The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV (Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 4) [1 ed.] 0745660355, 9780745660356

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The Object Relation

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation The Seminar o f Jacques Lacan Book IV

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller Translated by A. R. Price

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First published in French as Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IV. La relation d ’objet © Editions du Seuil, 1994 This English edition © Polity Press, 2020 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6035-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981, author. | Miller, Jacques-Alain, editor. | Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. Seminaire de Jacques Lacan. English ; bk. 4. Title: The object relation / Jacques Lacan ; edited by Jacques-Alain Miller ; translated by A.R. Price. Other titles: Relation d’objet. English Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2020] | Series: The seminar of Jacques Lacan ; book IV j “First published in French as Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IV. La relation d’objet, [copyright] Editions du Seuil, 1994”-Verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An examination of phobia and fetishism by the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024389 | ISBN 9780745660356 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Object relations (Psychoanalysis) | Psychoanalysis. Classification: LCC BF175.5.024 L3313 20201DDC 150.19/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024389 Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Times N R MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT I II III IV V

Introduction The Three Forms of the Lack of Object The Signifier and the Holy Spirit The Dialectic of Frustration On Analysis as Bundling and the Consequences Thereof

3 18 33 51 68

THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE VI VII VIII

The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young Homosexual Woman A Child is Being Beaten and the Young Homosexual Woman Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman

87 103 123

THE FETISH OBJECT IX X XI

The Function of the Veil Identification with the Phallus The Phallus and the Unfulfilled Mother

143 157 171

MYTHICAL STRUCTURE IN THE OBSERVATION ON LITTLE HANS’S PHOBIA XII XIII XIV XV

On the Oedipus Complex On the Castration Complex The Signifier in the Real What Myth is For

191 207 224 241

Contents

VI

XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII

How Myth is Analysed The Signifier and Der Witz Circuits Permutations Transformations The Mother’s Drawers and the Father’s Shortcoming An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic ‘Me donnera sans femme une progeniture'

261 278 295 310 327 344 362 380

FAREWELL XXIV

From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

Note Translator’s Notes Index

403 427 432 447

B ook IV The Object Relation 1956-1957

THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT

I IN T R O D U C T IO N

The Z-shaped diagram The object, lost and re-found Gems The object, anxiety and the hole Fetishes and phobic objects This year we shall be speaking on a topic to which the historical evolution of psychoanalysis, or what is so termed, could offer a central place in both theory and practice, whether in a way that hangs together or otherwise. This topic is The Object Relation. Why did I not choose this topic before, back when we began these seminars, given that it was already a crucial, prominent and contem­ porary topic? Well, precisely for the reason behind the second part of my title - . .. and The Freudian Structures. Indeed, this topic could be treated only after a certain step back had been taken in relation to this question. We first had to examine what constitutes those structures in which, according to what Freud has shown us, analysis moves and operates, and most especially the complex structure of the relation between the two subjects present in analysis, namely the subject being analysed and the analyst. This is what our past three years of commentary and critical reading of Freud’s texts have been devoted to, which I shall rapidly recall for you now. The first year dealt with the main technical features in the steer­ ing of the treatment, that is, with the notions of transference and resistance. The second year bore on the grounding of the Freudian discovery and experience, namely the notion of the unconscious. I think I showed well enough how this notion is what necessitated Freud’s introduction, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of principles that are utterly paradoxical on the purely dialectical plane. Lastly,

4

Theorising the Lack of Object

over the third year, I gave you a patent example of the absolute necessity of isolating the essential articulation of symbolism that is known as the signifier, so as to understand, analytically speak­ ing, something of that field of psychoses that is strictly limited to paranoia. After these years of critical reading we are now armed with a number of terms that have culminated in certain schemas. On no account is the spatiality of these schemas to be taken in the intui­ tive sense of the term schema, but rather in another sense that is altogether legitimate, the topological sense. It’s not a matter of local­ isations, but rather of relationships between loci, interposition, for example, or succession, sequence. What we developed culminated in the following diagram -

This diagram lays out, first and foremost, the subject’s relation to the Other. In the way that it is naturally constituted at the start of analysis, this relation is one of virtual speech wherein the subject receives, from the Other, his own message in the form of unconscious speech. This message, which for him is interdicted, is profoundly misrecognised. It is mangled, stayed and intercepted by the inter­ position of the imaginary relationship between a and a', between the ego and the other, which is the ego’s type-object. The imaginary relationship, which is an essentially alienated relation, barges in, hampers, and more often than not reverses and profoundly misrecognises the relationship of speech between the subject and the Other. This happens insomuch as the big Other is another subject and insomuch as he is capable, par excellence, of deceiving. There was a point to introducing this schematisation in analytic experience, given how nowadays this experience is being refor­ mulated by an ever larger number of analysts who give priority in analytic theory to the object relation as something primary, without for all that offering any further commentary. They have been realigning the entire dialectic of the pleasure principle and reality principle on the object relation, and basing all analytic fur­ therance around what might be called a rectifying of the subject’s

Introduction

5

relation to the object, regarded as a dual relationship, as a relation­ ship that would be - so we are told when they speak about the analytic situation - exceedingly straightforward.1 Well, this rela­ tionship between subject and object that is increasingly tending to occupy the centre stage of analytic theory is the very thing that we are going to put to the test. Given that the object relation, insomuch as it is dual, corresponds to the line a-a’ in our diagram, can we on this basis construct in a satisfactory way the entirety of phenomena open to our observation in our analytic experience? Can this implement possibly answer for the facts all by itself? Can the more complex diagram that we have set in opposition to this be disregarded, indeed must it be cast aside? I shall give you some sustained evidence of how the object relation has become, at least apparently, the foremost theoretical feature in the explication of analysis. Not that I can recommend that you delve into what can be called a sort of collective work that has just come out, and to which the term collective is particularly well suited. You will see that from beginning to end this object relation is foregrounded in a way that is not always particularly satisfactory, in the sense of hanging together, but the monotony of which, the uniformity, is quite striking. You will see this object relation being expressly promoted in one of the articles, entitled Evolution de la psychanalyse, and, as the final stage of this evolution, you will see in the article La clinique psychanalytique a way of presenting clinical practice itself that is fully aligned with it. Perhaps I will give you some idea of what a presentation such as this can lead to. The collection as a whole is certainly quite striking. In it, you can see practitioners of analysis trying to put their minds in order. The understanding they manage to have of their own experience does not seem to give them full and complete satisfaction. On the other hand, however, this only orients or penetrates their practice with any depth when they conceive of how their own experience in this realm is not something that would truly have consequences for the actual patterns of their intervention, for the direction they give to analysis, nor, by the same token, for its outcomes. In merely reading them, one can misrecognise this, even though it has always been said that analytic theory and practice cannot be separated, dissociated, one from the other. Once people start conceiving of analysis in a certain direction it is inevitable that it will also be led in a certain direction, if the theoretical direction and the practical outcomes can likewise be but glimpsed. To introduce the question of the object relation, and precisely the question of its legitimacy, or of the groundlessness of its being placed at the centre of analytic theory, I shall have to recall for

6

Theorising the Lack of Object

you at least briefly what this notion owes, or doesn’t owe, to Freud himself. I shall do so first of all because this is indeed a sort of guide rope for us, and almost a technical delimitation that we have imposed on ourselves, based on this Freudian commentary. Likewise, this last year I have sensed some questioning arising from you, worries even, as to whether I would be taking Freud’s texts as my point of departure. When it comes to the object relation, it is undoubtedly very hard to begin with Freud’s texts themselves, because it’s not to be found in them. I’m speaking, of course, about something that is hereby categorically asserted to be a deviation from analytic theory. So, I’m going to have to begin with recent texts and with a criticism of their positions. However, that we shall ultimately have to refer to Freud’s positions is not in doubt, and by the same stroke we cannot avoid bringing up, even very rapidly, what revolves around the very notion of object in those fundamen­ tal themes that are strictly Freudian. We cannot do so, here at the point of departure, in a developed way. It is precisely at the end that we will be joining up with this, when we will have to spell it out. So, I simply want to provide a brief reminder, which wouldn’t even be conceivable were it not for the three years of collaboration we have under our belt, and had you not already met this theme of the object in various different guises here with me.1

1 Freud does, of course, speak about the object. The final section of the Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality is called Die Objektfindung, The Finding o f an Object. The object is being implicitly spoken of whenever the notion of reality comes into play. It is spoken of in yet a third way whenever the ambivalence of certain fundamental rela­ tionships is implied, namely the fact that the subject turns himself into an object for the other party, the fact that there is a specific type of relationship in which an object’s reciprocity with a subject is a plain and even constituting factor. I would like to accentuate more firmly the three ways in which notions relating to the object become apparent to us. This is why I’m alluding to one of the points in Freud’s writings to which we can refer in order to demonstrate, to articulate, the notion of object. If you go to this chapter in the Three Essays you will see something that was already there at the time he was drafting the Entwurf a text that I remind you has only been published by a sort of histori­ cal accident, for not only was Freud not minded to publish it but,

Introduction

7

furthermore, it was published against his will. None the less, we find the same wording in connection with the object back in this first projection of his psychology. Freud insists that any way by which man may find the object is only ever subsequent to a drive tendency2 in which what is at issue is a lost object, an object that would have to be found again. Here, the object is not regarded in the same terms as in the new­ fangled theory, where it is said to be a fully satisfying object, a type-object, the object par excellence, a harmonious object, the object that grounds man in a corresponding reality3, in the reality that is proof of maturity - the infamous genital object. It is quite striking to see how, when he is laying out the theory of instinctual development, such as it can be isolated in the first analytic experi­ ences, Freud indicates that it is grasped along the path of a search for the lost object. This object that corresponds to an advanced stage in the maturation of instincts is the object of the first weaning, found again. It is the object that was initially the point of attach­ ment to the infant’s earliest satisfactions. It is a re-found object. It is quite clear that discordance is established by the bare fact of repetition. Nostalgia binds the subject to the lost object, through which every searching effort is exerted. It brands this re-finding with the stamp of a repetition that is impossible, precisely because it is not the same object and never can be. The primacy of this dialec­ tic places a fundamental tension at the heart of the subject-object relationship, which ensures that what is sought out is never sought out in the same way as what will be found. It is through a search for a satisfaction that is both passee and depassee, past and outgrown, that the new object is sought out and found, and seized elsewhere than the very spot at which it is being sought out. A fundamental distance is introduced by the essential conflictive element that any search for the object entails. This is the first form in which this notion of the object relation appears in Freud’s work. It is here that we ought to resolve to lay the stress squarely on what I’ve been underscoring. I would say that to articulate this in terms that would be philosophically developed would be at cross-purposes. I’m not doing this, and intentionally so, because I’m setting it aside for our return to this theme. For some of you these terms already carry a meaning by way of certain items familiar to you from phil­ osophy. I’m underscoring the distance that lies between, on the one hand, the subject’s relationship to the object in Freud’s work and, on the other, what preceded it in a certain conception of the object as a corresponding object, the object expected in advance, coapted to the subject’s maturation. This full distance is already implicit in what contrasts a Platonic perspective - the perspective that grounds

Theorising the Lack of Object

each apprehending, each recognition, upon the reminiscence of a type that is in some sort preformed - with a profoundly different notion. It is the same distance that lies between modern experience and experience in Antiquity, and it is set out by Kierkegaard in the register of repetition, the repetition that is forever sought out but essentially never satisfied insomuch that, of its very nature, it is not reminiscence by any stretch of the imagination. It is always repeti­ tion as such, and thus impossible to assuage. It is in this register that Freud’s notion of re-finding the lost object is located. We shall take this textual reference on board. It is crucial that it should have survived in Freud’s first report on the notion of the object. It is essentially with a notion of the subject’s profoundly conflictive relation with his world that things are set out and clari­ fied. How could it be otherwise since, already at that time, it was essentially a matter of the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle? If pleasure principle and reality principle were not extricable, one from the another - 1 would further say, each implying the other and each including the other in a dialectical relation, as Freud consist­ ently established - then the reality principle would be constituted only by what is imposed, for its satisfaction, on the pleasure princi­ ple. It would merely be its extension. Correlatively, while the reality principle does imply, in its dynamic and in its fundamental search, the fundamental tension of the pleas­ ure principle, it is no less the case that between the two - and this is the essential factor in what Freudian theory brings us - there is a wide gap that there would be no cause to single out were the one merely the continuation of the other. Indeed, the pleasure princi­ ple tends to become a reality in profoundly unrealistic formations, while the reality principle implies the existence of an organisation, a structuration, that is different and autonomous, and which entails that what it grasps may well be something fundamentally different from what is desired. In itself this relation introduces another term into the very dialectic of subject and object, a term that is here posited as irreducible. Just as the subject we saw earlier was something that was founded in its primordial requirements as something that is fated forever to make a return, and even an impossible return, so too in the opposi­ tion between reality principle and pleasure principle do we have the notion of a fundamental opposition between reality and what is sought by the drive tendency. In other words, the notion of the satisfaction of the pleasure principle, insomuch as it is always latent, subjacent to any world-building exercise, is something that always tends to become more or less of a reality in a loosely hallucinatory

Introduction

9

form. The fundamental possibility of this organisation that is sub­ jacent to the ego, that of the subject’s drive tendency as such, is to be satisfied in an unreal realisation, in an hallucinatory realisation. Here, with hallucinatory, we have the other term on which Freud squarely lays the accent in the Traumdeutung, in The Interpretation o f Dreams, where there is the first full and articulated formulation of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle. These two positions are not, as such, articulated one to the other. The fact that Freud presents them as distinct marks out well enough how the development is not centred around the relationship between subject and object. Each of these two terms finds its place at a differ­ ent point in the Freudian dialectic, for the simple reason that in no case whatsoever is the subject-object relationship central. This relationship becomes apparent only in a way that may seem to be sustained directly, without any gap. It is within this ambivalent relationship, or in a kind of relationship that has since been labelled pregenital - referring to relations of seeing/being seen, attacking/ being attacked, passive/active - that the subject experiences these relationships that always imply, in a way that is more or less mani­ fest, his identification with the partner of this relationship. That is to say, these relations are lived through in a reciprocity - the term is acceptable in this instance - of ambivalence between the subject’s position and the partner’s position. Indeed, at this level a relationship is introduced between subject and object that is not only direct and seamless but which literally equates them. It was this relationship that provided the pretext for the foregrounding of the object as such. This relationship of reci­ procity between subject and object, which warrants being termed a mirror-relation, already in and of itself raises so many questions that, in an attempt to resolve them, I introduced the notion of the mirror stage into analytic theory.4 What is the mirror stage? It is the moment at which the infant recognises his own image, but it is far from being purely and simply the connoting of this one phenomenon in child development. It encompasses everything that the child learns from being captivated by his own image, and precisely everything of the distance that lies between his inner tensions and those that are brought out in this relation to his identification with the image. This is still something that has served as a theme, as a central point, in the foregrounding of this subject-object relation as, so to speak, the phenomenal scale to which may be referred, in a valid and satisfactory manner, what had hitherto been presented in terms that were not only pluralist but strictly speaking conflictive. It introduces an essentially dialectical relation between the

10

Theorising the Lack of Object

different terms, except that some thought - and one of the first to accentuate this, though not as early on as might be believed, was Karl Abraham - that they ought to be trying to refocus every­ thing that had thus far been introduced concerning the subject’s development. Until then, the subject’s development had always been introduced in a way that was seen retroactively, as a reconstruction, based on a central experience, that of the conflictive tension between conscious and unconscious. This conflictive tension is created by the funda­ mental fact that what is sought by the drive tendency is obscure, that what is consciously acknowledged therein is first and foremost a misrecognition, and that it is not along the path of consciousness that the subject recognises himself. There is something else, and there is a beyond-zone. By the same stroke, this beyond-zone thereby poses the question of its structure, its origin and its meaning, in being fundamentally misrecognised by the subject, beyond the reach of his cognisance. This is the perspective that was abandoned on the initiative of a number of figureheads, and then in trends of significance within analysis. They refocused everything in accordance with an object the terminal point of which is not the same as our point of departure. Our point of departure leads backwards in time, so as to understand how this terminal point is arrived at. Moreover, this terminal point can never be observed. This ideal object is literally unthinkable. They, on the contrary, conceived of it as a sort of focal point, a cul­ minating point, onto which a whole series of experiences, elements and partial notions of the object would converge. This conception became prevalent from a particular time onwards, and especially from the moment that Abraham formulated it, in 1924, in his theory of libidinal development. For many, this theory grounds the very law of analysis and everything that occurs within it. It grounds the system of coordinates within which they situate the entire analytic experience, along with the experience of this infamous correspond­ ing object that is ideal, terminal and perfect. They propose this object in analysis as the one that in and of itself marks out the achieved goal, namely the normalisation of the subject. In itself alone, the term normalisation ushers in a slew of catego­ ries that are utterly foreign to the point of departure of analysis.

2 By the admission of those who have gone down this path - I think I can offer no better illustration of what is at issue than what they

Introduction

11

have certainly worded in very precise terms - what they regard to be furtherance in analytic experience is the fact of having pushed to the fore the subject’s relations with his surroundings. The accentuation they give to the surroundings amounts to a reduction of everything that analytic experience yields. There is a kind of reverting to the altogether objectifying position that posits, at the forefront, the existence of a particular individual and a rela­ tion that more or less corresponds, that is more or less adapted, to his surroundings. This is something that is spelt out in the collective work we were speaking about, on pages 761 to 773 [of the original French edition], in the following terms. After having underscored that what is at issue in the furtherance of analysis is the accentuation of the subject’s relations with his sur­ roundings, we read in passing that this is especially relevant in the little Hans case study. We are told that Hans’s parents seem to be lacking a personality o f their own. Nothing compels us to subscribe to this opinion. The important matter is what follows. It was before the outbreak o f the 1914 war, at a time when Western society was more self-assured and didn’t think to second-guess its longevity; since 1926, the emphasis has been, on the contrary, on anxiety and the organism’s interaction with its surroundings; so it was that society’s foundations were shaken, the anxiety o f a changing world was lived through on a daily basis, and individuals saw themselves differently. This was also the time when physics was trying to find itself, with relativism, uncertainty, and probability seeming to undermine the self­ confidence o f objective thought. It seems to me that this reference to modern physics as the foun­ dation of a new rationalism speaks for itself. What is important is that it is being oddly confessed, in a roundabout way, that psy­ choanalysis is envisaged as a kind of social remedy. This is what is pushed to the fore as the driving feature behind its furtherance. It is of no matter whether this is well founded or otherwise, because these are items that don’t appear to us to carry much weight. What is instructive is the great casualness of the context in which these items are accepted. This example does not stand alone, because what is specific to this collective work is how it communicates internally in a way that seems to be much rather composed of a kind of odd homogenisation than any articulation in the strict sense. The first article to which I alluded earlier also marks out in a deliberate way the fully formulated notion that, all things consid­ ered, what will afford us the general conception o f a scheme that enables us to understand, here and now, the structure o f a personality is the point o f view that we are told is the most practical and the most

12

Theorising the Lack of Object

prosaic, that of the patient’s social relationships. This last expression is emphasised by the author. I shan’t linger over other terms, which are confessional in nature - there arises a painful impression o f something in motion, ungraspable, even artificial, but doesn’t this depend on the very object o f this discipline, which is an activity o f which the variations over time no one dreams o f contesting? Indeed, this is one explanation for the somewhat cloudy character of the different approaches that this point of view offers, but it’s perhaps not an explanation that ought to be entirely satisfactory for us. I fail to see which objects of any discipline are not equally subject to variations over time. Concerning the relationship between the subject and his world, it is asserted that there is a parallelism between the more or less advanced state in the maturation o f instinctual life and the structure o f the ego in a given subject at a given moment. To spell it right out, from a certain point on, this structure of the ego is considered to be the inner lining and, ultimately, the representative of the state o f the maturation of instinctual activities. There is no more difference, whether on the dynamic plane or the genetic plane, between the different stages of the ego’s progress and the different stages of instinctual progression. For some of you, these are terms that you might not find particu­ larly questionable in and of themselves. No matter. This is not the issue. We will be seeing to what extent we may or may not take them on board. But their consequence is that setting this up at the heart of analysis presents as a typology in which there are those who are pregenital and those who are genital. This is written - Pregenitals are people with egos that are [ . . . ] weak. For them, the ego’s coherence depends strictly upon the stabil­ ity o f object relationships with a significant object. This is where we can start to ask questions. Later, in passing, we might see where this unexplained notion of a significant object leads in the other texts, namely the absolute lack of differentiation and discernment about what is significant. The technical notion that this implies is the bring­ ing into play, and by the same stroke the emphasising, within the analytic relationship, of pregenital relations, those that typify this pregenital individual’s relation with his world. We are told - The loss o f these relationships, or o f their object (which amounts to the same thing since the object exists only by virtue o f its relationship to the subject), may bring about functional disturbances o f the ego, such as depersonalisation or psychotic disorders. Here we uncover the spot where a test is being sought that would vouch for this deep fragility in the ego’s relationships with its object. The subject makes every effort to maintain at all costs his object relationships, making all sorts o f adjustments to this end, changing the object by using displacement

Introduction

13

or symbolism in such a way that the choice o f a symbol, quite arbitrar­ ily charged with the same affective values as the original object, makes it possible for him not to be deprived o f an object relationship. For this object, onto which the affective value of the original object is displaced, the term auxiliary ego is fully justified. This explains the following - The genital type, on the other hand, possesses an ego whose strength and healthyfunctioning do not depend upon the possession o f a significant object. While, for the first group, the loss o f a person o f great subjective importance - to take the most straightforward example - may endanger the whole personality, for the second group, however painful the loss may be, it does not consti­ tute a threat to the solidity o f their personality. The latter individuals are not dependent upon an object relationship. This is not to say that they can easily do without all object relationships - which, after all, is unrealisable in practice, so many and so varied are such relationships - but simply that the integrity o f their being is not at the mercy o f the loss o f one significant object. This is where, from the standpoint o f the connection between the ego and its object relationships, wefind the difference between this and the former types o f personality. Much further on, we read - It may well be that, as in all neuroses, normal development seems to be halted by the subject’s finding it impossible to achieve a resolution o f the last structural conflict o f the infantile phase. Such a resolution normally results in that happy adap­ tation to the world which we call the genital object relationship and which gives the observer the impression o f a harmonious personality and, in analysis, what seems a sort o f crystalline clarity o f mind that is more an ideal than a reality. But this difficulty in resolving the oedipal conflict is very often the result not only o f the problems involved in that conflict [ . . . ] . Crystalline clarity. We can see where this author is able to lead us with the perfection of the objectal relation. Whereas the drives in their pregenital form present a need for a possession that cannot be controlled or limited by conditions and has in it a destructive element, in their genital form they are really tender and loving, and while such subjects may not show themselves to be oblative, that is, disinterested, and the object selected may be fundamentally just as narcissistic a choice as in the earlier cases; nev­ ertheless, they are capable o f understanding and adapting themselves to the object situation. Moreover, the inner structure o f their object relationships shows that the happiness o f the object is essential to the happiness o f the subject. The convenience, the desires, and the needs o f the object are taken into consideration to the highest degree. This is enough to open up a very serious problem. Is it important to draw distinctions within maturation, which is neither a path, nor

14

Theorising the Lack of Object

a perspective, nor a plane? Indeed, we cannot help but ask what is meant by a normal end to childhood, to adolescence and to maturity. However, an essential distinction does need to be drawn between the establishing of a reality - with all the problems it poses in terms of adapting to something that resists, to something that refuses, to something that is complex, to something that in any case implies the notion of objectivity, as the most elementary experience shows us - and what is being aimed at in these same texts as a notion that is loosely implicit, and which is opened up by the contrasting term objectality, the plenitude of the object. Besides, this confusion is spelt out because the term objectivity can be found in the text as what typifies this form of achieved relation. There is certainly a distance between, on the one hand, what is implied by a certain construction of the world regarded as more or less satisfying at such-and-such an era that is effectively determined outside of any historical relativity, and, on the other, this relationship with the other party in its affective register, indeed its sentimental register, including the fact of taking his needs, happiness and pleasure into consideration. This certainly carries us much further, because what is at issue is the constitution of the other as such, insomuch as he speaks, insomuch as he is a subject. We shall have to come back to these texts, whose authors plop out one gem after another. It’s something that requires more than just quoting, even when coming out with the comic remarks that they themselves suggest quite readily enough, without, for all that, making the necessary progress.

