Desire in the works of Jacques Lacan

Part I – Écrits
Selected passages

[In chronological order, with some modifications to respect the temporal

sequence. See ‘Bibliographical References in Chronological Order’, pp. 864-
868. The Écrits are not arranged in a strict chronological order. Some texts were
added in 1966, presumably to be included in the Écrits.]

Beyond the “Reality Principle” (1936)

This is the way in which what we may call “analytic experience” is

constituted: its firs condition is formulated in a law of non-omission,
which promotes everything that “is self-explanatory”, the everyday and
the ordinary, to the status of interesting that is usually reserved for the
remarkable; but it is incomplete without the second condition, the law of
non-systematization, which, positing incoherence as a condition of
analytic experience, presumes significant all the dross of mental life—not
only the representations in which scholastic psychology sees only
nonmeaning (dream scenarios, presentiments, daydreams, and confused
or lucid delusions), but also the phenomena that are not even granted a
civil status in it, so to speak, since they are altogether negative (slips of
the tongue and bungled actions). Let us note that these two laws, or
better, rules of analytic experience, the first of which was isolated by
Pichon, appear in Freud’s work in the form of a single rule that he
formulated, in accordance with the concept prevailing at the time, as the
law of free association. [pp. 65-66]

[…] I now turn to a critique of [Freud’s] metapsychology. It begins,

precisely, with the introduction of the notion of “libido”. Freudian
psychology […] claims to move from interpersonal relations, isolating
them as determined by our culture, to the biological function that is taken
to be their substratum; it locates this function in sexual desire.
We must nevertheless distinguish between two different uses of the
term “libido”, which are constantly confounded in analytic theory: libido
as an energetic concept, regulating the equivalence of phenomena, and
libido as a substantialist hypothesis, relating the phenomena to matter.

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Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 […] it is the metabolism of the sexual function in man that Freud
designates as the basis of the infinitely varied “sublimations” manifested
in his behaviour. [p. 73]
The elements of a positive determination were thus introduced between
psychical realities that a relativistic definition has allowed us to objectify.
This determination is dynamic or relative to the facts regarding desire.
It was possible in this way to establish a scale for the constitution
of man’s objects of interest, and especially for those, which are
prodigiously diverse, that remain an enigma, if psychology in theory
posits reality such as knowledge constitutes it: anomalies of emotion and
drive, idiosyncrasies of attraction and repulsion, phobias and panic
attacks, nostalgias and irrational wills; personal curiosities, selective
collecting, inventions of knowledge, and job vocations. [p. 74]

Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty (1945)

[Endnote 6, added in 1966] The reader who continues on in this

collection is advised to return to this reference to the collective, which
constitutes the end of the present article, in order to situate what Freud
produced in the field of collective psychology (Massenpsychologie und
Ich-Analyse, 1920) [Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]): the
collective is nothing but the subject of the individual. [p. 175]

Presentation on Psychical Causality (1947)

Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis (1948)

The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic

Experience (1949)

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Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 As I myself have shown, human knowledge is more independent than
ani-
mal knowledge from the force field of desire because of the social
dialectic
that structures human knowledge as paranoiac; but what limits it is the
“scant reality” surrealistic unsatisfaction denounces therein. These
reflections lead to recognize in the spatial capture manifested by the
mirror stage, the effect in man, even prior to this social dialectic, of an
organic inadequacy of his natural reality-assuming we can give some
meaning to the word “nature.” [p. 77]

This moment at which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates,

through identification with the imago of one’s semblable and the drama of
primordial jealousy (so well brought out by the Charlotte Bühler school in
cases of transitivism in children), the dialectic that will henceforth link the
I
to socially elaborated situations.
It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human
knowledge
[savoir] into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in
an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns
the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a
danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process. The very
normalization of this maturation is henceforth dependent in man on
cultural intervention, as is exemplified by the fact that sexual object
choice is dependent upon the Oedipus complex. [p. 79]

In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can

accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the “Thou art that”, where
the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole
power as practitioners to bring him to he point where the true journey
begins. [p. 81]

3
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology
(1951)

Presentation on Transference (1952)

I will base my demonstration on the case of Dora, because of what it

stood for in the still new experience of transference, being the first case in
which Freud recognized that the analyst plays a part. [p. 178]

Thus it is true, as Freud thinks, that the return to a passionate complaint

about the father represents a regression when compared with the relations
that had begun to develop with Herr K.
But this homage, whose beneficial value for Dora was glimpsed by
Freud, could be received by her as a manifestation of desire only if she
could accept herself as an object of desire—that is, only once she had
exhausted the meaning of what she was looking for in Frau K.
As is true for all women, and for reasons that are at the very crux
of the most elementary social exchanges (the very exchanges Dora names
as the
grounds for her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally
that of accepting herself as a man’s object of desire, and this is the
mystery that motivates Dora’s idolization of Frau K. In her long
meditation before the Madonna and in her recourse to the role of distant
worshipper, this mystery drives Dora toward the solution Christianity has
offered for this subjective impasse by making woman the object of a
divine desire or a transcendent object of desire, which amounts to the
same thing. [p. 181]

What then is this transference whose work, Freud states somewhere, goes
on invisibly behind the progress of the treatment and whose effects,
furthermore, are “not susceptible of definite proof” (SE VII, 74) Can it
not be considered here to be an entity altogether related to
countertransference, defined as the sum total of the analyst’s biases,
passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any
given moment in the dialectical process? [p. 183]

4
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 […] transference is nothing real in the subject if not the appearance, at a
moment of stagnation in the analytic dialectic, of the permanent modes
according to which she constitutes her objects.
What then does it mean to interpret transference? Nothing but to
fill the emptiness of this standstill with a lure. But even though it is
deceptive, this lure serves a purpose by setting the whole process in
motion anew.
[…] I believe […] that transference always has the same meaning
of indicating the moments where the analyst goes astray and takes anew
his bearings, and the same value of reminding us of our role: that of a
positive nonaction aiming at the ortho-dramatization of the patient’s
subjectivity. [pp. 183-4]

Variations on the Standard Treatment (1955)

[…] psychoanalysis is not like any other form of therapeutics.

