The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960

Lacan's central argument is that psychoanalysis is not merely a therapeutic technique but an ethics—indeed, that the kernel of the psyche is 'ethical through and through' . The seminar rejects the moralizing ethics of self-realization and the pursuit of the supreme good, arguing that what has traditionally been supposed to be the supreme good is in fact nothing but radical evil . The ethical domain is structured around desire and its relation to das Ding, the lost object that lies beyond the pleasure principle. The imperative Lacan formulates—not to give ground relative to one's desire—is not a prescription for self-indulgence but a rigorous position that requires distinguishing desire from both the superego's cruelty and the drive's compulsion . The seminar also rejects the idea that psychoanalysis can formulate a new practical ethics or a new erotics on its own premises .

Das Ding, the Thing, is the lost object that Lacan identifies as the beyond of the pleasure principle—the absolute Other of the subject, the forbidden and impossible object of incestuous desire. In Seminar VII, das Ding is not a concrete object but a structural place, a void around which desire circulates. The ethical question becomes the subject's relation to this Thing: whether desire will be regulated by the pleasure principle's avoidance of pain, or whether it will risk the encounter with the Thing that lies beyond. Lorenzo Chiesa argues that in the seminar, evil is discussed with respect to Lacan's updating of the Freudian assessment of human nature as related to the Thing and to jouissance, which Lacan assigns a 'malignant' character . The ethics of psychoanalysis, on this reading, requires acknowledging the Thing as the horizon of desire.

Lacan devotes three sessions in 1960 to Sophocles' Antigone, treating her as the undisputed protagonist of the play and the source of its cathartic effect . Antigone functions as a figure of pure desire—a desire that does not yield, that goes to death rather than compromise. But scholars have warned against extracting a simple 'Do not give up on your desire!' as the seminar's ethical precept. Dany Nobus argues that Lacan did not promote Antigone as the model for what psychoanalysts should induce in patients; rather, patients are brought to acknowledge the tragic reality of the human condition, that 'the very fact of being shall always remain insufficient to lead one's life successfully' . Chiesa concludes that Antigone is not an ethical model for psychoanalysis, and that Lacan's ethics requires overcoming her tragic 'holocaust'—her 'criminal desire' as opposed to Creon's 'criminal good' .

The phrase, which Lacan states at the end of the seminar, is not an imperative to pursue every impulse. Clotilde Leguil explains that for Lacan, 'yielding on one's desire' means betraying it by obeying the superego as a cruel authority—an authority that treats desire harshly . Not yielding means finding a third way between duty (superegoic obedience) and the drive (compulsive satisfaction). This third way is the path of desire itself, which requires distinguishing desire from both the superego's demands and the drive's cruelty . The ethical subject is one who does not cede on their desire—but this requires a rigorous analysis of what desire actually is, a task that Seminar VII undertakes through readings of Freud, tragedy, and the mystics.

Lacan's engagement with Sade and Kant is central to his argument about the relation between the moral law and evil. Chiesa's analysis shows that Lacan investigates evil through Sade and Kant, highlighting how both thinkers overestimated Evil—either absolutizing it into a first principle or mistaking it for the Good—in a comparable and failed modern endeavor to construct human nature as a Thing on the basis of the moral or immoral Law . Kant's categorical imperative and Sade's libertine maxim both produce a law that is indifferent to the subject's particularity, and both fail to account for the Thing around which desire circulates. The seminar thus positions psychoanalytic ethics as an alternative to both moral rigorism and libertine transgression, neither of which escapes the superego's cruelty.

The seminar was delivered orally during the 1959-1960 academic year and published in French by Éditions du Seuil in 1986 as Le séminaire, Livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller . Miller's choice to publish Seminar VII before the earlier Seminar IV surprised many who expected the object-relations seminar to appear first . The English translation by Dennis Porter was published by Routledge in 1992, with an American edition by W. W. Norton and a Norton paperback in 1997 . The published text was deliberately stripped of scholarly apparatus, despite Lacan's numerous implicit references and allusions—a decision that has required subsequent commentators to provide extensive clarifications and interpretive guidance .