Linking Seminar IV

The Lacanian Compass Chicago Compass Point will be holding our fourth annual Linking Seminar in the fall of 2025. The exact date has not yet been determined.

Argument for Linking Seminar IV (2025)

Chicago Vector of the Lacanian Compass

Dear fellow Lacanians,

After meeting with all of you as a group, along with several one-on-one discussions, I believe I've identified what will guide our work from today until our next Linking Seminar. In this text, I aim to name and describe this Theme and explain the rationale behind its formulation. 

I will start by constructing the logic and move towards the Theme. The Theme will be:

The Clinic at the Horizon of Subjectivity

It becomes apparent when reading Freud, Lacan, or Miller's transmission of Lacan's teaching that psychoanalytic theory and technique are grounded in experiences within the clinic. Alternatively, to express this slightly differently, what occurs in the clinic serves as the foundation upon which theory and technique are constructed, rather than the other way around. 

Theory was developed to create an orienting semblance of understanding, serving as a compass to guide would-be analysts in interpreting their experiences in the clinic. Within the Lacanian framework, theory is not a sacred dogma. This is evident in the way the theory has evolved and changed in response to what is experienced in the clinic. A good example of this evolution is how the understanding of psychosis and the distinction between neurosis and psychosis have changed over time.[1] (I'll say more about this change later.) 

Technique involves testing out theory, following the compass, and observing the results as they manifest in the form of psychoanalytic acts (i.e., interventions). Freud, Lacan, and later psychoanalysts within the Lacanian tradition have observed the effects of their techniques in the clinic to evaluate their effectiveness. In general, when these techniques prove effective, we continue to use them. However, when they do not work, these techniques are modified or discarded. A well-known example of a modification of established psychoanalytic technique was Lacan's use of variable-length sessions. Why did Lacan do this? Because he noticed that it had significant effects on how the analysand utilized the session. 

This is one example of what Lacan transmits to us when he writes, "Let whoever cannot meet at the horizon the subjectivity of his time give it up. […] Let him be well acquainted with the whorl into which his era draws him in the ongoing enterprise of Babel, and let him be aware of his function as an interpreter in the strife of languages [of his time]." [2]

My interpretation of what Lacan is conveying here is that the world into which we are born and where we become subjects is not a static, unchanging realm; rather, it is a dynamic environment teeming with changing technologies, economies, laws, and evolving discourses through which individuals shape who and what they are. 

The Neurotic Symptom

One of the fundamental claims of psychoanalysis, going back to Freud and continuing through Lacan, is the idea that a person's symptom is not a problem that is "fixed" by going through an experience of psychoanalysis.[3] Rather, the symptom is always a solution (or an attempt at a solution) to a mode of jouissance (a form of satisfaction) that sustains the subject.[4]

The symptom as a solution arises from the subject's encounter with the norms and expectations of the family, community, society, and culture in which the subject is born and exists. I will take a Lacanian shortcut and refer to the combination of these norms and expectations as the Law (symbolic order), and I will refer to the function of the enforcers of the Law's norms and expectations as the Name-of-the-Father.

During Freud's time and for part of Lacan's era, perhaps up until the 1960s, the Law remained relatively stable. Furthermore, the enforcers of the Law, who enacted the Name-of-the-Father, were predominantly males who inherited the power of traditional patriarchal authority and could confidently act in ways they believed would ensure compliance with the Law. 

What did the Law demand, and the Name-of-the-Father enforce? A prohibition or a limit on Jouissance; a kind of "thou shalt not": experience too much jouissance.

It was this stable Law and the socially empowered functionaries who implemented the Name-of-the-Father that allowed subjects to develop what Freud called neurotic symptoms as solutions. The neurotic found ways to experience jouissance privately and discreetly, without provoking the Law or the Name-of-the-Father into paying too much attention to them or risking punishment for publicly indulging in their method of jouissance without shame. 

While the neurotic symptom provided a solution, it came at a cost. The neurotic had to endure suffering due to their solution. However, this suffering was less severe than facing imprisonment, hospitalization, or death, which were likely outcomes had they not formed a symptomatic relationship with the Law and the Name-of-the-Father. 

