The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI

Delivered in 1964 and published in French in 1973, this is the seminar in which Lacan reorganises psychoanalysis around four concepts: the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. He treats the unconscious as structured like a language, a thing that pulses open and closes again rather than a hidden reservoir, and reads Freud's chance encounters through the pairing of tuche and automaton, the missed meeting with the real against the insistence of the signifying chain. The middle sessions turn to the scopic field, where Lacan develops the objet petit a and the gaze as an object that looks back from outside the subject's mastery. The closing argument names the desire of the analyst as the pivot on which a cure turns, separating transference from suggestion. Sheridan's translation carries Lacan's spoken voice, and the seminar reads more plainly than the Ecrits, giving the clinician a workable route into his account of what analysis does.