Lacan Seminar 1958 return to freud

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and Its Interpretation

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

→ Concept index for this source → Author profile

Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar VI, "Desire and Its Interpretation" (1958–1959), pursues a single sustained question: what is desire in its properly psychoanalytic — and thus irreducibly structural — sense, and how can it be interpreted? Working against both ego-psychological "object-seeking" libido theory (Fairbairn, Hartmann, Glover) and any simple wish-fulfilment account of dreams, Lacan argues that desire is neither a biological tendency nor an interpersonal relation but a structural effect produced at the intersection of two signifying chains, the conscious and the unconscious, and is therefore legible only through the topology he has been developing: the Graph of Desire. The seminar moves through three major demonstrations of this thesis: a close rereading of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (especially the dreams of the dead father and little Anna), a detailed critical analysis of Ella Sharpe's Dream Analysis case to expose what interpretation misses when it lacks adequate structural coordinates, and seven sessions on Shakespeare's Hamlet — treated not as a biographical document but as a "mode of discourse" whose architecture stages the tragedy of desire in its fullest structural dimension. Across all three movements Lacan formalizes the fantasy ($◇a), the Graph of Desire in its completed two-level form, the phallus as privileged signifier of the Other's desire, aphanisis as the structural fading of the subject at the point of desire, and the signifier of the barred Other S(A) as the ultimate answer to the "Che vuoi?" — the question of what the Other wants. The seminar concludes with a comparative clinical survey of desire in neurosis and perversion and with an appeal to situate psychoanalytic practice within a defense of the irreducible dimension of desire against social normalization.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar VI is the seminar in which Lacan most systematically deploys the completed Graph of Desire as a working analytical instrument rather than a schematic illustration. Unlike the earlier seminars that construct elements of the graph piecemeal, here the two-level graph — with its four intersection points (A, s(A), $◇D, S(A)) — is used to generate precise formulae: the formula of the enigma E(e) for the structure of dream-reporting; the formula ($◇a) for fantasy inscribed on the upper line between the barred subject and the object; the signifier S(A) for the answer the subject receives from an Other who is itself barred. No other work in the Lacanian corpus so explicitly walks the reader through the graph's application to clinical material — Freud's own dream texts, a published case by Sharpe, and Shakespeare's dramatic architecture — in such methodical succession. The result is that the graph ceases to be a theoretical diagram and becomes a genuine map that can be consulted while reading a session transcript or a literary text.

The Hamlet section, comprising seven sessions (chapters XIII–XIX), constitutes a unique contribution to both psychoanalytic and literary theory. Lacan's sustained structural reading of Hamlet as "the tragedy of desire" — where Hamlet's constitutive inability to act is indexed not by an Oedipal conflict that hasn't yet taken place (as in Jones) but by the very completeness of his knowledge of the father's betrayal and by the derangement of his fantasy relation to Ophelia as objet a — has no direct parallel in the Lacanian corpus. The Hamlet section produces the concept of "operating on the Other's time" (à l'heure de l'Autre) as a phenomenology of obsessional neurosis, elaborates the structural homology between Hamlet and mourning (linking it to the incomplete symbolic rites throughout the play), and develops the formula ($◇φ) as the specifically neurotic tilt within the more general fantasy formula. Other Lacanian texts engage literary texts (Poe, Sophocles), but nowhere else does Lacan spend seven sessions on a single dramatic work as an extended laboratory for structural psychoanalytic theory.

The seminar also contains Lacan's most sustained critical engagement with Ella Sharpe's Dream Analysis, and through it with the tradition of British object-relations technique. The Sharpe section is distinctive in the corpus because it is a detailed, line-by-line reconstruction of how a skilled but structurally unequipped analyst interprets correctly at the level of content while systematically missing the level of the subject's relation to the phallic signifier and to the barred Other. No other Lacanian seminar offers such an extended demonstration of how the absence of structural coordinates produces clinical impasses — the patient's bed-wetting, the analyst's countertransferential complicity in his refusal to sacrifice the queen — and how those impasses can be retrospectively illuminated by the graph.

Main themes

Desire as a structural effect of the signifying chain, irreducible to need, demand, or object-relation
The Graph of Desire as an operative clinical instrument for distinguishing desire, the unconscious, and the repressed
Fantasy ($◇a) as the fundamental prop and index of the subject's position in desire
The phallus as privileged signifier of the Other's desire and mediator of castration
Aphanisis and the fading of the subject ($) at the approach of desire
Hamlet as the structural 'tragedy of desire': procrastination, mourning, and the subject's constitution by the Other's time
Mourning, incomplete rites, and the signifier of the barred Other S(A)
Critique of ego-psychological and object-relational reductions of desire to reality-adaptation
The differential structure of desire in neurosis (hysteria, obsession) versus perversion
The distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion proper, and the structural function of the cut (coupure) in subjective division

