Index
Publication
-Original Stenotype
-Unedited transcript
-Published edited text-in Jacques Lacan’s lifetime
Information on Seminar 7th December 1955 & its Mathemes
Jacques Lacan’s References
Jacques-Alain Miller’s Chapter Headings
Citations
Related Text
Publication
-Original Stenotypes
-École lacanienne de psychanalyse – E. L. P.
The École lacanienne de psychanalyse’s library makes all of Jacques Lacan’s seminars available to the Internet public, in the basic form of available stenotypes. A stenographer assisted Jacques Lacan in each of his seminar sessions, from 1953 to 1980. At the end of each session, she typed up the stenotype tapes, in duplicate or triplicate, using a process that had been famous for a century: carbon paper.
Available https://ecole-lacanienne.net/bibliolacan/stenotypies-version-j-l-et-non-j-l/ 1955-1956 : Les Structures Freudiennes des Psychoses/Version J.L.
Session of 7th December 1955, https://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1955.12.07.pdf
-Unedited transcript
– Staferla
Seminar III http://staferla.free.fr/S3/S3%20PSYCHOSES.pdf 7th December 1955 http://staferla.free.fr/S3/S3.htm
The main sources for Staferla’s working document are:
– Les psychoses…, sur le site E.L.P. (sténotypie).
– Les psychoses…, university thesis format
The bibliographical references give priority to the most recent editions. The diagrams have been redrawn. N.B. Anything enclosed in square brackets [ ] is not by Jacques Lacan.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Published during Jacques Lacan’s lifetime
‘Le Séminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses : Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller : Éditions du Seuil : Paris : 1981
Translated to English, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
The Psychoses, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955-1956 : Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller : Translated by Russell Grigg : Routledge : 1993 Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Texts by request
Information on Seminar 7th December 1955 & its Mathemes
Jacques Lacan’s Mathemes – the translated Introduction from www.Lutecium.org
Here is the computer version of a Mathematics Thesaurus taken from written texts and from Dr. Lacan. It covers all the texts written by Lacan and all the seminars he held in 1953 at 1979. Accompanying this thesaurus, there is a search tool allowing to visualise the citations comprising one or more mathemes, these appearing in chronological order.
General information see https://www.lutecium.org/mathemes/node1.html
Information on Seminar III see 3 Les structures freudiennes des psychoses — 1955-1956 – https://www.lutecium.org/mathemes/node141.html
Information for this session https://www.lutecium.org/mathemes/node145.html
It is translated from French via an internet translator. The search tool or links have not been included.
3.4 Freud, dans deux articles ; 7 décembre 1955
3.4 Freud, in two articles ; 7 December 1955
Points derived from the text [Lac56b, 7 Dec 1955]
* The reality that is sacrificed in neurosis is a part of psychic reality.
Reality is not synonymous with external reality.
At the moment the subject triggers his or her neurosis, he or she elides—or creates a scotoma of—a part of his or her psychic reality.
In psychosis, there has been, at some point, a gap and a rupture with external reality.
In psychosis, it is the fantastic that is called upon to fill the void.
In psychosis, reality is marked by a gap that is then filled with a fantastic world.
* What has been rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real.
* To act upon the repressed through the mechanism of repression is to know something about it.
* Repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same thing.
The homosexual drive lies at the root of paranoid delusions.
* Verdrängung is a form of symbolization; it is the return of the repressed.
Unterdrückung indicates that something is internally repressed.
* What is caught up in Verwerfung is that which has been excluded from the general symbolization that structures the subject.
What is caught up in Verwerfung returns from the outside.
The patient’s resistance is always that of the psychoanalyst.
* The subject receives the Other’s message in an inverted form.
* In the case of the delusional subject and delusional speech, the Other is truly excluded.
When the Other is truly excluded, what concerns the subject is actually said by the Other.
The threefold division of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real applies to language.
