characterizes the position of the speaking subject in society, or what distinguishes human society from animal societies: namely, that the individual is taken as a unit within a sequence of exchanges, more or less circular (with more or less extended intervals), according to the laws of a combinatory system of gift-giving, whose principle escapes him and which has no immediate, nor even direct, relation—ethnologists seem to tell us—with his needs.”

Lacan now expands from the individual subject to society at large, emphasizing how the symbolic function shapes not only language, but the entire field of human sociality. Drawing from structural anthropology—especially the work of Lévi-Strauss—he describes how the speaking subject is inserted into systems of exchange: kinship, gift-giving, language, law.

These systems are “combinatory,” meaning they are structured by rules and governed by a logic independent of any individual’s intention or need. This is what distinguishes human society from animal behavior: the human subject participates in exchanges whose purpose and structure transcend immediate biological function. What is exchanged—women, names, words, gifts—is mediated through the symbolic, not driven by instinct.

In other words, human need is coded through language and culture. This insertion into the symbolic is what makes us subjects—and what generates the contradictions, desires, and sufferings that psychoanalysis addresses.

“The conflict of order, in any case, is evident within the individual, and given the depth to which the symbolic order penetrates him, it can resonate to limits that are pushed back a little further each day into the organic realm.”

This “conflict of order” refers to the disjunction between the Real (the organic body, the drive, the biological) and the Symbolic (language, law, structure). The symbolic order “penetrates” the subject so deeply that it leaves marks not only on the psyche but also on the body. Psychoanalysis has long known that the body is not immune from symbolic inscription—hysterical symptoms, for instance, demonstrate that language can take hold in the flesh.

As our understanding of this symbolic penetration grows (“pushed back a little further each day”), we increasingly recognize that even what seems most material—somatic, neurological—may be shaped or interpreted through symbolic formations.

“Psychoanalysis is nothing other than the recognition of the symbolic chain in which these effects are arranged, because it is the only means by which the truth they symbolize can come to be recognized.”

This sentence defines psychoanalysis in precise structural terms: it is the recognition of the symbolic chain. That is, the analyst listens not for “the truth” as content, but for how truth emerges through the network of signifiers—through dreams, symptoms, slips, desires. These effects are arranged within this chain—not randomly, but with a logic.

Symptoms symbolize a truth—but this truth is not pre-existing. It is constituted through the symbolic system. The analytic process aims not to uncover hidden content, but to trace the pathway through which the subject’s desire is structured, and to make possible its articulation.

“This does not abolish all conflict but transfers its burden to the subject, who can assert this truth in the struggle.”

Psychoanalysis does not offer peace or resolution. It does not eliminate conflict. Rather, it enables the subject to assume their desire, to recognize the symbolic structure of their symptom, and to take responsibility for their position within that structure. The “burden” is now ethical: it is not to cure, but to subjectify—to enable the subject to speak, to struggle, to position themselves in relation to the truth that emerges through their speech.

This is the analytic ethic: not adaptation, not normalization, but the assumption of divided subjectivity.

“The very terms in which we formulate this goal make it clear that analysis does not lead to an individualistic ethic.”

This is a crucial point. Lacan rebukes any attempt to turn psychoanalysis into a self-help model or therapeutic individualism. Analysis is not about self-improvement, nor about achieving happiness or adjustment. The “goal” of analysis is not the flourishing of the ego, but the traversal of fantasy, the confrontation with castration, and the repositioning of the subject in the symbolic.

Thus, the ethics of analysis are not individualistic—they concern the subject in relation to the Other, to language, to desire. The outcome is not autonomy, but a certain way of bearing lack.

“However, its practice in the American sphere has been so crudely reduced to a means of achieving ‘success’ and a mode of demanding ‘happiness’ that it is necessary to specify that this constitutes a betrayal of psychoanalysis.”

Lacan now launches a sharp critique of American ego psychology and the cultural distortion of Freudian analysis into a tool for achieving success and happiness. In the United States, psychoanalysis had largely been transformed into a therapeutic technique aimed at helping individuals adapt to social norms—effectively a kind of psychological consumerism.

This, Lacan argues, is a betrayal of Freud—not a mere misreading, but a systemic corruption of the radical implications of the Freudian discovery. Psychoanalysis was not meant to comfort the ego, but to disturb it. Its aim is not satisfaction, but truth.

“This betrayal results, for too many of its practitioners, from the pure and radical fact that they have never wanted to know anything about Freud’s discovery and never will, not even in the sense of repression: for in this case, it is a mechanism of systematic misrecognition, one that simulates delusion, even in its group forms.”

This is a damning diagnosis. The problem isn’t even repression—because repression implies at least some recognition of what is being pushed away. What Lacan sees instead is méconnaissance: systematic misrecognition, not of content, but of the structure of Freud’s work itself. It is a collective delusion, a fantasy maintained at the level of institutions and discourse, wherein the Freudian act is preserved in name but evacuated of its core.

This is not just forgetting; it is a refusal to know. Not a lapse, but a structure. And the structure of this refusal is itself a kind of group fantasy—a false community bound not by recognition of the unconscious, but by its denial.

For Lacan, then, the return to Freud is not nostalgic—it is revolutionary. It is a call to re-encounter the subject of the unconscious, to hear again that “It speaks”, and to reject the ego’s comfort for the Real’s demand. That is where psychoanalysis begins—and where, against all betrayals, it must continue.

“A more rigorous reference of analytic experience to the general structure of the semantics in which it is rooted would nevertheless have allowed them to be convinced before needing to be defeated.”

This is a sober critique of the intellectual laziness or theoretical avoidance that Lacan perceives in much of contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly in the American adaptation. Had analysts seriously engaged with the semantic structure underlying psychoanalysis—namely, the structuralist understanding of language and meaning—they would not have had to be defeated (in debates or clinical failure) in order to recognize the validity of Freud’s insights.

This is a missed opportunity: had they examined the actual linguistic and semiotic structure in which the unconscious is rooted, they would have seen that Freud’s discovery is not a matter of metaphor or vague theory, but of structural necessity. The unconscious is not a container of repressed ideas but a discourse, a system of signifiers structured like a language.

Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis must not remain content with intuition or clinical tradition; it must submit its foundations to rigorous formalization. This includes not only Freud’s clinical discoveries, but also the linguistic framework in which they operate. Psychoanalysis cannot afford to ignore the theory of signification if it hopes to preserve the specificity of the unconscious.

“For the subject we were speaking of a moment ago, as the legatee of recognized truth, is precisely not the ego perceived in the more or less immediate givens of conscious enjoyment or laborious alienation.”

Here, Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the subject of the unconscious—the one who inherits truth through language—and the ego, which is often mistaken for the speaking subject but is instead a product of misrecognition. The ego operates within the Imaginary, tied to conscious experience, image, and identification. It is found in “conscious enjoyment” (jouissance that remains on the surface) or in the suffering of alienation within work, roles, or ideologies.

But this ego is not the subject that speaks in analysis. The true subject—the one addressed by the unconscious—appears in slips, dreams, and symptoms, not in reflective knowledge. This distinction is fundamental in Lacan’s return to Freud: the subject of analysis is not the ego, and psychoanalytic ethics begins from this separation.

“This factual distinction is the same one found in the a of the Freudian unconscious, insofar as it is separated by an abyss from preconscious functions, up to the ω of Freud’s testament in the 31st of his Neue Vorlesungen:”

Lacan constructs an alphabetic metaphor: from the a (beginning) of the Freudian unconscious, to the ω (omega, the end) of Freud’s last major lecture—the final chapter of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. This range marks the conceptual arc of Freud’s thinking: the unconscious as structurally distinct from the preconscious (those thoughts and memories on the threshold of consciousness) all the way to his final ethical-metaphorical pronouncements.

Between a and ω, there is an abyss—the abyss between conscious, accessible thought and the unconscious structured by signifiers. The unconscious is not a deep layer waiting to become conscious; it is a radically different system, one that speaks another language. The preconscious operates within the ego’s terms; the unconscious does not.

“‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.’” [Preceding the famous last sentence of the 31st lecture: “Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa wie die Trockenlegung der Zuydersee.”]

Now Lacan turns to Freud’s famous line: “Where Es was, there shall I become.” This phrase has been endlessly cited, but often misunderstood. Lacan underscores its place as Freud’s ethical testament, spoken at the close of his teaching. But he immediately begins to dismantle the common English translation (“Where the id was, there the ego shall be”), which distorts Freud’s precise, intentional formulation.

The phrase must be read not as a program for strengthening the ego to master the id (as in ego psychology), but as a poetic and structural formulation of transformation: at the place of the unconscious (“Es”), a subject emerges. It is a becoming that is not a conquest, but a symbolic reorganization.

“A dazzling formula in its brevity, so coextensive with the property of the meanings to which it refers, that the signifiers take on the weight of a consecratory utterance. Let us analyze them, then.”

Lacan praises Freud’s sentence as “dazzling”—not because it’s stylistically elegant, but because of how compactly and powerfully it condenses a structural truth. The signifiers—Es, Ich, werden—carry weight far beyond their grammatical roles. They form a consecratory utterance: a kind of ethical formula, almost liturgical in tone, that lays out the aim of analysis.

Lacan’s method is now philological and clinical: analyze the precise language. This is what the return to Freud entails—not paraphrase, but exegesis.

“Contrary to the form that the English translation—‘Where the id was, there the ego shall be’—cannot avoid, Freud did not say das Es, nor das Ich, as he usually did to designate these agencies, which he had organized in his new topography for over ten years. Given the inflexible rigor of his style, this choice in their usage in this sentence lends them a particular emphasis.”

This is an extraordinarily important technical point. Freud normally refers to the psychic agencies with definite articles: das Es (the id), das Ich (the ego). But here, Es and Ich appear without the articles. Lacan insists this omission is deliberate and meaningful. Without the article, these words point not to established psychic entities but to functions, positions, or even subjects in flux.

The lack of “das” suggests that Freud is not speaking of topographical components (as in the structural model of id, ego, superego), but of existential positions: a “there” (Wo) where something is—something without stable identity, something prior to objectification. And into this space, something else is called to emerge—not an ego as mastery, but a subjectivity wrought through symbolic work.

“In any case, without even having to confirm through internal critique of Freud’s work that he did indeed write Das Ich und das Es to maintain this fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego, constituted at its core by a series of alienating identifications, it becomes clear here that it is at the place: ‘Wo’, where Es: a subject deprived of any das or other objectifying article, war: ‘was’.”

Lacan continues clarifying Freud’s distinction: in Das Ich und das Es, Freud sets up a topographical model, but even there he maintains a strict division between the ego and the unconscious. The ego is not the subject—it is a product of identification, image, defense. The subject of the unconscious is elsewhere: in the Es, the It, the that which speaks without speaking for itself.

So what is Freud saying in Wo Es war? That at the place where the It was—the place of alien speech, of unconscious truth—the subject (Ich) should come to be. Not to dominate or replace it, but to assume it. The analyst’s task is to lead the analysand to this point: not of ego strength, but of subjectivation through the symbolic.

“It is a place of being that is at stake, and at this place: soll, a duty in the moral sense is announced there, as confirmed by the single sentence that follows to close the chapter: ‘Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa wie die Trockenlegung der Zuydersee.’”

The verb soll in Freud’s formula carries moral weight—it is not merely future tense (“shall”), but a duty, a call, a should. Freud here frames analysis as an ethical project. Not in terms of norms or values, but in the sense of symbolic labor—Kulturarbeit, cultural work. The following sentence compares analysis to the draining of the Zuyder Zee, a massive Dutch engineering feat: an arduous, slow, collective transformation of a hostile terrain into something inhabitable.

This metaphor is not about control—it is about symbolic work. The unconscious is not tamed or eliminated. Rather, through analysis, the subject gains a new relation to it. They come to inhabit the space of their own desire, to assume their lack, and to speak from that place—not to master it, but to live with it.

Thus Lacan returns us, with tremendous clarity, to Freud’s ethical horizon: the goal of analysis is not adaptation, but becoming—a symbolic becoming, where the subject emerges not in strength, but in relation to their own truth, spoken where Es war.

“‘Ich’, I, there must I (as it was once said: ‘this am I’ before it was said: ‘it is I’) werden, become, which means not arise, nor even occur, but come into the light of this very place as a place of being.”

Lacan carefully unpacks Freud’s formulation, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”, particularly the verb werden—often translated inadequately as “shall be.” Lacan notes that werden implies not a spontaneous arising (entstehen) or a mere occurrence (geschehen), but something more ontological: a coming into being. It is not about emergence but about a traversal—to come into the light, to occupy a place that was previously inhabited by the unconscious (Es), and to do so as a subject.

Furthermore, Lacan points out a historical shift in the mode of self-reference. The earlier form, “this am I”, expresses a demonstrative, embodied immediacy. It is the deixis of the subject pointing to itself in space. In contrast, “it is I” is reflective, already symbolic—positioned in language. The becoming at stake in werden is thus not biological or experiential, but symbolic and ethical: a coming to be as subject within the structure of the signifier, in a specific place of being.

“Thus, we would consent—against the principles of significant economy that must govern a translation—to slightly force the forms of the signifier in French in order to align them with the weight that German conveys better here, with a meaning still resistant.”

Lacan acknowledges that translations inevitably miss the weight carried by Freud’s original German phrasing. As a structuralist, Lacan insists that form is not incidental to meaning. Signifiers carry structural functions that are embedded in their linguistic materiality, and some meanings simply resist clean translation.

Here he signals his willingness—though cautiously—to violate the norm of “economy of expression” in translation, if doing so can retain the conceptual and affective density of Freud’s original. This is part of Lacan’s broader project: to return to Freud through the letter, the signifier, the exact wording—not through paraphrase or interpretive smoothing.

“For this, we might draw on the homophony between the German es and the initial letter of the word subject.”

This is a typically Lacanian linguistic play. The German Es (the Freudian “It”) and the initial letter S in subject can be heard as homophonically linked. Lacan exploits this phonetic accident to suggest a conceptual resonance: that the Es, the seat of the unconscious, already contains within it the mark of subjectivity (S).

This is not an etymological claim, but a structural one. The Es is the place where the subject is split, where the subject speaks without knowing it. By making this phonetic play, Lacan emphasizes that subjectivity is not outside the unconscious—it is structured by it. And the unconscious is not a “thing” but a discourse, a network of signifiers in which the subject is produced and divided.

“By the same step, we would come to a momentary indulgence for the first translation given of the word es as self. The id, which was later preferred, does not seem much more appropriate to us, since it responds to the das of the German was ist das? in das ist, it is.”

Lacan revisits the early English translations of Freud, where Es was sometimes rendered as “self” before id (from the Latin id, “it”) became the standard. Neither is ideal. “Self” suggests a coherent, unified personal identity, which is exactly what Freud’s Es destabilizes. “Id”, meanwhile, comes from Latin and sounds clinical or abstract, and it ties the Es too tightly to the idea of a biological or instinctual It—as in “it is,” das ist.

But Freud’s Es is not a substance. It is not a thing. It is a position, a place of being from which the unconscious speaks. In this sense, it resists objectification. Thus, Lacan challenges all attempts to render Es in terms that conceal its function as a locus of split subjectivity.

“Thus, the elided ‘c’ that would appear if we adhered to the conventional equivalence suggests to us the production of a verb: ‘to be oneself,’ where the mode of absolute subjectivity would be expressed, as Freud properly discovered it in its radical eccentricity:”

In French, translating “It is” as “C’est” introduces the elided “c’,” which signals a kind of impersonal subject (ce). Lacan seizes on this to evoke a verb-form—“to be oneself.” But this être soi is not about psychological self-identity. It is about subjectivation as a process of alienation: one becomes oneself only through the Other, through language, through the symbolic.

The subject is always “off-center” (eccentric) with respect to themselves. Freud discovered this radical alienation at the core of subjectivity: the unconscious is the truth of the subject, but it is not located in the subject as a possession. Rather, it structures the subject by speaking from elsewhere.

“‘There where it was, one might say—“There where it had been,” we would wish it to be understood—it is my duty to come to be.’”

Lacan gives his own version of Freud’s phrase, accentuating the ethical imperative (“it is my duty”) and the temporal nuance. He suggests that Es war be understood not only in the present perfect (“where it was”), but as a past anterior—“where it had been.” This accentuates that the unconscious is not simply there to be discovered. It is lost, repressed, and must be reconstructed. The subject doesn’t arise where the unconscious is, but where it has left its trace.

This transformation is an ethical and symbolic task. The subject must come to be—not through mastery, but through a relation to that which was, and still speaks in them. The unconscious, thus, is the site of both division and becoming.

“You understand well that it is not within a grammatical conception of the functions where I and ego appear that we must analyze whether and how je and moi distinguish and overlap in each particular subject.”

Lacan now insists that psychoanalysis cannot rest on a grammatical distinction between I (je) and ego (moi). These are not merely linguistic categories, but structural positions in the speaking subject. Je is the enunciating subject, the one that speaks but cannot be fully heard. Moi is the image of self, the reflected identity, the conscious agent.

Their distinction is not one of function but of structure. The je is always divided, always lacking. It speaks from a place that cannot be known in full. The moi is what the subject sees, but this vision is imaginary—a composite of identifications. Psychoanalysis must trace how these registers interact in the speech of each analysand—not through definitions, but through discourse.

“What the linguistic conception, which must form the analyst in their foundational initiation, will teach is to expect the symptom to prove its function as a signifier—that is, by what distinguishes it from the natural index, which the same term commonly designates in medicine.”

This is a pivotal methodological point. The analyst must be trained in linguistic structure, not merely in psychological concepts. The symptom, for Lacan, is not an expression of repressed content, nor a bodily malfunction—it is a signifier. It does not “indicate” a hidden reality (like a fever indicates infection), but functions within a chain of meaning. Its meaning is not fixed—it is structured through language.

This is why psychoanalytic interpretation is not explanatory but interpretive. The symptom must be heard within the subject’s discourse. It has no meaning outside the signifying chain. Thus, the analyst must listen not to what the symptom “means” as content, but to how it functions as speech.

“To meet this methodological requirement, the analyst must recognize its conventional usage in the meanings elicited by the analytic dialogue—a dialogue whose structure we will attempt to describe—but even these meanings must be regarded as impossible to grasp with certainty except in their context, in the sequence constituted for each meaning by the one that refers to it and the one to which it refers within the analytic discourse.”

