Lacan Seminar 1962 object a

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar X (1962–63), published as Anxiety, pursues a single sustained argument: anxiety is not a fear without object but rather the privileged signal of the subject's encounter with the real object that causes desire — the objet petit a. Moving through three large arcs (an introduction to anxiety's structure; a revision of the status of the object; and a mapping of anxiety between jouissance and desire), Lacan systematically displaces the received Freudian account in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and its post-Freudian inheritors by insisting that anxiety is not objectless but instead has the most intimate object there is: the pre-symbolic, non-specularizable remainder produced when the subject is constituted in and by the Other. The seminar unfolds what Lacan calls the "five forms" of the objet a — oral (breast/lips), anal (feces), phallic (minus-phi), scopic (gaze/eye), and invocatory (voice) — treating each as both a partial drive-object and a distinct anxiety-point. Topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap) is deployed throughout to demonstrate that objet a lacks a specular image and therefore cannot be captured within the imaginary register. The seminar culminates in a series of aphorisms on love, desire, and jouissance, a structural account of obsession, sadism, masochism, mourning, melancholia, and mania, and a final pivot toward the Names-of-the-Father, announced as the next seminar's project. The overarching claim is that the analyst's desire — and the analysand's ability to recognize herself as a lack — depends on correctly situating anxiety as the only subjective translation of objet a, "that which deceives not."

Distinctive contribution

Seminar X accomplishes something no other text in the Lacanian corpus does so comprehensively: it constructs the objet a not as a subsidiary concept but as the central, organising term of the entire analytic field, arriving at it through the backdoor of anxiety rather than through the logic of the signifier alone. Where Seminar XI will theorise the four fundamental concepts and Seminar XX will focus on jouissance and sexual difference, Seminar X is the hinge that holds them together by demonstrating that the signal-function of anxiety is the only reliable index of the real — "that which deceives not." This gives the seminar a unique epistemological weight: it argues that anxiety is not a pathological nuisance to be managed but the closest thing to a non-deceptive certainty available to the speaking being, more reliable than consciousness, more immediate than the signifier's truth. The distinction between objet a as cause of desire (behind desire, not in front of it) and the intentional object of phenomenological tradition is pressed with unusual rigour, and the consequences — for the theory of the drive, for analytic technique, for the handling of transference — are drawn out in clinical and topological detail.

The seminar is also distinctive in its catalogue of the five forms of objet a treated as a unified structural series rather than disparate drive-objects. The oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and invocatory objects are shown to share the same structural property — non-specularizability, potential for cession, capacity to function as cause rather than goal of desire — while each generating its own specific anxiety-point and its own modality of the relation between desire and jouissance. No other primary or secondary text in the corpus develops this pentad with the same degree of clinical grounding (transference, obsession, sadism/masochism, mourning) and topological formalisation simultaneously. The treatment of the voice as the most originative partial object, grounded in the myth of the father's murder rather than the primacy of maternal desire, establishes what becomes a cornerstone of subsequent Lacanian work on the superego, the invocatory drive, and the relation between the signifier and the Real.

Main themes

Anxiety as signal of the Real and 'that which deceives not'
Objet petit a as cause — not object — of desire
The five forms of the partial object (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, invocatory)
Topology as a formal demonstration of the non-specularizability of objet a
The structural identity of desire and the law (Oedipus, castration, prohibition)
Passage à l'acte versus acting-out as modalities of the subject's relation to objet a
Sadism and masochism as fourfold structure concealing anxiety and jouissance respectively
Woman's structurally simplified relation to desire and the phallic function
Mourning, melancholia, and mania through the differential function of a and i(a)
The analyst's desire as the operative dimension of the analytic cure