[…] At stake here is a rigour that is in some sense ethical, without which
any treatment, even if it is filled with psychoanalytic knowledge, can only
amount to psychotherapy. [p. 269]

While [Freud] thus views cure as an added benefit [la guérison comme
benefice de surcroît] of psychoanalytic treatment, he is wary of any
misuse of the desire to cure. This is so ingrained in him that, when an
innovation in technique is based upon this desire, he worries deep inside
and even reacts inside the analytic group by raising the automatic
question: “Is that still psychoanalysis?” [p.270]

To return psychoanalysis to a veridical path, it is worth recalling that

analy-
sis managed to go so far in the revelation of man’s desires only by
following,
in the veins of neurosis and the marginal subjectivity of the individual,
the

5
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 structure proper to a desire that thus proves to model it at an unexpected
depth-namely, the desire to have his desire recognized. This desire, in
which
it is literally verified that man’s desire is alienated in the other’s desire, in
effect
structures the drives discovered in analysis, in accordance with all the
vicissi-
tudes of the logical substitutions in their source, aim [direction], and
object.
But these drives, however far back we go into their history, instead of
prov-
ing to derive from the need for a natural satisfaction, simply modulate in
phases that reproduce all the forms of sexual perversion—that, at least, is
the most obvious and best known fact of analytic experience. [p. 285]

People have tried to detect the inner obstacle to training analysis in the
psychological attitude of candidacy in which the candidate places himself
in relation to the analyst, but they fail to realize that the obstacle lies in its
essential foundation, which is the desire to know or the desire for power
that motivates the candidate at the core of his decision. Nor have they
recognized that this desire must be treated like the neurotic’s desire to
love, which is the very antinomy of love, according to the wisdom of the
ages—unless this is aimed by the best analytic writers when they declare
that every training analysis is obliged to analyze the reasons why the
candidate chose the career of analyst. [p. 297]

[Reference No. 39 to Michael Balint, “Analytic Training and Training

Analysis”, IJP XXXV, 2 (1954): 157-62] [p. 299 and p. 302]

[…] the extreme discretion with which Freud introduced the very forms
of the “standard treatment” that have since become the norm:

I must however make it clear that what I am asserting is that this

technique is the only one suited to my individuality; I do not
venture to deny that a physician quite differently constituted might
find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and

6
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 to the task before him. [Freud, S. (1912e) Recommendations to
Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis, SE XII, 111] [p. 300]

The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1956)

Nothing created appears without urgency; nothing in urgency fails to

surpass itself in speech. [p. 201]

If we examine the literature that we call our “scientific activity”, the

current problems of psychoanalysis clearly fall into three categories:
(A) The function of the imaginary […]
(B) The concept of libidinal object relations […]
(C) The importance of countertransference and, correlatively, of
analytic training. Here the emphasis has resulted from the difficulties
related to the termination of analytic treatment that intersect the
difficulties related to the moment at which training analysis ends with
the candidate beginning to practice. The same oscillation can be
observed here: On the one hand, the analyst’s being is said, not
without audacity, to be a non-negligible factor in the effects of an
analysis and even a factor whose conduct should be brought out into
the open at the end of the game; on the other hand, it is put forward no
less energetically that a solution can come only from an ever deeper
exploration of the unconscious mainspring. [p. 202]

Whether it wishes to be an agent of healing, training or sounding the

depths, psychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech. The
obviousness of this fact is no excuse for ignoring it. Now all speech
calls for a response. [p. 206]

Let us ask ourselves […] where […] frustration comes from. Is it from
the analyst’s silence? Responding to the subject’s empty speech—
even and especially in an approving manner—often proves, by its
effects, to be far more frustrating than silence. Isn’t it, rather, a
frustration that is inherent in the subject’s very discourse? Doesn’t the
subject become involved here in an ever greater dispossession of

7
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 himself as a being, concerning which—by dint of sincere portraits
which leave the idea of his being no less incoherent, of rectifications
that do not succeed in isolating its essence, of stays and defences that
do not prevent his statue from tottering, of narcissistic embraces that
become like a puff of air in animating it—he ends up recognizing that
this being has never been anything more than his own construction
[oeuvre] in the imaginary and that this construction undercuts all
certainty in him? For in the works he does to reconstruct it for
another, he encounters anew the fundamental alienation that made
him construct it like another, and that has always destined it to be
taken away from him by another.
The ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its capacity to
bear frustration, is frustration in its very essence. Not frustration of
one of the subject’s desires, but frustration of an object in which his
desire is alienated; and the more developed this object becomes, the
more profoundly the subject becomes alienated from his jouissance.
[…]
The subject’s aggressiveness here has nothing to do with animals’
aggressiveness when their desires are frustrated. This explanation,
which most seem happy with, mask another that is less agreeable to
each and every one of us: the aggressiveness of a slave who responds
to being frustrated in his labour with a death wish. [pp. 207-8]

The analyst’s art must […] involve suspending the subject’s

certainties until their final mirages have been consumed. And it is in
the subject’s discourse that their dissolution must be punctuated. [p.
209]

