Passage to the act
| French: passage à l'acte |
Passage to the Act (passage à l'acte)
The passage to the act (passage à l'acte in French) designates a radical breakdown wherein the subject exits the symbolic scene entirely, typically manifesting as sudden, apparently unmotivated violence, suicidality, or other extreme behavior that severs the subject's connection to symbolic mediation and the Other.[1][2] Unlike acting-out (which addresses the Other and solicits interpretation) or the act proper (which restructures the symbolic coordinates), the passage to the act represents a catastrophic fall into the real, a Niederkommen (falling down, descent) where the subject becomes object, stripped of the signifier that normally maintains subjectivity.[3]
Lacan systematically distinguishes the passage to the act in Seminar X (Anxiety, 1962–63), situating it as fundamentally different from both neurotic acting-out and the ethical act that characterizes analysis's end.[1] The passage to the act involves a foreclosure or collapse of the symbolic order at the very moment of its maximum tension—when anxiety (the affect of the real) overwhelms the subject's capacity to maintain symbolic position.[2] It cannot be directly interpreted because it occurs precisely where interpretation fails; it is irreducible to meaning and marks a fall out of the scene of discourse rather than a message within it.[4]
The clinical significance of this concept is immense: the passage to the act represents one of the most dangerous clinical presentations, potentially involving suicide, homicide, or other forms of self-harm.[5] Yet Lacan's theorization—echoed and extended by contemporary theorists like Jean Allouch—resists simple psychiatric categorization, insisting instead on a precise phenomenological and structural understanding of what constitutes passage to the act versus superficially similar phenomena like impulsive violence or desperate acting-out.[5][2]
Etymology and Conceptual Background
Linguistic and Philosophical Origins
The term passage à l'acte literally translates as "passage to the act" or "transition to the act." The word passage suggests both a movement through something and an exit from something. The French acte derives from Latin actus but in this context carries the sense of a sudden, violent, or catastrophic doing—not the deliberate, ethical act (acte) that concludes analysis, but something far more primitive and terrifying.[6]
The concept emerges particularly in late nineteenth-century French psychiatry and phenomenology, where terms like impulsion and passage à l'acte were used to describe sudden violent acts that appeared to lack rational motivation. However, Lacan's theorization moves beyond psychiatric description toward a psychoanalytic understanding rooted in the theory of the Symbolic Order and the Real.[5]
French Psychiatric Antecedents
In nineteenth-century French psychiatry, particularly in the work of alienists and forensic psychiatrists, the passage à l'acte was recognized as a distinct clinical phenomenon—a sudden transition from psychological state to violent action that seemed to bypass consciousness and deliberation. The term appeared frequently in legal medicine and discussions of criminal responsibility, where it was used to describe acts that appeared unmotivated or incomprehensible.[7]
By the early twentieth century, the concept had become standard in French clinical discourse. Yet it remained somewhat descriptive rather than theoretically grounded—a name for a phenomenon rather than an explanation of it. Lacan and, later, Allouch explicitly criticize this merely descriptive usage when the term comes to designate “any act whatsoever.”[8]
Freudian Resonances and Divergences
While Sigmund Freud does not systematically theorize passage à l'acte as such, his concept of Agieren (acting-out) encompasses elements later separated by Lacan. Freud's discussion of the young homosexual woman's suicide attempt (1920)—where she threw herself over a railway embankment after a humiliating encounter with her father—is the crucial clinical event Lacan reinterprets.[9] Freud treats this act within the framework of unconscious wish and guilt; Lacan will eventually read it as exemplary of the structural deadlock that can culminate in a passage to the act.[3]
Freud’s 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” establishes Agieren as the mode in which the analysand enacts what cannot yet be remembered, framing acting-out as a “repetition in the act” of what is repressed.[10] Lacan initially tries to graft passage à l'acte onto this Freudian notion, but later, and more rigorously in Seminar X, he separates the two: acting-out remains within the field of transference and calls for interpretation, whereas passage to the act marks a fall outside the field of speech altogether.[1][8]
Lacan draws on Freud's theorization of Anxiety (Angst) and the encounter with trauma, yet systematically refocuses these through his own framework. The passage to the act represents a particular kind of encounter with the real—not the regulated encounter of the act proper that restructures symbolic coordinates, but a catastrophic irruption of the real that dissolves symbolic position itself.[2]
Phenomenological Dimensions
Existential phenomenology (Heidegger, Sartre) emphasizes freedom, choice, and the subject's responsibility for action. From this perspective, action is defined by consciousness, intention, and the subject's capacity to project possibilities. The passage to the act, by contrast, involves precisely a failure or suspension of this phenomenological structure of action. The subject does not choose; something happens. The subject does not project; something erupts.