The Neurotic Symptom & the Introduction of Desire

Lacan captures the symptomatic "deal" the neurotic creates in their relationship with the Law and the Name-of-the-Father when he tells us, "Castration means the jouissance must be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire." [5]

What Lacan means here is that the Law and the Name-of-the-Father create a cut, a loss, a prohibition: "You may not have full jouissance" (e.g., of the mother, or any totalizing object). The neurotic is someone who has learned that the more they pursue satisfaction directly (think perversion or psychosis), the more it slips away from them or becomes problematic in their day-to-day life. The neurotic accomplishment is not refusing castration, but rather opening up to it and creating a symptomatic way to live within the structuring effects of the Law (castration, prohibition, lack) in a way that is still satisfying, even though it is not complete or total satisfaction.

The neurotic not only loses in making this deal, but they also gain something, which we can call desire. In neurosis, the subject's acceptance of the castrating effects of the Law—mediated by the Name-of-the-Father—does not merely impose limitation or prohibition; paradoxically, it makes desire possible. When the Law interrupts the path that jouissance flows through by forbidding total or unmediated enjoyment, a new path is opened, and that path is the path of desire. To use a different metaphor, the Law and the Name-of-the-Father create a cut in the subject's attempt to obtain what would satisfy them. Within the space this cut has produced, desire emerges. It is important to realize that the void created by the cut (i.e., castration) is generative: it establishes the conditions for desire to persist and be articulated within the symbolic order. Thus, castration is the price of admission not only to social reality but also to the very experience of desiring itself, rather than being overwhelmed by unregulated experiences of jouissance (e.g., the blunt force of the drive, or psychotic certainty).

The most crucial aspect to understand about desire is that it arises from the experience of absence, stemming from a lack of something. When desire enters someone's lived experience, it enables them to reflect on what is missing in their lives and consider how they might respond to this absence. In this way, the lack gives rise to both the desire to react to the absence and the creative process of attempting to fill the void that castration has opened up in their subjective experience.

The Fundamental Fantasy

In the text above, I discussed how the Law and the Name-of-the-Father create a cut within the subject's mode of jouissance, and how desire can emerge from this cut. However, before moving on, I want to make something as clear as I possibly can: Castration is not something that can simply be accepted. We can't say to our patients, "You just need to accept the limits imposed on you and see that they offer you an opportunity to be creative in how you react to them. Accept these limits! Open yourself to the creative situation these limits created! Do this and you will be happy!" Things are more complicated than that.

The cut of castration illustrates that access to jouissance is never direct or total; it is always limited and, at best, partial. However, for neurotics, this cut is covered over by a fantasy ($◊a). The neurotic's fantasy is of a scenario where their lost access to jouissance and can be regained by acquiring an object that will provide what the subject has lost or lacks. This fantasy, which Lacanians usually refer to as the fundamental fantasy, is employed by the neurotic to symptomatically act in ways that they believe will help them get closer to what they want but don't have. Of course, the fantasy remains a fantasy because the neurotic repetitively fails to regain what has been lost.

For neurotics, this fantasy becomes the organizing principle of their desire. It's what Lacan called the "window" through which they view reality. The neurotic subject repeatedly seeks out situations that confirm their fantasy scenario - whether that's being the one who suffers (obsessional), being the one who lacks/desires (hysteric), or other variations.

Crucially, the fantasy both sustains desire (by maintaining the illusion that the object can be attained) and simultaneously protects against the anxiety of encountering real jouissance (by keeping it at a safe distance). The neurotic clings to their fantasy because it provides a bearable framework for their relationship to lack and desire.

The Drive

The drive is the force behind this repetitive attempt to obtain the object of desire (a). In the neurotic, we observe the drive in action through the symptom. The symptom, which is a solution, is a form of satisfaction (jouissance that has been altered through the subject's encounter with castration) in failing to attain what is desired and attempting again. 