Chapter outline

I. Constructing the Graph — p.3-24
II. Further Explanation — p.25-42
III. The Dream about the Dead Father: 'He did not know he was dead' — p.43-59
IV. Little Anna's Dream — p.60-77
V. The Dream about the Dead Father: 'As he wished' — p.78-94
VI. Introducing the Object of Desire — p.95-110
VII. Desire's Phallic Mediation — p.111-131
VIII. The Little Cough as a Message — p.133-151
IX. The Fantasy about the Barking Dog — p.152-170
X. The Image of the Inside-Out Glove — p.171-190
XI. Sacrificing the Taboo Queen — p.191-209
XII. The Laughter of the Immortal Gods — p.210-231
XIII. Impossible Action — p.233-248
XIV. The Desire Trap — p.249-268
XV. The Mother's Desire — p.269-290
XVI. There is No Other of the Other — p.291-305
XVII. Ophelia, the Object — p.306-320
XVIII. Mourning and Desire / XIX. Phallophanies — p.321-369
XX–XXI. The Fundamental Fantasy / In the Form of a Cut — p.372-400
XXII. Cut and Fantasy — p.401-421
XXIII–XXIV. The Function of the Subjective Slit in Perverse Fantasies / The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis — p.422-450
XXV–XXVI. The Either/Or Concerning the Object / The Function of Splitting in Perversion — p.451-483
XXVII. Toward Sublimation (Conclusion) — p.486-501

Chapter summaries

I. Constructing the Graph (p.3-24)

Lacan opens the seminar by recentering psychoanalytic theory on 'desire' against the drift of object-relations theory (Fairbairn) toward 'object-seeking' libido. He argues that libido in Freud is 'the psychical energy of desire' and that symptoms, anxiety, and the very notion of 'defense' are only intelligible as defenses against desire. He situates desire philosophically through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence and Aristotle's ethics, and distinguishes it rigorously from need and will via a critical reading of Lalande's philosophical dictionary.

The session then constructs the first stage of the Graph of Desire step by step, introducing the signifying chain (the lower-level trajectory), the relation of the subject's intention to the retroactive effect of the signifier, and the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy). The encounter with the Other at the second level is dramatized through Cazotte's Devil who responds to the subject's invocation with 'Che vuoi?' — 'What do you want?' — marking the moment at which desire is revealed as originally the Other's desire. The famous Sydney Smith limerick ('overlooked Lady Cork') illustrates metaphor's capacity to produce a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and points toward the function of death and the signifier in the constitution of fantasy.

The four-term structure of the completed graph (with its two levels and two loops) is announced: the lower level encodes the subject's actual discourse from demand to the Other, and the upper level encodes the unconscious circuit from desire to the signifier of the barred Other. The driving pedagogical aim is to distinguish three things that are too frequently conflated: the repressed, desire, and the unconscious.

Key concepts: Desire, Signifier, Graph of Desire, Metaphor, Metonymy, The big Other Notable examples: Sydney Smith / Lady Cork limerick; Cazotte, The Devil in Love; Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality

II. Further Explanation (p.25-42)

Lacan reconstructs the graph's two levels with greater precision, addressing the difficulties students had with the first session. The lower level is described as the trajectory of 'innocent' demand through the signifying chain to the Other (A), from which signification s(A) is retroactively produced. The upper level is the level at which the subject qua speaker — the I of enunciation — encounters the 'Che vuoi?', the question of what the Other wants from him. Lacan insists on the strict distinction between the I of the statement (énoncé) and the I of enunciation (énonciation), drawing on the Sartrean cogito debate and on the linguist's concept of the 'shifter' to show that the speaking I is not reducible to any element of the code.

The clinical and theoretical upshot is a distinction between three non-identical registers: the repressed (operative at the level of the lower chain), desire (situated on the upper chain in the gap between demand and the code of the Other), and the unconscious (the locus where only signifying elements circulate and from which the answer S(A) can emerge). The formula 'I desire you' is subjected to close analysis: to say 'I desire you' is to include the other in one's fundamental fantasy, not to promise satisfaction of needs. Fantasy is thus located as the structure that sustains desire at the upper level of the graph, at the locus of the unconscious — the only register in which signifiers, and not affects, are strictly speaking repressible.

Key concepts: Graph of Desire, Splitting of the Subject, Unconscious, Desire, Fantasy, Repression Notable examples: Little Anna Freud's dream (anticipatory mention); Sartre, 'The Transcendence of the Ego'

III. The Dream about the Dead Father: 'He did not know he was dead' (p.43-59)

Beginning the section 'On Desire in Dreams,' Lacan takes up Freud's dream of the dead father who 'did not know he was dead' as the principal clinical text of the seminar's first arc. He situates the two desires at the heart of every dream: the desire to preserve sleep and the death wish. The wishing subject of the dream is bracketed — it is neither the ego nor simply 'the unconscious' — and Lacan argues that what circulates in the unconscious are strictly signifying elements (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, which he equates with the signifier), not affects, following Freud's metapsychological paper on 'The Unconscious.'

The mechanics of censorship and repression are reformulated: repression bears essentially on the elision of signifiers (specifically the two clausulae 'nach seinem Wunsch' and 'daß er [der Träumer] es wünschte' in the dream's latent text). The distinction between Verwerfung (foreclosure), Verneinung (negation), and Verdrängung (repression) is articulated with reference to French negation (Damourette and Pichon's foreclusive ne versus discordant pas). Repression, Lacan argues, is not a simple suppression but an operation on the signifier by which the subject effaces himself qua subject. The formula of the dream's desire is announced: the confrontation of the barred subject ($) with the object (a), leading toward ($◇a).