This phenomenological failure becomes theoretically significant for Lacan: the passage to the act reveals something about the subject's constitution that ordinary action obscures—it reveals the possibility of non-choice, of action without consciousness, of the subject as object rather than agent.[11]
Historical Development in Lacan's Teaching
Early Work and Clinical Encounters (1930s-1950s)
Lacan encounters the phenomenon of passage à l'acte early in his psychiatric career, particularly in his work at Sainte-Anne Hospital. His early case of Aïmée (Marguerite Pantaine-Anzieu), whom he presents as a case of "erotomania," involves an act of violence that he interprets through the lens of paranoid projection and imaginary identification.[12] Yet even in these early writings, Lacan struggles to fit the phenomenon of violent passage into the categories available to him, suggesting an inchoate awareness that existing psychoanalytic theory proves inadequate.[4]
In his work on the mirror stage (1936, revised 1949), Lacan's focus on imaginary captation and its dissolution provides groundwork for later theorization of passage à l'acte as involving a particular catastrophe of the imaginary.[13]
Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60)
In S7, Lacan's reading of Sophocles' Antigone addresses a figure on the boundary between act and passage to the act. Antigone's decision to bury her brother violates Creon's law, yet it is not a passage à l'acte—it is an act of ethical assumption, staged in the space of the Other and tied to a position of desire.[14] However, the seminar establishes themes crucial to understanding passage à l'acte: the encounter with das Ding (the Thing), the real, and the dissolving of the imaginary order; what Lacan calls “the zone of horror” beyond the beautiful.[15] Passage to the act can be understood as a catastrophic rather than ethical encounter with this same zone.
Seminar X: Anxiety (1962-63)
S10 provides the systematic, definitive theorization of passage à l'acte. In the lessons devoted to anxiety and acting-out, Lacan elaborates the distinction between:
Agieren (acting-out)
Passage à l'acte (passage to the act)
L'acte (the act proper)[1]
The passage à l'acte is characterized as:
An exit from the symbolic scene (sortie de la scène symbolique)
A fall or descent (Niederkommen in German, emphasizing both falling and giving birth in a negative sense)[3]
A phenomenon where the subject becomes object and loses subjective position
An encounter with the real that dissolves rather than restructures the symbolic
A phenomenon that cannot be interpreted directly, because interpretation presupposes the symbolic field that passage to the act abandons[4]
Lacan emphasizes that passage à l'acte involves the real in its most disruptive sense—not as external reality but as that which returns despite all symbolic defenses, as the point where the symbolic order collapses.[2]
Seminar XI: Four Fundamental Concepts (1964)
S11 positions passage à l'acte within the broader framework of repetition and encounter with the real. The tuchē (the real that escapes, what is missed) and the compulsion to repeat relate directly to passage à l'acte as a moment where the real overwhelms the symbolic.[16] Lacan’s distinction between automatism of repetition (automaton) and encounter with tuchē provides a backdrop against which passage to the act appears as a kind of failed encounter—where the real shatters instead of being symbolically “worked through.”