3 This extraordinarily simplistic conception of the notion of instinc­ tual development in analysis is far from universally accepted. Texts like those by Glover, for instance, will refer you to a very different notion of the exploration of object relations, and which are even named and carefully defined as such. When you read Glover’s texts, you will see that what essentially characterises the stages of the object throughout the different phases of individual development is an object that is conceived of as having an utterly different function. Analysis insists on introducing a functional notion of the object that is quite different from that of something that simply corre­ sponds, that simply coapts the object to a particular demand from the subject. The object has an altogether different role here. It is, as it were, placed against a backdrop of anxiety, insomuch as the object is an instrument for masking off, for fending off, the funda­

Introduction

15

mental backdrop of anxiety that characterises the different stages in the development of the subject’s relation to the world. This is how the subject needs to be characterised at each stage. As we near the end of today’s talk, I should cast some light on what I am asserting by means of an illustrative example. It will be enough to punctuate Freud’s classic and fundamental conception of phobia. Freud, and all those who studied phobia both with him and after him, could not fail to note that there is no direct relation between the object and the purported fear that tinges this object with its crucial mark, constituting it as such as a primal object. On the contrary, considerable distance lies between the fear at issue - and which may be a primal fear in some cases but not so in others - and the object that is constituted in relation to this fear in order to keep fear at a distance. This object encloses the subject in a circle, a bulwark wherein he shields himself from these fears. The object is essentially linked to the sounding of an alarm signal. It is an outpost against an established fear. This fear furnishes the object with its role, its function, at a point that is determined by a certain crisis of the subject, but which, for all that, is neither a typical crisis nor a developmental crisis. This modern notion, as it were, of phobia is something that is more or less legitimately asserted - though we shall also have to criticise it - at the origin of the notion of object such as it is pro­ moted in Glover’s papers and in the way of conducting analysis that is characteristic of his thought and technique. We are told that the anxiety at issue is castration anxiety, and until recently this has seldom been contested. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that things have got to the point that the desire for reconstruction, in the genetic sense, has gone so far as to try to make us deduce the very construction of the paternal object from something that would be seen as its sequence and culmination, namely the burgeoning of primal constructions that are phobic and objectal. There is a report by Mallet on phobia that goes in precisely this direction, curiously reversing the trail that effectively allowed us to trace back from the phobia to the notion of a protective function which the phobic object holds in relation to anxiety. In another register, it is no less remarkable to see what has become of notions of the fetish and fetishism. I’m introducing this today to show you that, if we take them from the object-relations perspec­ tive, fetishes are seen to fulfil a function that in analytic theory is also articulated as a protection against anxiety and, oddly enough, against the same anxiety, that is to say, castration anxiety. This doesn’t seem to be the same angle from which fetishes are purported

16

Theorising the Lack of Object

to be more particularly bound to castration anxiety in so far as it is linked to the perception of the absence of a phallic organ in the female subject, and to the negation of this absence. What matter. You cannot fail to see, here too, that the object has a certain func­ tion of complementation in relation to something that presents as a hole, even an abyss, in reality. The question is whether there is a relation between the two, whether there is something in common between these fetishes and phobic objects. However, in posing such questions in such terms, perhaps, without declining to broach these problems on the basis of the object rela­ tion, we ought to find in the phenomena themselves the opportunity and the starting point for a critique that - even if we submit to the interrogation that is pressed on us regarding the type-object, the ideal object, the functional object, indeed all these forms of the object that you may presume in mankind - does effectively lead us to tackle the question in this light. But then, let’s not content ourselves with uniform explanations for a variety of phenomena. Let’s focus our opening question upon what constitutes the essential functional difference between a phobia and a fetish, in so far as both are centred on the same backdrop of fundamental anxiety, where both one and the other are called upon by the subject as a protective measure, as a security measure. It is precisely this that I have resolved to take as my point of departure to show you where we start from in our experience in order to reach these same problems. Indeed, this needs to be posed, not in a mythical fashion, nor in an abstract fashion, but in a direct fashion, in the way the objects are presented to us. It is insufficient to speak about the object in general, or about an object that, by goodness knows what property of magical commu­ nication, would have the function of regularising relationships with every other object, as though the fact of having come to be a genital individual would be enough to resolve each and every question. For example, one such question is what one particular object might be for a genital individual, an object that doesn’t strike me as having to be any the less enigmatic from the essentially biological viewpoint that is foregrounded there, an object of everyday human experience, namely a coin. This object does not pose in and of itself the question of its object value. Doesn’t the fact that, in a certain register, we might lose the coin as a means of exchange - or any other kind of regard for the exchange of any item whatsoever of human life transposed into its commodity value - introduce in umpteen different ways the ques­ tion of what has effectively been resolved in Marxist theory by an

Introduction

17

altogether coterminous, though not synonymous, term, namely the fetish? In short, there is the notion of the fetish object and, if you like, the screen object. Likewise, we can only wonder why its rightful value is still not being accorded to the function of the constitution of an altogether singular reality on which, right at the start, Freud shed a truly piercing light, namely the notion of screen memories as what are especially constitutive of the past of each and every subject as such. All these questions deserve to be taken in themselves and on their own terms. They should also be analysed in their mutual relations, because it is from these relations that the necessary distinctions between differ­ ent planes can emerge, which will enable us to define, in a way that hangs together, why a phobia and a fetish are two different things. What relation is there between the widespread use of the word fetish and the precise employment of the term to designate a sexual perversion? We are hereby introducing the subject of our next talk, which will be on phobias and fetishes. It is along this path back to the experience that we will be able to establish anew the term object relations and restore its true value. 21 November 1956

II THE THREE FO RM S OF THE L A C K O F O BJECT

What is an obsessional? The imaginary triad Phallicism and the imaginary Reality and Wirklichkeit Mr Winnicott’s transitional object This week, with you in mind, I did some reading. I’ve been reading what psychoanalysts have written on what is going to be our subject this year, namely the object, and more specifically the genital object. The genital object is, to call it by its name, woman. So, why not call it by its name? I rewarded myself, therefore, by reading a number of texts on female sexuality. It would be more important for you to do this reading than for me. It would make you more at ease when it comes to understanding what I’ve been led to tell you on this subject. And then, what I have read is very instructive from yet further points of view, principally from the following. Human stupidity gives an idea o f the infinite, said Renan. Well, I have to say that, had he lived in our times, he would surely have added - as do the theoretical ramblings o f psychoanalysts. Don’t believe that I’m equating them with stupidity. I’m not. Rather, they belong to the realm of what may afford an idea of the infinite. Indeed, it is exceedingly striking to see what extraordinary difficulties the minds of different analysts have had to cope with in the wake of Freud’s altogether sharp and astonishing statements. What did Freud, ever on his own, contribute on this subject? What I shall tell you today will probably not go beyond this. Freud’s con­ tribution here is that the idea of a harmonious object that of its very nature would bring about the subject-object relationship is at abso­ lute variance with experience. I won’t even say analytic experience, but the common experience of relations between man and woman.

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

19

If harmony in this realm were not a problematic thing, there would be no analysis at all. Nothing is more precise than Freud’s formula­ tions on this matter. In this realm there is a wide gap, something that doesn’t work out, though this doesn’t mean that it suffices to define it. Freud positively affirms that things don’t work out. You will find this affirmation in Civilization and Its Discontents and in one of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. This leads us back, then, to asking ourselves about the object.

1 I remind you that what is commonly forgotten in regard to the notion of the object is nowhere more greatly accentuated than in the contours through which the experience and the expounding of Freudian doctrine locate and define this object. The object first presents in a quest for the lost object. The object is always a re-found object, the object caught up itself in a quest. This stands in categorical opposition to the notion of an autonomous subject, which is what the idea of an object that would bring about a subject-object duality leads to. Likewise, I underscored last time the notion of an object that is hallucinated against a backdrop of anguishing reality. This is a notion of the object such as it arises in the exercise of what Freud calls the primary system of pleasure. In complete contrast to this, in analytic practice there is the notion of the object that ultimately boils down to the real. It’s a matter of re-finding the real. This object stands out, not against a backdrop of anxiety this time, but against a backdrop of common reality, as it were. The terminal point of the analytic search is to realise that there is no reason to hold this in fear. Fear is a term to be distinguished from the term anxiety. Lastly, the third term under which the object becomes apparent when we trace it in Freud is that of imaginary reciprocity, namely, in any relationship with the object, the place of the term that is in the relation is simultaneously occupied by the subject. Identification with the object thus lies at the root of any relationship with the object. In truth, this last point has not been forgotten, but it’s clearly the point to which object-relations practice in the new-fangled analytic technique is most attached, resulting in what I shall call an impe­ rialism of identification. Since you can identify with me, and since I can identify with you, out o f the two o f us the ego that best adapts to reality is surely the better model. Ultimately, the furtherance of the analysis would be dragged, in a pure stripping back, towards an

20

Theorising the Lack of Object

identification with the analyst’s ego. To show the extreme deviation that such partiality in the steering of the object relation can condi­ tion, I would like to illustrate this by recalling how practice with obsessional neurosis has been particularly exemplary in this regard. As most of you here accept, obsessional neurosis is a structuring notion that can be expressed more or less as follows. What is an obsessional? All in all, he is an actor playing his part, carrying out a certain number of acts as though he were dead. It’s a way of shield­ ing himself from death. The game he plays is in some sense a lively game that consists in showing that he is invulnerable. To this end, he practises a sort of subduing that conditions his every approach to others. This can be seen in a sort of exhibiting of how far he can go in this practice that has every aspect of a game, including its illusory aspects. He exhibits how far this little other, which is his alter ego, his own double, can go, and does so before an Other who witnesses the spectacle in which he himself is a spectator. Therein lies the very possibility of the game and all the pleasure he takes in it. However, he doesn’t know what place he occupies, and this is what is uncon­ scious as far as the obsessional is concerned. He does what he does to distractive ends. He is able to glimpse this, and is well aware that the game is not being played where he is, which is why almost nothing of what occurs has genuine importance for him. But that he should know where he beholds all of this from is another matter. Who, ultimately, calls the shots? We know that he does, but we will make countless mistakes if we don’t know from where these shots are called. Hence the notion of the object, and of one signifi­ cant object for this subject. It would be quite wrong to believe that this object can be desig­ nated in any of the terms of a dual relationship. You are going to see now where this leads with the notion of the object relation that is developed by the author in question. It’s quite clear that in this very complex situation, the notion of object is not given immedi­ ately because it takes part in an illusory game, a game of aggressive retaliation, a cheating game, which consists in steering as close as possible to death while keeping out of range of every blow, because the subject has in some sense killed his desire in advance, mortifying it, so to speak. The notion of object is infinitely complex here, and deserves to be accentuated from one instant to the next so that at least we may know which object we are talking about. We shall try to furnish this notion of the object with a uniformity, which will allow us to find our way in our vocabulary. This is a notion that, I won’t say steals away, but rather pre­ sents itself as something difficult to circumscribe. To bolster our

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

21

comparison, let’s say that it’s a matter of demonstrating something that the subject has articulated for the other spectator that he is, unknowingly, and at the site where he positions us as the transfer­ ence advances. I urge you to take up the case of the obsessive reported by the author I’ve been speaking about in order to see what to his mind constitutes the furtherance of the analysis. You will see that the way of handling the object relation in this case consists in doing something analogous to what would happen if you were to witness a circus routine where Auguste and Chocolat administer each other a series of simultaneous, alternating slaps.1It would consist in step­ ping down into the arena and forcing oneself to brave the fear of being smacked. In actual fact, it is the obsessional subject’s aggres­ siveness that leads him to land each slap and makes the relation with him in the consultations an aggressive one. Whereupon the Ringmaster rolls up and says - Look. This is all quite unreasonable. Pack it in. Swallow your cane, each o f you. That way you’ll have it in the right place. You’ll have interiorised it. Indeed, this is one way of resolving the situation and securing an outcome. You can sing a little tune to this, the enduring song by N*, who was something of a genius. Those of you who never saw him when he was performing in one of the Parisian cabaret clubs cannot possibly form an idea of what he was capable, simply clowning around with a hat.2 However, one will never understand a single thing, either about what here I am calling the somewhat sacred character of what we would be witnessing on such occasions, or about the forced exhibiting, however dark it may appear, but nor perhaps will one understand what the object relation means, strictly speaking, until, between the lines, there appears the profoundly oral character and backdrop of the imaginary object relation. This also enables us to see what can be narrowly and rigorously imaginary in a practice that is unable to escape from the laws of the imaginary, from this dual relationship that it takes as real, because in the end the culminating point of this object relation is the fantasy of phallic incorporation. Why phallic? Not only does experience not follow the ideal notion that we may have of its accomplishment, but furthermore this notion only highlights its paradoxes all the more, to the extent that the full accomplishment of the dual relationship as such brings to the fore, the closer one gets to it, the imaginary object known as the phallus, as a privileged object. This is what I’m introducing today in the step I’m trying to get to you take. The notion of object relations cannot be dealt with, cannot be understood, cannot even be put into practice, if one doesn’t include the phallus as a third-party element. I won’t call it a mediating

22

Theorising the Lack of Object

element, because that would involve taking a step that we haven’t yet taken together. I’m calling this to mind today, writ large in the following diagram which I gave you at the end of the last academic year as both a conclusion to the analysis of the signifier with which we carried out our exploration of psychosis, and as an introduc­ tion to what I’m putting forward this year concerning the object relation.3

o

Phallus

The imaginary relationship, whichever it may be, is moulded on a certain relation that is effectively fundamental - the mother-child relation, with everything that is problematic therein. This relation certainly gives us the idea that a real relationship is at issue, and indeed this is the point to which all analysis of the analytic situation is currently heading. They have been trying ultimately to reduce it to something that can be conceived of as the development of motherchild relationships, and what thereafter in the early stages bears the traces and the reflections of this initial position. It is impossible, however, even for those authors who have turned this into the base of the whole analytic genesis in the strict sense, to bring in this imaginary feature without what we may term the phallicism of the analytic experience revealing itself as a key point at the heart of the notion of the object relation. This is demonstrated by experience, and by the evolution of analytic theory. In particular, I will be trying to show you in the course of this lecture the impasses that result from every attempt to reduce this imaginary phallicism to anything whatsoever that is given in the real. Indeed, when one seeks the origin of the entire analytic dialectic in the absence of the trinity of terms - symbolic, imaginary, and real - ultimately one can refer only to the real. To offer you a final remark, to put the final touch to my descrip­ tion of how the dual relationship is being conducted in a certain orientation and theorisation of the analytic experience, I shall again make reference to the leader article in the collective work I spoke to you about. When the analyst, entering the obsessional’s imaginary game, is insistent in making him acknowledge his aggressiveness, that is to say, in making him situate the analyst in the imaginary relation­

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

23

ship, the same that earlier I described as that of reciprocations, we find in this text something that is offered as testimony of the sub­ ject’s refusal, his misrecognition of the situation. This is the fact that he never wants to express his aggressiveness and only does so by way of a slight irritation provoked by the analyst’s technical rigidity. The author confesses that he insists on perpetually bring­ ing the subject back to the theme of aggressiveness, as though it were the central significant theme. He adds, tellingly, that in the end everybody knows that irritation and irony are aggressive by nature. Is it really so obvious that irritation is characteristic of aggressive relationships? We do know, however, that aggression can be provoked by any other feeling, and that for example it is not ruled out that a feeling of love may be the basis of a reaction of aggression. As for saying that a reaction like that of irony is aggressive by nature, this doesn’t seem to me to be compat­ ible with what everybody knows, namely that far from being an aggressive reaction, irony is above all a way of questioning. It’s a mode of question. If there is an aggressive element, it is second­ ary to the structure of the element of questioning that there is in irony. This shows you the kind of reductive perspective that such a conception of the object relation culminates in. Anyway, with this, I resolve not to speak to you any further on this matter. On the other hand, we have now been led to the fundamental question as to relations between anyone and anything. We have to begin with this question because we are going to have to return to it. It will be our end point. The whole ambiguity of the question that arises around the object can be summarised as - is the object real or not?

2 We arrive at this question both along the path of the expanded vocabulary that we are using here - symbolic, imaginary, and real and through the most immediate intuition. When they speak to you about the object relation purely and simply along the lines of a point of access to the real, an access that the terminal point of analysis should constitute, what does this represent for you, as a spontaneous intuition? Is the object the real, or not? Is the object what is found in the real? It’s worth taking the trouble to ask oneself this, even without going into the problematic of phallicism that I’m introducing today, that is, without taking into account a truly prominent point in

24

Theorising the Lack of Object

analytic experience, a major object around which the entire dialectic of individual development revolves, along with the entire dialectic of an analysis. We shall be seeing in greater detail that phallus and penis are not to be conflated. When in the 1920s and 1930s the notion of phallicism and of the phallic period fell into place around a great ruckus that occupied the whole of the analytic community, what was at stake was to draw a distinction between the penis as a real organ, with functions that can be defined by certain real coordi­ nates, and the phallus in its imaginary function. Even if there were no more than that, still it is worth taking the trouble to ask ourselves what the notion of the object means. It cannot be said that this object is not a supervalent object in the analytic dialectic, an object that the individual has an idea of as such. While it has never been formulated that the singling out of this object is, strictly speaking, conceivable solely on the plane of the imaginary, this represents no less how the notion of phallicism entails the extrication of this category of the imaginary. It will leap out at you from every line of what Freud contributed at a particular date, and from the responses of Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones in particular.4 Before we move into this, however, let’s ask ourselves what is meant by the relationship, the reciprocal position, of the object and the real. There is more than one way to broach this question because as soon as we do broach it we realise that the real carries more than one meaning. Some of you, I think, will let out an immediate sigh of relief - At last he’s going to speak to us about the notorious real that so far has stayed in the shadows. Indeed, it should come as no surprise to us that the real is something that lies on the fringes of our experience. This position in relation to the real is quite amply explained by the screen of our experience, the conditions of which are so artificial, contrary to what we are told when it is presented as being such a straightforward situation. None the less, we cannot do otherwise than to refer to the real when we theorise. What do we mean when we invoke the real? It is highly unlikely that each of us has the same notion of it at the outset, but it is also plausible that each of us is able to reach certain essential distinctions and dissociations to be applied to the handling of the term real, or reality, if we look closely at how it is used. When one speaks about the real, one may be driving at several things. What is at issue first of all is the whole of what effectively occurs. This is the notion of reality that is implied in the German term Wirklichkeit, which advantageously discerns a function in reality that French can isolate but poorly. It is what implies in

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

25

itself any possibility of effect, of Wirkung. It’s the mechanism as a whole. I shall just share a few reflections here in passing, to show the extent to which psychoanalysts have remained captive to categories that are utterly foreign to everything that their practice ought, in all appearance, to have introduced them to - with ease, I daresay - with respect to this very notion of reality. While it is conceiv­ able, for a mind steeped in the tradition of mechanodynamics that reaches back to the eighteenth-century attempt to devise Man a Machine, with La Mettrie, that everything that happens at the level of mental life should require that we relate it to something that is posited as matter, how could this possess the slightest interest for an analyst? In what way could this possess the slightest interest when the very principle through which the analyst’s technique and func­ tion is practised plays out through a succession of effects that are hypothetically accepted, if analyst he is, as having their own specific order? If he follows Freud, if he conceives of what directs the sense of the system as a whole, the perspective thereof that he must adopt is one of energetics. Matter, this primitive St off, is so intriguing for the medical mind that people think they are actually saying something when they mindlessly assert that we, like all other doctors, posit an organic reality as the basis of everything that is brought to bear in analysis. Freud put is as simply as this. One just has to refer to where he said it and see the function it has. But in the end this remains a kind of need for reassurance. You can see analysts repeating it endlessly in their texts, like touching wood - In the end, it’s quite clear that these are merely superficial mechanisms, and everything must ultimately be referred to things that perhaps we shall know one day, namely the basic matter o f what lies at the origin o f everything that happens. There is a kind of absurdity in this for an analyst, if indeed he accepts the realm of effectiveness he moves about in. Allow me to draw a simple comparison to illustrate this. It’s a little as though someone in charge of a hydroelectric power station on a wide river, the Rhine for instance, in an attempt to get you to understand what goes on in the machine, were to start going on about the time when the landscape was still untouched, when the Rhine flowed freely, and so on. However, it is the machine that is the source of the accumulation of energy, in this case electrical energy, which can thereafter be distributed and made available to consumers. What is accumulated bears the strictest relation to the machine, above all else. Saying that the energy was already there in a virtual state in the flow of the river doesn’t get us anywhere. Strictly speaking, it means nothing, because energy only starts to concern

26

Theorising the Lack of Object

us in this instance from the moment it begins to accumulate, and it only accumulates from the moment the machines are set running in a certain way. Yes, they are kept going by a sort of permanent propulsion that comes from the river’s flow, but referring to this flow as though it were the primal organisation of this energy is an idea that can only occur to someone who is utterly foolish. It amounts to conflating this energy with a notion that strictly speak­ ing belongs to the realm of Mana. The realm of energy, even force, is quite different. Well, the same foolishness is to be met in anyone who, by any means possible, seeks out the permanence of what is ultimately accumulated as the element of Wirkung, of a possible Wirklichkeit, in something that has been there in some kind for all eternity. In other words, this kind of urge that we have to conflate the Stoff, or primal matter, or forward thrust, or flow, or tendency, with what is really at stake in the exercise of analytic reality represents nothing less than a misrecognition of symbolic Wirklichkeit. The conflict, the dialectic, the organisation and the structure of the ele­ ments that are assembled and composed, lend what is at issue an altogether different energetic scope. Keeping up this urge to speak of this ultimate reality as though it existed elsewhere than in this exercise itself amounts to misrecognising the specific reality that we move about in. I may verily qualify this reference as a superstitious one. It’s a sort of legacy of the organicist postulate, which in the analytic perspective can hold absolutely no meaning whatsoever. I’m going to show you that it carries no more meaning in the realm where Freud appears to be touching upon it. A different use of the notion of reality is made in analysis, which is far more important and has nothing to do with the previous one. This other question of reality is the one that is brought into play in the twofold principle of the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Here, something utterly distinct is at issue, because it’s quite clear that the pleasure principle is not something that is carried through in a way that is any less real than the reality principle. I even think that analysis is designed to demonstrate the contrary. Its use of the term reality is quite different. There is a rather striking contrast here. While this use initially proved to be exceedingly fruitful, with the furtherance of analysis the terms of this primary system and secondary system in the realm of the psyche turned out to be more problematic, but in a way that was tremendously elusive. To perceive the distance that has been covered between the first use of the opposition of these two principles and the point we have now reached, through a certain sliding, we almost need to refer - and we do once in a while - to the

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

27

child who says that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Is this child a simpleton? Is he a genius? Is he a cheerful soul? Is he a brute? No one will ever know. He is surely a fairly liberating fellow. Well, this happens once in a while. We see analysts coming back to a kind of primitive intuition, realising that everything people have been saying explains nothing. This is what occurred to Mr Winnicott in a short article he wrote to speak about what he calls Transitional Objects - we should think of these as objects in transition - and Transitional Phenomena. Mr Winnicott simply notes that as we start becoming more inter­ ested in the mother’s function and start deeming her to be absolutely primordial and decisive in the infant’s apprehension of reality, that is, as we start replacing the impersonal and dialectical opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle with some­ thing to which we have given actors, subjects - they undoubtedly are exceedingly model subjects, who look far more like bit parts or imaginary puppets, but this is what we’ve come to - the pleas­ ure principle starts to be identified with a particular relation to an object, namely the maternal breast. The reality principle, mean­ while, starts to be identified with the fact that the child has to learn to go without the breast. Mr Winnicott has noted quite rightly that if all goes well because it is important that all should go well - we are to make all that goes badly divert into a primordial anomaly, into frustration, this term which is becoming the key term in our dialectic. Winnicott notes that for things to turn out well, namely for the infant not to be traumatised, everything should happen as though the mother operates by always being there at just the right moment, that is, precisely by coming to lay out in just the right place, at the moment of the infant’s delusional hallucination, the real object that fulfils him. Thus, to start with, there isn’t any kind of distinction in the ideal mother-child relationship between the hallucination of the maternal breast, which arises in principle from the notion that we have of the primary system, and the encounter with the real object at issue. Therefore, if all goes well, the infant has no means of distinguish­ ing between what belongs to the realm of the satisfaction that in principle is rooted in hallucination - which is bound to the exercise and functioning of the primary system - and the apprehension of the real that effectively fulfils and satisfies him. What is at issue, then, is for the mother gradually to teach the child to tolerate these frustrations, and by the same stroke to perceive, in the form of a certain inaugural tension, the difference that lies between reality and illusion. This difference can be brought to bear only along the

28

Theorising the Lack of Object

path of disillusionment, when every now and then reality does not coincide with the hallucination that has arisen from desire. Winnicott simply notes, first of all, that in this dialectic it is incon­ ceivable that anything whatsoever could be elaborated that would go further than the notion of an object that strictly corresponds to primary desire. The wide variation of objects, as much fantasmatic as instrumental, which crop up during the development of the field of human desire, is strictly unthinkable in this dialectic once you start embodying them in two real actors, namely the mother and the child. Second, it is a fact of experience that, even in the youngest infants, we see these objects appearing which Winnicott calls transi­ tional, because we cannot say on which side they lie in this reduced and embodied dialectic between hallucination and real object. All objects in the infant’s play are transitional objects. The infant doesn’t need to be given toys in the strict sense, because he turns anything that falls in his hands into a transitional object. And we do not challenge the infant in regard to subjectivity or objectivity just here where there is the transitional object. It is of a different nature, the limit of which Winnicott does not cross by naming it thus. We shall simply call these objects imaginary. In articles that are certainly very tentative, full of digressions and confusion, we can see all the same that their authors are invariably led back to these objects when they seek to explain the origin of a fact like the existence of sexual fetishes. They are led to see, as far as they can, what the common points are between the infant’s object and the fetish, which comes to the forefront of objectal requirements on account of the great satisfaction that there can be for a subject, namely sexual satisfaction. They are always on the look out for any somewhat preferential handling on the part of the infant of some trifling object - a handkerchief pilfered from his mother, a corner of a blanket, some incidental piece of reality left within reach of his clasp - and which appears during this period that, despite here being called transitional, does not constitute an intermediate period but a permanent period in the child’s development. They are thereby led almost to conflate these two kinds of object, without asking any questions about the distance that can lie between the eroticisation of the fetish object and the first appearance of the object as an imaginary object. What is forgotten in this dialectic - a forgetting that of course calls upon these forms of supplementation that I’m accentuating in connection with Winnicott’s article - is one of the most essential mainsprings of the entire analytic experience, and has been so since the very beginning, namely the notion of the lack of object.