Key concepts: Desire, Repression, Signifier, Unconscious, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a Notable examples: Freud's dream of the dead father ('He did not know he was dead'); Freud, 'The Unconscious' (SE XIV); Damourette and Pichon, Des Mots à la pensée

IV. Little Anna's Dream (p.60-77)

The seminar turns to little Anna Freud's childhood dream (strawberries, wild strawberries, omelets, pudding) as a pedagogical contrast: in children's dreams, the I of enunciation has not yet been distinguished from the I of the statement, which is why the censorship of desire is absent and the dream presents itself as naked wish-fulfilment. Lacan uses Alfred Binet's test ('I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me') to illustrate the late developmental achievement of 'uncounting' oneself from the statement — that is, distinguishing the subject of enunciation from the subject of the stated process.

A detailed account of Freud's account of the primary process follows, centering on the concept of hallucination as the topographic regression produced when motor discharge is blocked. Lacan reads Freud's Letter 52 to Fliess and the Traumdeutung's account of the Niederschriften (layered inscriptions) to argue that the primary process involves a 'true topology of signifiers': reality is not apprehended by a quasi-instinctual selective triage, but by a recursive critique of signifiers that progressively constitutes 'indices of reality' within the signifying order. The difference between little Anna's dream and the adult's 'borrowed desire' is thus structural: repression, inaugurated by the child's discovery that the Other knows nothing (and therefore by the unsaid, Verdrängung's constitutive operation), requires a more advanced stage of signifying structure.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Repression, Language, Signifier, Splitting of the Subject, Desire Notable examples: Little Anna Freud's dream; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter VII); Freud, Letter 52 to Fliess; Binet's developmental test

V. The Dream about the Dead Father: 'As he wished' (p.78-94)

Lacan completes his reading of the dead-father dream by placing its four elements (pain / he did not know / that he was dead / as he wished) on a two-column distribution (subject's side vs. father's side) and mapping them onto the two levels of the graph. The key theoretical move is to identify 'as he wished' as the point at which desire's real impact registers in the dream, the moment at which the repressed clausulae, had they not been elided, would have revealed the son's own death-wish toward the father and the son's constitutive confrontation with castration — what the father's death makes impossible to avoid.

Lacan distinguishes three levels of interpretation: the addition of manifest signifiers, the subtraction of repressed ones, and the reconstruction of the unconscious desire that sustains the whole. He articulates the relationship between the subject and the object as fundamentally a relationship of desire (not of knowledge), and proposes that the object's function is to 'prop the subject up in his existence' at the precise moment when the subject, as a speaking being, must otherwise vanish behind the signifier. The phrase from an unnamed author — 'To ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we should learn much' — is used to capture the analytic task: to locate not what was lost, but what the loss revealed about desire's structure.

Key concepts: Desire, Objet petit a, Signifier, Unconscious, Castration, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Freud, dream of the dead father ('As he wished'); Freud, 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' (SE XII)

VI. Introducing the Object of Desire (p.95-110)

This session elaborates the formula ($◇a) as the structural key to desire, situating it against the psychoanalytic tradition's debate on the castration complex and Jones's concept of aphanisis. Lacan critiques Jones for having used 'aphanisis' (disappearance of desire) as a common denominator for men's and women's relations to desire, thereby eliding the fundamental asymmetry Freud discovered in the differential relation of the sexes to the phallus as signifier. Jones's error is to pose aphanisis as a fear of the disappearance of desire, whereas the structural question it raises is: what is the subject's existence beyond desire? The subject is a being who 'takes desire into account and counts on it.'

Lacan introduces the transition from use-value to exchange-value (citing Marx's polemic against Proudhon) as an analogy for the volatilization of the object in the symbolic: to value an object is simultaneously to devalue it, to rip it away from the field of pure need. The session develops the idea that when the object is another person — and especially a sexual partner — a set of consequences follows from this symbolic volatilization that is at the heart of the libidinal dialectic. The hippopotamus anecdote (territory marked by excrement vs. the human's retention of excrement as symbolic collateral) introduces the specifically human, symbolic function of the anal object, preparing the ground for the object a in its different forms.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Aphanisis, Castration, Phallus, Desire, Demand Notable examples: Jones, concept of aphanisis; Marx, The Misery of Philosophy; T.S. Eliot on the hippopotamus

VII. Desire's Phallic Mediation (p.111-131)

This session provides the most condensed and systematic account in the seminar of desire's phallic mediation. Lacan distinguishes the level of the call (appel, the most immediate cry that collapses subject into need) from the level of the wish (voeu, the votive dimension in which the subject must reconquer what was filtered out by language). The symptom is reformulated as a metaphorical phenomenon (repressed signifier interfering with manifest signifier) grounded in desire; the RSI knot is invoked to insist that desire cannot be grasped except in the tightest knot of the real, imaginary, and symbolic.