Finally, Lacan outlines the core epistemological challenge of analytic practice: meaning is not fixed. It is not graspable in isolation. Each utterance in analysis must be understood in context—not in the sense of personal history, but in the structure of the analytic dialogue. Meaning is constituted diachronically—by the signifier that precedes and the one that follows.

This is why interpretation must always be cautious and situated. The symptom speaks, but only within a sequence. The analytic act is not to explain or decode, but to intervene in the chain—to allow the subject to hear their own desire differently, through the unfolding of their speech.

In this way, Lacan returns us to the radical core of Freud’s project: the unconscious speaks, not in signs or images, but in signifiers—and it is the ethical task of the subject, not to master this speech, but to become in relation to it. Where Es war, there Ich—not the ego, but the divided subject—must come to be.

“These fundamental principles are easily applied in technique, and by illuminating it, they dissipate many of the ambiguities that, by persisting even in the major concepts of transference and resistance, render their use in practice ruinous.”

This is a clear affirmation: the structural principles of language and the signifier are not just theoretical—they have immediate consequences for technique. When applied rigorously, they clarify and cut through the ambiguities that have accumulated around central psychoanalytic concepts like transference and resistance. These concepts, foundational to Freudian clinical work, have been preserved in name but distorted in usage.

Lacan warns that unless these ideas are grounded in the structure of discourse—that is, in the speaking subject—they will inevitably be misapplied. If we continue using them within a psychological or ego-centered framework, without regard for their linguistic and dialectical function, their clinical implementation becomes ruinous. That is, they will not produce the emergence of truth, but rather reinforce misunderstanding and stagnation.

“RESISTANCE TO THE RESISTANT.”

This subheading introduces a new and critical inversion. Lacan stages a confrontation—not just with resistance itself (in the Freudian sense), but with how psychoanalysis has come to resist the concept of resistance. It is a pun that folds the history of the concept onto itself: analysts resist the resistant when they cling to inadequate models of it.

What follows will be a critical re-reading of resistance: not as an obstacle to be eliminated or interpreted in moral or psychological terms, but as a structural function of discourse. Resistance is not merely a force against analysis; it is in speech—it is the very opacity that marks the place of the subject.

“If we consider only resistance, whose usage increasingly overlaps with defense, and everything it implies in this sense as maneuvers of reduction, we can no longer be blind to the coercion they exert.”

Lacan now identifies a slippage in the Freudian field: resistance has come to be conflated with defense—that is, with mechanisms that serve to protect the ego from anxiety, loss, or unacceptable desire. While Freud himself initiated the link between resistance and defense (especially in his later work), Lacan critiques the way this link has become psychologized.

When resistance is understood primarily as egoic defense, it is reduced to a maneuver, a tactic to be countered or bypassed. But Lacan emphasizes that such reduction transforms the analytic process into a form of coercion: it imagines the analyst as someone who must “overcome” the patient’s defenses, as if leading them toward a known truth. This is not psychoanalysis—it is pedagogy or suggestion.

“It is good to recall that the first resistance analysis must confront is that of discourse itself, insofar as it is initially the discourse of opinion, and that any psychological objectification will inevitably be tied to this discourse.”

Here is the core of Lacan’s structural reading: resistance is not primarily psychic; it is discursive. The “first” resistance is not the patient’s avoidance of a particular memory or truth, but the resistance of language itself. The analysand enters the analytic setting speaking in the “discourse of opinion”—that is, the Imaginary register of social clichés, ideologies, commonplaces, self-narratives.

Moreover, the analyst who attempts to “objectify” the patient psychologically—by naming their defenses, explaining their symptoms, or defining their structure too early—is also caught in this same discourse. Any such objectification remains within the Symbolic field of social speech, where the subject is already misrecognized. True analysis begins when both analyst and analysand recognize the limits of this discourse and begin to interpret within it—not from outside it.

“This is indeed what motivated the remarkable simultaneity with which the burghers of analysis reached an impasse in their practice around the 1920s: they knew both too much and too little to make their patients—who knew scarcely less—recognize the truth.”

Lacan offers a historical diagnosis. In the 1920s, the first generation of post-Freudian analysts—those “burghers” of the analytic establishment—reached a point of stagnation. Why? Because they were caught between knowing too much (theoretical jargon, clinical doctrines) and knowing too little (of the subject’s truth as spoken in their own language). Their patients, meanwhile, were already speaking in an increasingly analyzed world—one where Freudian vocabulary had entered popular discourse.

As a result, the encounter between analyst and analysand became performative rather than transformative. Both parties could speak the language of truth—symptom, resistance, trauma—but without accessing the real effects of that speech. What was missing was structure: a way to listen to the unconscious as a speech effect, not a known content.

“But the principle, adopted from that moment, of granting primacy to the analysis of resistance is far from having led to a favorable development.”

Responding to this crisis, the analytic community adopted a new principle: prioritize resistance. Focus on it, analyze it. But for Lacan, this shift—while seemingly faithful to Freud—did not achieve what it intended. It failed to produce a deeper engagement with the subject. Why? Because the structure of resistance was still being misunderstood.

Instead of interpreting resistance as the symptom of a divided subject in language, it was treated as a barrier to interpretation itself—something to be overcome or broken down. This tactical attitude toward resistance turned the analytic process into a struggle for control, with the analyst trying to extract or elicit confession from a withholding patient.

“Because prioritizing an operation does not suffice to achieve its objective if one does not fully understand what that objective is.”

This sentence generalizes the critique: technique without theory is useless. Prioritizing resistance—as an operation—is meaningless if the analyst does not understand what resistance is. If the objective is misread, the means will fail.

Lacan’s argument is that resistance is not a pathology of will, nor a technical problem. It is a structure—a function of the unconscious, a mode of speech. Unless one understands its structural function within the signifying chain, one’s interventions will reinforce the very misrecognitions that generate the symptom.

“Yet it was precisely toward a reinforcement of the objectifying position in the subject that the analysis of resistance was directed—to the point that this directive now openly appears in the principles governing the conduct of a standard cure.”

In practice, the emphasis on resistance has turned into a new form of objectification. The subject is no longer heard as divided, spoken by the unconscious, but treated as a person with defense mechanisms that need to be interpreted, controlled, or bypassed.

This orientation has now crystallized into the standardized model of psychoanalytic technique—where interpretation is formulaic, transference is managed, and the patient is guided toward ego-strengthening. This, for Lacan, is a betrayal of the Freudian act. The subject is not an object to be shaped or corrected; they are the effect of a discourse to be heard.

“Far from needing to keep the subject in a state of observation, we must understand that in engaging them there, we enter a circle of misunderstanding that nothing can break—neither within the cure nor in critique.”

Lacan warns that keeping the analysand in a position of observation—treating them as an object of study or even of self-study—locks the analytic process into a hermeneutic circle. A loop of misunderstanding ensues: the analysand tries to explain themselves, the analyst tries to interpret, and both remain trapped in the Imaginary.

This circle cannot be broken from within, because its very form reproduces misrecognition. Even critique cannot save it, because critique itself becomes part of the same discursive trap—speaking about the subject rather than listening to the speech that constitutes them.

“Any intervention in this direction could only be justified by a dialectical end, namely, to demonstrate its dead-end value.”

If an analyst does intervene in a way that mirrors this objectifying structure—challenging resistance, provoking insight, naming defense—it must be only to reveal the dead-end of such a position. That is, the intervention must function dialectically: to produce a turning point, a recognition of failure, a gap in the structure that allows the subject to shift position.

In this light, interpretation is not about correcting or informing the patient. It is about cutting into the discourse at the right moment, revealing the lack that structures it. Only through this dialectical movement—structured around the signifier—can psychoanalysis remain faithful to its Freudian origin and Lacan’s return: not to ego psychology, but to the truth that speaks in the symptom, and resists as a way of revealing the subject.

“But I will go further and say: you cannot simultaneously proceed with this objectification of the subject and speak to them as you should.”

Here Lacan brings the argument to its critical edge. He declares that it is impossible to both objectify the subject—treat them as an object of knowledge, analysis, observation—and to speak to them as an analyst must. This is not merely a practical concern or a question of incompatible attitudes. It is a structural impossibility.

The analyst must choose: either engage the subject in the discourse of truth—as divided, desiring, speaking—or reduce them to a psychological entity, an ego, a set of behaviors to be managed or explained. The two are incompatible positions in psychoanalytic praxis. The analytic act is not neutral; it is ethically and structurally situated. To truly speak to the subject is to speak to the subject of the unconscious, not to the ego.

“This is not simply because, as the English proverb says, ‘you cannot eat your cake and have it too’—that is, you cannot adopt two approaches toward the same objects whose consequences mutually exclude one another.”

Lacan acknowledges the common sense explanation: trying to apply two mutually exclusive frameworks at once (structural analysis and psychological objectification) is a contradiction. The cake can’t be both eaten and preserved. But he signals that this proverb doesn’t go far enough. The contradiction is not merely pragmatic; it’s ontological.

“Rather, it is for the deeper reason expressed in the maxim ‘no man can serve two masters’—that is, one cannot align one’s being with two actions oriented in opposite directions.”

This is the ethical heart of Lacan’s position. The maxim “no man can serve two masters” (from the Gospels) is invoked to mark the impossibility of split intentionality. The analyst cannot orient themselves both toward truth (the subject of the unconscious) and toward control (the ego of adaptation or objectification). These orientations demand fundamentally different positions of being.

Serving the unconscious means submitting to its logic—its lack, its desire, its temporal unfolding through signifiers. Serving psychology means seeking mastery over phenomena, categorizing, diagnosing. The analyst cannot occupy both positions. The very being of the analyst is structured by which master they serve.

“For objectification in psychology is fundamentally governed by a law of misrecognition, which governs the subject not only as observed but also as observer.”

Lacan here specifies the Imaginary structure that underpins objectification. Psychology—when it objectifies—operates within the méconnaissance (misrecognition) of the mirror stage: the subject relates to themselves through images, ideal forms, identities. This logic governs both how the subject sees themselves and how they see others.

The subject becomes caught in a hall of mirrors: they look at themselves through the eyes of others and are seen in return through projections. This imaginary structure is reinforced when the analyst positions themselves as a neutral observer. To truly enter into psychoanalysis, this structure must be traversed—the analyst must disrupt it, not reenact it.

“This means that it is not of him that you must speak to him, because he is sufficient for this task, and, in doing so, it is not even to you that he speaks.”

This is a subtle but essential distinction. When the analysand speaks “of himself”—of his ego, his personality, his memories—he speaks within the register of the Imaginary, where the ego attempts to define and stabilize itself. In this realm, the subject already has enough tools: language, experience, social scripts. Nothing new emerges here.

But crucially, when he speaks in this mode, he is not speaking to the analyst. He is speaking into the mirror, to the Other he imagines, not the one who listens structurally. The analyst must not take this speech at face value or respond to its surface. They must instead listen beneath it, at the level where the unconscious speaks.

“If you must speak to him, it is literally about something else—that is, something other than what he is referring to when he speaks about himself.”

The analyst must speak not about the patient, or even to the self the patient constructs, but about something else—the thing that speaks through the analysand, often without their knowledge. This “something else” is the unconscious: the slip, the repetition, the joke, the hesitation, the silence. It is the subject of the signifier—not the ego, but what is divided by language.

The analyst’s response must be directed not to the ego’s statements but to this other discourse—the truth that emerges in spite of what is being said.

“It is the thing that speaks to you, a thing that, no matter what he says, would remain forever inaccessible to him if, by being a word addressed to you, it could not evoke in you its response.”

This “thing” (la chose, das Ding) is what Lacan elsewhere calls the Real. It speaks in the analysand’s speech but remains opaque to them—unless it is addressed to someone who can hear it as such. The analyst must receive this word not at the level of its content, but at the level of its structure, its displacement, its failure.

If the analyst hears it, it can be returned. It is not interpretation in the explanatory sense; it is recognition of the message’s structure and its return in a form the subject can integrate.

“And if, having heard the message in this inverted form, you could not return it to him, offering him the double satisfaction of having recognized it and of having its truth recognized by him.”

This is the analytic function proper. The analyst hears what the subject cannot hear in their own speech, and returns it—not as explanation, but as mirror, cut, signifier. When this occurs, the analysand experiences recognition: not only of what was said, but that it was true, that it had always been there. This is what makes psychoanalysis unique: the truth was not repressed content, but always-already structured as a missed encounter in speech.

The double satisfaction Lacan refers to is the recognition of one’s own desire and the recognition that someone else heard it—that it counts as truth in the Other’s field.

“This truth that we thus know—can we not truly know it?”

Lacan here poses the question that returns us to the core of epistemology. The analyst “knows” the truth of the unconscious—but what does it mean to know it? Can we claim this knowledge as true, or is it always deferred, veiled, partial?

Psychoanalysis never grants full knowledge. The unconscious resists full presence. But it does produce effects of truth—moments when the subject recognizes something that had been structuring them all along. This is not positivist knowledge, but truth as traversal, as encounter with lack.

“‘Adæquatio rei et intellectus’ (Truth is the adequation of the intellect and the thing —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica), such has been the definition of the concept of truth since there have been thinkers to lead us along the paths of their thought.”

Lacan cites Aquinas’s classical definition of truth: a correspondence between the intellect and the thing (res). In traditional metaphysics, truth is when mind matches reality. But Lacan is skeptical of this model in psychoanalysis. In the analytic encounter, the “thing” (la Chose, das Ding) does not present itself in full. It is not “out there” to be matched—it is structured by lack, by desire.

Psychoanalytic truth is not adequation—it is subjective truth, spoken truth, truth that divides the subject. It emerges not as correspondence but as rupture—when the symbolic order reveals the Real that underlies it.

“An intellect like ours should indeed be up to the task of comprehending this thing that speaks to us—or even speaks within us. And even if it hides behind the discourse that says nothing except to make us speak, it would be remarkable if it failed to find someone to speak to.”

Even though the unconscious hides—behind speech that says nothing, behind banalities, behind symptoms—it insists on being heard. The “thing that speaks” is the Real within the Symbolic, the drive within the chain of signifiers. The grace of psychoanalysis is that this thing can find someone to speak to—that the analyst can hear it and respond.

The challenge is not that the unconscious is silent, but that it speaks too much—in the wrong place, at the wrong time, through the wrong mouth. The analyst is the one trained to listen to this excess and give it place.

“This is indeed the grace I wish upon you: to speak of it—for that is now the matter at hand—and the floor belongs to those who put the thing into practice.”

This is a gesture of transmission. He gives the floor not to theorists, not to critics, but to practitioners—those who put the thing into practice. This is a call to ethical engagement. To be an analyst is not to possess knowledge, but to speak of the thing—to enter the field where the unconscious speaks, to listen where the symptom insists, and to respond from a place beyond mastery.

It is the act of holding open the space where the subject might come to be—where Es war, Ich soll werden—and that is the real work of analysis.

INTERLUDE.

The interlude signals a shift, a pause, but not an end. Lacan has led us through a dialectical spiral: from resistance and objectification, through speech and truth, into the ethical heart of psychoanalytic practice. What follows will return, perhaps, to the scene of teaching—but this moment marks a crossing: the transition from theory to the act.

“Do not expect too much here, for ever since the psychoanalytic thing became an accepted thing, and since its servants now visit the manicurist, the housekeeping they do accommodates sacrifices to good taste. This is rather convenient for ideas, which psychoanalysts have never had in excess. Ideas on sale for all will balance out whatever is missing for each individual.”

Lacan’s critique moves with sardonic irony. Now that la chose freudienne—the Freudian Thing, the scandal of psychoanalysis—has become institutionalized, sanitized, and mainstream, it has lost its disruptive edge. The analytic movement, once grounded in the encounter with the Real of desire and the unconscious, now enjoys the comforts of professional respectability. “Servants” of the cause, analysts, are now well-manicured—more concerned with polish than with rupture.

In trading theoretical rigor for cultural acceptance, psychoanalysis accommodates “good taste”—meaning bourgeois norms, conventional thinking, therapeutic adaptation. As a result, Lacan accuses the field of an intellectual flattening. Psychoanalysts, he jokes, were never in surplus of ideas, and now they content themselves with sale items: market-friendly formulations that can be consumed by all, inoffensive and universal. These circulate as substitutes for what each subject truly lacks—desire, truth, a place within the symbolic. But nothing singular is heard in these generalities. The void that analysis is meant to touch is papered over with ideological wallpaper.

“We are sufficiently well-versed in these matters to know that ‘thing-ism’ is not well regarded, and there you have our ready-made pirouette.”

Lacan anticipates the critique: that his own emphasis on la Chose—the “thing”—is an indulgent metaphysics, an outdated philosophical gesture. Thing-ism is a dismissive term, suggesting an overinvestment in vague or abstract objects. Lacan is well aware that the mainstream analytic community finds his return to the Real, to the Thing, suspect.

So he performs a rhetorical pirouette: light on his feet, he dodges the accusation not by denying it, but by showing how the dismissal itself reveals the very thing being avoided. The analysts’ aversion to the thing—that around which desire circulates—betrays the depth of their repression.

“‘Why are you looking for anything other than this ego you distinguish, while forbidding us from seeing it?’ they retort. ‘We objectify it, fine. What harm is there in that?’”

Here Lacan ventriloquizes his critics. They demand: why complicate things with all this talk of subject, division, desire? We have the ego, we recognize it, we work with it. What harm is there in objectifying the ego—as if it were a stable thing, an entity one could observe, strengthen, manage?

This rhetorical question exposes the underlying assumption: that the ego is knowable and useful as an object in therapy. But Lacan will show that this assumption leads precisely to the foreclosure of the unconscious. By treating the ego as a thing, analysts betray Freud’s discovery—that the ego itself is a symptom, a fiction of unity masking division.

“Here, with stealthy steps, finely polished shoes approach to deliver the following sly kick: ‘Do you truly believe that the ego can be taken for a thing? We do not eat that kind of bread.’”

This line is dripping with sarcasm. Lacan imagines the “stealthy steps” of respectable analysts—polished, civilized—approaching not to debate, but to strike subtly, smugly. They rebuke Lacan for treating the ego as a reified thing. Ironically, though, they themselves have been treating it as such—objectifying it in theory and technique.

Their retort—“We do not eat that kind of bread”—suggests they’re above such philosophical indulgence. But Lacan exposes the contradiction: they both rely on the ego as a “thing” and disavow its thing-ness. This, again, is the structure of misrecognition. The ego appears solid, but is structurally unstable.

