Canonical general 223 occurrences

Ego Psychology

ELI5

Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis, popular in America, that said therapy should make the patient's ego stronger and better adapted to reality — like fixing a malfunctioning part of a machine. Lacan thought this completely missed Freud's real discovery: that there is an unconscious that speaks through us, structured like language, and no amount of ego-strengthening can reach it.

Definition

Ego Psychology, as treated throughout the Lacanian corpus, designates the post-Freudian theoretical and clinical movement—associated principally with the "American troika" of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein, and with Anna Freud's defense analysis—that recentered psychoanalysis on the ego as an autonomous, synthesizing, conflict-free agency capable of adaptive integration with social reality. In Lacanian discourse, the term functions primarily as a polemical foil: ego psychology is diagnosed as a systematic betrayal of Freud's Copernican decentering of the subject, substituting a naturalistic, organicist, and adaptive conception of psychic life for Freud's radical discovery of the unconscious as structured like a language. By foregrounding the ego's "autonomous" and "conflict-free" sphere (Hartmann), prioritizing defense analysis (Anna Freud), and making the goal of treatment the "strengthening" of a weak ego through identification with the analyst's own, ego psychology is charged with reducing psychoanalysis to an ideological instrument of social conformity aligned with American capitalist norms—a transformation Lacan frequently figures as medicine, dentistry, or a "trade school" for technique.

Theoretically, Lacan identifies ego psychology's core error in its misreading of Freud's second topography (ego/id/superego) as a developmental schema mapping ego-maturation onto instinctual progression, while eclipsing the topographical model's emphasis on the unconscious as such. The notorious mistranslation of "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Where id was, there ego shall be"—prescribing ego-over-id mastery—is treated as the symptomatic condensation of this error. Against this, Lacan insists that the "I" (Ich) in Freud's formula names the subject of the signifier, the locus of the entire network of signifiers, not the adaptive ego. Ego psychology also stands accused of collapsing the signifier/signified distinction by privileging imaginary, affective, and interpersonal dimensions over the symbolic structure of the unconscious; of treating analysis as a dyadic ego-to-ego relation rather than a quadripartite structure irreducibly involving the Other; and of reproducing the analysand's alienation rather than dissolving it, insofar as defense analysis identifies with the analyst's ego as the standard of "mental health."

Evolution

In the early seminars of the "return to Freud" period (Seminars I and II, 1953–1955), Lacan establishes his critique of ego psychology as a central polemical axis. Seminar I opens with a direct attack on the "American troika" — Hartmann, Loewenstein, and Kris — as representing "a very significant failure" that collapses Freud's unprecedented theory of the ego back into general psychology (jacques-lacan-seminar-1, p. 29). Seminar II develops this as a historical-metapsychological argument: Freud's 1920 metapsychological turn (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) was meant to maintain the decentering of the subject, but ego psychology read the return of the ego in the second topography as a restoration of the "nice little ego" — a regression to pre-analytical psychology (jacques-lacan-seminar-2, p. 23). The death drive, which resists any homeostatic reduction, is the concept ego psychology most conspicuously abandons, as Hartmann's conflation of the pleasure, constancy, and Nirvana principles demonstrates (jacques-lacan-seminar-2, p. 75).

In the period of the Écrits and contemporaneous seminars (1955–1958), Lacan's critique becomes explicitly institutional and ideological. "The Freudian Thing" (presented 1955) portrays ego psychology as an "American immigrant psychology" shaped by the demands of capitalist adaptation, whose adherents "got rich in post-war America" by popularizing theories that invert the true truths of Freudianism (derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, pp. 7–8). The Kris case is repeatedly invoked as the clinical paradigm of ego-psychological failure: by intervening at the level of "the surface" (reality-oriented defense analysis), Kris produces acting-out rather than analytic progress (derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, p. 222; jacques-lacan-seminar-14-1, p. 151). "The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956" extends the critique to analytic institutions: IPA-affiliated institutes, by reducing training to manualized technique (compared to "dental schools"), spread psychoanalysis "like a cancer" according to the ignorance of Loewenstein et al. (derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, p. 96).

In the seminars of the objet a period (Seminars X–XV, early 1960s), the critique persists but is inflected differently: ego psychology's developmental adaptation model is now measured against the structure of objet petit a and jouissance. Erik Erikson's "happy swine" developmental ideal (Seminar XIV/XVII), Hartmann's autonomous ego functions and "sexualisation" problem (Seminar XIV), and Fenichel's "genital character" ideal (Seminar XV) are each treated as paradigmatic distortions. The transference concept is similarly contested: Szasz's ego-psychological account — which analyses transference through "the healthy part of the ego" — is treated as a theoretical blind alley that places the analyst beyond reality-testing (Seminars XI, pp. 145–147). The formula "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" receives its most sustained re-reading in this period, with Lacan arguing against "some execrable translation" (Seminar XI, p. 59) that renders Ich as the adaptive ego rather than the subject of the signifier.

In the secondary and commentator literature (Fink, McGowan, Copjec, Boothby), ego psychology serves as a stable negative reference that clarifies Lacanian positions by contrast. Fink explicitly opposes ego psychology's "strengthening" model to Lacan's traversal of fantasy (the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink, p. 81). McGowan diagnoses ego psychology's therapeutic goal as self-defeating because the ego "emerges through rivalry and never transcends it" (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p. 314). Copjec situates Lacan's critique within a broader political argument: both ego psychology and the "American way of life" share a belief in a consistent Other capable of harmonizing all differences (radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso, p. 151). Žižek classifies ego psychology as the "reactive" response to the Freud-Event, normalizing and re-integrating its disruptive truth (slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v).

Key formulations

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on TechniqueJacques Lacan · 1953 (p.29)

The triumvirate who work in New York, Hartmann, Loewenstein and Kris, in its current attempt to elaborate a psychology of the ego... I believe that what has happened there is a very significant failure

This is Lacan's earliest direct naming of the ego-psychology triumvirate in the Seminars, establishing the polemical target and the register of the critique: ego psychology represents a failure to maintain Freud's decentering of the subject.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.59)

This does not mean, as some execrable translation would have it, Le moi doit dIloger le ça (the ego must dislodge the id). See how Freud—and in a formula worthy in resonance of the pre-Socratics—is translated in French. It is not a question of the ego in this soil Ich werden; the fact is that throughout Freud's work—one must, of course, recognize its proper place—the Ich is the complete, total locus of the network of signifiers, that is to say, the subject

This passage is the pivot of Lacan's entire counter-reading of ego psychology: the mistranslation of 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' as ego-over-id mastery is diagnosed as the symptomatic condensation of the whole ego-psychological misreading of Freud.

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.11)

Lacan claims that post-Freudian ego psychology creates for itself intractable, insoluble problems both metapsychological and clinical by too sharply distinguishing between, on the one hand, a surface of defense mechanisms mobilized by a conscious ego and, on the other hand, a depth of unconscious memories and energies.

Summarizes the core theoretical failure of ego psychology's surface/depth model and its origin in Anna Freud's defense analysis, making explicit why the clinical consequences are 'intractable.'

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1954 (p.79)

People tell us about the autonomous ego, about the sane part of the ego, about the ego which must be strengthened... You see these two egos, arm in arm, the analyst's ego and that of the subject, in fact subordinated to the other in this so-called alliance. Nothing in experience gives us the faintest hint of it, since precisely the contrary takes place - it is at the level of the ego that all the resistances occur.

A direct clinical demolition of the therapeutic alliance model: Lacan shows it is empirically self-refuting, since resistances arise precisely at the level of the ego the analyst is trying to make his ally.

Seminar VIII · TransferenceJacques Lacan · 1960 (p.348)

Ich-Psychologie [ego psychology], which has come to the fore in analytic theory, has for over a decade now been constituting a barrier to and creating inertia for any recommencing of psychoanalytic efficacy.

The most institutionally focused formulation: ego psychology is not merely a theoretical error but an organizational mass-formation that blocks psychoanalytic efficacy — framing the critique as both theoretical and political.

Cited examples

The Ernst Kris case ('fresh brains'): Kris intervenes at the level of surface/reality (reassuring his patient that his plagiarism anxieties are unfounded), producing acting-out (the patient immediately goes to eat 'fresh brains' at a restaurant) rather than analytic progress. (case_study)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.222). The Kris case is the paradigmatic clinical illustration of ego-psychological failure: by operating at the 'surface' field of reality-appreciation rather than at the level of the signifier and the Other, the analyst provokes acting-out. Lacan reads this as demonstrating that ego-psychological surface interpretation systematically misses the structural truth of the patient's desire.

Anna Freud's case of 'Dick' (discussed via Melanie Klein): Klein's radically interpretive approach to a severely inhibited child is contrasted with Anna Freud's 'intellectualist' method, which requires a strong enough ego to serve as a starting point for re-education. (case_study)

Cited by Seminar I · Freud's Papers on TechniqueJacques Lacan · 1953 (p.73). The contrast between Klein and Anna Freud (the 'Merovingian rivalries') is used to show that the ego-psychological approach — requiring 'strong ego' and 'weak ego' categories and a 'preliminary re-education' — is closer to pedagogy than to analysis, whereas Klein's structural interpretation of Dick opens the symbolic where ego psychology's method would be stuck.

Hartmann's classic work Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, whose therapeutic aim is a 'better functioning synthesis and relation to the environment.' (literature)

Cited by Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of PsychoanalysisTodd McGowan · 2013 (p.140). McGowan uses Hartmann's title and explicit program to demonstrate that ego psychology is the primary vehicle through which the leftist critique of psychoanalysis as adaptive normalization is grounded: the very title announces adaptation as the goal, making ego psychology complicit in the perpetuation of oppressive social norms.

The comparison of American psychoanalytic institutes to 'dental schools' and analysts to 'dentists', derived from Lacan's Seminar I and elaborated in 'The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956.' (social_theory)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.127). The dental school metaphor satirizes the IPA's reduction of psychoanalytic training to manualized, standardized technique disconnected from the humanities — the institutional expression of ego psychology's reduction of psychoanalysis to an adaptive medical specialty.

The parable of the talking lectern in 'The Freudian Thing': Lacan uses a prosopopoeia of a speaking desk to demonstrate that ego psychology, by treating the ego as both an autonomous subject and an operational function, cannot maintain any distinction between this ego and an inert piece of furniture. (other)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.34). The lectern allegory is the most extended rhetorical demolition of the ego-psychological notion of the 'autonomous ego': if the ego is both noun-like (a thing) and verb-like (a function), Lacan shows that noun defeats verb, leaving an inert object indistinguishable from furniture — satirizing the claim that this objectified entity can serve as a therapeutic ideal.

Erik Erikson's article on the dream of Irma's injection, in which Erikson 'enumerates in stages, how there ought to be edified the security of the little chap... to give us a perfectly secure GI.' (literature)

Cited by Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1967 (p.53). Lacan uses Erikson's developmental ego-psychological reading of Freud's paradigmatic dream to illustrate how ego psychology converts psychoanalytic insight into an ideology of adaptive security ('becoming a happy swine'), locating it at the 'Imaginary/Knowledge' pole of the schema and contrasting it with the structural account of the objet a.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether ego psychology represents a theoretically motivated deviation or primarily an ideological-institutional one

McGowan (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan): ego psychology is self-defeating on purely structural grounds — since the ego emerges through imaginary rivalry, strengthening it produces more rivalry, not less. The critique is essentially immanent and theoretical. — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p. 314
Lacan (derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, 'The Freudian Thing' context): ego psychology is primarily a social-historical distortion produced by the Americanization of immigrant analysts who custom-tailored Freudianism to capitalist ideology, profiting 'both libidinally and financially.' The critique foregrounds ideological determination over structural argument. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, p. 8

This tension marks whether the decisive critique of ego psychology is internal/structural (it produces what it aims to cure) or external/ideological (it is capitalism's distortion of Freud).

Whether Hartmann's adaptation concept is simply adaptive conformism or a more nuanced negotiation between conformity and modification of social norms

Lacan and McGowan as primary critics: ego psychology's adaptation goal means producing uncritical social conformity — Hartmann sees the aim of analytic therapy as 'to help men achieve a better functioning synthesis and relation to the environment,' which is tantamount to ideological normalization (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p. 140). — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p. 140
McGowan's endnote (partially rehabilitating Hartmann): Hartmann 'defines adaptation as the negotiation between conformity to social norms and the attempt to modify these norms, not as pure capitulation on the part of the subject,' complicating the standard Lacanian critique. — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p. 323

McGowan simultaneously presents the standard Lacanian critique of Hartmann and then partially qualifies it in an endnote, creating an internal tension in the secondary literature about the fairness of Lacan's reading.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: Ego psychology represents a fundamental betrayal of Freud's discovery: by positing an autonomous, conflict-free ego sphere and making adaptation to social reality the telos of treatment, it forecloses access to the unconscious as structured by the signifier and substitutes imaginary identification with the analyst for genuine analytic work. The ego is not an autonomous agent but a heteronomous, imaginary construct constituted through méconnaissance. The formula 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' does not prescribe ego-over-id mastery but names the ethical task of the subject's encounter with the locus of the signifier.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein) holds that effective psychoanalytic treatment requires strengthening the ego's synthetic and adaptive functions. A 'conflict-free' autonomous sphere of ego functioning—developed through neutralization of libidinal and aggressive energy—enables the subject to engage with reality without being overwhelmed by id-derived conflicts. Therapeutic progress is measured by increased ego autonomy, reality-testing capacity, and adaptive functioning. Identification with the analyst's healthy ego is a legitimate therapeutic mechanism.