* Artificial languages are always constructed in an attempt to connect through meaning. [la signification]
Meaning always refers back to meaning.
Meaning is of the nature of the imaginary.
Meaning is like the imaginary: always fleeting.
* There is no discourse without a certain temporal order.
* There is an otherness that is of the nature of the symbolic.
There are three objects in speech: the signifier, the signified, and real concrete discourse.
At the level of S, there is something that belongs to the imaginary: the ego and the fragmented body.
***
Jacques Lacan’s References
***
This is largely a work-in-progress, August 2026
-Reference to Spinoza
P48 of Russell Grigg’s translation, Naturally, I’m like everybody else, I make the same mistakes as you, I do everything I tell you that you mustn’t do. I’m no less in the wrong – even when it works. A true opinion remains no less an opinion from the point of view of science, as Spinoza shows. If you understand, so much the better, keep it to yourself. The important thing is not to understand, but to attain the true.
***
Jacques-Alain Miller’s Chapter Headings
Seminar III : 7th December 1955 : p44-58 of Russell Grigg’s translation
Chapter IV “I’ve just been to the butcher’s”
What returns in the Real
Puppets of delusion
R.S. I. in language
The erotization of the signifier
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Citation
***
P47-53 of Russell Grigg’s translation (includes ‘delire à deux’).
-‘From a seminar on the first four chapters of ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ : Winter 1994 : Richard Klein.
See this site /5 Authors A-Z (Klein)
Klein Section 6 p41, There is no subjective position. If, in addition, the operator of the barred Other is not in play, then jouissance returns to the Other. In this state a thought is ascribed to the external world, says Freud. A, though, is ascribed to the little other (a) since each represents the other by the same meaning. For instance, to take the classical illustration, a woman says she has just been to the pork butchers to a man whom she meets in the corridor. Being represented by the same meaning as the little other, she hears him say ‘sow’. At the level of jouissance he is going to cut her up into little pieces [3].
[3] THIS TEXT Session (IV) of Seminar III, “I’ve just been to the butcher’s” : 7th December 1955 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19551207)
P47-53 of Russell Grigg’s translation, To introduce the problem I shall begin from a thoroughly up-to-the-minute element. No one can say that this seminar is merely a commentary of texts, in the sense in which it would involve a pure and simple exegesis [Note the detailed explanation of a piece of writing, especially religious writing-OxfordLearnersDictionary.com] – these things are alive for us in our daily practice, in our supervisions, in the way we conduct our interpretation, in the way we deal with resistances.
So I shall borrow an example from my case presentation of last Friday.
2
Those of you who attend my presentations will recall that I was dealing with two people and one single delusion, what is known as a delire à deux.
It wasn’t very easy for me to draw out either daughter or mother. I’ve reason to think that the daughter had been examined and presented before I became involved with her and that she had seen the role that patients play in a teaching ward a good dozen times. It does not matter whether or not one is delusional, one gets fed up fairly quickly with these sorts of exercises, and she wasn’t particularly well disposed.
It was nevertheless possible to bring out certain things, and in particular the following. Paranoid delusion, since she is paranoid, is far from presupposing a character base of pride, mistrust, irritability, psychological rigidity, as people say. At least, alongside the chain of interpretations, difficult to grasp, of which she felt she was the victim, this young girl had, on the contrary, the feeling that a person as good and kind as herself who, into the bargain, was surrounded by the many trials she had undergone, could only benefit from benevolence, from a general sympathy – and indeed the head of her ward, in making his report on her, spoke of her only as a charming woman loved by all.
In a word, after having had all the difficulty in the world tackling the subject, I approached the centre of what was manifestly present there. Of course, her basic concern was to prove to me that no element was subject to reticence, while at the same time not allowing the doctor any room for the wrong interpretation, of which she was certain in advance. All the same she confided to me that one day, as she was leaving her home, she had a run-in in the hallway with an ill-mannered son of chap, which came as no surprise to her, since this shameful married man was the steady lover of one of her neighbours, someone of loose morals.