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

29

3 We can never do without a notion of the lack of object as a central matter in our concrete practice of analytic theory. The missing object is not a negative, but the very mainspring of the subject’s relationship with the world. From the start, analysis, the analysis of neurosis, has begun with the altogether paradoxical notion of castration, which we may say has still not been fully developed. We believe we are still speaking about it in the same way it was spoken of in Freud’s time. This is utterly mistaken. We speak about it less and less, and in this we are wrong. What we have been speak­ ing about much more is the notion offrustration. There is yet a third term, which is starting to be spoken of. More precisely, we are going to see how this notion has necessarily been introduced, by what path and by what requirements. This is the notion of privation. On no account are these three things equivalent. To distinguish between them I would like to make a few remarks simply to try to help you first to understand what this is. We should begin with the one that is most familiar to us by use, namely the notion of frustration. What difference is there between a frustration and a privation? Let’s take this as our point of departure, because Jones has gone so far as to introduce the notion of privation and to say that these two notions are experienced in the same way in the psyche. This is some­ thing that is tremendously brazen. It’s quite clear, however, that we shall have to refer to privation to the extent that while phallicism, the requirement of the phallus, is, as Freud says it is, the major point of the entire playing out of the imaginary in the conflictive progress that the analysis of the subject describes, when it comes to a very dif­ ferent thing from the imaginary, namely the real, we can speak only of privation. This is not where the phallic requirement is brought to bear, because one of the things that appears most problematic is how a being presented as a totality can feel deprived of something that by definition this being does not have. We shall say, therefore, that privation is essentially something that of its nature as a lack is a real lack. It’s a hole. The notion that we have of frustration, simply by referring to the use that is effectively made of these notions when we speak about them, is the notion of detriment. It is an injury, a harm done, and from the way we are used to allowing it to play out in our dialectic we can see that it is only ever an imaginary detriment. Frustration is, in essence, the domain of revendication. It concerns something

30

Theorising the Lack of Object

that is desired and is not held to, but rather which is desired without reference to any possibility of satisfaction or acquisition. Frustration is, in and of itself, the domain of unbridled demands, of lawless demands. The crux of the notion of frustration, insomuch as it is one of the categories of lack, is an imaginary detriment. It is to be located on the imaginary plane. On the basis of these two remarks it is perhaps easier for us to see that the essential nature of castration, its Wesen, has been neglected and abandoned far more than it has been dealt with in depth. Freud introduced castration in a way that coordinated it fully with the notion of primordial Law, of the fundamental Law that there is in the incest prohibition and in the structure of the Oedipus complex. If we think from where we are now about the meaning of what Freud first stated, it was by taking a kind of mortal leap into experience that he placed so paradoxical a notion as castration at the heart of the major, decisive and shaping crisis of the Oedipus complex. We can only remark on this after the event, because it certainly is remarkable that we think only of not speaking about it. Castration can only be classified in the category of symbolic indebtedness. With symbolic indebtedness, imaginary detriment, and real absence - the hole - we have what allows us to locate these three elements that we shall call the three terms of reference for the lack of the object. For some, this will undoubtedly seem to be something that cannot be taken on board unreservedly. They would be right in that, in reality, for it to be valid we are going to have to cling firmly to the central notion of this having to do with categories of the lack of object. I’m saying lack o f object and not object because if we position ourselves at the level of the object we shall be able to ask ourselves what the object is that lacks in each of the three cases. This is most immediately apparent at the level of castration. What lacks at the level of castration - in so far as it is constituted by sym­ bolic indebtedness, something that is recognised by law and which lends it both its support and its inverse, namely punishment - is quite clearly not, in our analytic experience, a real object. Only in the Manusmrti is it said that he who has slept with his mother must cut off his own testicles and, cupping them in his hand, walk in a westerly direction until he drops down dead.5 Until further notice, we have observed such things only in exceedingly rare cases that have nothing to do with our experience and which appear to us to require explanations that still belong to a very different realm from that of the structuring and normalising mechanisms put at stake in our experience. Here, the object is imaginary. The castration at issue is always the

The Three Forms of the Lack of Object

31

castrating of an imaginary object. It was this commonality, between the imaginary character of the object of castration and the fact that frustration is an imaginary lack of the object, that made it easier for us to believe that frustration was something that could allow us to proceed more easily to the heart of these problems. Yet it is by no means sure that lack, object, and even a third term that we shall call agent, stand on the same level within these categories. In fact, the object of castration is an imaginary object, and this is what ought to make us ask what is meant by this phallus that it took so long to identify as such. The object of frustration, on the other hand, is well and truly real, even though frustration itself is wholly imaginary. The infant, the choice subject of our dialectic of frustration, is always missing a real object. This will help us to perceive something that is obvious - and which requires a slightly more metaphysical handling of the terms than people usually have when referring to precisely those criteria of reality we were speaking about earlier - namely, the object of priva­ tion is never anything but a symbolic object. This is absolutely clear. How could something not be in its place, not be in a place where, precisely, it is not? From the point of view of the real this means absolutely nothing. Everything that is real is always and necessarily in its place, even when it is being interfered with. The property of the real is first and foremost that of carrying its place around with it on the soles of its shoes. You can disrupt the real as much as you like, it remains the case that, after our bodies have been blown apart, they will still be in their place, their place of fragments. The absence of something in the real is purely symbolic. An object is missing from its place to the extent that we would have defined it by law as having to be there. There is no finer reference for this than the following. Think of what happens when you ask for a book in a library and you’re told that it’s missing from its place. It might be just alongside, but it is no less the case that it’s missing from its place. It is, in principle, invisible. This means that the librar­ ian lives entirely in a symbolic world. When we speak of privation, a symbolic object is at issue, and nothing else. This might appear somewhat abstract, but you will see how useful this will be to us hereafter when it comes to detecting those sleights of hand whereby mock solutions are given to false problems, in other words, those sleights of hand whereby, in the ensuing part of the dialectic that is debated in an effort to break away from what appears to be intolerable, namely the utterly different develop­ ment in men and in women of what is called sexuality, in analytic terms, desperate bids are made to bring these two terms back to a single principle. Yet perhaps from the very first there was something

32

Theorising the Lack of Object

that permits of explaining and appreciating in a very clear and straightforward fashion why their respective development will be so different. I simply want to add something that is also going to have a certain scope, and this is the notion of an agent. Here I’m making a leap that would mean having to come back to the imaginary triad of mother, child and phallus, but I don’t have time for that. I simply want to complete the picture. The agent will also play a part in the lack of object. Regarding frustration, we have the paramount notion that the mother plays this part. But is the agent of frustration symbolic, imaginary or real? And what is the agent of castration? Is it symbolic, imaginary or real? What is the agent of privation? Is it ultimately something that has no real existence whatsoever, as I said earlier? These are questions that at the very least warrant the posing. Nearing the end of this session, I am going to leave these ques­ tions open. While the answer could perhaps be gone into here, even deduced, in an altogether formal manner, either way it would be unsatisfactory at the point we’ve reached because the notion of agent is something that lies completely outside the framework of what we have confined ourselves to today. Today we have dealt with a first question concerning the relations between the object and the real. We have stayed within the categories of the imaginary and the real, whereas the agent plainly belongs to another realm. You can see nevertheless that the question of qualifying the agent at each of these three tiers is a question that is plainly connoted by this initial construction of the phallus. 28 November 1956

I ll T H E S IG N IF IE R A N D T H E H O L Y SPIR IT

The body image and its signifier The power station of the Id Signifier, signified and death The signifying transmission of the object Its imaginary discordance Yesterday evening you heard an expose by Madame Dolto on the body image. Circumstances were such that I was unable to go beyond a general statement of how well I thought of it. Had it fallen to me to speak about it, it would have been to say where it stands in relation to what we are doing here, that is, all in all, teaching. This is something I am loath to do in a context of scientific work that really is of a very different kind, and I’m not upset at not having had to speak about it. If we take as our point of departure this body image in the way it was presented to us yesterday evening, I think that, to situate it in relation to what we are doing in this seminar, you are all quite well enough aware of something that is obvious above all else, namely that this image is not an object. When an object was spoken of yesterday, it was in an attempt to define stages of development, and the notion of object is indeed important in this regard. It is still no less the case, however, not only that the image of the body is not an object, but also that it cannot even become an object. This simple remark, which no one stated except indirectly, will better allow you to situate the body image in contrast to other imaginary formations. In the analytic experience we do indeed deal with objects that can lead us to pose the question as to their imaginary nature. I’m not saying that these objects are imaginary, but rather that this is the question we are asking here. It is the central point at which we position ourselves in order to introduce at the clinical level what is

34

Theorising the Lack of Object

of interest to us in the notion of the object. This doesn’t mean that we subscribe to the hypothesis of the imaginary object, nor does it mean that it is our point of departure. Actually, it is so scarcely our point of departure that this is precisely what we are questioning. You are already familiar with this possibly imaginary object in the way it is evinced in the analytic experience. To anchor your ideas about it, I have taken two examples which I said I would be focusing on - the phobia and the fetish. You would be wrong to believe that these objects have already yielded their secrets. Far from it. Irrespective of the exercise, the acrobatics, the contortions, the fantasmatic genesis, which people have given themselves over to, it still remains rather mysterious that during certain periods of children’s lives, whether they are male or female, they feel they have to be afraid of lions, despite the lion not being an object they commonly meet in their experience. It is difficult to conjure up its form, or any kind of primitive feature that would, for example, be inscribed in the image of the body. One may try to, one may do all one can, but even so a residue remains. The residues in scientific explanations are invariably what are most fruit­ ful for our consideration. In any case, we certainly won’t make any progress by skirting round them. Similarly, you have been able to note how, across the board, the number of sexual fetishes remains fairly limited. Why so? Apart from shoes, which play such a stunning role that one may wonder why more attention is not paid to this, we find scarcely more than garters, stockings, brassieres and the like, all of which cling to the skin. Chief among them, however, is the shoe, and there too there is a residue. How could one be a fetishist in the time of Catullus?1 We shall ask ourselves whether these objects are imaginary. How might we conceive of their kinetic value in the economy of libido? Can we do so only on the basis of indicating what might emerge from a point of origin? Ultimately this always has to do with the notion of an ectopia with respect to a certain typical relation. Do these objects arise from a typical relation of so-called stages that follow on one from the next? Whichever the case may be, if these are the objects you were hearing about yesterday evening, then it’s clear that they represent something that puts us in quite a bind. You have only to consider the interest generated in the audience, and the extent of the discus­ sion, to appreciate how enthralling this is. On first approach, we could say that these objects are constructions that order, organise and articulate a certain lived experience. What is altogether strik­ ing however is the use that is made of this - and one doesn’t doubt for a second its effectiveness - by the operator, Mme Dolto on this

The Signifier and the Holy Spirit

35

occasion. This is quite certainly something that can be situated at the outset, and in a fully comprehensible way, only on the basis of the notions of signifier and signified. Mme Dolto uses this object, or what is supposed to be such, this image, as a signifier. It is as a signi­ fier that the image comes into play in her dialogue. It is as a signifier that it represents something. This is particularly apparent in the fact that not one of them is supported on its own. It is always in relation to another of them that each one assumes its crystallising value that orients and penetrates the subject at stake, namely the infant. So, here we are, brought back once again to the notion of the signifier.

1 Since here it’s a matter of teaching, and since there is nothing more important than misunderstandings, I would like to begin by saying that I have observed, both directly and indirectly, that a few things I said last time when I was speaking about reality were not understood. I said that psychoanalysts have such a mythical notion of reality that it overlaps the notion that for decades has been hindering any progress in psychiatry. This is precisely the hindrance that one might have thought psychoanalysis would deliver them from, namely that of seeking out reality in something whose character would be more material. To make myself understood, I gave the example of the hydroelectric power station, and I said that it was as though someone who is involved in whatever changes the station might undergo, its up-scaling or downscaling, its shutdowns and repairs, always thought they could reason in a valid way about what is to be done with it by referring to the prime matter that comes into play to set it running, namely the downward flow of water. Whereupon someone came up to me to say - what are you going to get out o f that? You can well imagine that for the engineer this run o f water counts for everything. You speak o f energy accumulated in the power station, but this energy is no less than the transformation o f the potential energy that is given in advance at the site where the power station is to be located. When the engineer has measured the height o f the water upstream in relation to the outflow point, he can make his calculation. Everything is already given at the level o f the potential energy. The power o f the hydroelectric plant is already determined by prior conditions. This objection calls for a number of remarks. The first is that having to speak to you about reality, I started by defining it as

36

Theorising the Lack of Object

Wirklichkeit, as the efficacy of the system as a whole, in this instance the psychical system. I then wanted to specify for you the mythical character of a certain way of conceiving of this reality, which I laid out for you by means of the example of the power station. I didn’t manage to get to the third point, which is a yet further perspective from which the theme of the real can present, namely the real that is there before we are constantly reckoning with it. Of course, this is precisely yet another way of considering reality. Considering what is there prior to when a certain symbolic func­ tioning is brought to bear is what is most substantial in the mirage harboured in the objection that was levelled at me. In truth, on no account am I denying that there is something that was there before. For instance, before the advent of the I, there was something else. The Id was there. It’s simply a matter of finding out what this Id is. So, in the case of the power station, I’m being told that what was there before is, effectively, energy. I never said any different. But energy and natural reality are worlds apart, because energy only begins to be taken into account once you start measuring it. And you only dream of measuring it once these power stations are up and running. Thenceforth, you have to make numerous cal­ culations, one of which is indeed the energy that you will have at your disposal. This notion of energy is effectively constructed upon the necessity imposed by a civilisation of production that seeks to balance the books when it comes to the labour necessary to obtain from it this available remuneration of efficacy. For instance, you always measure this energy between two refer­ ence points. There is no absolute energy of the natural reservoir. There is an energy of the reservoir in relation to the lower elevation to which the flowing liquid will travel when you have added a spill­ way to this reservoir. But the spillway all by itself will not allow for any calculation of energy. The energy will be calculable in relation to the lower elevation. However, the question does not lie here. The question is that certain natural conditions have to be realised in order for it to be even faintly worthwhile calculating the energy. Any difference in elevation in running water, even if these are mere brooks or even driblets, will always potentially hold a certain value of energy in reserve, but this is of strictly no interest to anyone. To spell it right out, there has to be something in nature that presents the different materials that will come into play in the running of the machine, which are in a certain fashion privileged and, quite frankly, signi­ fying. There have to be, in nature, certain privileged things that present themselves as useable, signifying and measurable, to enable the plant to be installed. On the path of a system that is taken to be

The Signifier and the Holy Spirit

37

signifying, this is obviously something that on no account is to be contested. What is important is the comparison I’m making with the psychi­ cal system. Let’s see now how it takes shape. Freud was led by the notion of energetics to designate a notion that we have to use in analysis in a way that would be comparable with the notion of energy. This is a notion that, just like energy, is entirely abstract and consists solely in the fact that it can posit, in analysis, yet in a virtual way, a simple bid for a principle designed to allow a certain leeway in thinking. This is strictly the energy that was introduced by the notion of equivalence, that is, the notion of a common measure between manifestations that present as being qualitatively very different. This notion of energy is precisely the notion of libido. Nothing is less anchored in a material underpinning than the notion of libido in analysis. It is marvelled at, in the Three Essays on Sexuality, how small a modification was made necessary in Freud’s hypothesis - the first time, in 1905, speaking about the biological underpinning of libido - by the discovery o f the sex hormones. There is no marvel here. It means that, in either case, when it comes to libido, Freud attaches no importance to this reference to a chemi­ cal factor, strictly speaking. Freud spells this out. Whether there is one libidinal substance or several - one whose presence produces a male sexual excitation and another substance which produces afemale one - he says that for us it is a matter o f indifference whether there is a single sexually exciting substance in the body or two or countless numbers of them. Whichever is the case, analytic experience makes it necessary for us to think with a single libido. In this way, he locates libido on a plane that is, if I may say so, neutralised, as paradoxical as the term may seem. Libido is this something that will link the behaviour of two beings, for example in a way that will ascribe to them the active position or the passive position. However, Freud tells us that in every case, even in the passive position, we take this libido as having active effects. Indeed, to adopt a passive position, a certain activeness is required. Thus, Freud comes to indicate that, ipso facto, libido takes on an aspect that presents only in this effective and active form, and is thus invariably rather akin to the masculine position. He goes so far as to say that only the masculine form of libido is within our reach. How paradoxical all this would be, were it not merely a notion that is there simply to allow us to embody and to support the par­ ticular type of liaison that occurs on what is strictly speaking the level of the imaginary. It is what binds the behaviour of each living being in the presence of another living being by what are called

38

Theorising the Lack of Object

bonds of desire, that is, all the yearning that is one of the essential mainsprings of Freudian thought when it comes to organising what is at issue in any line of behaviour in sexuality. We tend to regard the Es as an agency that bears the strongest relation to the drive tendencies, the instincts and libido. But what is the Es? And to what does the comparison with the power station allow us to compare it? Well, precisely to the power station as seen by someone who has absolutely no idea how it works. The unin­ structed person who sees it might indeed think that it is the genie in the current who has started playing around inside, transforming water into light or force. The Es is what, through the intermediary of the Other’s message, is liable to become I.2 This is the best definition there can be of the Es. If analysis has brought us something, it is the following. The Es is not a physical reality, nor is it merely what was there before. The Es is organised and articulated as the signifier is organised and articulated. This is also true for what the machine produces. All the force that is already there can be transformed, with the slight difference, nevertheless, that it is not only transformed but accumulated as well. This is even what is essentially interesting in the fact that the plant is a hydroelectric power station and not simply a hydraulic pumping station, for example. Of course, there is all this energy, but nevertheless no one can challenge the fact that when the plant has been constructed there is a palpable difference, not only in the landscape, but in the real. The plant was not constructed through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. More precisely, it was constructed through the interven­ tion of the Holy Spirit, and if you have any doubt about this, you’re wrong. I’m producing this theory of the signifier and the signified precisely to remind you of the presence of the Holy Spirit, which is absolutely essential for the furthering of our understanding of analysis.

2 Let’s take this up at a different level, at the level of the reality prin­ ciple and the pleasure principle. In what respect is there an opposition between the two systems, primary and secondary? If you stick to what defines them when they are looked at from the outside, you can say the following. What occurs at the level of the primary system is governed by the pleas­

The Signifier and the Holy Spirit

39

ure principle, that is, by the tendency to return to rest, while what occurs at the level of the reality system is defined purely and simply by that which forces the subject into what is called exterior reality, conducting him to make a detour. Yet nothing in these definitions gives us a sense of what in practice will emerge from the conflictive and dialectical character of the use of these two terms, simply in the concrete use that you make of them on a day-to-day basis. You never fail to make use of them in this fashion, with each of the two systems, endowed as they are with a particular indication that is in some way its own specific paradox. This paradox is often eluded, but is never left out in practice. The paradox of the pleasure principle is that what presents at this level is linked, as indeed is pointed out to you, to the law of a return to the state of rest, to the tendency towards rest. Nevertheless, what is striking, and this is why Freud put it in a categorical way in his text, is that he introduced the notion of libido because pleasure, in its concrete sense, is linked not only to rest but to yearning, to the elevation of a desire. The word in German is Lust, with the ambigu­ ous meaning that Freud underscores, both pleasure and yearning,3 which are indeed two things that can appear contradictory but which are no less efficaciously linked in experience. A no lesser paradox is found at the level of reality. Just as at the level of the pleasure principle there is, on one side, the return to rest, but on the other, yearning, so too at the level of reality is there not only the reality that one bumps into, but also the principle of edging, of taking a detour through reality. This appears more clearly if, correlatively to the existence of these two principles, we bring in the two terms that bind them together in a way that allows for their dialectical functioning, namely the two tiers of speech such as they are expressed in the notions of signifier and signified. I have already placed the course of the signifier, or of concrete discourse, for example, in a kind of parallel superposition over the course of the signified, in which and as which the continuity of lived experience presents itself, the flow of tendencies within a subject and between subjects. ------------------------------signifier ------------------------------signified This presentation4 is all the more valid given that nothing may be conceived of, not only in speech or in language but in the very functioning of everything that presents as a phenomenon in analy­ sis, unless we accept the essential possibility of a perpetual sliding of

40

Theorising the Lack of Object

the signified under the signifier, and of the signifier over the signi­ fied. Nothing in the analytic experience can be explained except in reference to this fundamental schema. This schema entails that what is the signifier of one thing may at any moment become the signifier of something else, and that what presents in the subject’s yearnings, tendencies and libido, is always branded with the mark of a signifier. In so far as it concerns us, there is nothing else. There might be something else in the drive and in yearning that is not branded in any way by the signifier, but we have no access to it. Nothing is accessible to us unless it is branded by this mark of the signifier, which is introduced into natural movement, into desire, or into the particularly expressive term demand to which the English language has recourse as a primal expression of appetite, of exigency, even though it is not marked by laws that are specific to the signifier. Thus, yearning becomes what is signified. The intervention of the signifier poses a problem that earlier led me to remind you about the Holy Spirit. The year before last, we saw what this means for us and what it means in Freud’s thought and teaching. This Holy Spirit is, on the whole, the coming into existence of the signifier. This is undoubtedly what Freud brings us under the term death instinct. What is at stake is the limit of what can be signified, which can never be reached by any living being, save in exceptional cases because we meet it only in the last-gasp writings of a certain philo­ sophical experience. This is all the same something to be found virtually at the limit of man’s reflection on his life as what allows him to glimpse death as the absolute and unsurpassable condition of his existence, as Heidegger puts it. Man’s existence in the world, at any rate his potential relations with the signifier as a whole, is bound very precisely to this possibility of the suppression, the bracketing off, of everything that is lived. What lies at the bottom of the existence of the signifier, of its presence in the world, is something that we will put there, and which is this efficient surface of the signifier as something where it reflects in some way what may be called the last word of the signified, that is, of life, of lived experience, of the flux of emotions and libido. It is death, insomuch as this is the support, the base, the intervention of the Holy Spirit through which the signifier exists. Is this signifier, which has its own laws that may or may not be recognised in any given phenomenon, what is designated here in the Esl We ask this question, and we answer it. To understand anything of what we do in analysis, we have to answer in the affirmative. The Es that is at issue in analysis is the signifier that is already

The Signifier and the Holy Spirit

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there in the real, the uncomprehended signifier. It’s already there, but it’s a signifier, and not some confused and primitive property of goodness knows what pre-set harmony, this being loosely the hypothesis that is always hauled out by those I would unhesitatingly describe as feeble-minded. Foremost among these is a certain Dr Ernest Jones. I’ll be telling you presently how he tackles the issue, for example, of the early development of women and their infamous castration complex, which has posed an unsolvable problem to all analysts whenever it rears its head. The error is to start off from the idea that because there are, as one says, needle and thread, so there are also girl and boy, and so there can be the same pre-set harmony between them, such that should some difficulty arise, it can only be due to some secondary disorder, some defence process, or some purely accidental and con­ tingent occurrence. When one imagines that the unconscious means that whatever lies in one subject is designed to perceive what must respond to it in another, one is simply presupposing the notion of a primitive harmony. This notion can be contrasted with Freud’s altogether straight­ forward remark in his Three Essays on Sexuality concerning what is such an important theme in child development in respect of these sexual impressions, namely that it’s a great pity that things are not laid out in such a way that guiderails leading to man’s open access to woman5 would be installed and signposted in advance. On no account is this an encounter in which the only obstacles are those that may crop up along the way. On the contrary, Freud asserts that the subject’s infantile sexual theories, those that will leave their mark on the entire development and history of the relation between the sexes, are linked to the first maturity of the genital stage that occurs before the full development of the Oedipus complex, namely the so-called phallic phase. This phase is called phallic not in the name of a joining of some sort of fundamental equality at the level of energetics, which is there solely for the convenience of thought. It’s not on account of there being only one libido. Rather, it is because this time, on the imagi­ nary plane, there is a single primary representative of the genital state and stage, and this is the phallus as such. The phallus is neither wholly nor merely the full male genital apparatus. The phallus is excepted, says Freud, from the other part o f the male genitals, the testes, say. The erect image of the phallus is what is crucial here. There is only one. There is no other choice but a virile image or castration. I’m not enshrining Freud’s term. I’m telling you that this is the

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Theorising the Lack of Object

starting point that Freud offers us when he performs this reconstruc­ tion. In relation to everything that came before, the Three Essays did indeed set off in search of natural references for the idea which had been uncovered in analysis, but what analysis underscores is precisely that there are a whole host of accidental occurrences that are far from being as natural as all that. Furthermore, we posit what I’m laying out here as the principle behind the analytic experience, namely that it begins with the notion that there is something of the signifier already installed and already structured. A power station is already up and running. You are not the one who has made this power station. It is language, which has been functioning here for as long as you can remem­ ber. Literally, you cannot remember further back. I’m speaking about the history of the whole of humanity. For as long as there have been functioning signifiers, subjects have been organised in their psychical systems by the specific play of the signifier. This is precisely what means that the Es of what is already given, which is something you will seek out in the depths, is not as natural as all that, and even less so than images. Indeed, the existence in nature of the hydroelectric power station, constructed through the intervention of the Holy Spirit, stands in stark contrast to the notion of nature. The analytic position inheres in this scandal. When we approach a subject, we know that already in nature there is something that is his Es and which, ipso facto, is structured in accordance with a signify­ ing articulation that leaves its mark - its imprints, its contradictions, its profound difference from natural coaptations - on everything that is brought to bear on this subject. I thought I ought to remind you of these positions, which strike me as fundamental. I note that I placed the signifier behind this ultimate reality, which is completely veiled with respect to what is signified. Moreover, the use of the signifier also entails the possibil­ ity that nothing of what is signified exists. This is none other than the death instinct, the awareness that life is completely obsolete and improbable. Here we have a whole host of notions that have nothing to do with any kind of living exercise, because any living exercise consists precisely of making one’s own little way in exist­ ence by falling exactly in line with all those who have come before us. The existence of the signifier is bound to nothing other than the fact - for it is a fact - that discourse exists and is introduced into the world against a backdrop that is more or less familiar or mis­ construed. Yet it is curious all the same that Freud was led by the analytic experience not to be able to do otherwise than to spell this

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out by saying that if the signifier functions, then it is against the backdrop of a particular experience of death. This experience has nothing to do with any kind of lived experi­ ence. If our commentary on Beyond the Pleasure Principle two years ago was able to show something, then it was that what is there at issue is a reconstruction, which is prompted by the fact of certain paradoxes that in experience are inexplicable, that is to say, by the fact that the subject is led to behave in an essentially signifying fashion, repeating indefinitely something that for him is, strictly speaking, deathly. Conversely, just as this death is reflected here at the bottom of the signified, so there is a whole series of things in the signified, things that are there but which have been imprinted by the signifier. These are precisely the things that are at issue, namely certain elements that are linked to something that is just as profoundly engaged in the signified, and this is the body. There are a number of elements, of accidental occurrences of the body, that amount to experiential givens. Just as in nature certain natural reservoirs are already there, so too in the signifier there are certain elements that are taken up in the signifier in order to furnish it with, as it were, its first weapons. These elements are things that are ungraspable in the extreme, and yet they are irreducible. Among them is the phallic term, the pure and simple erection. The upright stone is one such example. The notion of the erect human body is another. Thus, a number of ele­ ments are each linked more or less to bodily stature, and not merely to the lived experience of the body. They constitute the first ele­ ments, and are effectively borrowed from experience, but completely transformed by the fact that they are symbolised. Symbolised means that they are introduced into what characterises the bond of the signifier as such, the signifier being something that is articulated in keeping with its own logical laws. I led you back to the first of these logical laws in connection with the death instinct, at the very least getting you to play the game of odds-and-evens, in order to remind you that what these laws finally boil down to - that is, the pluses and minuses and their groupings in twos and threes within a temporal sequence - is that there are ultimate laws that are the laws of the signifier. These laws are of course implicit, wherever you start off from, but it is impossible not to encounter them. Let’s come back now to where we left things last time, namely at the level of the analytic experience.

