Canonical lacan 20 occurrences

La Passe

ELI5

The pass is Lacan's special procedure where someone who has finished their own psychoanalysis explains their experience to two intermediaries, who then report to a committee — testing whether the inner change that made them want to become an analyst can actually be passed on to others, or whether it remains something only that one person lived through.

Definition

La Passe (the Pass) is Lacan's institutional and theoretical procedure for certifying the end of analysis and the transition from analysand to analyst, formalized in the "Proposition of 9 October 1967." Structurally, it names the moment when an analysand who has traversed the fundamental fantasy and confronted the objet petit a as cause of desire undergoes a "leap" into the position of analyst — a leap that is not automatic, gradual, or institutionally guaranteed but constitutes a genuine act of self-authorization. In Lacan's Seminar 11 preface, the pass is defined as the voluntary "putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test," explicitly withheld from universal imposition; it attests to the lying structure of truth and to the analysand's peculiar desire to take up the analyst's function. Procedurally (as described by Fink), the passant (the candidate) recounts their analysis to two passeurs, who in turn relay it to a Cartel de la passe — a relay structure designed to capture what is transmissible about the analytic process independently of the analysand's own testimony.

Theoretically, la passe condenses several of Lacan's most consequential theses. It is the site where the "fault in the subject supposed to know" becomes manifest: the analysand who has completed the work of analysis has, in that very completion, liquidated their positive transference and therefore knows something about the analyst-position that makes the desire to occupy it paradoxical. The pass tests whether this subjective dismissal (destitution subjective) — the evacuating of the objet a that has served as cause of desire — can nonetheless be transmitted as knowledge about truth. In the later seminars, Lacan extends the problem topologically: the passant occupies the locus of S(Ø), the signifier of the barred Other, but cannot, from within that position, say the locus from which they speak. This is why the pass is described as perpetually failing or "always to be recommenced, like the sea": its essential transmission cannot be borne by a speaking subject alone but requires a topological writing as genuine Passer.

Evolution

La passe first appears as an institutional-political concept in the "Proposition of 9 October 1967," which Lacan retroactively linked to his 1956 essay on psychoanalytic training (derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule). At this stage, the pass addresses a concrete institutional problem: how to certify the analyst within a Lacanian school without falling back onto hierarchical rubber-stamping or the mere accumulation of credentials. Lacan's insistence that "the analyst hystorizes only from himself" — that no hierarchy can truly confer the analyst's name — is already the theoretical nerve of the procedure.

In the object-a period (Seminars 15 and the Seminar 11 preface), la passe is theorized more rigorously as the structural hinge of the psychoanalytic act itself. Seminar 15 (jacques-lacan-seminar-15, jacques-lacan-seminar-15-1) characterizes it as the "elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst," an act that "dismisses the very subject it establishes" — meaning that the subjective destitution undergone at the end of analysis is constitutive of, not merely preparatory for, the analyst-function. In the Seminar 11 preface (jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1), Lacan explicitly refuses to impose the pass universally and frames it as a test of whether "hystorization" — the singular narrativization of one's desire — can be transmitted. The fault that the pass exposes is located in the Subject Supposed to Know: having liquidated transference, the analysand confronts the impossibility of the analytic position they are about to take up.

In the topology-Borromean period (Seminar 24, jacques-lacan-seminar-24), the problem deepens. Alain Didier Weill's intervention (introduced with Lacan's endorsement) argues that the pass fails not because candidates are unprepared but because no speaking subject — the passant — can occupy the locus S(Ø) and simultaneously bear witness to it. The topology of enunciation exceeds any individual testimony. The "jury d'agrément" cannot receive the locus because it cannot be said as such; only a topological writing — not a speaking passant — could function as genuine Passer. This move radicalizes the pass from an institutional procedure into a structural aporia about the transmissibility of analytic experience.

In secondary literature, Fink (the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink) frames the pass primarily as part of Lacan's broader search for a scientificity proper to psychoanalysis — a "generic procedure" in Badiou's sense, designed to gather transmissible knowledge about analysis independently of the analyst's self-report. Zupančič (the-shortest-shadow-nietzsche-alenka-zupancic) uses the pass to illustrate the Lacanian thesis that truth has the structure of fiction: the pass tests whether knowledge about truth can travel through symbolic transmission independent of the subject's lived experience.