Chapter outline

Chapter I: Anxiety in the Net of Signifiers — p.3-14
Chapters II–III: Anxiety, Sign of Desire / From the Cosmos to the Unheimliche — p.16-52
Chapters IV–VI: Beyond Castration Anxiety / That Which Deceives / That Which Deceives Not — p.43-92
Chapters VII–VIII: Not Without Having It / The Cause of Desire — p.85-129
Chapters IX–XI: Passage à l'acte and Acting-Out / On a Lack Irreducible to the Signifier / Punctuations on Desire — p.114-166
Chapters XII–XV: Anxiety, Signal of the Real / Aphorisms on Love / Woman, Truer and More Real / Men's Business — p.157-222
Chapters XVI–XX: The Five Forms of the Object a (Buddha's Eyelids / The Mouth and the Eye / The Voice of Yahweh / The Evanescent Phallus / What Comes in Through the Ear) — p.213-290
Chapters XXI–XXIV: Piaget's Tap / From Anal to Ideal / On a Circle that is Irreducible to a Point / From the a to the Names-of-the-Father — p.291-350

Chapter summaries

Chapter I: Anxiety in the Net of Signifiers (p.3-14)

Lacan opens the seminar by situating anxiety within the larger project of his teaching: it is the 'meeting point' where all his prior conceptual work — the graph of desire, the fantasy, the mirror stage, the signifier — converges and becomes more tightly knotted. Against those who treat anxiety as a subject with little to offer, Lacan insists it is the nodal phenomenon of the entire analytic field. He introduces two diagrams on the blackboard: the fantasy formula and the graph of desire, and notes that the graph's shape suggestively resembles the 'poire d'angoisse' (a choke pear), a detail he treats as more than accidental.

Lacan proposes a matrix of concepts organised along two axes — difficulty and movement — in order to begin distinguishing inhibition, symptom, and anxiety as terms that do not occupy the same structural level. Inhibition is associated with the halting of movement; impediment (impedicare, 'to be ensnared') brings the subject more directly into play; and embarrassment begins to approach the structural condition Lacan wants to isolate. The chapter announces the guiding thesis: anxiety arises when 'something appears in the place of minus-phi,' that is, when the structural void where lack should be found is instead filled — when 'lack comes to be lacking.' This is linked to the Unheimliche as the paradigmatic phenomenological site where anxiety announces itself, preparatory to Freud's essay being brought in as a primary reference for the entire seminar.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Inhibition, Unheimliche, Objet petit a, Phallus, Mirror Stage Notable examples: Freud, Inhibitions Symptoms and Anxiety; The 'choke pear' analogy with the graph of desire

Chapters II–III: Anxiety, Sign of Desire / From the Cosmos to the Unheimliche (p.16-52)

Chapter II takes up the question of analytic teaching itself, arguing that analytic knowledge is irreducible to communitarian elaboration and must always move toward the wellspring of experience. Lacan then advances what he calls 'a leap beyond Hegel' on the function of desire: where Hegel's desire is desire of/for another consciousness — generating the struggle to the death for pure recognition — Lacanian desire is desire of the Other qua unconscious lack. The fantasy ($ ◇ a) is the imaginary support through which the subject gains oblique access to this desire; the declaration 'I desire you' is structurally a trap, because in naming the other as the object of desire, I identify them with the lack that is the actual cause of my desire, thereby fulfilling their own want. This leads to the formulation of five formulae for the desire of the Other and the division-remainder algebra that produces the barred subject and objet a as co-residues.

Chapter III returns to the request, posed by an interlocutor, for a more precise articulation between the mirror stage and the signifier. Lacan insists these two registers were always interwoven in his teaching (citing his 1946 'Presentation on Psychical Causality') and uses Hamlet — particularly the 'play within the play' scene — to illustrate the distinction between identification with the specular image i(a) and identification with the lost object a proper. Hamlet's identification with Lucianus (who appears in Hamlet's own garb) as the murderer enacts the specular modality; but what actually 'seizes' Hamlet is his relation to the object a that escapes specularisation entirely. The cross-cap topology is introduced to show that minus-phi and objet a share a status irreducible to the mirror: anxiety emerges when something appears at the place of minus-phi, when 'lack comes to be lacking' — a formulation now given precise topological grounding.

