Conquest of the Name

The "conquest of the name" designates the achievement that marks the successful termination of analysis: the analysand's assumption of a singular, self-founded symbolic identity through the active separation from the identificatory names that had previously anchored — and alienated — the subject. These alienating names include the Name-of-the-Father (the paternal patronymic that inscribed the subject into the symbolic order) and the name of the analyst (onto whom the subject's transference has been projected). The "conquest" is not an acquisition of something new but a re-knotting of the signifying chain in which the subject ceases to be named by the Other and instead comes to bear a name that has "meaning and action on the person" — a formulation that emphasizes the performative, operative dimension of the proper name as signifier rather than its merely referential or designating function.

Structurally, the conquest of the name is the positive face of what Lacanian theory calls the liquidation of the transference. Transference, as the re-actualization of the subject's fundamental fantasy in the analytic relation, must dissolve for the subject to cease projecting the Other's desire onto the analyst. This liquidation is the structural hinge: on one side lies alienated subjectivity (the subject constituted through the Other's names, the paternal metaphor, the signifying chain inherited wholesale), and on the other lies a singular autonomous subjectivity in which the subject undergoes, as it were, a second symbolic baptism. Literature — operating through metaphor (condensation, substitution) and metonymy (the sliding of desire from signifier to signifier) — serves as a magnified analogue of this process, in that the literary proper name condenses a world of meaning through the same operations by which the subject's "own" name must be conquered.

The concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-12 and jacques-lacan-seminar-12-1 (p. 185 in both), situating it squarely within Seminar XII's sustained meditation on the subject's identity and the end of analysis. It functions as a concrete, clinical specification of several canonical concepts simultaneously. It is an extension of Separation: where separation names the structural operation by which the subject constitutes itself through the gap in the Other's desire, the conquest of the name names the terminal achievement of that operation — the point at which separation is not merely structural but existentially accomplished, producing a proper name the subject can inhabit without alienation. It is equally a specification of Name-of-the-Father: the paternal name is what had to be internalized to enter the symbolic order, but the conquest of the name marks the moment when the subject is no longer simply the bearer of that name as an external imposition but has refounded its symbolic identity from a singular position.

The concept also triangulates with Identity, Metaphor, and Metonymy. Identity in the Lacanian corpus is never self-coincident but constituted through difference and symbolic operation; the conquest of the name is precisely the moment when identity ceases to be a "mistaken identity" (imposed by the Other) and becomes a second-order symbolic achievement. The literary analogy in the passage invokes Metaphor (substitution, the creative spark between two signifiers) and Metonymy (the sliding of desire) as the rhetorical-structural mechanisms through which any proper name accumulates singular meaning — mechanisms that the analysand must traverse and, in some sense, master. The concept thus lives at the intersection of the clinical theory of the end of analysis and the Lacanian theory of the signifier, positioning the termination of transference as a fully symbolic — not merely relational or affective — accomplishment.

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.185)

In that way, to bear a name has a meaning and an action on the person and one could perhaps speak about the conquest of the name.

The phrase "meaning and action on the person" is theoretically loaded because it frames the proper name not as a passive label but as a performative signifier — one that constitutes rather than merely denotes its bearer — while "conquest" introduces the dimension of struggle and agency, marking the passage from a name that acts upon the subject (alienation) to a name the subject actively assumes (separation achieved).