It is, therefore, a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the

subject’s discourse. This is why the ending of the session—which
current technique makes into an interruption that is determined purely
by the clock and, as such, takes no account of the thread of the
subject’s discourse—plays the part of a scansion which has the full
value of an intervention by the analyst that is designed to precipitate
concluding moments. Thus we must free the ending from its routine
framework and employ it for all the useful aims of analytic technique.
[p. 209]

8
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 I have […] approached the function of speech in analysis from its least
rewarding angle, that of “empty” speech in which the subject seems to
speak in vain about someone who—even if he were such a dead ringer
for him that you might confuse them—will never join him in the
assumption of his desire. [p. 211]

Its [the psychoanalytic method’s] means are those of speech, insofar

as speech confers a meaning on the functions of the individual; its
domain is that of concrete discourse qua field of the subject’s
transindividual reality; and its operations are those of history, insofar
as history constitutes the emergence of truth in reality [reel]. [p. 214]

The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual,

which is not at the subject’s disposal in reestablishing the continuity of
his conscious discourse. [p. 214]

The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank

or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be
refound; most often it has already been written elsewhere. Namely,
 in monuments: this is my body, in other words, the hysterical
core of neurosis […];
 in archival documents too: these are my childhood memories
[…];
 in semantic evolution: this corresponds to the stock of words
and acceptations of my own particular vocabulary […];
 in traditions, too, and even in the legends which in a heroicized
form, convey my history;
 and, lastly, in its traces that are inevitably preserved in the
distortions necessitated by the insertion of the adulterated
chapter into the chapters surrounding it, and whose meaning
will be re-established by my exegesis. [p. 215]

For to say of psychoanalysis and of history that, qua sciences, they are
both sciences of the particular, does not mean that the facts they deal with

9
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 are purely accidental or even factitious, or that their ultimate value comes
down to the brute aspect of trauma.
Events are engendered in a primal historization—in other words,
history is already being made on the stage where it will be played out
once it has been written down, both in one’s heart of hearts and outside.
[p. 216]

To put it succinctly, the instinctual stages are already organized in

subjectivity when they are being lived. And to put it clearly, the
subjectivity of the child who registers as victories and defeats the epic of
the training of his sphincters—enjoying in the process the imaginary
sexualization of his cloacal orifices, turning his excremental expulsions
into aggressions, his retentions into seductions, and his movements of
release into symbols—is not fundamentally different from the subjectivity
of the psychoanalyst who strives to restore the forms of love that he calls
“pregenital” in order to understand them. [p. 217]

The subject goes far beyond what is experienced “subjectively” by the

individual; he goes exactly as far as the truth he is able to attain—which
will perhaps come out of the mouth you have already closed again. [p.
219]

We know that [Freud] laid it down as a rule that the expression of a desire
must always be sought in a dream. But let us be sure we understand what
he meant by this. If Freud accepts, as the reason for a dream that seems to
run counter to his thesis, the very desire to contradict him on the part of a
subject whom he had tried to convince of his theory, how could he fail to
accept the same reason for himself when the law he arrived at is supposed
to have come to him from other people?
In short, nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire
finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other
holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to
be recognized by the other. [p. 222]

Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they
join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh”

10
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 before he comes into the world; so that that they bring to his birth, along
with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of
his destiny; […].
Servitude and grandeur in which the living being would be
annihilated, if desire did not preserve his part in the interferences and
pulsations that the cycles of language cause to converge on him, when the
confusion of tongues intervenes and the orders thwart each other in the
tearing asunder of the universal undertaking.
But for this desire itself to be satisfied in man requires that it be
recognized, through the accord of speech or the struggle for prestige, in
the symbol or the imaginary.
What is at stake in an analysis is the advent in the subject of the
scant reality that this desire sustains in him, with respect to symbolic
conflicts and imaginary fixations, as the means of their accord, and our
path is the intersubjective experience by which this desire gains
recognition. [p. 231]

Psychoanalysis can provide scientific foundations for its theory and

technique only by adequately formalizing the essential dimensions of its
experience, which—along with the historical theory of the symbol—are
intersubjective logic and the temporality of the subject. [p. 239]

Now while Hegel’s work is also precisely what we need to confer a

meaning on so-called analytic neutrality other than that the analyst is
simply in a stupor, this does not mean that we have nothing to learn from
the elasticity of the Socratic method or even from the fascinating
proceedings of the technique by which Plato presents it to us, were it only
by our sensing in Socrates and his desire the unresolved enigma of the
psychoanalyst, and by situating in relation to Platonic vision our own
relation to truth […]. [p. 242]

WE always come back, then, to our twofold reference to speech and

language. In order to free the subject’s speech, we introduce him to the
language of his desire, that is, to the primary language in which—beyond
what he tells us of himself—he is already speaking to us unbeknown to
himself, first and foremost, in the symbols of his symptom.

11
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 It is certainly a language that is at stake in the symbolic brought to
light in analysis. This language, corresponding to the playful wish found
in one of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, has the universal character of a tongue
that would be understood in all other tongues, but at the same time—
since it is a language that grabs hold of desire at the very moment it
becomes humanized by gaining recognition—it is absolutely particular to
the subject.
It is thus a primary language, by which I do not mean a primitive
language […].
In a fundamental article on symbolism, Jones points out on page
102 that, although there are thousands of symbols in the sense in which
the term is understood in analysis, all of them refer to one’s own body,
blood relatives, birth, life, and death. [p. 243]

The antinomy immanent in the relations between speech and language

thus becomes clear. The more functional language becomes, the less
suited it is to speech, and when it becomes overly characteristic of me
alone, it loses its function as language. [p. 246]

For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.