Key concepts: Desire of the Other, Fantasy, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Mirror Stage, Topology Notable examples: Hamlet and the play within the play; Cross-cap and Möbius strip; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Chapters IV–VI: Beyond Castration Anxiety / That Which Deceives / That Which Deceives Not (p.43-92)

Chapter IV deepens the structural analysis of the object, distinguishing the specular object from the pre-specular remainder. Drawing on Hoffmann's fantastic fiction (especially 'The Sand-Man' and 'The Devil's Elixir'), Lacan elaborates the Unheimliche as the return of the object a into the world of common, shareable objects — the 'heimlich' object that has never been processed through the sieve of recognition and suddenly intrudes as uncanny. The chapter also begins to distinguish the two faces of the analytic discourse on anxiety — the neurotic's perverse fantasy as support of desire, the pervert's structural loyalty to the Other's jouissance — and introduces 'the Other's jouissance' and 'the Other's demand' as the two axes that frame anxiety's functional space.

Chapters V and VI survey the landscape of anxiety from experimental (Pavlov, Goldstein's 'catastrophic reaction'), philosophical, and clinical angles, insisting in each case that the irreducibility of the Other's dimension is what all these approaches approach without reaching. The nightmare, via Jones's study, is introduced as the purest phenomenological presentation of the Other's jouissance crushing the subject. Lacan then arrives at his foundational aphorism: anxiety is not without object, but its object is of a different order from any structured perceptual object. It is the 'cut' that precedes and grounds the signifier's capacity to deceive — 'anxiety is not doubt; anxiety is the cause of doubt.' The chapter concludes by articulating the 'signal' function of anxiety through circumcision: God's demand for the foreskin as the circumscription of an object, the separation by cut that structures the relation of the subject to a primordial lost object. The seminal aphorism 'desire and law are one and the same thing' is delivered here, grounding the structural identity of Oedipal prohibition and desire itself.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Unheimliche, Jouissance, Demand, Signifier, Castration Notable examples: Hoffmann, The Sand-Man; Jones, On the Nightmare; Goldstein's catastrophic reaction; Circumcision and the God of the Jews; Freud, Inhibitions Symptoms and Anxiety

Chapters VII–VIII: Not Without Having It / The Cause of Desire (p.85-129)

With the 'Revision of the Status of the Object' section, the seminar pivots to a systematic account of objet a. Chapter VII specifies the object algebraically: it is constituted in the subject's relation to the Other as a structural remainder, irreducible to symbolisation, lacking a specular image, and functioning as the signal of anxiety rather than simply its occasion. The Möbius strip and cross-cap are used to demonstrate this non-specularizability: objet a, once the 'cross-cap slice' has been performed (as in circumcision, the umbilical cut, or any separating operation), is analogous to the Möbius-strip residue — it has no inside or outside, cannot be turned over, and carries no mirror image. Five partial objects are announced: breast/lips, feces, phallus (as minus-phi), eye, and voice.

Chapter VIII introduces the decisive epistemological correction to object-relations theory: the object of desire is not the intentional object in front of desire (Husserlian noesis), but its cause, lying behind and prior to any internalisation. Lacan maps this through the structural positions of sadism (identification with the fetish-object) and masochism (identification with the common object, the ejectum): in masochism, the subject becomes the object — the 'ejectum,' thrown to the rubbish — in order to demonstrate that the desire of the Other lays down the law. The structural identity of desire and law via the Oedipus myth is elaborated: 'the father's desire is what laid down the law.' The chapter concludes with Freud's case of the young homosexual woman as a clinical illustration: her passage à l'acte (the leap into the canal) is the moment of absolute identification with objet a, ejection from the scene, and Freud's own symmetrical 'dropping' of her constitutes a reverse passage à l'acte on his part.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Topology, Partial Drive, Castration, Desire, Separation Notable examples: Möbius strip and cross-cap topology; Freud's case of female homosexuality; Husserlian intentionality critiqued; Sadism and masochism as structural fourfold

Chapters IX–XI: Passage à l'acte and Acting-Out / On a Lack Irreducible to the Signifier / Punctuations on Desire (p.114-166)