Seminar XV: The Psychoanalytic Act (1967-68)
S15 further clarifies the distinction. The contrast becomes explicit: the analytic act involves a transformation of the subject's position within the symbolic, while passage à l'acte involves a catastrophic exit from symbolic position altogether.[17]
Lacan introduces the notion of the enlightened passage to the act (passage à l'acte éclairée) to describe the analyst's particular position—an act that occurs without reflective thought yet is informed by analytic knowledge, which Allouch later reads through the procedure of la passe (The Pass).[18]
Late Seminars and Contemporary Extensions
In the late seminars and through the work of contemporary Lacanians (particularly Jean Allouch), passage à l'acte is reconsidered through new lenses. Allouch's New Remarks on the Passage to the Act (French: Nouvelles remarques sur le passage à l’acte) introduces the concept of the epic leap (saut épique) to distinguish violence and ruptures that can be narrativized and inscribed in meaning from pure passages à l'acte that remain enigmatic and meaningless.[4] In this framework, the Papin sisters’ crime is treated as paradigmatic of passage to the act, while certain jihadist massacres or political conversions illustrate the “epic leap.”[19]
Conceptual Analysis
Exit from the Symbolic Scene
The defining characteristic of passage à l'acte is its structure as an exit from the symbolic scene. The subject no longer appeals to the Other; the act is not staged. The subject does not address the analyst but rather exits the analytic setting, or engages in behavior that completely disregards the Other's presence or capacity to interpret.[1]
This exit is not just temporal (leaving the room, ending analysis) but structural. It is a refusal or inability to remain within the symbolic order as such, which is why it is experienced by clinicians as a terrifying break in, or beyond, transference.[5]
The Real and Its Irruption
Passage to the act involves a real that devastates the symbolic. The real, here, is not productive but destructive—it overwhelms, shatters, leaves trauma. When Anxiety reaches a certain threshold, when the subject can no longer maintain the symbolic defenses against the real, passage à l'acte may occur. The symbolic order, which normally mediates between subject and real, collapses.[2]
Subject Becomes Object
In passage à l'acte, the subject—who is normally constituted as a position within the symbolic order—becomes object. Agency is lost; the subject is overcome. In passage à l'acte, the subject themselves becomes object—something happens to them, through them, without their conscious control or direction. Lacan will later link this place to the position of the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, when the subject identifies with what is expelled as waste or déchet.[20]
Niederkommen: The Fall
The German term Niederkommen, which Lacan emphasizes in his early reading of Freud’s young homosexual woman, carries multiple meanings. It refers to falling, descending, collapsing. Yet it also carries connotations of childbirth—coming down, being delivered. This polyvalence is important: passage à l'acte is not simply collapse but a kind of giving birth to something—the subject is delivered into the real, becomes the instrument of something real and uncontrollable.[3]
Non-Interpretability
Crucially, passage à l'acte cannot be directly interpreted. This distinguishes it from acting-out, which, though it bypasses speech, solicits interpretation and can be brought into the symbolic order through analytic work. Passage à l'acte occurs precisely where interpretation fails—where the symbolic order itself has broken down.[1][4] Attempts to “decode” a pure passage to the act as if it were a disguised signifying message risk reducing it to acting-out or epic leap, precisely what Allouch warns against.[19]
Relationship to Meaning and Narrative
The distinction introduced by contemporary theorists (particularly Jean Allouch) between passage à l'acte and the epic leap hinges on the relationship to meaning. Acts that can be inscribed in a narrative—acts motivated by belief, ideology, or narrative—constitute epic leaps. By contrast, pure passages à l'acte remain enigmatic. The Papin sisters' crime, for example, resists all narrative explanation; it emerges from nowhere and returns to nowhere, and has provoked literature, cinema and psychiatry precisely because “no one has the last word” on it.[19]
Clinical and Technical Dimensions
Manifestations in Different Clinical Structures
Neurosis: Neurotic passage à l'acte typically involves violent or self-destructive behavior that erupts suddenly despite the neurotic's usual capacity to maintain symbolic order. However, neurotic passage à l'acte may be rare; neurotics typically maintain more stable symbolic organization and tend to remain within the register of acting-out and symptom-formation.[2]
Psychosis: Passage à l'acte occurs more frequently in psychosis, where the subject's disconnection from the symbolic order is already established. The psychotic may engage in apparently unmotivated violence or self-harm as a way of managing unbearable real experiences (hallucinations, delusions).[21]
Borderline presentations: Subjects with borderline features frequently engage in behaviors that might be classified as passage à l'acte—cutting, burning, suicide attempts that emerge suddenly and violently. These represent moments of absolute crisis where the subject's fragile symbolic organization collapses, and where the clinician must distinguish between staged appeal (acting-out) and true exit from the scene.