The drive connects with the fundamental fantasy through knowledge. What I mean by this is that what a person believes they "know" about themselves, others, or the world tends to keep them in their symptomatic repetitions. What the person "knows" could be many things. However, what this fantasmatic "knowing" obscures is what is desired (what is not known or what knowledge lacks), and this lack is what the drive orbits.

Interpretation & Meaning

In Freud's clinical work and Lacan's early work of Lacan, psychoanalysis aims to transform the satisfaction that neurotics derive from their symptoms from something mysterious and unknown into something meaningful that connects to the analysand's desire (a). However, at this juncture in Lacan's teachings, interpretation does not clearly convey meaning to the analysand. What Lacan does is interrupt the analysand's speech (i.e., signifying chain) through punctuation or cuts in a way that, in essence, slows down the process of knowing (having knowledge) and exposes what remains unknown (where knowledge is lacking). The clinical brilliance of Lacan's approach is evident in its ability to highlight the analysand's lack and the desire that emerges from this lack, transforming the lack that is the cause of desire into something the analysand could better engage with. 

An experience of psychoanalysis does not eliminate desire (a) by explaining it away, but it can alter the way the subject experiences and relates to their desire as such. Psychoanalysis does not free the neurotic from their fundamental fantasy, but it can reveal the fantasy as a fantasy, which allows for a kind of traversal (escape) from the intensity of the fantasy's power to compel the subject to act without consideration.

So, in an attempt to summarize what I've tried to transmit thus far, in Lacan's first clinic, closely aligned with Freud's, psychoanalytic treatment centers on desire as the structuring absence in the subject. The analyst listens not for a coherent narrative, but for the splits, slips, and formations in the analysand's speech that reveal a divided relation to the unconscious. Acting as an interpreter of desire—not by delivering meaning, but by cutting into the signifying chain—the analyst provokes moments in which something of the subject's desire becomes newly legible or assumable. This experience is not one of discovering a hidden truth, but of reconfiguring the subject's position in relation to the Other, castration, and the object cause of desire. As a result, the subject may find themselves less bound by defenses and more capable of traversing the fantasy that structures their suffering.

In a sense, at this stage of Lacan's teaching, we might say that an experience of psychoanalysis has the potential to reverse what Lacan says in Seminar VII, where something "begins with a tickle and ends with a blaze of petrol," [6] and transform it from a blaze of petrol (suffering) into an itch.

The Clinic I: (The Clinic of Structure – Neurosis/Psychosis)

Once again, I'll take a shortcut here and summarize what I'm trying to convey in the text above, stating that Freud's psychoanalytic treatment of neurosis focused on interpreting the unconscious meaning embedded in the symptom. In Freud's clinical approach, this involved interpreting the symptom's latent content and recovering repressed wishes and memories by translating the symptom back into the terms of the Oedipal drama and the subject's childhood history.

For Lacan, the symptom was not a vessel of hidden content, but a signifying formation that must be analyzed in its linguistic structure. Interpretation did not merely uncover meaning, but rather produced effects of displacement, disrupting the subject's imaginary certainties and reorienting their relationship to the desire of the Other. While Freud aimed to make the unconscious conscious, Lacan's early clinic sought to relate the subject to their dividedness, not by recovering a lost truth but by articulating how the subject is constituted by lack, castration, and the effects of the signifier.

During these moments of Lacan's clinical orientation, the symptom was understood as a symbolic compromise formation that revealed the subject's divided relationship to the Other and desire. The symptom, formed through repression, is not merely a malfunction to be eliminated but a message to be read—a formation of the unconscious that speaks, albeit obliquely, in the language of the signifier. The analyst interprets these formations to bring the subject's relationship with their lack/desire (a) into symbolic circulation, enabling the subject to confront their desire, assume the role of the speaking being, and potentially traverse the fantasy that structures their neurotic suffering.