Chapter IX consolidates the structural distinction between passage à l'acte and acting-out. The passage à l'acte is when the subject, at the moment of maximal 'embarrassment' (in the full Lacanian matrix), identifies absolutely with objet a and topples off the scene entirely — illustrated through the young homosexual woman's leap and Dora's slap. Acting-out, by contrast, is a message addressed to the Other, a display staged for interpretation: it is what the subject 'puts on the stage' when the analyst has failed to attend to the level of the object. The natal cut is introduced as a topological model: the embryonic envelopes (differentiated from the egg itself) provide a more satisfying model of the primordial separation than birth-as-such, because they show the 'object-bundle' (a) that is constitutively separated from the child before any specular relation is established.

Chapter X returns to the topology of lack: anxiety introduces us to a function that is radical for the analytic field — lack as irreducible to the signifier. The chapter distinguishes 'lack of handling' from 'handling of lack' and demonstrates this via Margaret Little's clinical case, where the decisive therapeutic factor was not interpretive content but the introduction of 'the function of the cut': the analyst's inadvertent admission of her own distress allowed the patient to grasp herself as a lack, opening the possibility of transference in the full sense. Chapter XI addresses countertransference directly through Lucia Tower's case report, arguing that analytic cure depends not on managing countertransference but on allowing the analyst's desire to be genuinely implicated — a point Lacan ties to his broader claim that women analysts have spoken more candidly about this precisely because their relation to desire is structurally less encumbered by the phallic function.

Key concepts: The Act, Symptom, Objet petit a, Transference, Desire, Separation Notable examples: Freud's case of female homosexuality (passage à l'acte); Dora's slap; Margaret Little's clinical case; Lucia Tower's countertransference article; Embryological envelopes as topology of the cut

Chapters XII–XV: Anxiety, Signal of the Real / Aphorisms on Love / Woman, Truer and More Real / Men's Business (p.157-222)

Chapter XII, opening the third section ('Anxiety Between Jouissance and Desire'), begins with Chekhov's 'Panic Fears' and a careful distinction between fear (oriented toward an object) and anxiety (whose object is non-specular). Zurbarán's paintings of Agatha and Lucy — martyrs who carry their own severed organs on platters — are read as images of the 'deciduous object': the organ that falls away, whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence. Lacan reframes castration not as a threat from outside but as the structural falling-away of the phallus as object — 'detumescence' as the paradigmatic form of the cession that constitutes desire. The chapter demonstrates that orgasm itself can function as an anxiety-point, occurring precisely at the moment of maximal loss — the student who ejaculates when handing in an exam paper.

Chapter XIII delivers a sequence of aphorisms: anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance; 'only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire'; sadism aims at the Other's anxiety (concealing the Other's jouissance) while masochism aims at the Other's anxiety (concealing the Other's jouissance) — constituting a fourfold concealment structure. Chapter XIV takes up the question of woman's relation to desire: woman is 'truer and more real' not as a mystical claim but structurally, because her relation to the phallic function is not a necessary knot — she does not require the negativising operation of castration to access the desire of the Other. Tiresias, blinded for his testimony to woman's greater jouissance, is Lacan's figure for the analyst who must endure the knowledge of this asymmetry. Chapter XV returns to Lucia Tower and the structure of masculine desire, introducing the topology of the vessel (pot) and minus-phi: men are 'potters,' imagining the woman-vessel to contain the object of desire, when in fact the structurally relevant vessel is always already elsewhere. Circumcision is revisited through Egyptian inscriptions, biblical passages (Moses, Zipporah, Joshua), and Jeremiah, as a cultural institution of the structural cut that separates the subject from his object.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Jouissance, Desire, Phallus, Castration, Objet petit a Notable examples: Zurbarán, Saint Lucy and Saint Agatha; Chekhov, Panic Fears; Tiresias (Ovid, Metamorphoses); Lucia Tower's countertransference case; Circumcision (Egyptian, biblical)

