Sources

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (29)

1. #01

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: This passage, drawn from Freud's early dream theory, establishes that objective sensory stimuli during sleep are insufficient as sole dream sources, and that the psychic transformation of stimuli into dream content requires additional determining factors beyond the stimulus itself — pointing toward the independence and overdetermination of dream formation.

   Examples of this nature make it appear that the objective stimuli during sleep are the most firmly established of all the dream sources; indeed, it is the only stimulus which plays any part in the layman's knowledge.

2. #02

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(A) RECENT AND INDIFFERENT IMPRESSIONS IN THE DREAM**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that every dream has a connection to an impression from the immediately preceding day (the "dream-day"), and that older memories only enter dream content through a chain of thought anchored in a recent impression — demonstrating this through detailed analysis of the Cyclamen monograph dream, where a daytime perception triggers associative chains linking wife, forgetting, cocaine, and professional ambition.

   If I now consult my own experience concerning the source of the elements which appear in the dream... some reference to the experiences of the day which has most recently passed is to be found in every dream.

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud uses the analysis of "typical dreams" (especially nakedness/exhibition dreams) to argue that such dreams are universal because they draw on shared infantile sources—specifically childhood exhibitionism preceding the acquisition of shame—and that the dream-work's distortion through wish-fulfilment and repression explains their characteristic structure, including the contradictory indifference of spectators.

   they probably all come from the same sources with every person, that they are thus particularly suited to give us information upon the sources of dreams

4. #04

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.128

   [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 has managed to sustain itself without any reference to Freudian concepts (the 'forces of dissociation to which Freud's heritage is being subjected')

5. #05

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.132

   [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.

   The sources in Freud's work for these two seminars differ. 'The Psychoses' relies heavily on Freud's reading of the Schreber case, while 'Formations of the Unconscious' employs his work on jokes (witz). Both reference Freud's work on dreams.

6. #06

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

   THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > ANAMORPHOSIS

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the trajectory from Cartesian reflexive self-certainty through idealist representation (Berkeley) and Hegelian active self-consciousness to Merleau-Ponty's attempt to restore a pre-reflective ground of vision, staging the problem of the subject's place in the scopic field as one that these philosophical moves fail to resolve.

   he chooses to withdraw, in order to propose a return to the sources of intuition concerning the visible and the invisible

7. #07

   Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

   **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

   Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological structure (hole) that is "represented" precisely by not being representable, and reframes his entire method as a second circuit around Freud's teaching—not a mere return to sources but a non-orientable, Möbius-strip-like redoubling that transforms meaning through structure rather than reduplication.

   Zurück zu Freud, return to Freud, I said first of all… The very classical ideal, in all sort of idealisations, of a return to the sources was not what I affected.

8. #08

   Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

   **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is a topological structure identifiable with the "hole" in surfaces like the torus, cross-cap, and Klein bottle—not a represented object but the very condition of representation—and frames his entire method as a second circuit of Freud's own Möbius-like path, where repetition transforms rather than reduplicates, culminating in the division of the subject.

   Zurück zu Freud, return to Freud, I said first of all, at a moment when this took on its sense from the confused manifestations of a colossal deviation in analysis.

9. #09

   Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

   **Seminar 22: Wednesday 15 June 1966**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the standard format of the psychoanalytic 'scientific paper' distorts clinical truth by constituting a 'conspiracy against the patient', and uses the example of perversion to insist that genuine scientific rigour requires returning to Freud's foundational claim that perversion is normal—reframing the clinical problem as why abnormal perversion exists at all, a move he aligns with Foucault's historical problematization of madness and medicine.

   Someone said, someone brought forward, timidly, these Three essays on sexuality, the fact is that perversion is normal.

