Animal Model of Sexuality

The "Animal Model of Sexuality" names the implicit but foundational assumption that human sexual difference and sexual relations can be adequately explained — or at least modelled — by recourse to animal copulation. In Lacan's argument in Seminar XIX (jacques-lacan-seminar-19a), this model functions as an ideological default: the image of two sexes coupling in nature seems to supply a sufficient ground for what "a relationship between the sexes" means. The model is, in other words, the pre-theoretical residue that survives inside even sophisticated accounts of sexuality, quietly supplying the idea that there is a natural complementarity between "male" and "female" — that they fit together, that their difference is binary and symmetrical, and that their encounter constitutes a relation.

Lacan's theoretical move is to expose and void this model. Once language enters — once the speaking being (parlêtre) is constituted — the biological-imaginary pair is structurally replaced by the Symbolic pair "Man / Woman," whose universality is an artefact of language, not of nature. The "second sex" (the Other as heteros) is not the empirical female but the very place of the Other that language opens and simultaneously empties of being. The consequence is the formula "there is no sexual relationship": what looked like a natural complementarity grounded in animal copulation turns out to be a topological-linguistic impossibility. The Animal Model is therefore not merely wrong — it is the illusion that language itself must displace in order to produce the subject of sexuality.

Within jacques-lacan-seminar-19a, the Animal Model of Sexuality functions as a foil — the naive realist position that Lacan systematically dismantles on his way to the formulae of sexuation and the thesis of the non-rapport. It directly cross-references several canonical concepts. Language is the primary lever: as the canonical definition establishes, language "introduces the dimension of being for the subject and at the same time robs him of it," and it is precisely this privative function that voids the animal model's pretension to naturalness. What was copulation in the animal register becomes, under language, an impossible relation between two linguistic universals. Sexuation extends this: the formulae of the "not-all" and the absence of a Woman-signifier (from Feminine Sexuality) are unintelligible if sexuality is grounded in biological complementarity — the entire apparatus of the pas-toute presupposes that the animal model has been abandoned.

The concept also bears on the Imaginary: the "animal image of copulation" is precisely an imaginary figure — a specular, dyadic, symmetrical picture of two bodies that fit. The canonical definition of the Imaginary as the register of specular images, narcissistic dyads, and méconnaissance explains why the animal model is seductive: it flatters the imaginary demand for wholeness and complementarity. Fantasy is the structure that steps in where the animal model fails — it is the constructed fiction that covers the void left by the non-existent sexual rapport, and it is only necessary because the animal model cannot do the work assigned to it. Finally, the Borromean Knot provides the alternative topology: what the animal model presents as a natural binary is re-written as an irreducible triadic (RSI) structure, where no two elements suffice and the "relation" is always mediated by a third term that language itself installs.

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the PsychoanalystJacques Lacan · 1971 (p.76)

what we refer to, is a supposedly animal model. There is then a relationship between the sexes and the animal image of copulation, which seems to be for us a sufficient model of what is involved in a relationship

The phrase "supposedly animal model" is theoretically loaded because the qualifier "supposedly" signals Lacan's ironic bracketing — it marks the animal model not as a fact but as an assumption the speaking being uncritically imports. The conjunction of "animal image of copulation" with "sufficient model" then identifies the precise ideological operation under critique: the imaginary picture of two bodies coupling is taken to settle, in advance and without further inquiry, what a "relationship" is — the very claim Lacan's formulae of sexuation are designed to refute.