Phobia as Turntable

Lacan introduces "phobia as turntable" not as a way of characterising phobia's symptom content, but as a structural claim about phobia's topological position within the broader map of clinical structures. A turntable (plaque tournante in French) is a pivot or switching-point: a place where tracks converge and from which movement can be redirected in multiple directions. By calling phobia a turntable, Lacan asserts that phobia is the structural junction at which hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion all become legible in their mutual differentiation. It is not a self-contained entity but a relay — a locus that makes visible the relations between the other structures rather than standing alongside them as one further item in a list.

This reframing has specific consequences for the theory of knowledge and power. The turntable function implies that by examining phobia — in particular, the role of the phobic object as a stand-in for the phallic signifier and as the support for anxiety — one can read off the structural disjunction between what a subject knows and what a subject can do. Phobia condenses in one place the dissociation between savoir (the symbolic articulation of knowledge) and the effective power to act, a disjunction that hysteria and obsession each resolve in their characteristic ways (hysteria by sustaining unsatisfied desire, obsession by rendering desire impossible), and that perversion resolves through disavowal. Phobia thus operates as an analytic instrument — a structural crossroads — rather than as a clinical terminus.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-16 (p. 311) and represents a methodological and meta-structural intervention rather than a first-order clinical description. Its immediate anchor is the concept of Clinical Structures: Lacan's established taxonomy positions neurosis, psychosis, and perversion as distinct structural relations to the signifier and the big Other, with hysteria, obsession, and phobia as internal differentiations within neurosis. The synthesis already warns that these internal neurotic differentiations are "irreducible to one another" — phobia is not simply a milder hysteria or a variant of obsession. The turntable formulation sharpens this irreducibility: phobia is structurally other to both, but precisely because it is other, it is the point from which both can be surveyed.

The concept further extends the canonical definitions of Hysteria and Obsession by implying that each of those structures represents one departure route from the phobic junction: hysteria departs by maintaining constitutively unsatisfied desire, obsession by making desire impossible and circling the dead Other interminably. Phobia, sitting at the turntable, does neither — it holds the anxiety in place through the phobic object, which is why it illuminates both. The connection to Knowledge and Perversion signals the additional theoretical payload: the turntable reveals the disjunction between savoir and power, suggesting that phobia is also the structural site where the question of what the subject can know (and cannot act on) is most nakedly exposed — before it is resolved in the symptomatic formations proper to hysteria, obsession, or perversion's disavowal.

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the otherJacques Lacan · 1968 (p.311)

it in phobia that we can see not at all something that is a clinical entity but that is in a way a sort of turntable

The phrase "not at all something that is a clinical entity" performs an explicit categorical negation — it strips phobia of its usual diagnostic standing — before immediately substituting a topological metaphor ("turntable"), thereby replacing a taxonomy of contents with a structural account of relations. The tension between the negative clause ("not at all") and the positive requalification ("in a way") marks this as a precise theoretical redefinition rather than a rhetorical flourish.