A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the Société Française de Psychanalyse.

"Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire – ágalma, the good object. I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found. It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates's desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other – the object, ágalma – was at his mercy. Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed – its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a." Jacques Lacan

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the Société Française de Psychanalyse. The French text was prepared by Jacques-Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the seminar.

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less specialist audience than ever before, amongst whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted "to introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based", namely the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive. In re-defining these four concepts he explores the question that, as he puts it, moves from "Is psycho-analysis a science?" to "What is a science that includes psycho-analysis?"