“From thirty-five years of cohabitation with the ego under the roof of Freud’s second topography—ten of them rather stormy—finally regularized by the stewardship of Miss Anna FREUD into a marriage whose social credit has only continued to grow, to the point where I am assured it will soon seek the Church’s blessing—in short, from the most sustained experience of psychoanalysts, you will derive nothing more than this drawer.”

Lacan now shifts to a mocking genealogical narrative. The ego, he says, has been Freud’s companion for decades—ever since the second topography (the division of psyche into ego, id, and superego). The first ten years of this relationship were stormy—marked by uncertainty and theoretical tension. But thanks to Anna Freud’s ego psychology, the marriage was regularized: the ego became central to psychoanalytic training, diagnosis, and treatment.

This union has enjoyed rising “social credit”—that is, respectability in psychological institutions, academia, even the wider therapeutic culture. Lacan jokes that soon it will “seek the Church’s blessing”: a dig at how psychoanalysis, once heretical, is now on the verge of becoming dogma.

And what has come of this sustained relationship with the ego? A “drawer”—a storage space, cluttered, stagnant. This is what the theoretical commitment to the ego has produced: not insight, but accumulation without movement.

“It is true that it is filled to the brim with old novelties and new antiquities, whose accumulation is not without a certain amusement: the ego is a function, the ego is a synthesis, a synthesis of functions, a function of synthesis.”

Lacan turns his wit to the language analysts use to describe the ego. The drawer is full of recycled terms, contradictions dressed as theories: the ego as function, as synthesis, as the synthesis of functions, or the function of synthesis. These definitions pile up endlessly, giving the illusion of depth but producing no new understanding.

This is how the ego is preserved: through semantic proliferation that masks the fundamental absence at its core. In truth, these definitions are all variations on a defensive gesture—the refusal to recognize that the ego is not a coherent entity, but a mirage, a misrecognition constitutive of the subject’s relation to themselves.

“It is autonomous! That one is truly rich. It’s the latest fetish introduced into the sanctum sanctorum of practice, legitimized by the superiority of the superior.”

The claim that the ego is “autonomous” is, for Lacan, the ultimate absurdity. He ridicules the notion that the ego—fundamentally formed through identification and structured by the Other—could stand as an independent agent. This autonomy is a fetish, a belief sustained precisely to avoid confronting the subject’s lack.

Its elevation to dogma—the “sanctum sanctorum” of clinical practice—is supported not by evidence, but by authority: “the superiority of the superior.” This is an unmistakable jab at analytic training institutes, where hierarchical prestige replaces critical thought. Lacan’s use of fetish here is exact: a substitute object installed in the place of loss, covering over the anxiety that would erupt if lack were acknowledged.

“It serves its purpose just as well as any other in this role, everyone knowing that for this function—one that is entirely real—it is the most outdated, filthy, and repellent object that always does the job best.”

This is a darkly humorous insight: in rituals, in sacrifice, in fantasy, the object that functions best is often the filthiest, the most degraded, the one that absorbs all projections. In psychoanalytic practice, the ego—despite being a conceptual relic, despite its incoherence—continues to function. Why? Because it serves as the scapegoat, the placeholder, the object to be worked on, reformed, adapted.

This, too, is part of its fetishistic role. The more degraded the object, the more it paradoxically satisfies the need to believe in it. The analyst may scorn the ego intellectually, but still revolve their practice around it.

This passage is a polemical crescendo in Lacan’s long critique of ego psychology. The transformation of the ego from theoretical construct to institutional idol has produced a psychoanalysis that evades the very truth it was founded to pursue. Instead of confronting the subject’s division, lack, and relation to the Other, it props up a false unity.

But Lacan’s tone—cutting, ironic, scathing—is not merely destructive. It is designed to clear the ground. To return to Freud is not to reclaim the ego, but to pass through it—to listen again for the thing that speaks, not through synthesis or autonomy, but through the break, the slip, the Real that disorganizes every drawer.

“If this one earns its inventor the veneration he enjoys wherever it is employed, so be it. But the best part is that it grants him, in enlightened circles, the prestige of having brought psychoanalysis back under the laws of general psychology.”

This is a sharp, ironic nod toward the professional success of ego psychology and its primary architects—most pointedly Anna Freud and her followers. He concedes, with a shrug of sarcasm, that if their invention (i.e., the theorization of the ego as a central agent in psychoanalysis) earns them fame and praise in the institutions that use it, so be it.

But then he points to what he considers the true scandal: that this conceptual turn has reabsorbed psychoanalysis into the framework of general psychology. That is, instead of preserving the radical uniqueness of the Freudian discovery—the speaking, divided subject—this model returns analysis to the realm of adaptation, behavior, and objectivity. It effectively collapses the fundamental discontinuity between psychoanalysis and psychology that Freud introduced. Lacan is suggesting: this is not a neutral shift. It is a betrayal.

“It is as if His Excellency the AGA KHAN, not content with receiving the famous weight of gold—which does no harm to his standing in cosmopolitan society—were to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distributing, in return, the detailed regulations of the pari-mutuel betting system to his devotees.”

Lacan underscores the absurdity of the situation with a vivid and mocking metaphor. Imagine a powerful, cosmopolitan figure like the Aga Khan receiving lavish honors—justified by his status—and then returning the favor not with spiritual wisdom or intellectual contribution, but with a dry manual on betting odds. This is how Lacan views the work of those who have reduced psychoanalysis to a bureaucratic set of ego functions.

In other words, ego psychology has turned what was a radical discourse on desire, truth, and the unconscious into a technocratic guidebook. It has domesticated the “Freudian Thing,” converting it into measurable parameters and procedures—the “pari-mutuel betting system” of the clinic. It rewards prestige and circulation but at the cost of symbolic depth.

“But the latest discovery is the best: the ego, like everything we have been handling lately in the human sciences, is an o-pe-ra-tion-al notion.”

Now Lacan targets a buzzword that had infected mid-20th-century scientific discourse: operationalism. To call something an “operational notion” means that it is defined entirely by the procedures used to measure or manipulate it. This was a key concept in positivist approaches to psychology and social science, particularly in behaviorism and empirical research paradigms.

For Lacan, applying this idea to the ego is not a mark of progress but a symptom of decline. It empties the concept of its subjective and structural richness and reduces it to a functional placeholder—something that can be measured or manipulated in terms of behavior or test outcomes.

“Here I appeal to my audience, whose naive thing-ism keeps them so well-behaved on these benches, listening to me despite the ballet of service calls, to join me in stopping this o-pe.”

Lacan now directly addresses his listeners with mock affection. He calls out their “naive thing-ism”—a play on reification—for their passive absorption of these sanitized notions. They are, he suggests, disciplined by the academic or institutional setting: well-behaved, unquestioning, attending politely despite the background noise of institutional bureaucracy (“ballet of service calls”).

His challenge—“join me in stopping this o-pe”—is a call to interrupt the shallow operationalization of analytic concepts. “O-pe” is his stylized, phonetic play on “operational,” which he stretches to ridicule its pretentiousness and emptiness. He wants to break this automatic discourse—this jargon that hides behind pseudo-precision.

“How does this o-pe rationally distinguish what is done with the notion of the ego in analysis from the common usage of any other thing, such as this lectern, to take the first example that comes to hand?”

Lacan puts the operationalist logic to the test. If the ego is treated as an operational construct—defined only by how it functions in controlled contexts—how is this any different from the way we treat objects like a lectern? His point is devastating: there is no difference. In reducing the ego to a functional object, psychoanalysis loses all specificity. It becomes just another object among objects.

This comparison exposes the poverty of the operational model. If your theory of the ego cannot distinguish it structurally from a piece of furniture, it is no longer psychoanalytic—it is administrative.

“So little that I am confident I can demonstrate that the discourses concerning them—and that is what is at stake—coincide point by point.”

Lacan now ups the ante: not only are these objects treated similarly, but the discourse used to speak of them is identical. That’s the real issue—how language, and particularly institutional discourse, empties the subject of its structural place and replaces it with a managed object.

The “point by point” coincidence of the discourses shows that psychoanalytic theory, when hijacked by operational thinking, simply borrows the language of utility, function, and control. The ego becomes no different than a tool or apparatus, something “used” in therapy. This reveals the core problem: the symbolic collapse of the subject into a thing.

“For this lectern, no less than the ego, is dependent on the signifier, that is, the word which, by assigning its function in general, allows it to stand by the quarrelsome pulpit of memory and the noble pedigree of the TRONCHIN furniture.”

Here Lacan begins to articulate the correct way to understand both the lectern and the ego—not as things in themselves, but as effects of the signifier. The lectern is not just a pile of wood. It becomes what it is—a lectern—because of a linguistic designation. Its function, its status, its place are determined symbolically, not materially. It can be next to a pulpit, associated with memory, prestige, history—because of the words and discourses that confer that identity.

Likewise, the ego is not a “thing” inside the psyche. It is an effect of discourse, a function produced by language, identification, and the Imaginary. The moment one tries to grasp it as a stable object, one is already within the logic of misrecognition.

“This means it is not merely wood felled, carpentered, and glued back together by a cabinetmaker, intended for commerce tied to the fashion cycles of needs creation, which support its exchange value under the condition of a careful balance that does not too quickly lead it to satisfy the least superfluous of those needs in its final use dictated by wear and tear: namely, as firewood.”

This is a flourish of capitalist irony. The lectern is not just a physical object built for use; it is a commodity, tied to cycles of need, value, prestige—and eventually destined for disuse and destruction. It has a symbolic function as long as it circulates within a system of signifiers. Once it no longer does—once its value has been exhausted—it becomes waste, or firewood.

So too with the ego, when reified: it serves for a while, gaining symbolic currency. But when its usefulness lapses—when it fails to account for the subject’s suffering or truth—it too can be discarded. The challenge Lacan issues is: will psychoanalysis continue to treat the ego as a piece of symbolic furniture, circulated for status, used in therapy, then burnt for heat? Or will it return to its radical core—the subject divided by language, spoken by the unconscious, and not reducible to function?

This passage, with its biting irony and rhetorical flair, reaffirms Lacan’s central thesis: psychoanalysis must not become psychology. The subject is not a thing. The ego is not a tool. The lectern teaches us that everything is structured by the signifier—and it is only by listening to the signifier that the subject might come into being.

“On the other hand, the meanings to which the lectern refers yield nothing in dignity to those the ego concerns itself with.”

Lacan continues the extended analogy between the ego and the lectern—a comparison meant to deflate the ego’s supposedly privileged position in psychoanalytic theory. He provocatively states that the meanings attached to a lectern—an inanimate object—are no less rich, nuanced, or dignified than those associated with the ego. This isn’t mockery for its own sake; it’s a precise structural argument. Both the lectern and the ego exist only in and through the symbolic order: they are functions of language, invested with meaning through signifiers, and thus structurally equivalent in that regard.

The implications are immense: if the ego is meaningful only because of its symbolic designation, then it cannot claim to be a seat of essential identity, autonomy, or truth. The lectern reminds us that symbolic function—not metaphysical essence—is what structures both object and subject.

“The proof is that they occasionally envelop the ego itself, if it is through the functions that Mr. Heinz HARTMANN attributes to it that one of our fellows can become our lectern: namely, by maintaining a proper position with a more or less deliberate intention.”

Lacan here references Heinz Hartmann, the father of ego psychology, who sought to define the ego as an autonomous agency, capable of intention, adaptation, and control. Hartmann conceptualized the ego as a system of functions—orienting, integrating, reality-testing, etc.—that allow the subject to maintain a stable relation to the environment.

Lacan uses this very definition to push the analogy further. If we follow Hartmann’s line of thinking, then one of Lacan’s own students or colleagues could “become” the lectern, simply by holding themselves upright and maintaining “a proper position”—deliberately or not. That is, the same criteria used to define ego functions (stability, orientation, usefulness) apply just as well to a piece of furniture.

This is not just satire—it’s a powerful demonstration that the ego, reduced to functional terms, loses any unique structural status. It becomes operationally indistinguishable from objects. Psychoanalysis, if it accepts such a reduction, forfeits its claim to address the subject of desire and truth.

“An operational function, undoubtedly, which will allow said fellow to scale within himself all the possible values of the thing that is this lectern: from the costly rental that kept and still maintains the reputation of ‘the little hunchback of Quincampoix Street’ [sic, cf. Paul Féval: Le Bossu], above the vicissitudes and even the memory of the first great speculative crash of modern times, descending through all the services of practical convenience, spatial furnishing, commercial transfer, or usufruct, down to the use—and why not? It has been seen before—of fuel.”

Lacan now opens up the semantic field of the lectern. If we are to treat the ego as a thing with operational value, then we must recognize that such “things” are always overdetermined by history, usage, function, and fantasy. The lectern is not just a podium. It may carry prestige—like that tied to the figure from Paul Féval’s novel Le Bossu, who earns a reputation tied to an infamous crash and a romanticized aura of nobility and infamy.

From the heights of speculative finance (suggesting symbolic capital) to practical convenience (material utility), and even to being burned as firewood (total degradation), the lectern carries a spectrum of values. So does the ego—if we reduce it to this kind of object.

But Lacan’s real point is that psychoanalytic theory ought not reduce the ego to a “thing” whose value fluctuates like market goods. When we do, we treat the subject not as a bearer of desire and division, but as a utility—subject to commodity logic. This reduction hollows out psychoanalysis.

“That’s not all, for I am ready to lend my voice to the real lectern so that it might deliver a discourse on its existence, which—utensil though it is—is individual; on its history, which, however radically alienated it may seem to us, has left documentary traces with nothing lacking for what the historian requires: documents, texts, supplier notes; on its destiny itself, which, however inert it may be, is dramatic, since a lectern is perishable, it was born of labor, it has a fate subject to chance, misfortune, adventures, prestige, even fatality, of which it becomes the inter-sign, and it is promised an end of which it needs to know nothing for it to be its own, since it is an end that is already known.”

Lacan now gives the lectern a voice—a rhetorical device known as prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is personified to speak. He imagines the lectern narrating its own life: it has an individuality, a history, a drama. Though “only” a utensil, it has been shaped by labor, marked by commerce, tracked by texts and bills. It has its destiny: a series of events, placements, uses, and eventually, its disintegration.

This dramatic flourish is more than theatrical. It shows that anything that passes through the symbolic order—lectern, ego, subject—is infused with meaning, history, and fate. Objects do not escape alienation—they are produced by it. And their end is never just physical: it’s structured symbolically. The lectern’s “death” (as firewood) is written into its use and exchange value from the beginning.

In this, Lacan’s satire folds back into seriousness: if the lectern can be given a narrative, a history, a place in discourse, then what differentiates it from the ego, as conceived in much of psychoanalytic practice? What remains of the subject if its “autonomy” is just the speech of the lectern?

“But there would still be nothing extraordinary if, after this prosopopoeia, one of you were to dream that he is this lectern, endowed or not with speech.”

Lacan pivots now from metaphor to clinical phenomenon. What if someone dreamed they were a lectern? It wouldn’t be absurd—it would be analytic material. The unconscious, structured like a language, produces signifiers in dreams whose logic is associative, metaphorical, metonymic. The lectern, in such a dream, would function as a signifier—for something else.

And so, even if the dreamer became the lectern, with or without a voice, psychoanalysis would not dismiss the image. It would read it as a rebus, a layered puzzle expressing desire, repression, and subjectivity.

“And since the interpretation of dreams is now a known—if not commonplace—practice, it would not be surprising if, upon deciphering the signifier role that this lectern has taken in the rebus in which the dreamer has enclosed his desire, and upon analyzing the more or less equivocal reference that this use entails for the meanings his awareness of this lectern has concerned itself with, with or without its discourse, we were to reach what one might call the preconscious of this lectern.”

Lacan returns to Freud, grounding his argument in The Interpretation of Dreams. The lectern-dream would be treated like any other dream image—not as a symbol with a fixed meaning, but as a signifier inserted into a chain of associations. This signifier has meaning only within the rebus—the encoded puzzle of the unconscious.

The analyst’s task is to track what this lectern means to the dreamer: how it links to other signifiers, how it plays with ambiguity, how it condenses memories and desires. Through this chain, we reach the preconscious—that liminal zone between conscious articulation and unconscious structure.

Thus, even the lectern is not immune to psychoanalytic method—so long as it is treated structurally. The ego, therefore, deserves no privileged immunity. It too is a lectern—animated only through signifiers, symbolized only through discourse. But unlike the dream lectern, the ego is often mistaken as real, autonomous, foundational. Lacan’s entire argument is a theatrical dismantling of that illusion.

Lacan’s extended analogy is not absurdist for its own sake. He demonstrates that once the ego is reduced to an “operational notion,” it becomes indistinguishable from an object. Its meanings, like the lectern’s, are historical, functional, symbolic. To recover psychoanalysis, we must not treat the ego as a thing, but as a function of speech—a position in the symbolic. Otherwise, we are merely talking lecterns.

“Here I hear a protest, which, although it is as neatly arranged as sheet music, I do not quite know how to name. For, to tell the truth, it belongs to something that has no name in any language, something that generally announces itself under the black-and-white motion of total personality, summarizing everything that deafens us in psychiatry with pseudo-phenomenology and in society with stationary progressivism.”

Lacan anticipates the reaction to his previous provocations—his comparison of the ego to a lectern, his demolition of the ego’s supposed autonomy. The protest he hears is refined and seemingly harmonious (“as neatly arranged as sheet music”), but he immediately points out its deeper ambiguity. This protest is hard to pin down, not because it lacks form, but because it transcends (or evades) precise designation. It emerges from a totalizing impulse, one that appeals to the whole personality—a concept often invoked in psychiatry (particularly in humanistic and phenomenological orientations) and in liberal society, which favors the idea of harmonious, self-realizing individuals.

This protest, Lacan says, is what “deafens” us—noise masquerading as insight. In psychiatry, it’s the clamor of pseudo-phenomenology: a descriptive mode that aims to grasp the patient’s lived experience but fails to account for the structure of the unconscious. In society, it’s the drone of “stationary progressivism”—a paradoxical ideology that claims to move forward while keeping everything essentially the same, a bourgeois fantasy of improvement without rupture.

“A protest of the beautiful soul, no doubt, but in forms appropriate to that being who is neither flesh nor fish, with an air half-fig and half-grape, walking the twilight line between dog and wolf—the modern intellectual, whether of the right or the left.”