A re-reading of Freud's three-phase schema from 'A Child is Being Beaten' establishes the concept of primary masochism: the subject comes closest to constituting itself as a subject in the signifying dialectic precisely at the moment of near-abolition, when it perceives that its 'whole being, qua existing being, resides in the very possibility of subjective cancellation.' This phase — never remembered, only reconstructable — is the transformational base from which the barred subject ($) emerges as the third term in the fantasy structure. The phallus is designated as the mediating signifier that regulates the specular couple (a–a') and that, at the level of castration, generates objet a as 'the object that sustains the subject precisely in his position as not being the phallus.' The session closes with a remarkable account of the asymmetry between men and women in relation to desire and jouissance: in men, desire is split from love by the phallic function; in women, the real phallus can satisfy desire but love is directed toward men insofar as they are castrated (deprived of the phallus).

Key concepts: Phallus, Castration, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Jouissance, Demand Notable examples: Freud, 'A Child Is Being Beaten'; Freud, Oedipus complex and phallic phase; Inverted bouquet illusion (optics)

VIII. The Little Cough as a Message (p.133-151)

Beginning the 'Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe' section, Lacan introduces the simplified graph and uses it to articulate Freud's rule that the subject's asides, doubts, and stresses in recounting a dream are themselves elements of the dream-text, inscribed at the level of enunciation. Freud's rule is not a matter of psychological sensitivity but follows structural necessity: everything the subject says 'as an aside' — like annotations of tonality on a musical score — belongs to the latent dream-thoughts because it is located at the level of enunciation rather than the statement. The formula E(e) — enunciation containing the statement — is proposed as the general structure of the enigma that interpretation must navigate.

Lacan presents the case: Sharpe's patient is a married lawyer with severe professional phobias (not fear of failure but fear of excessive success). His most salient current symptom is a 'little cough' before entering the analyst's consulting room. Lacan demonstrates that this cough belongs to the symbolic (vocal) register and functions as a doubly self-conscious message: the patient himself thematizes it as a message. Fantasy is introduced as 'the subject's mode of adorning himself with a signifier that both conceals and reveals his desire.' The patient's fantasy of becoming a barking dog — identifying himself as 'no one' (like Odysseus responding to the Cyclops) in the presence of the female other — is presented as the structure in which the subject discovers that 'inasmuch as I am in the presence of the Other, I am no one.'

Key concepts: Fantasy, Signifier, Graph of Desire, Desire, Objet petit a, Unconscious Notable examples: Ella Sharpe, Dream Analysis; Patient's 'little cough' symptom; Odysseus/Cyclops (no one)

IX. The Fantasy about the Barking Dog (p.152-170)

Lacan continues analyzing the session transcript in detail, focusing on the patient's barking-dog fantasy and the structural logic of the cough as signifier. The patient's question about his own cough — 'what is this message about?' — is positioned on the graph as a second-order question (au second degré) that already implicates the dimension of the Other's desire: it is raised from the locus of the Other, insofar as the patient has already entered analytic discourse. Sharpe, Lacan argues, is 'behind the curve' relative to her patient here, misconstruing the question as a simple manifestation of the wish for omnipotence.

A remarkable excursus on child language acquisition follows: Lacan uses Darwin's anecdote of a child who extends 'quack' from ducks to water, wine, and coins to demonstrate that the child's first metaphor is not an associative or perceptual connection but a structural necessity of language — one signifier must be substituted for another for a new signified to be produced. 'Bowwow' replaces 'dog' as the child's first metaphor, and the session argues that this is not a 'mysterious primitive operation of the mind' but a 'structural necessity of language' that grounds the child's apprehension of the world as a world structured by speech. The omnipotence that concerns the patient, Lacan insists, is the omnipotence of discourse, not of the individual ego — a confusion that will prove fatal to Sharpe's interpretation.

Key concepts: Metaphor, Signifier, Language, Desire, Objet petit a, Graph of Desire Notable examples: Darwin's duck/quack anecdote; Ella Sharpe, Dream Analysis; Barking dog fantasy

X. The Image of the Inside-Out Glove (p.171-190)

Lacan turns to the dream's central image: the 'hoodlike' female genital as a prolapsed (inside-out) vagina. Reading the dream associations — the glove-like fold, the car hood, the cave visited with the mother — Lacan critiques Sharpe's interpretive moves as precipitate: she rushes to identify the hood with the maternal phallus and then with a repressed childhood memory of seeing the sister's or mother's genitals. Each inference produces a new compensatory inference that strays further from structural precision.

Against this, Lacan argues that what should attract attention is the structural use to which the images are put by the subject in relation to the phallus as signifier — not their imaginary content alone. The patient's pseudo-masturbation in the dream (turning the prolapsed vagina inside-out again) is read as an attempt to verify that the phallus is absent: it is an escamotage (conjurer's trick), not a sexual act. The 'egg-bag' magician's trick — making an egg appear and disappear — is proposed as the analogy: what is being hidden (escamoté) is above all the subject himself. The formula of the Lewis Carroll 'double rule of three' is introduced as a way of organizing the two stages of the subject's relation to the fetishistic object.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Phallus, Fantasy, Castration, Identification, Signifier Notable examples: Ella Sharpe, Dream Analysis (hood/vagina image); Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (Mad Gardener's Song); Queen of Sweden / Lady from China anecdotes

XI. Sacrificing the Taboo Queen (p.191-209)

Lacan now exposes the fundamental deadlock of the case as one of structural impossibility: the patient cannot accept the castrated Other. Sharpe's own chess metaphor — the analysis as a game in which she is the 'unconscious avenging father' who will checkmate the patient — is taken seriously as a structural insight Sharpe herself did not fully recognize. Chess is proposed as an analogy for analysis: each piece is a signifying element with its own characteristic movement, and the analytic work consists in progressively reducing the number of signifiers until the subject's structural position is clearly located.

