Sinthome () is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). It redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of the role of the subject outside of analysis, where enjoyment is made possible through creative identification with the symptom.
Sinthome () is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). It redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of the role of the subject outside of analysis, where enjoyment is made possible through creative identification with the symptom.
==Overview== The idea of the sinthome was the final stage in Lacan's exploration of the Freudian conception of the symptom which gradually emerges through analysis, and especially Freud's conception of neuroses which emerge from a struggle for pleasure. Lacan first viewed the symptom as something inscribed in a writing process of the unconscious, not as a completed ciphered message calling for interpretation: it is not a call to the Other and has no addressee. For example, in the first seminar, explaining the Freudian concept of the "return of the repressed", Lacan compares the emergence of the symptom with a scenario posited by American cyberneticist Norbert Wiener: Wiener posits two beings each of whose temporal dimension moves in the opposite direction from the other. To be sure, that means nothing, and that is how things which mean nothing all of a sudden signify something, but in a quite different domain. If one of them sends a message to the other, for example a square, the being going in the opposite direction will first of all see the square vanishing, before seeing the square. That is what we see as well. The symptom initially appears to us as a trace, which will only ever be a trace, one which will continue not to be understood until the analysis has got quite a long way, and until we have discovered its meaning.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).