Intersubjectivity
ELI5
Intersubjectivity is the idea that two people are genuinely connected through language and can really affect each other — but Lacan gradually argues this idea is misleading because it assumes people relate to each other as equals, when actually something much stranger and more unequal is going on.
Definition
Intersubjectivity, in Lacan's corpus, names the structural field within which two subjects are constituted in and through their relation — but its theoretical career is marked by a progressive critique and displacement rather than straightforward endorsement. In the early seminars, intersubjectivity designates the founding medium of the analytic situation: speech is what constitutes and retroactively modifies both subjects of the relation, grounding transference not in affective states but in the symbolic act of address. At this stage, intersubjectivity is opposed to the imaginary plane of the ego — where the other is captured as a mirror-object in narcissistic rivalry — and is identified instead with the symbolic dimension in which the subject can lie, can address an Other who is genuinely other, and can be constituted by a discourse that precedes and exceeds any individual consciousness. The capacity of the subject to lie — not merely to answer — is precisely what marks the authentically symbolic (rather than imaginary) register of intersubjectivity.
However, Lacan increasingly subjects the term to reservation and finally to outright critique. By Seminar VIII, the notion of intersubjectivity is explicitly rejected as the adequate framework for transference, on the grounds that it fails to account for constitutive disparity — the non-reciprocal, asymmetrical structure of the analytic relation. And in Seminar XIV, intersubjectivity is diagnosed as complicit with psychology's ideological illusion of "reciprocity," as a concept that keeps the subject within the order of the imaginary ego-dyad and obscures the barred Other as the genuine locus of speech. The term thus traces a Lacanian arc from provisional theoretical instrument to symptom of the very misconception it was meant to overcome.
Place in the corpus
Intersubjectivity appears across multiple seminars as a concept that is mobilised, qualified, and ultimately superseded. In jacques-lacan-seminar-1 and jacques-lacan-seminar-2, it functions as a positive marker for the Symbolic register: the relation grounded in speech (as distinct from the Imaginary dyad of ego and specular other) constitutes what might genuinely be called intersubjective. At this stage it is intertwined with the concept of the big Other — the locus of speech that precedes any individual subject — and with Language as the constitutive medium through which subjects are retroactively formed. In jacques-lacan-seminar-2 (p.252), the Other's capacity to lie is presented as the proof of authentic intersubjectivity, linking it directly to the asymmetry and unpredictability of the Symbolic rather than the imaginary's specular closure.
By jacques-lacan-seminar-5 and jacques-lacan-seminar-8, the concept is progressively hollowed out: in Seminar V it is identified as inherently ambiguous, liable to slip back into an imaginary objectification of the other; in Seminar VIII the concept is explicitly rejected as inadequate to transference because it presupposes symmetry and reciprocity where there is only disparity. The terminus is jacques-lacan-seminar-14 and jacques-lacan-seminar-14-1, where intersubjectivity is diagnosed as the "rampart of oversight" in psychology — the concept that naturalises the imaginary ego-dyad and prevents access to the Unconscious as structured by the barred Other. The concept thus functions in Lacan's corpus not as a stable theoretical anchor but as a term whose progressive abandonment enacts the shift from a phenomenological-Hegelian frame (mutual recognition between subjects) toward the properly Lacanian topology of the split Subject, the barred Other, and the non-relational Real.
Key formulations
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) (p.105)
The term intersubjectivity - with the equivocation that it keeps in the psychological order… the status of reciprocity, the rampart of everything that in psychology, is best designed to ground every oversight about psychic development
The phrase "rampart of everything… best designed to ground every oversight" is theoretically explosive: it does not merely criticise intersubjectivity as imprecise but indicts it as structurally productive of blindness — a "rampart," a fortification, that actively shields psychology from its own constitutive misconceptions. "The status of reciprocity" names exactly what Lacan rejects: the assumption that two subjects stand in a symmetrical, mutually recognising relation, which conceals the asymmetry of the barred Other and the non-reciprocal structure of desire.
Cited examples
This is a 12-occurrence concept; the corpus extractions did not surface a curated illustrative example. See the source page(s) above for the surrounding argument and the cross-referenced canonical concepts for their cited examples.
Tensions
This is a 12-occurrence concept; intra-corpus tensions and cross-framework comparative analysis are reserved for canonical-level coverage. See the cross-referenced canonical concepts for those layers.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (13)
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#01
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_96"></span>**intersubjectivity**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of intersubjectivity undergoes a theoretical reversal: initially (1953) a positive term marking the transindividual, symbolic dimension of speech in psychoanalysis, it becomes by 1960 a negative term associated with imaginary reciprocity and the dual relationship, ultimately displaced by the logic of transference.
the locutor is constituted in it as intersubjectivity… the term 'intersubjectivity' thus possesses, at this point in Lacan's work, a positive value, since it draws attention to the importance of language in psychoanalysis and emphasises the fact that the unconscious is 'transindividual'.
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#02
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.275
xxn > The concept of analysis > **Wbe-faas any questions?**
Theoretical move: Lacan dismantles the affective/intellectual opposition as analytically useless, grounds transference in the action of speech as the founding medium of intersubjective relations, and distinguishes narcissistic (imaginary) love—the desire to capture the other as object—from active (symbolic) love directed at the other's being.