The decisive clinical formula emerges: the patient 'did not want to sacrifice his queen.' The phallus is a hidden signifier that has been displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst). Aphanisis in neurotics is reinterpreted not as a fear of losing desire but as an 'insufficient articulation or partial foreclosure of the castration complex': the neurotic refuses to allow the Other to be castrated, maintaining the Other in the position of the idealized (uncastrated) phallus. The patient's 'little cough' before entering Sharpe's consulting room is now fully legible: it is an instruction to her to erase whatever traces might require him to engage with her as a woman who does not have the phallus. Sharpe's intervention — 'Your penis has always been excessively dangerous; don't be afraid of it' — is critiqued as inciting the patient toward an aggression that bypasses the actual structural question.

Key concepts: Phallus, Aphanisis, Castration, Objet petit a, Neurosis, Fantasy Notable examples: Ella Sharpe's chess metaphor; Patient's 'little cough' as signal to analyst; Jones's concept of aphanisis (critique)

XII. The Laughter of the Immortal Gods (p.210-231)

The concluding session on the Sharpe case moves toward a theoretical resolution. Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation through the specular couple (a–a') regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One (drawing on Plato's Parmenides: Being vs. the One). The emergence of metaphor (substitution) is designated as the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges, yielding the fantasy formula ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

Lacan critiques Melanie Klein's account of early object-relations (the mother's body as universal container of good and bad objects) for its failure to theorize the signifier: Klein correctly observes that the phallus is already present in the earliest relation to the breast, but cannot explain why because she lacks the structural concept of the signifier. The 'being and having' of the phallus is articulated as the fundamental dialectic: the patient's position is one in which he should 'be it without having it' (the feminine position), and the analysis must reveal this. The session concludes by announcing the transition to Hamlet, whose 'To be or not to be' resonates directly with this structure.

Key concepts: Phallus, Objet petit a, Identification, Symbolic, Fantasy, Oedipus Complex Notable examples: Klein, object relations theory (critique); Plato, Parmenides (Being and the One); Sister's sandal straps (patient's associations)

XIII. Impossible Action (p.233-248)

Opening the 'Seven Classes on Hamlet,' Lacan establishes the structural equivalence between Hamlet and Oedipus that Freud himself proposed in the first edition of the Traumdeutung, and immediately distinguishes them. Oedipus acts without knowing; Hamlet knows from the beginning — his Oedipal drama is already concluded before the play begins, which is precisely why 'To be or not to be' presents itself as a live question for him. This fundamental difference means that Hamlet's action cannot be understood as an Oedipal revolt against the father; it is rather the action of a subject who is 'guilty for being,' for whom existence itself has become the problem.

Lacan provides a detailed structural summary of the play — the father's mysterious death, the incestuous remarriage, the ghost's revelation — and reads the play's key structural feature: the fact that the father 'knew the truth.' Unlike Oedipus, who did not know, Hamlet's father possessed the truth and transmitted it. This inversion of Oedipal unknowing is what generates the graph-position Lacan diagrams as 'He knew': the father who knew constitutes the differential coordinate that distinguishes Hamlet from Oedipus. The session introduces procrastination as the play's essential dimension — not a character defect but a structural necessity: Hamlet 'operates on the Other's time' (à l'heure de l'Autre) throughout.

Key concepts: Desire, Splitting of the Subject, Graph of Desire, Oedipus Complex, Name of the Father, Symbolic Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet ('To be or not to be'); Freud's footnote on Hamlet (Interpretation of Dreams); Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus

XIV. The Desire Trap (p.249-268)

Lacan surveys the literary-critical and psychoanalytic literature on Hamlet (Goethe, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Vining, Jones, Dover Wilson) in order to identify the precise point where all prior accounts fall short: they approach the internal contradiction in Hamlet's task but cannot adequately formulate what the unconscious mainspring is. Jones goes furthest, demonstrating the mythical-Oedipal structure, but remains within the framework of the Oedipus complex as an explanation of the procrastination, and thus cannot account for what is decisive: the specific derangement of Hamlet's desire.

Lacan argues that what Hamlet is 'always dealing with' is his mother's desire — not Hamlet's desire for his mother. The 'closet scene' (Act III, iv) is designated as the theatrical climax: Hamlet's pathetic and violent interrogation of his mother about the nature of her desire is what the whole machinery of the play turns on. The 'play-within-the-play' (the play scene) is analyzed as Hamlet's device for catching the king's conscience — an attempt to constitute an Other who knows (S(A) in its positive, guaranteed form) — and the scene in the cemetery where Hamlet jumps into Ophelia's grave is interpreted as the sudden moment at which $, in a certain relationship with little a, allows Hamlet to find his desire 'in its totality' for the first time.

