Talk:Seminar IX

Jacques Lacan's Seminars : I · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X · XI · XII · XIII · XIV · XV · XVI · XVII · XVIII · XIX · XX · XXI · XXII · XXIII · XXIV · XXV · XXVI · XXVII I. Freud's technical writings II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis III. The Psychoses IV. The Object Relations V. The Formations of the Unconscious VI. Desire and its Interpretation VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis VIII. Transference IX. Identification The Names of the Father X. Anxiety XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis XIII. The Object of Psychoanalysis XIV. The Logic of Fantasy XV. The Psychoanalytic Act XVI. From One Other to the Other XVII. The Reverse of Psychoanalysis XVIII. On a Discourse That Would Not Be Semblance XIX. Or Worse XX. Encore XXV. The Moment of Concluding XXVII. Dissolution ← Seminar VIII Seminar X →

Identification
Seminar IX
Cover image associated with circulating editions and transcriptions of Seminar IX.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L'identification
English Title	Identification (unofficial title in English circulation)
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1961–1962 (academic year)
Session Count	c. 25–26 sessions (weekly teaching cycle)
Location	Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris (seminar milieu)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Identification • Signifier • trait unaire (unary trait) • Ego ideal • Ideal ego • Proper name • Negation • Phallus • Name-of-the-Father • Objet petit a (in transition) • Topology
Notable Themes	Identification as signifying operation; the One and repetition; the mark and naming; logic and grammar of negation; clinical formations of identification (love, hysteria, idealization); continuity with transference and preparation for anxiety
Freud Texts	Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego • Negation • The Ego and the Id • Totem and Taboo (background)
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar VIII
Followed by	Seminar X

Identification ([L'identification] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is Jacques Lacan’s ninth yearly seminar (Séminaire IX), delivered during the 1961–1962 academic year in Paris. In this seminar Lacan reworks the Freudian theme of identification by treating it less as a psychological mechanism of imitation than as a structural operation of the signifier: the subject is said to emerge through a mark, a name, and a minimal difference introduced by repetition. The seminar is especially associated with Lacan’s elaboration of the trait unaire (“unary trait”), a concept intended to formalize the unitary mark that supports ego-ideal formation and the subject’s insertion into a signifying series.

Seminar IX belongs to the sequence of Lacan’s early-1960s teaching that follows Seminar VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis and Seminar VIII on transference. In that transition, Lacan moves from the ethical stakes of “not giving ground relative to one’s desire” and the paradoxes of jouissance to a more technical inquiry into the signifying supports of subjectivity: how the subject is counted, named, and placed among others through marks that both unify and divide.

Although long circulated in French notes and transcripts and in unofficial English versions, Seminar IX has been influential in Lacanian psychoanalysis and adjacent fields (literary theory, philosophy, social theory) for its attempt to connect clinical phenomena of identification—idealization, hysterical mimicry, love, group formations—to a formal logic of the signifier, the One, and repetition.

Historical and institutional context

Place in Lacan’s seminar sequence

Lacan’s seminars of the late 1950s and early 1960s are often read as a shift from a primarily linguistic and structural “return to Freud” (centered on the Symbolic order and the primacy of the signifier) toward an increasingly complex articulation of desire, object a, and jouissance. Seminar VII (1959–1960) foregrounded ethics and tragedy (notably a reading of Sophocles’ Antigone) and formulated an influential maxim of the ethical act: “not to give way on one’s desire.” Seminar VIII (1960–1961) re-centered technique on the logic of transference—especially transference love—and introduced the Platonic motif of the agalma to describe how the analysand attributes a hidden precious object to the analyst.

Seminar IX continues this trajectory by asking how the subject becomes legible as “one” among others through signifying marks. In Lacanian terms, the seminar extends the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language by investigating the minimal unit (the mark, the “one”) that permits counting, series, and the formation of ideals, while remaining inseparable from lack and division.

