Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse) was published in Paris by Le Seuil in 1973.

"[2] In early 1964, with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel's support, he was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

He begins his new seminar on "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" on January 15 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure.

Lacan sought in his eleventh Seminar to cover what he called "the major Freudian concepts – I have isolated four that seem to come within this category...the first two, the Unconscious and Repetition.

Praxis thus, which "places the subject in a position of dealing with the real through the symbolic," produces concepts, of which four are offered here: the Unconscious, Repetition, Transference and the Drive.

"No progress has been made that has not deviated whenever one of the terms has been neglected around which Freud ordered the ways that he traced and the paths of the unconscious."

This declaration of allegiance contrasts with the study of Freud's dream about the dead son screaming "Father, can't you see I'm burning?"

In "The Freudian thing",[3] Lacan presents the Name-of-the-Father as a treasure to be found, provided it implies self-immolation as a sacrificial victim to truth.

The purpose of the drive is not to reach a goal (a final destination) but to follow its aim (the way itself), which is to circle round the object.

Lacan rejects the notion that partial drives can attain any complete organization since the primacy of the genital zone is always precarious.

Under the form of objet a, Lacan groups all the partial drives linked to part objects: the breast, feces, the penis, and he adds the gaze and the voice.

How then is it possible to reconcile desire linked to the signifier and to the Other with the libido, now an organ under the shape of the "lamella," the placenta, the part of the body from which the subject must separate in order to exist?

The analyst's role is to allow the drive "to be made present in the reality of the unconscious": he must fall from the idealized position so as to become the upholder of objet a, the separating object.

The appearance during its course of what he called 'the newly published, posthumous work of my friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible" led Lacan however – "free as I am to pursue...the way that seems best to me" – into a long detour midway upon "the eye and the gaze – this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.