I'll end this section of this text by stating as clearly as I can: The world that produced the neurotics that Freud and Lacan treated is no more. The Law (symbolic order) is unevenly distributed and interpreted as opposed to Universal. The lack (castration) of the Other, the Law, and those who enact the function of the Name-of-the-Father has been made abundantly clear. As a result, the effects of castration are different, and the symptomatic responses to castration have mutated.

The Fall of Law & the Father

One of the most significant changes that has impacted individuals presenting their subjective suffering in psychoanalysis is the decline of the Name-of-the-Father as an empowered agent of the Law, which, as I described above, functioned as a common symptomatic point of reference for neurotic subjects. Today, the castrating power of the Father, which subjects developed a symptomatic relationship with, has become, for the most part, impotent.

Miller comments on this directly when he wrote,

Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increased equity, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former’s place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits.[7]

I would rephrase what Miller is saying here by noting that in the past, the symptoms exhibited by neurotics and psychotics in the clinic were all, in some way, symptomatic reactions to the castrating limits placed on jouissance. Today, the Law and the Name-of-the-Father are no longer able to create or maintain a limitation on jouissance. Nevertheless, people still develop symptoms! This raises an important question: if the symptoms do not reflect the subject's attempt to resolve the castrating limitation imposed by a responsible agent of the symbolic order, what are they attempting to address? 

In the past, we could generally assume that symptoms represented attempts to respond to the limitations of the Law on modes of jouissance. Today, when the Law and the Name-of-the-Father no longer have the same ability to impose limits on these modes of jouissance, what happens to the symptom? If the symptom is not a retort to the limits of the Law maintained by the Name-of-the-Father, what is the symptom a retort to? 

My attempt at an answer is that symptoms are formed as a response to a lack of a limit to jouissance.

In the past, the presence of a limit led people to develop repetitive symptomatic ways of acting and relating, whereas today, the absence of a limit has this effect. 

The Clinic II: The Clinic of the Sinthome

When addressing what psychoanalysis can offer in response to psychosis, Freud is rather pessimistic. He says, "The psychoses… are not proper objects for analysis. In them, the transference does not develop in the usual way, and the patient's relation to reality is too seriously disturbed for the treatment to proceed successfully." [8] Lacan builds upon Freud's essential work as the foundation of the psychoanalytic clinic, but when it comes to the treatment of psychosis, Lacan goes further than Freud[9]. This is evident in Lacan's psychoanalytic approach to understanding and treating psychosis.

I want to propose that there is a kind of movement within Lacan's transmission of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice regarding psychosis: the movement from the clinic of structure, where there is a clear distinction between neurosis and psychosis based on the presence or absence of the Name-of-the-Father, to the clinic of the sinthome, where the singular expression that all subjects (neurotic and psychotic) create responds to the universal need to go on living in the world by making sense of their experiences within the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers. In my opinion, the clinic of structure is most directly expressed in Seminar III (1955-56), and the clinic of the sinthome is taken up twenty years later in Seminar XXIII (1975-76). 

In Seminar III, Lacan establishes a foundation with a structural theory of psychosis and neurosis, where the presence or absence of the Name-of-the-Father and castration clearly distinguishes the two structures. Within the structural clinic, Lacan proposes a symbolic approach to treatment. By Seminar XXIII, he transitions to a topological and real-based clinic, where psychosis is no longer viewed as a distinct structure but as a matter of singular stabilization—part of what Miller has termed a universal clinic of the delusion[10], or the universal clinic of the sinthome, where the sinthome becomes a universal category, functioning in both neurosis and psychosis as the unique way a subject knots together (i.e., makes sense of) their experiences and responses to the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary registers.[11] This approach shifts psychoanalytic treatment away from structural diagnostic categories of neurotic (hysteric/obsessive), or psychotic, and toward a clinic of singularity, where the analyst's task is not to create conscious knowledge by interpreting the symptom as a meaningful expression of an unconscious truth (i.e., revealing how the subject is implicated in their symptom). Instead, the aim of treatment becomes to support the subject's unique mode of jouissance and stabilization, whether through delusion, bodily symptoms, artistic creation, or idiosyncratic language. Thus, the "universal clinic of the sinthome" opens a field where treatment becomes less about correcting structure and more about sustaining the subject's way of persisting as parlêtre (i.e., as a body that the signifier has marked through the establishment and use of language).