What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What
constitutes me as a subject is my question. In order to be recognized by
the other, I proffer what was only in view of what will be. In order to find
him, I call him by a name that he must assume or refuse in order to
answer me.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an
object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what
was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I
am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in
the process of becoming.
If I now face someone to question him, there is no cybernetic
device imaginable that can turn his response into a reaction. […] a
reaction is not a response.
If I press an electric button and a light goes on, there is a response
only to my desire. [p. 247]

12
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a
subtle body, but body it is. [p. 248]

Analysis can have as its goal only the advent of true speech and the
subject’s realization of his history in its relation to a future. [p. 249]

In order to know how to respond to the subject in analysis, the method is

to first determine where his ego is situated—the ego that Freud himself
defined as formed by a verbal nucleus—in other words, to figure out
through whom and for whom the subject asks his question. As long as
this is not known, we risk misconstruing the desire that must be
recognized there and the object to whom this desire is addressed. [p. 250]

Freud’s interpretation, the dialectical method of which appears so clearly

in the case of Dora, does not present these dangers, for when the analyst’s
biases (that is, his countertransference, a term whose correct use, in my
view, cannot be extended beyond the dialectical reasons for his error)
have misled him in his intervention, he immediately pays a price for it in
the form of a negative transference. For the latter manifests itself with a
force that is all the greater the further such an analysis has already led the
subject toward an authentic recognition, and what usually results is the
breaking of the analysis.
That is exactly what happened in Dora’s case, because of Freud’s
relentless attempts to make her think Herr K. was the hidden object of her
desire; the constitutive biases of Freud’s countertransference led him to
see in Herr K. the promise of Dora’s happiness.
[…] Freud himself recognized after the fact the preliminary source
of his failure in his own misrecognition at that time of the homosexual
position of the object aimed at by the hysteric’s desire. [p. 251-2]

Of course, we must be attentive to the unsaid that dwells in the holes in

discourse, but the unsaid is not to be understood like knocking coming
from the other side of the wall. [p. 253]

13
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 This there is no further need to resort to the outdated notion of primary
masochism to explain repetitive games in which subjectivity
simultaneously masters its dereliction and gives birth to the symbol.
These are occultation games which Freud, in a flash of genius,
presented to us so that we might see in them that the moment at which
desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language.
We can now see that the subject here does not simply master his
deprivation by assuming it—he raises his desire to a second power. For
his action destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear by
bringing about its absence and presence in advance. His action thus
negativizes the force field of desire in order to become its own object to
itself. […]
Fort! Da! It is already when quite alone that the desire of the
human child becomes the desire of another, of an alter ego that dominates
him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own affliction.
Should the child now address an imaginary or real partner, he will
see that this partner too obeys the negativity of his discourse, and since
his call has the effect of making the partner slip away, he will seek to
bring about the reversal that brings the partner back to his desire through
a banishing summons.
Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and
this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire. [p.
262]

Man’s freedom is entirely circumscribed within the constitutive triangle

of the following: the renunciation he imposes on the other’s desire by
threatening to kill the other in order to enjoy the fruits of the other’s
serfdom, the sacrifice of his life that he agrees to for the reasons that give
human life its measure, and the suicidal abnegation of the vanquished
party that deprives the master of his victory and leaves him to his
inhuman solitude.
Of these figures of death, the third is the supreme detour by which
the immediate particularity of desire, reconquering its ineffable form,
refinds in negation a final triumph. And we must recognize its meaning,
for as analysts we deal with it. It is not, in fact, a perversion of instinct,
but rather a desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form we can
find of the death instinct.

14
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 The subject says “No!” to this darting game of intersubjectivity in
which desire gains recognition for a moment only to lose itself in a will
that is the other’s will. The subject patiently withdraws his precarious life
from the churning aggregations of the symbol’s Eros in order to finally
affirm life in a speechless curse. [p. 263]

Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the

Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic
function of language to give his desire its symbolic mediation. May this
experience finally enable you to understand that the whole reality of its
effects lies in the gift of speech; for it is through this gift that all reality
has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality.
[p. 265]

Introduction to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung”

Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung” (1956)

Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”

A remainder that no analyst will neglect, trained as he is to remember

everything having to do with the signifier even if he does not always
know what to do with it […]. [p. 8]

[…] the unconscious is the Other’s discourse. [p. 10]

For it can literally [à la lettre] be said that something is not in its place
only of what can change places—that is, of the symbolic. For the real,
whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in its
place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing
that can exile it from it. [p. 17]
If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a
meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts,
destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate
gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex; and that

15
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly
the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage. [p. 21]

“You believe you are taking action when I am the one making you stir at
the bidding of the bonds with which I weave your desires. Thus do the
latter grow in strength and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the
fragmentation of your rent childhood […].” [p. 29]

[…T]hat the signifier’s answer to whomever questions it is: “Eat your

Dasein.” [p. 29]

That is why the “purloined letter”, nay the “letter en souffrance,” means
is that a letter always arrives at its destination. [p. 30]

For the time being, the links of this [symbolic] order are the only ones
that can be suspected to suffice to account for Freud’s notion of the
indestructibility of what his unconscious preserves. […] The program
traced out for us is hence to figure out how a formal language determines
the subject. But the interest of such a program is not simple, since it
assumes that a subject will not fulfill it except by contributing something
of his own to it. [p. 31]