10. #10

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a digressive, semi-autobiographical register to position his own discourse against misappropriation and institutional misreading, deploying the cogito circuit, Cantor's fate, and the Platonic figures of Poros and Penia to frame the stakes of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge — arguing that the discourse's justification lies not in institutional recognition but in the resonance it produces in its audience's number.

    to procure for yourself the Jokes book, and to soak yourself in it … it is the first thing - from my past seminars - that I would try to give an equivalent of in writing

11. #11

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan, through a detailed philological dialogue with Caquot, uses Sellin's textual manipulations of Hosea as a case study in how a pre-existing interpretive thesis (the murder of Moses) distorts exegetical method, implicitly staging the problem of the subject's desire overdetermining the reading of the Other's text.

    you see the artifices through which, because one cannot call them anything else, by what artifices Sellin has managed to make the text of Hosea say something that it certainly did not intend to say

12. #12

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that writing is not the representation of speech but rather the material support that makes scientific and psychoanalytic formalization possible, and uses this to sharpen the claim that the sexual relationship cannot be written except through the phallus — while insisting that the unconscious is structured like a language *within which* its writing appears, distinguishing the Letter from the Signifier.

    there is someone called, I no longer know what, Fu-hsien... it is called the Chouo-wen, namely, precisely, what is said qua written.

13. #13

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse diverges from scientific discourse precisely because the 'economy of enjoyment' cannot be rendered as a mathematical device, yet mythology, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque art all attest to historically contingent attempts to regulate jouissance — attempts that are 'founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being' and that analytic discourse may partially continue.

    the Counter-Reformation was a return to sources and Baroque is its display.

14. #14

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.219

    **XVI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychotic subject's testimony about their relationship to language must be taken literally rather than filtered through academic clinical categories, because the psychotic's "turning" in relation to language reveals a dimension constitutive of all human subjectivity — namely, the half-external position every subject occupies with respect to the signifier. The Schreberian case is thus elevated from pathological curiosity to methodological key for understanding the signifier/signified relation and the ego's grounding in the Other.

    we are apparently willingly going to become secretaries to the insane... not only shall we be his secretaries, but we shall take what he recounts literally - which till now has always been considered as the thing to avoid doing.

15. #15

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symbolic order — demonstrated through the internal lawfulness of a combinatorial letter-sequence and the lion/counting anecdote — introduces an originary dimension into the Real that is irreducible to experience, and then deploys this argument to read the pre-phobic structure of little Hans's imaginary phallus as the condition of possibility for the eruption of castration anxiety.

    It seems that for some minds these items entail very considerable resistance. This path nevertheless struck me as being a more straightforward one … than recommending … a reading of Frege

16. #16

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    **VII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces sublimation as the positive, "other side" of the psychoanalytic critique of ethics, arguing that the plasticity and displacement-structure of the drives (*Triebe*) — irreducible to instinct and governed by the play of signifiers — is the necessary starting point for any theory of sublimation, while simultaneously exposing the paradoxical cruelty of the moral conscience as a parasite fed by the very satisfactions it demands.

    Sublimation is, in effect, the other side of the research that Freud pioneered into the roots of ethical feeling... We who find ourselves, along with Freud, in a position to give a radically new critique of the sources and the incidence of ethical thought

17. #17

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    **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.

    In France, as in the English-speaking countries, we are quite ignorant of a whole, extremely rich German tradition, which shows that Freud, in fact, was the object of readings that were careful and extensive, or, in a word, immense.

18. #18

    The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    IV. Closing in on the Symptom

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends the productive opacity of the Écrits as a formal feature rather than an accidental one, while positioning the Freudian unconscious as a genuinely unprecedented discovery, and introduces the concept of the 'parlêtre' (speaking being) as his own reformulation of the unconscious, tying language and sexuality together in a way that psychoanalysis uniquely illuminates—before religion re-absorbs the symptom.

    Just because he borrowed the word Unbewusste from I forget whom - [Johann Friedrich] Herbart - doesn't mean it had anything to do with what the philosophers called 'unconscious.'