For the Analyst: Technical and Ethical Implications
The analyst's position in relation to passage à l'acte differs fundamentally from their position regarding acting-out or the act proper:
Helplessness and limitation: The analyst must acknowledge that direct interpretation cannot address passage à l'acte. The analyst's symbolic tools prove inadequate, and any temptation to “make sense” of an act that is structurally outside meaning must be resisted.[4]
Risk management: The analyst must assess risk and implement safety measures. Hospitalization, medication, or increased contact may be necessary to prevent catastrophic outcomes. As Allouch notes, contemporary psychiatric and judicial institutions are “obsessed” with avoiding passage to the act, which structures many clinical and legal decisions.[5]
Maintenance of transference: The analyst attempts to maintain a minimal position that preserves the possibility of later re-entry into symbolic discourse. The analyst does not respond to passage à l'acte as though it were meaningful but holds a position of non-collapse, maintaining the structure of the analytic relationship to the extent possible.
Working with Aftermath
Often, the significant analytic work occurs after passage à l'acte—in helping the subject organize their experience retroactively, in attempting to restore symbolic order, in understanding what happened. The subject who has experienced passage à l'acte may emerge with altered symbolic coordinates, and the work of analysis involves helping them re-establish symbolic order while integrating what was learned through this catastrophic encounter.[22]
Examples and Illustrations
Classical Cases
Freud's Young Homosexual Woman: Lacanian reading recognizes this act as a passage à l'acte—a radical exit from the symbolic scene that shatters the neurotic structure, rather than as resistance to treatment. Allouch revisits Lacan’s own vacillations on this point, showing how the niederkommen equivocation initially led Lacan to treat the suicide attempt as a symbolic act of childbirth before he reconceived it as passage to the act.[3][23]
The Papin Sisters: The 1933 crime of the Papin sisters represents what Allouch calls an exemplary passage à l'acte—an act that remains eternally enigmatic and cannot be narrativized, despite the enormous psychiatric and literary commentary it has generated.[19]
Distinguishing from Related Phenomena
Passage à l'acte vs. suicide: Not all suicides constitute passage à l'acte. Suicides that occur without warning, that lack apparent motive, that leave the subject baffled retrospectively—these approach passage à l'acte, but suicides that are painstakingly planned and symbolically addressed (e.g. in manifestos) belong more to the domain of epic leap or political act.
Passage à l'acte vs. acting-out: The distinction depends on structure: if the behavior is addressed to the Other (even if aggressively), it remains acting-out. If it represents an exit from the scene of transference, it approaches passage à l'acte.[1][24]
Passage à l'acte vs. impulsivity: Not all sudden or impulsive actions constitute passage à l'acte. Passage à l'acte involves a qualitative break—an exit rather than merely sudden occurrence. Clinically, this distinction has consequences for risk assessment, treatment planning, and the decision to hospitalize.
Extended Theoretical Applications
Jean Allouch: Epic Leap and the Passage à l'Acte
Jean Allouch's work introduces the crucial refinement of the epic leap (saut épique):
Epic leap: Acts that involve a break in existential trajectory but can be inscribed in narrative (e.g., jihadist acts, religious or political conversions). The epic leap allows itself to be understood, contextualized, and made sense of.
Passage à l'acte (proper): Acts that remain outside meaning, that cannot be inscribed in narrative, that remain eternally enigmatic.[19][4]
Allouch also introduces the notion of an “enlightened passage to the act” to describe the analytic act at the end of analysis and the procedure of la passe: here, the subject who has traversed analysis takes up the place of the analyst precisely by performing an act in which “to think is to capitulate,” yet an act that is nonetheless informed by analytic knowledge and the subject’s division.[25]
Žižek and Political Passage à l'Acte
Slavoj Žižek distinguishes passage à l'acte from political acts proper. A mere passage à l'acte, however dramatic, may leave the fundamental structure unchanged—it may even reinforce it by providing a spectacular release that allows the system to persist. A true political act, for Žižek, involves transformation of the symbolic coordinates themselves, more in line with Lacan’s notion of the act than with passage to the act.[26][27]
Controversies and Debates
The Problem of Meaninglessness
A crucial controversy concerns whether passage à l'acte is truly meaningless or whether this meaninglessness reflects analytical inability to decode meaning. Allouch insists on maintaining a structural distinction between actions that can be narrated (epic leap) and those that cannot (passage to the act), arguing that collapsing the distinction risks losing the specificity of Lacan’s concept.[4] The debate has implications for treatment: if passage à l'acte has no meaning, attempts at meaning-making analysis in its immediate aftermath may be counterproductive.
