Review of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

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BOOK REVIEW
Jacques Lacan (1973, 1979). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin
Books), pp. 290, ISBN 0-14-055217-0

INTRODUCTION
This book is based on Jacques Lacan’s seminar of 1964 at the École Normale
Supérieure. It was the period when Lacan was in the process of founding his own
analytic school after leaving the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963.
Lacan’s new school was known as the École Freudinenne de Paris. This book is also
known as Seminar XI since it is the eleventh of the annual seminars that he began in
1953 at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris; it was made possible by the support of
Claude-Lévi Strauss and Ferdinand Braudel.
1
Seminar XI is the best known and the
most readable of the seminars.
2 It is also important because it symbolizes the first
scholarly collaboration between Jacques Lacan and his editor, Jacques-Alain Miller.
Even though Miller went on to edit any number of Lacanian texts, this is his first and
favourite seminar. It includes a number of interactions between Lacan and Miller in
a Q&A format since Miller attended these seminars and offered to put them together
in the form of a book. Lacan was more than happy to accept the offer and the result
is not only this seminar, but the series of seminars that were subsequently published
in French and in any number of translations. Those readers who find these public
seminars easier than Lacan’s writings should start with this lucid translation by Alan

1 The role that Lévi-Strauss played in influencing Jacques Lacan is explained in Patrick
Wilcken (2010). Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (London: Bloomsbury), passim.
See also Anne Dunand (1996). ‘Lacan and Lévi Strauss,’ Richard Feldstein et al (1996).
Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud (Albany: State University of New York
Press), pp. 98-108.

2 For a chronology of Jacques Lacan’s seminars, see Marcelle Marini (1992). Jacques Lacan: The
French Context, translated by Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press),
pp. 95-138.

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Sheridan.
3
There are four parts and four important concepts that Lacan takes up for
analysis here. The four parts, in addition to the four fundamental concepts
comprising ‘the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive’ also focus
on the function of ‘the gaze’ and ‘the field of the Other.’
4
Lacan, as usual, relates
these terms to each other as topological constructs rather than work with tidy or
reductive definitions.
5
However Lacan does identify the key attributes of these
concepts without necessarily collecting them together in any specific chapter. This
conveys the impression that Lacan is thinking aloud rather than declaring outright
what these concepts mean on the basis of his previous acquaintance with them.
6

THE LACANIAN GAZE
This seminar also includes Lacan’s forays in art criticism. The main purpose of his
analysis of art is to explain the conceptual differences between the function of the
eye and the gaze. Lacan also analyses the roles played by the concepts of light, the
line, and the picture. The best known aspect of Lacanian art criticism is his analysis
of the concept of anamorphosis in Thomas Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. So
while the title of the book makes it seem that Lacan will focus on only four concepts,
there is a lot more on offer in the seminar than he promises at the outset. Most
readers will find Lacan’s art criticism much more difficult to follow than his analysis
of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis since it presupposes that they
understand the differences between his approach and those of conventional art
critics. Since working out the differences between these forms of art criticism will
make this review too long, I will focus mainly on the analytic concepts that Lacan
invokes in his title and point out that Lacan’s preoccupation with art is mainly an
attempt to explain the conceptual differences between the eye and the gaze and not

3 See, for instance, Jacques Lacan (1966, 1992). Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan
(London: Tavistock/Routledge). First time readers of Lacan should definitely consult Bruce
Fink (2004). Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press).

4 This theme is taken up later in Seminar XVII (1969-1970). See Jacques Lacan (1991, 2007).
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, translated by Russell
Grigg (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co).

5 For an introduction to the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysis, see Charles Rycroft
(1995). A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Books).

6 For a formal definition of Lacanian concepts, see Dylan Evans (1996). An Introductory
Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge). An in-depth study
of technical terms in psychoanalysis is available in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis (1967, 1988). The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
(London: Karnac Books).

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an end in itself.
7
This again is partly because of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre on
his work and partly because the libidinal economy that structures the analytic
distinction between the eye and the gaze is important within the Lacanian order of
the imaginary. The main aspect of the gaze is not so much to see in the direct sense
but to see oneself seeing or see oneself seeing oneself; the gaze, to put it simply, is
necessarily implicated in turns of visual reflexivity and the forms of desire that
constitute it. The gaze also brings out the asymmetric dynamic of seeing while being
looked at unexpectedly by the subject or the Other. These forms of asymmetry are
then mapped onto the Lacanian thesis about the impossibility of the sexual relation
since the unconscious emerges in the gap between the eye and the gaze; in human
speech in the gap between the statement and the utterance; in the psychic apparatus
in the gap between perception and consciousness; and in the structural gap between
biological instincts and psychosexual drives. Furthermore, the Lacanian theory of
the drives is defined as necessarily ‘partial’ making it impossible to fuse the drives
into something akin to a biological model of instinct. These drives exert a constant
force on the subject and are not reducible to the function of reproduction; and in so
far as they are partial drives they have a centrifugal effect on the subject. Therefore
the Lacanian theories of art, sexuality, and sublimation are all related to a theory of
the partial drive.
LACAN, PICASSO & SPINOZA
Seminar XI begins with Lacan’s ‘excommunication’ from the mainline analytic
movement and the analogy that he invokes to Baruch Spinoza’s excommunication
from his synagogue. The main reason for Lacan’s excommunication was related to
his experiments with the variable session in lieu of the analytic hour. Lacan argued
that the fixed duration of the analytic hour would make it impossible to ‘hystericize’
the patient; a variable model of the analytic session was much more likely to
‘precipitate’ the disclosures of the unconscious.
8 This approach however met with a
lot of resistance and led to Lacan’s excommunication from the analytic mainstream;
that is why Lacan founded his own school of psychoanalysis in Paris in 1964. This
seminar makes a case for why he went his own way and what the fundamental