Fault line: The central disagreement is constitutive: Lacan holds that the ego is the primary site of alienation and resistance, not a therapeutic ally; ego psychology holds that a sufficiently strengthened ego is the precondition and goal of therapeutic success. For Lacan, 'what neurotics suffer from is not weak but excessively strong egos'; for ego psychology, neurosis indexes a deficit of ego strength.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: The Lacanian subject is constitutively barred, split by language, with no pre-given authentic core waiting to be liberated or actualized. Desire is not the expression of an underlying true self but is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, always already mediated by the Other. The goal of analysis is not self-realization but the traversing of fantasy and assuming one's relation to the objet a — an irreducibly incomplete process, not a telos of plenitude.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) posits a natural tendency toward growth, self-actualization, and the expression of an authentic organismic self. Therapeutic conditions of unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence allow the client to move from incongruent to congruent self-experience. Mental health is the achievement of organismic experiencing, openness to experience, and self-determination — a fullness of being, not a constitutive lack.

Fault line: The deepest disagreement is ontological: humanistic self-actualization presupposes an adaptive plenitude as the subject's natural endpoint, while Lacanian theory posits constitutive lack (manque-à-être) as the subject's irreducible condition. Where humanistic therapy works toward healing a gap between actual and ideal self, Lacan holds that the gap is structural and that any attempt to close it is a symptom of neurosis, not its cure.

vs Cbt

Lacanian: CBT's focus on conscious cognitions, behavioral reinforcement, and measurable symptom reduction exemplifies what Lacan calls the reduction of psychoanalysis to 'general psychology' — a mapping of the subject against reality rather than against the signifier. By treating symptoms as dysfunctional beliefs or behaviors to be corrected, CBT bypasses the symptom's status as a formation of the unconscious, structured like a language, and as the subject's most intimate mode of enjoying. The goal of symptom elimination misses the sinthome as the subject's fundamental support.

Cbt: CBT holds that psychological distress arises from maladaptive cognitive schemas, automatic thoughts, and behavioral patterns that can be identified, challenged, and modified through structured, time-limited, empirically validated techniques. The therapeutic relationship is collaborative and educational; the goal is symptom reduction and the acquisition of coping skills enabling more adaptive functioning. The unconscious, as conceived by psychoanalysis, plays no role in the therapeutic mechanism.

Fault line: The disagreement turns on the status of the symptom: for CBT the symptom is a dysfunction to be eliminated through conscious re-learning; for Lacan it is a signifying formation whose meaning must be deciphered and whose enjoyment must be reckoned with, such that the subject is implicated in its own symptom rather than freed from it by technique.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (220)

#01

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES**

Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliography/further reading section listing secondary works on ego psychology, object relations, linguistics, feminism, post-structuralism, and queer/gay-lesbian studies; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.

This text represents the beginning of a new post-Freudian movement in psychoanalysis that focuses on the ego, especially of the child, as the most formative and fundamental part of a human being
#02

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Introduction to ‘Reading the Écrits’: La trahison de l’écriture](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-002)

Theoretical move: The Écrits is theorized not as a conventional book but as a labyrinthine, desire-engendering psychoanalytic tool whose deliberate obscurity, resistance to writing, and symptomatic relation to the seminars position it as a transference-inducing object rather than a vehicle of rational comprehension.

An extended manifesto against the ossified norms of the ego psychologists and the International Psychoanalytic Association, indeed, a diatribe against a degraded form of psychoanalysis?
#03

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.7

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Context

Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes "The Freudian Thing" as a polemical intervention in which Lacan frames his "return to Freud" against the distortions of Ego Psychology and the IPA, positioning the unconscious as the true addressee and theoretical stake of his work.

Lacan (1987) pointedly contrasts his teaching as per le Séminaire with the 'harmful' American embrace of the presumably 'autonomous ego' and corresponding 'objectification' of the subject qua subject of the unconscious.
#04

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Situation in time and place of this exercise

Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is theorized as a repetition-with-difference (après-coup) that counters the ego-psychological Americanization of psychoanalysis, which is diagnosed as a symptomatic repression of the unconscious behind an adaptive, autonomous ego and a medicalized analyst-as-knower structure that inverts the true knowledge-relation of the clinic.

Lacan considers the classical ego psychology of the mid-twentieth century forged by the troika of Heinz Hartmann… Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Lowenstein… to be an American immigrant psychology.
#05

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The adversary

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.

Lacan claims that post-Freudian ego psychology creates for itself intractable, insoluble problems both metapsychological and clinical by too sharply distinguishing between, on the one hand, a surface of defense mechanisms mobilized by a conscious ego and, on the other hand, a depth of unconscious memories and energies.
#06

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.18

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Parade

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

This parade of suspects and their accusers displays the perspectives of various non-Lacanian strains of post-Freudian analysis, namely, currents of ego psychology and object-relations theory.
#07

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.26

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing’s order

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "thing's order" names the symbolic order as a self-relating system of signifiers—structurally homologous to Hegelian dialectics—that constitutes human subjectivity, the mirror stage, and the symptom, while ego psychology's failure to grasp the unconscious is recast as foreclosure (psychotic repudiation) rather than repression.

Lacan's claim that 'its ethics are not individualistic' (346, 7) is another jab at ego psychology, with its adaptation to America via embracing America's consumer-capitalist ideologies.
#08

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.27

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing’s order

Theoretical move: By retranslating Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' against the ego-psychological rendering, Lacan argues that the telos of analysis is not ego-over-id domination but the analysand's de-alienating subjectification toward the unconscious subject ($), grounding his ethics of psychoanalysis and his critique of misreadings of Freud that degrade the primacy of speech and signifiers in clinical practice.

these post/pseudo-Freudians take Freud as describing the telos of a properly conducted and completed analysis to be the establishment in the patient of the dominance of the ego over the id.
#09

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.30

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Resistance to the resisters

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.

The 'analysis of defenses' comes to be integral to Lacan's ego-psychological nemeses.
#10

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.34

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Interlude

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology, prosecuted through a prosopopoeia of a talking lectern, demonstrates that the ego-psychological ego—conceived as an autonomous, synthetic function—collapses into an inert object indistinguishable from a piece of furniture, and that it is the Symbolic (speech/parole) alone, not ego-level consciousness or perception, that truly distinguishes the analysand's psyche from inanimate things.

Lacan proceeds now to embellish upon these criticisms (349, 6). He also mocks one of the core tenets of ego psychology—'The ego is a function, a synthesis of functions, a function of synthesis. It is autonomous! That's a good one!'
#11

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.38

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The other’s discourse

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology is mobilized to demonstrate that the ego is structurally an alienating sedimentation of the other's discourse and a device of resistance against the unconscious, such that the proper analytic use of the ego is as a *via negativa* — a negative index pointing toward the speaking subject of the unconscious rather than a therapeutic ideal to be strengthened.

Anglo-American ego psychologists reduce analysis to an exercise in condescending ideological indoctrination aiming to produce nothing more or less than uncritical social conformity within the world of twentieth-century Western capitalism
#12

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.44

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Imaginary passion

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's mirror stage grounds the ego in a constitutive double alienation—imaginary and symbolic—such that the ego is structurally paranoid, narcissistic, and rivalrous, making ego-to-ego analysis (as in ego psychology) a therapeutic dead end that merely amplifies imaginary passions rather than dissolving the transference.

ego-psychological defense analysts rely for 'corroboration' of their interventions' purported successes upon 'semblances of regression'
#13

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.56

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The locus of speech

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively Symbolic rather than Imaginary: needs (hunger as paradigm) are sublated into demand and desire through Imaginary-Symbolic mediation, and post-Freudian reduction of analysis to affective/imaginary phenomena distorts Freud's discovery, culminating in a socio-cultural "general infantilization" through scientistic misidentification with the subject supposed to know.

post-Freudian analysis implicitly relegates the Symbolic structures of the unconscious to a secondary position with respect to the Imaginary phenomena of consciousness … 'affective frustration, instinctual inadequacy, and imaginary dependence'
#14

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > A sign of alarm

Theoretical move: This passage contextualizes Lacan's 1957 essay "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching" within the institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis, arguing that Lacan's theoretical insistence on humanistic, structuralist, and intersubjective foundations for analytic training was simultaneously a militant political intervention against the positivist-medical orthodoxy represented by the IPA and Nacht.

Nacht, himself a neuropsychiatrist, saw psychoanalysis as a subdiscipline of medicine (within neurobiology), and actively sought official status for it as such
#15

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract

Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.

An ignorance of Freud's treatment of the death instinct has ramifications for an understanding of what came after it, including the bulk of Freud's metapsychological writings, which were central to the ego psychology movement.
#16

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychological unconscious

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that pre-Freudian (and ego-psychological) hierarchical dualisms between conscious and unconscious encode a political bias that is itself legible as the 'unconscious of scientific discourse'; true psychoanalytic insight locates conflict not in biological or archetypal sources but in the linguistic structure of the symptom as articulated in speech.

an attitude which clearly prefigures the ego-psychological tendency toward increasing the ego's mastery over the other parts of the psyche.
#17

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.81

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The symbolic unconscious

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order—structured by the sliding of signifiers over signifieds—is constitutive of the subject, and that both Jungian symbolism and ego-psychological adaptation represent reactionary misreadings of Freud that replace the truth-seeking function of psychoanalysis with domination and narcissistic identification.

the use of Freudian theory by ego psychology, in which adaptation of the ego, rather than reading of the unconscious, was the aim.
#18

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The intersubjective game by which truth enters reality

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symptom is constituted by the diachronic and synchronic operations of the signifier rather than by object-relations or emotional causality, and that the signifier's arbitrary yet overdetermined nature means it cannot serve as a guide to adaptive reality but instead generates a complex web of meanings that impacts reality — a view that Lacan uses to critique the ego-psychological and object-relations reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptive "corrective emotional experience."

Embracing impudence makes it easier to promote one's own ego as the measure of health, which will be used to bring the analysand back to 'reality.'
#19

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.92

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.

'contemporary psychoanalysts' who seek to further strengthen it show a 'complete misunderstanding' of Freud's conception.
#20

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis, by assimilating to scientism's demand for universally quantifiable knowledge, betrays Freud's founding intention—which was to preserve access to the symbolic (the unconscious) rather than reduce analysis to mere technical practice under the IPA's institutional aegis.

Freud sought to preserve the access he gained to the symbolic, and not to create a trade school whose practitioners simply implemented technique, say, from a treatment manual.
#21

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.96

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Freud’s desire

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's reduction of psychoanalytic training to standardized technique (rather than a humanistic, symbolic "style") constitutes the repression of Freudian truth, and that the only genuine transmission of psychoanalysis is through a demonstrative style that enacts the very mechanisms of the unconscious it describes — not through institutional affiliation or positivist technique.

it spread according to the ignorance that Lowenstein et al. had embraced—like a cancer
#22

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.110

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The foundation of our research: free association

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "golden age" of psychoanalysis was undone by the cultural absorption of its interpretive vocabulary, and that analysts' recourse to non-mediated access (the "third ear," affect, lived experience) represents a regression into the Imaginary; the remedy lies in privileging the Symbolic/signifier, whose irreducible triangularity (the Other as third) keeps psychoanalysis from collapsing into a dyadic imaginary relation.

metaphors 'involving something compact were invoked—affect, lived experience, attitude, discharge, need for love, latent aggressiveness, character armor, and the system of defenses…'
#23

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The number two is odd

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic dimension irreducibly introduces a third term into the analyst-analysand dyad, making "two" structurally odd (*impair*), and uses this mathematical-structuralist move to critique ego psychology's reduction of drive to instinct, to align psychoanalysis with conjectural sciences, and to expose how the IPA's group dynamics reproduce the imaginary mechanisms of identification Freud himself theorized.

ego psychology's theory of narcissism reduces psychoanalysis to animal behavior and base determinism
#24

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.127

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > From mental to dental: the analyst and the tooth

Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's satirical attack on American ego psychology and the IPA's institutional structure to argue that ego psychology functions as a hypnotic "life support" keeping a dead psychoanalysis artificially alive, and that a return to Freudian speech is necessary to allow authentic psychoanalysis to be reborn.

Psychoanalysis is kept in a state of limbo, neither dead nor alive, under the spell of ego psychology (a kind of hypnosis), a sham life-support an already dead body.
#25

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Appendix

Theoretical move: Lacan uses this appendix to mount a sustained critique of ego psychology and identification-based training analysis, arguing that genuine psychoanalytic cure produces separation from rather than identification with the analyst, and that a return to Freud's texts is the corrective to the conformist institutionalization of psychoanalysis.

Lacan shows how Freudian theories of the ego, group psychology, and narcissism in fact critique the stagnancy to which analytic theory has come under the aegis of ego psychology.
#26

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.131

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Context

Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.

in the United States so-called ego psychology was increasingly popular with its relatively optimistic approach emphasizing the strengthening of the ego, something that would prove antithetical to more pessimistic structural and ontological continental European approaches.
#27

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.136

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Introduction

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Instance of the Letter" is positioned between speech and language (*parole* and *langue*), such that the unconscious is revealed not through the linguistic system as a whole but through the failures and anomalies of specific acts of speech—making rhetoric (the study of language effects) as important as grammar/structure for analytic practice.

probably advocates of ego psychology, who may use the 'false identity' of the ego (as they understand it) to oppose what Lacan understood as the truly Freudian view of the unconscious
#28

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.147

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious

Theoretical move: Lacan's deployment of rhetorical trope (via Quintilian) over mere figure reframes metaphor and metonymy as active, structural operations of the unconscious that work independently of conscious intention—thereby establishing the primacy of the signifier and positioning psychoanalysis as necessarily interdisciplinary, in explicit opposition to ego psychology's "autonomous ego."

those who are listening to me…can recognize bad psychoanalysts: by the word they use to deprecate all research on technique and theory that furthers the Freudian experience in its authentic direction. That word is 'intellectualization'
#29

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.153

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.

how repetition functions not as a deeply buried internal dynamic of individual subject (as one might expect in ego psychology) but as a relationship between grammar and rhetoric
#30

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.178

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > II. After Freud

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

Psychoanalysts who make a distinction between neurosis and psychosis on the basis of defence mechanisms in the ego alone miss the point of Freud's theory, and return to the lines of reasoning of pre-Freudian theory.
#31

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.208

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > Context

Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's 'The Direction of the Treatment' as a theoretical turning point that pivots from an intersubjective/symbolic model of analysis toward a structural account of desire as the metonymy of lack-of-being, in direct opposition to ego psychology and object relations approaches that centre adaptation and the analyst's ego as goals of treatment.

