The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII
Desire, the good, and what an analyst is not entitled to want for a patient.
The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.
Delivered across 1959 and 1960 and first published in French in 1986, this seventh seminar sets out Lacan's account of what an ethics grounded in psychoanalysis would require. Dennis Porter's English translation appeared in 1992. Lacan places das Ding, the Thing, at the centre of desire: an irrecoverable object around which the subject organises its longing and its loss. Against the classical ethics of the good, he argues that the analyst has no business steering a patient toward any received notion of well being. The seminar works through sublimation, the moral law, and courtly love before turning to Sophocles. Its reading of Antigone presents her as the figure of desire followed to its limit, past the boundary the ethics of the good would police. For the clinician, the seminar supplies a rigorous vocabulary for the question of what the treatment serves, and a warning against substituting the analyst's good for the patient's desire.
About the author
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan (1901 to 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose reading calls for a return to Freud. From 1953 he led a weekly seminar in Paris that shaped a generation. His work holds that the unconscious is structured like a language, traces the mirror stage in the forming of the ego, and distinguishes three registers: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Object a names the cause of desire. He broke with the IPA and founded the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, later the Ecole de la Cause freudienne.
Details
- 1986
- 1992
- French
- Dennis Porter
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1986
- 432
- 9780415423618