Key concepts: Desire, Splitting of the Subject, The big Other, Objet petit a, Phallus, Mourning Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (closet scene, play scene, gravedigger scene); Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus; Coleridge on the ghost

XV. The Mother's Desire (p.269-290)

Lacan makes the theoretical claim explicit: Hamlet is not a biographical document but a 'mode of discourse' — a dramatic architecture organized so as to offer maximum dimensional space for desire to resonate within. The play's power derives not from Shakespeare's personal drama but from the 'singular, exceptional articulation' he achieved — the degree to which the structure of the unconscious is legible in the play's organization. Hamlet himself is a 'situated ignorance,' an empty place that renders the unconscious present.

The session focuses on the circuit of desire as schematized on the graph, connecting the S(A) point (the answer from the barred Other) to the formula of desire ($◇a) via the Hamletian question. Lacan articulates the 'big secret of psychoanalysis' at the level of S(A): the signifier of the Other's castration, which marks that there is no Other of the Other — no metalanguage, no guarantee of truth behind the signifier. The father knew, and what he knew was 'the irremediable, absolute, unfathomable betrayal of love.' This is the content of S(A) in Hamlet's case: a hopeless truth, one that admits no redemption, and that condemns Hamlet to an 'impure desire' — a desire that is constitutively tangled with the mother's desire — making his action impossible in any straightforward sense.

Key concepts: The big Other, Desire, Phallus, Splitting of the Subject, Name of the Father, Symbolic Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (closet scene); S(A) as signifier of the barred Other; Graph of Desire applied to Hamlet

XVI. There is No Other of the Other (p.291-305)

This session directly addresses the signifier S(A) — the signifier of the barred Other — as the structural conclusion of the analysis of Hamlet and of the seminar's theoretical arc. The 'big secret of psychoanalysis' is that there is no Other of the Other: no metalanguage, no guarantor of truth outside the signifying system itself. In the analytic experience, the subject asks 'What am I in all of this?' and the only possible answer is S(A) — a signifier that marks the lack in the Other.

Lacan introduces Ophelia for the first time as a structural object, surveying the philological history (Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest) to show how Shakespeare transformed a simple 'trap' figure into something structurally decisive. Ophelia functions as the 'barometer of desire': the meter of Hamlet's desire can be read off his relation to Ophelia. She is introduced as 'objet a' — the object around which the dialectic of desire revolves — and the formula ($◇a) is shown to tilt toward ($◇φ) in Hamlet's case, where the phallus itself takes the place of the object and Ophelia becomes the externalized, rejected, and then mourned phallus.

Key concepts: The big Other, Objet petit a, Phallus, Desire, Mourning, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (Ophelia's role); S(A): signifier of the barred Other; Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest (sources of Hamlet)

XVII. Ophelia, the Object (p.306-320)

Lacan maps the three successive stages of Hamlet's relation to Ophelia — estrangement and cruelty (the 'Get thee to a nunnery' scene), rejection and externalization (Ophelia treated as the phallus to be expelled), and mourning/reconquest (the graveyard scene) — arguing that these are not psychological states but structural positions within the fantasy formula. In each phase, Ophelia's structural function shifts: from the object whose very existence threatens Hamlet's desire (because she is the signifier of that desire's phallic nature) to the mourned object whose loss reconstitutes Hamlet's desiring position.

The concept of das Unheimliche is invoked to illuminate the uncanny dimension of Hamlet's estrangement from Ophelia: what is uncanny is the object's revelation of the phallus that had been located there. Lacan argues that the modern hero — Hamlet as opposed to the tragic hero of antiquity — is constitutively displaced onto the Other's time: he is always 'someone who does not know what he wants,' not by psychological weakness but by structural necessity. The distinction between perversion and neurosis in terms of the fantasy formula is stated sharply: perversion emphasizes the imaginary pole a, while neurosis emphasizes the barred subject $. Hamlet is the exemplary illustration of the neurotic fantasy in its constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Fantasy, Phallus, Mourning, Neurosis, Perversion Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (Ophelia scenes); Das Unheimliche (Freud); Fantasy formula ($◇a) vs. ($◇φ)

XVIII. Mourning and Desire / XIX. Phallophanies (p.321-369)

The final two Hamlet sessions work together to connect mourning, the phallus, and the structure of desire. The 'Mourning and Desire' session identifies procrastination and precipitation as the two poles of Hamlet's temporality (structured like the neurotic's alternation of deferral and headlong flight into action), and makes the decisive structural claim: mourning in Hamlet is paradigmatic because all the major rites of mourning in the play are abbreviated, clandestine, or refused. The incomplete symbolic rite opens a hole in the real, and it is the totality of the signifying system — 'the entire logos' — that must intervene to fill this hole. This is why mourning is akin to psychosis: the missing signifier proliferates in the form of images, ghosts, apparitions.

The 'Phallophanies' session ('Phallophanie' = manifestation/appearance of the phallus) addresses the Untergang of the Oedipus complex as a mourning of the phallus. Freud's account of the Oedipus complex's dissolution — the subject caught in the bind of castration whichever vertex of the Oedipal triangle he occupies — is re-read as a passage from the level of demand to that of desire. The phallus is what must be symbolized (raised to the function of a signifier) through this mourning; it is the 'key' to the Untergang. Three forms of the subject's disappearance are distinguished — at the level of castration (S blacked out), at the level of frustration (subjected to A's law), at the level of deprivation (the subject must situate himself in desire) — and their articulation with objet a is sketched.