At the time of 'The Direction of the Treatment', ego psychology and object relations perspectives were the dominant theoretical and clinical paradigms. In both approaches, adapting the patient's behavior to the reality of the analyst was central to the treatment.
#32

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.213

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > I. Who analyzes today?

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of post-Freudian (especially ego-psychological) psychoanalysis is mobilized to argue that authentic analytic practice requires orienting from the symbolic axis (Other, lack, desire) rather than from imaginary ego-to-ego relations, with the L-schema formalizing why the analytic situation must be understood as four-positional rather than dyadic.

Lacan disparagingly describes ego-psychologists' introduction of the notion of an autonomous ego, a conflict-free part of psychic functioning that the analyst can appeal to starting from his own autonomous ego
#33

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.216

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.

Instead of enhancing specific characteristics of the analyst's autonomous ego, a psychoanalytic training should aim to familiarize analysts with 'the ways the signifier effects the advent of the signified'
#34

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Rat Man and Ernst Kris cases to demonstrate that correct analytic interpretation operates through the Symbolic frame (the signifier, the Other, the paternal function) rather than through ego-level defense analysis; the ego-analysts' surface-to-depth model systematically misses desire by subordinating it to drives and defenses, requiring instead a topology that locates desire at the level of speech and the signifier.

Lacan criticizes the ego-analysts for the emphasis they place on Freud's second topography (Ego, Superego, Id), while seemingly forgetting about its forebear (Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious) and especially the Unconscious
#35

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.222

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "central defect" of post-Freudian theories of transference (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and intersubjective-introjective) is their reduction of the analytic situation to a dual, imaginary relationship, thereby neglecting the symbolic order and the constitutive impasse of desire; against these, Lacan insists that the direction of treatment must be oriented by the patient's signifiers rather than any normalizing ideal of adaptation or harmonious object-love.

The first theory Lacan engages is the genetic approach in psychoanalysis, which is also the title of an article by ego-psychologists Hartmann and Kris (1945)
#36

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.237

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams through the butcher's wife dream, Lacan argues that desire operates through the linguistic mechanisms of metonymy (desire as sliding lack-of-being) and metaphor (surplus of meaning), and that analytic treatment must preserve the literal, signifier-structured dimension of desire rather than reducing it to ego-psychological normalization.

Lacan ego-analysts wrongfully focus on the "reproduction of analysts"… As patients end up with 'sound principles and normal desires,' they become mere representations of their (ego-)analysts.
#37

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.241

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

The important distinction between Lacan's conception and ego-analytic perspectives is that rectification – in the sense of adaptation to an ostensibly objective reality – is never the goal of analysis for Lacan.
#38

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.259

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject

Theoretical move: Lacan's commentary on Lagache's paper argues that structure must be understood in strictly formal, linguistic-mathematical terms (not naturalistic or organismic ones), such that signifying structure is not an abstract beyond but actively functions in the real—shaping organisms, producing the barred subject, and establishing the priority of the Other's discourse over any putative being-in-itself of the child.

Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, however, defend a naturalist reading of Freud, such that Freud's descriptions of the second topography should be taken to be merely 'metaphorical and anthropomorphic'
#39

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.280

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

Theoretical move: The passage uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.

psychoanalysis made the error of endorsing the development of a strong ego – precisely the lesson that should not have been taken from Freud, Lacan thinks. This approach ends up arguing that the analyst's ego is the 'point' with which the analysand should identify.
#40

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.140

I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

The association of psychoanalysis with adaptation becomes most apparent in American ego psychology, where developing a healthy ego becomes the overriding goal of analysis.
#41

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.314

I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive

Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.

Jacques Lacan's wholesale opposition to all forms of psychoanalysis focused on the ego stems from his recognition that the ego emerges through rivalry and never transcends it. The development of a strong ego produces rather than prevents relations of rivalry with other egos.
#42

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.323

I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation... He defines adaptation as the negotiation between conformity to social norms and the attempt to modify these norms, not as pure capitulation on the part of the subject.
#43

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **factor** ***c***

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'factor c' designates the culturally specific dimension of the symbolic order that shapes a given milieu's relationship to psychoanalysis; by identifying the American 'c factor' as ahistoricism, Lacan argues that this cultural constant is responsible for the theoretical distortions of Ego Psychology.

Lacan regards the c factor of United States culture as particularly antithetical to psychoanalysis, and sees it as largely responsible for the errors which have beset psychoanalytic theory in the USA (such as EGO-PSYCHOLOGY)
#44

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **time**

Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of time constitutes a double break with linear temporality: logical time replaces chronometric time with a dialectical intersubjective structure (tripartite: instant of seeing / time for understanding / moment of concluding), while retroaction and anticipation replace linear developmental sequences with a non-linear psychic temporality in which present, past and future mutually condition one another.

Other forms of psychoanalysis, such as ego-psychology, are based on a linear concept of time (as can be seen, for example, in their stress on a linear sequence of developmental stages)
#45

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **defence**

Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures Freudian defence by distinguishing it structurally from resistance—defences are permanent symbolic structures (effectively equivalent to fantasy) while resistances are transitory imaginary responses—and further identifies desire itself as dialectically constituted by a defensive prohibition against exceeding the limit of jouissance.

Lacan is very critical of the way in which Anna Freud and ego-psychology interpret the concept of defence. He argues that they confuse the concept of defence with the concept of RESISTANCE
#46

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***C*** > ***cogito***

Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with the Cartesian cogito performs a double move: it subverts the cogito's equation of subject=ego=consciousness (thereby grounding the critique of ego-psychology) while simultaneously retaining and radicalising the concept of the subject — identifying the subject of the cogito with the subject of the unconscious, and using it to articulate the split between enunciation and statement.

One of Lacan's main criticisms of ego-psychology and object-relations theory is that these schools betrayed Freud's discovery by returning to the pre-Freudian concept of the subject as an autonomous ego
#47

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **psychoanalysis**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's position that his own practice constitutes the only authentic psychoanalysis—a return to Freud against deviations—and that psychoanalysis is an autonomous scientific discipline irreducible to psychology, medicine, philosophy, or linguistics, whose aim is not cure but the articulation of truth.

the three major non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory (KLEINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS, EGO-PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY) are all, in Lacan's view, deviations from authentic psychoanalysis
#48

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***R*** > **resistance**

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes resistance as a structural feature of the analytic process rooted in the imaginary register of the ego, not the ill will of the analysand, and distinguishes it from defence by locating resistance on the side of the object (transitory, imaginary) and defence on the side of the subject (stable, symbolic), while also implicating the analyst's own resistance as the true source of any obstruction to treatment.

ego-psychology placed increasing importance on overcoming the patient's resistances. Lacan is very critical of this shift in emphasis
#49

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **ego**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's theory of the ego as an imaginary, paranoiac formation produced by the mirror stage and grounded in méconnaissance, positioning it against Ego Psychology's rehabilitation of the ego as centre of the subject and ally of psychoanalytic treatment, while also resolving (or privileging) Freud's own internal contradiction between narcissistic and structural-model accounts of the ego.

Lacan also argues that the proponents of ego-psychology betrayed Freud's radical discovery by relocating the ego as the centre of the subject (see AUTONOMOUS EGO).
#50

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **ego-psychology**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes Ego Psychology as the institutional foil against which Lacanian theory is constructed, arguing that Lacan's sustained critique of its central concepts (adaptation, the autonomous ego) and its IPA dominance is constitutive of Lacanian theory itself rather than merely polemical.

Lacan presents both ego-psychology and the IPA as the 'antithesis' of true psychoanalysis (E, 116) and argues that both were irremediably corrupted by the culture of the United States
#51

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **Freud, return to**

Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a simple return to orthodoxy but a claim to have uncovered a deeper, coherent logic in Freud's texts that had been obscured or betrayed by post-Freudian schools (ego-psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory), while simultaneously functioning as a rhetorico-political challenge to the IPA's monopoly on the Freudian legacy.

Freud's radical insights had been universally betrayed by the three major schools of psychoanalysis within the IPA: EGO-PSYCHOLOGY, KLEINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS, and OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY.
#52

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **ethics**

Theoretical move: Lacan's analytic ethic is defined against both traditional (Aristotelian/Kantian) ethics and the normative ethics of ego-psychology, positioning it as an ethic of desire — and later of 'speaking well' — that refuses the Sovereign Good, the pleasure principle, and the 'service of goods' in favour of the subject's fidelity to their desire.

the formulations of ego-psychology about the adaptation of the ego to reality imply a normative ethics (S7, 302). It is in opposition to this ethical position that Lacan sets out to formulate his own analytic ethic.
#53

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***O*** > **object-relations theory**

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object-relations theory targets its reduction of the object to a register of need and satisfaction, its neglect of the symbolic dimension of desire, and its idealization of a perfectly symmetrical dyadic relation, against which Lacan reasserts the triadic Oedipal structure and the irreducibility of symbolic desire.

object-relations theory can be contrasted with EGO-PSYCHOLOGY on account of its focus on objects rather than on the drives in themselves. This focus on objects means that object-relations theory pays more attention to the intersubjective constitution of the psyche, in contrast to the more atomistic approach of ego-psychology.
#54

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **autonomous ego**

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of the ego-psychology concept of the "autonomous ego" reframes the locus of autonomy: rather than the ego achieving freedom through adaptation and identification with the analyst, it is the symbolic order that is genuinely autonomous, exposing the ego's supposed mastery as a narcissistic illusion.

The term 'autonomous ego' was coined by the proponents of EGO-PSYCHOLOGY.
#55

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **School**

Theoretical move: The passage traces the institutional logic behind Lacan's founding of the École Freudienne de Paris, arguing that the deliberate choice of 'school' over 'association' or 'society' encoded a structural critique of the IPA's hierarchical, church-like model, and that the EFP's innovations—democratic membership, the pass, and cartels—were concrete attempts to institutionalise psychoanalytic formation around doctrine rather than authority.

Lacan was particularly keen to avoid the dangers of the hierarchy dominating the institution, which he saw in the INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL ASSOCIATION (IPA), and which he blamed for the theoretical misunderstandings which had come to dominate the IPA
#56

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **adaptation**

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of adaptation as a psychoanalytic aim demonstrates that ego-psychology's biologistic framework distorts psychoanalysis by misreading the ego's alienating function, naturalizing the analyst's authority, and ignoring the de-naturalizing effect of the symbolic order and the death drive on human beings.

EGO-PSYCHOLOGY applies this biological concept to psychoanalysis, explaining neurotic symptoms in terms of maladaptive behaviour... arguing that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to help the patient adapt to reality.
#57

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***A*** > **acting Out**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of acting out is distinguished from the Freudian baseline by introducing the intersubjective dimension of the Other: acting out is not merely repetition substituting for memory, but a ciphered message addressed to a 'deaf' Other, locating the cause partly in the analyst's own interpretive failure (resistance of the analyst).

Lacan refers to a case history described by the ego-psychologist Ernst Kris (Kris, 1951). Lacan argues that the interpretation given by Kris was accurate at one level, but did not go to the heart of the matter, and thus provoked an acting out
#58

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***I*** > **International Psycho-Analytical** **Association**

Theoretical move: The passage uses the IPA as a foil to articulate Lacan's institutional and theoretical positioning: his excommunication from the IPA becomes the occasion for defining his own school's aims (La Passe, cartels) and his "return to Freud" as a corrective to the IPA's betrayal of psychoanalysis, particularly through its embrace of Ego Psychology.

his most sustained and profound criticisms were reserved for the school of EGO-PSYCHOLOGY which had achieved a dominant position in the IPA by the 1950s.
#59

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **psychology**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive dissociation of psychoanalysis from psychology: psychology is reduced to ethology/behaviourism and shown to be built on illusions (unity, wholeness, nature), while psychoanalysis alone, by uncovering the linguistic basis of subjectivity and the split subject, escapes those illusions and constitutes a genuinely human science.

Lacan argues that psychology is essentially a tool of 'technocratic exploitation'… dominated by the illusions of wholeness and synthesis, NATURE and instinct, autonomy and self-consciousness
#60

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **development**

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of developmental psychology (geneticism) turns on replacing a linear, chronological model of psychosexual maturation with a structural, retroactive account: the so-called stages of development are timeless symbolic structures ordered *nachträglich* by the Oedipus complex, and entry into the Symbolic is always a creation ex nihilo rather than gradual evolution.

Psychoanalysis is presented by EGO-PSYCHOLOGY as a form of developmental psychology, with the emphasis placed on the temporal development of the child's sexuality.
#61

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **transference**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.

He criticises ego-psychology for defining the transference in terms of AFFECTS; 'Transference does not refer to any mysterious property of affect'
#62

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

Theoretical move: Fisher argues that postmodern culture suppresses not darkness but luminosity/the numinous, and that certain minimalist electronic music (Foxx, Budd) succeeds in rendering a haecceitic, depersonalised encounter with the numinous that operates as a release from identity — a melancholic grace that ego psychology actively forecloses.

contrary to today's ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to 'sell ourselves'), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace.
#63

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.58

**V**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego's fundamental function is misrecognition (*méconnaissance*), not synthetic mastery, and that the symbolic system—marked by linguistic criss-crossing (*Verschlungenheit*)—infinitely exceeds any intentional control the ego might exercise over speech; this reorients the analytic experience toward speech and the Other rather than ego-psychology's adaptive model, framing Freud's *Verneinung* as the key text for rethinking judgement and negation beyond positive psychology.