7 For a Lacanian theory of art, see Stuart Schneiderman (1988). ‘Art According to Lacan,’
Newsletter of the Freudian Field, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring, pp. 17-26.

8 An exposition of the Lacanian technique of the variable session is available in Bruce Fink
(2007). ‘Scanding (The Variable Length-Session),’ Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A
Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York and London: W. W. Norton), pp. 47-73. See, for
instance, Jacques Lacan (1953). The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in
Psychoanalysis, translated by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1968), p. 80.

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concepts of psychoanalysis should mean to those who want to incorporate the
insights of structural linguistics, structural anthropology, and his triadic model of
the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic within Freudian meta-psychology. Lacan
not only explains why he thinks these analytic innovations are important, but also
differentiates between two forms of scientific research. Unlike conventional science
which ‘seeks’ the truth, he belongs to the category of those who ‘find’ the truth. This
is a distinction that he borrows from the painter Pablo Picasso who was also a finder
by temperament. Lacan was fond of citing Blaise Pascal who was fond of the Christian
dictum that you would not seek me (in the world) unless you had already found me (in your
heart). In other words, we seek the Lord only when we have already found the faith
necessary to do so. There is, in other words, a transferential dimension in such an
approach to faith, prayer, and belief that can generate insights in terms of a patient’s
pre-transference to the analyst and in delineating the problem of the choice of an
analyst. This relates to the question of why patients demand an analysis from a
particular analyst and the forms of the clinical transference that accompany such a
demand. Likewise, the quest for truth in analysis is mediated by the desire of the
analyst. There is no space outside the transference, Lacan argues, from which the
analyst can view the patient’s neurosis. That is why the desire of the patient, the
desire of the analyst, and the state of the transference go a long way in determining
the state of the analysis and its therapeutic outcomes.
9
Desire however is not to be
situated in this formulation at the level of the subject, but at the level of the Socratic
objet a. That is because the origin of psychoanalysis demonstrates that something in
Freud’s own desire for psychoanalysis remains unanalysed by those who came in his
wake; this un-analysed element constitutes, according to Lacan, ‘the original sin of
analysis.’
THE UNCONSCIOUS & REPETITION
The main task that Lacan sets himself is to differentiate between the Freudian
unconscious and those that preceded it. Furthermore, he attempts to situate his
model of the unconscious (that is structured like a language) within Freudian meta-
psychology.
10 The main attributes of the unconscious include the function of the gap,
the feeling of failure, the sense of impediment, and the structure of splits in the

9 See, for instance, Colette Soler (2002). ‘Symptoms of Transference,’ analysis, No. 11, pp. 60-
73. A comprehensive analysis of the Lacanian clinic is available in Bruce Fink (1999). A
Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press).

10 For a comprehensive analysis of meta-psychology, see Sigmund Freud (1991). On
Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis translated by James Strachey and edited by
Angela Richards (London: Penguin Books).