44

Theorising the Lack of Object

3 The central object relation, the one that is dynamically creative, is that of lack. At the level of the analytic experience, every Findung of the object is, Freud tells us, a Wiederfindung. One oughtn’t to read the Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality as though it were a book written in one go. Admittedly, not a single one of Freud’s major works went unrevised - they all include added notes - but there are very few textual modifications. The Traumdeutung, for instance, was expanded without anything of its original balance being altered. However, the first thing you have to bear in mind should you read the first edition of the Three Essays is that you won’t get over it, so to speak, because you won’t recognise any of what you think of as the familiar themes of the Three Essays from your usual reading of the book, that is to say, with the additions that were made many years later, chiefly in 1915. Everything that has to do with the pregenital develop­ ment of libido could be conceived of only after the appearance of the theory of narcissism. At any rate, it was never included in the Three Essays before the modification of everything that comprised the sexual theory of childhood, with its major misunderstandings that consist, in particular, in Freud’s telling us that the child has no notion of coition or of begetting. This is their essential failing. That this should have also been repeated after 1915 is due largely to the fact of a notion that only saw light of day after the final edition of the Three Essays in 1920, in the 1923 article on Die infantile Genitalorganisation.6 This crucial element of genitality in development remains beyond the confines of the Three Essays, which don’t quite come to this. Their progress, in this research on the pregenital relation as such, can only be explained by the impor­ tance of sexual theories and the libido theory itself. The chapter entitled The Libido Theory concerns the narcissistic notion, along with the discovery and origin, and even the very idea, of the theory of libido. Freud tells us that we can account for all this when we possess the notion of an Ich-libido as a reservoir of libido that constitutes objects. He adds that we can do no more than peep at this reservoir over its walls. In sum, it is in the notion of narcis­ sistic tension as such, that is to say, in a relation between man and image, that we may form the idea of a common measure. At the same time, we have an idea of the central reserve from which any objectal relation is established insomuch as it will be fundamentally imaginary. In other words, one of these essential articulations is the subject’s fascination with the image. All things considered, this is an image that is only ever an image that he bears within himself. This is the last word on the theory of narcissism as such.

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So, everything that thereafter took its bearing from this, heading in the direction of acknowledging an organising value in fantasies, is something that is backed up, not at all by the idea of a pre-set harmony, of a natural inclination between object and subject, but on the contrary by something that first and foremost presupposes an experience, laid out for us in the Three Essays in their origi­ nal version, that revolves entirely around a diphasic development. This two-stage temporal development of child sexuality hinges on the fact that the re-finding of the object will always be marked by the fact of the latency period, of the latent memory that persists throughout this period. Freud spells this out. The result is that the first object, the mother, is remembered in a way that has not been able to change. It is, as he puts it, unverwendbar, unutilisable. The object, which will only ever be a re-found object, wiedergefunden, will bear the mark of the initial style of this object. This will intro­ duce an essential and fundamentally conflictive division into this re-found object and into the very fact of its re-finding. Thus, Freud’s first dialectic in the theory of sexuality is introduced around an initial notion of the discordance between the re-found object and the object that is sought. This fundamental experience supposes that throughout the latency period the object is preserved in the subject’s memory, but unbeknown to him. That is to say, during the latency period, there is a signifying transmission of an object that thereafter divides, becomes discordant, and plays the role of a disturbing force in all the subject’s subsequent object relations. It is within this frame that, at certain moments, in certain choice articulations, during certain phases of this evolution, the strictly imaginary functions are uncov­ ered. Everything that falls within the remit of pregenital relations is taken up within this parenthesis. This notion of an imaginary layer is introduced into a dialectic that is first and foremost, in our vocabulary, essentially a dialectic of the symbolic and the real. This introduction of the imaginary, which has since become such a prevalent notion, only comes about, first, with the article on nar­ cissism, which is not articulated into the theory of sexuality until 1915, and then, second, with its formulation in connection with the phallic phase, which doesn’t happen until 1920. However, at the time this was formulated in a categorical way, it seemed disturbing and threw the entire analytic audience into a state of bewilderment. Things are such that the dialectic that at the time was termed pre­ genital - and not, I note, preoedipal - is situated in relation to the Oedipus complex. The term preoedipal was introduced in connection with female sexuality, ten years later. In 1920, however, what is at issue is the

46

Theorising the Lack of Object

pregenital relation, which is situated in the emergence of experi­ ences that are preparatory to the Oedipal experience but which only come to be linked up in this latter experience. It is on the basis of the signifying articulation of the Oedipus complex that we are able to behold the signifying material of these images, these fantasies, which do indeed arise from a certain experience of contact between signifier and signified. In such experience, the signifier has drawn its material from somewhere in the signified, from a certain number of living and lived relations. This past is grasped retroactively, ena­ bling us to structure this imaginary organisation that we meet first and foremost as having a paradoxical character. It is paradoxical in that it opposes, far more than it accords with, any idea of a regular harmonious development. On the contrary, it is a critical develop­ ment, in which from the very first the objects, as they are called, of the different oral and anal phases, are already taken to be something other than what they are. They are objects that have already been worked over. Yet people have been working with these objects in such a way that it is impossible to extract their signifying structure. This is what people have been referring to with all these notions of incorporation, notions that organise them, dominate them, and enable them to be linked up. How ought this experience to be arranged? As I told you last time, we should be arranging the entirety of the experience around the notion of the lack of object. I showed you the three different tiers of this lack, which for us are essential when it comes to understanding all that occurs whenever there is a crisis, an encounter, or an efficient action in the search for the object, which in and of itself is essentially a critical notion of search. These tiers are castration, frustration and privation. Their central structure, what they amount to as lack, is essentially three distinct things. In the coming lessons we are going to position ourselves at the precise point where the new-fangled theory and current practice are entrenched. The analysts of today have been reorganising the analytic experience upon the tier of frustration, while neglecting the notion of castration, which, along with the Oedipus complex, was Freud’s original discovery. Next time I shall take as my point of departure an example that I chose at random in volumes III and IV of The Psychoanalytic Study o f the Child, published in 1949. It’s a presentation by Mrs Anneliese Schnurmann, one of Anna Freud’s pupils. Mrs Schnurmann was able to observe the fairly sudden emergence of a phobia in one of the young boarders at Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nursery. We are going to read this observation, which is one among

The Signifier and the Holy Spirit

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umpteen others, and we shall see what we can understand in it. We shall also see what has been understood by she who reports the observation with what seems to be exemplary fidelity. That is to say, it does not exclude a certain number of pre-established categories. However, what has been gathered together is ample for us to have a notion of temporal succession. We shall see how, through a number of points of reference, the phobia will appear and then disappear. We are going to see a privileged imaginary creation in this subject, which prevails for a certain while, and which has a whole series of effects on the subject’s behaviour. We shall have to see whether it really is possible for the author to spell out what is essential in this observation when she takes as her sole point of departure the notion of frustration, in the way it is currently conceived, that is, as related to the privation of a privileged object that is the object of the stage to which the subject has arrived when the privation appears. This is a loosely regressive effect, which can even be progressive in some cases - and why not? But can a phenomenon like phobia be under­ stood by merely appearing, by merely being located, in a particular chronological order? Don’t things become clearer when we refer to the three terms I have set out? This is what we are going to see. I shall now simply underscore what these three terms mean. In cas­ tration, there is a fundamental lack that is located, as indebtedness, in the symbolic chain. In frustration, lack can only be understood on the imaginary plane, as an imaginary detriment. In privation, lack is purely and simply in the real, as a real gap or limit. When I say that in privation the lack is in the real, certainly this only holds interest when we see that on no account does this mean that it is something that is in the subject. For the subject to reach privation, he already has to symbolise the real, to conceive of the real as being something other than what it is. The reference to privation, as it is set out here, consists in positing - before we can say something sensible - that all of this does not come to pass as it does in the idealist dream where we can see the subject in some sense obligated in the genesis of the psychical system as it is laid out for us. In the current analytic conception of psychogenesis, the subject is like a spider who has to spin the entire web herself. There, each subject has to envelop himself in the silk of his cocoon. He has to make his entire conception of the world emerge from himself and his images. In this psychogenesis, the subject secretes from himself his successive relations, in the name of goodness-knows-what pre-set maturation with the objects that will somehow manage to be the objects of this human world of ours. So it is, in defiance of how often analysis makes it apparent that giving oneself over to such an exercise is impossible, because the partisans of this conception

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Theorising the Lack of Object

only latch on to those aspects that support it. Moreover, each time they get in a muddle, it seems to them that it is merely a difficulty of language. In fact, this is simply a manifestation of the error they are in. Somatognosis, the image of the body as a signifier, shows this well enough.7 The problem of object relations can be posed in the right way only by positing a framework that must be regarded as fundamental to the comprehension of this object relation. The framework, or the first of these frameworks, is that in the human world the structure, the point of departure for objectal organisation, is the lack of the object. We have to conceive of this lack of object across its different stages in the subject, not merely at the level of the symbolic chain, the beginning and end of which are beyond his grasp, nor merely at the level of frustration, though he is indeed poised at this level, where his lived experience is thinkable for him. We also have to consider this lack in the real, because when we speak of privation here, it’s not about feeling deprived. Privation as a feeling of being deprived of a central reference that we need, to such an extent that everyone makes use of this, is simply the trick of making privation equivalent to frustration, which is what Dr Ernest Jones does. Privation is not the equivalent of frus­ tration. Privation is in the real, and quite outside of the subject. For the subject to apprehend privation, he must first symbolise this real. How is the subject led to symbolise it? How does frustration intro­ duce the symbolic order? This is the question we shall be asking, and it will allow us to see that the subject is neither isolated nor independent. The subject is not the one who introduces the symbolic order. It is quite striking that yesterday evening no one spoke about a major passage in what Mme Dolto offered us, namely that accord­ ing to her the only children who become phobic are those, of either sex, whose mother happens to have endured a disturbance in the objectal relation with her own parent of the opposite sex. Here we are introduced to a notion that certainly brings in something very different from the relationships between mother and child, and indeed this is why I have set out for you the trio of mother, child and phallus. For the mother, there is nearly always this requirement of the phallus on the side of the child. The child symbolises, sometimes more, sometimes less, the phallus. As for the child, who has his own relationship with his mother, he knows nothing about it, because if there is one thing that surely must also have been apparent to you yesterday evening when the body image was being spoken of in rela­ tion to this child, it’s that, if this image is even accessible to him, is

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this how the mother sees her child? This is a question that was never raised. Similarly, at what moment is the child in a position to realise that what his mother desires in him, saturates and satisfies in him, is her phallic image? What possibility is open to the child of having access to this relational element? Is this something that belongs to a kind of direct effusion, or even a projection? Doesn’t this amount to suppos­ ing that any relationship between subjects is of the same kind as the relationship between Mme Dolto and her child? I’m stunned that no one asked her, she who sees all these body images, whether there is anyone else, apart from analysts - of her school, at that - who happen to see in the child such elements and such images. Yet this is the important point. How are we to conceive of the way in which the child, male or female, is induced or introduced to this imaginary discordance that means that, for the mother, the child is far from being just the child? The child is also the phallus. This is something that falls within the scope of experience, because certain elements can be extracted from experience which show us, for instance, that there needs already to be a period of symbolisation in order for the child to have access to this, or even that in certain cases the child has broached the imaginary detriment in a way that is in some sense direct - not his detriment, but the mother’s detriment with respect to this privation of the phallus. This really is essential in development. Is an imagi­ nary here being reflected in the symbolic? Or, on the contrary, is a symbolic element appearing in the imaginary? These are the crucial points in relation to which we ask ourselves the question of phobia. So as not to fall short of your expectations, and in order to shed some further light, I will tell you what is in question in the threefold scheme of mother, child and phallus. It’s a different question from the question of phobia, and it will certainly take us a long way. Why in fetishism does the child come more or less to occupy the position of the mother in relation to the phallus? Or why, on the contrary, in certain highly particular forms of dependency in which anomalies can present with every appearance of normality, does the child also come to occupy the position of the phallus in relation to the mother? What leads him to this? It does indeed seem that this mother-phallus relation is not afforded to the child in a spontane­ ous and direct fashion. Does everything happen simply because he watches his mother and notices that what she desires is a phallus? Apparently not. We shall be coming back to this. A phobia, when it develops, is not at all of the same kind. It has nothing to do with this liaison that the infant establishes between the phallus and the mother by putting something of his own into it,

50

Theorising the Lack of Object

and rather a great deal. A phobia is something else. It’s another type of solution to the difficult problem introduced by the relationships between child and mother. I showed you this last year. For there to be the three terms of the trio - it was in a closed forum - there has to be an organisation of the symbolic world, and this is called the father. The phobia belongs rather to this realm. It has to do with this circumscribing bond. At a particularly critical moment, when no path of any other nature is open for solving the problem, the phobia constitutes a call for rescue. It’s an appeal to a singular symbolic element. In what way is it singular? Let’s say that it appears always to be exceedingly symbolic, that is, exceedingly far from any imaginary apprehension. When it is called to the rescue of a solidarity that it is essential to maintain in the gap introduced by the appearance of the phallus in the orientation between mother and child, the element that intervenes in the phobia has a truly mythical character. 5 December 1956

IV T H E D IA L E C T IC O F F R U S T R A T IO N

Frustration placed at the centre of the mother-child relation Revisiting the Fort-Da game The mother, from symbolic to real The infant and the phallic image The young English girl’s phobia agent

lack of object

object

castration symbolic indebtedness

imaginary

frustration imaginary detriment

real

privation real hole

symbolic

This is the chart at which we have arrived, and which allows the issue of the object such as it arises in analysis to be spelt out with precision. The lack of rigour in this matter, the confusion that analysts have shown, has resulted in a curious slippage. Analysis partakes of a sort of scandalous notion of man’s affective relations. I think I have already underscored on several occasions what at the start gave rise to so much outrage in analysis. It was not so much that it highlighted the role of sexuality, and that it played

52

Theorising the Lack of Object

its part in the fact that this has become commonplace - in any case, these days no one dreams of taking offence at it - rather, it was precisely that at the same time as introducing this notion, and far in excess of this, it introduced the notion of a paradox, of an essential difficulty, that is inherent, so to speak, in the approach to the sexual object. It is peculiar indeed that since then we have slid from this to a harmonic notion of the object. To take measure of the distance that lies between this notion and what Freud spelt out with the greatest rigour, I chose a sentence from the Three Essays on Sexuality. Even those who are the least informed with respect to object relations have remarked that it may quite readily be seen that in Freud’s writings there are many things pertaining to the object - object-choice, for example - but that the notion of object relations on its own is neither highlighted nor cultivated, nor brought to the fore of the question. Here is Freud’s sentence that can be found in the article Drives and Their Fates The object o f the drive is that / through which the drive is able to achieve its aim. It is the most variable aspect o f a drive, not originally connected with it, but merely appropriated by it on grounds o f suit­ ability to provide satisfaction. One might also say that it’s about the possibility of satisfying the drive. It’s a matter of satisfaction insomuch as the position that the pleasure principle takes as the goal of the drive tendency is that of arriving at its own satisfaction. So, the notion that there is no pre-set harmony between object and drive tendency is spelt out. The object is literally bound to the drive tendency only by conditions that are its own. In short, one gets by as best one can. This is not a doctrine. It’s a quotation. But it’s one quotation among others that motion in the same direction, and it’s one of the most significant. What is this conception of the object that is at issue here? Along what winding paths does it lead us before we manage to conceive of its effective impact? We have already managed, thanks to a number of points that have also been spelt out by Freud, to give some depth to the notion that the object is only ever a re-found object, based on a primary Findung. This means that the Wiederfindung, the re-finding, is never satisfactory. What is more, drawing on further characteristics, we saw on the one hand that this object is inadequate, and on the other that it steals away, partially, from any conceptual grasp. This is now leading us to take a firmer grip on the fundamental notions, and in particular to revise the one that has been placed at the centre of latter-day analytic theory, that of frustration. To what extent has it been turned into something necessary? To what extent, too, ought it to be revised? It’s up to us to critique it so

The Dialectic of Frustration

53

as to make it both usable and, to spell this right out, coherent with what constitutes the grounding of analytic doctrine, which is still fundamentally Freud’s thought and teaching. I have underscored for you many times now that the notion of frustration is quite mar­ ginal in Freud’s thinking.

1 I reminded you of what presents at the outset in what is given castration, frustration and privation. Marking out the differences between these three terms is going to be productive. What is involved in castration? Castration is essentially linked to a symbolic order qua already established, which as such comprises a long coherence in which the subject can on no account be an isolated given. The liaison between castration and the symbolic order is evinced as much in each of our earlier reflections as in the straightforward remark that, from the very first, Freud yoked castration to the central position he gave to the Oedipus complex as the essential articulation of any develop­ ment in sexuality. The Oedipus complex already bears within it, and fundamentally so, the notion of Law that is absolutely ineradicable. I think that the fact that castration stands at the level of symbolic indebtedness will appear amply confirmed and even amply demon­ strated by this remark, which has been weighed up and supported through each of our earlier reflections. What is the object that is at issue, or that is brought into play, in the symbolic indebtedness established by castration? As I indicated last time, it is an imaginary object, the phallus as such. At least this is what Freud asserts, and this will be my point of departure today in order to push the dialectic of frustration a little further. Frustration holds the central position on this chart. In itself, this does not harbour anything that should throw us out of kilter or off track. By laying the emphasis on the notion of frustration we do not stray very far from the notion that Freud placed at the heart of analytic conflictedness, this being the notion of desire. What is important here is to grasp what is meant by frustration, how it was introduced, and what it refers to. Clearly, insomuch as it is placed to the fore in analytic theory, the notion of frustration has been linked to the earliest age of life. It has been linked to research into traumas, fixations and expe­ riential impressions that in themselves are preoedipal. This does not imply that they lie outside the scope of the Oedipus complex but rather that in some sense they provide its preparatory ground,

54

Theorising the Lack of Object

its base and foundation. They model it in such a way that certain inflexions are prepared within it, and they will furnish those aspects through which the Oedipal conflict will be led to reorient, in a more or less pronounced way, in a direction that is loosely atypical or heterotypic. What, then, is the pattern of relationship with the object that is in play in frustration? Clearly it introduces the question of the real. Indeed, along with the notion of frustration we can see a whole host of other notions being placed to the fore in the subject’s con­ ditioning and development. These notions have been conveyed in a language of loose quantitative metaphor. People speak about satisfactions, gratifications, and a certain number of well-adapted benefits that correspond to steps in the young subject’s develop­ ment. Furthermore, when it more or less reaches saturation point, or on the contrary when it comes up short, this is considered to be an essential feature. I think that just making this remark is enough to open our eyes to the evidence, when we consult the texts, and to see what step has been taken in this research, guided by an analysis of this fact of a basic shift of interest within the analytic literature. This can already be seen fairly easily, at least for those who are sufficiently familiar with these three notions to be able to recognise them with ease. You will see in one article from the analytic literature, in which you can recognise this element of the conceptual articulation of the matter quite straightforwardly, that the thrust of it bears on certain real conditions that we are supposed to be able to ascertain in a subject’s history through the analytic experience. In the first analytic observa­ tions, it is on the whole apparent that any such foregrounding of this element of interest is absent, in the sense that it is articulated differently. So, here we are led back to the level of frustration regarded as a sort of feature of a real impression, experienced by the subject during a period when his relationship with this real object, whatever it might be, is habitually focused on the so-called primordial image of the maternal breast. It is essentially in relation to this primordial object that what just now I called its first aspects and first fixations will take shape in the subject. Faced with these aspects and fixa­ tions, descriptions have been made of the various typical instinctual stages, which are characterised by the imaginary anatomy of the subject’s development that they offer us. This is where the relation­ ships of the oral stage and the anal stage have been articulated, with their various subdivisions - phallic, sadistic, and so on. Each of these bear the mark of the element of ambivalence whereby the subject’s position partakes of the other’s position, where the subject

The Dialectic of Frustration

55

is twain, where he participates always in a dual situation without which any comprehensive assumption of his position is not possible. By simply limiting ourselves to this, let’s see where it takes us. We are, therefore, in the presence of a subject that is in this position, which is a position of desire. Let’s take it in the form it is given to us, as the breast qua real object. Here we are led to the heart of the question of what this relationship is, this most primitive of relation­ ships, between the subject and the real object. You know the extent to which the theoretician-analysts have found themselves in a sort of discussion that is teeming with all manner of misunderstanding. After Freud spoke of a lived stage of autoeroticism, some preserved this autoeroticism as the primal relationship between the infant and the primordial maternal object, while others objected that it was difficult to refer to a notion that seems to be founded on the fact that the subject that it implies is acquainted only with himself, given how a good many features from direct observation seem to run athwart the idea that in this instance there are no effective relations with an object. We conceive of these features as necessary when it comes to explaining the development of relations between child and mother. Furthermore, what could be more overtly exterior to the subject than this something for which he feels the most pressing need, and which is the first nourishment par excellence? In truth, it seems that there is a misunderstanding here, begotten essentially by a kind of confusion, whereby the discussion comes to a standstill, culminating in formulations that are so diverse that simply to list them would take up considerable time. This is why I can’t do so straightaway, because we need to make some headway in the conceptualisation of what is at issue here. I shall simply remind you of the theory we have already spoken about, Alice Balint’s theory. This theory seeks to reconcile the notion of autoeroticism, such as it is set out by Freud, with what seems to impose on the reality of the object that confronts the infant during an altogether primary stage of his development. This culminates in the strikingly articulated conception that Mr and Mrs Balint call Primary Love. According to them, this is the only form of love in which egoism and altruism are perfectly reconcilable, allowing of a perfect and fundamental reci­ procity between what the infant requires of the mother and what the mother requires of the infant, a perfect complementarity between the two poles of need. This conception runs quite contrary to all clinical experience, in that we are constantly dealing with the evocation, within the subject, of the mark of each truly fundamental discord that may have arisen.

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Theorising the Lack of Object

The theory of this so-called primary love, which would be perfect and complementary, contains in its very wording the hallmark of this discord. Alice Balint tells us, in Love for the Mother and Mother Love, that where relations are natural, that is, in the wild, the child is always carefully maintained in contact with its mother.1In other words, this always happens elsewhere, in dreamland, in the Garden of the Hesperides, there where, as everyone knows, the mother always carries the child on her back. Such a strict complementary notion of love, destined in and of itself to find its reciprocity, con­ stitutes an evasion that is so scarcely compatible with an accurate theorisation that ultimately it has to be admitted that this is, there­ fore, an utterly ideal stance, if not an idealist one. Actually, I have taken this example only because it serves as an introduction to what is going to be the driving element in our cri­ tique of the notion of frustration. It’s clear that this is not quite the image of fundamental representation that is given to us in a theory like, say, Mrs Melanie Klein’s. Here, too, it’s amusing to see from what angle the theoretical reconstruction that she proposes comes under attack, especially given that object relations are at issue. It so happened that a Bulletin fell into my hands reporting on the activities of the Belgian Psychoanalytic Association. On its contents page are the same authors who are to be found in the collection I dealt with in my first lecture, and which I said is oriented around a shamelessly optimistic and contestable view of the object relation, this being the main thrust of the two volumes. In this Bulletin for a slightly more restricted audience, things are broached with greater nuance, as though it were the lack of assurance that was giving rise to a mild shame on their part, and they were allowing it to show through in places where certainly it becomes apparent, when one becomes aware of it, that this is of greater merit. So, we find in this Bulletin an article by Messrs Pasche and Renard that reproduces the same critique of the Kleinian positions that they delivered at the Geneva congress. It is quite striking to read them reproaching Melanie Klein for a developmental theory that, according to these authors and their criticisms, would place everything within the subject in a preformed fashion. The whole Oedipus complex, its whole possible development, would already be included in what is given instinctually, and the different elements, which would already be potentially articulated, would just have to sprout from it. In the way the authors frame the comparison, which is how it is for some in the biological theory of development, the full-grown oak would already be wholly present in the acorn. Nothing would come to such a subject from the outside. From the outset, he possesses his primitive aggressive drives - the prevalence

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of aggressiveness is indeed manifest when comprehended within Melanie Klein’s perspective - and then, through the intermediary of shocks that he feels from the outside, from the maternal field, in return for these aggressive drives, there is a progressive construction of something that we are told can only be received as a sort of fullgrown oak, namely the notion of the totality of the mother. On this basis, the so-called depressive position is established, which can arise in any experience. Without taking each of these criticisms into account one after the next, as would be necessary to appreciate their rightful worth, I would simply like to underscore what they paradoxically culminate in as a whole, which constitutes the crux and the core of this article. The authors seem to be fascinated by the question of what, in development, is brought in from the outside. What they think they can read in Melanie Klein’s work is that this is already given at the start in an internal constellation, such that it would come as no surprise that the notion of an internal object should thereafter be foregrounded so prevalently. The authors come to the conclu­ sion that they think can be drawn from the Kleinian contribution, namely the notion of a full-grown oak that follows hereditary pat­ terns, which they say is very difficult to represent in one’s mind. So, they say - The child is born with certain inherited instinctual drives into a world which he does not yet perceive but which he recalls, and which later he will not have to create simply from within himself and from nothing else but a series o f chance discoveries, but a world he will come to recognise. I think that for most of you the Platonic character of the wording will not escape your notice. This world that one has only to recall, and which will be established in accordance with a certain imaginary preparation, to which the subject already corresponds, is something that surely represents a critique of the position. However, we are going to have to test out not simply whether this critique goes against everything that Freud wrote, but whether we cannot already glimpse how the authors themselves stand far closer to the position for which they reproach Melanie Klein. For they are the ones who indicate, in the subject, in the state of the full-grown oak, ready to appear on cue, all the elements that will enable the subject to be counted throughout a series of stages that can be called ideal only to the extent that they are precisely the subject’s memories, very precisely his phylogenetic memories, and which furnish them with their norm and type. Is this what Mrs Melanie Klein intended? It is strictly unthinkable to maintain as much. If there is indeed one thing that Mrs Melanie Klein gives us an idea of - and, moreover, this is the thrust of the

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authors’ critique - it is surely that the first situation is far more chaotic. At the start, it is truly anarchic. What characterises the origin is the noise and fury of the drives. The question, therefore, is much rather how something like an order can be established on this basis. That there is something mythical in the Kleinian conception is absolutely beyond doubt. It’s quite certain that the contradiction that is introduced by a myth that the authors do not locate very well, though it does resemble the Kleinian phantasy, is wholly on the beam. Of course, these phantasies only have a retroactive character. During the construction of the subject we see them being projected back onto the past from points that can themselves be very early. But how is it that these points can be so early? How is it that Mrs Melanie Klein can take a toddler of fairly advanced age, of two-anda-half, and like the Pythia reading in a mantic mirror, a divinatory mirror, is able to read retroactively in his past nothing less than the Oedipal structure? There is some reason behind this. Doubtless there is some manner of mirage here, and of course she is not to be followed when she tells us that the Oedipus complex was already there in the very forms, fragmented as they are, of the penis roaming around amid the brothers and sisters on the inside of the entire field that is defined as the interior of the mother’s body. But that this articulation should be detectable in a certain relation with the child, and that it should be articulable very early on, is something that certainly poses us a fruitful question. That this theoretical articulation, which is in some sense a purely hypothetical articulation, should allow us to provide at the outset something that might better satisfy our idea of natural harmonies, nevertheless does not conform to what experience shows us. I think that this is starting to indicate for you the angle from which we can introduce something new in the confusion that remains at the level of the primordial mother-child relation.