I am not talking about the ego in psychology, where it performs a synthetic function, but the ego in analysis, a dynamic function.
#64

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.68

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego analysis must be reframed as discourse analysis: the ego's function is constitutively one of méconnaissance, and analytic progress requires moving beyond the dual imaginary relation (ego-to-ego) toward the symbolic structuration of the subject, with the Oedipus complex understood as a triangulated, asymmetrical symbolic structure rather than a simple content to be interpreted.

All the recent discussions which take the ego of the analysand to be the ally of the analyst in the Great Analytic Work contain quite obvious contradictions.
#65

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.22

**I**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology's identification of the ego as the function through which the subject learns the meaning of words is internally contradictory, and that the analyst's ego brought into the clinical relation as a measure of reality constitutes the foundational theoretical and technical problem the seminar will address.

the fundamental absurdity of interhuman behaviour can only be comprehended in the light of this system as Melanie Klein so happily called it, not knowing, as usual, what she was saying - called the human ego, naively that set of defences, of denials [négations], of dams, of inhibitions, of fundamental fantasies which orient and direct the subject.
#66

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.73

**VI**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the theoretical claim that the Real is defined as what resists symbolisation absolutely, and uses Melanie Klein's case of Dick to demonstrate that without symbolisation the subject is trapped in undifferentiated reality with no ego-formation, no anxiety-signal, and no human world of objects—thus counterposing Klein's interpretive brutality (which introduces the Symbolic) against Anna Freud's ego-educative intellectualism.

Anna Freud's point of view is intellectualist, and leads her into putting forward the view that everything in analysis must be conducted from a median, moderate position, which would be that of the ego.
#67

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.109

**vin** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Universal*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is fundamentally an imaginary function, and that disturbances in imaginary development (rather than organic lesion) explain the wild child's motor, sleep, and relational failures—thereby grounding a structural account of psychosis in the failure of imaginary mastery rather than in nosological categories.

we are confronted with signs of failures in the functions of egosynthesis, in the sense in which we understand the ego in analytic theory.
#68

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.168

**Xffl**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes méconnaissance (misrecognition) from simple ignorance by arguing that misrecognition presupposes a correlative knowledge behind it, and uses this distinction to pivot from ego-psychology's conception of the ego as a synthesising function toward a Lacanian account of the ego as fundamentally imaginary and constituted through the specular/linguistic relation to the other.

the recent development of the theory of the ego by the American troika, Hartmann, Loewenstein and Kris. These writings are sometimes quite disconcerting in the way they disengage concepts. They are always referring to the desexualised libido
#69

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.33

**II** > **Z\*:** *Certainly.*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues against reductive psychobiographical readings of Freud (e.g. his work as compensation for a 'desire for power'), insisting that the analytic attitude toward a subject cannot be collapsed into the logic of domination or resistance-conquest; he further distinguishes Freud's interpretive practice as more 'humane' than modern ego-psychological technique precisely because it does not privilege the interpretation of defence over the interpretation of contents.

you'll find in this interventionism no satisfaction being gained from having won a victory over the patient's consciousness, in contradiction to what Hyppolite says, less, certainly, than in the modern techniques, which put all the emphasis on the resistances
#70

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.57

**IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that speech has two fundamental dimensions—mediation (hooking onto the other) and revelation (of the subject's truth)—and that resistance arises precisely when revelatory speech fails to arrive, causing speech to collapse entirely into its mediatory/relational function; this dialectic between full and empty speech structures the entire analytic experience, including the ego's constitutive dependence on the other.

Aren't we all the more caught up in it the more the history of technique shows that a stronger emphasis has always been placed on the ego-related aspect of resistances?
#71

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.234

xvra > **The symbolic order**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues, against Balint's theorization, that the transference is constituted entirely within the symbolic order—understood as the register of the pact, speech, and contract—and that the progress of analysis is not an ego's reconquest of the id but a constitutive act of speech that inverts their relation; the 'beyond' that matters is not psychological but immanent to speech itself.

Freud's formula - Where id was, ego must be - is usually understood in line with crass spatialisation, and the analytic reconquest of the id is in the end reduced to the action of a mirage.
#72

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.197

**XV** > The nucleus of repression

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego is an imaginary function distinct from the subject, and uses this to critique ego-strengthening models of analysis (Balint, Anna Freud); he then reframes the superego not as a tension of instinctual forces but as a schism within the symbolic system—parallel to the unconscious itself—situating both in relation to the law and the subject's symbolic integration of desire.

Either the ego is strong, or else it is weak. And if it is weak, they are obliged, by the internal logic of their position, to think it has to be strengthened.
#73

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.37

**m**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical case from Margaret Little to argue that ego-to-ego interpretation — premised on hic et nunc intentionality and projective reciprocity — is structurally indistinguishable from projection and therefore generates errors prior to truth and falsity; genuine interpretation of defences requires at minimum a third term beyond the dyadic ego-relation, and resistance must be understood in Freud's broader sense as anything that interrupts analytic work, not merely as psychical obstacle to interpretation.

interpretation based on the intentional signification of the discursive act in the immediate present of the session is subject to all the relativities implied by the possible engagement of the analyst's ego.
#74

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.285

xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood through the dialectic of the imaginary and symbolic registers rather than reduced to the real (Ezriel) or to ego-normalization (ego psychology); the imaginary relation, rooted in the mirror stage and the ideal ego, crystallizes transference while the symbolic—via speech and the analyst as mediating Other—enables the subject's integration of repressed history.

the analyst has no other guide than his own conception of the subject's behaviour. He attempts to normalise it - in accordance with a norm that is coherent with his own ego. So this will always be a modelling of one ego by another ego
#75

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.29

**II** > *Idem,*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's analytic experience was uniquely inaugural rather than methodological, and uses this to challenge Ego Psychology's domestication of Freud's later theory of the ego—positioning a return to the truth of the subject (via discourse/resistance/unconscious) against the objectifying tendencies of both standard science and post-Freudian technique.

The triumvirate who work in New York, Hartmann, Loewenstein and Kris, in its current attempt to elaborate a psychology of the ego... I believe that what has happened there is a very significant failure
#76

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.21

**I**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the founding Freudian experience is not the affective reliving of the past but the *reconstruction* (rewriting) of the subject's history through speech, and that subsequent analytic theory went astray by privileging the ego as the sole analytic interlocutor—a move Lacan exposes as contradictory since the ego is itself structured like a symptom.

Anna Freud, Fenichel, nearly all those who have written about analysis since 1920, say it over and over again - We speak only to the ego, we are in communication with the ego alone, everything is channelled via the ego.
#77

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

**x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

far from being a consolidation of or a complement to the indications of Freud's late doctrine in the exploration of the ego's mainsprings and status, far from being a continuation of his work, is strictly speaking a deviation, a reduction, a veritable aberration
#78

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.137

BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's case of female homosexuality to demonstrate that acting-out is structurally addressed to the Other, that the unconscious desire can operate through lying/fiction, and that Freud's own passage à l'acte (abandoning the case) reveals his inability to think femininity as evasive structure—while also critiquing ego-identification as the goal of analysis by pointing to the unassimilable remainder (objet a) it leaves untouched.

what shifted the question of the way in which we domesticate the transference in the direction of strengthening the ego — the third of the hypotheses — because as you've heard me say, it's not straightforward.
#79

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is fundamentally resistant (Übertragungswiderstand) — it is the closing up of the unconscious rather than its opening — and that the big Other is always already present in every fleeting opening of the unconscious, making the analyst's interpretation a secondary reflection of the unconscious's own prior interpretive work. This grounds a sharp critique of ego-alliance conceptions of transference.

a conception which would have the analysis of the transference proceed on the basis of an alliance with the healthy part of the subject's ego, and consists in appealing to his common sense
#80

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286

IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological figure of a surface crossing itself (cross-cap/Möbius-type surface) to argue that the line of self-intersection symbolizes identification, and then critiques any conception of analysis that terminates in identification with the analyst as eliding the true motive force of analysis — insisting there is a "beyond" to identification.

Any analysis that one teaches as having to be terminated by identification with the analyst reveals, by the same token, that its true motive force is elided.
#81

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan redefines transference against ego-psychological and reality-adaptation frameworks by positing it as "the enactment of the reality of the unconscious," insisting that the unconscious is constitutively bound to sexuality — a linkage that post-Freudian analysis has progressively forgotten.

you will see the function of the transference formulated as a means of rectification from the standpoint of reality, to which everything I am saying today is opposed
#82

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.151

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Theoretical move: Lacan opens his discussion of transference by critically engaging with an orthodox psychoanalytic account that reduces transference to measurable distortions relative to the 'reality of the analytic situation', setting up his own counter-claim that transference is the enaction of the reality of the unconscious rather than a distortion of external reality.

I took the opportunity offered me by an article published in a recent number of the most official organ of psycho-analysis, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, which went so far as to question the use in analysis of the notion of transference
#83

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.59

OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan aligns Freud's method with Cartesian doubt by showing that Freud's 'certainty' (Gewissheit) rests not on conscious statement but on the constellation of signifiers—including doubt itself as part of the text—thereby establishing that the subject (Ich) is the locus of the network of signifiers, not the ego, and that the unconscious is the subject's proper home: 'Wo es war, soll Ich werden.'

This does not mean, as some execrable translation would have it, Le moi doit dIloger le ça (the ego must dislodge the id).
#84

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.157

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mapping the subject against "reality" rather than against the signifier constitutes a fundamental degradation of psychoanalytic experience into psychology, and that the ego—the "psychological isolate"—is a theoretical deviation that confuses the subject with a mere adaptive organism, in flagrant contradiction with what analytic experience actually reveals through the function of the internal object.

which—by a deviation which, I think, is merely a detour—is confused, in psycho-analytic thinking, with the subject in distress in the relation to reality.
#85

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's account of love and the gesamt Ich to argue that love requires a structural level (the real/economic/biological triad) distinct from the drive, and critically challenges the developmental reading of autoeroticism in Ego Psychology by pointing out that the infant is never indifferent to its perceptual field.

Analysts have concluded from this that—as it must be situated somewhere in what is called development, and since what Freud says is gospel—the infant must regard everything around him as indifferent.
#86

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.147

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Szasz's ego-psychological conception of transference — wherein transference analysis reduces to reality-testing by a "healthy part of the ego" — as a theoretical blind alley that, by placing the analyst beyond critique, paradoxically endangers psychoanalysis itself; the implicit counter-move is that transference cannot be resolved by appeal to ego integrity or consensual reality-testing.

he can conceive of the analysis of the transference only in terms of an assent obtained from the healthy part of the ego, that part which is capable of judging reality and of separating it from illusion.
#87

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.25

The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis cannot be defined as a science through hermeneutics, praxis-field, or formula-making alone; instead, its scientific status depends on clarifying the status of its four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and, crucially, on interrogating the analyst's desire as constitutive of the analytic field itself.

everything that has been developed around the concept of frustration is, in relation to Freud's concepts, from which it derives, clearly retrograde and pre-conceptual
#88

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.150

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: Lacan indicts a conformist, adaptationist tendency within psychoanalytic theory—where analysts flee the unsettling implications of the unconscious into orthopedic, evolutionist therapeutics—positioning this as a betrayal of the still-young, subversive discovery of the unconscious.

He then seeks for assurances in theories that operate in the direction of an orthopaedic, conformist therapeutics
#89

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is a moment of closure against the unconscious, and that the analyst's interpretive intervention must be directed at the split subject itself (the "beauty behind the shutters") rather than a presumed healthy ego-part; this reframes transference as a topological knot requiring topology to adequately conceptualize it.

To appeal to some healthy part of the subject thought to be there in the real, capable of judging with the analyst what is happening in the transference, is to misunderstand
#90

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively a zone of the "unrealized" (not unreal), structured around a fundamental gap — the navel of the dream — and that post-Freudian ego psychology betrayed this dimension by "stitching up" the gap through psychologization; Lacan positions his own return to the signifier as reopening this gap with care, installing the law of the signifier in the locus of cause.

The unconscious had closed itself up against his message thanks to those active practitioners of orthopaedics that the analysts of the second and third generation became, busying themselves, by psychologizing analytic theory, in stitching up this gap.
#91

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.142

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian field is constitutively defined by loss, and that the analyst's presence is irreducible precisely as witness to this loss — a structural condition that exposes Ego Psychology's propagation of the American way of life as a regressive obscurantism, making the conflict internal to analysis necessary rather than contingent.

the revival of notions long since refuted in the field of psycho-analysis, such as the predominance of the functions of the ego.
#92

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a polemical dismissal of neo-Freudian adaptational constructions to re-grounding the drive's theory: he argues that transference enacts the reality of the unconscious precisely as sexuality, but questions whether love—its visible surface in the transference—is the privileged or culminating form of that sexuality, thus opening a more radical inquiry into the partial drive.

When I read in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly an article like the one by Mr Edward Glover, entitled Freudian or Neo-Freudian, directed entirely against the constructions of Mr Alexander
#93

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.223

THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Piaget's concept of "egocentric discourse" to demonstrate that what appears as the child speaking to no one is in fact the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other — thereby grounding aphanisis (the fading of the subject) in a concrete, observable phenomenon.