Psychoanalytic institutions and the question of technique

The early-1960s seminars are also shaped by institutional disputes in French psychoanalysis, especially around technique, training, and the status of Lacan’s practice (notably variable session length). Within this context, a theory of identification has clinical stakes: it concerns not only how subjects form symptoms and ideals, but how analytic authority, group effects, and institutional ideals operate. Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier offers a critical alternative to adaptationist or “ego-strengthening” approaches associated with ego psychology.

Composition and textual status

Unpublished status and circulation

Unlike several earlier seminar books established in the canonical French series at Éditions du Seuil (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller), Seminar IX is historically known through stenographic notes, student transcriptions, and compiled French texts circulated in psychoanalytic milieus. Unofficial English translations—often associated with the translator Cormac Gallagher—have circulated widely online and in academic references, but they are generally treated as non-canonical working texts rather than as a standard published edition.

Because multiple versions exist (with differences in pagination, editorial choices, and session demarcations), scholarly citation practice typically specifies the session date (or lecture number) and the version consulted.

Internal organization

The seminar unfolds as a sustained inquiry rather than a single treatise. Lacan moves between:

• close readings of Freud (especially the Freudian typology of identification in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego);
• linguistic and logical problems (identity, repetition, negation, naming);
• clinical remarks on transference, love, and hysterical formations; and
• formalization attempts (the unary trait; counting “before number”; and early gestures toward a topological approach to the subject).

Conceptual framework and methodology

Identification as signifying operation

A guiding claim of Seminar IX is that identification cannot be reduced to an ego’s copying of an image. Lacan treats identification as an operation in which a signifier functions as a mark that both produces and divides the subject. This approach follows his broader distinction between the Ideal ego (an imaginary formation tied to images and narcissistic coherence) and the Ego ideal (a symbolic function linked to the Other’s point of view and to signifying authorization).

In this framework, “identifying with a signifier” names the subject’s insertion into a symbolic series: an element is counted as “one” only by virtue of difference from other signifiers and by the repetition that makes a mark iterable. Identification thus participates in Lacan’s redefinition of the subject as divided ([sujet barré] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), represented by one signifier for another signifier.

Freud’s three identifications and Lacan’s re-reading

Lacan takes as a point of departure Freud’s classic distinctions in Group Psychology:

1. a primordial identification (classically linked to the father or leader) as the earliest and most fundamental bond;
2. an identification in love relations, where the subject takes the place of the object when object-choice is blocked or lost; and
3. a hysterical identification, in which the subject identifies with another’s situation or symptom rather than with a concrete object.

Lacan’s reading re-situates these identifications within the logic of the signifier. The “single feature” (Freud’s einziger Zug) becomes central: it anticipates Lacan’s unary trait, the minimal mark that supports ideal formation and group cohesion without requiring a full image or total resemblance. By emphasizing the single trait, Lacan can explain how a collective identification may be organized around a signifier (a name, a slogan, an emblem) that functions precisely as a differential mark.

The trait unaire and the problem of the One

The seminar’s best-known concept is the trait unaire (unary trait). Lacan proposes that the One is not a metaphysical totality but a mark produced by repetition—an “unbroken line” that counts as one because it can be repeated as the same mark, thereby instituting difference within sameness. The One is thus linked to the signifier’s defining property: it is what it is only by not being other signifiers.

This conceptualization directly challenges the intuition that identity is tautological (A = A) in a simple sense. If a signifier repeats, it is “the same” only within a system that registers difference; repetition both confirms sameness and produces a gap. For Lacan, the subject’s being is implicated in this gap: the subject is not the substantial “A,” but what is represented between signifiers by the operation of repetition.

Secondary Lacanian reference works commonly link the unary trait to ego-ideal formation, the field of the Other, and the minimal inscription that can support a symbolic identification beyond imaginary capture.