Key formulations

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.9)

I have therefore designated as a 'pass' that putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test, while refraining from imposing this pass on all

This is Lacan's own compressed definition of la passe in the Seminar 11 preface: it is a voluntary, non-universal test of whether the analysand's singular hystorization of desire can be transmitted as testimony, not a bureaucratic requirement.

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic ActJacques Lacan · 1967 (p.110)

to explore what is involved in this leap that I have called the pass (la passe). Until we have looked at it more closely, there is nothing more to be said about it, except that it is, very precisely, a leap.

Lacan's characterization of la passe as a structurally untheorized 'leap' is pivotal: it marks the transition from analysand to analyst as something irreducible to gradual training or institutional verification, a discontinuous act.

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1967 (p.199)

Subjective dismissal is not any the less in prohibiting this pass because it must, like the sea, always be recommenced.

This formulation ties la passe to subjective destitution and to structural incompleteness: the pass is never definitively achieved but must perpetually be recommenced, revealing that the analyst's position is constitutively without ground.

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourreJacques Lacan · 1976 (p.80)

Bozef therefore, at S(Ø) is in the position of being a Passer, but he is not in the position of bearing witness from where he is passing.

This late topological formulation identifies the fundamental limit of the pass procedure: the passant cannot testify to the locus of their own enunciation, making any transmission of the analytic experience structurally incomplete.

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and JouissanceBruce Fink · 1995 (p.164)

The pass is a process wherein someone who has gone through analysis talks about his or her analysis in detail with two other people (passeurs) who in turn report on what they have heard to a committee (Cartel de la passe).

Fink provides the clearest procedural description of la passe in the corpus, situating it as an institutional mechanism for establishing a transmissible, 'scientific' knowledge of the analytic process.

Cited examples

Hamlet's play-within-the-play ('The Mousetrap') in Olivier's film adaptation (film)

Cited by The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the TwoAlenka Zupančič · 2003 (p.125). Zupančič invokes the structure of the play-within-the-play — truth passing through fictional staging to 'nail' the king — as an analogue for la passe's logic: just as the theatrical fiction transmits a truth that direct accusation could not, the pass tests whether analytic truth can be transmitted through symbolic relay independent of the subject's direct experience. The camera's pendulum-like motion, decentering toward King Claudius, illustrates how truth 'finds its center' only obliquely, through the structural relay of gazes.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether la passe is a viable institutional procedure for transmitting analytic knowledge, or whether it is structurally doomed to fail because the passant cannot occupy and simultaneously testify to the locus from which they speak.

Fink (the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink): The pass is a workable 'generic procedure' that gathers transmissible knowledge about the analytic process independently of the analyst's self-report, part of Lacan's project of establishing a scientificity proper to psychoanalysis. — cite: the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink p.164
Alain Didier Weill, endorsed by Lacan (jacques-lacan-seminar-24): The jury d'agrément fails because the passant, situated at S(Ø), cannot transmit the locus of their enunciation; only a topological writing (not a speaking subject) can serve as genuine Passer — making the pass structurally incomplete in its current form. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-24 p.80

The tension is between a pragmatic-institutional reading of the pass (transmissibility through relay) and a topological-aporic reading (the locus of enunciation cannot be said and therefore cannot be transmitted by any passant).

Whether the pass should be universally imposed as a condition of becoming an analyst, or whether its non-universality is constitutive of its meaning.

Lacan in the Seminar 11 preface (jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1): The pass is explicitly defined by the gesture of 'refraining from imposing this pass on all' — its voluntary, singular character is essential to what it tests. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p.9
Lacan in Seminar 19a (jacques-lacan-seminar-19a): When Lacan says 'the passe is failed, that does not mean that they have not presented themselves to the experience of the passe,' he implies the pass is a standard procedure to which analysts do present themselves, and its failure is measured against what it is supposed to certify — implying a more normative institutional framing. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-19a p.125

This is a tension internal to Lacan's own development: between the pass as a radically voluntary, non-imposable test and the pass as an institutional procedure whose successes and failures can be evaluated.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: La passe is premised on the irreducibility of subjective destitution: the end of analysis cannot be certified by the analyst's adaptation to reality or by ego-strengthening. The transition to analyst-position is a structural leap conditioned by the traversal of fantasy and the evacuation of the objet a, not by the accumulation of clinical competence or character normalization.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology locates the end of analysis in the strengthening of the ego, the resolution of conflict, and the candidate's ability to maintain a stable therapeutic alliance. The training analyst's report on the candidate's character and ego-resilience — not a procedure like the pass — is the primary certification mechanism. Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein would regard the pass as bypassing the systematic assessment of ego functioning.