The Piagetic error... is an error that lies in the notion of what is called the egocentric discourse of the child... the notion of egocentric discourse is a misunderstanding.
#94

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

Theoretical move: Lacan positions the Freudian unconscious as a zone of the "unrealized" (neither unreal nor dereistic) structured around a constitutive gap—figured by Freud's "navel of the dream"—and argues that post-Freudian analysts (second and third generation) betrayed this dimension by psychologizing theory and suturing the gap, while Lacan himself claims to re-open it by introducing the law of the signifier into the domain of cause.

those active practitioners of orthopaedics that the analysts of the second and third generation became, busying themselves, by psychologizing analytic theory, in stitching up this gap.
#95

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.45

OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan positions the unconscious as neither being nor non-being but the "unrealized," and uses this to critique both spiritualist/parapsychological misappropriations of Freud and the rationalist "desiccation" of the unconscious by orthodox analysis, thereby clearing space for his own structural account of the unconscious and desire.

a certain desiccation, a reduction to a herbarium, whose sampling is limited to a register that has become a catalogue raisonné, a classification that would certainly like to be thought a natural one.
#96

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59

OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan aligns Freud's method with Cartesian doubt to argue that the unconscious subject is not the ego but the complete locus of the signifier network — thus correcting the Ego Psychology misreading of "Wo es war, soll Ich werden" and insisting that Freud's certainty (Gewissheit) is grounded in the constellation of signifiers, not in any psychical function.

This does not mean, as some execrable translation would have it, Le moi doit déloger le ça (the ego must dislodge the id).
#97

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.142

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian field is constitutively marked by loss, and that the analyst's presence is irreducible precisely as witness to this loss — a structural loss inscribed in the oblique stroke dividing the concepts of unconscious, repetition, and transference — while diagnosing Ego Psychology as a symptomatic obscurantism that betrays the field.

the function assumed by psycho-analysis in the propagation of a style that calls itself the American way of... characterized by the revival of notions long since refuted in the field of psycho-analysis, such as the predominance of the functions of the ego.
#98

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the standard clinical view of transference: rather than being a vehicle for unconscious communication, transference is fundamentally resistant—it is the mechanism by which the unconscious closes up again—and the big Other is already present in every opening of the unconscious prior to any analytic intervention.

the conception which would have the analysis of the transference proceed on the basis of an alliance with the healthy part of the subject's ego, and consists in appealing to his common sense
#99

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.146

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transference is not a moment of ego-alliance but a moment of closure against the unconscious, and that interpretation must address the split subject directly through this closure — reconceiving transference as a topological knot rather than a therapeutic lever on a "healthy part" of the subject.

To appeal to some healthy part of the subject thought to be there in the real, capable of judging with the analyst what is happening in the transference, is to misunderstand
#100

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.147

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Szasz's ego-psychological account of transference — which reduces it to a defence mechanism analysable only through the "healthy part of the ego" — exposing the theoretical blind alley this creates: if transference is merely illusion to be corrected by reality-testing, the analyst becomes an unappealable judge and analysis collapses into "pure, uncontrolled hazard."

the blind alley that Szasz has created for himself is, for him, necessitated by the very fact that he can conceive of the analysis of the transference only in terms of an assent obtained from the healthy part of the ego
#101

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.150

PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: Lacan indicts mainstream analysts ("slag") for retreating from the subversive potential of the unconscious into conformist, evolutionist therapeutics oriented toward a mythical happiness, thereby betraying the radical discovery of psychoanalysis.

theories that operate in the direction of an orthopaedic, conformist therapeutics, providing access for the subject to the most mythical conception of happiness
#102

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.151

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Theoretical move: The passage opens Lacan's theoretical reframing of transference: against the ego-psychological view that transference is mere distortion measurable against "the reality of the analytic situation," Lacan prepares to argue that transference is the enaction of the reality of the unconscious itself — not a departure from reality but its positive emergence.

the analyst is supposed to point out to the patient the effects of more or less manifest discordances that occur with regard to the reality of the analytic situation, namely, the two real subjects who are present in it
#103

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.157

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that orienting analytic practice toward the subject's relation to "reality" rather than to the signifier collapses into psychology, which isolates and degrades the subject; the ego-as-psychological-isolate is a deviation from authentic psychoanalytic theorization, which must instead retain the function of the internal object.

is confused, in psycho-analytic thinking, with the subject in distress in the relation to reality
#104

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan redefines transference not as the enactment of an alienating illusion toward an ideal model, but as "the enactment of the reality of the unconscious," opposing prevailing ego-psychological conceptions that ground transference in reality-rectification, and insisting that the unconscious is strictly consubstantial with sexuality in Freud's sense.

analysis has inherited a conception of reality that no longer has anything to do with reality as situated by Freud at the level of the secondary process
#105

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hallucination is possible only through the sexualization of objects, not through a simple re-presentation of need; reality is defined as desexualized in Freud's two principles, and transference restores the weight of sexual reality beneath the discourse of demand. This is mapped topologically via the "interior 8" figure placing libido at the junction of its lobes.

A lot is said in the most recent analytic theories about desexualized functions.
#106

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical review of early analysts' (Abraham, Ferenczi, Nunberg) countertransferential positions to pivot toward a topological account of how the subject accommodates its image around the objet petit a via a mirror-shutter mechanism, illustrating how desire structures the analytic field rather than the analyst's psychology.

in response to a psychologizing theory of the psychoanalytic personality
#107

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the problem of sexuality in the transference by questioning whether love is the privileged manifestation of sexuality in the analytic situation, pivoting toward a return to Freud's central texts on the drive as the proper theoretical ground.

when I read in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly an article like the one by Mr Edward Glover, entitled Freudian or Neo-Freudian, directed entirely against the constructions of Mr Alexander
#108

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reading of Freud's "Real-Ich" and autoerotism by showing that the infant is never indifferent to its perceptual field, thereby distinguishing the structure of love (tied to the gesamt Ich and the pleasure principle as a homeostatic surface) from the structure of the drive.

Analysts have concluded from this that—as it must be situated somewhere in what is called development, and since what Freud says is gospel—the infant must regard everything around him as indifferent.
#109

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.131

**Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Freudian identification by grounding it in the subject's relation to lack and the zero/one dialectic (via Frege), arguing that primary identification precedes truth and is rooted in a mythical-incorporative relation to the father that cannot be reduced to either libidinal development or ego-psychological adaptation — thereby positioning identification as the analytic problem that displaces the theological impasse of knowing/willing.

there is nothing that it is less proper to keep distinct, as was always the central flaw of their psychology, to keep distinct this register of the mapping-out of knowledge
#110

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.328

**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Marguerite Duras's *Lol V. Stein* as a literary incarnation of the Lacanian object-gaze (*objet petit a*) as the novel's true subject — a detached, exiled, fallen object that sustains all other subjectivity — while Jacques-Alain Miller's summary of Zinberg on American psychoanalysis diagnoses the latter's decline through its reduction of psychoanalysis to an Adaptation-theory and its spread of an "ethical illness" into the social body.

In denouncing the plague that the United States of America has brought to psychoanalysis I am only following the vigilance of which Jacques Lacan as far as I know has never ceased to affirm the imperative as regards what is elaborated starting from Freud in the United States
#111

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.266

**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Plato's *Sophist*, the passage argues that the question of non-being (the status of the *phantasma*/simulacrum) is ultimately a question about the subject's particular, perspectival position with respect to a universal, and that the Sophist's art—producing illusions calibrated to the observer's viewpoint—anticipates the psychoanalytic concept of *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* and fantasy. The dialogue's apparent concern with ontology is recast as a topology of the subject's place.

Do you not hear the psychoanalyst designating to his cured patient, the window through which he finally sees reality? And through which, if the patient has really finally understood, he will not fail to throw himself.
#112

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.101

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, understood topologically through the Klein bottle as a cut that reveals an a-cosmic surface, exposes the fundamental inadequacy of ego-psychological and developmental object-relations approaches to transference: the analyst risks being "deceived" (not merely deceiving) by reducing the structure of the subject to a normative developmental history of needs and traumatic incidence, thereby foreclosing the properly Freudian dimension of desire and the unconscious.

everything that is ordinarily said about transference... has led to putting the accent in a more and more prevalent way on the effects that were produced in the development of the subject, by what can be called... an inadequate emotional conditioning
#113

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.334

**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that American psychoanalysis has undergone a pathological inversion by becoming an 'o-object' (objet petit a) of conspicuous display and ideological suture — masking the class struggle under the 'pursuit of happiness' and the promise of adaptation — while true psychoanalysis is defined by assuming the irreparable, i.e. the lack of being, and the properly oriented desire of the analyst.

this biologism opposed to a so-called culturalism, which you know precisely is one of the most debatable things in these developments - I am speaking about culturalism - in the developments of psychoanalysis in the United States
#114

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.131

**Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances identification as the central problematic of analytic experience by triangulating it across three registers: the mathematical logic of zero/one (Frege) as the structural model for the subject's appearing-disappearing pulsation; a critique of ego-psychology's pseudo-developmental account of identification (adaptation, secondary narcissism); and a close reading of Freud's Group Psychology chapter VII, where the primordial identification with the father (Einverleibung) is shown to be logically prior to—and irreducible by—the conscious/unconscious or will/knowledge dualisms inherited from Western philosophical-theological tradition.

there is nothing that it is less proper to keep distinct, as was always the central flaw of their psychology, to keep distinct this register of the mapping-out of knowledge...the vital surge—I give it to you here as that which...culminates in the function of a consciousness
#115

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.101

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle to theorise desire as a "good cut" that reveals the a-cosmic, non-orientable surface of the subject, and then pivots to critique the object-relational/developmental reduction of transference, arguing that the analyst risks being deceived when transference is interpreted merely as a reproduction of parental experience rather than as a structural positioning of the subject at the locus of the Other.

this aspect, this slope, is all the same only the bottom of a slope. Analysis has in no way come out of that, and what we have to deal with is not what its praxis, in a certain field, in a certain milieu, directs itself towards in a fascinated way
#116

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.266

**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the lens of psychoanalytic experience, Audouard argues that the dialogue's central problem is not the ontological status of non-being per se but rather the status of the subject, whose particular point of view (place) is precisely what makes the simulacrum (fantasma/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) possible — thereby transposing an ancient metaphysical problem into a Lacanian one about the split, positionally-determined subject.

Do you not hear the psychoanalyst designating to his cured patient, the window through which he finally sees reality? And through which, if the patient has really finally understood, he will not fail to throw himself. In short, it is the Stranger straight from the USA, namely, one that we are used to.
#117

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.328

**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* to demonstrate how the subject can be constituted as a pure object-gaze (objet petit a), an exiled remainder that paradoxically becomes the novel's only true subject; this is then counterposed to the critique of American ego-psychology's reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptation theory, which Lacan frames as an "ethical illness" spreading through the social body.

In denouncing the plague that the United States of America has brought to psychoanalysis I am only following the vigilance of which Jacques Lacan as far as I know has never ceased to affirm the imperative
#118

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.334

**Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan (via a presenter's reading of Zinberg) diagnoses the "ethical illness" of American psychoanalysis as its transformation into an objet petit a — an object of ostentatious display and adaptation ideology — whose inversion of the analytic aim (assumption of irreparable lack) replaces the desire of the analyst with the pursuit of happiness as social suture; Lacan then defends his own teaching as what preserves a "breathable" theoretical atmosphere against these impasses.

this biologism opposed to a so-called culturalism, which you know precisely is one of the most debatable things in these developments - I am speaking about culturalism - in the developments of psychoanalysis in the United States
#119

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.255

**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses game theory (Pascal, Von Neumann) as a structural analogy to articulate the analytic relationship: the divided subject stakes himself as objet petit a in the game of analysis, desire is the appearance of this stake in the interval between lack and knowledge, and the analytic dyad functions not as opposing players but as a convergent structure aimed at a Pascal-style "distribution of bets" — the cure.

what every analyst from the school of today's psychoanalysis call, in this false language borrowed from psychology, the alliance with the healthy part of the ego.
#120

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

Mademoiselle Grazien

Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relationship between Jones's concept of aphanisis and Lacan's theory of the subject's fading, using this parallel to introduce jouissance as a bodily dimension that cannot be reduced to the pleasure principle and that stands in a constitutive tension with the subject's "I am" — arguing that the subject is always already implicated in the duplicity between being and non-being that jouissance makes visible.

some reference, whatever it may be, to reality or again to the establishment of a better, less distorted, stronger ego... all of this only consists in making the paths that analysis has allowed us to imagine, enter into the register of development, in the sense of a fundamental orthopaedics which dissipates, properly speaking, the sense of psychoanalytic experience
#121

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

**Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses his return from the USA to position psychoanalytic interpretation as radically distinct from both hermeneutics and religious interpretation, grounding this on the advent of science and its relation to the subject of the signifier, while also reflecting on how travel reveals the familiar anew—figured here as Europe's "absolute past" transplanted to America.

After having made use of it in lectures given in America which moreover had a great success, then in a work whose goals are properly speaking goals that are contrary to those which constitute the foundation of psychoanalysis
#122

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.139

**Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses his return from America to make two linked theoretical moves: (1) he defends the radical incompatibility of psychoanalytic interpretation with hermeneutics and religion, grounding it in the subject's relation to the signifier and truth; and (2) he reflects on America as a site of "pure past" – a past that never existed in its supposed origin – as a travel experience that will alter his own discourse going forward.

a work whose goals are properly speaking goals that are contrary to those which constitute the foundation of psychoanalysis
#123

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

Mademoiselle Grazien

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Jones's concept of aphanisis to pivot from a discussion of the o-object's four aspects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) toward the foundational problem of the subject's being, arguing that aphanisis—the fading of the subject behind the signifier—opens the question of how jouissance (irreducibly corporeal) relates to the subject constituted by the "I think/I am" split, a relation Jones gestures toward without being able to theorize.

everything that brings into play... some reference, whatever it may be, to reality or again to the establishment of a better, less distorted, stronger ego, as it is put, all of this only consists in making the paths that analysis has allowed us to imagine, enter into the register of development, in the sense of a fundamental orthopaedics
#124

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.74

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as a structural foreclosure of being—a "rejection" (Verwerfung) that installs the Other in the place of Being—and uses this to ground the psychoanalytic Id not as a "bad ego" or first-person subject but as the grammatical remainder of discourse once "I" is subtracted, thereby articulating alienation as the rejection of the Other rather than capture by it.

that one of my pupils … thought himself obliged to take that path again, holding for a moment to the illusion that it was even a path along which I am supposed to have lead you to formulate it … the psychology of Freud was a psychology in the first person.
#125

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the objet petit a through the golden number equation (1 + o = 1/o), arguing that this mathematical structure captures the objet a's incommensurability with sex, and deploys the unary stroke as the necessary precondition for measurement of the objet a within the locus of the Other, linking metaphor's substitutive logic to the emergence of the sexual subject.

not therefore in any case along the grain of the G.I., the promised prize of becoming a happy swine which seems to Mr Erik Erikson to be a sufficient motive for his cogitations and his labours.
#126

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.217

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a biographical anecdote but a structural-logical condition that "norms" the subject with respect to the sexual act, and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the mediation of a value-function tied to castration — a move that repudiates ego-psychology's proliferation of subjective entities and the concept of primary narcissism.