Lacan now names the type behind this protest: the beautiful soul, a term borrowed from Hegel to designate those who critique society from a distance, maintaining moral purity while refusing engagement with the contradictions of reality. But here, the beautiful soul takes on an even more evasive form: a hybrid creature, “neither flesh nor fish,” ambivalent and chimeric—“half-fig and half-grape.” The imagery comes from common French idioms (e.g., ni chair ni poisson, mi-figue mi-raisin), expressing ambiguity and indecision.

This creature walks the “twilight line between dog and wolf”—a liminal, dangerous space. And who is it? The modern intellectual, whether politically right or left. Lacan points here to the complicity of intellectuals in maintaining illusions, their tendency to adopt positions of critique that are detached from the symbolic Real. These are the ones who protest against the radical edge of psychoanalysis—precisely because it forces a confrontation with the unconscious, not with ideals.

“Indeed, it is from this side that the fictitious protest of those who arise from disorder finds its noble kinships.”

This fictional protest—against Lacan’s reduction of the ego, against his structural reading of subjectivity—finds its allies among those who claim to speak from disorder, from marginality, from critique. Yet Lacan sees this position as a fantasy: these protestors do not truly disrupt anything. Instead, they align themselves with noble illusions, idealized disorder that upholds the symbolic order they claim to contest.

“Let us rather listen to its tone. The tone is measured but grave: the preconscious, no more than consciousness, we are told, does not belong to the lectern but to ourselves, who perceive it and give it its meaning with all the less difficulty since, after all, we made the thing.”

Now Lacan shifts from characterizing the protest to quoting its typical argument. It proceeds with serious gravity: Surely, the lectern cannot have consciousness or even preconscious processing. These belong to us—the humans who built it, perceive it, and give it meaning.

On its surface, this seems like a reasonable claim. Of course objects don’t think. But Lacan isn’t interested in this kind of common sense rebuttal. What he exposes is the logic behind it: the assumption that we are sovereign over meaning, that subjectivity is inherent to our biology or craftsmanship. This reflects a deeply humanist assumption that consciousness is a property of an individual mind, not a function of the symbolic structure.

“But even had it been a more natural being, we must never carelessly reduce, within consciousness, the higher form which—whatever our weakness in the universe—assures us an inalienable dignity (see “reed” in the dictionary of spiritualist thought).”

Here Lacan exposes the idealizing move embedded in the protest. Even if the object were a living creature, it is argued, we should not reduce consciousness to mere function. There’s something elevated, something sacred, about human consciousness—it grants us dignity, despite our physical frailty. Lacan points wryly to “reed”—a reference to Pascal’s famous statement: “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”

This spiritualist-humanist lineage insists that thought itself ennobles man. Lacan parodies it to reveal how even supposedly secular theories fall back into metaphysical ideas about consciousness and dignity. But psychoanalysis, especially in Lacan’s structuralist version, departs radically from this lineage. It doesn’t locate dignity in consciousness but in the subject’s relation to the unconscious—precisely where mastery is lacking.

“It must be acknowledged that here FREUD incites me to irreverence by the way, somewhere in passing and as if in jest, he speaks about the modes of spontaneous provocation that are standard in activating universal consciousness.”

Lacan now shifts into a more playful tone, using Freud himself as a license to push his paradox further. Somewhere, Freud jokes about the mechanisms that stir “universal consciousness”—a phrase he never treats with reverence. It’s a subtle jab at those who romanticize Freud as a spiritual humanist, rather than as a thinker who grounded truth in the unconscious, not in some vague “consciousness of mankind.”

Lacan uses this as permission: if Freud could be irreverent, so can he. The sacred cows of consciousness and human dignity are not off-limits; they are precisely what must be interrogated.

“And this removes any discomfort I might feel in pursuing my paradox. Is the difference between the lectern and us, with regard to consciousness, really so great, if it so easily acquires its appearance when placed between me and you, to the point that my sentences have allowed such confusion?”

Lacan now returns to the image of the lectern, which earlier served as a satirical stand-in for the ego. He wonders aloud: if this inert object can appear to have “consciousness”—simply because it mediates our interaction—how different is it from us, symbolically speaking?

That is, the lectern enters discourse; it is positioned in relation to subjects; it takes on meaning and becomes part of a chain of signifiers. Isn’t this what subjectivity is? If speech directed through or around an object creates effects of subjectivity, then subjectivity itself is relational and symbolic, not tied to substance.

This is the crux: the lectern becomes a screen of projection and a node of meaning in discourse—not unlike the ego in misrecognition.

“Thus, when placed with one of us between two parallel mirrors, it will be seen reflected endlessly, which means that it will resemble the observer far more than one might think. For seeing its image repeat itself in the same way, the observer, too, sees himself through another’s eyes when he looks at himself; for without that other—that image—he would not see himself seeing himself.”

This final image is classically Lacanian: two mirrors facing each other, producing an infinite regress of reflections. When a person (or a lectern) is placed between them, what results is not clarity, but endless replication—a visual metaphor for méconnaissance, or misrecognition.

Here, Lacan returns to his theory of the mirror stage: the ego is formed not through direct knowledge of self, but through identification with an external image. One sees oneself through the eyes of the Other, through the reflection—and that reflection is not true, but alienating. It is the imaginary basis of the ego.

So, the lectern, in this analogy, resembles the observer not because it is conscious, but because it participates in the structure of symbolic mediation. It occupies the place of the Other’s gaze. And the subject, in turn, only recognizes themselves via that other place, via that image. Without it, one does not “see oneself seeing”—which is Lacan’s way of saying: without the mirror (the Other, the signifier), there is no self-consciousness.

Lacan dismantles the supposed sanctity of the ego and of consciousness by comparing them—structurally—to a lectern. This is not nihilism, but an exacting critique of how subjectivity is produced through language, images, and desire. The difference between subject and object is not absolute; it is mediated through the Symbolic, and it is there—between two mirrors, in the chain of signifiers—that the subject emerges, divided, reflective, and never whole.

“In other words, the ego’s privilege over things must be sought elsewhere than in this false infinite recurrence of reflection, which constitutes the mirage of consciousness.”

Lacan reiterates the central lesson from the previous mirror analogy: the illusion of self-knowledge that arises from recursive reflection—seeing oneself seeing oneself—is not the true foundation of subjectivity. It is a mirage. The ego appears to have a privileged status because of this seemingly infinite loop of self-awareness, but this loop is a structure of misrecognition (méconnaissance), not truth.

Thus, if the ego is to have any real privilege over objects, it cannot be because of this capacity for mirrored consciousness, since that structure, Lacan insists, is topological, optical, and deceptive. The ego is not the master of consciousness—it is its most confused effect.

“Despite its utter emptiness, it still excites those who deal in thought enough for them to see in it some supposed progress of interiority, when in fact it is a topological phenomenon whose distribution in nature is as sporadic as the purely external arrangements that condition it—assuming that humanity has not spread them with an immoderate frequency.”

Lacan is now addressing the philosophers and intellectuals—“those who deal in thought”—who remain enamored with the idea that consciousness (and thus the ego) marks some inner progress or essential truth of the human. He dismisses this as a fantasy: a philosophical inflation of what is, in fact, just a trick of surface and space.

The infinite regression of mirrored images isn’t the revelation of some deep interiority; it’s a topological arrangement, dependent entirely on external structures—mirrors, perspectives, and the gaze of the Other. It occurs only in specific configurations, and Lacan wryly suggests that perhaps modern humans have overpopulated the world with such mirrors—literal and symbolic—mistaking their proliferation for depth.

“How, on the other hand, can we exclude the term preconscious from the attachments of this lectern, or from those that exist potentially or actively in any other object, which, by adjusting themselves so precisely to my affections, will come to consciousness along with them?”

Lacan now returns to the lectern, which remains a figure in his sustained metaphor. He asks: can we truly exclude the preconscious from the way the lectern relates to us? After all, the objects around us are not merely inert; they are caught up in our affective life. They trigger, organize, or accompany thoughts and memories that were previously latent.

This isn’t an animist claim that objects think. Rather, Lacan is noting that the boundary between consciousness and object is mediated. The subject becomes conscious through objects—via their positions in the symbolic network. The lectern, like a dream image, becomes part of a chain of signifiers that organize meaning and desire. And so it enters consciousness alongside the subject’s affections, not apart from them.

“That the ego is the seat of perceptions and not the lectern, we willingly accept, but in doing so, it reflects the essence of the objects it perceives, not its own essence, as if consciousness were its privilege—since these perceptions are, for the most part, unconscious.”

Here Lacan accepts the common-sense distinction: yes, the ego is the seat of perceptions, not the object. But immediately, he problematizes what this means. The ego does not perceive itself—it perceives objects, and even then, only as reflections of its own structure. It reflects, not knows. And crucially, most of these perceptions do not reach consciousness. They remain unconscious or preconscious, surfacing only in distorted forms (symptoms, slips, dreams).

Thus, the notion that consciousness is the ego’s privilege is untenable: perception, even when “received,” does not guarantee conscious awareness. The ego is more effect than origin, more screen than subject.

“It is not without reason, moreover, that we trace the origin of the protest we must address here to these bastard forms of phenomenology, which cloud technical analyses of human action, especially those required in medicine.”

Lacan now turns his critique toward phenomenology—specifically, what he calls its “bastard forms.” Phenomenology (as in Husserl, Heidegger, and their psychiatric heirs like Binswanger or Jaspers) claims to describe subjective experience from the inside. But Lacan finds these efforts ultimately obfuscating. They “cloud” technical analysis by mistaking description for structure.

In medicine—and particularly psychiatry—this tendency is damaging. It replaces structural analysis (like that found in Freud or Lacan) with vague talk of “lived experience,” masking the mechanisms of the unconscious. The result is not clinical precision, but conceptual fog.

“If their cheap material (to use a term that JASPERS himself specifically applies in his assessment of psychoanalysis) gives his work its style, as well as weight to his statue as a director of conscience in cast iron and a master thinker in tinplate, they are not without their use—and indeed, it is always the same use: to create diversion.”

With biting sarcasm, Lacan returns fire to Karl Jaspers, who once dismissed psychoanalysis as relying on “cheap material.” Lacan accepts the charge, and flips it: yes, psychoanalysis works with the low, the vulgar, the banal—the slip, the symptom, the dream. But he suggests that it is precisely phenomenology that uses cheap metal for its monuments. He calls Jaspers a “director of conscience in cast iron” and a “master thinker in tinplate”—hollow, manufactured titles, whose weight is more theatrical than substantial.

Yet these discourses have a function: they create diversion. Like a magician’s sleight of hand, they distract from the central truth—the speaking subject, structured by the unconscious, caught in language.

“For example, it is employed here to avoid confronting the fact that the lectern does not speak—a fact that the proponents of false protest refuse to acknowledge because, in conceding this to me, their lectern would immediately become a speaking lectern.”

Lacan now touches the paradox at the heart of his metaphor. The protestors—those who defend ego psychology, phenomenology, or humanist consciousness—do not want to admit the obvious: the lectern does not speak. Why? Because to admit it would be to concede Lacan’s point—that the ego, like the lectern, is spoken, not speaking in itself.

And in that very concession, the lectern would speak. That is, it would enter the symbolic order as a signifier. It would take its place as a function in the subject’s discourse. This is the Lacanian twist: the only way to “silence” the lectern is to refuse its symbolic position. The moment it is spoken about in analysis, it is already speaking—as a symptom, a metaphor, a substitute for the thing.

THE DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER.

With this heading, Lacan introduces the structural foundation of his theory: the Other (with a capital “A”) is the site from which meaning arises. The discourse of the Other is the unconscious discourse—the place from which the subject is spoken. This is where the truth of the subject emerges—not from the ego, but from the symbolic field in which it is inscribed.

“‘How, then, does the “ego” you treat in analysis prevail over the lectern that I am?’ it might ask them.”

This is the final, delicious irony: Lacan imagines the lectern itself posing the question. If you treat the ego as a functional, adaptive, operational object—how is it different from me, the lectern?

The lectern has already entered the symbolic. It’s asking a question. It’s functioning as a subject of enunciation, which exposes the absurdity of any theory that pretends the ego is somehow metaphysically superior. In the analytic field, once something is caught in speech, it becomes a signifier, and thus, structurally speaking, a subject. Even the lectern.

Lacan’s masterful inversion: the ego, far from being the privileged locus of consciousness, is structurally akin to an object—no different from a lectern—until and unless it is spoken. Only through the discourse of the Other can subjectivity emerge. And once that happens, the question of “who speaks” is already answered: not the ego, but the unconscious, the Other, language itself.

“For if its health is defined by its adaptation to a reality considered uniformly to be proportional to it, and if you must ally yourselves with ‘the healthy part of the ego’ to reduce, in the other part presumably, discordances with reality—discordances that appear such only because of your principle of considering the analytic situation as simple and harmless, and which you will not rest until you have made the subject see them through your own eyes—isn’t it clear that there is no other discrimination of the healthy part of the subject’s ego than its agreement with your viewpoint? And this viewpoint, assumed to be healthy, becomes the measure of things, just as there is no other criterion for cure than the subject’s complete adoption of this measure, which is your own.”

This is one of Lacan’s most scathing critiques of ego psychology and its therapeutic ideology. The notion that the health of the ego can be measured by its adaptation to reality is, for Lacan, deeply suspect—especially when that “reality” is assumed to be uniform and proportional to the subject. In truth, he suggests, “reality” is always already mediated by language and structured by the Symbolic order. There is no unproblematic access to a reality “out there” that the ego can be measured against.

He points out that in much of analytic practice (especially American ego psychology), the analyst is encouraged to “ally” with the so-called “healthy” part of the ego to correct the “unhealthy” part—those elements that don’t fit neatly into social or normative expectations. But Lacan exposes the circular logic: the analyst assumes an alignment between “health” and their own conception of reality, then retroactively defines the patient’s improvement as the adoption of that same viewpoint. “Health” becomes synonymous with agreement with the analyst.

Thus, the ego is not restored, healed, or integrated—it is subordinated. The cure, in this model, is nothing more than the subject’s submission to the analyst’s ideological position. This is not psychoanalysis as Freud envisioned it—it is suggestion masquerading as therapy.

“This is confirmed by the frequent admission among serious authors that the end of analysis is achieved with the subject’s identification with the analyst’s ego.”

Lacan here cites what he sees as a disastrous endpoint that many “serious” authors of the analytic tradition accept without irony: that the cure is accomplished when the patient identifies with the analyst’s ego. This admission is, for Lacan, a confession of psychoanalysis’s collapse into normative modeling—the analyst is turned into a healthy ego-ideal, and the patient is invited to model themselves accordingly.

Such a conclusion runs directly against Freud’s more radical understanding of transference, identification, and the return of the repressed. Instead of traversing the fantasy, analysis under this model becomes absorbed into it—culminating in a totalization of the ego through assimilation.

“Certainly, the conception that spreads itself so calmly, and the reception it meets with, leads one to think that, contrary to the cliché that the gullible are imposed upon, it is even easier for the gullible to impose upon others.”

This line is delivered with a typical Lacanian irony. We’re often told that naïve patients are vulnerable to manipulation, but Lacan inverts this idea: in analytic institutions and culture, it is the naïve analyst—believing in their own benevolent neutrality and psychological insight—who most imposes themselves on others. Their gullibility consists in their unreflective belief in the value of their worldview, and it enables them to project that worldview onto the subject under the guise of care, help, and healing.

And it works—because they do it calmly, rationally, and with social approval. The analyst becomes the one who “knows,” while the patient must align themselves with that knowledge to be considered cured.

“And the hypocrisy revealed in the declaration—whose repentance appears with such curious regularity in this discourse—that one must ‘speak the subject’s language’ offers even more to reflect on regarding the depth of this naivety.”

Another layer of irony. The analyst will often claim to be “speaking the subject’s language”—to enter their world, to match their symbolic coordinates. But Lacan sees this as a hollow rhetorical gesture, one frequently followed by repentance. Why? Because once the analyst really listens to the subject, in the structure of their speech, the neat categories of ego psychology begin to fall apart. The subject doesn’t speak in coherent, adaptive terms—they speak from the unconscious, in slips, metaphors, repetitions.

The phrase “speak the subject’s language” becomes a platitude—a phrase that cloaks a refusal to truly hear what the unconscious is saying. In pretending to respect the subject’s idiom, the analyst risks imposing their own interpretive grid while imagining they are being accommodating.

“One must also overcome the disgust evoked by the suggestion of ‘baby talk’, without which well-meaning parents would not believe themselves able to guide their little ones with their lofty reasoning—a reasoning that must, after all, keep them quiet! Simple courtesies, supposedly owed to what analytical idiocy projects into the notion of ‘the weakness of the ego’ in neurotics.”

Lacan now makes a comparison that’s as scathing as it is incisive. The analyst who reduces the subject to an “ego in need of strengthening” is like a parent who stoops to baby talk to guide their child. This “lofty reasoning” isn’t designed to stimulate the child’s intelligence—it’s to keep them quiet, to pacify them, to maintain control. Likewise, in psychoanalysis, the supposedly caring language of adaptation and ego support functions to shut down the subject’s disruptive truth.

He dismisses this as “analytical idiocy”—the foolishness of those who believe the neurotic’s suffering stems from a fragile ego, and that the cure lies in bolstering that ego with kind words, affirmations, and therapeutic cheerleading. This approach misses the core of Freudian analysis: the neurotic’s symptoms are not a product of ego weakness, but of conflict between the unconscious and the ego’s misrecognitions.

Lacan is not advocating for cruelty—he is demanding rigor. Analysis is not the art of ego-pampering. It is the art of structural listening, of traversing the fantasy, of leading the subject to encounter their own divided desire. “Speaking the subject’s language” doesn’t mean soothing their ego—it means hearing the Other speaking in them, and responding at the level of the signifier, not the sentiment.

This passage sharpens Lacan’s ethical and structural critique of mainstream psychoanalytic practice. What masquerades as care—the alliance with the “healthy ego,” the gentle reinforcement of adaptive perception, the pledge to “speak the subject’s language”—is in fact a subtle form of domination. The analyst becomes the arbiter of reality, the standard of health, the model to be emulated.