But, people object, my s, s, s, and s, are not without a subject
remembering them. This is precisely what I am calling into question here:
what is repeated is a product, not of nothing from the real, (which people
believe they have to presuppose in it), but precisely of what was not [ce
qui n’était pas]. [p. 32]

For it is his inaugural discovery that Freud reaffirms in [Beyond the

Pleasure Principle]: namely, the conception of memory implied by his
“unconscious”. […] What is revamped here was already articulated in the
“Project”, in which Freud’s divination traced the avenues his research
would force him to go down: the  system, a predecessor of the
unconscious, manifests its originality therein, in that it is unable to satisfy
itself except by refinding an object that has been fundamentally lost. [p.
34]

§
The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis
(1956)

16
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 §

The Situation on Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956

(1956)

Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching (1957)

The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud (1957)

My title conveys the fact that, beyond […] speech, it is the whole
structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the
unconscious. This is to alert prejudiced minds from the outset that the
idea that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts may have to
be reconsidered.
But how are we to take the letter here. Quite simply, literally [à la
lettre]. By “letter” I designate the material medium [support] that
concrete discourse borrows from language. [p. 413]

[…] the dream-work proceeds in accordance with the laws of the

signifier.
The rest of the dream revision is termed “secondary” by Freud,
taking on its value from what is at stake: they are fantasies or daydreams,
Tagtraum, to use the term Freud prefers to use to situate them in their
wish-fulfilling function (Wunscherfüllung). [p. 426]

f (S… S’) S  S () s

that is, metonymic structure, indicating that it is the signifier-to-signifier
connection that allows for the elision by which the signifier instates lack
of being [le manque de l’être] in the object-relation, using signification
referral’s [renvoi] value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that
it supports. [p. 428]

17
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 For the notion of the subject is indispensable even to the workings of a
science such as strategy in the modern sense, whose calculation exclude
all “subjectivism”. [429]

Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or

eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That
is the question?
The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that
conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of
myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak. And there is no reason
not to bring in the term “thought” here. For Freud uses the term to
designate the elements at stake in the unconscious, that is, in the
signifying mechanisms I just pointed to there. [p. 430]

[…] I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not

thinking. […]
What me must say is: I am not, where I am the plaything of my
thought; I think about what I am where I do not think that I am thinking.
[p. 430]

And the enigmas that desire—with its frenzy mimicking the gulf of
the infinite and the secret collusion whereby it envelops the pleasure of
knowing and of dominating in jouissance—poses for any sort of “natural
philosophy” are based on no other derangement of instinct that the fact
that it is caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the
desire for something else. Hence its “perverse’ fixation at the very point
of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is
immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen.
There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of
unconscious desire—given that there is no need which, when its satiation
is prohibited, does not wither, in extreme case through the very wasting
away of the organism itself. It is in a kind of memory, comparable to
what goes by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are
based on an electronic realization of signifying composition), that the
chain is found which insists by reproducing itself in the transference, and
which is the chain of a dead desire.

18
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 It is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the
subject cries out through his symptom, as Christ said that stones
themselves would have cried out, had the children of Israel not lent them
their voices. [p. 431]

If I have said that the unconscious is the Other’s discourse (with a capital
O), it is in order to indicate the beyond in which the recognition of desire
is tied to the desire for recognition. [p. 436]
If I speak of the letter and being, if I distinguish the other from the Other,
it is because Freud suggests them to me as the terms to which resistance
and transference effects refer—effects against which I have had to wage
unequal battle in the twenty years that I have been engaged in the practice
that we all, repeating after Freud, call impossible: that of psychoanalysis.
It is also because I must help others avoid losing their way there.
It is to prevent the field they have inherited from falling fallow, and
to that end to convey that if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a
metaphor to say so, any more than it is to say that man’s desire is a
metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor, whether one likes to admit it
or not, just as desire is a metonymy, even if man scoffs at the idea. [pp.
438-9]

The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire (1958)

On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1959)

The Signification of the Phallus (1958)

In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism (1960)

19
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 §

The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious (1960)

The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power (1961)

The analyst is even less free in what dominates both his strategy and
tactics—namely, his politics, where he would be better to take his
bearings from his want-to-be than from his being. [p. 493]

[Freud] immediately recognized that the crux [principe] of his power lay
in the transference—in which respect it did not differ from suggestion—
but also that this power only gave him a way out of the problem on the
condition that he not use it, for it was then that it took on its whole
transferential development. [p. 499]

[…] it is in a direction of the treatment, ordered, […] in accordance with

a process that begins with rectification of the subject’s relations with
reality [reel], and proceeds to development of the transference and then to
interpretation, that is situated the horizon at which the fundamental
discoveries […] surrendered themselves to Freud […]. [p. 500]

[…] the idea that the surface is the level of the superficial is itself
dangerous.
Another topology is necessary if we are not to be mistaken as to the
place of desire.
To wipe desire off the map [carte] when it is already covered over
in the patient’s landscape is not the best way of following Freud’s
teaching. [p. 503]

Although we must agree with Abraham when he suggests that the typical
object-relation is manifested in the activity of the collector, perhaps the
rule of that relation is not given in its edifying antinomy, but is to be

20
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 sought, rather, in some impasse that is constitutive of desire as such. [p.
507]

It is the privileged function of the signifier “phallus” in the subject’s way

of being present in desire […]. [p. 508]

An ethics must be formulated that integrates Freud’s conquests

concerning desire: one that would place at the forefront the question of
the analyst’s desire. [p. 514]

