THE LACANIAN OBJECT 

Date: Saturday, November 1, 2025 10am-4pm

Credits: 6 CE 

Speaker: Bruce Fink, Ph.D.

Meeting is both on Zoom & in-person at: 

The University of Dallas

1845 East Northgate Drive

Irving, Texas 75062

This course will present the origins and development of what Jacques Lacan considered

to be his most important contribution to psychoanalysis: object a. From its inception in

the 1930s in the “imaginary register,” as he calls it, we will trace its evolution through

Seminar VIII, where it takes on the form of agalma—precious object Alcibiades sees in

Socrates—and Seminar XVI, where it takes on the form of “surplus jouissance,” to his

work in the 1970s where it becomes virtually equated with jouissance itself.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Grasp the history of the concept of the object in Lacan’s work, from its origins

in the imaginary register onward.

2. Articulate the reasons for the progressive shifts in the concept, owing to

Lacan’s extensive work on language and libido (i.e., jouissance), from the

imaginary “other” (the other like oneself), to the object of desire, to the object

as real cause of the subject’s desire.

3. Elaborate the topological models Lacan introduces to problematize the notions

of inside and outside, and to show in what ways the object belongs neither

exclusively to the subject nor to the Other.

4. Discuss the clinical and theoretical usefulness of a concept that has myriad

avatars, including the little other (or semblable), ágalma, the golden number or

ratio, the Freudian Thing, the voice, gaze, phoneme, turd, urinary flow, the real,

the anomaly, the cause of desire, surplus jouissance, the letter, the analyst’s

desire, logical consistency, the Other’s desire, semblance, the lost object, the

soul, the placenta, the amniotic sac, haste, and so on.

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHY:

Bruce Fink, Ph.D., is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and supervisor who trained in France

with the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the

École de la Cause freudienne in Paris. He has translated many of Lacan’s works into

English—including Écrits and Seminars VI, VIII, XVI, XVIII, and XX—and is the author

of numerous books on Lacan, including The Lacanian Subject, A Clinical Introduction to

Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Lacan to the Letter, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic

Technique, Against Understanding (two volumes), Lacan on Love, Lacan on Desire, and

Miss-ing. He also published A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday

Practice. A board member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, he has also penned

several mysteries involving a character loosely based on Jacques Lacan, including

(among others) The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal, Death by Analysis,

and most recently The Da Vinci Staircase: Love and Turbulence in the Loire Valley. His

books have been translated into 17 different languages.

PREPARATORY READING:

Selections from Lacan’s Family Complexes.

The following version is very literal, not easy to follow, but easy to find:

http://lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/FAMILY-COMPLEXES-IN-

THE-FORMATION-OF-THE-INDIVIDUAL2.pdf

Better partial translations exist but are much harder to come by:

1938 “The Family Complexes,” translated by Carolyn Asp [J. Anderson?] in Critical

Texts, 5, 3 (1988): 13-29. Also translated by Andrea Kahn in Semiotext 10, vol. 4, 1,

1981.

Chapter V, “Lacan’s Imaginary Register,” in Fink, Lacan on Love (Cambridge, UK: Polity

Press, 2016)

Seminar VIII, Transference, Chapter X, “Agalma” (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015)

Seminar XVI, From an Other to the other, Chapter I, “From Surplus Value to Surplus

Jouissance,” Chapter VIII, “The One and little a,” and Chapter IX, “From Fibonacci to

Pascal” (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2024)