On passing her – she could not hide this from me, it still weighed upon her chest – he had said a dirty word to her, a dirty word that she was disinclined to repeat to me because, as she put it, it devalued her. Nevertheless, a certain gentleness that I had put into approaching her meant that after five minutes of chat we were on good terms with one another, and on that subject she confessed to me with a conceding laugh that she was not completely innocent in this matter for she herself had said something in passing. This something, which she confessed to me more easily than what she had heard, was this – I’ve just been to the butcher’s.
Naturally, I’m like everybody else, I make the same mistakes as you, I do everything I tell you that you mustn’t do. I’m no less in the wrong – even when it works. A true opinion remains no less an opinion from the point of view of science, as Spinoza shows. If you understand, so much the better, keep it to yourself. The important thing is not to understand, but to attain the true. But if you attain it by chance, even if you understand, you don’t understand. Naturally, I understand – which proves that we all have a little something in common with delusionals. I have within myself, as you have within yourselves, what there is that is delusional in the normal man.
I’ve just been to the butcher’s – if I am told that there is something there to understand I may well declare that there is a reference to pig. I didn’t say Pig, I said Pork.[6]
She agreed entirely. That was what she wanted me to understand. It was perhaps also what she wanted the other to understand. Except that this is precisely what one must not do. What one has to be interested in is the point of knowing why she wanted the other to understand this, precisely, and why she didn’t say it to him clearly, but by allusion. If I understand I continue, I don’t dwell on it, since I’ve already understood. This brings out what it is to enter into the patient’s game – it is to collaborate in his resistance. The patient’s resistance is always your own, and when a resistance succeeds it is because you are in it up to your neck, because you understand. You understand, you are wrong. What it is, precisely, that has to be understood is why there is something there given to be understood. Why did she say, I’ve just been to the butcher’s and not Pig?
I limited my commentary, because of insufficient time, to pointing out to you that it contained a gem, and showed you the similarity with the discovery that consisted in observing one day that certain patients who complain of auditory hallucinations were manifestly making movements of the throat, of the lips; in other words, they were articulating them themselves. Here, it’s not the same, it’s similar, and it’s even more interesting because it’s not the same.
I said – I’ve just been to the butcher’s, and then she blurts it out to us, what did he say? He said – Sow! This is the final word – thread, needle, my soul, my life, things happen thus in our existence.
Let’s pause here a moment. There he is, all pleased with himself, you are saying to yourselves. This is what he teaches us – in speech the subject receives his message in an inverted form. Disabuse yourselves, this isn’t true. The message in question is not identical with speech, far from it, at least not in the sense in which I describe it to you as the form of mediation where the subject receives his message from the other in an inverted form.
First, who is this character? We have already said he is a married man, the lover of a girl who is herself the friend of our patient and heavily implicated in the desire of which our patient is the victim – she is not its centre but, I would say, its main character. Our subject’s relations with this couple are ambiguous. They are no doubt persecutory and hostile characters, but they are not grasped in such a terribly litigious style, which surprised those present at the interview. What characterises this subject’s relations with the outside is rather her perplexity – how was it possible, through malicious gossip, no doubt through taking legal action, to get them into hospital? The universal interest bestowed on them has a tendency to be repeated. From this there arise these beginnings of erotomaniacal elements that we observed in the presentation. They aren’t properly speaking erotomaniacs, but they’re inhabited by the feeling that one is interested in them.
Sow, what is that? It is effectively her message, but is it not rather her message to herself?
Note, Jacques Lacan continues his comments from p48 to p53 of Russell Grigg’s translation.
Russell Grigg’s footnote – [6] p48 That is, in the interview with the woman, he said Pork and not Pig. The charcutier, here translated as butcher, specializes in pork products.
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Related Texts
Full information about Seminar III – notes, references, etc. see Seminar III The Psychoses (1955-1956) : from 16th November 1955 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19551116 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)