V. Desire must be taken literally.

A dream, after all, is but a dream, we hear people say these days. Does it
mean nothing that Freud recognized desire in dreams?
Desire, not tendencies. For we must read the Traumdeutung [The
Interpretation of Dreams] to know what is meant by what Freud calls
“desire” there.
We must pause at the vocable Wunsch, and its English translation
“wish”, to distinguish them from the French désir [desire], given that the
sound of damp firecrackers with which the German and English words
fizzle out suggests anything but concupiscence. Their French equivalent
is voeu.
These voeux may be pious, nostalgic, annoying, or mischievous. A
lady may have a dream that is motivated by no other desire than to
provide Freud, who has explained to her his theory that dreams are
desires, will proof that they are nothing of the kind. What we must keep
in mind here is that this desire is articulated in a very cunning discourse.
But in order to understand what desire means in Freud’s thought, it is just
as important to perceive the consequences of the fact that he was satisfied
to recognize the dream’s desire and the confirmation of his law in that
cunning discourse.
For he takes its eccentricity still further, since a dream of being
punished may, if it likes, signify a desire for what the punishment
suppresses. […]
Let us read the texts; let us follow Freud’s thinking in the twists
and turns it imposes on us, and not forget that, in deploring them himself

21
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 compared with an ideal of scientific discourse, he claims that he was
forced into them by his object of study.
We see then that this object is identical to those twists and turns,
since at the first turning point of his book, when dealing with a hysteric’s
dream, he stumbles upon the fact that, by displacement, in this case
specifically by allusion to another woman’s desire, a desire from the day
before is satisfied in the dream—a desire that is sustained in its eminent
position by a desire that is of quite a different order, since Freud
characterizes it as the desire to have un unsatisfied desire.
One should try and count the number of referrals [renvois] made
here to bring desire to a geometrically higher power. A single index
would not suffice to characterize the exponent. For it would be necessary
to distinguish two dimensions in these referrals: a desire for desire, in
other words, a desire signified by a desire (a hysteric’s desire to have an
unsatisfied desire is signified by her desire for caviar: the desire for
caviar is its signifier), is inscribed in a different register of a desire
substituted for a desire (in the dream, the desire for smoked salmon,
characteristic of the patient’s female friend, is substituted for the patient’s
own desire for caviar, which constitutes the substitution of a signifier for
a signifier). […]
The desire in the hysteric’s dream, but also any other bit of nothing
in its place in this text by Freud, summarizes what the whole book
explains about mechanisms said to be unconscious—condensation,
sliding, etc.—by attesting to their common structure: namely, desire’s
relation to the mark of language that specifies the Freudian unconscious
and decenters our conception of the subject. […]
[…] Freud, in positing that smoked salmon has been substituted
here for caviar, which he takes to be the signifier of the patient’s desire,
proposes that the dream be viewed as a metaphor of desire.
But what is metaphor if not a positive meaning effect, that is, a
certain access gained by the subject to the meaning of her desire?
The subject’s desire being presented here as what is implied by her
(conscious) discourse, thus, as preconscious—which is obvious since her
husband is willing to satisfy her desire, though it is important to the
patient, who has persuaded him that she has such a desire, that he do not
do so, but you still have to be Freud to articulate this as the desire to have

22
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 an unsatisfied desire—one still must go further to figure out what such a
desire means in the unconscious.
For a dream is not the unconscious but, as Freud tells us, the royal
road to it. […]
Let us note for the moment that the desire in question, while
signified as unsatisfied, is signified thusly by the signifier “caviar”,
insofar as the signifier symbolizes this desire as inaccessible; note, too,
however, that as soon as this desire slides, qua desire, into the caviar, the
desire for caviar becomes this desire’s metonymy—rendered necessary
by the want-to-be in which this desire sustains itself. […]
[…] the scant meaning that turns out to be at the root of this desire,
conferring upon it the hint of perversion one is tempted to point to in the
present case of hysteria.
The truth of this appearance is that desire is the metonymy of the
want-to-be. [pp. 518-520]

Desire merely subjugates what analysis subjectivizes. [p. 520]

For desire, assuming that Freud is right about the unconscious and that
analysis is necessary, can only be grasped in interpretation. [p. 521]

For the desire of our witty hysteric (Freud is the one who characterizes
her as such)—I mean her waking desire, that is, her desire for caviar—is
the desire of a woman who is fulfilled and yet does not want to be. […]
But there it is: she does not want to be satisfied regarding her true
needs alone. She wants other needs that are gratuitous and, in order to be
quite sure that they are gratuitous, not to satisfy them. This is why the
question “What does the witty butcher’s wife desire?” can be answered as
follows: “Caviar”. But his answer is hopeless because she also does not
want any. [p. 522]

To be the phallus, even a somewhat skinny one—isn’t that the final

identification with the signifier of desire? [p. 523]

Desire is what manifests itself in the interval demand excavates just shy
of itself, insofar as the subject, articulating the signifying chain, brings to

23
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 light his lack of being [manque à être] with his call to receive the
complement of this lack from the Other—assuming that the Other, the
locus of speech, is also the locus of this lack.
What it is thus the Other’s job to provide—and indeed, it is what
he does not have, since be too lacks being—is what is called love, but it
is also hate and ignorance.
Those passions for being are, moreover, evoked by any demand
beyond the need articulated in that demand, and the more the need
articulated in that demand is satisfied, the more the subject remains
deprived of those passions.
[…] the being of language is the nonbeing of objects, and the fact
that desire was discovered by Freud in its place in dreams—which has
always been the bane of all attempts by thought to situate itself in reality
—suffices to instruct us.
[…] the child does not always fall asleep […] in the bosom of
being, especially if the Other, which has its own ideas about his needs,
interferes and, instead of what it does not have, stuffs him with the
smothering baby food it does have, that is, confuses the care it provides
with the gift of its love.
It is the child who is the most lovingly fed who refuses food and
employs his refusal as if it were a desire (anorexia nervosa).
This is an extreme case where one grasps as nowhere else that hate
is the payback for love, but where it is ignorance that is not pardoned.
Ultimately, by refusing to satisfy the mother’s demand, isn’t the
child requiring the mother to have a desire outside of him, because that is
the pathway toward desire that he lacks? [p. 524]