19. #19

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Critique of Pure Reason serves reason by replacing dogmatic metaphysics with a critical method that demarcates the limits of speculative reason, thereby protecting morality and religion from both dogmatism and scepticism, while preserving the public's rational convictions on their own proper, non-scholastic grounds.

    it is the highest and weightiest concern of philosophy to render it powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of error

20. #20

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs terminological clarification, tracing the evolution of Freud's drive nomenclature from the ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissistic libido to the final antithesis of Eros (life drives) and death drives, while also noting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and situating Freud's speculations within a broader intellectual genealogy (Spielrein, Ferenczi, Plato, Upanishads).

    These speculations have been anticipated to a very considerable extent by Sabina Spielrein in a paper that is rich in substance and ideas but not, to my mind, entirely lucid.

21. #21

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Translator's Preface

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Standard Edition's systematic mistranslations and bowdlerizations of Freud have ideologically transformed his work from a daring, open-ended inquiry into a dogmatic corpus, and that new translations must restore both his precise meanings and his stylistic voice.

    Freud's ideas have entered and conditioned modern consciousness not in their original German form, but mainly through English translations, most notably those enshrined in the Standard Edition

22. #22

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," critiquing Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian technical terms; it is primarily philological/bibliographic apparatus with limited direct theoretical work.

    Freud's term – used here for the first time in his œuvre – is Anlehnungstypus. Alas, it cannot be rendered directly into English, and so 'imitative type' is necessarily an approximate rather than a precise translation

23. #23

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.46

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Second naïveté

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "second naïveté" — a post-critical return to devotional engagement with sacred texts — is the proper mode of accessing the primordial transforming Event (the Real) that overdetermines scriptural language, insofar as that Event remains irreducible to any propositional, academic, or descriptive capture, including within the text itself.

    it is solidly directed at the task of connecting with the primordial source of the text in all its terrifying and transformative dimensions.

24. #24

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.42

    Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies: > **Traveler's Logorrhea** > **Communicable Disease**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces a conceptual genealogy of "chatter" (snak/Geschwätz/adoleschia) from Plutarch through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan, arguing that the medical metaphor of talkativeness as a communicable disease—flowing through barbers, journalists, and audiences alike—is the structuring logic behind Kierkegaard's critique of everyday talk as a collective, self-perpetuating civic pathology.

    his primary sources seem to have been German translations of a single Greek text: Plutarch's essay 'Concerning Talkativeness.'

25. #25

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    III

    Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.

    Here, so it seems to me, may lie one of the sources of the feelings of inferiority so readily avouched by those suffering from transference neuroses.

26. #26

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section traces the conceptual evolution of Freud's drive theory from the sexual/ego drive opposition through narcissism and Eros to the final life drive/death drive antithesis, while also documenting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and cross-cultural precursors to Platonic myth.

    I should like to point out that essentially the same theory already occurs in the Upanishads… K[onrat] Ziegler systematically explores the history of this particular notion prior to Plato, and traces it back to Babylonian conceptions.

27. #27

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," correcting Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian terms; it is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than theoretically substantive, though it touches on Narcissism, the Ego Ideal, libido cathexis, and the censorial agency (superego precursor).

    'Cathexis' is an ugly and opaque term – coined by James Strachey – that has nothing of the apparent simplicity of Freud's metaphor Besetzung.

28. #28

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.93

    **Vicissitude**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's taxonomy of drive vicissitudes — reversal into its opposite (change of aim or content), turning round upon the self, repression, and sublimation — as modes of defence against the drive, with the theoretical pivot being the distinction between transformation of *aim* versus transformation of *object* or *content*. The second half of the passage is a non-substantive bibliography of sources.

    These are (most of) the titles I pulled quotes from

29. #29

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.253

    Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs scholarly philological critique of Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade," documenting systematic misattributions, citation errors, and misreadings across Žižek's corpus while tracking the precise textual sources in Sade, Lacan's Seminar VII, and related literature for concepts such as the second death, desire, alienation/separation, and the quadripartite structure of Lacanian theory.

    the way in which Žižek 'quotes' the system of Pope Pius VI in his most recent works… borders on the unforgivable, at least from a scholarly perspective. In both of these books, the long quote 'from Sade' that is set apart from the rest of the text is in fact a literal quote from a book by Aaron Schuster