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For a period of ten years, between November 1953 and November 1963, Jacques Lacan delivered a weekly seminar at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, as part of the psychoanalytic training program of the Société française de Psychanalyse. Each academic year, Lacan chose to present
his seminar on a different topic, while still ensuring that the clinical and technical issues of psychoanalysis took pride of place. In addition, although the seminar was exclusively directed at psychoanalysts in training, the lectures were open to all interested parties and were therefore regularly attended by emerging and established scholars, as well as researchers without a psychoanalytic background who did not intend to enter the psychoanalytic profession. From January 1964 until June 1980, the seminar was no longer part of a psychoanalytic training program, which enabled Lacan to explore a broader range of questions, and which also contributed to the massive expansion of his audience.
Each weekend prior to the delivery of his seminar, which was consistently scheduled on Wednesdays at 12.15pm, Lacan carefully prepared a set of notes that would constitute the backbone for his lecture, without therefore depriving himself of the joy of improvisation and the occasional unplanned digression. From January 1953, Lacan also started to employ a stenographer, which provided him with the opportunity to read (and sometimes correct) what he had effectively said and which made it easier for him to use his seminar as the basis for a journal article or book chapter.
Until the early 1970s, Lacan himself had never given much thought to publishing his seminars. However, during the early summer of 1972, Jacques-Alain Miller, a philosopher who had actively participated in most of Lacan’s seminars since January 1964 and who had married Lacan’s daughter Judith, decided to edit and release Lacan’s seminars in book format, with the goal of coming as close as possible to what Lacan had said (Miller 1985, 16–17; 2011