What Connects the Clinic of Structure & The Clinic of the Sinthome

If we view these two clinics as a Venn diagram, there would be an overlap area, indicating something they shared between the two clinical approaches. My claim is that what we find in this overlap is the analyst's desire, which I will represent with the lowercase italic letter a that holds great significance within our Lacanian Orientation. 

But how can we articulate what this desire is, and how it connects the two styles of clinical orientation described above?

First, the analyst's desire is itself a desire, which means it also represents a lack or something that can only arise from the absence of something. I would suggest that what is absent is knowledge or knowing. The analyst's desire is a desire to learn something, perhaps about the analysand's unconscious, their fantasies, or their symptoms. We could even say it is a desire to understand more about subjectivity itself. Perhaps we could go so far as to say it is a desire to learn more about psychoanalysis. In both of these clinical orientations, it is the analysand/patient (or their unconscious) that teaches the analyst, not the other way around.

In the clinic of structure, the analysand teaches the analyst about their structure, and in the clinic of the sinthome, the analysand teaches the analyst about their sinthome. It is always the analysand who does the teaching, and it is the analyst who takes up their passion for not knowing (even when the patient, via the transferences, supposes the analyst does know).

Conclusion

One of the points I would like to propose in this text is that both the clinic of structure and the clinic of the sinthome are interesting and useful. I'll follow this with a second proposal, that the clinic of the sinthome does not necessarily undo or replace the clinic of structure. The third proposal I'll make is that we can use both the clinic of structure and the clinic of the sinthome simultaneously, and through doing this, achieve a kind of binocular vision that is better than the monocular perspective when we use only one but not the other.

I look forward to the discussions this will generate within our group leading up to the Linking Seminar and at the seminar itself.

--Neil Gorman (AP)

References:

[1]Jacques‑Alain Miller, "Ordinary Psychosis Revisited," Psychoanalytical Notebooks, no. 19 (2009): 139–168, accessed June 18, 2025, https://lacanianworksexchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/20080707MillerOrdinarypsychosisPsychoanalyticNotebooksVol19p139-168.PDF.

[2] Lacan, Jacques. "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," pp. 197–268 in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. This quote appears on page 264.

[3] Jacques‑Alain Miller, "A Fantasy," presented at the IXth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, 2008, in Lacanian Works Exchange, accessed June 18, 2025, https://lacanianworksexchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/20040801MillerAfantasyIVWAPcongressLacanianPraxiscorrected.pdf. 

[4] Rollier, Frank. "From Structure to Sinthome." Lecture or article presented via New Lacanian School, 2022. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://lacaniancompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/FrankRollier.pdf.

[5] Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," 671–702.

[6] Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Seminar XVII, 1969–1970, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 72.

[7] This text appears on the back cover of the English translation of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, Polity Press 2019.

[8] Freud, Sigmund. "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis." 1912. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, translated by James Strachey, 109–120. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

[9] It is not only on the treatment of psychosis where Lacan goes further than Freud.

[10] Miller uses this term in, "Ironic Clinic." Lecture, London NLS Society. Accessed June 13, 2025. https://londonsociety-nls.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/miller-jacques-alain_ironic-clinic.pdf.

[11] Miller's articulation of the ironic clinic, and the universal clinic of delusion follows from a statement made by Lacan in 1978 that "everyone is mad, that is, delusional." Lacan's statement's use of the term "everyone" can be taken to mean neurotic and psychotic subjects universally need to create a singular solution –a knot of the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers. This statement was published in English in: Lacan, Jacques, Culture/Clinic Vol. 1, "There are Four Discourses," University of Minnesota Press (2013re.), p. 3

Watch this space for:

• Syllabus with readings
• Announcements of upcoming reading groups and workshops to prepare for the seminar.
• Announcements of when and where the next Linking Seminar will take place.

Join in the Planning & Organization of the Linking Seminar:

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