Key concepts: Mourning, Phallus, Objet petit a, Castration, Oedipus Complex, Real Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (incomplete funeral rites, Polonius, Ophelia); Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia'; Freud on the Untergang of the Oedipus complex

XX–XXI. The Fundamental Fantasy / In the Form of a Cut (p.372-400)

After the break, Lacan recenters by restating his hypothesis: the 'Freudian thing' is desire, and the whole of analytic theory's equivocations — about reality-adaptation, ego-synthesis, object-relations — can be tracked as evasions of this thing. Against Glover's 'tiger-phobia' developmental model (where reality itself undergoes a developmental parallel to instinct-maturation) and Hartmann's ego-adaptive model (where the goal of analysis is to move the subject into the 'world of American lawyers'), Lacan insists that desire is structured synchronically within the signifier, not diachronically within a developmental sequence. The diachronic approach generates paradoxes about 'two realities' (a naive behavioral reality vs. a catastrophic Kleinian internal reality) that Lacan considers conceptually incoherent.

The 'In the Form of a Cut' session formalizes the logical generation of subject-constitution from the first stage (real Other responding to demand: rA/S) through the subject's questioning of the Other as subject, through demand becoming demand for love (D̄), to the production of little a as the remainder that cannot be articulated at the level of the Other. Lacan introduces three forms of objet a — the voice (in delusion), bodily mutilation/initiation marks (as indices of 'being' beyond the subject's natural desires), and the gaze — and argues that initiation rites function as objet a inasmuch as they orient desire toward a symbolic 'beyond.' The concept of the 'cut' (coupure) is foregrounded: 'Being is the same thing as cutting. Cutting renders being present in the symbolic.'

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Fantasy, Demand, Jouissance, Real, Symbolic Notable examples: Glover, 'tiger-phobia' developmental model; Hartmann, ego psychology; Initiation rites and bodily mutilation; Judge Schreber (voice as objet a)

XXII. Cut and Fantasy (p.401-421)

Lacan situates fantasy on the graph with renewed precision: the four intersection points are re-described, with the two 'message' points (S(A) on the upper chain and s(A) on the lower) articulating the retroactive production of signification, and the two 'code' points ($◇D and A) articulating the subject's inscription in demand and the Other. Fantasy ($◇a) is located at the upper level: it designates the point at which the subject is present in unconscious discourse 'as the subject of the cut' — the function of cutting being the essential subjective function in a discourse that escapes him.

The ghost's claim in Hamlet is analyzed as a 'revelation of a lie' — the tautology Hamlet produces after hearing the ghost ('There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he's an arrant knave') indexes the stupor produced by a revelation without a metalinguistic guarantee. The poison poured into the father's ear is read as a fantasy-object: what is at stake is not a toxicological mystery but the signifying function of the ear as the locus through which the signifier enters — the ear, moreover, of Hamlet-the-father, whose name is the same as his son's. The fantasy structure is thus inscribed in the very names and body-parts of the drama.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Splitting of the Subject, Graph of Desire, Signifier, The big Other, Real Notable examples: Shakespeare, Hamlet (ghost's revelation, poison in the ear); Lewis Carroll (double rule of three); Freud, 'A Child Is Being Beaten' (revisited)

XXIII–XXIV. The Function of the Subjective Slit in Perverse Fantasies / The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis (p.422-450)

Turning from Hamlet to a systematic account of perverse fantasy and neurotic desire, Lacan reformulates 'being' and the 'cut' through the philosophical categories of Being and the One, arguing that being 'is at the level of the symbolic' and is 'the same thing as cutting.' The structural formula 'every subject is not one' (tout sujet est pas un) is proposed as the fundamental condition of desire. Comedy and tragedy are distinguished: in tragedy (Hamlet), the hero is definitively abolished in his desire; in comedy, desire is unmasked but never refuted — Tartuffe, Arnolphe, Harpagon are unchanged by the comedy's conclusion.

The perverse fantasies of voyeurism and exhibitionism are analyzed in detail as parallel (not complementary) positions: in both cases, the subject is indicated not by what is shown or seen but by 'the slit' — a gap that is both a hole and a flash in the real. The exhibitionist's erection is redundant with respect to the essential structural element, which is the act of opening the screen; the voyeur's pleasure reaches its height when the secretly observed woman seems to offer herself up to 'invisible hosts of the air.' In the neurosis section, hysteria and obsession are contrasted: the hysteric structures her desire around a double (another woman) through whom her desire can slip in hidden; the obsessive makes $ — the disappearance of the subject — into his hiding place, always putting off his true desire 'until tomorrow,' his desire forever on his own horizon.

Key concepts: Perversion, Neurosis, Fantasy, Objet petit a, Jouissance, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Voyeurism and exhibitionism (structural analysis); Molière, Tartuffe / L'École des femmes (comedy); Freud, 'A Child Is Being Beaten' (obsessional fantasy)

XXV–XXVI. The Either/Or Concerning the Object / The Function of Splitting in Perversion (p.451-483)

These sessions develop the distinction between perverse fantasy (which appears in neurosis and perversion alike) and perversion as a structural position. Lacan critiques a 1956 Parisian article (unnamed colleagues) that conflates the two and concludes that there is 'no specific unconscious content' in the perversions — an error that follows from reducing desire to 'an eroticized relation.' Against the object-relations tradition (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), Lacan insists that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to a developmental conquest of reality.

