This seminar elaborates the consequences and results of a change in discourse resulting in the possibility of an analytic experience as one in which a space and time are given to speak about the ruptures the unconscious has made and continues to make in the lived experience of the speaking being. The seminar proposes that the Freudian rupture inaugurates a new social link, which Lacan will formally and logically define through his work on the “analytic discourse” in seminar XVII and following.
At the heart of this discourse, or in the position of the agent proper, is the position of the analyst and the analytic act itself as one that makes way for the subject of the unconscious as a barred subject. This seminar will work on the question of the “act” from the perspective of the psychoanalytic experience insofar as it concerns a desire and its cause, jouissance and its work and transformation, and the Thing at work in the life and being of the subject.