Seminars of Jacques Lacan

From 1952 to 1980 French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan gave an annual seminar in Paris. The Books of the Seminar are edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.

In 1951, Lacan, then a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, initiated a series of weekly Wednesday meetings in his apartment on Rue de Lille, Paris. In 1952, the meetings were transferred to the Sainte-Anne Hospital (Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne ()) where Lacan worked as a consultant psychiatrist. Book I of the seminar is the edited transcription of the 1953-1954 weekly lessons at Sainte-Anne, where the Seminar would be held until 1963.

The final seminar to be held at Sainte-Anne is published as Book X (Anxiety, 1962-1963). The single lesson delivered on 20 November 1963 and published as "Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar" is the introduction to a seminar that was never delivered, and which has thus been dubbed The Inexistent Seminar. Indeed, the night before this lesson, Lacan had been informed that the SFP "had voted, in a complicated procedure, to refuse to ratify the motion striking Lacan's name from the list of the training analysts", thus stripping Lacan of the right to continue as a training analyst within the International Psychoanalytical Association. This institutional manoeuvre effectively brought to a close the early period of Lacan's teaching.

The middle period of Lacan's teaching began two months later with The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Hosted by the École Normale Supérieure, under the patronage of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, the Seminar now enjoyed "a much larger audience" and represented a "change of front". This series of lessons, now edited as Book XI of the Seminar, opens with the lesson "Excommunication" in which Lacan expands on the circumstances and implications of his exclusion from the IPA. The second lesson, "The Freudian Unconscious and Ours" sets the tone of his ensuing teaching by indicating potential points of discontinuity with respect to Freud's oeuvre.

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