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psyche. The unconscious, Lacan emphasizes, is not be understood with an alternate
model of ontology; it is instead to be conceived as ‘pre-ontological.’ In other words,
it does not lend itself to a direct ontological description. Another important aspect of
the unconscious is its pulsative function; this means that the moment it is detected, it
closes up. That is the one of the main reasons that Lacan describes it as pre-
ontological. It is not uncommon amongst Lacanian commentators to invoke the
uncertainty principle while describing the unconscious. The process of observing the
unconscious affects either what it discloses when it is open or its propensity to close
up in the presence of an observer. Not only is the function of the unconscious related
to repression, but the discovery of the unconscious as a meta-psychological construct
itself is subject to periodic repression in the history of psychoanalysis. That is why
the unconscious is the most important concept in psychoanalysis; it has to be
repeatedly re-discovered by clinicians and theorists. Both the concepts of repression
and repetition are related to the unconscious. The former is the prototype of the
unconscious; the latter, i.e. repetition, relates to that which has not been adequately
worked through in the psyche. It is related to the unconscious because that aspect of
the unconscious which cannot be remembered and worked through in the clinic is
subject to repetition in the patient’s life. It is customary to relate the analytic
situation and the forms of jouissance that relate to the symptom in the context of
repetition. The patient can get out of the patterns of repetition only if he is able to
relate to the talking cure in its entirety. That is, the patient’s trauma will have to be
put into words. To summarize: Lacan situates the unconscious at the level of the
ethical plane since it does not lend itself to an ontological description.
11
This is why
most philosophical critiques do not do justice to the concept of the unconscious.
They presuppose that an ontological description is possible; which, as Lacan points
out, reifies the unconscious and makes it into a static entity. In other words,
ontological descriptions assume that the unconscious is a place rather than a
function because of our fondness for spatial metaphors; this is not a theoretical
temptation that Lacan himself is immune to in this seminar. The topographical
dimension of the unconscious does not subsume the unconscious as such; it only
makes it more convenient to talk about it through the invocation of spatial
metaphors. We must therefore differentiate between what the unconscious is and
how we talk about it. This is all the more important because almost everything that

11 See also Jacques Lacan (1986, 1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 1959-1960: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, translated by Dennis Porter, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London:
Tavistock/Routledge).

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the patient says on the couch through acts of free-association is related to the state of
his unconscious.
12

THE SUBJECT & THE OTHER
The topological relationship between the subject and the Other is emphasized by
Lacan in his theory of the unconscious through Schema L and the graphs of desire
because it is the Other that speaks through the subject. The effect created by this
topology in analysis is that the subject feels that he is spoken rather than speaking in
the conscious sense; that is because the subject always winds up saying more or less
than he consciously prepared to say. This inability on the part of the subject to
control exactly what he wants to say, how much he wants to say, and when he wants
to say, whatever he winds up saying in the analytic situation, is related to what
Lacan terms the plus-de-jouis. It also represents the libidinal function of speech since
the talking cure is a form of sublimation.
13
The importance of this libidinal aspect of
speech in neurotic states cannot be over-emphasized since the jouissance of speech is
either ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ and not just enough on any given occasion. The goal
of analysis is not to interpret in copious amounts since that will not be therapeutic
for the patient or subject to psychic resistance, but to interrupt the structure of the
symptom through clinical interventions known as ‘punctuation.’
14

CONCLUSION
An important aspect of Lacanian punctuation is to differentiate between three
important stages of the analysis; these stages are referred to as ‘the moment of
seeing,’ ‘the stage of understanding,’ and ‘the moment to conclude’ the analysis. In
other words, unlike Freud, Lacan defines the trajectory of analysis as ‘terminable.’
The technical requirement is to ensure that the analysis does not end too soon or too
late in the life of the patient. The need for an optimal duration to complete the
analysis is a function of the difference between ‘chronological time’ and ‘logical
time.’ The success of the treatment is related to the function of logical time and not
how many years of effort went into it (i.e. chronological time). The technique of
punctuation in the Lacanian clinic then is related to a model of temporality and

12 See, for instance, Richard Boothby (2001). Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan
(New York and London: Routledge), passim.

13 See Mary Ann Doane (1991). ‘Sublimation and the Psychoanalysis of the Aesthetic,’ Jacques
Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. IV, Culture, edited by Slavoj Žižek
(London: Routledge), pp. 127-146.

14 For an account of punctuation as a clinical technique, see Bruce Fink (2007). ‘Punctuating,’
Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York and
London: W. W. Norton), pp. 36-46.

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progress in the act of interpretation;
15
and, as Lacan puts it, as early as 1953, ‘the
suspension of a session cannot not be experienced by the subject as punctuation in
his progress’ towards a cure.
16
And, finally, Lacan emphasizes the importance of the
‘subject supposed to know’ as the motor force of the transference; it is the fantasy of
the knowledge contained in the Other that prompts the efforts of the patient in the
analysis. The fantasy may even go to the extent of getting the patient to believe that
the analyst can read his mind though that is not what Lacan meant by the locus of
the subject presumed to know. These fantasies are analogous to the relationship
between Socrates and his disciples in transferentially mediated dialogues where
what is at stake is not only what Socrates knows or does not know in the empirical
sense, but how that assumption of knowledge contained in the symbolic Other
affects the process of self-discovery on the part of the disciples; hence the Lacanian
preoccupation in the analytic situation on the topological relationship between the
subject and the Other and the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis that are
needed to make sense of this relationship.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN



15 See the three papers on temporality in psychoanalysis in the special issue on ‘Lacan on
Logical Time,’ in the Newsletter of the Freudian Field, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1988, pp. 4-45. See also
Colette Soler (1996). ‘Time and Interpretation,’ Richard Feldstein et al (1996). Reading
Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud (Albany: State University of New York Press), pp.
61-66.

16 Jacques Lacan (1953). The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis,
translated by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1968), p. 78.