Proper names, nomination, and symbolic authority

Seminar IX frequently engages issues of naming and the proper name. Proper names are treated not merely as labels but as signifiers that anchor a subject’s place in discourse. Nomination is thus connected to the paternal function (without being reducible to the empirical father) and to the symbolic networks of kinship, law, and recognition.

In Lacan’s earlier work on psychosis, the failure of a key paternal signifier was theorized under the heading of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. In Seminar IX, the emphasis shifts from structural diagnosis to the positive function of nomination: how signifiers (names, titles, marks) stabilize positions and make identification possible in the first place.

Negation and the grammar of subjectivity

Alongside naming, the seminar addresses the grammar and logic of negation. Freud’s short text Negation (1925) had proposed that negation allows a repressed content to emerge into discourse while remaining refused (“I did not think of my mother”—which can be read as a sign of the maternal thought’s insistence).

Lacan’s broader linguistic orientation treats negation as a privileged site where the subject’s division becomes legible: the subject speaks in a way that both reveals and disavows, indicating that the speaking position is not identical with an interior self. Within a theory of identification, negation matters because it shows how a subject can be bound to a signifier (or to an ideal) precisely through a refusal, a “not,” or a paradoxical avowal-by-denial.

Speech, language, and the limits of transference

Building on the preceding seminar’s focus on transference love, Lacan underscores that psychoanalysis is not primarily an intersubjective harmony but a structured situation in which speech is addressed to the Other. In this context, identification is not merely “being like” the other person but being marked by the other’s signifiers.

Circulating summaries of Seminar IX often cite Lacan’s contrast between speech-like behavior and language as symbolic structure: an animal may vocalize, respond, and demand, but does not enter the symbolic circuit of signifiers that support transference and interpretation. The point is methodological: transference presupposes the Other as locus of language, not merely an interlocutor.

Key themes, concepts, and clinical problems

Identification, love, and the object

In Freudian terms, identification and love are intertwined: love relations can produce identification with the loved object, especially when desire is blocked or the object is lost. Lacan reframes this in his developing theory of objet petit a and the phallus. Even where the seminar does not yet fully formalize later concepts, it repeatedly returns to the idea that the beloved object is “overvalorized” and that identification can function as a substitute satisfaction when direct possession is impossible.

In the wake of Seminar VIII (with its Platonic reading of the agalma), Seminar IX can be read as clarifying the signifying supports of that transference illusion: what is “seen” in the other is bound to a mark and to the Other’s place, rather than to a substantial treasure hidden in a person.

The ego-ideal, ideals, and group formations

A central application of the unary trait concerns the formation of ideals and groups. Freud had argued that group cohesion is tied to identification with a leader and to the formation of an ideal. Lacan’s signifying approach emphasizes that such cohesion can be organized around a single trait, a signifier that functions as an emblem.

This account has often been used in Lacanian social and political theory to analyze how collective identities are produced by signifiers (names, slogans, insignia) that unify by dividing—i.e., by demarcating an inside/outside and by instituting a minimal difference that can be repeated.

Hysterical identification and symptom formation

Freud’s third identification—hysterical identification—becomes especially important for Lacan because it links identification to the subject’s position in a desire-structure rather than to resemblance. In hysterical identification, the subject takes up another’s “situation” (for example, by adopting a symptom) as a way of inscribing a question about desire and the Other.

Within the seminar’s framework, this is not explained by empathy or imitation but by the circulation of signifiers that position subjects relative to the Other’s desire. Hysterical identification is thus one of the clinical sites where Lacan’s claim that the subject is represented by a signifier for another signifier becomes practically legible.

The father, the phallus, and symbolic marking

In Lacanian theory, the phallus is not primarily an anatomical object but a signifier of desire and lack, tied to symbolic authority and to the Other’s field. Seminar IX connects identification to paternal marking insofar as the ego-ideal is linked to a symbolic point from which the subject is seen and judged.