Fault line: The deep disagreement is whether analytic termination is a matter of ego consolidation and adaptive capacity (ego psychology) or of structural traversal of the fantasy and radical self-dispossession (Lacan) — two incompatible conceptions of what analysis is for.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: Lacanian theory holds that there is no pre-given authentic self to be actualized; the analyst's position is reached through subjective destitution — the stripping away of imaginary self-consistency — not through the fulfilment of human potential. La passe tests precisely whether the fiction of a self-knowing subject has been dismantled.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic approaches (Rogers, Maslow) frame the goal of therapeutic work as the movement toward greater self-actualization, authenticity, and congruence. The idea of a 'pass' — an external institutional certification of inner change — would be seen as antithetical to the self-directed nature of growth; the individual's own felt sense of development is privileged over committee adjudication.

Fault line: The core tension is whether psychic transformation is self-authorizing and oriented toward plenitude (humanistic) or whether it is precisely the collapse of self-authorization and the encounter with structural lack that marks genuine analytic work (Lacan).

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Lacan's pass procedure is designed to resist the institutionalization of psychoanalysis as a profession that reproduces social conformity; the analyst 'hystorizes only from himself' and the pass tests singular desire, not normative social integration. The fault in the Subject Supposed to Know is endemic to all institutions, including psychoanalytic ones.

Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School thinkers (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) would contextualize psychoanalytic training within the critique of the culture industry and of administered society. The pass, as an institutional committee procedure, could be read as an example of how even radical forms become bureaucratized and reabsorbed into instrumental rationality, reproducing authority structures under the guise of clinical legitimacy.

Fault line: The disagreement concerns whether institutional procedures like the pass are capable of resisting ideological co-optation, or whether the very form of certification necessarily reinstalls the authority it claims to bypass — a tension between Lacan's faith in the structural logic of the procedure and the Frankfurt School's suspicion of any institutionalized form.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (20)

#01

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) > Context

Theoretical move: This passage is a contextual/editorial introduction to Lacan's 1956 essay on psychoanalytic training, situating its historical significance and its relation to Lacan's later 'Proposition of 9 October 1967' on *la passe*; it is primarily bibliographic and contextual rather than a substantive theoretical argument.

whenever Lacanian psychoanalysts discuss the controversial procedure of "la passe" (the nomination of psychoanalysts within Lacanian schools) they refer to the "Proposition of 9 October 1967"
#02

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **desire of the analyst**

Theoretical move: The passage articulates a constitutive ambiguity in Lacan's concept of the desire of the analyst: on one side, it functions as an enigmatic attributed desire that engines the analytic process by sustaining the Che vuoi? question; on the other, it names a properly analytic desire oriented not toward identification or cure but toward 'absolute difference', situating it at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis and requiring a training analysis to constitute it.

According to Lacan, this can only occur by means of a training analysis. The essential requirement, the condition sine qua non for becoming an analyst, is to undergo analytic treatment oneself.
#03

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***E*** > **end of analysis**

Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's evolving formulations of the 'end of analysis' across his teaching, arguing that the end-point is a logical terminus defined by subjective destitution, traversal of fantasy, and identification with the sinthome—not therapeutic cure, ego-strengthening, or identification with the analyst—and that it always involves the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and the reduction of the analyst to objet petit a.

In 1967, Lacan introduced the procedure of the PASS as a means of testifying to the end of one's analysis.
#04

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.

The pass was instituted by Lacan in 1967 as a means of verifying the end of analysis, and constitutes the most original feature of the EFP.
#05

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **pass**

Theoretical move: The passage defines and contextualises Lacan's institutional procedure of 'the pass' (la passe), arguing that it operationalises the principle that the end of analysis must be articulable in language and extractable as knowledge (savoir), thereby serving a teaching rather than clinical function.

The procedure was called 'the pass' and was essentially an institutional framework designed to allow people to testify to the end of their analysis.
#06

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***C*** > **captation**

Theoretical move: The passage defines two institutional/conceptual terms: 'captation' as a term for the imaginary dual power of the specular image (captivation and capture), and 'cartel' as the small-group organizational unit Lacan designed to structure psychoanalytic training and research while resisting institutional massification.

Although participation in cartels plays an important part in the training (formation) of Lacanian analysts, membership of cartels is not restricted to members of the school.
#07

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.