Chapters XVI–XX: The Five Forms of the Object a (Buddha's Eyelids / The Mouth and the Eye / The Voice of Yahweh / The Evanescent Phallus / What Comes in Through the Ear) (p.213-290)

This extended section — spanning chapters XVI through XX — constitutes the most systematic elaboration of the five forms of objet a. Chapter XVI ('Buddha's Eyelids') takes Lacan's visit to Japan as its point of departure: the thousand-armed Kannon at Sanjūsangen-dō and the Miroku Bosatsu of Kamakura serve as images of the zero-point of scopic desire, where the lowered eyelids of the Buddha simultaneously indicate and suspend the fascination of the gaze. Lacan argues that Buddhist 'desire is illusion' is not nihilism but a structural observation: the lure of visual desire consists in substituting specular appearances for the non-specular objet a. The chapter also develops the notion of 'cause' through the figure of the 'pound of flesh' (Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice): the law of debt and donation is grounded not in exchange of women or goods but in the pound of flesh closest to the heart — the body's sacrificed fragment as the original site of objet a.

Chapter XVII ('The Mouth and the Eye') introduces the structural analysis of the oral drive and distinguishes the anxiety-point from the point of desire at this level. The mamma (breast/lips) is an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own organismal sphere, not an object of the mother. At the oral level, the anxiety-point lies at the level of the Other (the mother's body), while the point of desire is secured in the relation to the partial object. This inversion is then shown to be strictly reversed at the phallic/scopic level. The vampire image is used to mark the structural truth of the oral relation: the child is a 'little vampire' but must never complete the act — the anxiety that surrounds this image reveals the anxiety-point's location beyond the fantasy's protective function.

Chapters XVIII and XX ('The Voice of Yahweh' / 'What Comes in Through the Ear') establish the voice as the most originative of the five forms. Drawing on Theodor Reik's analysis of the shofar and its function in Jewish ritual, Lacan argues that the voice is not reducible to phonemisation (the system of linguistic oppositions) but constitutes a distinct dimension: 'the specifically vocal dimension.' The shofar is 'the voice of Yahweh' — not metaphorically but structurally, as the object that presents, in a sound unattached from any phonemic signifier, the originative dimension of the father's murdered voice. Lacan insists, contra positions that privilege maternal desire, that the original crime (the father's murder) is the foundational fact of desire's constitution. The infant's hypnopompic monologue (Jakobson's tape-recorded nursery recordings) is used to demonstrate the voice as remainder: it occurs only in the Other's absence, on the tape reel — voice as objet a that can only be grasped once it has been separated from its support. Chapter XIX ('The Evanescent Phallus') discusses castration anxiety and orgasm in terms of the 'always too soon/too late' structure of drive-satisfaction, and uses the Wolf Man's compulsive defecation as an illustration of the drive's structural non-coincidence with demand.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Scopic Drive, Gaze, Partial Drive, Jouissance, Real Notable examples: Kamakura Buddha and thousand-armed Kannon; Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (pound of flesh); Reik, shofar analysis; Jakobson's infant monologue recordings; Wolf Man's defecation symptom; Zurbarán's saints

Chapters XXI–XXIV: Piaget's Tap / From Anal to Ideal / On a Circle that is Irreducible to a Point / From the a to the Names-of-the-Father (p.291-350)

Chapter XXI ('Piaget's Tap') uses Piaget's experiment on children's causal reasoning — explaining to a peer how a tap works — to expose the irreducibility of the function of cause to empirical description. The child who 'reproduces' the explanation retains only the tap's dimension as cause (it turns off; it fills a basin) while losing the mechanical detail: Lacan reads this as demonstrating that what interests a child in a tap is the desire it arouses, not the mechanism it describes. The tap functions as an image of the anal object: the stopper, the act of turning on (passage à l'acte), the spurt (acting-out), and the leaking tap (symptom) are all mapped onto the structural matrix of inhibition/symptom/anxiety/passage à l'acte/acting-out. The obsessional's fundamental position is shown through the tap: his desire is structured as a desire to hold back, rooted in the anal drive's economy of retention and cession.