2 I believe that this confusion is due to not having taken a central notion, the true centre, as the point of departure. Frustration is not the starting point. It’s a matter of finding out how the child’s primary relationships are situated. A great deal can be clarified if we approach things in the following way, which is that in this frustra­ tion there are from the very start two facets that will bracket it to the very end. On one side, there is the real object. And as we are told, the object

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can affect the subject before he has formed the least idea o f it. This object is real, and the subject is affected in his direct relations. It is only as a function of this periodicity, in which holes and deficiencies can appear, that a certain pattern of relation will be established that on no account necessitates admitting that for the subject there would be a distinction between me and not-те. This is so, for instance, in the autoerotic position, in Freud’s understanding of it, namely that strictly speaking there is no constitution of the other, nor initially of any fully conceivable relationship. On the other side, there is the agent. Indeed, the object is instanti­ ated only in relation to lack. In this fundamental relation that is a relation of lack, the notion of agent is something that should enable us to introduce a formulation that from the very first is utterly crucial when it comes to the way in which the overall position is situated. In this instance, the agent is the mother. To show you this I just have to remind you of what we have been studying these last few years, namely what Freud spelt out concern­ ing the altogether principial position of the infant with regard to repetitive play, and especially the game that Freud seized upon so swiftly in the child’s behaviour. The mother is something other than this primal object. She does not appear as such at the start but, rather, as Freud underscores, on the basis of this first play, that of clutching an object that in itself is perfectly insignificant, which has no biological value whatsoever. On that occasion it was a spool, but it could equally be anything else that a six-month-old child could send over the edge of his cot in order then to retrieve it anew. This presence-absence pairing, which is articulated by the child at a very early age, connotes the first constitution of the agent of frustration that lies at the origin of the mother. We can write the symbol of frustration S(M).2 The mother is spoken of as introducing a new element of total­ ity that ushers in a stage of development known as the depressive position, which is characterised less by its opposition to the sort of chaos of fragmented objects that typifies the previous stage than by the connotation of presence-absence. This presence-absence is not only set out as such objectively, it is articulated as such by the subject. As we have already spelt out in our studies from last year, this presence-absence is articulated by the subject in the register of appeal. The maternal object is called upon when it is absent, and rejected when it is present, all within the same register of appeal, by modulating his voice. Of course, this essential scansion of the appeal is far from being something that gives us the entire symbolic order from the start, but it does show us how it is first broached. It allows us to discern

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something else, an element that is distinct from the real object rela­ tion and which will thereafter afford the subject the possibility of establishing a relation to a real object, with its scansion, its marks, and the traces that remain of it. This is what affords the possibility of a link between this real relationship and a symbolic relationship as such. Before I show you this in a more manifest fashion, I simply want to highlight what is entailed by the mere fact that in the child’s relations the presence-absence opposition is introduced into this relationship with the constituting person. What is introduced here in the child’s experience is that he tends, quite naturally, to drop off to sleep at the moment of frustration. So, the child is situated between the notion of an agent, which already participates in the order of symbolicity, and the contrasting couple of presence-absence, the plus-minus connotation, which gives us the first element of a sym­ bolic order. This element is not sufficient to constitute a symbolic order by itself alone because a sequence is required thereafter. This is a sequence that will be grouped as such, but already in the opposi­ tion between plus and minus, between presence and absence, there is the virtual origin, the virtual begetting, the possibility, the funda­ mental condition, of a symbolic order. The question now is how we are to conceive of the moment when this primordial relationship with the real object can change tack and open up to a more complex relationship. What, in truth, is the turning point at which the mother-child relation opens up to further elements that will introduce what we have called a dialectic? I believe that we can formulate this in schematic fashion by asking the fol­ lowing question - what happens if the symbolic agent, the mother as such, who is so essential to the child’s relationship with the real object, no longer responds? What happens if she no longer answers the child’s call? Let’s provide the reply ourselves. Whereas the symbolic struc­ turation makes her the present-absent object in keeping with the child’s appeal, from the moment she is in decline she becomes real. Why so? Until then she existed within this structuration as an agent, distinct from the real object that is the infant’s object of satisfaction. However, outside of this structuration, she becomes real. In a sense, she now replies merely as she pleases. She becomes something that also ushers in the start of the structuration of reality as a whole, and thereafter she becomes a power. Correlatively, the object positions switch around. So long as a real relationship is at issue, the breast - let’s take this as an example - can be made to be as enticing we may wish. Yet as soon as the mother becomes a power and, as such, real, the child will depend on her in

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the most manifest way for access to those objects that hitherto were purely and simply objects of satisfaction, but which now become objects that are gifted by this power. And so, in the same way, though no more than has thus far been the case for the mother, these objects are liable to enter a presence-absence connotation, but in dependence on this real object, this power that the maternal power is. In short, they are objects in the sense we intend here, not metaphori­ cally, but objects that can be clasped and possessed. As for the notion of not me, of non-ego, it’s a matter of observing whether it enters first via the image of the other or via what can be possessed. What the child wants to keep beside him are objects that from this moment forth no longer really need to be objects of satisfaction so much as objects that are the mark of the value of this power, this power that may not respond and which is the power of the mother. In other words, the positions have switched. The mother has become real and the object has become symbolic. The object now stands above all as a token of the gift from the maternal power. Thenceforth, the object possesses its satisfying property in two different realms. It is doubly a possible object of satisfaction. It satisfies a need, as surely it did before, but it also symbolises an auspicious power. This is exceedingly important because one of the most cumbrous notions in all analytic theory, now that it has become, as one slogan has it, genetic psychoanalysis, is the notion of the omnipotence of thought, of all-powerfulness. This has been imputed to everything that is most foreign to us. Is it conceivable that the child should have some notion of all-powerfulness? He does perhaps possess the essential part of it, but this doesn’t mean that the all-powerfulness at issue is his own. That would be absurd. Entertaining as much leads into dead-ends. The all-powerfulness at issue is the mother’s. At the moment I’m describing for you, that of the mother becom­ ing real, it is she who is all-powerful and not the child. It’s a decisive moment, when the mother passes into reality from an utterly archaic symbolisation. At that moment, the mother can give anything at all, but that the child should possess a notion of his all-powerfulness is quite erroneous and utterly unthinkable. Not only does nothing in his development indicate that he should possess such a thing, but indeed practically everything that interests us in this development and in the mishaps that crop up along the way serve to show us that this notion of his all-powerfulness and the failures it might meet do not amount to anything in the question. What counts, as you will see, are the shortcomings and the disappointments that affect maternal all-powerfulness. This investigation might strike you as somewhat theoretical, but at the very least it has the advantage of introducing essential

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distinctions and of making openings that are not those that are commonly put to use. You are going to see now what this leads us to and what we can already indicate therein. Here, then, is the child in the presence of something that he has made a reality as a power. What hitherto stood on the plane of the first presence-absence connotation all of a sudden passes over to something that can refuse, yet which harbours everything the subject may need. And even if he has no need of it, it becomes sym­ bolic from the moment it depends on this power.

3 Let’s pose the question now from a quite different point of departure. Freud tells us that in the world of objects there is one that has an utterly and paradoxically decisive function, namely the phallus. This object is defined as imaginary. In no case whatsoever is it possible to conflate it with the penis in its reality. Strictly speaking, it is its form, its image, in erection. This phallus has such a decisive role that both its presence and the yearning to which it gives rise, its instantiation in the imaginary, turn out to be more important - so it seems - for those members of humanity who lack one, namely women, than for those who can be sure that they possess the reality thereof, namely men, and whose entire sexual life is nevertheless subordinated to the fact that imaginarily they well and truly assume the use of it, and do so as licit, as permitted. This is a given. Let’s consider now our mother and child, who for Michael and Alice Balint form but a single totality of needs, just like Jean Cocteau’s Mortimer couple who have but one heart between them. Nevertheless, here on the blackboard I’m keeping them apart in two circles that do not intersect. Freud tells us that among a woman’s essential missing objects is the phallus, and that this bears the closest relation to her relation­ ship with her child. This is for the simple reason that if woman finds satisfaction in her child, it’s precisely insomuch as she finds in him something, the penis, that more or less succeeds in calming her need for the phallus, that saturates this need.3 Should we fail to take this into account we misconstrue not only Freud’s teaching but also something that is manifest in experience from one instant to the next. So, here we have mother and child in a certain dialectical relation. The child expects something from his mother and he also receives something from her. In this dialectic, we cannot avoid introducing the following. Let’s say, roughly speaking, in the way the Balints word it, that the child wants to be loved for what he is.

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The question is this. What happens, to the extent that, for the mother, the image of the phallus is not fully reducible to the image of the child? What happens in this double vision, this division of the so-called primordial desired object? Far from being harmonic, the mother’s relation to the child is doubled, on the one hand by the need for a certain imaginary saturation and, on the other, by what is effectively there in terms of real, effective relations with the child at a primordial, instinctive level, which ultimately remain mythical. For the mother, there is always something that remains irreducible in what is at stake. Ultimately, if we follow Freud, the child, as real, symbolises the image. More precisely, the three terms are here in the fact that the child, as real, should take on for her the symbolic function of her imaginary need. All sorts of variations can emerge here. All sorts of situations that have already been structured exist between child and mother. Once the mother has been introduced into the real in the state of a power, the possibility opens up for the child of an intermediary object as such, as a gift-object. The question is, at what point, how, and by what mode of access, can the child be introduced directly to the symbolic-imaginary-real structure in the way that it has been produced for the mother? In other words, at what point can the child enter - and assume in a way that is, as we shall see, loosely symbolised - the imaginary situation, which is also real on account of what the phallus is for the mother? At what point can the child to a certain extent feel himself dispossessed of something that he demands from the mother in noticing that it is not he who is loved but something else, a particular image? There is something that goes further here. The child makes this phallic image a reality upon his own self, and this is where the nar­ cissistic relation strictly speaking intervenes. When the child grasps sexual difference, for example, to what extent will this experience come to be articulated with what is offered him in the presence of the mother and her actions when this third imaginary term is recognised, which for the mother is the phallus? Furthermore, the notion that the mother lacks this phallus, that she herself is desiring not only of something other than him but desiring tout court, that is, afflicted in her power, will be more decisive for the subject than anything else. Last time I told you about the Observation o f a Phobia, the phobia of a young girl. I’m going to tell you right away what interest this holds. Given that it was wartime, and that the author is a pupil of Anna Freud, conditions were such that the child could be observed from beginning to end, and by a fine observer. She’s a fine observer

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because she understands nothing. And she understands nothing because Anna Freud’s theory is wrong. Consequently, this brings her face-to-face with the facts in a state of astonishment that consti­ tutes the fruitfulness of the observation. So, everything is noted down from one day to the next. The young girl - at the age of two years, five months - having noticed that boys have a widdler, as it is put in the observation on little Hans, sets to conducting herself throughout a whole period from a posi­ tion of rivalry. She does all she can to be able to do the same as the little boys do. The child had been separated from her mother, not just because of the Blitz but because her mother had lost her husband at the start of the war. Her mother would come to see her, since contact is not excluded, and the presence-absence was regular. When she came, the games she played with her child were games of teasing approach. She would sidle up to her slowly and hesitat­ ingly. You can see her function as symbolic mother. Everything was going very well. The child had the real objects she wanted when her mother was not there, and when the mother was there she played her role of symbolic mother. So, the young girl discovers that boys have a widdler. Sure enough, something happens. She wants to imitate them and to be given a boy’s bicki to urinate with. A fuss ensues, but which is entirely without consequence. Now, the observation is presented as an Observation o f a Phobia, and indeed one night the child was to wake up seized with terror at the presence of a dog in her bed that wanted to bite her. She asks to change beds, saying she should be put in another one. This observa­ tion of the phobia carries on for a while. Does the phobia follow the discovery of the absence of the penis? Why are we asking this? We ask this question because the dog is clearly a dog that bites the genitals. We know this insomuch as we are going to analyse the child, that is, insomuch as we are going to follow and comprehend what she tells us. Her first sentence of any length and articulation - this is a child with a slight retardation - is to say, Doggie bite naughty boy leg, and this was at the height of the phobia. You can see the relationship between the symbolisation and the object of the phobia. Why is it a dog? We shall speak about this presently, but what I want to note right away is that the dog is there as an agent that takes away what initially was more or less accepted as absent. Are we going to cut corners and say that what is at issue in the phobia is merely a passage to the level of Law? That is to say, is this merely the intervention of an element that, as I was saying earlier, is endowed with power so as to account for what is absent, and absent on account of having been bitten off?

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The schema that I’m trying to set out for you today motions in this direction and allows us to get over the hurdle by taking a look at this item that seems exceedingly cursory. Dr Ernest Jones tells us very succinctly that, after all, for the child the superego is perhaps merely an indirect vent, while the anxieties are primordial, primi­ tive and imaginary, and in some sense he there reverts to a sort of artifice. It’s the return for a moral contravention. In other words, it’s culture as a whole with all its prohibitions. It’s something fallen by the wayside that serves only to shield what is most fundamen­ tal, namely the anxieties in their uncontained state which in some sense find some relief there. There is something accurate in this, namely the mechanism of phobia. But the mechanism of phobia is the mechanism of phobia, and to extend it, as does Monsieur Pasche at the end of the article I was telling you about, to the point of saying that the mechanism of phobia is something that ultimately explains the death instinct, for example, or even that dream images are in a certain respect the subject clothing his anxieties and, as it were, personalising them, amounts always to reverting to the same idea, a misrecognition of the symbolic order in the notion that it is merely a kind of clothing, a kind of praetexta over something more fundamental. Is this what I want to tell you by drafting in this Observation o f a Phobia? No, it is not. What is interesting in the observation is that it indicates with pre­ cision the mother’s absence one month prior to the outbreak of the phobia. Certainly, the time it took for the phobia to burst forth was much longer. Four months pass by following her discovery of her aphallicism, but something else had to happen in this interval. First, her mother had to go to the hospital for an operation. The mother is no longer the symbolic mother. She has bowed out. She comes back, and she plays again with her child, and as yet nothing occurs. Then she comes back in very poor health . . . leaning on a stick. She no longer has the same presence, and is not her cheerful self. Nor can there be any resumption of the relations of approach and with­ drawal that were a sufficient ground for the whole attachment with the child, and which used to be played out on a weekly basis. And so it was at that moment, in a third period, much later in time, that the phobia was to break out. So, thanks to the observers, we find out that the Oedipus complex comes not from the aphallicism, from the second break in the alter­ nating of the mother’s coming-and-coming-back as such, but that it also required that the mother should appear as someone who could lack. Her lack was inscribed in the child’s reaction and behaviour, that is, she was very sad and had to be reassured, but there was no phobia. It was when she saw her mother again, weak and leaning

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on a stick, weary and unwell, that the very next day the dream of the dog erupted and the phobia set in. Nothing in the observation is more significant and more paradoxical than this, except for one point that I shall tell you about now. We are going to speak again about the way the therapists tackled the phobia, given what they thought they had understood. I simply want to point out the question that arises when considering the ante­ cedents to the phobia. From what moment is the phobia necessary, and why is it sufficient? It is when the mother lacks the phallus that something is determined that is balanced out in the phobia. This is another question that we shall look at next time. There is another point that is no less striking. Later, after the phobia, the Blitz comes to an end and the mother takes back her child and remarries. The young girl finds herself with a new father and a new brother, her stepfather’s son.4 The brother she has sud­ denly acquired is older than her, by about five years, and he gives himself over to all kinds of games, both adoratory and violent, including the request that they expose themselves to each other naked. He does something to her that is clearly linked to his inter­ est in the young girl insomuch as she is a-penian. Whereupon the psychotherapist shows some astonishment - why, this might have been a fine occasion for a relapse of the phobia! Indeed, the environmental theory on which Anna Freud’s thera­ peutics is founded has it that discord sets in to the extent that the ego is more or less informed of reality. Would the presence of the manbrother, a character who is not only phallic but also penis-bearing, be an occasion for a relapse? Far from it. There is not a trace of mental disturbance and she has never been in finer shape. Moreover, we are told exactly why this is. It’s that she is clearly favoured by her mother over the boy. Nevertheless, the father is someone who is sufficiently present to introduce a new element, which we haven’t yet spoken about, but which is essentially linked to the function of the phobia, namely a symbolic element beyond the relations of the mother’s power or powerlessness. This is the father properly speaking, himself bringing out from his relations with the mother the notion of power. In short, he is substituted for what seems to have been saturated by the phobia, namely what is feared in the castrating animal as such that has proven in all its necessity to have been the essential element of articulation that enabled the child to come through the deep crisis she had entered when faced with maternal powerlessness. The child then finds her need saturated by the maternal presence and, what is more, by something else. Does the therapist manage to see this something else with any clarity? This relationship in which she is already the brother’s girl

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brings with it all sorts of pathological possibilities. We can glimpse here, in a different aspect, that she has wholly become something that is worth more than the brother. She is to become the girl-phallus which is spoken about so often. It will be a matter of finding out to what extent thereafter she might not be implicated in this imaginary function. But for the time being no essential need is to be filled by the articulation of the phallic fantasy, because the father is there and he suffices for this. He suffices to maintain enough distance between the three terms of the mother-child-phallus relationship for the subject not to have to give of her own self. She doesn’t have to put anything of her own into it to maintain this distance. How is this distance maintained? Along what path? Through what identification and by what artifice? This is what we shall start to tackle next time by looking again at this observation, which will enable us to move into what is most characteristic of preoedipal object relations, namely the birth of the object as a fetish. 12 December 1956

V O N A N A L Y S IS A S B U N D L I N G A N D THE CO NSEQ UENCES THEREOF A presupposition about the drive The essence of the anaclitic relationship The fetishist solution Fever pitches of perversion A phobic subject’s transitory perversion The analytic conception of object relations has already become something of an historical reality. What I’ve been trying to show you takes this up in a sense that is in part different and in part the same, but the mere fact that here it is being inserted into a different whole lends it a different signification. At the point we’ve reached it is only right to punctuate with some emphasis how the object relation has been placed at the centre of a conception of analysis held by a group who have been pushing this increasingly to the fore. On recently rereading some of their articles I saw that this formulation, which over the years has been gathering pace and assurance, has now culminated in something that is being very assertively voiced. It so happens that in a few articles I expressed the ironic wish that someone might truly set out the notion of the object relation in the way it is being reckoned in a certain orientation. This wish has since been amply fulfilled by more than one person, and while a formula­ tion has been given by Bouvet, who introduced it in connection with obsessional neurosis in a way that rather softens it down, others too have made an effort at precision.1

1 The article by Messrs Pierre Marty and Michel Fain on the Importance du role de la motricite dans la relation d’objet, which was

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published in the January-June 1955 issue of the Revue frangaise de psychanalyse, offers us a vivid example of the dominant conception. I’m going to summarise this work for you, with the forewarning that when you read the article things will certainly strike you as going much further than in the few words I can utter here. The relationship between the one analysing and the one being analysed is conceived of at the start as a relationship that is estab­ lished between a subject, the patient, and an external object, the analyst. To put it in our vocabulary, the analyst is here conceived of as real. The whole tension of the analytic situation is conceived of on the basis of this couple being, in itself alone, a driving element of the analytic development. Between a subject, whether or not he is on the couch, and the external object that is the analyst, there can in principle be established and manifested only what is called the primitive drive relationship, the relationship that is normally manifested - this is the presupposition of the development of the analytic relationship - through motor activity. It is on the side of faint traces that are carefully observed during each stage of the subject’s motor reaction that, in this article, we find the last word of what happens at the level of the drive, which is in some sense to be localised and vividly felt by the analyst. Insomuch as the subject is forced to contain his movements through the rela­ tionship that is established by the analytic convention, it is at this level that what is manifested, namely the drive in the course of its emergence, is localised in the analyst’s mind. The situation is at bottom conceived of as something that can be exteriorised only in an erotic aggression. This doesn’t become mani­ fest, because it has been agreed that it will not become manifest, but it is desirable that its reception should spring up, so to speak, from one moment to the next. It is precisely to the extent that, within the analytic convention, due to the fact of the fundamental rule, the motor manifestation of the drive cannot occur, that we shall be allowed to perceive what interferes in this situation, a situation that is considered to be a constituting one. It is very precisely formulated for us that a relationship with an internal object is superposed onto the relationship with the external object. This is how it is expressed in the article I’ve just cited. The subject has a certain relationship with an internal object, which is invariably considered to be the person who is present but captured somehow in the subject’s pre­ established imaginary mechanisms, thus becoming the object of a fantasmatic relationship. It is insomuch as discordance is intro­ duced, between this imaginary object and the real object, that the analyst will be weighed up and gauged from one instant to the next, and that he in turn will model his interventions. Since according to

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this conception no one else comes into play in the analytic situation besides those who are there, one of the two authors - who in this respect is followed by all the rest in the ensuing discussion - is led to highlight the notion of neurotic distance that the subject imposes on the object. The fantasmatic internal object, at least in the suspended position it holds in the way it is experienced by the subject, will be reduced to the real distance that is the distance between subject and analyst. It is to this extent that the subject will make his analyst a reality as a real presence. The authors stretch this quite far. I’ve already alluded several times to the fact that one of these authors, admittedly during an aspirant phase of his career, had spoken of the crucial turning point in one analysis as the moment when the person he was analysing had been able to smell him. This was no metaphor. It wasn’t about sensing him psychologically. It was the moment when the patient smelled his odour. I must say that the wafting in of this relationship of subodoration is one of the mathematical consequences of such a conception of the analytic relationship.1 In this restrained position, within which a distance - here conceived of as active and present in relation to the analyst - has gradually to become real, it is quite certain that one of the most direct modes of relation is most surely this remote apprehending that is yielded by subodorating. I am not merely taking up a single example here. This has been repeated many times. It seems that within this group they are tending more and more to give pivotal importance to modes of apprehend­ ing such as these. Here, then, is how the analytic position is being regarded in this situation, which is the situation of a real relation between two pro­ tagonists in a closed space, where they are separated by a kind of conventional barrier and where something has to be made real. I’m talking about the theoretical formulation of things. We shall see afterwards what practical consequences this has. First, it is quite clear that such an exorbitant conception cannot be pushed to its ultimate consequences. On the other hand, if what I’ve been teaching you is true, then even when the practitioner shares this conception, the situation in which he operates cannot for all that really become what this conception stipulates. It is not enough, of course, just to conceive of it as such for it to be so. It will be pulled out of shape due to how it has been conceived of, but what it really is nevertheless remains what I’ve been trying to express for you by means of my diagram, which makes the symbolic relationship and the imaginary relationship intervene and crisscross, one serving in some sense as a filter to the other. The situation is not annulled, however much it is misconstrued, and this shows quite clearly the

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insufficiency of their conception. But conversely, the insufficiency of this conception can have consequences on the way that the whole situation is seen through to a successful end. This is a special example, which I’m going to highlight for you today, to show what this can effectively lead to, but here already we have a situation that is conceived of as a real situation, in which there is an operation of reducing the imaginary to the real. A certain number of phenomena occur through this operation, which allow for a situating of the different stages at which the subject has remained more or less stuck, or fixated, on this imaginary relationship. In this way the various positions are exhausted, which are essentially imaginary positions, foremost among them being the pregenital relation which becomes increasingly essential to what is explored in the analysis. There is just one thing that receives no elucidation whatsoever in this conception of the analytic situation, and this is no small matter because everything lies therein. This thing can be expressed as follows. It is not known why, in this situation, nothing is said of the fact of the function, strictly speaking, of language and of speech in this position. On no account does this mean that it can be bypassed. Furthermore, what we shall also see coming to light is the special value that is given to the simple impulsive verbalisation, to these sorts of plea to the analyst along the lines of - Why won’t you answer me? You will see this being punctuated most precisely in what the authors say and in the bits of text they quote. A verbalisa­ tion only holds any importance for them in so far as it is impulsive, that is, in so far as it is a motor manifestation. In what will this operation culminate, this operation of setting the distance with regard to the internal object, and with which tech­ nique is expected to comply? Our diagram enables us to form a conception of this.