Freud's concept of the 'polymorphously perverse disposition' is re-read as the discovery of the very structure of unconscious fantasy. The distinction between neurosis and perversion is then formulated structurally: for the neurotic, what must be proven is the continued existence of desire (desire is always on the horizon); for the pervert, a conjunction is made between 'being it' and 'having it' via identification with the Other — the phallus is located in the idealized/fetishized object. Male homosexuality (Boehm, Gillespie) and female homosexuality (Freud's young homosexual woman) are analyzed through this structure. The session on Lolita (Nabokov) is invoked to illustrate the perverse locus of desire, and the 'inside-out vagina' (evagination) is identified as the final imaginary term with which the homosexual analyzed by Boehm is confronted — connecting back to the Sharpe case's central dream image.

Key concepts: Perversion, Fantasy, Phallus, Objet petit a, Neurosis, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (polymorphous perverse disposition); Boehm, homosexuality studies; Freud, 'young homosexual woman' case; Nabokov, Lolita; Gillespie on perversion

XXVII. Toward Sublimation (Conclusion) (p.486-501)

Lacan offers a synthetic conclusion to the year's work. He diagnoses the current state of analytic theory as dominated by 'moralizing normalization': case studies are organized around a 'supposedly normal way of approaching other people,' and analytic progress is gauged by the subject's approximation to this norm. Against this, Lacan defends the irreducible dimension of desire as what psychoanalysis alone can properly thematize. The 'Freudian thing,' reiterated, is desire — and any reduction of analysis to adaptation, reality-testing, or object-relation normalization misses this thing entirely.

The seminar closes with a set of structural formulations about desire and culture: what Lacan calls 'culture' is 'a certain history of the subject in relation to logos.' Desire is not outside social structure but in a relation of 'interaction and exchange' with everything that crystallizes in it. The function of perversion as a 'protest' is acknowledged: it shows, by maintaining desire in an extreme form, that desire is irreducible. Sublimation — announced as the topic for the following year (Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) — is introduced as the remaining question: how can desire be honored without being either normalized or subjected to the destructive extremes of perversion? Spinoza's formulation ('Desire is man's very essence') is cited as the philosophical anchor for the seminar's entire trajectory.

Key concepts: Desire, Jouissance, Phallus, Objet petit a, Symbolic, Real Notable examples: Spinoza, Ethics (desire as human essence); Klein, object relations (final critique); Kris, Ernst (plagiarism case, 'fresh brains'); Glover, transitory perversion cases

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, 'A Child Is Being Beaten'
Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia'
Sigmund Freud, 'The Unconscious'
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Sigmund Freud, 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning'
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus
Ella Sharpe, Dream Analysis
Melanie Klein, object relations theory
Edward Glover, developmental theory of perversion
Heinz Hartmann, ego psychology
W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Spinoza, Ethics
Sartre, 'The Transcendence of the Ego'
Plato, Parmenides
Karl Marx, The Misery of Philosophy
Lacan, Seminar IV (Object Relation)
Lacan, Seminar V (Formations of the Unconscious)
Lacan, Ecrits
Felix Boehm, homosexuality studies
W. H. Gillespie, perversion studies

Position in the corpus

Seminar VI sits at a pivotal junction in the Lacanian corpus, belonging to the 'return-to-Freud' period and constituting the direct sequel to Seminar V (Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–58), in which the Graph of Desire was constructed and the paternal metaphor formalized. Where Seminar V used the graph primarily to analyze wit and the formations of the unconscious (the unconscious as structured like a language), Seminar VI deploys the completed graph to think desire in its properly clinical dimension. The seminar should ideally be read after Seminar IV (The Object Relation) — which elaborated frustration, deprivation, and castration and introduced the triad that reappears in the Hamlet and Phallophanies sections — and before Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), which takes up the sublimation question announced at the close of Seminar VI. The two key Ecrits that flank it are 'The Direction of the Treatment' (1958) and 'Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire' (1960), the latter of which represents the compressed, written version of many of the graph's elaborations that are performed pedagogically in Seminar VI. Readers of the Ecrits essay will find Seminar VI indispensable as a commentary and expansion of what is there compressed to the point of opacity.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian corpus, Seminar VI is the most sustained treatment of fantasy as a structural concept prior to the later development of jouissance in Seminars XI and XVII. Its Hamlet reading is an essential complement to the much shorter treatments in the Ecrits ('Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet') and has no equivalent in density anywhere else. For readers coming from outside the Lacanian tradition — from literary theory, from Shakespeare studies, from Freudian clinical practice — the Hamlet section makes this the most accessible entry point into Lacanian structural theory in its full clinical-theoretical elaboration. Those working on mourning, melancholia, and the object should read it alongside Seminar X (Anxiety), which develops the objet a concept further, and Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts), which returns to the drive and the gaze as forms of objet a that are here only adumbrated.