Against this, Lacan reaffirms a different analytic ethics: one that refuses the imaginary comfort of ego-identification, and instead opens the space for subjective division—for the speech of the unconscious, even when it disrupts, disorients, and disidentifies. Analysis does not end with ego-coherence. It begins where the ego fails to capture the truth of the subject’s desire.

“But we are not here to dream between nausea and vertigo. It remains true that, lectern though I may be as I speak to you, I am the ideal patient, since there is not so much effort to be made with me—the results are achieved at once; I am cured in advance.”

Lacan speaks with a dry, ironic tone. He’s signaling a departure from the nauseating sentimentalism and dizzying idealism of previous discourses about the ego and therapeutic “cure.” Returning to his running metaphor of the lectern, he now has it speak again—not just as an object, but as a patient. And what a patient it is: “ideal,” easy, already cured. Why? Because it doesn’t resist. It doesn’t speak back. It has no unconscious.

By imagining the lectern as the perfect patient, Lacan caricatures the kind of subject that ego psychology implicitly idealizes: one who fully assimilates the analyst’s viewpoint, one who “adjusts” without trouble. The lectern, after all, doesn’t have trauma, desire, or transference—it just functions. And this, Lacan implies, is what the adaptive model of cure would prefer: subjects who behave like compliant objects.

“Since it is only a matter of substituting your discourse for mine, I am a perfect ego, as I have never had another and I rely on you to inform me about those things to which my adjustment mechanisms cannot directly adapt me—namely, all those that are not your diopters, your stature, and the dimensions of your papers.”

The lectern continues its sarcastic testimony: it is the perfect ego precisely because it has no history of alienation, no division, no otherness. It exists purely to receive the discourse of the analyst—to reflect their speech back, to be informed, educated, adjusted. It is docile.

Lacan’s jab here is sharp: if the ego is understood merely as a mechanism for adjustment to external reality, then its “perfection” would be a total transparency to the analyst’s reality—their stature, their optics, their paperwork. This is not psychoanalysis; this is compliance. The lectern—mute, adaptable, dependent—is the parody of the ego imagined by adaptationist theory.

“That, it seems to me, is rather well-spoken for a lectern. Undoubtedly, I mean to amuse myself. In what it said, in my opinion, it had no say. For the reason that it itself was a word, it was me in the sense of a grammatical subject.”

Now Lacan breaks the illusion. He reminds us: the lectern didn’t speak. He put words into its mouth, and so its “discourse” is really his. This is a moment of metalinguistic reflection: the lectern is not a subject, but a signifier. It was “me,” Lacan says—not in the sense of the ego, but in the sense of grammar: the speaking “I” that structures speech. He underscores that subjectivity in psychoanalysis is not a substance, but a position in discourse.

By ventriloquizing the lectern, Lacan stages the very structure of subjectivity: the subject is always spoken, always divided, always constituted by language. Even the ego is only a grammatical placeholder, a function of enunciation.

“Look at that—a rank gained, and ready to be picked up by the occasional soldier from the ditch of a purely eristic claim, but also to provide us with an illustration of Freud’s motto, which, when expressed as: ‘Where it was, there I must become,’ would confirm for our benefit the weakness of the translation that reifies the Ich by passing a t into the must of soll and fixes the course of S at the rate of a C-cedilla A.”

Lacan now returns to Freud’s famous phrase: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—“Where it was, there I must become.” He notes how the traditional translation distorts the phrase: rendering Ich (“I”) as a reified ego, and soll as a moralistic imperative (“must”). This translation turns the dynamic, structural process of subjectivation into a command for ego-control.

Lacan critiques this distortion by pointing out that the sentence is not about the ego mastering the id, but about the subject taking up a place where the unconscious was. It’s not the ego becoming sovereign, but the subject emerging through its confrontation with the unconscious. By reifying the Ich, the English translation (he hints, perhaps wryly, in its “C-cedilla A” rendering) transforms Freud’s topology into a developmental fantasy.

“The fact remains that the lectern is not an ego, no matter how eloquent it may have been, but rather a means within my discourse.”

Lacan now states clearly what was already suggested: the lectern, despite all its imagined speech, is not an ego. It’s a rhetorical device, a structural placeholder. In psychoanalytic terms, it is a signifier in the chain of Lacan’s own discourse.

But this distinction allows him to circle back to a key insight: so too is the ego. The ego, like the lectern, is a means, not an end. It is not a sovereign agent, but a mediating function in the subject’s relation to language and desire.

“But after all, when considering its virtue in analysis, the ego too is a means, and we can compare them.”

Now the comparison becomes explicit: if the lectern is a support in Lacan’s discourse, so too is the ego in analysis. It is not the seat of truth, nor the source of desire. It is a site, a structure, a tool—one that allows certain effects to emerge, especially when interpreted or traversed.

The danger comes when the ego is mistaken for the subject or mistaken for the truth of the subject. Then it becomes an obstacle.

“As the lectern pertinently remarked, it has the advantage over the ego of not being a means of resistance.”

The punchline: the lectern, at least, doesn’t resist. It’s a dead object. The ego, by contrast, is saturated with resistance. That is its paradox: though it pretends to clarity, unity, and adaptation, the ego is the main source of misrecognition, of méconnaissance, in the subject.

And this is exactly why Lacan playfully prefers the lectern—it is a better support than the ego, precisely because it does not interfere. It does not defend against the unconscious. The analyst, likewise, should avoid identifying with their own ego in order to avoid contaminating the transference with their Imaginary.

“And it is precisely for this reason that I chose it to support my discourse and thereby lighten the resistance that greater interference from my ego in Freud’s speech might have provoked in you.”

This is a key statement about Lacan’s own pedagogical strategy. He has used the lectern as a stand-in—literally and metaphorically—for the ego, so that he can speak without invoking his own too directly. He performs a kind of erasure of his ego so that Freud’s speech can pass through him with less distortion. It’s an anti-identificatory gesture: Lacan refuses to present himself as a personality or master—he insists on the transmission of structure.

And he anticipates the resistance this discourse might provoke in his audience. By using the lectern, he diffuses that resistance. It is a subtle move: psychoanalysis must always watch for resistance, including that of the audience in theoretical discourse.

“I would already be satisfied if what remains with you despite this erasure leads you to find what I say ‘interesting’.”

Here again, irony is Lacan’s tool. If, after all this displacement, all that lingers is that the lecture was “interesting,” then perhaps something of the Real passed through. The term “interesting” is itself euphemistic, modest—often used to hide discomfort or intrigue. Lacan is happy to leave the ego behind and allow the lecture to function like the unconscious itself: displacing, slipping, resonating.

“This phrase, whose euphemism is not without reason, designates what moderately interests us and completes its loop in its antithesis, whereby ‘disinterested’ is used to refer to speculations of universal interest.”

This is a linguistic twist. The word “interesting” implies mild engagement, but it often hides deeper resonance. Its supposed opposite, “disinterested,” is used to describe something of universal value—something supposedly untouched by personal bias.

Lacan’s point is that both terms—interesting and disinterested—mask the structural stakes of what is truly being said. They are ways the ego manages affect and meaning. The Real of psychoanalysis, however, cuts through such defenses. It is neither interesting nor disinterested—it is unsettling, disruptive, and dividing.

This is a final reminder: the ego is not the goal of analysis, but a support for it. Like the lectern, it is a prop—a tool within discourse. But unlike the lectern, the ego resists. And it is only by lightening that resistance—through the analyst’s own decentering, through humor, structure, and the cut—that Freud’s speech, and the unconscious it carries, might be heard.

“But let us see if what I say comes to interest you—as one says, redundantly filling the antonomasia—personally, the lectern will soon be in pieces, serving us as a weapon. Well! All this also applies to the ego, except that its uses appear reversed in relation to its states.”

This is another wry remark: let us see if what I say comes to interest you. He calls attention to the redundancy of the phrase—as one says—highlighting how everyday speech often cloaks deeper mechanisms of identification and misrecognition. “Antonomasia,” a rhetorical figure where a title or attribute stands in for a name (like “the Bard” for Shakespeare), becomes a stand-in for the I in language—already signaling how speech circulates through substitutions, not identities.

He then returns to his lectern metaphor with a violent twist: the lectern will soon be in pieces, broken up and used as a weapon. This is not gratuitous imagery—it points to the structural collapse of the symbolic support. That which served as a neutral tool—an object in discourse—becomes a site of conflict. And what’s true for the lectern, Lacan notes, also applies to the ego. But in the ego’s case, the relation between its states and its uses is reversed—the ego might appear stable, but it functions disruptively. It resists precisely by presenting itself as whole.

“A means of addressing you with the unconscious speech of the subject, a weapon for resisting its recognition, it carries speech fragmented, and it serves, whole, to not hear it.”

Here Lacan lays out the paradoxical structure of the ego in psychoanalysis. On one hand, the ego is the very means by which unconscious material can be spoken—since it is the ego that speaks, identifies, and constructs narratives. But at the same time, it is also the primary resistance to that very unconscious recognition. The ego carries the subject’s speech in fragments, split, displaced, encrypted—but in doing so, it as a whole becomes a mechanism for not hearing what is being said.

That is, the ego’s apparent coherence is the mask that prevents the subject from encountering the truth of their divided desire. Its unity is a defense—an Imaginary defense—against the Real of the unconscious.

“It is indeed in the disintegration of the imaginary unity that constitutes the ego that the subject finds the signifying material of his symptoms.”

Lacan reaffirms one of his most crucial contributions to psychoanalytic theory: the symptom—the coded formation of the unconscious—is constructed from the breakdown of the ego’s Imaginary coherence. The ego, formed through misrecognition (in the mirror stage), produces a false image of unity. But it is in the cracks of this mirror, in the disintegration of the Imaginary, that the symbolic logic of the unconscious inserts itself.

Symptoms are not disturbances to the ego—they are products of its failure to totalize the subject. The subject, then, doesn’t suffer from “ego weakness” per se, but from the structural impossibility of ego unity. And the symptom is the trace of that impossibility.

“And it is from the kind of interest the ego awakens in him that come the meanings that divert his discourse.”

The ego awakens a particular kind of libidinal investment—a passion, Lacan will say—that diverts the subject’s speech. The ego attracts the subject’s desire, but redirects it away from the unconscious truth and toward identification, misrecognition, rivalry.

This “interest” is not neutral curiosity. It is Imaginary captivation, fascination with an image, with the me, which diverts the subject’s speech from the chain of signifiers where truth might emerge. The ego captures and refracts discourse, displacing its meaning.

THE IMAGINARY PASSION

With this subheading, Lacan now shifts to develop this central idea: that the ego is structured not by reason or coherence, but by a passion. Specifically, the Imaginary passion of self-love—a term that evokes both traditional moral critique and psychoanalytic theory.

“This interest of the ego is a passion whose nature had already been glimpsed by the line of moralists, who called it ‘self-love,’ but whose dynamics have only been analyzed by psychoanalytic investigation in its relation to the image of one’s own body.”

The passion Lacan speaks of—self-love, amour-propre—was long the concern of moralists like La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, or Augustine. But only psychoanalysis, Lacan argues, has uncovered the dynamics behind it: it is rooted in the subject’s relation to their own image, first encountered in the mirror stage.

That image—the idealized form of the body, the Gestalt—becomes the foundation for ego formation. But it also becomes a site of alienation: the subject identifies with something that is not themselves, that exists outside them, and that they can only grasp through the Other’s gaze. This is not a stable basis for identity; it is the beginning of division.

“This passion imparts to every relationship with this image—constantly represented by my fellow man—a significance that interests me so intensely, that is, that makes me so dependent on this image, that it binds all the objects of my desires to the desire of the other more closely than to the desire they themselves arouse in me.”

Here Lacan articulates one of his fundamental claims about desire: it is always mediated by the Other. The subject does not desire an object for what it is, but because it is desired by the Other. The ego, captivated by its own image—reflected in others, especially in the “fellow man”—is thus dependent not just on how it sees, but on how it is seen.

Desire is therefore triangular—the subject, the object, and the Other. The object is never pure; it is always inscribed within the field of the Other’s desire. This makes human desire structurally mimetic, and the ego the center of this passionate misrecognition.

“It concerns the objects insofar as we expect their appearance in a space structured by vision—that is, the characteristic objects of the human world.”

Desire attaches to visuality—to objects in space that appear as imagined wholes. Human objects of desire are not like instinctual objects in animals; they are mediated by fantasy, expectation, symbolic value. These are objects that appear in the Imaginary, whose contours are shaped by images, mirrors, screens.

Thus, the human world is not populated with instinctual cues, but with objects shaped by the gaze, by the way they appear to the Other.

“As for the knowledge on which the desire for these objects depends, human beings are far from confirming the saying that they cannot see beyond the end of their nose. On the contrary, their misfortune is that it is precisely at the end of their nose that their world begins, and that they can only apprehend their desire through the same medium that allows them to see their nose itself—namely, in a mirror.”

This is one of Lacan’s most brilliant metaphorical formulations. He takes the idiom “can’t see beyond the end of your nose” and turns it on its head: humans don’t fail to see far—they fail precisely because what they do see first is too close to them.

The mirror becomes the medium not only of visual recognition but of desire itself. We see our nose in the mirror, and with it, the world of our objects—and thus we see the world through the structure of image and desire. Our very self-image—our narcissism—is the lens through which we grasp both ourselves and our desires. The problem isn’t blindness; it’s misrecognition through vision.

“But as soon as they discern that nose, they fall in love with it, and this is the first meaning through which narcissism envelops the forms of desire.”

This final phrase distills the psychoanalytic account of narcissism: the subject falls in love not with the Other per se, but with the image—the specular double that stands in for the “self.” And this love shapes all subsequent relations.

Desire becomes enclosed in narcissism—it seeks wholeness, mastery, recognition in the Other, but always under the illusion of completeness. This is the Imaginary passion Lacan speaks of: the ego’s investment in its own image, and the redirection of desire through that misrecognized unity.

“This is not the only one, and the rising prominence of aggressiveness at the forefront of analytic concerns would remain obscure if we stopped here.”

Lacan foreshadows the next dimension: aggressiveness. The narcissistic image doesn’t just structure desire—it also structures rivalry, hatred, and violence. If the mirror image is both ideal and other, then it is also the site of comparison, competition, and aggression. The fellow man is the mirror, but also the enemy.

Thus, the imaginary unity of the ego is not merely seductive—it is volatile. Behind every identification is the threat of disidentification, of destruction, of breakdown. This is where Lacan’s theory of the Imaginary begins to turn toward the structural necessity of the Symbolic—the order that can mediate, stabilize, or at least name this violence.

This passage is a sweeping yet precise articulation of Lacan’s central idea: that the ego, far from being the seat of rationality or health, is a passion—a structure of desire and misrecognition. Formed in the mirror stage, sustained by identification with the Other, the ego diverts, resists, fragments. It does not lead to truth—it blocks it. And the task of analysis is to work through this blockage, to allow the subject’s speech—not the ego’s coherence—to emerge from the cracks in its imaginary armor.

“This is a point that I believe I have contributed to clarifying by conceiving the dynamics known as the mirror stage as a consequence of a premature birth, generic to humans, which results, at the appointed time, in the jubilant identification of the still-infant individual with the total form into which this reflection of the nose integrates itself—namely, the image of his body.”

Lacan reintroduces one of his most foundational theoretical contributions: the mirror stage. He characterizes it not simply as a moment in development, but as a structural dynamic rooted in a specifically human biological condition—premature birth. Humans are born before they are neurologically or motorically mature; unlike other animals, we are dependent, fragmented, and uncoordinated in our early months.

It is in this vulnerable state that the infant encounters their image in the mirror and experiences what Lacan famously called a jubilant identification—a kind of ecstatic misrecognition. The fragmented body, which the infant experiences as chaos, is suddenly unified in the mirror into a Gestalt, an image of wholeness, symmetry, and coordination. Even something as mundane as “the reflection of the nose” becomes integrated into this imagined totality.

But Lacan is careful to point out that this identification is not a recognition of self in the mirror, but a capture by the image—a fiction of wholeness that will structure the ego henceforth.

“This operation—achieved by sight, so to speak (and rightly so)—is roughly equivalent to the ‘aha!’ moment that illuminates us about the intelligence of a chimpanzee, a miracle that still fills us with wonder when we detect it on the faces of our peers. However, this operation does not fail to bring with it a regrettable aftermath.”

Here, Lacan uses a familiar and humorous analogy to evoke the intuitive leap of understanding—a chimpanzee “getting it,” or a peer suddenly enlightened. The mirror stage operates through sight, and it provokes in the child a kind of visual “aha!”—a sudden illumination or synthesis.

But this jubilation is not innocent. It has a regrettable aftermath: the subject is now captured in the Imaginary. What began as a seemingly empowering moment—the identification with an image of unity—now becomes the foundation of alienation. The ego is constructed not from within but from outside, from an external image.

“As a sharp-witted poet aptly remarks: ‘The mirror would do well to reflect a little more before sending back our image.’ [Jean Cocteau, Le Sang d’un poète] For at this moment, the subject has seen nothing yet.”

Lacan quotes Jean Cocteau to underscore his point: the mirror doesn’t just reflect—it imposes. The subject hasn’t “seen” in any meaningful sense; rather, they have been seen, or more precisely, caught. The “image” the mirror sends back is not a transparent reflection of the real self but a projected form, an illusion of mastery.

This is what Lacan calls méconnaissance, or misrecognition: the subject believes they are seeing themselves, but in truth, they are identifying with an alien image. The mirror doesn’t simply give—it captures, fixes, and defines.

“But if the same capture occurs in front of the nose of one of his peers—the nose of a notary, for example—God knows where the subject will be led by the nose, considering the places where these ministerial officers are accustomed to sticking theirs.”

Here, Lacan extends the metaphor into the social and symbolic realm. Once the mirror image is no longer just one’s own, but reflected in the gaze of the Other—say, a notary, a figure of social authority—the identification takes on another level of alienation.

The subject may now be “led by the nose”—a French idiom meaning to be manipulated—by the Other’s image and desire. The joke about notaries sticking their noses into people’s business is more than comic: it’s structural. The subject’s ego, formed in the image of the Other, is also subject to the Other’s desire, norms, judgments.

What was first a private misrecognition (the child and the mirror) becomes a social entrapment. The ego’s identity is now inextricably bound to symbolic roles and Imaginary projections of others.

“Furthermore, everything we have left—hands, feet, heart, mouth, even the eyes that hesitate to follow—faces an imminent rupture of alignment, whose announcement in the form of anxiety can only lead to drastic measures.”