The line a-a' concerns the imaginary relationship, which refers the subject - who is more or less discordant, decomposed, and exposed to fragmentation - to the unifying image of the little other,

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a narcissistic image. On the line S-A, the subject’s relationship with the Other is produced, though this is not yet a solid line because it needs to be established. This Other is not merely the other party who is there, but is literally the locus of speech. This is so inasmuch as, already, structured in the speaking relationship, this big Other stands beyond the other that you apprehend imaginarily. This sup­ posed Other is the subject as such, the subject in which your speech is constituted because it is able not only to greet it and to perceive it, but to respond to it. It is on this line that everything belonging to the transferential realm is established, with the imaginary playing its role as a filter, and even as an obstacle. Of course, in every neurosis, the subject already has, as it were, his own set functioning. His set functioning in relation to the image serves him when it comes both to hearing and to not hearing what is there to be heard in the locus of speech. Let’s say no more than the following. What happens if all our effort and interest is focused solely on the imaginary relation that lies here in this transversal position in relation to the advent of speech? What happens if everything is misrecognised when it comes to the relationship between the imaginary tension and what has to be made a reality, what has to be brought to light, with respect to the unconscious symbolic relation - because here lies precisely the whole analytic doctrine in a potential state, and because there is something here that must allow this symbolic relation to be realised as history as much as an avowal? What happens if we abandon the notion of the imaginary relationship functioning in relation to this impos­ sibility of symbolic advent that constitutes neurosis, and if we fail to take them into account constantly in their mutual functioning? Well, what one can in principle expect to hear is what the authors who hold this conception speak of in terms of distance with respect to this object, which is precisely set to one certain end. Should we turn our interest to this distance only in order to abolish it, were such a thing possible, we would come to a certain result that indeed has already been borne out by subjects who have come into our hands after having passed through this style of apprehension and test. One thing is absolutely certain, which is that in at least a certain number of cases, these being precisely cases of obsessional neurosis, this way of situating the development of the analytic situation entirely within a pursuit of the reduction of this notorious distance - a distance they consider to be typical of the object relation in obsessional neurosis leads to what may be called paradoxical perverse reactions. We are now seeing phenomena that are quite out of the ordinary, which scarcely existed in the analytic literature before this techni­ cal mode was brought to the fore. I’m thinking for example of the

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precipitated outbreak of a homosexual attachment to an object, one that is in some sense quite paradoxical in the subject’s relation­ ship, which even lingers there in the manner of a kind of artefact, a thing that has crystallised around objects that are lying around within his reach. This can display for some time a somewhat durable persistence. None of this is astonishing if we refer to the imaginary triad. 2 At the point to which matters were brought last time, you were able to see a line of research being sketched out concerning the imaginary triad of mother-child-phallus. This was for us to stay at the level of a prelude to the bringing into play of the symbolic relationship that will be wrought only with the fourth function, that of the father, which is introduced through the dimension of the Oedipus complex. The triangle is itself preoedipal. I stress that this is only being iso­ lated here in an abstract way. It is of interest to us in its development only to the extent that it is subsequently taken up in the quartet that is constituted by the paternal function entering the fray, on the basis of what we may call the child’s fundamental disappointment. This happens when he recognises - we have left open the question of how - not only that he is not his mother’s sole object, but also that his mother’s point of interest is the phallus, in a way that has greater or lesser accentuation depending on the case. On the basis of this recognition, he is to realise in a second moment precisely that she is deprived of this object, that she lacks it. This is the point we reached last time. I showed you this with reference to the case of a transitory phobia in a very young girl, which is highly favourable to the study of phobia because it stands on the frontier of the Oedipal relationship. We were able to see this frontier in the wake of a double disap­ pointment. First, there is an imaginary disappointment, which is the child’s ascertaining the phallus that she lacks. Next, in a second moment, comes the perception that her mother, who is on the frontier between the symbolic and the real, also lacks the phallus. Then comes the child’s appeal for this unsustainable relationship to be sustained. The phobia breaks out with the intervention of the fantasmatic creature, the dog, which steps in as the one that is responsible for the whole situation, strictly speaking. It bites. It castrates. It is owing to the dog that the whole situation is thinkable and symbolically liveable, at least for a provisional period. What position is possible when, on this occasion, the yoking of

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the three imaginary objects is broken? There is more than one pos­ sible solution, and a solution is always called upon, whether the situation is normal or abnormal. What happens in the normal Oedipal situation? It is through the intermediary of a certain rivalry, punctuated in the subject’s relations with the father, that something will be established that will mean that the subject will find him- or herself being conferred this phallic might, in various ways depending on the subject’s posi­ tion as a boy or as a girl. For the boy, this is altogether clear. The conferring of this phallic might happens within certain limits, which are precisely those that introduced the subject to the symbolic relationship. I told you the other day that, for the mother, the child as a real being is captured as a symbol of her lack of object, of her imaginary wish for the phallus. The normal outcome of this situation is that the child receives, symbolically, the phallus he is in need of. But for him to be in need of it, it was necessary for him first to be threatened by the castrating agency, which is originatively and essentially the paternal agency. It is within a constitution on the symbolic plane, on the plane of a sort of pact of entitlement to the phallus, that this virile identification is established, which lies at the base of a norma­ tive Oedipal relationship. I will slip in a side-remark here concerning the originative formu­ lations that come from Freud’s pen when introducing the distinction between the anaclitic relationship and the narcissistic relationship. They are somewhat peculiar, and even paradoxical. In the libidinal relationship in adolescents, Freud tells us that there are two types of love. There is anaclitic love, which bears the stamp of a primal dependence on the mother, and the narcissistic love object, which is modelled on the image that is the subject’s own self-image, the narcissistic image. It is this image that we have been striving to develop here by showing its root in the specular relation to the other party. The word anaclitic, even though we owe it to Freud, is ill wrought, for in Greek it really doesn’t have the meaning that Freud gives it, this being indicated by the German word Anlehnung. It’s a relation­ ship of propping against. Furthermore, this gives rise to all sorts of misunderstanding, some having pushed this propping against so far as to turn it into something that is ultimately a kind of defensive reaction. But let’s leave this aside. In fact, when one reads Freud, one can see that this is well and truly about the need for a prop and for something that indeed asks only to open out on the side of a relationship of dependence. If we press further, we shall see that there are peculiar contra­

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dictions in the two contrasting formulations that Freud provides for these two modes of relationship, the anaclitic and the narcis­ sistic. Rather curiously, with regard to the anaclitic relationship he is led to speak of a need to be loved much more than a need to love. Conversely, and altogether paradoxically, the narcissist all of a sudden appears in a light that surprises us. Indeed, Freud is drawn to an element of activity that is inherent to the highly particular behav­ iour of the narcissist. He appears to be active insomuch as he always misrecognises the other party to a certain degree. Freud adorns him, in contradistinction to the anaclitic type, with the need to love, and gives him its attribute, which suddenly and paradoxically turns this into a sort of natural site for what in another vocabulary we would call the oblative, which cannot help but disconcert. I think we will have to come back to this, but once again, it is in the misrecognition of the position of intersubjective elements that these paradoxical perspectives find their origin and, by the same stroke, their justification. What is called the anaclitic relationship - there where it is of inter­ est, that is, in its persistence in the adult - is always conceived of as a sort of pure and simple survival, or prolongation, of what is called an infantile position. In his article on Libidinal Types, Freud refers to this position as neither more nor less than an erotic position, which shows very well that this is the most open position. Its essence will be misconstrued if one fails to notice the following. It is precisely in so far as, in the symbolic relationship, the male subject acquires, is invested with, the phallus as such, as belonging to him and as being legitimately wielded by him, that he becomes the bearer of the object of desire for the object that succeeds the maternal object. This object that succeeds the maternal object is the re-found object, marked by the relationship with the primal mother, which in the normal posi­ tion of the Oedipus complex - this is how it is, in principle, from the first in what Freud expounded - will invariably be the object of the male subject, namely woman. The position becomes anaclitic in so far as it is upon him, upon the phallus of which he is now the master, the representative, the custodian, that woman depends. The relationship of dependence is established in so far as, identify­ ing with the other party, with the objectal partner, the subject knows that he is indispensable for this partner. He knows that he is the one who has satisfied her, and he alone, because in principle he is the sole custodian of this object that is the mother’s object of desire. It is commensurate with an achievement of the Oedipal position that the subject finds himself in the stance that, from a certain standpoint, may be qualified as optimal with respect to the re-found object, the successor to the primal maternal object, and in relation to whom he

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will become the indispensable object, knowing himself to be indis­ pensable. One portion of the erotic life of subjects who partake of this libidinal aspect is wholly conditioned by the need, once it has been experienced and assumed, of the Other, of the maternal woman, in so far she needs to find the object in him, this object being the phallic object. This is what forms the essence of the anaclitic relation­ ship in contradistinction to the narcissistic relationship. This is a mere parenthesis designed to show how useful it is always to bring into play the dialectic of the relationship between these first three objects and the fourth term that encompasses them and binds them into the symbolic relationship, namely the father. This term introduces the symbolic relationship and, with it, the possibility of transcending the relationship of frustration or lack of object, thereby shifting up into the relationship of castration which is some­ thing altogether different. That is to say, it introduces this lack of object into a dialectic, into something that gives and takes, that instates, invests and confers the dimension of a pact, of an interdic­ tion, of a law, and in particular the incest prohibition. Let’s come back to our topic. What happens when, in the absence of the symbolic relationship, the imaginary relationship becomes the rule and the measure of the entire anaclitic relationship? Well, exactly the following. When discord, when non-binding or the destruction of bonds, come about for whatever reason in the progressive devel­ opment of historical incidents in the child’s relationship with the mother in respect of the third-party object - the phallic object that is both what woman lacks and what the child has uncovered as lacking for the mother - there are other modes by which this coherence can be re-established. There are imaginary modes, which are atypical. For example, there is the child’s identification with the mother. On the basis of an imaginary displacement in relation to the mater­ nal partner, the child will make the phallic choice in her place, will assume for her the clinamen towards the phallic object as such. The scheme that I’m giving you here is none other than the scheme for fetishist perversion. This is one example of a solution, if you like, but there is a more direct path. In other words, further solutions exist to access this lack of object. Already, on the imaginary plane, this lack of object constitutes the human path to a realisation that cedes man to his existence, that is, to something that can be called into question. This is already something different from the animal realm and from all possible animal relationships on the imaginary plane. This imaginary access to the lack of object is achieved under certain conditions that will in some sense be punctuated, and which are extra-historical, which is how the fever pitch of perversion always presents.

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Perversion has the property of bringing about a certain mode of access to what lies beyond the image of the other that typifies the human dimension, but it does so only in such moments as are always produced by the fever pitches of perversion, moments that are syncopated within the subject’s history. There is a kind of con­ vergence or build-up towards such moments, each of which can be significantly qualified as a passage a I’acte. During this passage a I'acte, something is brought about that is both a fusion and a point of access to what lies beyond, which is strictly speaking the trans-individual dimension that Freud’s anaclitic theory formulated as such. Freud’s theory teaches us to call by the name Eros the union of two individuals, each of whom is tom away from himself and, for an instant that is more or less fragile and transitory, even virtual, finds himself a constituent of this unit. A unity such as this is brought about at certain moments in perversion, but what is specific to perversion is precisely that it can only ever be brought about in these moments that are not ordained symbolically. In fetishism, the subject finds his object at last, his exclusive object, and says as much himself. It is all the more exclusive and perfectly satisfying in that it is inanimate. This way, at least, he will be calm in the knowledge that it will not disappoint him. To love a slipper is really to have the object of one’s desires in easy reach. An object that is itself bereft of any subjective, intersubjective, or even trans-subjective property is more reliable. When it comes to bringing about the condition of lack as such, the fetishist solution is incontestably one of the most conceivable conditions within this perspective, and it is indeed transformed into a reality. We also know - because what is specific to imaginary relation­ ships is that they are always perfectly reciprocal, since this is a mirror relation - that in the fetishist we must expect to see arising from time to time the position, not of identification with the mother, but of identification with the object. This is effectively what we shall see being produced in the course of an analysis of a fetishist, for this position is as such what is invariably non-satisfying in the utmost. That for a short while the mesmerising illumination of the object that the maternal object was should be something that satisfies the subject is not enough for an entire erotic equilibrium to be estab­ lished around it. Moreover, if he identifies with the object for this brief moment, he will effectively lose his primal object, namely the mother, and will reckon himself to be a destructive object for her. This perpetual game, this profound double vision, marks each and every apprehending of the fetishist manifestation. This is so visible that someone like Phyllis Greenacre, who has sought seriously to look into the foundation of the fetishist

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relationship, tells us that it seems as though we are in the presence of a subject who is showing us with excessive speed his own image in two opposite mirrors. She comes out with it like that, without her really knowing why. It comes out of the blue, but right away she has the sense that this is how it is. The fetishist is never where he is, for the good reason that he has left his place. He has gone over to a specular relationship between the mother and the phallus, where he is both one and the other in alternation. This is a position that does not manage to stabilise unless there is some grasp of this unique symbol that is privileged yet at the same time impermanent, this being the precise object of the fetishism, that is to say, this something that symbolises the phallus. It is therefore on the plane of relationships that, while they are not identical, are at the very least analogous, and which we can conceive of as being essentially perverse in nature, that the results will surely emerge, at least the transitory results, in the context of a certain way of handling the analytic relationship. This is what happens when this relationship is focused entirely on the object relation in so far as only the imaginary and the real are allowed to intervene, and when the whole focus of the imaginary relationship is set upon what is claimed to be real about the presence of the analyst. This is what we are going to see now.

3 In my Rome report, I alluded to how this mode of the object rela­ tion is being used in analysis. I compared it to what I called a sort of bundling taken to the extreme as a psychological test. This short passage perhaps went unnoticed, but I enlighten the reader in a footnote that specifies that bundling is a very precise practice, which still exists in these sorts of cultural islet where old customs have weathered well. Stendhal speaks of it as a kind of par­ ticularity of Swiss fantasists, also to be found in southern Germany, places that are not unimportant from the geographical point of view.2 This bundling is a conception of love relations. It is a technique, a pattern of relations between male and female that consists of the following. Under certain conditions, for instance when an associate comes into the group in a privileged way, it is allowed, as a show of hospitality, that someone of the household, generally the daughter, may extend to him the offer of sharing her bed, on the condition that there should be no contact between them. The word bundling comes from the fact that more often than not the daughter is wrapped in a

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bed sheet, such that all conditions of approach are possible save the final one. What could pass for a mere blithe and fanciful tradition that perhaps we might regret that we are not participating in - it could be amusing - warrants our attention because ultimately there is nothing artificial in saying that now, seventeen or eighteen years after Freud’s death, the analytic situation has come paradoxically to be conceived of and formalised in this manner. Fain and Marty’s article reports on one session, noting down all the patient’s movements insomuch as they manifest something of an oriented impulse that is more or less held back, at greater or lesser distance, from the analyst who is there, behind her back. There is something rather striking here. Their text came out after I wrote my report, which proves I forced nothing in saying that it is to this end, and to these psychological consequences, that the practice of analysis was being reduced within one particular conception. We find these paradoxes in the habits and customs of certain cultural islets, for example there is a protestant sect of Dutch origin that someone has studied in depth, which has maintained very precisely the local customs linked to one religious unit, the Amish sect. Without doubt all of this emerges today in remnants that are not understood, but we can find their fully coordi­ nated, deliberated and organised symbolic formulation across a whole tradition that may be termed religious and even symbolic. Everything we know about the practice of courtly love and the whole sphere in which it was localised in the Middle Ages implies a very rigorous technical elaboration of the approach to love that entailed a long practice of restraint in the presence of the loved object, aiming to make a reality of what lies beyond, which is what is sought in love and is specifically erotic. Once one has uncovered the key to all these techniques and traditions, one finds their points of emergence thoroughly formulated in other cultural spheres, because this is a realm of search in the realisation of love that has been set out with great deliberation on many occasions in the history of humanity. We do not need to pose the question here of what is ordained and effectively reached. Nor is there any doubt that the fact that this aims at something that tries to go beyond physiological corner-cutting, if it may be expressed in this way, should hold a certain interest. This is not something that is being introduced without a reference that allows us to locate with precision both this metaphor and, at the same time, the possibility of integrating across various levels, that is to say, in a loosely conscious fashion, what they make of this use of the imaginary relationship as such. This relationship is perhaps itself employed deliberately. It is a use, as it were, of practices that may

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seem perverse to unworldly eyes, but which in reality are no more so than any other regulating of the approach to love in a defined sphere of customs and patterns, as they say. This is something that deserves to be indicated as a reference point, so that we may know where to situate ourselves. Let’s turn now to a case that is set out in the small Bulletin I mentioned last time, which reports questions posed in all sincerity, by the members of a particular group, with respect to the object relation. We have here from the pen of someone who has assumed a certain rank in the analytic community, Mme Ruth Lebovici, the observation of what she quite rightly calls a phobic subject. This phobic subject, whose activity was already fairly restricted, has come to a state of almost complete inactivity. His most manifest symptom is the fear of being too tall, and he presents always with an extremely bent-over posture. Nearly everything has become impos­ sible for him in his professional context. He lives housebound, but nevertheless has a mistress, fifteen years his senior and who was purveyed to him by his mother. It is within this constellation that the analyst takes him on and starts to broach the question with him. The diagnosis of the subject is made with finesse. This diagnosis of phobia brooks no difficulty, despite the paradoxical fact that the phobogenic object in its foremost aspect does not seem to lie on the outside. Nevertheless, it does lie on the outside inasmuch as at one point we can see a recurring dream appear which is the model for an exteriorised anxiousness. In this particular case, the object is discovered only on a second approach. It is a phobic object that is perfectly recognisable in that it is marvellously illustrated by the substitute for the paternal image that utterly falls short in this case. Indeed, after a while, an image is obtained of a man in armour, who is equipped with a particularly aggressive instrument that is none other than a Fly-Tox pump sprayer for wiping out phobic objects insects. The subject reveals that he harbours a fear of being pursued and strangled in the dark by this man in armour, and this fear is no small matter in the overall balance of this phobic structure. The analyst who has this subject in her charge has published the observation under the title Perversion sexuelle transitoire au cours d’un traitement psychanalytique. Therefore, there is no forcing on my part when I introduce the question of the perverse reaction, since the author herself accentuates this as the focus of interest in the observation. The author is ill at ease, to say the least. Not only is she ill at ease, but she has seen very clearly that the reaction she calls perverse this is a label, of course - arose in precise circumstances in which she plays a part. The fact that she poses the question in relation to

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this moment proves she is aware that this is where the question lies. What happened? Having finally seen the phobogenic object come to light - the man in armour - she interprets it as being the phallic mother. Why the phallic mother when this is absolutely the man in armour with all his heraldic aspects? Throughout the entire obser­ vation, the questions that the author asks herself are set out with a fidelity that I believe to be beyond doubt, and in any case they are carefully underscored. In particular, the author asks herself whether perhaps one interpretation that she made was not the right one. Indeed, soon after this interpretation, a perverse reaction becomes apparent and we are then engaged in nothing less than a three-year period throughout which the subject developed, stage by stage, a perverse fantasy. This consisted first in imagining himself being seen urinating by a woman who, greatly aroused, would then solicit him for sexual relations. Next, there was a reversal of this position, with the subject watching - sometimes while he would masturbate, some­ times not - a woman urinating.3 Lastly, at a third stage, this position was effectively made a reality when the subject found in a cinema a small box room providentially equipped with a hole through which he could effectively watch the women in the toilets on the other side of the partition. The author herself wonders whether her way of interpreting might have had a determining value in precipitating what at first assumes the appearance of a fantasmatic crystallisation of something that clearly forms part of the subject’s composite elements, this being not the phallic mother but rather the mother in her relation with the phallus. But the key to this idea that a phallic mother is involved is given to us by the author when she wonders about the overall handling of the treatment, and observes that she was far more pro­ hibitive than his mother had ever been. Everything shows that the entity of the phallic mother has been produced here by what the author herself refers to as her own countertransferential positions. If one follows the analysis closely, there can be absolutely no doubt about this. Concomitant with the development of this imaginary relationship, which of course developed from this analytic faux pas, let’s see what is involved on the analyst’s side. First, the subject reports a dream in which, finding himself in the presence of a woman from his past for whom he claims to have had amorous inclinations, he finds himself impeded by the presence of another female subject who also played a role in his personal history in that he had once seen her urinate in front of him.4 This hap­ pened late in his childhood, that is, in his teenage years. The analyst intervenes by saying - No doubt you prefer to turn your attentions to a woman by watching her urinate rather than make the effort o f going

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after another woman who might be to your liking but who happens to be married. By means of this intervention the analyst thinks she is reintroducing the truth, but in a somewhat strained manner because the male character is only indicated in the dream through asso­ ciations. That is to say, the supposed husband of the mother, the husband who would reintroduce the Oedipus complex, intervenes in a way that has every character of provocation, especially when we know that it was the analyst’s husband who referred the subject to her. It is at this precise moment that a change of tack occurs, with the progressive turnaround of the watching fantasy which shifts from the sense of being watched to that of watching himself. Second, as though that were not enough, in response to the sub­ ject’s request to space out the frequency of the sessions, the analyst says - Now you’re showing your passive positions, because you know full well that, whatever happens, you won’t get that. From this point on, the fantasy crystallises completely, which proves that there is something more. The subject, who understands a great deal about his relations of impossibility when it comes to attaining the female object, ends up developing his fantasies within the treatment itself. He speaks of his fear of urinating on the couch, and so on. He starts to have these reactions that show a certain closing of the distance to the real object, such as peeping at the analyst’s legs - which, more­ over, she notes with a certain satisfaction. Indeed, there is something that lies on the edge of the real situation, as though we were witness­ ing the constitution of the mother who is, not phallic, but aphallic. If there is one thing that lies at the root of the fetishist position then it is very precisely that the subject comes to a standstill at a certain level in his investigation and observation of woman, inasmuch as she has or has not the organ that is called into question. This position gradually leads the subject to say, My goodness, there’s no solution but to sleep with my analyst. He tells her so. Realising that this is starting to get somewhat on her nerves, the analyst remarks, You’re amusing yourself by taking fright at something you know full well will never happen. Then, she wonders anxiously, Was I right to say that? Anyone can wonder as to what degree of mastery such an interven­ tion might entail. This somewhat blunt reminder of the conventions of the analytic situation is utterly in accord with the notion that can be entertained of the analytic position as a real position. So, things are here brought to a head. It is immediately after this interven­ tion that the subject makes a definitive passage a I’acte and finds the perfect location, the choice site in the real, namely the specific arrangement of a loo in a cinema on the Champs-Elysees. This time he really will find himself at the right real distance from the object

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of his observation, separated by a wall. This time he can observe the object not as a phallic mother, but well and truly as aphallic. Here he suspends for a certain while all his erotic activity, having found there such satisfaction that he declares that until the time of this discovery he had lived as an automaton, but that now everything has changed. This is what things have come to. In summarising this observation I wanted simply to allow you to put a finger on how the notion of distance from the analyst-object as a real object, and the notion of so-called reference, can be something that is not without effect, and how, all things considered, these are perhaps not the most desirable effects. I won’t tell you how the treatment ends. It would have to be examined meticulously, so richly instructive is its every detail. The final session is eluded, the subject undergoing surgery on varicose veins. Everything is laid out here. The timid attempt to access cas­ tration and a certain liberty that can arise from it is even indicated. It is deemed that, after this, they’ve gone far enough. The subject goes back to his mistress, the same he had at the outset, fifteen years his senior, and since he no longer speaks about his tallness, the phobia is thought to have been cured. Unfortunately, now he thinks only of one matter - his shoe size. Sometimes his shoes are too big and he loses balance in them, sometimes they are too small and they pinch his feet. Thus, the change of tack, the transformation of the phobia, is complete. After all, why not regard this as the end of the analytic work? Either way, from the experimental standpoint there is something that is surely not without interest. The summit of access to the supposedly correct distance from the real object is provided - seemingly with a sign of recognition among initiates - when the subject has a perception, in the presence of his analyst, of the odour of urine. This is deemed to be the moment at which the distance from the real object - throughout the observation we are told that this is the point at which any neurotic relationship fails - is finally accommodated within its exact scope. Of course, this coincides with the moment when the perversion reaches its height. This is not strictly speaking a perversion - and the author is not unwilling to face up to this - but much rather an artefact. Such things, though they can be permanent or long-lasting, are nevertheless artefacts that are liable to be broken off or dissolved, and sometimes fairly abruptly. Thus, in this case, after a while the subject is caught by surprise by an usherette. This simple fact of being surprised by the usherette is enough to make him drop, there and then, his visits to the especially propitious site that the real had offered him at just the right moment.

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Indeed, the real is always timely in offering everything one needs when finally one has been set, along the proper paths, at the proper distance. 19 December 1956

THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE

VI T H E P R IM A C Y O F T H E PHALLUS A N D THE Y O U N G H O M O SEX U A L W O M A N Freud, the girl, and the phallus The signifier Niederkommt The lies of the unconscious Serving the lady Beyond the object Today we are going to launch ourselves into a problem that, were we moving forward step by step, we ought normally to be meeting much further on in our disquisition. This problem is that of perver­ sion, in inverted commas, the most problematic perversion there is from the perspective of analysis, namely female homosexuality. Why am I proceeding in this way? Contingency is playing a part in this. But it is quite certain that we cannot examine the object rela­ tion this year without meeting the female object. You know that the problem is not so much one of how we meet the female object in analysis. Analysis provides us with plenty for our edification when the subject of this encounter is not natural. I showed you this quite adequately in the first lessons from last term, reminding you that the female subject is always hailed, when encountered by a man, to a sort of re-finding that positions her from the first in this ambiguity between natural relations and sym­ bolic relations. I’ve been trying to show you how the entire analytic dimension inheres in this ambiguity. The problem now is to find out what the female object thinks about this, because what the female object thinks about it is even less natural than the way in which the male subject approaches her. What path does she take, from her earliest approaches to the natural and primordial object of desire that is the mother’s breast? How does the female object enter this dialectic? I am not calling the woman object today just for the sake of it. It’s quite clear that this object must at some point start functioning, yet

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it assumes this position of object that is so scarcely natural because it’s a position at one remove, which there is no interest in qualifying as such except in that it’s a position that is taken by a subject.