While Lacan maintains a distinction between the empirical father and the symbolic paternal function, he also treats the paternal signifier as historically central to the way subjects are marked and inserted into discourse—an issue continuous with his earlier discussions of the Name-of-the-Father and with his later pluralization of paternal functions.

Toward a “topological structure of the subject”

A notable ambition attributed to this period of Lacan’s teaching is the construction of a more formal model of subjectivity—sometimes described as a movement toward topological thinking. In Seminar IX the formalization is still exploratory, but the insistence on the mark, the line, the cut, and counting “before number” points toward later topological and matheme-based developments in Lacan’s work (including the use of knots, surfaces, and formal writing).

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Reframing identification beyond psychology

The seminar’s central theoretical contribution is to recast identification as a symbolic operation rather than a psychological adaptation. This has two main consequences:

• Identification becomes inseparable from the signifier’s properties (difference, iterability, substitution) rather than from an ego’s conscious choice.
• Clinical phenomena of idealization, rivalry, and imitation can be reinterpreted as effects of signifying positions and marks.

This approach also reinforces Lacan’s critique of techniques that aim at strengthening the ego by consolidating self-images. If the ego is primarily an imaginary formation, then analytic work must attend to the signifiers that support ego ideals and symptoms rather than simply to the coherence of the self-image.

Clinical orientation: from “being” to “mark”

In clinical terms, a focus on the unary trait encourages attention to minimal signifiers that organize a subject’s identifications: a nickname, a title, a repeated phrase, a family signifier, a trait attributed to a parental figure. Such marks can function as pivots of symptom formation and as supports of ideals.

Rather than interpreting identifications as “traits of personality,” Lacan’s approach treats them as signifiers that can be displaced, reattached, or reconfigured in the analytic process. The question becomes less “Who am I?” in a substantial sense than “By what signifiers am I represented?”—and what desire and lack are organized around those signifiers.

Link to ethics and the direction of the cure

Read in sequence with Seminar VII, Seminar IX can also be placed under the heading of Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis. If ethics concerns the relation between action and desire, then identification concerns the signifying supports that make desire speakable and that structure the subject’s relation to ideals and guilt. The analytic task is not to replace one ideal with another, but to interpret the signifiers that bind the subject to an ideal and to locate the subject’s desire relative to that binding.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Seminar IX is a frequent reference point in Lacanian teaching on identification, the ego ideal, and the unary trait. It is often taught alongside Freud’s Group Psychology and Lacan’s writings on the signifier (notably “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud”), since these texts provide the conceptual grammar for thinking identification as inscription and difference rather than as imitation.

In clinical literature influenced by this seminar, the unary trait is used to discuss formations of the ego-ideal, the stabilization of identity, and the ways group signifiers can serve as symptomatic supports or as sites of conflict.

In the humanities and social theory

Beyond clinical contexts, Seminar IX has contributed to theoretical accounts of identity and subject formation that stress the role of symbolic marks and naming practices. The idea that “the One” is produced by repetition and difference has been taken up in discussions of discourse, social categories, and political identifications, often in conjunction with later Lacanian work on discourse and jouissance.

Debates and limitations

Because the seminar lacks a stable, universally cited published edition, scholarship faces textual challenges: variations across transcripts and translations can affect terminological nuance. Moreover, Lacan’s formalization of identity and the One has been read both as a powerful alternative to substantialist notions of identity and as a difficult, sometimes obscure recoding of psychoanalytic phenomena in logical terms. Commentators differ on whether the signifier-based approach illuminates clinical practice or risks over-formalization, though within Lacanian schools it is typically defended as a way to avoid psychologism and to maintain fidelity to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar VII
• Seminar VIII
• Seminar X
• Identification
• Trait unaire
• Signifier
• Ego ideal
• Ideal ego
• Transference
• Objet petit a
• Phallus
• Name-of-the-Father
• Negation
• Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud

Further reading

• Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), SE XVIII.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Negation” (1925), SE XIX.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud” (1957), in Écrits.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. Routledge, 1992.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.