Does not all of this carry in itself, indeed - as has been done in Anglo Saxon literature for some time - to add in the self, which … nonetheless fails because it only represents … a supplementary entity.
#127

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

Theoretical move: Lacan positions sublimation as the fourth term in a structural table alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out, arguing that sublimation — defined via Freud's *zielgehemmt* — is the conceptual locus for understanding the satisfaction (*Befriedigung*) that underwrites repetition, while simultaneously critiquing ego-psychology's (Hartmann's) energetics framework for inverting and obscuring this problem; he then anchors sublimation's solution in the proposition that the act is a signifier, with the sexual act as the paradigmatic case whose repetition traces the oedipal scene.

the functions of the ego - which in the most improper manner has been posited as being autonomous, even as coming from a different source to what is called, in this confused language, an 'instinctual' source
#128

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.151

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces acting-out as the structural representative of the deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act: because the analytic intervention misreads or inadequately articulates what is at stake (as in Kris's ego-psychological "surface" intervention), the patient enacts/stages what was not properly interpreted, bringing the oral object-a "on a plate." This positions acting-out as the inverse shadow of the analytic act, and advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act is structurally non-sexual yet topologically related to the sexual act via the analytic couch.

following a methodological principle which is the one that ego psychology promotes - intervened in the field of what he calls 'the surface' and that we, for our part, will call the field of an appreciation of reality
#129

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

This does not mean that there is what is called in one or other place, for political needs, this famous 'non-conflictual sphere', for example, an ego that is more or less strong, more or less autonomous
#130

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.151

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

Theoretical move: By introducing the concept of acting-out via the Kris case and the English etymology of 'to act out', Lacan argues that acting-out is a response to an inadequate or failed analytic intervention—specifically, a deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act itself—thereby linking the structure of acting-out to the inexact position of the analytic act relative to repression and the symptom.

following a methodological principle which is the one that ego psychology promotes - intervened in the field of what he calls 'the surface' and that we, for our part, will call the field of an appreciation of reality.
#131

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.217

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.

the bringing into play of a whole population of subjective entities … the ego, the ego ideal, the super ego, the id (ça) even … add in the self, which … only represents … a supplementary entity
#132

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.189

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.

not therefore in any case along the grain of the G.I., the promised prize of becoming a happy swine which seems to Mr Erik Erikson to be a sufficient motive for his cogitations
#133

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.62

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 6: 21 December 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a new logical operation (omega) that is irreducible to standard logical connectives—one where the conjunction of two truths yields the false—and identifies this operation with alienation, deploying it to articulate the distinctive logical structure of the unconscious as the relation between 'I do not think' and 'I am not', which allows a rigorous distinction between resistance and defence.

what is at stake in this indication, is not the hope that all of a sudden, in all human beings, as it is expressed in a verminous language: 'the ego must dislodge the id'
#134

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.129

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > acting-out

Theoretical move: Lacan installs sublimation as the fourth term of a structural quartet (alongside repetition, passage à l'acte, and acting-out), arguing that sublimation names the locus of fundamental satisfaction (Befriedigung) internal to repetition, and that the act is constitutively signifying—a repeating signifier that establishes and restructures the subject, with the sexual act exemplifying this structure by repeating the Oedipal scene.

the functions of the ego - which in the most improper manner has been posited as being autonomous, even as coming from a different source to what is called, in this confused language, an 'instinctual' source…how these completely pure functions of the ego, related to the measure of reality…how can it happen that there can come from what is then elsewhere, the instinctual focus, some…colouring…called, textually, 'the sexualisation of the ego functions'!
#135

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.22

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of 'the act' is constitutively signifying (not merely motor), that its meaning is always retroactively constituted (Nachträglich), and uses a critical reading of a contemporary report on transference and acting-out to distinguish his own theoretical position—that the act is new and unheard-of in its psychoanalytic formulation—from both ego-psychological reductions of transference and naive intersubjective readings of his own Rome Discourse.

a psychoanalyst of the strictest observance - and one very well placed in the American hierarchy - can find nothing better to say to define transference than that it is a mode of defence of the analyst
#136

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.4

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates the concept of the "psychoanalytic act" by distinguishing it from both motor activity/discharge (the physiologising, reflex-arc model favoured by ego-psychological theorists) and from mere action, arguing that an act is constitutively tied to a signifying inscription — and thereby implicates the Subject and the unconscious in a way that demands a wholly different theoretical framework.

I would evoke not just a famous article, but a whole volume written on this by Mr Rappaport, a psychoanalyst of the New York Society.
#137

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.31

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Ego Psychology's normative ideal (Fenichel's "genital character") and Winnicott's object-relations framework to establish that the psychoanalytic act — constitutively tied to the manipulation of transference — is precisely what analysts have most systematically evaded theorising, and that there is no analytic act outside this transference dimension.

I will take an example which is worth what it is worth. But which is worthwhile from the fact that it is typical, and that coming from the pen of a well known author... it is a piece from the classical Mr Fenichel, in as much as the author admits... Fenichel forms part of the basis of this teaching of psychoanalysis in the institutes.
#138

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a triangular mapping of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as cardinal poles to locate the Barred Subject, the unary stroke (first Identification), and the objet petit a, arguing that Truth belongs to the Other/Symbolic, Jouissance to the Real, and Knowledge to the Imaginary—positioning the analyst in the void between them. He then reads Winnicott's transitional object as an inadvertent, incomplete articulation of the objet petit a, showing how object-relations theory approaches but fails to theorize the subject commanded by that object.

There is an article by Erik Erikson on the dream of Irma's injection that is constructed in this way. He enumerates in stages, how there ought to be edified the security of the little chap... to give us a perfectly secure GI.
#139

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.50

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian primary process introduces jouissance as a constitutive dissatisfaction—not reducible to general psychology's satisfaction-seeking—and then maps the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) onto a topological diagram, locating Truth at the Other/Symbolic pole, Jouissance at the Real pole, and Knowledge as an imaginary idealisation, with the barred Subject, the unary stroke (I), and objet petit a as the three projected points, using Winnicott's transitional object as a clinical illustration that points toward—but stops short of—the full concept of the objet petit a as the subject's first object of enjoyment.

to completely reduce the relief of what had been contributed by Freud to what is called the reduction to general psychology, namely, to its abolition.
#140

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.31

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fenichel/Winnicott discussion to distinguish a normative, ego-psychological discourse about psychoanalysis from the analytical act proper, arguing that transference cannot be legitimised by an appeal to the analyst's objectivity but is itself constitutive of analytic practice—and that the analytic act has been systematically eluded, even by Freud's own treatment of parapraxis.

A normal, genital character is an ideal concept, he says himself... the capacity to discharge large quantities of excitation signifies the end of 'reaction formations' and a growth in the capacity to sublimate.
#141

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.4

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates his seminar on the psychoanalytic act by arguing that 'act' cannot be reduced to motor activity or energetic discharge (as in ego-psychology and physiologising theories); rather, the act is constituted by its correlative inscription in the Symbolic order, thereby implicating the subject—and specifically the unconscious—in a way that distinguishes it categorically from mere action or behaviour.

I would evoke not just a famous article, but a whole volume written on this by Mr Rappaport, a psychoanalyst of the New York Society.
#142

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.23

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the act (as distinct from mere motor activity) is constitutively signifying and only achieves its full status nachträglich, while simultaneously critiquing the reduction of transference to an intersubjective relation or a mere defensive concept by ego-psychological and American analytic orthodoxy.

a psychoanalyst of the strictest observance - and one very well placed in the American hierarchy - can find nothing better to say to define transference than that it is a mode of defence of the analyst
#143

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the "Copernican revolution" not as a change of centre but as the discovery that knowledge can be structured without a knowing subject, paralleling Newton's "unthinkable" formula for gravity and Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that escapes consciousness—both pointing to the impossible as the Real; simultaneously he argues that the concept of "revolution" only acquires structural dignity from Marx's discovery of surplus value as foreclosed in the capitalist discourse, and that being itself is born only from the flaw (lack) introduced by the speaking being.

there will be the 'autonomous ego' dragged in straight up by the New York clique despite the Freudian revolution
#144

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

*[A porter appears]*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phallic enjoyment is structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy, and that this exclusion—not biological sexuality—is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about; the repetition compulsion discovered in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is reread as the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance, while surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system that operates in place of prohibited phallic enjoyment.

unless we define it in a rather miserable way, namely, that it is to be like everyone else, which is what the autonomous ego comes down to
#145

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.90

*[A porter appears]*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language uses subjects rather than being used by them — enjoyment is the motor of discourse — and that truth stands in a sisterly relation to forbidden enjoyment, a relation legible only from within the discourse of the Hysteric. He frames this against Sade's theoretical masochism (the second death), Freud's discourse on the unconscious as self-speaking knowledge, and a sustained critique of Ego Psychology as a regression to the discourse of the Master.

the mainspring of analysis is goodness, and that what fortunately has been made evident throughout these years… is in particular the solidity and the glory of a discovery described as the autonomous ego, namely, the conflict free ego.
#146

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.332

XXIII > A, m, a, S > FATHER BEIRNAERT: Why?

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the death drive is not a biological tendency but the mask of the Symbolic order insofar as the Symbolic has not yet been realised — the Symbolic is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, and analysis reveals not the subject's biological reality but the signification of his lot within a received symbolic speech.

This doesn't mean that an allegedly autonomous ego finds support in the ego of the analyst, as Loewenstein writes in a text I won't read you today.
#147

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.165

XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Irma dream to demonstrate that the dream's manifest content—read as a text, not as psychological expression—operates across imaginary and symbolic registers simultaneously, and that desire in the dream oscillates between preconscious and unconscious levels, with the horrifying vision of flesh/formlessness marking the point where anxiety erupts as the Real beneath the imaginary scene.

Erikson then sets up an entire theory of the different stages of the ego, with which I will acquaint you. These psychological diversions are certainly extremely instructive, but to me they seem in truth to go against the very spirit of Freudian theory.
#148

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the schema of the "wall of language" separating the subject (S) from the true big Other (A), distinguishing the imaginary plane of ego/specular other (a/a') from the symbolic plane, and arguing that the Other's capacity to lie—not merely to answer—constitutes the decisive proof of authentic intersubjectivity; this schema also serves as a critique of ego-psychology's imaginary reduction of analytic aims.

the necessity of maintaining the ego's capacity for observation intact... What is advanced as being the aim of analysis is to make it well-rounded, this ego, to give it the spherical shape in which it will have definitively integrated all its disjointed fragmentary states.
#149

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.75

VI

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the seminar discussion of Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' to argue that the compulsion to repeat—and the death instinct Freud derives from it—exceeds and cannot be reduced to the pleasure/homeostasis principle, thereby positioning the unconscious as irreducible to ego-psychology's therapeutic optimism and raising the question of whether psychoanalysis is a humanism.

in the writings of an author like Hartmann, the three terms - principle of constancy, pleasure principle, Nirvana principle - are totally identified... by working on the ego, it was thought that one was working on one of the two halves of the apparatus.
#150

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.79

VI > M. H YPPOLI TE: A lot is.

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery of the death drive marks the decisive rupture with humanism and ego-psychology: where Hegel's phenomenology ends in an "elaborated mastery" grounded in reciprocal alienation, Freud escapes anthropology altogether by establishing that "man isn't entirely in man" — the death instinct is not an abdication of reason but a concept that surpasses the reality principle.

People tell us about the autonomous ego, about the sane part of the ego, about the ego which must be strengthened... You see these two egos, arm in arm, the analyst's ego and that of the subject, in fact subordinated to the other in this so-called alliance.
#151

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.217

B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > XVII

Theoretical move: By weaving together Wiederholungszwang (recast as "repetitive insistence" rather than "automatisme de répétition"), the common discourse of the unconscious, and the proximity of the ego to death, Lacan argues that the ego is not the centre of psychic life but a nodal point of alienation where the symbolic chain and imaginary reality intersect — and that the beyond of the pleasure principle is properly understood as the insistence of symbolic discourse, not organic inertia.

The return to the ego as the centre and common measure is not in any way implied by Freud's discourse. Quite the opposite in fact — the further his discourse advances... the more the ego is shown as a mirage, a sum of identifications.
#152

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.124

THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > IX

Theoretical move: Lacan traces the internal logic of Freud's *Project* schema, showing how the attempt to eliminate consciousness (by grounding the psychic apparatus in homeostasis, facilitation, and hallucination as primary process) necessarily reinstates consciousness-perception as an autonomous corrective system for reality-testing—and that this tension, rather than marking a conversion to psychology, is the continuous unfolding of a single metaphysics that will only be resolved by introducing information and the imaginary.