1 Female homosexuality has been ascribed a particularly exemplary value in analysis as a whole for what it has revealed in terms of the stages and the stopping-points that can mark out woman’s destiny on the path she wends. What is natural or biological at the start is constant in carrying over to the symbolic plane, where it is a matter of its being taken on board by the subject who is herself caught in the symbolic chain. It is precisely here that woman is at issue, to the very extent that she is to make a choice that, whichever side it may come from, must, as the analytic experience teaches us, be a compromise between what is to be attained and what it has not been possible to attain. The fact that female homosexuality is met whenever the discussion bears upon the subject of stages, which the woman has to complete in her symbolic becoming, ought to lead us during this period to read a certain number of texts exhaustively, in particular those that come in succession from Freud’s hand from 1923 onwards, the date of his article on The Infantile Genital Organisation. In this text Freud posits as a principle the Primat des Phallus, the primacy of the assumption of the phallus. The phallic phase is the final stage in the childhood phase of sexuality and is typical for both boys and girls. The genital organisation is reached by them both, but in accordance with a type that makes the possession or the non­ possession of the phallus the primordial differential element. At this level, the genital organisation is contrasted in either sex. Freud tells us that at this moment there is no realisation of male and female, but rather of what is endowed with the phallic attribute and what is not, the latter being deemed equivalent to having been castrated. I will add, to spell out his thought clearly, that this organisation is the formula from an essential stage that brings to an end the first phase of childhood sexuality, which comes to a close with the entry into the latency period. I will further specify that this is founded, for one sex as much as for the other, upon a miscar­ riage, a Mifilingen.1 This miscarriage is in turn founded upon an unawareness - not misrecognition, but unawareness - of the ferti­ lising role of male semen and, on the other side, of the existence as such of the female organ. These are very considerable assertions that require some exegesis

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if they are to be understood, for here we cannot be in the presence of something that may be taken at the level of real experience. Indeed, an objection was raised, and in the deepest confusion, by authors who went into action in the wake of this assertion from Freud. A very great number of facts lead to the admission that in a certain number of experiences there is a revelation of the pres­ ence, perhaps not of the real role of the male in the procreative act, but certainly of the female organ, at least for girls. It can hardly be contested that in the early experience of young girls there is something that corresponds to vaginal localisation, with sensations and even precocious vaginal masturbation. This is the reality in at least a certain number of cases. On this basis, people set to wonder­ ing whether the predominance of the phallic phase ought to be attributed to the existence of the clitoris. They wondered whether this is due to the fact that libido, as they say - making this term the synonym of all erogenous experience - is initially focused exclu­ sively on the clitoris or whether this might come about only after a displacement that must be both long and painful, necessitating a lengthy detour. Freud’s assertion can certainly not be understood in such terms. When it is couched in these terms, too many confused facts enable all sorts of objections to be levelled at it. I will allude to one such objec­ tion issued by Karen Horney, which is dictated by realist premises deeming that every misrecognition presupposes in the unconscious a certain acquaintance with the coaptation of the two sexes. This leads her to say that, in girls, the supervalence of the organ that as such does not belong to them in their own right can come about only against the backdrop of a certain denial of the existence of the vagina, which has to be accounted for. Based on these hypotheses, accepted as a priori, she ventures to trace back to a genesis of this phallic term in the girl. When we go into the details, we will see a kind of necessity that is borrowed from a certain number of theo­ retical premises, expressed in part by the author herself. She shows this very clearly through the very uncertainty of the ultimate fact to which this necessity is referred, for the facts upon which this primordial experience of the vaginal organ are based are exceed­ ingly discreet and even reticent. What is at issue here is a sort of reconstruction that is required by theoretical premises that stem from having taken a wrong path in the understanding of Freud’s assertion. Freud’s assertion is grounded in his experience. While it is advanced with care, even with a share of incertitude that is so char­ acteristic of his presentation of this discovery, it is asserted none the less as primordial. It’s a fixed point. The paradoxical assertion of

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phallicism is the very pivot around which the theoretical interpreta­ tion must be developed. This is what we are going to try to do. Eight years later, in 1931, he writes something yet more con­ siderable on Female Sexuality, which further extends his assertion of 1923. During the interval, an exceedingly lively discussion has taken place among his pupils which, such as it is reported by Karen Horney and by Jones, contains a crop of speculations. Thus, there is a veritable tangle of approximations here, which I’ve had to wade through over the holiday break. I must say that it has struck me as especially hard to give an account of this discussion without falsify­ ing it, because what characterises it is assuredly how ill-mastered are the categories that are brought into play. To give some account of this, and to get something of it across, there is no other means of proceeding but to master it, and to master it is already to alter its axis and nature completely. So, to a certain extent, this will not offer an accurate perspective of what is at issue, for this ill-mastered character is truly essential to the whole problem. It is truly correlative to the second goal of our theoretical examina­ tion this year, which is to show, in parallel with our exploration of the object relation, how analytic practice has been committing inflexibly to a deviation that cannot be mastered. To come back to the precise incidence that concerns us today, it occurred to me this morning that one exemplary image could be isolated from this heap of doings, plucked from one of these articles. All of the authors accept that in the young girl’s detour in her development, when she enters the Oedipus complex she starts to desire a child from the father as a substitute for the missing phallus. The disappointment of not receiving a child from the father will play an essential role in making the young girl retreat from the identification with the father that she established on entering the Oedipus complex. All the authors accept in principle that this will lead her to take up once more the feminine position, along the path of the privation of the child that she desires from the father. So, one of these authors cites the example of an analysis of a child in order to show the degree to which this disappointment can come into play and impact upon the present, precipitating the motion of the Oedipus complex. This motion is exemplified as being essentially unconscious, so, in the course of the young girl’s analysis, she was enabled to bring this image to light of day. Finding herself thereby greater enlightened as to what was going on in her unconscious, thereafter every morning she woke up to ask in a fury - Hasn’t the child come yet? This instance strikes me as exemplary of what is at issue in this deviation from analytic practice, which will be attendant through­

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out this year’s theoretical exploration of the object relation. Here, we put a finger on how a certain pattern of understanding and tackling frustrations is in reality something that leads the analyst to a manner of intervention the effects of which not only appear doubt­ ful, but positively opposed to what plays out through the process of analytic interpretation. It is plain to see that the notion we may form of a child from the father appearing at some point in the develop­ ment as an imaginary object, as a substitute for this missing phallus, which plays an essential role in the young girl’s development, cannot be brought into play at just any moment and in any old way. It can only be brought into play later, or else at a contemporary stage on the condition that the child, to the extent that the subject does have dealings with this child, has entered the interplay of a series of sym­ bolic resonances that will concern what the subject has experienced in the past, at the phallic stage, namely everything that might be bound for this subject to possessive or destructive reactions at the moment of the phallic crisis, with all that this entails that is so prob­ lematic in the stage of childhood to which it corresponds. In short, everything that refers to the supervalence or the predominance of the phallus at one stage of the child’s development only finds its point of impact retroactively. The phallus can be brought into play only in so far as it becomes necessary at one moment or another to symbolise some event that may occur, whether this is the late arrival of a child for someone who is in an immediate relation with the child, or else the subject’s question as to the possession of the child, which is to pose the ques­ tion of the subject’s own motherhood. But to bring in, at a different moment, something that does not intervene in the subject’s sym­ bolic structuration but rather bears a certain relation of imaginary substitution, precipitated then and there by speech on the symbolic plane, and which will be experienced by the child in an utterly dif­ ferent way, is tantamount to acknowledging it as having already been organised. It is tantamount to introducing it into some sort of legitimacy that literally acknowledges frustration as such at the heart of the experience, when in fact this is not how it is legitimately introduced. Frustration cannot be legitimately introduced as such in inter­ pretation unless it has effectively passed through at the level of the unconscious, as the correct theory tells us. This frustration is but an evanescent moment, which holds importance and a function only for we analysts, on a purely theoretical plane as an articula­ tion of what has occurred. That it should become a reality for the subject is excluded by definition, because it is exceedingly unstable. Frustration only has any importance and interest in so far as it leads

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on to something else, to one or other of the two planes that I distin­ guished for you as castration and privation. The plane of castration is nothing less than what establishes, in its true order, the necessity of this frustration. It transcends it and instates it in a law that lends it a different value. Furthermore, this is what sanctions the existence of privation, because the idea of privation is inconceivable on the plane of the real. The idea of privation is effectively conceivable only for a being who is articulating something on the symbolic plane. We can grasp this in those interventions that are in some way interventions of support, of psychotherapy, like, say, the interven­ tion I mentioned briefly concerning the young girl who was in the hands of one of Anna Freud’s pupils. You will recall that this young girl presented the beginnings of a phobia that arose in connection with her experience of effectively being deprived of something. This privation occurred under condi­ tions that were different from those within which the child found herself confined. Indeed, I showed you that the mainspring of the necessary displacement of the phobia on no account lay in this experience. This mainspring lies not in the fact that she doesn’t have the phallus, but in the fact that her mother couldn’t give it to her. Further still, the mother couldn’t give it to her because she didn’t have it herself. The psychotherapist’s intervention consists in telling her - and she is quite right - that all girls are like that. This might sound like a reduction to the real, but it is not. The child knows full well that she doesn’t have the phallus. The psychotherapist lets her know that this is the rule, thereby making it pass over to the symbolic plane of Law. This way of intervening does indeed remain debatable from the standpoint of efficacy, because in truth the psychotherapist can only wonder whether it might have been effective or not in a certain reduction of the phobia. At that point it is clear that it was effective only in an extremely fleeting way. The phobia resumes with greater intensity, and will only subside once the child has been integrated into a complete family. Why so? In principle, the child’s frustration should seem to her even greater than before, for now she is confronted with a step­ father, that is to say, a male who enters the family dynamic, her mother having until then been a widow. And there is now an elder brother too. But in fact the phobia really does subside, because it literally no longer needs to make up for this absence of any specifi­ cally phallophore element in the symbolic circuit, that is to say, the absence of males. These critical remarks bear above all on use of the term frustra­ tion. This use is in a certain sense legitimised by the fact that what is

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essential in this dialectic is much rather the lack of object than the object itself. Frustration corresponds very well, in appearance, to a conceptual notion. But what is at stake concerns the instability of the very dialectic of frustration. Frustration is not privation. Why not? Frustration concerns something you are deprived of by someone else, from whom you might precisely have hoped to get what you were asking for. Thus, what is at stake in frustration is something that is less the object than the love of the one who can bestow this gift upon you, if and when it is given to you. The object of frustration is less the object than the gift. Here we find ourselves at the origin of a dialectic that stands at one remove from the symbolic, and which itself fades away from one instant to the next because this gift is a gift that is still bestowed only as though it were free of charge. It comes from the other. What lies behind this other, namely the full chain in virtue of which the gift comes to you, is yet un-glimpsed. It is only afterwards that the subject will perceive this and notice that the gift is far more complete than at first appeared, in that it entails the entire human chain in the symbolic. But at the start of the dialectic of frustration there is merely the confrontation with the other and the gift that surfaces. If this gift is bestowed as a gift, it will make the object itself vanish as an object. In other words, if the request is granted, the object will pass into the background. If, however, the request is not granted, the object will, in this case too, vanish and change signification. What justifies using the word frustration? There is frustration only when the subject shifts into revendication, into the laying claim that this term implies, bringing in the object as though it were something that may be demanded by right. At such a moment, the object enters what may be called the narcissistic zone of the subject’s appurtenances. In either case, whichever should occur, the moment of frustration is an evanescent moment. It leads on to something that projects us onto a plane that is different from that of pure and simple desire. The request does indeed have something about it with which human experience is very familiar, which is that in itself it can never be truly granted as such. Whether it is granted or not, it will be annihilated, it will be wiped out, at the next stage, whereupon it projects onto something else - either onto the articulation of the symbolic chain of gifts, or onto this closed and absolutely inextinguishable register that is called narcissism, in virtue of which the object is for the subject both what is him and what is not him, with which he can never be satisfied, precisely in this sense that it is him and is not him at the same time. It is solely insomuch as frustration enters a dialectic,

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which by legalising it also situates it by lending it this dimension of something free of charge, that the symbolised order of the real can be established whereby the subject is able to instate certain perma­ nent privations, for example, as existent and accepted. In misconstruing this condition, these various authors usher in all sorts of ways of reconstructing what is given to us in the experi­ ence as an effect linked to the fundamental lack of object. A whole series of impasses are thereby introduced, which are always linked to the idea of wanting to deduce the entire chain of experience on the basis of desire regarded as a pure element of the individual, with all that this desire brings with it in terms of repercussions both in his satisfaction and in his disappointment. Now, this entire chain of experience can literally be conceived of and elaborated only if we first posit the principle that nothing is articulated, that nothing can be layered up in experience, so long as we have not posited before­ hand the fact that nothing can be established and constituted as a properly analysable conflict until the subject has entered the realm of the symbol, the legal realm of the symbolic order, the symbolic chain, which is the order of symbolic indebtedness. It is solely on the basis of the subject’s entry into an order that pre-exists everything that happens to him, every kind of happening or disappointment, that everything through which he broaches this - that is to say, what is called his lived experience, this confused thing that is there beforehand - takes on an order, an articulation, and assumes its meaning. And only as such can it be analysed. Nowhere else can I better enable you to appreciate how wellfounded is this reminder - which ought to be no more than a reminder - than in a few texts by Freud himself, and by going through them with fresh eyes. 2 Yesterday evening some people spoke of an uncertain aspect, sometimes a paradoxically wild aspect, to some of Freud’s texts, even speaking in terms of chanciness. Yet others spoke in terms of diplomacy - though I can’t see why. This has led me to choose one of his most brilliant texts, and I would almost say one of the most disturbing, but it is conceivable that it might appear to you to be archaic and even outmoded. I’m referring to The Psychogenesis o f a Case o f Homosexuality in a Woman. I will remind you of its essential points of articulation. It concerns a young woman from a Viennese family of good standing. For such a family in the Vienna of 1920 to send someone

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to Freud amounted to taking a fairly large step. To resolve to do so, something exceedingly peculiar had to have occurred. The daughter of the household - a beautiful and clever girl o f eighteen, from a very high social class - has become a cause of concern for her parents because she has been running around after a woman ten years her senior, a certain society lady. It is specified through all sorts of details provided by the family that this dame du monde is perhaps from a world that could be qualified as a demi-monde - going by how such things were predominantly classified in the Vienna of the time2- and not altogether respectable. The young woman’s attachment to this lady, which as events unfold is revealed to be truly passionate, puts her in a rather vexed relationship with her family. We then learn that this vexed relation­ ship was not unrelated to what brought about the situation in the first place. To spell it right out, this concerns the fact that it throws her father into a rage, which certainly seems to be a motivating factor, not for the continuation of the passion itself, but for going about it in the way she does. I’m referring to the calm defiance with which she pursues her attentions towards the lady in ques­ tion, waiting for her in the street and making in part a show of her affair. Without her flaunting it publicly, all of this is enough for her parents, and especially her father, not to be in the dark about it. We are also told that the mother is someone who is not exactly easy­ going, having been neurotic. She doesn’t take the situation quite so badly, or at least not so seriously. They come to Freud to ask him to sort this out. He lays out altogether pertinently the difficulties of putting in place a treatment when one has to meet the family’s stipulations, and notes quite rightly that one cannot do analysis on demand. In truth, this leads onto something yet more extraordinary, which motions in a direc­ tion that will make apparent Freud’s considerations on the analysis itself and which to some will seem altogether out-of-date. Freud specifies that the analysis was not taken to its end, but that it did allow him to see a very long way, which is why he is sharing it with us. He reveals that the analysis certainly did not enable him to change much in this young woman’s destiny, and to explain this he introduces an idea that is not unfounded, though it may seem oldfashioned, a schematic idea that ought rather to incite us to return to certain fundamental givens instead of finding more manageable ones. This idea is that there are two phases to an analysis, the first being the procuring of everything there is to know, the second the bringing down of resistances that still hold strong even though the subject does by now know a great deal. The comparison he then introduces is not one of the least

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astounding. He compares the first stage to preparing one’s luggage before a journey, today so complicated and hard to effect, and the second to setting off and making the journey. Coming from a man who has a phobia of railways and travel, this reference is all the same rather spicy. A yet more considerable matter is that throughout this time he has the sense that, effectively, nothing is working. He does, however, see very clearly what has been happening, and throws light on a certain number of stages. In the subject’s childhood there was something that seems not to have passed off without a hitch, when she beheld in the elder of her two brothers the difference that would make of her someone who does not possess the essentially desirable object, the phallic object. Nevertheless, Freud says that the girl had never been neu­ rotic, and came to the analysis without even one hysterical symptom. Nothing in the childhood history is noteworthy from the standpoint of pathological consequences. This is precisely why it is remarkable, clinically speaking, to see emerging so belatedly the flaring of an attitude that strikes everyone as being downright abnormal, that is to say, the peculiar position that she occupies with respect to the faintly denigrated lady. The passionate attachment that she shows towards her culmi­ nates in the outburst that leads her to Freud’s consulting room. For things to have reached such a point that Freud would be involved, something peculiar had surely occurred. In her mild flirting with danger, the girl would go strolling with the lady practically beneath the windows of her own home and, one day, her father comes out and sees them. Since there are other people around, he casts a furious look at them, and goes on his way. The lady asks the girl who it was, and she replies that it was her father. He doesn’t look happy. The lady becomes incensed at this. It is noted that hitherto she had always shown a very reserved, even cold, attitude to the girl. On no account had she encouraged the girl’s attentions, and she was not especially keen on being embroiled in any complications. So she tells her that, under these conditions the affair must now come to an end. In Vienna there are these little cuttings for the suburban belt of the railway, and just nearby was one of those small footbridges that crosses over. From there, the girl falls, niederkommt. She fractures a couple of bones, but pulls through. So, Freud tells us that up until the moment when the attachment appeared, not only had the girl’s development been normal, but indeed everything suggested that she had been evolving very well. After all, hadn’t she shown at the age of thirteen or fourteen a

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deportment that presaged the most congenial bearing in the femi­ nine vocation, that of maternity? She used to dote on a small boy, even befriending his parents. And yet, all of a sudden, this sort of motherly love, which seemed to make of her a model mother in advance, was to come to an abrupt halt, and it was then that she started to associate with women - for the affair in question is not the first - whom Freud qualifies as mature, that is to say, who seem to be substitute mothers. Nevertheless, this pattern is not really valid for the last in the line, for she truly incarnated the dramatic affair around which the engaging of the analysis was to revolve, along with the problematic of a declared homosexuality. Indeed, the subject declares to Freud that she is prepared to give up neither anything of her ambitions nor her object-choice. She will do all it takes to deceive her family, and she continues to safeguard her bonds with the person for whom she is far from having lost the taste, the lady having been sufficiently touched by this extraordinary mark of devotion to have become far more amenable since then. Freud makes three very striking sets of remarks with respect to this declared and maintained relationship, and gives them the value of a sanction that is explicative either with regard to what occurred before the treatment, for example the suicide attempt, or with regard to his own failure. The first set seems very pertinent. The second too, though perhaps not altogether as he intends. One of the distinguish­ ing features of Freud’s observations is that they always leave us a great deal of extraordinary clarity, even on items that have in some sense eluded him. I’m alluding to the Dora observation, which Freud came to see clearly at a later stage. He intervened in the Dora case when he was still misconstruing the bearing of her question towards her own sex, that is to say, her homosexuality. Here we can observe an analogous misconstruing, but one that is far more instructive because it runs much deeper. Then there are other things that he tells us without taking full advantage of them and which are certainly not the least interest­ ing, about what is at issue in the suicide attempt that crowns the crisis with an act of significance. It certainly cannot be said that the subject is not tightly bound to the tension that mounts until the bursting of the conflict and the catastrophic occurrence. How does Freud explain this? He says that it is within the register of a normal orientation of the subject towards the desire to have her father’s child that the originative crisis has to be understood, the same that led to her committing herself to something that goes right in the opposite direction. Indeed, we are told that there is a great reverse of position, and Freud attempts to spell this out. This is one

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of those cases where being let down by the object of desire gives rise to a complete swing-over. The subject identifies with this object and, as Freud lays out with precision in a footnote, this is equivalent to a kind o f regression to narcissism. When I make the dialectic of narcis­ sism essentially this relationship between ego and little other, I’m doing absolutely no more than highlighting what is implicit in each of Freud’s ways of expressing himself. What, then, is this disappointment that brings about the reversal? When in her fifteenth year the subject was committed to the path of taking possession of the imaginary object, of the imaginary child - and she was sufficiently occupied with this child for it to leave its mark on the patient’s history - it so happened that her mother really did bear a child from the father. In other words, the patient acquires a third brother. Here, then, is the key point. This also makes for the apparently exceptional character of this observation. It is rather unusual that the late arrival of a little brother should have resulted in such a profound reversal of a sub­ ject’s sexual orientation. It is at this moment that the girl changes position, and so now we shall see how this is best to be interpreted. Freud tells us that this has to be regarded as a reactional phenom­ enon. The term is not in his text, but it is implied because he supposes that her resentment towards her father is still being played out. This linchpin in the situation explains her entire manner of handling the affair. The girl is distinctly aggressive towards her father, while the suicide attempt, which follows her being opposed by the counterpart object of her attachment, is simply the counter-aggressiveness from the father. Her aggression against the father swings round onto her own self, combined with something that symbolically satisfies what is at issue, namely a sort of collapse of the entire situation onto its primal givens through a precipitation, a reduction, to the level of the objects that are truly at stake. In short, when the girl falls from the little bridge she performs a symbolic act, which is none other than the Niederkommen of a child during childbirth. This is the term used in German for dropping or whelping. Thus we are brought back to the ultimate and originary meaning of the structure of the situation.

3 In the second set of remarks that Freud makes, he explains how the situation lay in a cul-de-sac in the treatment. He tells us that to the extent that the resistance had not been conquered, everything that was said to the patient was received

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with great interest, but without her giving up her latest position. Nowadays we would say that she held all this on the plane of an intellectual interest. He employs a metaphor, comparing her reac­ tions to those of a grande dame being shown museum pieces, peering through her lorgnette and saying, How nice! Nevertheless, he notes that it cannot be said that there was an absence of any transference. He indicates with great perspicacity the presence of the transference in the patient’s dreams. Parallel to her unambiguous declarations of her determination not to change anything in her deportment towards the lady, her dreams herald a remarkable re-flowering of this most congenial bearing, the arrival of some handsome and satisfying husband and the expectant advent of an object, the fruit of this love. In short, the idyllic and almost forced character of this spouse announced by the dream appeared in such conformity with the efforts undertaken together that anyone else but Freud would have pinned great hopes upon it. Freud makes no mistake. He spies a transference here. It is the doubling of the kind of counter-ploy that she was carrying on in response to the disappointment with the father. Indeed, she had not been solely aggressive and provocative with him. She also made him concessions. It was just a matter of showing the father that she was deceiving him. Freud recognises that something analogous is going on in these dreams of hers, and that this is their transferential signification. She is reproducing with him the fundamental stance of the cruel game she has been carrying on with her father. We must not fail here to come back to this kind of founding relativity, which is essential to what is involved in symbolic for­ mation to the extent that there lies the fundamental line of what for us constitutes the field of the unconscious. This is what Freud expresses with great accuracy - its only wrong is to be a little over accentuated - when he tells us, beside the intention to mislead me, the dreams partly expressed the wish to win my favour; they were also an attempt to gain my interest and my good opinion - perhaps in order to disappoint me all the more thoroughly later on. Here appears the leading edge of the intention that is imputed to the subject, of presently occupying this stance of captivating him so as then to make him tumble from on high, to make him fall from an even greater height on account of having been drawn yet further into the situation. There can be no doubting, when one hears the accentuation of this sentence, that it harbours what we call a counter-transferential action. It is correct that the dream is decep­ tive, but Freud does not retain just this. Immediately after, he enters into a discussion that is quite gripping to find in his writing, on how the typical manifestation of the unconscious can be deceptive. It is

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certainly true that he understands in advance the objections that will be levelled at him. I f the unconscious too can lie, then what are we to trust? his disciples will ask. He offers them a lengthy explanation of how this can come about and how in the end it contradicts nothing in the theory. This explanation is a little tendentious, but it still remains that what Freud foregrounds here in 1920 is exactly what is essential in the unconscious, namely the subject’s relation to the Other as such. This relation implies as its basis the possibility of being brought about at this level of the lie. We are in the realm of lies and truth. Freud spots this very well. What seems to escape his notice, however, is that this is a true transference. It is in the interpretation of the desire to deceive that the path is opened, instead of taking this as something that - let’s put it somewhat crudely - is directed against him. It was enough for him to come out with one sentence more, it’s also an attempt to string me along, to captivate me, to get me to think her so pretty - and the young woman must be ravishing - for him not to be completely free in this business, just as with Dora. What he wants to avoid is precisely to have to affirm that what he has coming to him is the worst, that is to say, something in which he is the one who will be disillusioned. In other words, he is quite pre­ pared to form his own illusions. In putting himself on guard against these illusions, he has already entered the game. He is making the imaginary game a reality. He turns it into something real because he is right in it. Moreover, this doesn’t miss the target because his way of inter­ preting the thing is to say to the young woman that her intention is precisely to deceive him just as she habitually deceives her father. This amounts immediately to cutting off short the imaginary relation that he has made a reality. In a certain respect, his coun­ tertransference could have served him well here, so long as it is not a countertransference, that is, so long as he doesn’t believe in it, so long as he doesn’t fall into it. To the extent that he has fallen into it and interprets too early, he brings the girl’s desire into the real, when in fact it was no more than a desire, and not an intention, to deceive him. He fleshes out this desire. He operates with her just as the therapist intervened with the little girl, giving the thing a symbolic status. Here we have what lies at the heart of this slide into the imaginary that becomes much more than a trap. It becomes a calamity once it has been established doctrinally. Here we are seeing a borderline example that is transparent. We cannot fail to recognise it because it’s in the text. With his inter­ pretation, he makes the conflict break out. He fleshes it out, when

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in fact what was at issue, as he himself senses, is to point out this mendacious discourse that is there in the unconscious. He tells her that all this is being done against him, and in effect the treatment doesn’t go much further. He breaks it off. In wanting to unite, he has sundered. But something far more interesting is accentuated by Freud, without him interpreting it, something of considerable scope, namely the nature of the young woman’s passion for the person in question. Indeed, it did not escape his notice that this is not a homosexual relationship like others, although in truth homosexual relationships display all the variety of heterosexual relationships, and perhaps even a few extra variations. Freud underscores quite admirably that this object-choice corresponds to a type that is specifically mannliche, and explains what he means by this. He spells out in remarkable depth how this is platonic love in its most exalted aspect. It’s a love that asks for no other satisfaction but to serve the lady. It’s truly a sacred love, so to speak, or courtly love in its most devo­ tional form. He adds a few extra words like Schwdrmerei, which has a very particular meaning in Germany’s cultural history.3 It is this exaltation that lies at the base of the relationship. In short, he pitches this love relation at the highest degree of symbolised love relationship, posited as a service, as an institution, as a reference. It is not merely something that is submitted to, like an attraction or a need. It’s a love that, in itself, doesn’t simply make do without satis­ faction, but aims very precisely for this non-satisfaction. It instates lack in the relationship with the object as the very realm in which an ideal love can blossom. Can you not see that there is something here that joins in a kind of nexus the three tiers of what I’ve been trying to give you a sense of in this entire process that goes from frustration to symptom? Take, if you will, the word symptom as equivalent to enigma, since this is what we have been examining. This is how the problem of this exceptional situation will come to be articulated. However, it is of interest only when taken in a register that is its own, which is to say that it is exceptional because it is particular. At first we have the reference, which has been lived through, though in an innocent fashion, to the imaginary object, the child. Interpretation enables us to conceive of it as a child received from the father. As we have already been told, contrary to what one might believe, female homosexuals are subjects who have formed a staunch paternal fixation. Why does a real crisis ensue? It is because the real object arises at this moment. It is indeed a child given by the father, but precisely to someone else, and to the person who is closest to her.

