The Four

Fundamental
Concepts of
Psychoanalysis

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the 1978 English-language translation of a

seminar held by Jacques Lacan. The original (French: Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse) was published in Paris by Le Seuil in 1973. The Seminar was
held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris between January and June 1964 and is the
eleventh in the series of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. The text was published by Jacques-
Alain Miller.

Background
In January 1963, Serge Leclaire succeeded Lacan as president of the S.F.P. (Societé Francaise
de Psychanalyse). In May, envoys from the I.P.A (International Psychoanalytic Association)
visited Paris and meet with Leclaire. Not only
did they express doubts about Lacan's
attitude towards Freud, but they also claimed The Four
that Lacan manipulates transference through
the short session: he must be excluded from
the training courses. At the Congress of
Fundamental
Stockholm, in July, the I.P.A. votes an
ultimatum: within three months Lacan's name Concepts of
has to be crossed off the list of didacticians.
Two weeks before the expiration of the
deadline fixed by the I.P.A. (October 31), a Psychoanalysis
motion was called for Lacan's name to be
removed from the list of training analysts. On
November 19 a general meeting had to make
a final decision on I.P.A.'s conditions regarding
Lacan. Lacan then wrote a letter to Leclaire
announcing he would not attend the meeting
because he could foresee the disavowal.
Thus, on November 19, the members' majority
takes the position in favor of the ban. As a
result, Lacan no longer is one of the
didacticians. The next day, his seminar on
"The Names-of-the-Father" was to start at
Sainte-Anne: he announced its end.
Fragments of it would be published in Cover of the first
L'excommunication. [1] Lacan then founded
L'École Française de Psychanalyse that would edition
become L'École Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.): "I
hereby found the École Française de
Psychanalyse, by myself, as alone as I have Editor Jacques-
ever been in my relation to the psychoanalytic
cause."[2] Alain
In early 1964, with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Miller
Fernand Braudel's support, he was appointed
lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes
Etudes. He begins his new seminar on "The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Author Jacques
Psychoanalysis" on January 15 in the
Dussane room at the École Normale Lacan
Supérieure.

Original title Les qua

Contents concept
fondam
Lacan talks about the censorship of his
teachings and his excommunication from de la
official psychoanalytical circles. He wants to
train analysts and, at the same time, address psychan
the non-analyst by raising the following
questions: Is psychoanalysis a science? If so,
under what conditions? If it is – the "science Translator Alan
of the unconscious" or a "conjectural science
of the subject" – what can it teach us about Sheridan
science?

Lacan sought in his eleventh Seminar to cover Illustrator Jay J.

what he called "the major Freudian concepts –
I have isolated four that seem to come within Smith
this category...the first two, the Unconscious
and Repetition. The Transference – I hope to
Cover artist François
approach it next time -...and lastly, the Drive."
Praxis thus, which "places the subject in a
position of dealing with the real through the
Leclaire
symbolic," produces concepts, of which four
are offered here: the Unconscious, Repetition,
(photo)
Transference and the Drive.

The 1973 title, Les quatre concepts

Country France
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, has often
been contested in favor of the 1964's: Les
fondements de la psychanalyse, which implies
neither that it is a matter of concepts, nor that Language French
there are only four of them. Lacan is
suspicious of the rapport between
psychoanalysis, religion and science. Did they
Series Seminars
not have a founding father and quasi-secret
texts? Freud was "legitimately the subject
of
presumed to know," at least as to the
unconscious: "He was not only the subject
Jacques
who was presumed to know, he knew." "He
gave us this knowledge in terms that may be
Lacan
said to be indestructible." "No progress has
been made that has not deviated whenever Subject Psychoanaly
one of the terms has been neglected around
which Freud ordered the ways that he traced
and the paths of the unconscious." This Publisher Éditions
declaration of allegiance contrasts with the
study of Freud's dream about the dead son du Seuil
screaming "Father, can't you see I'm burning?"
The main problem remains that of
Publication 1973
transference: the Name-of-the-Father is a
foundation, but the legacy of the Father is sin, date
and the original sin of psychoanalysis is
Freud's desire that was not analyzed. In "The
[3]
Published in 1978
Freudian thing", Lacan presents the Name-
of-the-Father as a treasure to be found, English
provided it implies self-immolation as a
sacrificial victim to truth.
Media type Print
Of the four concepts mentioned, three were
developed between 1953 and 1963. As to (Hardcov
drives, whose importance has increased since
the study of objet a in the 1963 Seminar and
L'angoisse, Lacan considers them as different
from biological needs in that they can never Paperbac
be satisfied. The purpose of the drive is not to
reach a goal (a final destination) but to follow
its aim (the way itself), which is to circle round Pages 290
the object. The real source of jouissance is the
repetitive movement of this closed circuit.
Freud defined Trieb as a montage of four
ISBN 0-393-
discontinuous elements: "Drive is not thrust
(Drang); in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes"[4]
00079-6
Freud distinguishes four terms in the drive:
Drang, thrust; Quelle, the source; Objekt, the OCLC 8106863
object; Ziel, the aim. Such a list may seem
quite natural; my purpose is to prove that the (https://
text was written to show that it is not as
natural as that."[5] The drive is a thoroughly www.wor
cultural and symbolic construct. Lacan
integrates the aforementioned elements into
ldcat.or
the drive's circuit, which originates in an
erogenous zone, circles the object and returns
g/oclc/8
to the erogenous zone. This circuit is
structured by the three grammatical voices:
106863)
1. the active (to
Preceded by Seminar
see) X
2. the reflexive (to Followed by Seminar
see oneself) XII
3. the passive (to
make oneself be seen).
The first two are autoerotic; only in the passive voice a new subject appears, "this subject, the
other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to show its circular course." The drive is
always active, which is why he writes the third instance as "to make oneself be seen" instead of
"to be seen."