Chapter XXII ('From Anal to Ideal') traces the 'circular constitution' of the object across the five stages, against the Abrahamic-Freudian model that binds objects to developmental sequences. The anal object (feces) enters subjectification via the Other's demand: the mother asks the child to retain, then to yield, producing the objet a as gift. The chapter follows Jones's obsessional cases and the scopic masking of castration: at the fourth level (scopic), the object a is most fully masked beneath i(a) — the narcissistic image — and the subject is therefore most 'at ease' and most alienated simultaneously. The case of the obsessional's 'idealized love' (Rat Man, Wolf Man) is analysed as the scopic substitute for the phallic object that cannot be confronted directly.

The final two chapters (XXIII: 'On a Circle Irreducible to a Point'; XXIV: 'From the a to the Names-of-the-Father') bring the seminar to its conclusion. The matrix from the opening chapter (inhibition/symptom/anxiety × difficulty/movement/turmoil) is completed: 'turmoil' (émoi) is revealed as the objet a itself at the correlative pole of anxiety and desire. Desire is mapped at the locus of inhibition (its structural concealment), and 'the act' is defined not as motor response but as the event in which another field — the field of the real — makes its impact felt by suspending the automatism of the signifying chain. The concluding session distinguishes mourning (where i(a) is lost and the subject must reconstitute the links of narcissistic desire) from melancholia (where the subject attacks his own image to reach the a within it, ending in suicidal automatism) and mania (where a ceases to function at all, delivering the subject to infinite signifying metonymy). Lacan closes by pivoting to the Names-of-the-Father, arguing that the father is not a causa sui but a subject who has integrated his own desire back into the irreducible objet a — the only path through which desire can be authentically realised in the field of the Other.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Obsession, The Act, Mourning, Identification, Name of the Father Notable examples: Piaget's tap experiment; Jones's obsessional cases (Rat Man, Wolf Man); Margaret Little's case; Mourning and Melancholia (Freud); Zurbaran revisited; Names-of-the-Father announcement

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions Symptoms and Anxiety
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Heidegger, Being and Time
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Kurt Goldstein, The Organism
Lacan, Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Lacan, Seminar VIII (Transference)
Lacan, Seminar IX (Identification)
Plato, Symposium
Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare
Theodor Reik (shofar analysis)
Margaret Little (countertransference case)
Lucia Tower (countertransference article)
Phyllis Greenacre (acting-out article)
Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child
Roman Jakobson
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Claude Lévi-Strauss

Position in the corpus

Seminar X occupies a pivotal hinge position in the Lacanian corpus, standing between the ethical-linguistic work of Seminars VII–IX and the structural-topological maturity of Seminars XI and beyond. It presupposes the graph of desire (Seminar V, VI), the ethics of the Thing (Seminar VII), and the agalma-logic of Transference (Seminar VIII), while preparing the ground for the four fundamental concepts (Seminar XI) and the later theory of the drives, the gaze, and the voice that structures Écrits texts such as 'The Subversion of the Subject.' Readers should have a working familiarity with Seminar VII and the essay 'The Direction of the Treatment' before entering Seminar X; they should read Seminar XI immediately afterwards to see how the four concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) are re-articulated once objet a has been secured as a formal concept. Žižek's work on the gaze (The Plague of Fantasies, Looking Awry) and Joan Copjec's Read My Desire both depend directly on the scopic theory worked out here; Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More takes up precisely the invocatory dimension of chapters XVIII and XX.\n\nWithin the primary corpus, Seminar X is the decisive locus for the concept of objet a — more systematic than Seminar XI, more technical than Seminar XX, and more clinically grounded than either. Secondary readers working on anxiety, jouissance, the partial drives, or the topology of the subject should treat it as the primary reference text, reading it alongside Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (which Lacan both honours and dismantles) and Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety (which Lacan cites for its structural rather than existential account). For those focused on clinical questions — obsession, sadism/masochism, mourning — Seminar X provides a level of case-level engagement (Little, Tower, Greenacre, Freud's own cases) not found in Lacan's more purely theoretical seminars.