Lacan now describes the subject’s somatic experience: once the ego is formed through the mirror image, the body-in-pieces remains beneath it. The jubilation of wholeness is fragile, and the body—hands, feet, heart, mouth—always threatens to fall out of alignment again.

This misalignment is experienced as anxiety. The Real intrudes; the imagined unity of the body collapses. The subject responds with “drastic measures”—attempts to stabilize or recapture the wholeness, often by rigid identification, defensive formations, or aggression. The ego must reassert itself to prevent fragmentation.

“Rallying!—that is, a call to the power of that ego image whose honeymoon with the mirror brought jubilation, to that sacred union of right and left that asserts itself there, however inverted it may appear if the subject happens to inspect it more closely.”

The “rallying” is the ego’s response to anxiety—it reasserts the image from the mirror, the “honeymoon” moment of coherence and mastery. This identification is what Lacan calls a “sacred union” of bodily symmetry—right and left sides unified in an Imaginary gestalt.

But Lacan again reminds us: this unity is inverted (as mirror images always are), and if the subject inspects it too closely, they will see its falsehood. The ego’s stability is always under threat, and its origin in inversion makes it structurally deceptive.

“But what better model of this union than the image of the other itself, that is, of the notary in his role?”

Now Lacan brings the social back in. The ego doesn’t just identify with any image—it finds its model in the Other, especially in social figures, symbolic roles, “notaries” who embody law, order, mastery.

The notary is no longer just an individual but a representative of the Symbolic Order. Identification with such figures helps the subject stabilize their ego, but at the cost of alienation. The subject is now under the law, identified through roles that precede them.

“It is thus that the functions of mastery, improperly referred to as ‘functions of ego synthesis,’ establish, on the foundation of a libidinal alienation, the development that follows, namely what we once called the paranoiac principle of human knowledge, according to which its objects are subject to a law of imaginary reduplication, evoking the homologation of an indefinite series of notaries, owed not at all to their professional association.”

Lacan delivers the critical theoretical twist. What ego psychology calls “ego synthesis”—a positive developmental integration—is, for Lacan, actually a misrecognized mastery, based on libidinal alienation. The subject’s ego is not the site of integration but of projection, rivalry, and control—functions rooted in Imaginary identification, not real unity.

This leads to what Lacan calls the paranoiac structure of knowledge: the subject sees the world as filled with doubles, mirrors, copies—“an indefinite series of notaries.” This is not about literal notaries but about the endless proliferation of social roles, images, and ideal egos. The ego’s knowledge is imaginary: it knows only by projecting its image onto the world, and thus its knowledge is always already distorted by its passion for coherence.

And crucially, these reduplications are not caused by the profession of the notaries—they are structural. The ego always sees the world through the lens of its Imaginary identifications.

This weaves together the core of Lacan’s critique of ego psychology and developmental models. The mirror stage, while jubilant in appearance, installs a structure of alienation at the heart of the subject. The ego is born not from unity, but from misrecognition—formed in and through the Other’s image. It promises mastery, but only through identification with social roles and specular images that never fully coincide with the subject’s divided being. Knowledge, too, becomes distorted: not a clear grasp of reality, but a paranoiac reduplication of one’s own image. To analyze is to go beyond this Imaginary—to hear what the ego cannot say, and to reach the subject where it speaks.

“But the decisive meaning for us of the constitutive alienation of the Urbild of the ego appears in the relation of exclusion that henceforth structures, within the subject, the dual relationship of ego to ego.”

Here Lacan returns to his structural critique of the ego by focusing on the Urbild—a German term meaning “primordial image” or “prototype.” This refers to the mirror image with which the infant originally identifies, and which becomes the foundational form of the ego. This image is constitutively alienating because it is not the subject’s body as lived, but rather a visual outside, an illusion of coherence imposed from without.

This alienation is not resolved once the image is integrated—it is structural and ongoing. And it produces a relational structure inside the subject: a split between ego and ego. That is, within the subject, there is already a conflict between two images or positions of identification—between the ego I think I am and the ego I fear or desire to be, often projected onto the other.

“For if the imaginary coaptation of one to the other should distribute roles complementarily—between the notary and the notarized, for example—the subject’s precipitate identification of the ego with the other results in a distribution that never constitutes even a kinetic harmony but instead establishes itself on the perpetual ‘you or me’ of a war in which the existence of one or the other of the two notaries within each subject is at stake.”

This is one of Lacan’s more sardonic developments of the mirror stage’s consequences: the complementary roles of subject and other—say, the notary and the notarized—do not lead to a peaceful social interaction but rather to a structural antagonism.

Because the subject identifies too quickly and too fully with the image of the other, the result is not harmony but rivalry. The subject does not simply recognize the other but competes with them. Lacan calls this the perpetual “you or me”—a conflict of being, not just of role or position. And within each subject, this mimetic rivalry duplicates itself: there are two notaries battling within the psyche, each trying to exclude the other from the scene of identification.

This is Lacan’s early formulation of the fundamental aggressiveness inherent in the Imaginary relation.

“This situation is symbolized in the ‘You are another’ of the transitivist quarrel, the original form of aggressive communication. [Cf. ‘The Quarrel of Images’]”

Lacan points here to an important clinical observation made early in developmental psychology: in children, especially around the age of three or four, there’s a phenomenon known as “transitivism,” where a child will say “he hit me” while striking another. The subject’s own action is displaced onto the other.

The phrase “You are another” captures this confusion and projection—aggression is externalized, not owned. This is not just childish confusion but the primordial form of aggressive communication structured by the mirror relation. The subject cannot stabilize their own image, and so all aggression must be located in or through the other.

“We can see what the language of the ego is reduced to: intuitive illumination, recollective command, retaliatory aggressiveness of verbal echo.”

Now Lacan turns to the kind of “language” that emanates from the ego—what kind of speech is structured by Imaginary identifications. It is a language not of openness or truth, but of closed loops: the flash of insight, the repetition of commands from memory, or echoed aggression.

These are not genuine acts of symbolic communication; they are patterned, mimetic, and defensive. They are the speech-acts of a subject trapped in the ego’s mirror logic: reactive rather than reflective, iterative rather than interpretive.

“To this, we can add what falls to it from the automatic debris of common speech: educational repetition and delirious refrains—modes of communication that can be perfectly reproduced by objects barely more complicated than this lectern: a feedback mechanism for the former and a gramophone record, preferably scratched in just the right spot, for the latter.”

Lacan goes further in his critique. Even the most “learned” uses of ego-language—schooling, catechismal instruction, social scripts—are reduced here to mechanical repetition. The ego speaks not as a subject but like a feedback system or a scratched record—repeating the same phrase, the same story, the same desire, often in delusional loops.

The lectern, which previously served as a metaphor for structural speech, now becomes a figure for the emptiness of ego-language. The ego, in this scenario, could be replaced by a machine and no one would notice—because what it speaks is not truth, but programmed cliché.

“Yet, it is within this register that the systematic analysis of defense claims to sustain itself, provided it remains coherent with its principles.”

Here Lacan takes aim at ego psychology’s focus on defense mechanisms. For much of post-Freudian analysis, especially in Anglo-American contexts, defense became the central object of analytic work—how the ego protects itself against the id, or against anxiety.

Lacan points out that this whole model remains trapped in the register of the Imaginary: it works with mechanical representations of function and distortion but never interrogates the symbolic structure of speech and desire. And yet this model persists, he suggests, because it is “coherent with its principles”—which is to say, it is internally consistent but structurally flawed.

“One grasps the structure that opposes any resolution to such analysis, even if forced.”

Lacan now states a hard truth: analysis, when structured on this egoic model, cannot resolve anything. Its tools—identification, adaptation, ego-strengthening—only reinforce the Imaginary relations that generate the symptom in the first place.

Attempts to force a resolution (through interpretation, suggestion, or normalization) fail because they preserve the structure of alienation. They address the ego but leave untouched the subject of the unconscious.

“This is why the strict analysis of object relations leads either into reality through an acting-out that signals resistance to suggestion, or into transient paranoia through the kind of megalomaniacal intoxication that our friend Michael BALINT—whose pen, so friendly to truth, makes him all the more our friend—describes as the indicator of the termination of analysis, or into the psychosomatic symptom through a hypochondria where the laws of Kleinian phantasmatic dynamics are revisited.”

This is Lacan at his most precise and polemical. He now critiques the outcomes of “object relations” theory—particularly in its British iterations (Klein, Balint). If analysis is reduced to navigating the subject’s relation to part-objects, maternal objects, or internalized others, then the outcomes tend to be:

• Acting-out: the subject stages the analytic drama in real life as a form of resistance. This is not a breakthrough, but a sign that the subject is not heard within the analytic frame.
• Paranoiac intoxication: the subject experiences a megalomaniacal high, an illusion of mastery. Balint (whom Lacan gently mocks even while praising) describes this as the endpoint of therapy—but for Lacan, it’s the endpoint of ego inflation, not analysis.
• Psychosomatic symptom: if the subject’s speech is not engaged symbolically, the repressed returns in the body. Hypochondria becomes a symptom where speech fails, and the body bears the inscription of unconscious conflict, echoing Kleinian dynamics of projection and introjection.

“The theory of a two-ego analysis can, therefore, only account for its own results insofar as it remains untenable.”

Lacan brings his critique home. The idea that analysis consists of two egos—analyst and analysand—in dialogue, harmonizing, mirroring, is untenable. Not because it fails logically, but because it produces its own impasses: identification instead of interpretation, ego reinflation instead of truth, adaptation instead of subjectivation.

It is a theory that explains its failures only by doubling down on them. It’s not just flawed; it’s structurally self-reinforcing. To move beyond it, one must abandon the ego as the central pivot of analysis.

ANALYTIC ACTION

With this heading, Lacan signals a turn from critique to construction: what kind of action is proper to psychoanalysis, once we discard the Imaginary traps of ego-centered discourse?

If analysis is not a conversation between egos, nor a mechanical process of ego-strengthening, then what is it? This is the question Lacan begins to answer in the next phase of his teaching. But already we know: it will concern the symbolic, the cut, the place of the subject in the signifier. Not what the ego says—but what speaks through the subject.

This section reveals the Imaginary entrapment at the heart of ego psychology and object relations theory. The ego is born in alienation, maintained in rivalry, and expressed in clichés. Its speech is mechanical, reactive, defensive. True analysis cannot work within the ego’s closed circuit. It must act upon the symbolic coordinates that structure the subject’s desire and symptom—coordinates that no notary can authorize, and no mirror can contain.

“This is why we teach that there are not merely two subjects present in the analytic situation but two subjects, each endowed with two objects: the ego and the other, the latter being indexed by a lowercase a.”

Lacan formalizes the analytic situation in structural terms. There are not just two people—analyst and analysand—but two subjects, and each subject is composed internally of a duality: the ego (a′) and the other (a). This internal division within each subject is critical to understanding what occurs in the analytic encounter.

The lowercase a here refers to the other in the imaginary register—the image of the other, the alter ego, the fellow human with whom the subject identifies or competes. Meanwhile, a′ (a-prime) designates the ego, the subject’s own Imaginary construction, formed in the mirror stage. So, in the analytic dyad, there are four operative elements: two subjects (S and A), each split into ego and other.

What Lacan shows is that analysis cannot be conceived as a linear exchange between two unified egos, but as a complex quadripartite configuration structured by misrecognition, mirroring, and desire.

“Now, due to the peculiarities of a dialectical mathematics with which we must become familiar, their union in the pair of subjects S and A consists, in total, of only four terms. This is because the relation of exclusion that operates between a and a’ reduces the two pairs thus noted to a single one in the confrontation of the subjects.”

This passage reflects Lacan’s use of formalization—what he calls a “dialectical mathematics.” In this logic, the four elements (S, a′, A, a) are not independent but structurally related through exclusion. The ego (a′) and the other (a) are not simply distinct; they are mutually exclusive in a way that prevents their harmonious co-presence.

Because of this, when the two subjects (analyst and analysand) meet in the analytic encounter, their respective ego–other pairings do not add up to a smooth four-part harmony. Instead, they are overdetermined by a logic of mirroring, rivalry, and displacement. The relation of exclusion means that only one of each pair can function dominantly in the exchange at any given time. The encounter becomes a dialectical confrontation—structured not by symmetry, but by division and deadlocks.

This logic is visualized in the diagram you provided: over time, the imaginary mirroring between a and a′ becomes displaced by a triangulation through S and A, and the antagonism of identification gives way (if properly handled) to symbolic transmission.

“In this fourfold dynamic, the analyst will act on the significant resistances that weigh down, slow, and deflect speech, bringing into the quartet the primordial sign of exclusion connoting the ‘either-or’ of presence or absence [1,0], which formally reveals the death included in narcissistic Bildung (education).”

In the analytic process, the analyst works within this fourfold dynamic. His task is to act on resistance—those points in the discourse where the subject hesitates, stumbles, repeats, or fails to speak. These are not just psychological blocks; they are structured effects of the relation between the ego (a′) and the other (a), mediated by the Symbolic (S) and the Other (A).

Lacan here invokes the binary code of presence and absence—[1,0]—to indicate that speech always involves a cut, a loss, a gap. This exclusion, or disjunction, introduces the sign of death into the analytic space. It’s not physical death, but the symbolic absence that structures meaning: the death of the Imaginary coherence, the loss of the ego-ideal, the vanishing of certainty.

Narcissistic Bildung, or self-cultivation, always carries death within it because it is predicated on an illusion of unity that cannot hold. The symbolic intervention of analysis is to break that illusion—not violently, but structurally—through the play of absence, of the signifier.

“Let us note in passing that this sign is missing in the algorithmic apparatus of modern logic, which calls itself symbolic, demonstrating thereby the dialectical insufficiency that still renders it incapable of formalizing the human sciences.”

This is one of Lacan’s critical jabs at formal logic. While modern symbolic logic claims to handle truth, it lacks the formal tools to handle subjectivity. Specifically, it cannot account for the structural absence, the gap, the non-being that is constitutive of the subject.

The logic of [1,0] in computer science or formal logic treats 0 as nothing—but in psychoanalysis, 0 is not nothing: it is lack. It is the function of the signifier that introduces division into the subject. Modern logic, says Lacan, lacks this dialectical sensibility—it cannot deal with contradiction, negativity, or the split subject.

Hence, psychoanalysis remains irreducible to symbolic logic. Its own “mathematics” must be dialectical, not positivist.

“This means that the analyst intervenes concretely in the dialectic of analysis by ‘playing dead,’ by cadaverizing his position, as the Chinese say—either through his silence, where he is the Other with a capital A, or by annulling his own resistance, where he is the other with a lowercase a.”

Lacan introduces here one of his most paradoxical formulations of analytic technique: the analyst must play dead. This doesn’t mean he is passive or disengaged. Rather, he occupies a null point in the structure—a position of absence that allows the subject’s desire to emerge.

This cadaverizing of the analyst’s position serves two purposes:

• In silence, the analyst becomes A, the Other. He does not impose meaning but provides a gap into which the analysand’s speech can pour. The subject addresses their speech to this Other, hoping to find recognition, but encountering instead a lack—which forces them to confront their own division.
• In annulling his own resistance, the analyst becomes a, the other. He reflects back the analysand’s Imaginary relation, but in such a way that it fails—that it leads not to identification, but to a question. This opens space for symbolic reworking.

In both roles, the analyst presents death—not as a threat, but as structural lack, the absence at the heart of subjectivity.

“In both cases, and under the respective incidences of the symbolic and the imaginary, he presents death. Yet it is necessary for him to recognize and therefore distinguish his action in each of these two registers, to know why he intervenes, when the opportunity presents itself, and how to act.”

Lacan now stresses the ethical dimension of analytic action. The analyst must know what he is doing—not just that he is present, or silent, or interpreting, but why he acts in the Symbolic or the Imaginary, when to step in, and how.

This is not a technical protocol—it is a structural responsibility. The analyst is responsible for the position he occupies in the structure, and must continually distinguish whether he is functioning as A (the Symbolic Other) or a (the Imaginary other).

These two positions are not interchangeable. Confusing them results in suggestion, manipulation, or ego reinforcement—all contrary to analysis.

“The primary condition is that he must be deeply aware of the radical difference between the Other to whom his speech must be addressed and this second other—the one he sees and by whom and through whom the first speaks to him in the discourse that unfolds before him.”

This is one of the most precise formulations of analytic listening. The analyst must distinguish between:

• The Other (A), to whom the analysand’s speech is addressed. This is the symbolic position, the locus of law, language, and desire. The analysand speaks to this Other when they bring their unconscious to language.
• The other (a), who is seen, who occupies the position of the ego-double, the mirror image. This is the Imaginary other—the fellow human, the analyst as person, body, gaze.

But crucially, Lacan says: it is through this second other (a) that the first Other (A) speaks. That is, the subject’s unconscious desire reaches the analyst only by way of identifications, fantasies, and projections. The analyst must listen through the Imaginary to hear the Symbolic.

“For it is in this way that he will know how to be the one to whom this discourse is addressed.”

The analyst must take up the position of the Other—the structural recipient of the subject’s divided speech—not by identifying with it, but by holding open its place. By refusing to collapse into the Imaginary mirror (as ego psychology does), and by sustaining the absence proper to the Symbolic Other, the analyst allows the subject to discover the truth of their own desire.

This culminates Lacan’s structural mapping of the analytic situation: four terms, two subjects, two objects, governed by exclusion, misrecognition, and symbolic difference. The analyst’s ethical and technical task is to hold the structure—to act not as ego, but as function. Only then can the analysand encounter the subject they are in the speech that traverses their symptom.

“The allegory of my lectern and the common practice of the discourse of conviction will show him well enough, if he reflects upon it, that no discourse—regardless of the inertia on which it relies or the passion to which it appeals—ever addresses itself to anyone other than the attentive listener to whom it brings its salvation.”

Lacan revisits the allegory of the lectern, which earlier served as a metaphor for the position of the ego, the speech object, and the analytic function. He now reframes it in terms of discourse and its destination: speech always aims at a subject who listens. Not the generic “receiver” of communication theory, but a singular Other—the attentive one who hears in the psychoanalytic sense. The addressee of discourse is not a passive ear, nor an ego to be convinced by reason or passion, but the subject who finds in the discourse something that saves them—something that touches truth.

