How can we understand the hypothesis of the unconscious, the unconscious as hypothesis? What are the formations of the unconscious? And, to what can we attribute psychical causality for the unconscious? Pursuing questions such as these, this semester-long seminar will be organized around Jacques Lacan’s Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958). Over the course of our reading, we will focus on the following: the formalization of the three moments of the Oedipus complex; the construction and interpretation of “The Graph of Desire”; and, the dialectic of demand and desire in the clinical study and treatment of the neuroses, in particular, obsessional neurosis. Alongside our reading of the Seminar, we will also refer to several of Freud’s metapsychological papers, including “The Unconscious” and “Repression.” By the end of the seminar, we will begin to differentiate between the transferential unconscious and the real unconscious, as presented in Lacan’s late teaching, and as developed by Jacques-Alain Miller.