Violence and Responsibility
A critical debate concerns responsibility for passage à l'acte. If the act occurs where conscious choice and intention fail, in what sense is the subject responsible? Some argue that the very unconsciousness of passage à l'acte precludes moral responsibility, while others contend that even unconscious action has consequences for which the subject must ultimately answer. Lacanian theory tends to shift the focus from moral blame to structural location: what is at stake is not exonerating the subject but understanding the place from which the act arises.
Diagnostic Precision
A practical controversy concerns the differential diagnosis and identification of passage à l'acte. Misidentification has clinical consequences: treating passage à l'acte as acting-out (through interpretation) may fail; treating it as impulsivity (through behavioral management) may miss the real psychological structure.[8] Debates within Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis concern how narrowly or broadly the category should be applied and whether it should be reserved for rare, catastrophic breaks or used more widely in everyday clinical practice.
See Also
See Also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre X: L'angoisse (1962–1963).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), entries “Anxiety” and “Acting out”.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, trans. Oscar Zentner (London: Routledge, 2025), especially the discussion of Freud’s “young homosexual woman” and the equivocation of niederkommen.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, chap. 1–3, on the irreducibility and “strangeness” of the passage to the act and its resistance to narrative inscription.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Introduction, on the dread of passage to the act structuring psychiatric and judicial decision-making.
- ↑ Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac, 1988), entries “Acting out” and “Act”.
- ↑ For a Lacanian reconstruction of this history and its intersections with judicial and political discourses, see Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Introduction and chap. 1.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Conclusion, on the misuses of “passage to the act” in psychoanalytic clinical literature and in Louise de Urtebey’s Si l’analyste passe à l’acte.
- ↑ Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
- ↑ Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), in Standard Edition, vol. 12.
- ↑ For a contemporary reconstruction of the relation between act, enjoyment and ethical choice, see Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales (eds.), Studying Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2023), esp. essays by Todd McGowan and others on das Ding, enjoyment and “senseless sacrifice”.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932).
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
- ↑ Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales (eds.), Studying Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2023), chaps. 4–5, on Antigone, das Ding and the “zone of horror”.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XV: L'acte psychanalytique (unpublished seminar, 1967–1968).
- ↑ Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Conclusion, on “enlightened passage to the act” and its relation to Lacan’s “Proposition of 9 October 1967”.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 Jean Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, chap. 2–3, on Fethi Benslama’s notion of the “epic leap” and the contrast between jihadist acts and the crime of the Papin sisters.
- ↑ For a discussion of the shift from das Ding to objet a and the subject’s relation to the object, see Todd McGowan, “Escaping the Object,” in Owens and Swales (eds.), Studying Lacan’s Seminar VII, esp. on object and Thing.
- ↑ On the intersection of psychiatric, judicial and political concerns around psychotic violence and passage to the act, see Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Introduction.
- ↑ For reflections on historical narrative, trauma and the difficulty of integrating passage to the act into a life-story, see Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Introduction.
- ↑ Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”.
- ↑ Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, entry “Acting out”.
- ↑ Allouch, New Remarks on the Passage to the Act, Conclusion, esp. his commentary on Lacan’s “Proposition of 9 October 1967” and the motif “to think is to capitulate”.
- ↑ See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), and Rafael Winkler, Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), esp. on the distinction between violent discharge and transformative act.
- ↑ On Žižek’s use of Pauline motifs and the event of conversion as a model for the political act, see Ole Jakob Loland, The Reception of Paul the Apostle in the Works of Slavoj Žižek (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
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