11. Indeed, one of the principles that follows from these premises is that:
 if desire is an effect in the subject of the condition—which is
imposed on him by the existence of discourse—that his need pass
through the defiles of the signifier;
 and if, […] by opening up the dialectic of transference, we must
establish the notion of the Other with a capital O as being the locus
of speech’s deployment (the other scene, ein anderer Schauplatz,
of which Freud speaks in the Traumdeutung);

24
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 then it must be posited that, as a characteristic of an animal at the
mercy of language, man’s desire is the Other’s desire.
This concerns a totally different function than that of primary
identification […], for it does not involve the assumption by the
subject of the other’s insignia, but rather the condition that the subject
find the constitutive structure of his desire in the same gap opened up
by the effect of signifiers in those who come to represent the Other for
him, insofar as his demand is subjected to them.
[…] The desire in the dream is not owned [assume] by the subject
who says “I” in his speech. Articulated, nevertheless, in the locus of
the Other, it is discourse—a discourse whose grammar Freud began to
enunciate as such. This is why the wishes it constitutes have no
optative inflection to alter the indicative in which they are formulated.
A linguistic point of view would allow us to see that what is called
the aspect of the verb is here that of the perfective [accompli] (the true
meaning of Wunscherfüllung [wish-fufillment].
It is this ex-sistence (Entstellung) of desire in the dream that
explains how the dream’s signifierness masks its desire, whereas its
motive vanishes as being simply problematic. [pp. 524-525]

Desire is produced in the beyond of demand, because in linking the

subject’s life to its conditions, demand prunes it of need. But desire is
also excavated in the [area] shy of demand in that, as an unconditional
demand for presence and absence, demand evokes the want-to-be in
the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the ground for the
demand for love, for the hatred that goes so far as to negate the other’s
being, and for the unspeakableness of what is not known [s’ignore] in
its request. In this aporia incarnate—of which one might
metaphorically say that demand borrows its heavy soul from the hardy
offshoots of the wounded tendency, and its subtle body from death as
it is actualized in the signifying sequence—desire asserts itself as an
absolute condition.
Less still than the nothing that circulates in the round of
significations that stir men up, desire is the wake left behind by its
trajectory and like the signifier’s brand on the speaking subject’s
shoulder. It is not so much as a pure passion of the signified as a pure
action of the signifier, which stops at the moment when the living

25
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 being, having become a sign, renders this action meaningless
[insignifiante]. [pp. 525-526]

13. The function of this signifier as such in desire’s quest is, as Freud
detected, the key to what we need to know in order to terminate our
analyses—and no artifice can make up for it if we are to achieve this
end. [p. 526]

[Lacan’s analysis of an obsessional neurotic, pp. 526-529]

14. The importance of preserving the place of desire in the direction of

the treatment requires one to position this place in relation to the
effects of demand, the only effects that are currently considered to be
at the crux of the power of the treatment. [p. 529]

Although it always shows through in demand, […] desire is

nevertheless beyond demand.
[…] it is only from a kind of speech [une parole] that would
remove the mark the subject receives from what he says that he might
obtain the absolution that would return him to his desire.
But desire is nothing but the impossibility of such speech, which,
in replying to the first speech can merely redouble its mark by
consummating the split (Spaltung) the subject undergoes by virtue of
being a subject only insofar as he speaks. […]
[…] if demand’s signifiers have sustained the frustrations on which
desire is fixated (Freud’s Fixierung), it is only in their place that
desire is exacting [assujetissant].
Whether it intends to frustrate or to gratify, any response to
demand in analysis reduces transference to suggestion. [p. 530]

[…] it is natural to analyze transference. For transference is already, in

itself, an analysis of suggestion, insofar as transference places the
subject, with regard to his demand, in a position he occupies only
because of his desire.
It is only in order to maintain this transference framework that
frustration must prevail over gratification.

26
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 The subject’s resistance, when it opposes suggestion, is but a desire
to maintain his desire. As such, his resistance should be considered
positive transference, since it is desire that maintains the direction of
the analysis, quite apart from the effects of demand. [p. 531]

Let us say that, in its fundamental use, fantasy is the means by which
the subject maintains himself at the level of his vanishing desire,
vanishing inasmuch as the very satisfaction of demand deprives him
of his object. [p. 532]

[…] Freud can articulate that hat presents itself as not very reasonable
in desire is an effect of the passage of the rational qua real—that is, of
language—into the real, insofar as the rational has already traced its
circumvallation there.
For the paradox of desire is not the neurotic’s privilege; it is rather
that he takes the existence of this paradox into account in his way of
dealing with desire. [pp. 532-533]

It was not until the chapter on identification in Group Psychology and

the Analysis of the Ego that Freud clearly distinguished the third form
of identification, which is conditioned by its function of sustaining
desire and is therefore specified by the indifference of its object. [p.
534]

Long before Freud came on the scene, psychologist knew, even if they
did not express it in these terms, that while desire is the metonymy of
the want-to-be, the ego is the metonymy of desire. [p. 534]