Lacan rejects the notion that partial drives can attain any complete organization since the
primacy of the genital zone is always precarious. The drives are partial, not in the sense that they
are a part of a whole (a genital drive), but in that they only represent sexuality partially: they
convey the dimension of jouissance. "The reality of the unconscious is sexual reality – an
untenable truth," much as it cannot be separated from death. Objet petit a is something from
which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as
symbol of the lack, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must be an object
that is separable and that has some rapport to the lack. At the oral level, it is the nothing; at the
anal level, it is the locus of the metaphor – one object for another, give the feces in place of the
phallus – the anal drive is the domain of the gift; at the scopic level, we are no longer at the level
of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other; it is the same at the level of the invocatory
drive, which is the closest to the experience of the unconscious."[6] The first two relate to
demand, the second pair to desire. Under the form of objet a, Lacan groups all the partial drives
linked to part objects: the breast, feces, the penis, and he adds the gaze and the voice. Here, he
asserts the split between the eye and the gaze when he analyzes Holbein's painting The
Ambassadors as a "trap for the gaze" (piège à regards), but also as a dompte-regard (the gaze is
tamed by an object) and a trompe-l'oeil. In the foreground, a floating object, a phallic ghost
object gives presence to the – Φ of castration. This object is the heart of the organization of
desire through the framework of the drives.

In "La Lettre volée", The Purloined Letter,[7] Lacan states that "the unconscious is the discourse of
the Other," meaning that "one should see in the unconscious the effects of speech on the
subject." The unconscious is the effect of the signifier on the subject – the signifier is what gets
repressed and what returns in the formations of the unconscious. How then is it possible to
reconcile desire linked to the signifier and to the Other with the libido, now an organ under the
shape of the "lamella," the placenta, the part of the body from which the subject must separate in
order to exist? A new conception of repetition comes into play, whose functioning stems from
two forces: automatism on the side of the signifier and the missed yet desired encounter on the
side of the drive, where objet a refers to the "impossible" Real (that as such cannot be
assimilated). If transference is the enactment (la mise en acte) of the reality of the unconscious
– what Lacan's deconstruction of the drive wants to bring to light – if desire is the nodal point
where the motion of the unconscious, an untenable sexual reality, is also at work, what is to be
done? The analyst's role is to allow the drive "to be made present in the reality of the
unconscious": he must fall from the idealized position so as to become the upholder of objet a,
the separating object.

The appearance during its course of what he called 'the newly published, posthumous work of
my friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible" led Lacan however – "free as I am to
pursue...the way that seems best to me" – into a long detour midway upon "the eye and the gaze
– this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field."[8]

The French edition contained Lacan's 1965 "Report" on the Seminar" and a "Postface" penned in
1973 on the occasion of the French publication. Both were omitted from the 1977 English-
language translation in favour of a specially written "Preface". The original "Report" and
"Postface" can be consulted in English.

Editions

Seminar on The Purloined Letter, Écrits

(http://www.lacan.com/purloined.htm) ,
transl. by Jeffrey Mehlman, "French
Freud" in Yale French Studies 48, 1972.

See also

Seminars of Jacques Lacan

Gaze
 Psychoanalytic theory

References

1. David Macey Lacan in Contexts (1988)

2. Jacques Lacan, Founding Act (1964), New
Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, tranls.
Russell Grigg
3. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, New
York: W.W. Norton (1977)
4. Sigmund Freud, "On the History of the Post
Psychoanalytic Movement", "Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works", S.E. XIV
5. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis
6. Jacques Lacan, ibid
 7. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, New
York: W.W. Norton (1977)
8. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts

Further reading

Richard Feldstein, Maire Jaanus, Bruce

Fink (eds.), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's
Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis: The Paris Seminars in
English, New York, State University of
New York Press, 1994.
ISBN 0791421481.
Lacan, Jacques "Report on the 1964
Seminar" Hurly-Burly, 5, 2011.
 Lacan, Jacques "Postface to Seminar
XI". Hurly-Burly, 7, 2012.

External links

Practice

École de la Cause freudienne (http://ww

w.causefreudienne.net/)
World Association of Psychoanalysis (ht
tp://www.wapol.org/)
CFAR – The Centre for Freudian Analysis
and Research. London-based Lacanian
psychoanalytic training agency (http://w
ww.cfar.org.uk/)
Homepage of the Lacanian School of
Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco
Society for Lacanian Studies (http://ww
w.lacan.org/)
The London Society of the New
Lacanian School. Site includes online
library of clinical & theoretical texts (htt
p://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk/)
The Freudian School of Melbourne,
School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis –
Clinical and theoretical teaching and
training of psychoanalysts (https://web.
archive.org/web/20131213192019/htt
p://www.fsom.org.au/Training.htm)
Theory
Lacan Dot Com (http://www.lacan.com/l
acan1.htm)
Links about Jacques Lacan at
Lacan.com (http://www.lacan.com/perf
ume/frame.htm)
"How to Read Lacan" by Slavoj Zizek (htt
p://www.lacan.com/essays) – full
version
Jacques Lacan at The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.
iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm)
LacanOnline.com (http://www.lacanonli
ne.com/index/category/lacan/)
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