ABSTRACT
Just one year before Seminar IV, the lectures Lacan delivered in 1955–1956 during two academic terms were put together as a text titled, “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” (Lacan, 2006a). There, Lacan outlines Freud’s theoretical framework in the following way. This description of Freud’s framework will, in some ways, seem recognisable as it has been covered in this book so far. Lacan asserts that
Freud maintains of the imaginary function of the phallus in the two sexes … the castration complex to be a normative phase of the subject’s assumption [assomption] of his own sex, the myth of the killing of the father rendered necessary by the constitutive presence of the Oedipus complex in every personal history. (p. 455)