The phrase “brings its salvation” should be understood in the psychoanalytic register, not the theological one. “Salvation” here refers to the subject’s opportunity to be spoken by the truth that their unconscious reveals, through the mediation of the analyst as listener. Lacan emphasizes that discourse, especially in analysis, cannot be reduced to mere information or rhetorical force. It is always structured toward a listener whose response retroactively constitutes the speech.

“What is called the ad hominem argument itself is regarded, by those who employ it, as nothing more than a seduction intended to secure from the other, in their authenticity, the acceptance of a speech—a speech that constitutes, between the two subjects, a pact, whether acknowledged or not, but which, in either case, lies beyond the reasoning of the argument.”

The ad hominem—an argument directed at the person rather than the logic—is typically dismissed as fallacious. But Lacan flips this evaluation on its head. He says that even those who use such arguments know they are not about truth in any logical sense, but about a kind of seduction or interpellation: an attempt to secure assent by invoking the other’s personhood, their authenticity.

And this reveals something fundamental: that any speech directed at another carries with it a pact—a structure of address, a performative dimension that precedes logical structure. The speech act in analysis always exceeds what is “said”; it creates a bond, a circuit, a transference, which is not reducible to the propositions it contains.

“Ordinarily, everyone knows that others, just like themselves, will remain inaccessible to the constraints of reason unless there is a principled acceptance of a rule of debate, one that cannot exist without an explicit or implicit agreement about what is called its foundation. This almost always amounts to a pre-agreed consensus on its stakes.”

Here Lacan shows that the “constraints of reason” do not function in a vacuum. Logic, debate, rationality—these only operate within a shared framework, and such a framework must be agreed upon. If there is no shared foundation (whether stated or implied), then reason has no grip. One cannot simply convince another by reasoning alone unless both already agree on the terms and stakes of the exchange.

This principle is crucial to Lacan’s distinction between speech as communication and speech as constitutive of the subject. The former requires shared rules; the latter—psychoanalytic speech—exceeds these rules, because it works with what escapes consensus: the unconscious, the drive, desire.

“What is called logic or law is never anything more than a body of rules laboriously adjusted at a duly dated moment in history and stamped with an origin seal—whether that be an agora, a forum, a church, or even a party.”

Lacan historicizes logic and law. He reminds us that what passes for universal reason is always historically situated, laboriously constructed, and socially validated. The “origin seal”—whether the democratic agora, the Roman forum, the ecclesial tradition, or the political party—attests not to eternity, but to contingency. These rules are products of time and power.

And yet, analysis is not governed by these historical codes. The analytic act involves a different kind of law: the law of the unconscious, which is both symbolic and ahistorical. It is precisely because modern logic cannot account for this that it fails to capture psychoanalytic truth.

“I will therefore expect nothing from these rules except the good faith of the Other, and as a last resort, I will use them—if I judge it appropriate or am compelled to do so—only to entertain bad faith.”

This is one of Lacan’s most subversive statements. He declares that he puts no faith in logic or law as such; the only thing that matters is the ethics of the Other. That is, the position of the analyst as the place where speech can be heard—where truth can be addressed.

And as for “the rules,” he will use them only if necessary, and even then, only to expose the bad faith of the one hiding behind them. This is a powerful psychoanalytic ethic: the rule is not sovereign. What is sovereign is the structure of address, the cut, the truth-effect that emerges in speech. Law and reason are tools—not ends.

THE PLACE OF SPEECH

This heading marks a decisive shift. Lacan now turns from critique of logic and communication to the topology of speech itself—to the place where the speaking subject is constituted.

“The Other is therefore the place where the ‘I’ is constituted—the ‘I’ who speaks with the one who hears, where what one says was already the response, and the other decides, in hearing it, whether or not the one has spoken.”

This is a central axiom of Lacanian theory: the subject is constituted in the field of the Other. The “I” is not prior to speech; it emerges through speech—specifically, through the address to the Other. Lacan emphasizes that what is said is already a response, even before the speaker knows it. This is the effect of unconscious structuring: every utterance is shaped by the Other’s desire, and meaning is always retroactively conferred.

The listener—the Other—decides whether or not the subject has truly spoken. That is, speech is not validated by the speaker’s intent, but by its recognition. And this is why the analyst’s listening is so critical: the analyst ratifies the speech of the subject, not by confirming its truth, but by holding the place of the Other who hears.

“But, in return, this place extends as far into the subject as the laws of speech reign there—that is, far beyond the discourse that takes from the ego its orders of command, ever since FREUD discovered the unconscious field and the laws that structure it.”

The field of the Other is not external. It extends into the subject—it is internal to their very being. The unconscious, discovered by Freud, is structured like a language. It follows laws—metaphor, metonymy, displacement, condensation. These are the laws of speech, not of ego-command.

What Lacan stresses here is the radical decentering of the subject. The ego may think it gives commands—but the true discourse that constitutes the subject comes from elsewhere: from the Other, from the symbolic order, from the unconscious.

So, the place of speech is split: it is at once the site of subjectivation and of alienation. One speaks, but does not master what one says. And one is spoken, often in what one does not say.

This passage brings to a head the Lacanian view of speech, subjectivity, and the analytic position. Discourse is never neutral or universal—it is always addressed, always relational, always structured by a pact with the Other. Logic, law, and reason are secondary to this structure of address. The subject is born not through understanding but through being heard. And psychoanalysis, unlike ideology or law, must remain faithful to this truth: that to speak is to be split, and that what is said is always already a response to the place from which one is called.

“It is not because of some mystery of the indestructibility of certain infantile desires that these laws of the unconscious determine analyzable symptoms. The imaginary molding of the subject by their desires—fixed or regressed to varying degrees in their relation to the object—is insufficient and partial to provide the key.”

Lacan cuts through a common misunderstanding of Freudian theory: the idea that symptoms endure because of some mysterious tenacity of infantile desires. That is, a crude view assumes that certain early wants—sexual or aggressive impulses, perhaps—simply persist into adulthood in disguised form. Lacan rejects this.

The persistence of symptoms, he argues, cannot be explained solely by the Imaginary—by the way the subject’s desire is shaped or “molded” through identifications, images, and regression to earlier objects. That schema—desire → fixation → symptom—is too simplistic. The Imaginary is partial. It may structure the ego, but it cannot fully account for the return of the repressed.

“The repetitive insistence of these desires in transference and their permanent recollection in a signifier seized by repression—in which the repressed returns—finds its necessary and sufficient reason if one admits that the desire for recognition dominates, in these determinations, the desire that is to be recognized, maintaining it as such until it is indeed recognized.”

Here Lacan offers his alternative: what structures the symptom is not simply desire for an object, but the desire to be recognized. In other words, desire is not just about having, but about being seen, being named, being acknowledged. This is the true drive behind the transference: the subject does not repeat simply because of instinctual fixation, but because their speech, their being, awaits recognition by the Other.

Importantly, this desire for recognition dominates the original desire. It is this dynamic that keeps the symptom alive: the desire must remain a desire—unfulfilled, still waiting—to preserve its structure as a call for recognition. Only once recognized as such can it be transformed.

“The laws of recollection and of symbolic recognition are, in fact, essentially and manifestly different from the laws of imaginary reminiscence—that is, from the echo of feeling or the instinctual imprint (Prägung)—even if the elements ordered as signifiers by the former are borrowed from the material to which the latter gives meaning.”

Here Lacan explicitly distinguishes two kinds of memory:

• Imaginary reminiscence: the memory of feelings, affects, perceptual images—linked to the body, the senses, and what he calls instinctual “imprinting” (borrowing the ethological term Prägung). These are evocative but unstable.
• Symbolic recollection: structured not by affect but by the laws of the signifier. This is the kind of memory that functions in the unconscious—not episodic memory, but a system of differences, organized by absence and opposition, like language itself.

Even if symbolic memory uses the “stuff” of imaginary impressions, it operates under entirely different laws. The unconscious does not “replay” the past like a movie; it works through signifying chains, metaphors, displacements, condensations. The return of the repressed is the return of a signifier, not of a lived moment.

“To grasp the nature of symbolic memory, it is enough to have once studied, as I have had done in my seminar, the simplest symbolic sequence: that of a linear series of signs connoting the alternative of presence or absence, each being randomly chosen, regardless of whether one proceeds in a pure or impure mode.”

Lacan now turns toward formalization. Symbolic memory can be modeled mathematically: as a chain of elements where the only difference is presence or absence. This is the most minimal unit of meaning—akin to binary code or Boolean logic. But Lacan does not invoke this to reduce psychoanalysis to information theory. Rather, he’s showing that even the barest symbolic structure can generate law, exclusion, structure.

“Pure” or “impure” refers to the method of selection—whether the sequence follows a clean rule or a more chaotic one—but in either case, a syntax begins to emerge from repetition, difference, pattern.

“If one then applies the simplest elaboration to this series—marking the ternary sequences into a new series—syntaxic laws will emerge, imposing on each term certain exclusions of possibility until the compensations required by their antecedents are resolved.”

When we parse the sequence into three-part units (ternary sequences), a secondary structure arises. Certain sequences exclude others—this is not unlike grammar, where certain word combinations are prohibited or required. These exclusions generate syntax—rules of arrangement that determine meaning not from content, but from position in the sequence.

This reflects how symptoms operate: the unconscious does not “speak” in content (feelings, impressions), but in position within a symbolic chain. And this chain always bears the mark of repression, absence, and the compensatory return of what has been excluded.

“. . 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 2 2 2 1 2 3 2 1 1 . . . . α δ β β δ δ β β γ δ γ α γ α δ”

This cryptic line, lifted from Lacan’s earlier Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, shows how abstract numerical positions (1, 2, 3) can correspond to symbolic elements (α, β, γ, δ). The exact mapping is less important here than the principle: symbolic sequences generate rules, exclusions, and effects that emerge not from individual units, but from their structure of repetition and substitution.

The point is that the unconscious functions structurally like this—governed by position, difference, substitution. The subject is caught in this chain, not in a chain of feelings or memories, but of signifiers.

“At the heart of this determination of symbolic law, FREUD immediately positioned himself through his discovery. For in this unconscious, about which he repeatedly tells us has nothing to do with anything previously designated by that name, he recognized the agency of the laws upon which alliance and kinship are founded, establishing, as early as The Interpretation of Dreams, the Oedipus complex as its central motivation.”

Lacan returns to Freud’s foundational gesture: the discovery of the unconscious as a structured field. Freud, Lacan reminds us, was clear that the unconscious he discovered was not the unconscious of mystical inspiration, subliminal impressions, or biological instincts. It was something else: a locus governed by laws.

And what are these laws? The laws of alliance and kinship—that is, the symbolic laws that determine who one can marry, who one can desire, who is forbidden. These are not biological facts but cultural inscriptions—they come from language, naming, prohibition.

From the very beginning, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud understood that desire is not simply drive—it is structured by the Name-of-the-Father, by the law, by the Oedipus complex, which is not a mere drama of family romance but a structural operation: the insertion of the subject into the symbolic order, via prohibition and desire.

Lacan here articulates his formal understanding of the unconscious: not a vault of feelings, not a storehouse of infantile wishes, but a structured chain of signifiers, governed by symbolic laws. The symptom does not repeat because desire is “indestructible,” but because recognition is missing. The subject’s speech must be heard in its symbolic function—where absence, exclusion, and position determine its truth. Freud, in Lacan’s reading, is the one who taught us this: that the unconscious speaks, and it speaks in the grammar of kinship, desire, and prohibition—at the crossing of language and law.

“And it is this that now allows me to tell you why the motifs of the unconscious are limited—a point on which FREUD declared himself from the start and never wavered—to sexual desire.”

Here Lacan addresses a foundational question in psychoanalysis: Why is the unconscious so bound up with sexuality? He insists—echoing Freud—that this is not an arbitrary feature of psychoanalytic doctrine, nor a provisional assumption awaiting revision. Freud was unwavering on this point: the unconscious is structured around sexual desire. But Lacan, staying faithful to Freud through a structuralist lens, now explains why this is so.

The motifs of the unconscious are not unlimited, nor do they reflect an inventory of all biological needs or psychological drives. The unconscious is not encyclopedic—it is structured, and its structure is symbolic. It does not register hunger, fear, or fatigue in the way it registers sexuality, because sexuality is tied to law, speech, and kinship. It’s not that sex is more biologically urgent—but rather, more symbolically overdetermined.

“It is indeed essentially on sexual connection, and by aligning it with the law of preferential alliances and forbidden relationships, that the first combinatory system of women exchanged between nominal lineages finds its foundation, in order to develop into an exchange of gratuitous goods and an exchange of key words—the fundamental commerce and concrete discourse that support human societies.”

Lacan brings in the anthropological basis for Freud’s insight: sexual connection becomes symbolically charged because it is the linchpin of the social order. Through Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Lacan draws a genealogy from the exchange of women (kinship alliances) to language and commerce. This “first combinatory system” refers to the symbolic economy in which women—like signs or goods—are exchanged to form bonds between groups. This is not a moral judgment, but a structural observation.

What emerges from this original exchange is not just social reproduction but the very possibility of symbolic order: language, law, prohibition, and meaning. Hence, sexual desire is not just about gratification—it is caught up in the network of signifiers. This is why the unconscious is saturated with sexual themes: not because sex is especially exciting to the unconscious, but because it is the point where the subject is spoken by the Symbolic.

“The concrete field of individual preservation, on the other hand, through its connections not to the division of labor but rather to the division of enjoyment and labor, already evident from the first transformation that introduced a human significance into nourishment, up to the most advanced forms of the production of consumable goods, clearly shows that it is structured within that master-slave dialectic, where we can recognize the symbolic emergence of the imaginary life-or-death struggle in which we earlier defined the essential structure of the ego. It is therefore no surprise that this field reflects itself exclusively therein.”

In contrast to the symbolic structuration of sexuality, Lacan now discusses the field of individual preservation—our needs for food, safety, survival. But he argues that this domain is not structured in the same symbolic way as sexuality. Rather, it’s structured by Imaginary identifications and struggles—especially those governed by rivalry, domination, and labor.

Drawing from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Lacan sees the division of enjoyment and labor as a symbolically mediated reflection of the imaginary life-or-death struggle. In the analytic register, this refers to the ego’s rivalry and misrecognition, its dependence on images of power, submission, or autonomy.

Thus, the domain of self-preservation—hunger, for instance—remains within the realm of the ego and the Imaginary. It plays out in images of control, utility, consumption, and mastery—not in the symbolic chain of lack, desire, and law that structures the unconscious.

“In other words, this explains why the other great generic desire, that of hunger, is not represented—as FREUD always maintained—in what the unconscious preserves in order to make it recognized.”

This is the clinching point. Hunger—though biologically primary—is not represented in the unconscious the way sexual desire is. Freud never wavered on this either, and Lacan explains why: hunger is not subject to the same symbolic structuration. It is not caught in kinship systems or the law of the father. It does not introduce the subject into the field of the Other.

That doesn’t mean hunger is irrelevant—it can be metaphorized, symbolized—but it is not the engine of repression, symptom formation, or unconscious desire in the way sexuality is. The unconscious preserves that which seeks recognition through the Other, and hunger, in its immediacy, bypasses that circuit.

“In this way, the intention of FREUD becomes ever clearer to those who do not content themselves with mechanically repeating his text. At the moment when he introduced the topology of the ego, his goal was to restore with rigor the separation—even in their unconscious interference—between the field of the ego and that of the unconscious, which he first discovered, by demonstrating the crosswise position of the ego relative to the unconscious. The ego resists recognition through the incidence of its own meanings within speech.”

Here Lacan corrects misreadings of Freud, especially those of the ego psychologists who seek harmony between ego and unconscious. Lacan insists that Freud never intended the ego to be the master of the unconscious. On the contrary: the ego is formed in opposition to the unconscious.

Lacan recalls Freud’s “topography” of the psyche, where the ego occupies a crosswise position relative to the unconscious. It doesn’t overlay it—it cuts across it, obstructs it, resists it. The ego, formed in the Imaginary, aims at mastery and coherence. The unconscious, structured by the Symbolic, disrupts that coherence through slips, symptoms, dreams.

Even when they overlap, the ego and unconscious remain structurally distinct. The ego misrecognizes the subject. It inserts its own meanings into speech, thereby resisting the recognition that the unconscious seeks. This is why in analysis, the symptom cannot be interpreted through the ego’s logic—it must be read through the signifier.

“It is precisely here that lies the contrast between the meanings of guilt, whose discovery in the subject’s actions dominated the first phase of the history of analysis, and the meanings of affective frustration, instinctual deficiency, and imaginary dependence of the subject, which dominate its current phase.”

Lacan contrasts two phases of psychoanalysis:

• The first phase, dominated by Freud, focused on guilt—on the unconscious recognition of desire as transgression. Guilt arises from symbolic transgression of the law (as in the Oedipus complex), and its interpretation reveals the subject’s implication in their unconscious speech.
• The current phase, dominated by ego psychology and object relations theory, focuses on affective frustration, instinctual deficiency, and dependency. These are rooted in the Imaginary: in images of loss, lack of love, broken attachments—not in symbolic transgression.

For Lacan, this shift marks a decline. The focus on deficiency and frustration displaces the subject of the unconscious with a psychology of adaptation and harmony. But the symptom, for Lacan, is not a cry for help or a deficit—it is a structured speech act, a formation of the unconscious that demands to be read, not repaired.

Lacan reaffirms the Freudian position that the unconscious is rooted in sexual desire, not because of biological necessity, but because of the symbolic structure of society. Kinship, law, prohibition, and language all intersect in sexuality, making it the privileged site of repression and return. Hunger, by contrast, belongs to the Imaginary and does not generate the same symbolic effects. Thus, analysis must return to speech, law, and the cut that separates ego from unconscious, restoring to Freud the rigor that later psychoanalytic trends have obscured.

“That the prevalence of the latter meanings, as they are now consolidating with the forgetting of the former, promises us a propaedeutic of generalized infantilization—this is putting it mildly—when psychoanalysis already allows itself, on principle, to authorize large-scale practices of social mystification.”

Lacan gives a warning: the current phase of psychoanalysis—dominated by interpretations centered on affective frustration, instinctual deficiency, and imaginary dependence—not only departs from Freud’s original rigor but is complicit in a process of infantilization. And this is a mild way of putting it.

