A reading of Jacques Lacan's Seminar XVII: discourse and psychoanalysis

The aim of this paper is to present a reading of Seminar XVII by Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and fruitful interpreter of Sigmund Freud's legacy. Entitled “The Reverse of Psychoanalysis” and given between 1969 and 1970, we follow Lacan in the construction of what he himself called his “quadripods”, the theory of the four discourses. To this end, we contextualize the work historically (we must acknowledge the impact of May 1968) and theoretically (notably the recourse to Political Economy, with the concept of surplus value).