This is not a matter of opinion. Reading the works of Jacques Lacan — an enormous collection of dense works beginning in the 1930s to almost 1980 — involves matching wits with one of the best-read intellectuals in Paris in the 20th century, who would quote from Hebrew texts, Latin histories, and technical fields such as linguistics and mathematics. This workshop involves voluntary readers who think they might benefit from having company while undergoing the hardships of Lacanian psychoanalytical ideas. A “nothing left to lose” attitude sacrifices perfect understanding (impossible anyway) for a sympathy for this great thinker’s legacy and an admiration for his energy, perseverance, and ingenuity. Currently there are three reading projects: (1) reading Seminar IX, Identification, with Olga Cox Cameron and Dan Collins; (2) reading Seminar XIV, Fantasy, with Berrin Terim and Jodi LaCoe; and (3) reading Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, with Claudio Sgarbi.
reading seminar v (formations of the unconscious)
Resource: the on-line translation by Cormac Gallagher of Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious.
The focus of the first stage of this reading is the Signorelli Parapraxis, a famous conjecture derived from Freud’s most famously documented case of forgetting proper names [Freud, S. (1898) “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 3:287-297]. Strachey writes in the introduction:
The episode which is the subject of this paper occurred during Freud’s visit to the Adriatic coast in September, 1898. He sent a short account of it to Fliess on his return to Vienna in a letter dated September 22 (Freud, 1950a, Letter 96), and reported a few days later (September 27, Standard Ed., Letter 97) that he had sent this paper off to the journal in which it appeared soon afterwards. This was the first published history of a parapraxis, and Freud made it the basis of the opening chapter of his longer work on the subject three years later (1901b); the Editor’s Introduction to this (Standard Ed., 6) discusses the whole matter more fully. The present paper was only reprinted after Freud’s death, more than fifty years after its first publication. It had been generally assumed, on the basis of Freud’s remarks at the beginning of the first chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Standard Ed., 1, that what was in question was no more than a rough draft of the later version. An actual comparison of the two works now shows that only the main lines of the topic are the same, that the chain of argument is differently arranged here, and that at one or two points the material is amplified.
The gateways to the unconscious are sign-marked by slips of the tongue, bungled explanations, and forgetting. Lacan treats this in a curiously specific way, taking Freud’s original account not just as one of the sets of signs pointing to the unconscious but as a matrix organized in, specifically, an organized way. The stakes involved in reading Lacan’s analysis correctly are considerable. Like Seminar IX (Identification), it contains early versions of his metaphor formula (S/S’ • S’/x → S(1/s”)). Here it is the form of X/Signor • Signor/Herr. Here is direct evidence that Lacan links the repressed signifier (S’) to the “symptom” (S’/x) as it emerges “elsewhere” in the body, which in this anecdote is, specifically, the traveling body of Freud himself.
This website will provide annotated references to the materials collected for this study.
- Freud’s short writing, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” (Zum Psychischen Mechanismus Der Vergesslichkeit).
- A video animating the associative cloud of terms constituting Freud’s peripatetic network reconfiguring the name “Signorelli.”
- Correspondence (Sgarbi-Kunze) on the role of metaphor in the formations of the unconscious.
- Links to supplemental materials.
reading seminar xiv (fantasy)
Resource: the on-line translation by Cormac Gallagher.
- 22 February 2022
- 3 March 2022