You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Despite Lacan's considerable influence in Europe and America, most of his teaching material still remains unpublished. Of the promised twenty-six volumes of his Séminaire, only ten have appeared so far. Book V, published in Paris in 1998, covers the academic year 1957-1958. It should be read as the record of a body of ideas in the throes of development, replete with contradictions and repetitions in its attempt to convince an audience made up not only of analysts in training but also of colleagues, patients and many cultivated individuals interested in psychoanalysis. A seminar of texts whose watchword is ‘back to Freud’, it includes a detailed study of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905b), as well as more superficial treatments of several other writings (“‘A child is being beaten”’ [1919], the Dora case [1905a] and the case of Elizabeth von R [Freud & Breuer, 1893-95], Totem and Taboo [1912-13], and several dreams from The Interpretation of Dreams [1900]). In his enthusiasm, Lacan often quite seriously attributes his own ideas to Freud—for example, the ‘desire for recognition’ (p. 245), the ‘phallus signifier’ (p. 378), the ‘signifier’ (for instance, p. 233 and p. 235), and imaginary identifications (p. 227). However, despite this return to the inventor of psychoanalysis, he does not conceal his criticisms. He considers that Freud's chapter on the comic is worthless (p. 109). The Nirvana principle and the death drive make him ‘faintly … smile’ (p. 246). The idea that ‘ontogenesis reproduces phylogenesis’ seems to him a ‘fundamental reference of modern obscurantism [which is] more idiotic than the … catechism’ (p. 315). Freud's interpretive technique is stated to be wrong: Freud gives advice and his interventions are off the point (p. 322). Lacan does not accept the economic point of view, for example in the understanding of jokes. In particular, like other analysts at this time, he deprecates the fact that Freud's topographies have no place for the o