Let us note:
(1) that speech possesses all the powers here, the specific powers of
the treatment;
(2) that, with the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, the analyst is far
from directing the subject toward full speech, or toward a coherent
discourse—rather, the analyst leaves the subject free to have a go
at it;
(3) that his freedom is what the subject tolerates least easily;

27
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 (4) that demand is exactly what is bracketed in analysis, it being ruled
out that the analyst satisfy any of the subject’s demands;
(5) that since no obstacle is put in the way of the subject’s owning
[aveu] of his desire, it is toward this owning that he is directed and
even channeled;
(6) that resistance to this owning can, in the final analysis, be related
here to nothing but desire’s incompatibility with speech. [p. 535]

Since the point is to take desire, and since it can only be taken
literally, [à la lettre], since it is the letter’s snare that determines, nay
overdetermines, its place as a heavenly bird, how can we fail to
require the bird catcher to first be a man of letters? [p. 536]

A man of desire, a desire he [Freud] followed against his will down

pathways where it is reflected in feeling, dominating, and knowing,
but whose unparalleled signifier he and he alone—like an initiate at
the defunct mysteries—succeeded in unveiling: the phallus, the
receiving and giving of which are equally impossible for the neurotic,
whether he knows that the Other does not have it, or that the Other
does have it, because in both cases the neurotic’s desire is elsewhere
—to be it. And whether male or female, man must accept to have and
not have it, on the basis of the discovery that he isn’t it. [p. 537]

Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality

Structure” (1961)

Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality (1962)

Kant with Sade (1963)

28
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire (1964)

Position of the Unconscious (1966)

Science and Truth (1966)

Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung” by Jean

Hyppolite (1954)

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject (1961)

Added in 1966

Overture to this Collection (October 1966)

On My Antecedents [Undated]

What is involved in the triumph of assuming [assumption] the

image of one’s body in the mirror is the most evanescent of objects, since
it only appears there in the margins: the exchange of gazes, which is
manifest in the fact that the child turns back toward the person who is
assisting the child in some way, if only by being present during the game.
Let me add to this something that a movie, which was made by
people with no knowledge of my conceptions, showed us when it

29
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 captured on film a little girl looking at herself naked in the mirror: with
an awkward gesture, her hand quickly encountered the phallic lack.
Regardless of what covers the image, nevertheless, the latter
merely centers a power that is deceptive insofar as it diverts alienation—
which already situates desire in the Other’s field—toward the totalitarian
rivalry which prevails due to the fact that the semblable exercises a
dyadic fascination on him: that “one or the other” is the depressive return
of the second phase in Melanie Klein’s work’ it is the figure of Hegelian
murder. […] [pp. 55-56]
I thus find myself situating these texts in a future perfect: they will
have anticipated my insertion of the unconscious into language. […] [p.
56]
While the quantity of recruits, from which an effect of quality is
engendered, completely changed after the war, perhaps the standing-room
only crowd that came to hear me speak about “Training Analysis” [*] will
serve as a reminder that I played an important role therein. […] [p. 57]

[* The original reads La psychanalyse, didactique (une virgule entre).

Écrits, pp. 71-72]

Allow me to add that this not owes what is biographical in it only

to my desire to enlighten the reader. [p. 57]

On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question (1966)

On a Purpose (1966)

On an Ex Post Facto Syllabary (1966)

30
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
 By the editor, Jacques-Alain Miller

Classified Index of the Major Concepts

Commentary on the Graphs

References

Index
(Page numbers correspond to the English edition of Écrits)

a, object a

Alienation

Bedeutung See Signification

Being 512-517. See also Want-to-be

Demand
and desire
and need 244
for love 244, 525

Desire 243
and demand
and need 431
of the hysteric 518-523
indestructibility of 431
and its interpretation 521
of the psychoanalyst

Didactique 57

Direction of the treatment 489, 490, 529, 535

Discourse

Dream

31
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
Ego

Ego psychology 244

Ex-sistence (Entstellung) 525

Fetish 431

Freud, Sigmund 300, 412-441, 537

Freudian Thing, the

Frustration 531

Fundamental rule of psychoanalysis 490, 535

Gratification 531

Hate 524

Hegel 55-56

Hyppolite, Jean

Ignorance 524

Image
of the body

Instinct

Interpretation 495-503

Jones, Ernest 243

Lacan, Jacques
Beyond the “Reality Principle”
Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”
On my Antecedents

Lagache, Daniel

32
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
Lalangue

Language

Letter 412, 413

Logical time

Love 524

Metaphor

Metonymy

Mirror Stage

Need
and demand 244
and desire
for love 244

Negation See Verneinung

Object 513

other
and Other

Other
and other

Parlêtre

Part-object 513

Passions 524 See Love, Hate, Ignorance

Phallus

Plato 242

Pleasure Principle

Power 489, 535

33
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
Psychanalyse, didactique (la)

Psychical causality

Psychical reality

Reality Principle

Resistance 531

Separation

Sign

Signification

Signified

Signifier

Signifierness

Sinthome

Socrates
his desire 242

Spaltung 537

Speech 535
full
empty

Subject
constitution of
division
Spaltung

Suggestion 530, 531

Symbol 220, 222, 225, 228, 243, 244

Symbolism 229, 243

34
Desire in Écrits Selected passages
Symptom
formation 533

Time, logical

Training of psychoanalysts
See also Didactique

Transference 491, 503-512, 530

Traumdeutung

Trieb

Truth 535

Unconscious

Verneinung

Voeu, voeux

Want-to-be 525

Wish

Witty butcher’s wife 518-523

Wunsch

35
Desire in Écrits Selected passages