Instead of leading subjects to confront their symbolic responsibility—the place they occupy in speech, law, and desire—this mode of analysis flatters the ego, comforts the patient, and mystifies the real. Worse, it legitimizes social mystification on a wide scale. That is, it aligns itself with ideological apparatuses (education, therapy, institutions) that pacify rather than emancipate the subject. Analysis, meant to bring the unconscious truth into speech, is now used to numb or soothe.

SYMBOLIC DEBT

This subheading marks a turn toward the central Lacanian concept of symbolic debt, the notion that subjectivity is constituted through a fundamental owing—a lack, a promise, a missed call—that shapes desire and law.

“Will our action, then, repress the very truth it carries in its exercise? Will it return this truth to slumber, a truth that FREUD, in the passion of The Rat Man, would forever keep available for our recognition—even if we were increasingly to turn our vigilance away from it?”

Here Lacan questions the ethical standing of psychoanalytic practice. Has it become a discourse that represses what it was designed to uncover? Does analysis, in its normalization and ego adaptation, send the truth—Freud’s truth—back into slumber?

Lacan invokes The Rat Man, one of Freud’s most celebrated and tormented case studies, as emblematic of this truth: a truth that is not smooth, not reconciliatory, but shot through with passion, madness, and structure. In The Rat Man, we see the unconscious in its full symbolic cruelty—compulsions, debts, guilt, and the impossible demand for reparation. Lacan insists this case keeps the torch burning for what psychoanalysis must recognize: that the truth is not healing—it is disturbing.

“Namely, the truth that it is from forfeitures and false oaths, broken promises and empty words, that the constellation governing a man’s birth was assembled; that it is The Stone Guest—kneaded, as it were—who comes to disturb the banquet of his desires through his symptoms.”

This is a poetic condensation of Lacan’s central insight: the subject is born into a symbolic network already marked by betrayal, loss, and broken speech. The child does not enter the world as a blank slate but as a node in a chain of deferred meanings, failed signifiers, and unmet promises. The Stone Guest—a reference to Don Giovanni and the figure of inevitable judgment—represents the return of the repressed truth in the form of symptoms. It is not a person but a symbol, a structuring force that crashes the party of desire.

Desire is never pure—it is already disturbed by the symbolic debts inherited through speech, law, and family narrative. This is why psychoanalysis is not simply about “recovery” but about reckoning with this haunting Other.

“For the sour grape of speech, by which a child receives too early from a father the authentication of the nothingness of existence, and the cluster of anger that responds to the words of false hope with which his mother misled him while nourishing him with the milk of her true despair, irritate his teeth far more than having been weaned from an imaginary enjoyment or even deprived of certain real care.”

This is Lacan at his most devastatingly lyrical. He describes how the symbolic wounds the subject far more deeply than any material lack. The child is scarred by speech—not by physical deprivation but by what was said, or not said, too early, too falsely, too desperately.

A father who delivers a truth the child cannot integrate (“the nothingness of existence”) or a mother who misleads with words of hope while transmitting despair through the body—these are not empirical traumas, but symbolic violences. The child is injured not by weaning, but by being prematurely placed in a structure of meaning that fails. These “sour grapes” of speech mark the point where the Real intrudes via language.

“Will we extract ourselves from the symbolic game in which real fault pays the price of imaginary temptation? Will we divert our study from what happens to the law when, having been intolerable to a subject’s fidelity, it was misrecognized by him already when it was still unknown, and from the imperative which, having been presented in imposture, is rejected by him even before it is discerned?”

Lacan now poses the clinical and ethical challenge of analysis: Can we bear to look at the symbolic law that structures the symptom? Or will we retreat into a psychology of comfort?

He describes how the law—the Symbolic order, the Name-of-the-Father—is often experienced as intolerable, even before it is consciously encountered. A subject might misrecognize the law (for instance, through the father’s failure or imposture) before they even articulate it. This leads to the rejection of the law, to a psychic structure of rebellion, guilt, or denial that plays out in symptoms.

Lacan describes a game in which real fault (ethical action) is paid for through imaginary temptation—the symbolic is displaced into the Imaginary, and the subject ends up at war with a phantom law. Analysis must bring the symbolic chain back into focus.

“In other words, from the springs that, in the broken mesh of the symbolic chain, give rise from the imaginary to that obscene and ferocious figure in which one must see the true meaning of the superego?”

This is a return to one of his most important revisions of Freud: the superego is not simply an internalized conscience. It is the return of the law in its obscene form, the law misrecognized, unmet, twisted. When the symbolic chain breaks—when the subject cannot locate themselves in the web of meaning and law—what arises is not freedom but tyranny: the superego as cruel command, the voice of obscene duty, self-punishment, and repetition.

This is not a law that liberates or binds—it is a law that haunts. Its ferocity is the result of the imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic failure.

Lacan lays out the stakes of psychoanalysis as a reckoning with symbolic debt. The unconscious is not the site of unmet needs but of broken promises, unacknowledged truths, speech that wounds. Symptoms arise not from deprivation but from the structural failure of recognition. If analysis forgets this—if it becomes a therapy of comfort—it will, ironically, reproduce the very repression it once sought to lift. The analyst’s task is not to soothe, but to hold open the place of truth—to hear in the subject’s speech the reverberation of the Stone Guest, the missing signifier whose absence structures desire, and whose recognition may begin to set it free.

“Let it be understood here that our critique of analysis, which claims to be that of resistance and is increasingly reduced to the mobilization of defenses, focuses only on the fact that it is as disoriented in its practice as in its principles, aiming to bring it back to the order of its legitimate ends.”

This is a clarifying remark: his critique of contemporary psychoanalytic practice, especially the kind that fixates on “resistance” and “defense mechanisms,” is not nihilistic or destructive. It is corrective. The issue is not merely that analysis fails—but that it is disoriented: lost both in its technical applications and its conceptual compass.

Instead of pursuing its original aim—to bring the subject into an encounter with their unconscious truth—analysis has shifted toward managing resistance and defending the ego, thereby abandoning its orientation toward the symbolic. Lacan seeks to restore it to its legitimate ends: namely, to re-establish the subject’s relation to speech, desire, and responsibility within the symbolic order.

“The dual complicities in which it engages, in pursuit of happiness and success, can only gain value in our eyes from the minimal resistance of the meanings that involve the ego in these effects, to the speech that reveals itself at a given moment in analysis.”

Lacan critiques the two-fold compromise psychoanalysis has made with prevailing social ideals: happiness and success. In modern therapeutic contexts, the goal often becomes normative adjustment or emotional relief—rather than truth. Psychoanalysis is made to serve the ego’s goals: contentment, performance, wellness.

But even within these superficial aims, Lacan sees an opportunity. There is a minimal resistance—a point where these egoic goals fail, where their meanings crack under the pressure of unconscious speech. It is precisely at these points—where the subject’s smooth pursuit of ego ideals falters—that speech emerges, and the real work of analysis begins.

“We believe it is in the avowal of this speech, whose transference is its enigmatic actualization, that analysis must rediscover its center and its gravity. And let no one imagine from our earlier remarks that we conceive of this speech under some mystical mode evocative of karma.”

The heart of Lacan’s analytic ethic lies here: speech, especially the speech produced in and through transference, is where analysis finds its center. Transference is not merely an obstacle to be interpreted—it is the very form in which unconscious truth is enacted.

But Lacan also cautions: this is not some mystical notion of “fated speech” or karmic return. There’s no metaphysical determinism at play. The unconscious does not express cosmic destiny—it is structured like a language, and its repetitions, errors, and demands emerge in speech. Analysis must treat this speech seriously, not mystically.

“For what strikes us in the pathetic drama of neurosis are the absurd aspects of a bewildered symbolization, whose misunderstanding, the deeper one penetrates it, appears all the more derisory.”

Neurosis, for Lacan, is not a deep mystery but a drama of misrecognition. Its structure is pathetic in the classical sense: tragicomic, marked by a kind of absurdity—because the subject continues to misread the symbols that structure their experience.

The further one analyzes, the more this misunderstanding appears not tragic but derisory—even laughable. The neurosis is not rooted in profound trauma or unfathomable depth, but in bewildered symbolization: in errors of reading, of speech, of failed recognition. The unconscious makes sense—but only within a structure that the subject does not master.

“Adæquatio rei et intellectus: the homonymic enigma that we can draw from the genitive rei, which, without even changing its accent, can also be that of the word reus, meaning ‘the party at issue in a trial,’ particularly the accused, and metaphorically, ‘the one in debt for something,’ surprises us by ultimately providing the formula for the singular adequation we posed as a question for our intellect, and which finds its answer in the symbolic debt for which the subject is responsible as a subject of speech.”

Lacan now deconstructs the classical definition of truth: adequatio rei et intellectus—the conformity between the thing and the intellect (from Thomas Aquinas). He plays on the Latin genitive rei (of the thing), noting that it is homonymous with reus, which means the accused or debtor.

Here we see Lacan’s structural poetry: the subject of truth is not just the one who knows the thing (res), but the one who stands accused, indebted, responsible. Truth is not a matter of correct representation—it is a matter of speech, and speech always entails a symbolic debt. The subject is bound by what they have said, failed to say, or were made to say—this is what psychoanalysis uncovers.

The “adequation” between thing and intellect becomes, in Lacan’s psychoanalytic version, the reconciliation between subject and symbolic debt. The unconscious is not a hidden essence—it is the remainder of this speech-act, and the symptom is its encryption.

THE TRAINING OF FUTURE ANALYSTS

This final heading opens a new orientation: not only a theory of speech and symptom, but a call to transmission. How should analysts be trained, if what’s at stake is symbolic truth, not adaptation?

“Thus, it is to the structures of language, so evidently recognizable in the primarily discovered mechanisms of the unconscious, that we will return to resume our analysis of the modes by which speech can recover the debt it generates.”

Training future analysts must begin with the structure of language, because this is where the unconscious resides and operates. Dreams, slips, symptoms, jokes—all obey linguistic laws. Freud’s early discoveries were not about content, but about form: condensation, displacement, equivocation.

Lacan insists that the way speech repays the debt it generates—the way subjects come to own their unconscious—is by analyzing how language structures desire. Without this linguistic framework, psychoanalysis collapses into psychology.

“That the history of language and institutions, along with the resonances—attested or not in memory—of literature and the meanings implied in works of art, are necessary for an understanding of the text of our experience is a fact so massively testified by FREUD, from whom he drew his inspiration, his methods of thought, and his technical tools, that one can grasp it merely by flipping through the pages of his work.”

Lacan reaffirms Freud’s cultural, literary, and symbolic foundation. Freud was never merely a clinician. His references to Sophocles, Goethe, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical myth show that psychoanalysis is not a clinical practice divorced from culture, history, or art.

Freud read the symptom like a text—he listened to the unconscious like one reads a poem or myth. Thus, to understand the “text of our experience,” analysts must be trained in the symbolic resonance of language, institutions, law, literature, and art. This is not aestheticism—it is a recognition that the unconscious speaks in symbolic material, and the analyst must be equipped to hear it.

Lacan calls for a return to the ethic of speech and the structure of language in psychoanalysis. The current drift toward adaptation, ego reinforcement, and emotional comfort is not only a betrayal of Freud—it is a repression of the truth that analysis exists to uncover. That truth is not mystical or intuitive—it is structural, symbolic, and owed. The subject is born into a debt—of words spoken before them, laws unacknowledged, desires unrecognized—and it is through analysis, through speech, that this debt may be heard, assumed, and transformed. Only a training grounded in this symbolic logic can produce analysts worthy of that task.

“However, he did not deem it superfluous to make this a condition for any institution of psychoanalytic teaching. That this condition has been neglected, even in the selection of analysts, cannot be unrelated to the results we now observe, and it indicates that it is only by technically articulating these requirements that we can hope to meet them.”

Lacan begins this closing crescendo by returning to Freud’s own stipulations concerning the teaching of psychoanalysis. Freud did not merely discover the unconscious—he sought to ensure that its transmission be rigorous, not diluted by academic routine or therapeutic compromise. He laid down conditions—ethical, theoretical, and methodological—for how psychoanalysis should be taught and practiced.

Lacan points to a fundamental neglect of these conditions, especially in the selection and formation of analysts. This neglect, he suggests, is not incidental: it is directly responsible for the degraded state of contemporary analytic practice, where analysis drifts into object relations theory, ego psychology, and psychosocial adaptation. Only by formally articulating and structurally understanding Freud’s requirements—not merely repeating them—can analysis recover its orientation.

“It is through an initiation into the methods of the linguist, the historian, and—I will say—the mathematician that we must now prepare a new generation of practitioners and researchers to recover the sense of the Freudian experience and its driving force.”

This is one of Lacan’s clearest pedagogical pronouncements. Psychoanalytic training must include rigorous initiation into other disciplines—not clinical psychology, but linguistics, history, and mathematics. Why these?

• Linguistics provides the structure of the unconscious, which is “structured like a language.”
• History gives the symbolic coordinates of subjectivity—names, events, institutions, the temporal unfolding of law.
• Mathematics, especially logic and topology, offers the formal tools to grasp the structure of desire, repetition, and the subject itself.

Lacan’s call is for a scientifically and structurally literate psychoanalysis—not empirical or positivist, but attuned to form, relation, and structure. Through this triad, the next generation can reclaim the drive of the Freudian discovery: the symbolic order that governs desire.

“In doing so, they will also safeguard themselves against the psychosociological objectification, where the psychoanalyst, in his uncertainties, seeks the substance of what he does. Yet this approach can offer only an inadequate abstraction, in which his practice becomes mired and dissolves.”

The warning continues: without structural orientation, analysts fall into the trap of psychosociological objectification. That is, they try to define themselves by importing sociological categories, affective models, or psychological types. This leads not to clarification but to dissolution: practice gets lost in abstraction, in endless reinterpretation, in therapeutic fashions. The analyst ends up seeking their own mirror in the discipline itself, rather than returning to the subject of the unconscious.

“This reform will be an institutional undertaking, for it can only be sustained by constant communication with disciplines that would define themselves as the sciences of intersubjectivity, or perhaps under the term “conjectural sciences”—a term I suggest for those capable of recognizing the emerging order of research currently restructuring the human sciences.”

Lacan here envisions a reformation of psychoanalytic training, but not as a solitary gesture. It must be institutional—not bureaucratic, but oriented by sustained dialogue with what he calls the sciences of intersubjectivity. These are not empirical sciences, but disciplines that deal with the relation between subjects—speech, law, ethics, language.

He proposes a term: conjectural sciences. This is crucial. Psychoanalysis is not a hard science—it is a field that operates on interpretation, structure, and conjecture. It handles what cannot be observed directly, what speaks in gaps, slips, and formations. These conjectural sciences include psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, anthropology, poetics, and logic: each trying to trace the unconscious logic of human action and speech.

“But it is also an undertaking that only genuine teaching—that is, teaching constantly renewed by its inspiration—will maintain on course, for it must govern itself from within the very experience it seeks to regulate. From this experience arises the harvest of compelling facts that draw us back to more or less latent modes of “magical thinking.””

This institutional reform must be animated by real teaching—not rote instruction, but teaching inspired by the unconscious itself. The teaching must not come from outside of the experience of analysis, but from within it. The unconscious teaches through repetition, transference, the symptom—it reveals the logic of desire.

And what does this teaching produce? A “harvest of compelling facts,” yes—but facts that bewilder as much as they clarify. In confronting the unconscious, we are drawn back to what seems like magical thinking: dreams, myths, slips, compulsions. This return is not a regression to superstition, but a return of the symbolic logic that modernity disavows.

“It is not I who insist on this point, nor am I the one who uses this term. Rather, let us say: it concerns ensuring that the thoughts of power, which stalk us in every action, do not devour its measure, a measure here more tightly bound than in any other to truth.”

Lacan distances himself rhetorically, but affirms a political-ethical warning: power—as it manifests in institutions, discourse, and even the analytic setting—threatens to consume the measure of truth. The analyst must be vigilant, not against power per se, but against the subtle ways it erodes the structure of speech, the ethics of listening, the duty to the unconscious.

Truth in psychoanalysis is not free-floating—it is bound to measure, to what can be spoken and assumed in the symbolic order. It must not be sacrificed to the analyst’s authority, institutional ideology, or therapeutic success.

“It is to this measure of truth that FREUD refers when he declares the impossibility of the three great wagers, which he lists as follows: educating children, governing men, and assisting them, as is our task, in a self-recognition they can only find on the margins of themselves, since it is there that truth speaks, as discovered by FREUD.”

Lacan brings us to one of Freud’s most famous insights: the three impossible professions. Freud recognized that education, politics, and psychoanalysis all confront structural failure. None can fully succeed, because each deals with a subject divided by the unconscious.

• You cannot perfectly educate, because the child resists symbolization.
• You cannot absolutely govern, because the people are not coherent.
• And you cannot definitively analyze, because the truth lies on the margins—where the subject is not master in their own house.

This marginality of truth is psychoanalysis’s domain. Not truth as correspondence, but truth as rupture, division, lack. A truth that emerges in slips, in symptoms, in what escapes mastery.

“For truth is revealed there as: complex by essence, humble in its offices, foreign to reality, unsubmissive to sexual choice, kindred to death, and, all things considered, rather inhuman.”

Lacan offers a final litany of what truth is in analysis—not idealized, not unifying, but:

• Complex: it cannot be reduced to a proposition.
• Humble: it speaks in minor keys—symptoms, dreams, failures.
• Foreign: it does not fit within egoic reality.
• Unsubmissive: it defies gender, choice, and identity categories.
• Kindred to death: it touches the limit of being.
• Inhuman: it belongs to the Other, not to the self.

Truth is not an image of wholeness—it is a cut, a lack, a trace of the Real.

“DIANA perhaps… ACTAEON, too guilty in pursuing the goddess, prey to the shadow you become, let the pack run without hastening your step; DIANA will recognize the hounds by their worth…”

Lacan closes with a mythic evocation. The analyst is Actaeon—the hunter who gazes upon the forbidden figure of Diana (Truth) and is torn apart by his own hounds. It is a final metaphor for the analytic subject: driven by desire for truth, punished for looking too directly.

But there is hope. “Let the pack run without hastening your step.” Do not rush, do not flee, do not dominate. Let the work of speech unfold. The goddess—truth, the Real—will recognize the hounds by their worth.

This is the ethic of analysis: not mastery, but fidelity. The analyst holds the space where truth may speak—not to resolve, but to recognize what was already there.