The specific organisational structures on which Lacan organised his own school, such as the cartel and the pass, were aimed at ensuring that this school did not repeat these errors of the IPA.
#08

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **training**

Theoretical move: Lacan abolishes the IPA distinction between therapeutic and training analysis, arguing that all analyses are potentially training analyses, and that the formation of the analyst is an ongoing, subject-transforming process irreducible to institutional certification.

the culmination of that process is not the removal of symptoms but the passage from analysand to analyst (see END OF ANALYSIS).
#09

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.9

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), articulates the lying structure of truth, anchors the analyst's position in the hystorization of desire rather than institutional validation, and grounds the pass-procedure in the object as cause of desire and the real as the 'lack of lack.'

I have therefore designated as a 'pass' that putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test, while refraining from imposing this pass on all
#10

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.199

**Annex 3**

Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

the elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst... Subjective dismissal is not any the less in prohibiting this pass because it must, like the sea, always be recommenced.
#11

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act has a two-stage language-effect structure culminating in the analyst's self-institution as the rejected object (objet petit a), and that the leap from analysand to analyst (la passe) is systematically concealed by the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis, which preserves an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know in place of genuine interrogation.

to explore what is involved in this leap that I have called the pass (la passe). Until we have looked at it more closely, there is nothing more to be said about it, except that it is, very precisely, a leap.
#12

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.110

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is theorised as a double language-effect in which the analysand's completion of analysis and the analyst's self-institution as psychoanalyst (the "pass") are structurally inseparable; the act's strangest consequence is that the subject who takes the analyst's position recognises himself as caused—in his division—by the rejected object (objet a), and the uninterrogated leap of this consecration is systematically concealed by analytic institutions that preserve an unquestioned Subject Supposed to Know.

to explore what is involved in this leap that I have called the pass *(la passe).* Until we have looked at it more closely, there is nothing more to be said about it, except that it is, very precisely, a leap.
#13

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.125

The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

Theoretical move: Lacan situates the psychoanalyst's complex, horror-laden relationship to knowledge as the central theoretical problem, arguing that the discourse of the analyst places its practitioner in a structurally difficult position where knowledge about truth—mapped onto the four-discourse schema—is simultaneously perceived and repudiated, with foreclosure (Verwerfung) operating not only in psychosis but as a rationally legitimated social force.

when I say that the passe is failed, that does not mean that they have not presented themselves to the experience of the passe.
#14

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.62

So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topological figures (flattening of the Borromean knot) to generate the Real/Imaginary distinction, then cedes the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who constructs a multi-stage circuit using the Graph of Desire and the Purloined Letter schema to theorise the *Passe* as a process by which successive inversions of knowledge between subject (Bozef) and Other (the King) propel the subject through positions of innocence, duplicity, and finally radical exposure before the Other.

Can we say that I am going to talk about the Passe?... I think I have eventually found what could account for a topological montage which does not exist and which would account for the fact that the jury d'agrement perhaps does not manage to use
#15

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.80

So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Passe cannot be transmitted by a speaking subject alone (the *passant*) because the locus of enunciating from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said; only a topological writing—a graphical arrangement that articulates the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible way—can function as the true Passer, which is why Lacan's seminars and graphs perpetually recreate the conditions of division.

Bozef therefore, at S(Ø) is in the position of being a Passer, but he is not in the position of bearing witness from where he is passing.
#16

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.172

Silence

Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

This is one way of looking at what Lacan called la passe as the outcome of analysis: how to turn the impasse of confronting this voice into a passe, a new opening.
#17

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.164

Psychoanalysis and Science > **Formalization and the Transmissibility of Psychoanalysis**

Theoretical move: Lacan's mathemes are theorized as a non-quantitative, qualitative mode of formalization whose value lies not in guaranteeing perfect communication but in the transmissibility of the written trace itself across time and interpreters; the "pass" is offered as an allied institutional mechanism for establishing a scientificity peculiar to psychoanalysis.

The pass is a process wherein someone who has gone through analysis talks about his or her analysis in detail with two other people (passeurs) who in turn report on what they have heard to a committee (Cartel de la passe).
#18

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.306

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

recall how, in his late writings, he is endlessly struggling with the organizational questions of the School. The psychoanalytic collective is, of course, a collective of (and in) an emergency state.
#19

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

See 'La passe. Conférence de Jacques-Alain Miller.'
#20

The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.125

part i

Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.

I am referring to the notion of la passe ('the pass') developed by Lacan as the 'test' by means of which an analysand who expresses the desire to become an analyst either is or is not allowed to become an analyst.