The unary trait is a central concept in Lacan’s articulation of subjectivity. Through an examination of the circuits of demand, this text proposes a number of theoretical coordinates for understanding the relationship between language, identification and desire, with direct implications for clinical practice.

In Seminar IX, Identification (1961–1962), Lacan strips identification down to its most elementary form in order to bring out the specificity of the unary trait. In doing so, he reduces the various forms of identification described by Freud in Chapter VII of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to their fundamental structure.

By unary trait (trait unaire), Lacan designates the signifier in its elementary form, accounting for the subject’s symbolic identification. The unary trait constitutes a unit insofar as its inscription produces a trace, a mark.

Where is the unary trait situated in the history of a subject?

Lacan locates it in the primordial trait, the first trait that leaves a mark and produces the memory of something that has been lost, something that escapes.

This concerns the first experience of satisfaction, forever lost, yet leaving a mark behind. This initial experience of satisfaction coincides with the beginning of the circuit of demand addressed to the Other. The subject repeats and continues to seek experiences capable of reproducing that satisfaction.

Yet this first satisfaction can never be recovered.

Thus, an incessant repetition emerges. No notch, however often repeated, can ever be identical to another. Nevertheless, the subject repeats, repeats and insists upon that point.

During childhood development, the incessant repetition of children’s questions to adults — asking why things are as they are — offers an example of what Lacan demonstrates through the circuits of demand around the topological figure of the torus.

No answer will satisfy the child, because the demand is constituted around this central hole.

Freud had left desire fixed upon the phallus that satisfies the mother, whereas Lacan introduces a new movement.

Through the topological figure of the torus, Lacan seeks to account for a psychoanalysis that is no longer imaginatively fixed upon the dimension of depth, metaphorically represented by archaeology — digging into the past.

Instead, psychoanalysis can be understood as an experience that accounts for the production of the subject of the unconscious through the topological figure of the torus, which delineates an inside and an outside, fullness and emptiness.

Lacan uses the torus to account for the constitution of the subject precisely because the circuits of demand traced by the subject around its circular surface, resembling that of a lifebuoy, reveal something essential.

With each circuit — whether around the torus, from inside to outside or from outside to inside — every turn of demand brings into play the subject’s lack-of-being (manque-à-être).

At the end of Chapter XIV, Lacan refers to the end of analysis.

But how do these circuits lead towards the end of analysis?

Lacan specifies that the aim of analysis is defined on the basis of an ethics. The end of analysis is sustained neither by truth nor by a universal rule.

At the end of an analysis, something of the echoes of that unary trait may be grasped: the trait that has determined the subject’s singular way of constructing their own contours around a demand addressed to the Other, a demand that can never be fully satisfied.

It is here that the ethical balance of the end of analysis takes shape.

As Lacan suggests:

“We are dealing with what, at the end of analysis, remains suspended from the Other. It is because the measure of unconscious desire, at the end of analysis, remains implicated in this place of the Other, which we as analysts embody, and which Freud, at the end of his work, was able to mark as irreducible: the castration complex insofar as it cannot be assumed by the subject.” **

Mary Nicotra

Bibliographical references

Nicotra, M. (2022). The Unary Trait and the Circuits of Demand. In Sergio Caretto (Ed.), Identifications, Singular Identities. Psicoanalisi Lacaniana, Annali. Turin: Edizioni SEB.

* Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Italian edition: Psicologia delle masse e analisi dell’Io, in Opere, Vol. 9. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1977.

** Lacan, J. (1961–1962). Seminar IX: Identification, p. 136. Unpublished edition cited in the original Italian text.