It is not at all, as Kris would like to have us believe, that Freud 'moved from a mechanistic to a psychological conception, a crass opposition which doesn't mean anything.'
#153

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.55

II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego is not the subject but a particular imaginary object within experience, and that the core of analytic technique requires intervening at the decentred, symbolic level of the subject's history/destiny rather than at the level of the ego — thereby distinguishing genuine analysis from suggestion and from Ego Psychology's reduction of the Freudian discovery.

That is what happened in analysis the day when realising that... people reverted to what is referred to as the analysis of the ego, claiming to find in it the exact inverse of what has to be demonstrated to the subject.
#154

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236

XVIII

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is irreducible to need or instinct and must be brought into existence through naming in the analytic act; resistance belongs to the analyst, not the subject; and the figure of Oedipus at Colonus enacts the Freudian "beyond the pleasure principle" as the point where destiny is fully realized and what remains exceeds any instinctual cycle.

All it takes is to remove the obstacles, and it will work all by itself... He doesn't understand what he is dealing with when he thinks that interpreting is showing the subject that what he desires is this particular sexual object.
#155

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

XII > The dream., of Irma's injection

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a methodological fulcrum to argue that the decentring of the subject in relation to the ego—not ego psychology's developmental synchronisation—is the essential Freudian discovery, and to demonstrate the theoretical stakes of reading the successive, contradictory stages of Freud's thought in their irreducible tension rather than harmonising them.

You will be surprised to see that this culturalism converges quite singularly with a psychologism which consists in understanding the entire analytic text as a function of the various stages in the development of the ego.
#156

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.25

II

Theoretical move: By reading the Meno episode of the slave's geometry lesson, Lacan establishes a structural distinction between the Imaginary (intuitive, reminiscent, formal) and the Symbolic (irreducible, forcing, non-homogeneous with intuition), arguing that the Symbolic cannot be derived from the Imaginary and that this cleavage is the founding move for understanding the ego in Freudian — rather than general psychological — terms.

the attempt at refusion of psychoanalysis with general psychology... unilinear, pre-established individual development, made up of stages each appearing in their turn... is purely and simply the giving up... the negation, properly speaking, even the repression of the essential contribution of analysis
#157

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques ego-psychology-style analytic technique—which aims at imaginary reconstitution of the ego through identification with the analyst's ego—and counter-proposes an analysis oriented toward the big Other, where the analyst functions as an empty mirror so that true speech can traverse the wall of language and the subject can assume its relations of transference with its real Others; "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" is re-read as the subject (S) being called to speak and enter into relation with the real Other.

The perverted inflection which analytic technique has been acquiring for some time is founded on this fact.
#158

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

v > IDOLATRY

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego cannot simply be the inverse of the unconscious system, because the unconscious shows an asymmetrical "insistence" (Wiederholungszwang/repetition compulsion) that exceeds the pleasure-reality principle energetic framework — this asymmetry is the central theoretical discovery of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and it obliges a rethinking of the subject beyond ego-centred consciousness.

Freud's introduction of his new topography has been understood as a return to the good old ego... including Anna Freud's Defence Mechanisms, written ten years later. There was a true liberation, an explosion of joy.
#159

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.47

II > III > Certainly not.

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic register is the indispensable framework for making sense of analytic experience—particularly transference—and that Freud's introduction of the death drive was a strategic move to preserve a dualism (symbolic vs. imaginary/naturalistic) that Lacan identifies as the autonomy of the symbolic; meanwhile, the ego is recast as fundamentally an imaginary function that operates only as symbol within the symbolic order.

They reverted to a confused, unitary, naturalistic conception of man, of the ego, and by the same token of the instincts.
#160

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23

THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Ego Psychology's restoration of the "autonomous ego" as a central given represents a systematic betrayal of Freud's post-1920 metapsychological move, which was designed precisely to maintain the decentring of the subject; reading *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* as the pivotal, primary text of this last metapsychological period is thus indispensable for understanding the death drive and resisting the regression to general psychology.

Mr Hartmann, psychoanalysis's cherub, announces the great news to us, 'so that we can sleep soundly - the existence of the autonomous ego.
#161

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

Theoretical move: Using the Amphitryon/Sosie myth as a clinical allegory, Lacan argues that the ego is constitutively alienated—always encountering its own reflected image rather than attaining desire or the Other—and that this imaginary capture is at its most binding in obsessional neurosis, where ego-reinforcement (as prescribed by ego psychology) only deepens the subject's dispossession.

And isn't chiming in with this to plan to reinforce his ego? to allow it its various drives, its orality, its anality, its later oral stage, and its primary anal stage? to teach him to recognise what he wants.
#162

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology represents a regression to pre-analytical, substantialist notions of the ego, betraying Freud's Copernican decentring of the subject; the Freudian discovery's radical move — that "I is an other," that the subject cannot be equated with the ego — is grounded in the gap between consciousness, the I, and the unconscious.

it tends towards the re-absorption, which is moreover openly admitted, of analytic knowledge within general psychology, which in this instance means pre-analytical psychology
#163

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.6

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976**

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXIV by proposing 'une-bévue' as a superior translation of the Unbewusst, then pivots to argue that the end of analysis is not identification with the analyst or the unconscious but rather 'knowing how to deal with one's symptom' — and grounds this clinical proposition in a topological account of the torus (and its inside-out inversion) as the proper model for the relationship between inside and outside, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

it is translated by psychologie collective, a collection, a collection of pearls no doubt, each person being one of them, even though what is at stake, is to account for the existence in this crowd of something which qualifies itself as ego.
#164

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.157

**X** > **XI** > **On the rejection of a primordial signifier**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis must be approached through structural-explanatory analysis rather than phenomenological understanding, with the unconscious "present but not functioning" in psychosis, and that language phenomena in psychosis are the most theoretically productive site of investigation — grounding the entire analytic enterprise in the irreducibility of language.

psychoanalysis doesn't consist in making thought conscious or in making the ego's defenses less paradoxical, so as to obtain what is rashly called its strengthening.
#165

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.254

**XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental discovery is the primacy of the signifier — the structure of language — as the organizing principle of the unconscious, dreams, symptoms, and the ego, and that the compulsion to repeat is grounded in the insistence of speech; this is what post-Freudian ego psychology has systematically obscured.

This is a complete misrecognition of Freud's teaching. The total personality is precisely what Freud intends to characterize as fundamentally foreign to the function of the ego.
#166

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.94

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Verwerfung (foreclosure) as a logical-prior failure of primitive symbolization—distinct from repression—whereby what is not symbolized reappears in the Real, establishing the foundational distinction between psychosis and neurosis and grounding a critique of the "defense" concept and premature interpretation in analytic technique.

Kris has pressed the right button. It is not enough to press the right button. The subject quite simply acts out.
#167

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.186

**XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dissymmetry of the Oedipus complex between the sexes is not anatomical but fundamentally symbolic: the absence of a signifier for the female sex forces the girl to take a detour through identification with the male (phallic) image, making the phallus as signifier — not as organ — the pivot of sexuation for both sexes; this symbolic lack is what structures neurosis and, specifically, the hysteric's question "What is a woman?"

the theory of the ego currently being promoted in New York circles completely changes the perspective from which the analytic phenomena have to be approached... This effectively ends up placing the ego-to-ego relation in the foreground.
#168

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.247

**XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery belongs irreducibly to the field of the signifier — not to biography, sexuality, or intuition — and that the current deformation of psychoanalysis into ego-orthopedics and object-relations represents a fundamental misrecognition of this literal, deciphering dimension that Freud himself enacted in dream-interpretation.

we have now got to the pure and simple restoration of an orthopedics of the ego, which only a hundred years ago everyone would have laughed at as being the most simplistic question begging.
#169

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.182

**XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

Theoretical move: Through a case of traumatic hysteria (Eisler's 1921 analysis), Lacan argues that hysterical symptoms are not reducible to imaginary or libidinal contents (anal, homosexual) but are formulations of a fundamentally symbolic question—"Am I a man or a woman? Am I capable of procreating?"—thereby grounding neurosis in the subject's failed symbolic identification with a sexed position, and linking this to Dora's question to establish a structural dissymmetry in the Oedipus complex between the sexes.

Eisler is already extremely impressed by the new ego psychology.
#170

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.256

**XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the central question animating all of Freud's work as how the symbolic order — the system of signifiers constituting law, truth, and justice — seizes an animal who has no natural need for it, producing neurotic suffering and guilt; from this he derives the thesis that psychoanalysis must be understood as the science of language inhabited by the subject, fundamentally anti-humanist and anti-egological.

let's make no mistake - psychoanalysis isn't an egology.
#171

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.145

**X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is distinguished from neurosis not by degree of ego pathology but by the structure of testimony to the unconscious (open vs. closed), and that psychoanalysis — unlike ego psychology or the discourse of freedom — operates at the level of discourse's effect on the subject rather than at the level of rational leverage, making psychotics "martyrs of the unconscious" and rendering their condition therapeutically irreducible.

the formula that is sometimes used, carelessly, regarding the way analysis works, namely that our leverage point is the healthy part of the ego
#172

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.344

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index for Seminar III (The Psychoses), listing key terms, proper names, and their page references across the seminar volume.

ego psychology, 166, 173, 196
#173

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.178

**XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

The excessive prevalence of ego psychology in the new American school introduces an illusion similar to that of the mathematician… indefinitely dividing a positive number by two in the hope of finally crossing over the zero line.
#174

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.119

**VIII**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental distinction between neurosis and psychosis lies in the register where the repressed returns: in neurosis it returns *in loco* within the symbolic order (under a mask), while in psychosis it returns *in altero* in the imaginary (without a mask) — and that post-Freudian ego-psychology's reduction of psychosis to ego-defense mechanisms systematically obscures this economic and topographical distinction.

the turn that took place in analysis at around the time of Freud's death led to the rediscovery of this good old ever-lasting center, the ego at the controls, guiding defense.
#175

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.72

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's phobia is not triggered by the discovery of anatomical difference (aphallicism) but by the moment the mother appears as lacking the phallus—that is, as a desiring, castrated subject—thereby demonstrating that what structures the child's entry into the symbolic is the mother's own relation to lack, not the child's imaginary all-powerfulness or ego-reality adjustments.

The environmental theory on which Anna Freud's therapeutics is founded has it that discord sets in to the extent that the ego is more or less informed of reality.
#176

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.420

FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Leonardo essay to develop a structural account of sublimation as the displacement of the radical alterity of the absolute Other into an imaginary relation—a "relation of mirage"—distinguishing this from the ego-psychological account of de-instinctualisation, and situating it through Leonardo's peculiar relationship to Nature as a non-subjective other accessible via imaginary identification.

A de-libidinalisation of libido. A dis-aggressivation of aggressiveness. These are the loveliest terms that we can most commonly find flowering up from the pen of Hartmann or Loewenstein.
#177

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.18

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Lacan contrasts his own structural account of the subject—grounded in the tension between pleasure principle and reality principle, the mirror stage, and the primacy of the unconscious—with the object-relations and ego-psychology tradition (traced through Abraham, 1924) that reduces analytic experience to ego-adaptation, subject-object reciprocity, and the ideal of a "genital" normalisation, arguing that this reduction is fundamentally foreign to Freud's point of departure.

There is no more difference, whether on the dynamic plane or the genetic plane, between the different stages of the ego's progress and the different stages of instinctual progression.
#178

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.30

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object must be theorised across three distinct registers—Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary—and that the psychoanalytic tendency to reduce reality to organic/material substrate misrecognises symbolic Wirklichkeit; Winnicott's transitional object is reinterpreted as belonging to the imaginary register, setting up the distinction between the imaginary object and the fetish that the subsequent elaboration of the three forms of lack of object will require.

psychoanalysts have remained captive to categories that are utterly foreign to everything that their practice ought, in all appearance, to have introduced them to… the organicist postulate, which in the analytic perspective can hold absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
#179

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.52

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that object relations must be structured around the lack of the object, articulated across three distinct registers — castration (symbolic), frustration (imaginary), and privation (real) — and that the re-found object is constitutively marked by a fundamental discordance introduced through diphasic development, against ego-psychological conceptions of the self-sufficient subject who generates his own world.

The analysts of today have been reorganising the analytic experience upon the tier of frustration, while neglecting the notion of castration, which, along with the Oedipus complex, was Freud's original discovery.
#180

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.241

ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phobia should not be reduced to fear or understood as a primitive element of ego-construction; rather, phobia is a structural response to anxiety, erecting a symbolic threshold (Vorbau/Schutzbau) that introduces an interior/exterior articulation into the child's world precisely where anxiety—as objectless—had reigned.

contrary to what has been voiced in the most categorical manner, as the base of his entire doctrine, by someone whom I'm not about to name and who occupies a leadership position in a certain school that is more or less rightfully termed Parisian
#181

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.369

**THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difficulty of accessing sexual desire is located in the gap between the Other's absolute subjectivity (as giver/withholder of love) and its necessary objectification as an object of desire; this gap produces dizziness/nausea, theorized via the Phallus as signifier rather than as image or fantasy, which Lacan proposes as the key rectification over existing (Ego Psychology) technique.

a particular technique concerning obsessional neurosis, and where the phallus as imaginary element plays the dominant role therein.
#182

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.425

**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical practice that reduces the treatment of obsessional neurosis to a two-person relation and ratifies the subject's fantasmatic production at the level of demand rather than desire, showing through detailed case analysis that such indoctrination—centered on the imaginary other and phallic fantasy—produces regression, acting out, and artificial transference effects rather than genuine analytic cure.

a veritable indoctrination, and this raises the problem of the direction of the treatment overall
#183

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.406

**TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's three types of identification onto his schema of need/demand/desire, distinguishing the line of suggestion (identification with the Other's insignia along the demand axis) from the line of transference (a second, properly analytic articulation beyond demand), thereby reframing the transference/suggestion opposition as a topological split within the structure of demand itself.