Speech is the founding medium of the intersubjective relation, and what retroactively modifies the two subjects.
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#03
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.105
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *cogito ergo Es* to reframe the Freudian *Es* (Id) not as a variant ego but as a function grounded in the barred Other, arguing that the real Freudian discovery is an *object* (not a thought-system) whose status is identical with structure insofar as structure is real — illustrated topologically by the Möbius strip transforming into a torus.
The term intersubjectivity - with the equivocation that it keeps in the psychological order… the status of reciprocity, the rampart of everything that in psychology, is best designed to ground every oversight about psychic development
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#04
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.106
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses an interrupted seminar session (deferred by a strike and Jakobson's presence) to sketch the theoretical stakes of the year's work on the *Logic of the Fantasy*: the Es/Unconscious cannot be substantified as an "outlaw ego"; its proper status must be derived from the barred Other as locus of speech, while topology (Möbius strip → torus) is introduced as a demonstration that structure is real, not metaphorical—culminating in the question of what authorises a teaching addressed to analysts who do not yet exist.
The term *intersubjectivity* undoubtedly still prowls around, and will prowl for a long time... It was never without accompanying it with some reservations... that I made use of this term of intersubjectivity.
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#05
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189
B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the game of even and odd—first analysed through imaginary intersubjectivity (ego-mirroring, temporal oscillation between first, second, third positions) and then through the confrontation with the machine—to demonstrate that the symbolic order, not imaginary identification, is the proper ground for logical reasoning; the machine forces a passage from imaginary intersubjectivity to the combinatory of language, and the detour through Freud's random number shows that the unconscious is itself a symbolic machine where chance does not exist.
even this method already presupposes the dimension of intersubjectivity, in that the subject has to know that he is faced with another subject, in principle homogeneous with him.
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#06
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227
B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > XVII
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's reality is constituted not by the brute real but by the emergence of the symbolic order, which structures even somatic reactions, obsessional alienation, and intersubjective experience — the real only becomes effective for the subject at the junction where symbolic "tables of presence" organise it.
in the register of intersubjectivity within which our entire experience is to be located. Do we ever reach as simple a real as those limitations of individual capacities which the various psychologies aim to attain?
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#07
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.252
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.
we think there are subjects other than us, that authentically intersubjective relations exist. We would have no reason to think that if we didn't have the testimony of the characterising feature of intersubjectivity, that is, that the subject can lie to us.
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#08
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284
XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar discussion and the apologue of the Martian to sharpen the distinction between language (as an impersonal, geometrical, polysemantic system) and speech (as a perspectival, founding, revelatory act), culminating in the thesis that the subject is not merely an agent of language but is always-already inscribed in it as a "message" — determined by a universal concrete discourse prior to birth.
If we immediately take up our place in the game of the diverse intersubjectivities, that's because we are in our place anywhere. The world of language is possible in so far as we have our place in it anywhere.
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#09
Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.59
II > A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness
Theoretical move: Lacan advances a "materialist definition" of consciousness by stripping it of its anthropocentric primacy: consciousness is not a privileged interiority but a surface-effect (like a mirror or a lake's reflection) producible by any bi-univocal correspondence between two points in real or imaginary space, thereby displacing the ego from the centre of experience and grounding subjectivity in the symbolic order rather than in self-transparent awareness.
it eliminates the intersubjective relation, which is the foundation not only of behaviour, but of actions and of passions. That has nothing to do with consciousness.
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#10
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.453
FAREWELL > AUSTRIA-HUNGARY > XXIII 'Me donnera sans femme une progéniture9 > XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar IV, listing names, concepts, and bibliographic references with page numbers; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.
intersubjectivity 75, 77, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125, 126, 145, 174, 187, 193, 197, 235, 251, 263, 266, 274, 288, 385-6
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#11
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.103
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other is not merely an intersubjective correlate but the structural locus where the "bit-of-sense" is transformed into the "step-of-sense" through a signifying chain that introduces an irreducible remainder (heterogeneity), thereby displacing the Cartesian cogito and grounding the unconscious as the signifier-in-action that thinks in the subject according to its own laws.
This is also what, in this case, leaves something ambiguous in the notion of intersubjectivity, which, having briefly emerged from the opposition between two subjects, as it were, is liable to disappear again in an attempt at objectification.
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#12
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.17
**Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.
'disparity' implies that I reject the idea that intersubjectivity alone can furnish the framework within which the phenomenon of transference is situated.
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#13
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.262
The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **Hollowed, Stuffed, and Leaning Together**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that empty speech, as the foundational medium of analytic intersubjectivity, is structurally complicit in the patient's resistance: it traps analyst and analysand alike in an imaginary ego-other dyad mediated by an ideological "objective system," converting the transformative potential of full speech into false communication and reducing analytic experience to an ideological apparatus.
Lacan refers to this foundational sense of community as intersubjectivity... the speaker [locuteur] is constituted in it as intersubjectivity.