There are people who imagine that when they carry out a lobotomy they are taking out a slice of the superego.
#184

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.252

IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

Theoretical move: By reading Hamlet against Oedipus through a quasi-algebraic comparison of homologous signifying threads, Lacan establishes that what is structurally decisive in Hamlet is the father's knowing of his own murder — the inversion of the Oedipal unknowing — and that Hamlet's inability to act is indexed by the derangement of his desire, whose barometer is his fantasy relation to Ophelia.

This tends to give these commentaries a vagueness and excessive weight that makes them of little use to us in our experience... people always go straight for superimposed identifications.
#185

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.375

THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "Freudian thing" is desire, and that desire is constitutively incompatible with any harmonistic or adaptive account of human development; against ego-psychological attempts (Glover, Hartmann) to reduce desire to a preparatory stage of reality-adaptation, Lacan proposes to re-situate desire within the synchronic structure of the signifier rather than the diachronic unfolding of the unconscious.

writers try to theorize analysis in the very terms that I said should be avoided because desire does not square with them
#186

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.378

THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.

Hartmann gives full credit to the structuring elements that ego organization brings with it. This ego, he says, has adapted in such a way as to move about efficiently within constituted reality.
#187

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.424

THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

the most mature and 'adult' of objects, as people put it in the sort of blithering drunkenness in which they exalt 'genital desire'
#188

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.489

TOWARD SUBLIMATION

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

correlating this eliminating action with the more or less thought-out notion of 'ego distortion' [distorsion du moi] with reference to what supposedly subsists in the ego that might possibly function as an ally
#189

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.403

IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.

Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.

a major trend in analytic technique is inclined to reduce the subject to reality functions - reality, for certain analysts, seeming not to have to be articulated otherwise than as the world of American lawyers
#190

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.200

THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE > I am going to skip here a little,

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical case analysis to argue that the patient's fundamental fantasy is structured around an "inside-out glove" image — a masturbatory, non-separating envelopment of male and female elements — and that the analyst's (Sharpe's) interpretive errors stem from reducing a complex signifying fantasy to a dyadic, imaginary transference and crude screen-memory reconstruction, thereby missing the structural topology of the subject's desire.

The analyst is essentially focused and centered, with regard to the patient, on the dyadic relation, that of one ego to another.
#191

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.532

449. "Your daughter is mute" > 462. The article I devoted to the case of Andre Gide > 463. Gide's history

Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus chunk (editorial notes and source identifications) for Seminar VI, identifying textual sources for Lacan's references to Spinoza's cupiditas, phallocentrism, a Toulet poem, and Ernst Kris's ego-psychology paper — it performs no independent theoretical argument of its own.

Lacan is referring here to Kris's paper, 'Ego Psychology and Interpretation in Psychoanalytic Therapy'
#192

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

**XIV** > **XXII**

Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must not collapse the distance between analyst and analysand into imaginary fusion; such a collapse (figured as the "joiner" fantasy) leads to psychosis or perversion, and points toward the ethics of analysis being grounded in sublimation and the sublime rather than imaginary incorporation.

it is the desire of the analyst, whose nature the latter misperceives as a result of an inadequate theory of his position
#193

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

**XIV** > **XVI**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

those unformulated, scarcely acknowledged, yet often explicit goals that are expressed in the notion of remaking the subject's ego or of accomplishing through analysis the restructuring of the subject's ego
#194

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

**XI**

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

we must start from the part of the instinct that may be employed for the ends of the ego, for the Ichziele, in order to define sublimation
#195

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

**XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld**

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's account of sublimation as dependent on a synchrony with repression and the Ich/Libidoziele distinction, arguing instead that sublimation must be articulated around das Ding — a primordial, non-object — which precedes the ego's aims and anchors the properly Freudian ethics/aesthetics Lacan is developing throughout Seminar VII.

Those components of the whole that are instinctive emotion and that are held together under the pressure of repression may be sublimated. Thus the particular qualities of these components enable the ego function to be supported through the reinforcement of ego instincts
#196

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.347

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function cannot be theorized neutrally from outside the analytic group, because post-Freudian technique underwent a symptomatic "slippage" in which the ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) was quietly replaced by the ideal ego (ideales Ich) — a displacement that reflects the analyst's own subjective involvement and traces back to the 1920 turning point, where analytic discourse ceased to recognize itself as a discourse bearing on the discourse of the unconscious.

the necessity or gravitational pull that made the analyst's function converge with the analyst's own image of it... theoretically articulated articles clearly state, without any ambiguity whatsoever, that relations between the analysand and the analyst are based on the fact that the analyst has an ego that one can call ideal.
#197

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.157

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

our first effort was to interpret it as pointing toward a dialectic of totalization, to turn it into a flat, round, total object, the only one worthy of us - the spherical object without feet or paws, the other as a whole person
#198

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.348

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**

Theoretical move: Lacan repositions psychoanalytic action as a necessary response to the unconscious/repressed, critiques Ego Psychology as a mass-formation obstacle to analytic efficacy, and begins dismantling the conflation of ideal ego and ego-ideal by grounding both in narcissism as rethought through the mirror stage — thereby clearing space for a renewed account of analytic action and the structure of fantasy.

Ich-Psychologie [ego psychology], which has come to the fore in analytic theory, has for over a decade now been constituting a barrier to and creating inertia for any recommencing of psychoanalytic efficacy.
#199

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.307

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.

We also well aware that we cannot operate as analysts the way Freud did either, Freud having adopted the position of the father... we spend our time telling our patients, 'You take me to be a bad mother,' but that is not the position we must adopt either.
#200

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.329

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the question of transference from countertransference to the analyst's ontological participation ('our being'), then uses this reframing to adjudicate the Kleinian (analyst as object) versus Anna Freudian/ego-psychological (analyst as subject, therapeutic alliance) poles, before pivoting to myth as the structural category that underlies psychoanalytic fate—the analysand's quest for what he calls his 'destiny'—and links it to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◇ a).

It is characteristic of the school of Hartmann and his associates to even conceptualize the ego as including elements that are, in the final analysis, irreducible and uninterpretable.
#201

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.281

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**

Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.

We see, for example, people formulating the 'genital character' of the end of an analysis, assimilating our goals to the pure and simple removal of impasses that they identify with the pregenital stage.
#202

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.293

*Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

this simply cacophonous chorus that one can call theoretical discussion in the American Psychoanalytic Society... it is obvious that it would be a little extreme to allow themselves... to reject what really coincides moreover with the ideals, with the practices, of what is called a particular cultural space
#203

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.51

II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

Alas, is it up to the psychoanalyst to repress the fundamental perverseness of human desire into the hell of the pre-genital because it is connoted with affective regression?… the sole result is to camouflage the far more complex sequences, whose richness and singularity alike seem to be strangely eclipsed in a certain orthopedic utilization of analysis.
#204

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.15

I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.

the ego, considered to be a function both of synthesis and of integration; consciousness considered to be the culmination of life; evolution considered to be the pathway by which the universe of consciousness comes into being
#205

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.94

Translator's Notes

Theoretical move: This passage is a translator's notes section providing bibliographic references, terminological clarifications, and contextual annotations for Lacan's "Triumph of Religion" text; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

On 'genetic psychoanalysis,' see H. Hartmann and E. Kris, 'The Genetic Approach in Psychoanalysis'... see Lacan's comments on it in Ecrits
#206

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.161

The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the psychoanalytic subject is objectively indeterminate (not merely vaguely described), and uses the need/demand/desire triad to theorize how democracy itself hystericizes the subject by structuring its relation to an impotent (unvermögender) Other—a relation that sustains demand precisely through the Other's failure to deliver, while American pluralism forecloses the radical difference psychoanalysis defends by clinging to belief in a consistent Other of the Other.

Lacan's systematic assault on American ego psychology and, beyond this, the 'American way of life' is mounted in defense of a different notion of difference.
#207

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.136

Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject is not an external cause of social failure but is structurally constituted by and as that failure—exemplified by Frankenstein's monster as the embodiment of a failed invention—and that the proper psychoanalytic response to the Real is to circumscribe its unbridgeability (via symbolic negation/repudiation), not to foreclose it through historicist chains of signification.

Rather than focus on all the broad and basic differences between Lacanian psychoanalysis and ego psychology, however, let us note that Lacan chose to derogate Erikson's interpretation of Freud's dream with the term culturalist.
#208

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.125

**Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

Lacan's understanding of this space as symbolic reality in its function as shield against the traumatic real… would make no sense at all to Erikson for whom reality is that into which the healthy ego is integrated.
#209

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.151

**The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that American democracy structurally hystericizes the subject by generating a demand for an *unvermögender* (impotent/incapable) Other whose very failure to deliver accreditation preserves the subject's singularity; this diagnosis is grounded in the tripartite distinction of need/demand/desire and the logic of love (giving what one does not have), and culminates in a critique of the American suppression of the Real excess within the law itself.

Lacan's systematic assault on American ego psychology and, beyond this, the 'American way of life' is mounted in defense of a different notion of difference.
#210

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.12

Introduction Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

Theoretical move: Boothby positions Lacan's "return to Freud" as a theoretically ambitious refounding of psychoanalysis through three cardinal registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), a radical critique of Ego Psychology's adaptation model, and an insistence that the signifier—not the ego—determines the subject, with the Other as the ultimate horizon of desire.

Lacan's innovative categories, particularly his conception of the imaginary ego, serve to mark a sharp departure from the prevailing interpretation of Freud's theory, especially in the United States, informed by 'ego psychology.'
#211

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.278

Chapter 5 Figurations of the *Objet a* > How the Real World Became a Phantasy

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is the structural condition of both love and reality-testing: it is the paradoxical lost object that simultaneously grounds erotic desire (as what the beloved signifies but does not possess) and the sense of reality (as the constitutive lack that prevents absolute certainty), thereby recasting the Freudian reality principle in genuinely radical terms against ego-psychological adaptation models.

This notion, or something very like it, underlies the stress on adaptation to reality championed by the school of ego psychology toward which Lacan remained so polemically opposed.
#212

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

Index

Theoretical move: This is a partial index (letter "E") from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive bibliographic apparatus listing page references for concepts and proper names, with no theoretical argument advanced in the passage itself.

Ego psychology 12, 278
#213

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.145

Chapter 3 The Freudian Dialectic > Imaginary Alienation

Theoretical move: Imaginary alienation is constitutive of the ego itself—not merely a social effect—because the mirror-stage form positively excludes pulsional energies and splits the subject from its own desire; the Symbolic (speech, the signifier) is what mediates and partially counters this primary self-alienation, repositioning Freud's ego/id dichotomy as an ego/subject split grounded in the signifier rather than in vitalist biology.

The first part of the answer lies in Lacan's polemic against the ego psychological tradition that centers the personality upon the ego and equates the adaptive functions of the ego with the 'self'
#214

The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.76

Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

Theoretical move: Comedy's structural logic consists in the "impossible articulation" of two mutually exclusive realities within one frame—not simply exposing the Real of what happened, but staging the structural Real whose suppression constitutes ordinary reality's coherence; this is distinguished from irony by comedy's capacity to produce a "concrete universal" (singular universality) that includes the infinite within the finite, and is further illuminated by the Freudian/Lacanian split between ego and id as the engine of comic incongruity.

the predominant ideological tendency of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, preoccupied, at the time, with two main themes: the theme of an autonomous ego and the theme of happiness
#215

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.86

**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation, Separation, and the Traversing of Fantasy in the Analytic Setting**

Theoretical move: The analytic setting operationalizes alienation and separation as clinical techniques: the analyst's enigmatic desire disrupts the analysand's fantasy ($ ◇ a), while the Freudian injunction "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" frames the Lacanian subject as ethically tasked with subjectifying the otherness of primal repression — making the subject appear where the drive/Other once dominated.

could lead, if left at that, to a kind of solution a la American ego psychology, the analysand identifying with the analyst as Other.
#216

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.14

**THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

the roles the analyst must avoid (those of imaginary other and of judgmental, all-knowing Other implicit in ego psychology approaches)
#217

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.56

**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Is Not the "Individual" or Conscious Subject of Anglo-American Philosophy**

Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the Lacanian subject from both the ego (as theorized in ego psychology) and the conscious subject of analytic philosophy, arguing that the ego is a narcissistic construct of crystallized ideal images whose very nature is distortion and error — making it precisely what the Lacanian subject is NOT.

The consciously thinking subject is, by and large, indistinguishable from the ego as understood in the school of ego psychology, which is prevalent in the same countries in which analytic philosophy predominates.
#218

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.81

**The Lacanian Subject** > **A Further Separation: The Traversing of Fantasy**

Theoretical move: The traversing of fantasy is theorized as a "further separation" in which the alienated subject paradoxically assumes its own traumatic cause—the Other's desire that produced it as split subject—thereby subjectifying jouissance and relocating from the position of effect to that of cause, in contrast to the Ego Psychology solution of identification with the analyst.

the analysand is to take the analyst's strong ego as a model by which to shore up his or her own weak ego, an analysis coming to a successful end if the analysand is able to sufficiently identify with the analyst.
#219

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

**Index**

Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

Ego psychology, 36, 62, 67
#220

The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.75

Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

Theoretical move: Comedy's deepest operation is not the exposure of a hidden "real" behind appearances but the impossible joint articulation of two mutually exclusive realities within a single frame—a "concrete universal" that includes the infinite within the finite, distinct from irony's mere pointing to the gap between universal statement and particular enunciation. This structure is further illuminated by the Lacanian split between Ego and Id/jouissance, where satisfaction follows its own autonomous logic indifferent to the subject.

Lacan first points out that nobody actually knows what this happiness would be, except if one takes it to mean 'to be like everybody else'—which, he goes on, is precisely the meaning of the celebrated 'autonomous ego'