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It is then that a great reversal is produced. Its mechanism is explained to us. I believe that it is of the utmost importance to perceive that in this case what was at stake had already been estab­ lished on the symbolic plane. It was on the symbolic plane that the subject was satisfied by this child as a child that was given to her by her father, so that the presence of this real object would lead her back for a moment to the plane of frustration. It no longer has to do with something that satisfied her in the imaginary, something that already sustained her in the relation among women, with the full institution of the paternal presence as such, the father par excel­ lence, the fundamental father, the father who will always be, for her, any man whomsoever who will give her a child. The presence of the real child, the fact that the object really is right there, materialised for a moment by the fact that her mother is the one who has the child, right beside her, leads her back to the plane of frustration. What is most important in what happens next? Is it the swingover which brings her to identify with the father? It is understood that this played its part. Is it that she herself becomes this sort of latent child that will effectively niederkommen when the crisis comes to a head? Perhaps we might find out how many months it took for this to happen, if we had the dates as we do for Dora. But this is not the most important matter. What is most important is that what is desired is something that lies beyond the beloved woman. The young woman’s love for the lady aims at something else besides her. This love that lives purely and simply in the realm of devotion, and which raises the attachment to its supreme degree, the subject’s annihilation in the relationship, is something that Freud seems to restrict, and not without reason, to the register of male experience. Indeed, these things can be observed in a sort of institu­ tionalised thriving that is sustained in a highly elaborated cultural relation. When the fundamental disappointment passes reflexively onto this level, and the subject finds there her way-out, it raises the question of what, in this register of love, is loved in the lady beyond herself, and calls into question all that is truly fundamental in every­ thing that refers back to the attainment of love. What is desired, strictly speaking, in the beloved woman is pre­ cisely what she lacks. And what she lacks in this instance is the primordial object, the equivalent of which the subject would find in the child, the imaginary substitute. At this extreme, in the most idealised love, what is sought in the woman is what she lacks. And what is sought beyond her is the object that is central to the entire libidinal economy - the phallus. 9 January 1957

VII A CHILD IS BEING BEA TEN A N D THE Y O U N G H O M O SEX UA L W O M A N Intersubjectivity and desubjectivation The image as the cast of perversion The symbolic aspect of the gift Frustration, love and jouissance Permutational schema of the case We ended our talk last time by trying to summarise the case of female homosexuality presented by Freud. At the same time as sketching out its twists and turns, I adumbrated what might be called its structure. Indeed, this case would not hold a great deal more importance than being merely colourful were we not working through it on the basis of a structural analysis. We need to look again at this structural analysis. It is solely on the condition of pushing such analysis further, and as far as possible, that it is worthwhile committing oneself to this path in psychoanalysis. That the psychoanalytic theory is wanting is something that, so it seems to me, is there constantly to be seen. Moreover, there is no harm in reminding you that we are pursuing our effort here in order to respond to this want. This want is palpable across the board. I recently beheld it coming alive in my mind on reading Miss Anna Freud’s remarks pitted against those of Mrs Melanie Klein. Doubtless Miss Anna Freud has backed down a bit since then, but she grounded the principles of her child analysis on remarks such as the following - the child forms no transference, or at least, forms no transference-neurosis, because children are still within the situation that creates the neurotic tension. There could be no trans­ ference, in the strict sense, for something that was in the course of being played out. Then, in another remark, of the same nature but different, she

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says that the fact that children are still relating with their original objects of attachment calls for a change in position from the analyst, who enters the situation as a new person, on the current plane. This is purported to modify the analyst’s technique profoundly. In this respect, Miss Anna Freud pays homage to something of an inkling of the importance of the essential function of speech in the analytic relation. She says that the child will assuredly be in a different relation from that of the adult to speech, and so should be approached with the aid of play, which provides the means for the technique of child analysis. The child is in a position that does not allow the analyst to offer himself from the position of neutrality or receptivity, which strives above all to gather speech, to allow it to thrive, and, when the occasion presents, to echo it. I would say, therefore, that while it is not developed in this text, nor even con­ ceived of, the analyst’s engagement on a path that is different from the speech relation is nevertheless indicated there. Mrs Melanie Klein argues, on the contrary, that nothing could be more congruent with adult analysis than child analysis, and that already, even at a very early age, what is at issue in the child’s uncon­ scious has nothing to do with the actual parents, unlike what Miss Anna Freud says. Between the ages of two-and-a-half and three, the situation has already modified to such an extent compared with what can be observed in the real relation, that what is at stake is a whole dramatisation that is profoundly alien to the actual situation of the child’s familial relationship. This modification is illustrated by the example of a child who, being raised as an only child by an elderly aunt who lived far from his parents, leaving him in an altogether isolated and dual relation with this one person, none the less reconstituted a whole family drama with a father, mother, and even rival brothers and sisters. I’m quoting. It really is, therefore, a matter of revealing in analysis something that ultimately does not lie purely and simply in an immediate relation with the real, but rather is already inscribed in a symbolisation. Are we to accept what Mrs Melanie Klein asserts? These assertions are based on her experience, and this experience is communicated to us in observations that sometimes push things into the realm of strangeness. One cannot fail to be struck by this kind of witch’s cauldron, or soothsayer’s crucible, at the bottom of which a whole wide imaginary world is bubbling away, the idea of the mother’s body as a container, all the primordial fantasies present from the very first, in their tendency to become structured into a drama that seems to come preformed, this entire machine requiring the constant surfacing of the most aggressive primordial instincts if it is to keep turning. We cannot fail to be struck by how she vouches for a corre­

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spondence between this entire phantasmagoria and the clinical data that she handles here, and at the same time wonder just what we have before us. What can this dramatic symbolisation mean, which is found to be increasingly more complete the further back we go? It is as though the closer we get to the point of origin, the more the Oedipus complex is complete, articulated and ready to spring into action. This warrants at least the posing of a question. This question looms up at every turn along the precise path I’ve been trying to lead you along, that of perversion.

1 What is perversion? Within a single psychoanalytic group we have been hearing the most discordant voices raised on this issue. Some, thinking they are following Freud, say that we simply have to come back to the notion of the persistence of a fixation that bears on a partial drive. This fixation is purported to traverse unscathed the entire progress through the dialectic that tends to be established by the Oedipus complex. It is further purported that it does not undergo the transformations that tend to reduce the other partial drives into a movement that unifies them, ultimately culminating in the genital drive, which is the ideal unifying drive. What is at issue then in perversion is a sort of accident in the development of the drives. Translating in a classical way Freud’s notion that perversion is the negative of neurosis, these analysts seek to turn perversion into something where the drive has not been elaborated. Others, however, who moreover are not for all that the most discerning or the best, but who have been informed by experience and by something that truly does impress itself upon analytic prac­ tice, would try to show that, far from being this pure element that persists, perversion forms part of something that comes about via all the dramatic crises, fusions and de-fusions of a neurosis, present­ ing the same dimensional richness as a neurosis, along with the same abundance, the same rhythms and stages. They would then try to explain how perversion is the negative of neurosis by pushing forward formulas like the following - perversion is the eroticisation o f defences, just like all these games through which analysis is pursued as a reduction of defences. Fine by me. This offers an image. But, in fact, why is it that this can be eroticised? This is the whole question. Where does this eroticisation come from? Where does the invisible power lie that would project this colouration that here seems to come as something extra­ neous, a change in quality brought upon the defence, which strictly

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speaking should be regarded as a libidinal satisfaction? In truth, this thing is not unthinkable, but the least that can be said is that it has not been thought through. It mustn’t be believed that Freud never dared to give us a notion to be elaborated. I would further say that we have among Freud’s writings an example that proves that his formula that perversion is the negative of neurosis is certainly not to be taken to mean what it has long been taken to mean, namely that what is hidden in the unconscious when we are faced with a case of neurosis is, in perver­ sion, out in the open and, as it were, in a state of freedom. Freud is proposing something quite different in this formula. Perhaps, after all, it has to be taken in the same way as what is given to us in all these compressed formulas to which our analysis has to restore their true meaning. It is by trying first of all to follow him and to see, for example, how he conceives of the mechanism of a phenomenon that may be qualified as perverse, or even a categorical perversion, that we shall finally be able to perceive what he means when he asserts that perversion is the negative of neurosis. Let’s look at things a little more closely by taking up the study that was to gain a certain fame, Ein Kind wird geschlagen, subtitled, A Contribution to the Study o f the Origin o f Sexual Perversions. It is characteristic of Freud that his attention should here be focused on a single sentence - which he turns into the title of his text - that is not a mere label but instead a phrase extracted directly from what patients declare when they broach the theme of their fantasies. These fantasies may roughly be called sadomasochistic, irrespective of the role and function they hold in any particular case. Freud tells us that he is focusing his study on six cases, which are more or less obsessional neuroses, four women and two men. Behind this lies his experience of all the cases of which he does not have such a great understanding himself. So it seems that this is a sort of summary, an attempt to organise a considerable mass of experience. When the subject declares to be bringing into the arena of the treatment something that is his fantasy, he expresses it in a form that is remarkable for its imprecision, for the questions that it leaves hanging and to which he replies only with great difficulty. In truth, at the start the subject is unable to give a satisfactory answer, for he can scarcely say a word more about the characteristics of this fantasy. Furthermore, he only does so with a sort of aversion, even abashment or shame. There is something quite remarkable here, which is that whereas the masturbatory practices that are associated to a greater or lesser degree with these fantasies do not entail any sense of guilt, when

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it comes to wording these fantasies, not only does the subject very often show great difficulty, but furthermore it provokes in him a fairly considerable abhorrence, repugnance and culpability. The discrepancy between the fantasmatic or imaginary use of these fan­ tasies and their spoken articulation is something that ought to make us prick up our ears. The subject’s deportment here is already a signal that marks out a limit - it is not the same register mentally to play with the fantasy or to speak about it. What does the fantasy A child is being beaten signify in these subjects? Freud is going to tell us what his experience has shown him. We won’t get to the end of the article today. I simply want to throw some light on certain elements that directly concern the path to which I committed us last week when tackling the problem via The Psychogenesis o f a Case o f Homosexuality in a Woman. According to Freud, the progress of analysis shows that what is at issue in this fantasy is something that has been substituted through a series of transformations brought to bear on other fantasies, which themselves had a fully comprehensible role at precise moments in the subject’s development. It is the structure of these states that I would like to set out for you, so as to enable you to recognise in them something that seems to be altogether evident, so long as we keep our eyes open, at least with regard to the dimension into which we are trying to advance and which is summed up under the heading subjective structure. In other words, in order to restore its true posi­ tion to what often presents in our theory as an ambiguity, even as an impasse and an antinomy, we shall be seeking each time to locate on which level of subjective structure a given phenomenon occurs. Freud tells us that the subject’s history - to the extent that it opens up under analytic pressure and allows the origin of these fantasies to be found again - is punctuated in three stages. In the first part of his expose, which we shall not be bringing to the fore right now, he informs us that he will be confining himself to the women, for reasons that he makes clear afterwards but which we shall leave aside for today. The form taken by the first fantasy, which he tells us can be found when the facts are analysed, is the following - My father is beating the child whom I hate. This fantasy is loosely tied to the appearance of a brother or a sister in the subject’s history, a rival who happens to frustrate the child - through his presence and the care that is lavished on him - of her parents’ affection. Here it is especially the father who is at issue. Without insisting on this point, we should not omit the fact that this concerns a young girl who is caught at a moment when the Oedipus complex has already been constituted and when the relationship

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with the father has been instated. The pre-eminence of the father’s person in this altogether primal fantasy cannot be unrelated to the fact that this concerns a girl. But let’s leave the explanation of this issue for a later date. What is important is that here at the outset we are touching on an historical perspective that is retroactive. It is from a current point in the analysis that the subject formulates and organises a primal dramatic situation, and she does so in a way that is nevertheless inscribed in her current speech and her power of symbolisation at the present time. Thus, we find again, through the progress of the analysis, what presents as the primal thing, the deepest primordial organisation. This entails the evident complexity of accommodating three characters - there is the agent of the punishment, there is the one who undergoes it, and there is the subject. The one who is under­ going the punishment is someone other than the subject, namely a child whom the subject hates and whom she thereby sees being stripped of the parental preference at stake. She thus feels privileged by the fact that the other is being stripped of this preference. A tripartite dimension and tension is here implied. There is the subject’s relation to the two others, whose interrelations are them­ selves dictated by an element that is focused by the subject. To accentuate things in one direction, it could be said that My father is beating my brother or my sister for fear I might not believe that I am the favoured one. A causality, or a tension, a reference to the subject who is captured as a third party in whose favour all of this is being produced, is something that animates and dictates the action directed onto the ancillary personage, the one who is undergoing the beating. The third party, who is the subject, is presentified in the situation as an onlooker under whose eye this must come to pass with the intention of making it known to her that something is being given to her, namely the privilege of preference, of precedence. So, there is a notion of fear, that is to say, a sort of anticipa­ tion, a temporal dimension, a pre-tension that is introduced into the heart of this tripartite situation as its motor. And then there is the reference to the third party qua subject, insomuch as the subject is to believe or infer something from a certain deportment that is brought to bear on the ancillary object. In this instance, this object is taken as the instrument of the communication between the two subjects, which is ultimately a communicating of love, because what is declared for the central subject, this something that she receives, comes at the expense of the ancillary object. This something is the expression of her wish, or her desire, to be favoured and to be loved. Of course, the formation has itself been dramatised. It is already

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reactional in so far as it is the product of a complex situation, but the situation presupposes the tripartite intersubjective reference with all that it necessitates and introduces as a temporal punctua­ tion. It presupposes the introduction of the ancillary subject, who is necessary. Why so? This ancillary subject is the instrument, the mainspring, the medium, the means, by which the crossover from one subject to the other is made. All things considered we find ourselves before a full intersubjective structure in the sense that it is established in the culminated crossing-over of speech. The point is not that some­ thing should have been spoken, but rather that the intersubjective structure itself, in this ternary situation which is established in the primal fantasy, should carry the mark of the very same intersubjec­ tive structure that constitutes any culminated speech. Let’s shift now to the second stage. In relation to the first, this second represents a scaled-down situa­ tion. Freud tells us that here is to be found, in a very particular way, a situation reduced to two characters. I’m following Freud’s text, explaining it as best it can be. He describes this situation, without weighing it up, as a necessary and reconstructed step that is indis­ pensable when it comes to understanding the full motivation behind what is produced in the subject’s history. The second stage produces the fantasy - 1 am being beaten by my father. This situation, scaled-down to two, excludes any other dimension but that of the relation to the agent who is doing the beating. There is something here that can give rise to all sorts of interpretations, but such interpretations will themselves remain marked with the greatest ambiguity. While the first fantasy harbours an organisation and a structure that sets out a direction that could be indicated by a series of arrows, in the second the situation is so ambiguous that for a brief moment one may wonder as to how far the subject might be participating with the one who is assaulting her and striking her. This is the classic sado-masochistic ambiguity.1 To resolve it, one will conclude with Freud that this is linked to something that is the essence o f masochism, but that in this instance the ego is firmly accentuated in the situation. The subject finds herself in a reciprocal position, but which is also exclusive. It’s either him or her who is being beaten. And here, it’s her. The fact that it is her indicates something, without resolving it. In the very act of being beaten, one can see - and the ensuing part of Freud’s discussion shows this - a transposition or a displacement of an element that perhaps is already marked by eroticism. The very fact that one can speak on this occasion of the essence o f masochism is altogether indicative. At the previous stage we were

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in a situation that, as exceedingly structured as it was, was in some sense laden with virtuality. As Freud says, it is Not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stufffrom which both will later come. The precipitation in one direction or in the other is marked out at the second stage, though it will remain ambiguous. The second stage is a dual one, with the whole problematic that it raises on the libidinal plane. The subject finds herself included in a dual relation which is thus ambiguous. We meet the either. . . or.. . that is fundamental in this dual relationship. Freud tells us that we are almost always forced to reconstruct it, so fleeting is its existence. This fleetingness is such an essential characteristic that very quickly the situation is precipitated into the third stage. In the third stage, the subject is reduced to her most extreme point. Here the subject is apparently to be found again in a thirdparty position in the shape of a pure and simple onlooker, as at the first stage. After the scaling-down of the first intersubjective situation, with its temporal tension, and the passage to the second situation, which was dual and reciprocal, we come to the desubjectivised situation which is that of the final fantasy, namely - A child is being beaten. Of course, behind this passive voice one can vaguely make out the paternal function, but generally speaking the father is not recognis­ able. It’s a mere substitute. On the other hand, Freud did want to respect the subject’s wording but often it’s not a matter of just one child but of several. The fantasmatic production causes it to burst apart, multiplying into umpteen specimens, and this shows very well the character of essential desubjectivation that is produced in the primordial relationship. Indeed, there remains an objectivation, in any case a desubjec­ tivation, that is radical and that affects the entire structure at this level where the subject is no longer there except as reduced to the state of an onlooker, or merely an eye, that is to say, the very thing that always characterises any kind of object at the limit, at the point of final reduction. To behold it, there has to be at least, not always a subject, but an eye, a screen upon which the subject is established. How can we translate this into our language, at the precise point we’ve reached in our process? In referring to our diagram, the imaginary relationship, which is more or less fantasised, is inscribed between the two vertices a-a'in a relation that is marked to a greater or lesser degree by specularity and reciprocity between the ego and the other party. But here we find ourselves in the presence of some­ thing that takes place on the line S-A, namely unconscious speech, which had to be uncovered again through the artifices of the analysis of the transference. This unconscious speech runs as follows - My

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father, in beating the child whom I hate, is showing me he loves me. Or - My father is beating a child for fear I might believe I ’m not the favourite. Or some quite different wording that in whichever way highlights one of the accents of this dramatic relationship. What is excluded, what is not present in the neurosis, yet which will undergo different developments that will become manifest elsewhere, in all the constitutive symptoms of the neurosis, is uncovered in this element of the clinical picture that is the fantasy. How does this fantasy present? It bears within it, in a still highly visible manner, the testimony of the signifier-elements of speech that is articulated at the level of this trans-object, so to speak, which is the big Other. The big Other is the locus at which unconscious speech is articulated, the Es insomuch as it is speech, history, memory and articulated structure. Perversion, or rather, to limit ourselves here, the perverse fantasy, possesses a property that we can now bring out.2 What is this kind of residue, this symbolic reduction that has progressively eliminated the entire subjective structure from the situation, to allow to emerge from it nothing more than something that is entirely de-subjectivised? Ultimately it is enigmatic because it conserves the full charge - but this is a charge that is neither revealed, nor constituted, nor taken on board by the subject - of what, at the level of the Other, is the articulated structure in which the subject is engaged. At the level of the perverse fantasy, all the elements are there, but everything to do with signification has been lost, namely the intersubjective relationship. These are what we might call signifiers in their pure state, without the intersubjective relationship, signifiers shorn of their subject. We have here a sort of objectivation of the signifiers of the situation as such. What is indicated here in the sense of a fundamental structuring relationship in the subject’s history at the level of perversion is both preserved and contained, but in the form of a pure sign. Is this different from everything that we meet at the level of per­ version? Picture for a moment what you know about the fetish, for instance. You are told that it is explicable by what lies beyond but which is never seen, and for good reason, namely the penis of the phallic mother. More often than not, after a short effort of analysis, this proves to be linked by the subject, at the very least in those memories that are still accessible to him, to a precise situation when he came to a standstill in his observation - this at least is his memory of it - at the hem of his mother’s dress. Here we find ourselves before a remarkable convergence with the structure that can be called the screen-memory, that is to say, the moment at which the chain of memory is arrested. Indeed, it is arrested at the hem of the dress, no

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higher than the ankle, and this is why the shoe is met here. This is also why the shoe can, at least in certain particular but exemplary cases, assume its function as a substitute for what has not been seen but which is articulated and formulated as being, here for this subject, what the mother possesses, namely the phallus. Doubtless it is an imaginary phallus, but it is essential to her symbolic founda­ tion as a phallic mother. Here in the beating fantasy we also find ourselves faced with something that belongs to the same realm, something that freezes the flow of memory, that reduces it to the instantaneous, by arrest­ ing it at this point that is called a screen-memory. Think of how cinematographic motion can be speeding along altogether rapidly and then all of a sudden stop at some point, capturing the characters in a freeze-frame. This freeze-frame is characteristic of the reduc­ tion of the full signifying scene, articulated from subject to subject, to something that is immobilised in this fantasy, which remains charged with all the erotic values that are included in what it has expressed, and of which it is the testimony and the support, the last support that remains. Here we can put a finger on how there comes to be moulded what might be called the cast of perversion, namely the valorisation of the image. The image is at stake here to the extent that it remains the privileged witness of something that, in the unconscious, must be articulated and brought back into play in the dialectic of the transference, that is, in this something that must assume its full dimensions once more within the analytic dialogue. The value of an imaginary dimension appears, therefore, to be supervalent whenever a perversion is at issue. This imaginary rela­ tionship stands on the path of what occurs between subject and Other, or more accurately, of what of the subject remains located in the Other, precisely insomuch as it is repressed. This is speech that is indeed the subject’s own but, since by its very nature as speech it is a message that the subject must receive from the Other in an inverted form, it can equally remain in the Other and there constitute the repressed and the unconscious, establishing a relationship that is possible but which does not become a reality. Possible does not say it all. There has to be some impossibility in this, without which it would not be repressed. It is precisely because this impossibility is present in ordinary situations that it requires all the artifices of the transference to make that which has to be com­ municated from the big Other to the subject both newly passable and formulable, in so far as the subject’s / comes into being. Freud’s analysis affords us this indication in the sharpest fashion, and everything is spelt out at far greater length than what I’ve been

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saying here. He marks out how we must tackle the problem of the constitution of any perversion through the transformations of the Oedipus complex, through its advance and its revolution. It is astounding that people should have dreamed of maintaining the indication that perversion is the negative of neurosis simply by translating it, as is commonly being done, to mean that perversion is a drive that has not been elaborated by the Oedipal and neurotic mechanism. It is purported to be a pure and simple relic, the persis­ tence of an irreducible partial drive. On the contrary, in this vital article, and in many further points, Freud indicates well enough that perverse structuration, however primal we might suppose it to be - in any case, among those that come to our knowledge as analysts - can be articulated only as a means, a linchpin, an element of something that ultimately can be conceived of, can be understood, and can be articulated solely in, by and through the process, the organisation and the articulation of the Oedipus complex.

2 Let’s try now to inscribe the case from the other day, the case of the young homosexual woman, onto our diagram of the subject’s criss­ cross relationship with the Other. On the axis that runs S-A, insomuch as it is here that symbolic signification must come about and be established, lies the entire genesis of the subject in the present. On the other hand, the imagi­ nary interposition a-a' is where the subject finds her status, her object structure, which she recognises as such, installed in a certain liaison in relation to these objects, which for her are immediately attractive and correspond to her desire, in so far as she commits to imaginary guiderails that form what are called libidinal fixations. While we cannot push this exercise to its end today, we can try to sum things up. What can we see? Five temporal phases can be laid out to describe the major phenomena through which this perversion is instated. Whether we regard this perversion as fundamental or acquired matters little. In this instance, we know when it was first indicated, when it was established, when it was precipitated, we have its motives and we have its point of departure. It is a perver­ sion that was constituted belatedly, which doesn’t mean that it did not have its premises in quite primordial phenomena. But let’s try to understand what we can see on the level at which Freud himself cleared the avenues. There is a state that is essential, when the young woman has reached puberty, around her thirteenth or fourteenth year. She

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treasures an object, a child whom she looks after and to whom she is bound by ties of affection. She shows herself in everyone’s eyes to be steering particularly well in this direction, precisely on the kinds of paths that anyone might hope for, as the vocation typical to woman, that of maternity. On this basis, something occurs that will produce in her a kind of reversal that sets in when she starts to take an interest in love objects who will be marked first of all with the sign of femininity. These are women who are in a more or less motherly, neo-maternalising, circumstance. She will ultimately be led to the passion, which is literally quali­ fied as a consuming passion, for the person who in the text is called the lady, and there is a good reason for this. The young woman treats this lady in a highly elaborate style of relation that is chival­ rous and specifically masculine. Her passion for the lady is served, in a sense, without any requirement, without desire, without even hope of return, with this character of a gift, the lover projecting even beyond any kind of show from the beloved. In short, we find here one of the most highly cultivated forms of love relation. How are we to conceive of this transformation? I’ve given you its first temporal phase and its result. Between the two, something occurred. Freud tells us what. We are now going to implicate this transformation in the same terms that served to analyse the position. Let’s begin with the phallic phase of the genital organisation. What is the meaning of what Freud tells us in this regard? Just before the latency period, the infantile subject, male or female, reaches the phallic phase, which indicates the point of realisation of the genital type. Everything is there, up to and including objectchoice. However, there is one thing that is not there, namely a full realisation of the genital function insomuch as it would be structured and organised as a reality. Indeed, there remains this essentially imaginary and fantasmatic element which is the supervalence of the phallus, in view of which there are for the subject two types of being in the world - those who have the phallus and those who have not, that is to say, who have been castrated. This is how Freud formulates it and it’s quite clear that there is something here that truly suggests a problematic from which, in truth, the various authors do not manage to extricate themselves when they seek to justify it in any way by motives that are deter­ mined for the subject in the real. I’ve already told you that I would bracket off the extraordinary modes of explanation that this forces upon these authors. Their general pattern of explanation amounts pretty much to the following - as everyone knows, since everything is already figured out and inscribed in the unconscious drive tendencies,

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the subject must already possess, by his very nature, the preforma­ tion that makes one sex correspond to the other in cooperation. So, this can only be a kind o f formation in which the subject already finds some advantage, and there must already be a process o f defence here. Actually, this is not inconceivable from one perspective, but it simply pushes the problem further back. This in turn commits the authors to a series of constructions that merely place the entire symbolic dialectic back at the origin, and which become increasingly unthinkable as one shifts further back towards it. It is easier for us than for these authors to accept that in this instance the phallus happens to be the imaginary element - this is a fact, which has to be taken as a fact - whereby the subject at the genital level is introduced into the symbolic aspect of the gift. The symbolic aspect of the gift and genital maturation, which are two different things, are nevertheless linked by a factor that is included in the real human situation, namely the rules that are established by law in the exercise of genital functions, to the extent that they effectively come into play in inter-human exchange. It is because things happen on this level that the bond is so tight between the symbolic aspect of the gift and genital maturation. But this is something that has no internal, biological or individual coherence for the subject. On the other hand it emerges that the fantasy of the phallus, within this symbolic aspect of the gift at the genital level, does assume its value, and Freud insists on this. The phallus does not have the same value for he who really possesses it, that is, the male child, as for the child who does not possess it, that is, the female child. For the female child, she will be introduced to the symbolic aspect of the gift precisely in so far as she does not possess the phallus. It is in so far as she phallicises the situation - that is to say, in so far as it’s a matter of either having or not having the phallus - that she enters the Oedipus complex.3 Meanwhile, what Freud underscores is that this is not how the boy enters the Oedipus complex. Instead, this is his way out. At the end of the Oedipus complex he will have to make the symbolic aspect of the gift a reality on a certain plane. He will effectively have to make a gift of what he has, whereas the girl has entered the Oedipus complex in so far as she is to find, in the complex, what she does not have. What is meant by what she does not have? Here, we are already on the plane where an imaginary element enters a symbolic dialectic. In a symbolic dialectic, what one does not have is merely something that is just as inexistent as the rest, but it bears the mark of the minus sign. So, she enters with this minus. To enter here with a minus or with a plus does not change the fact that what is in play here is the

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phallus. There has to be something so that one can assign oneself with a plus or a minus, a presence or an absence. Freud tells us that this is the mainspring of the girl’s entry into the Oedipus complex. Within this symbolic aspect of the gift, all sorts of things can be given in exchange. Indeed, it is because so many things can be given in exchange that ultimately we find so many equivalents of the phallus in what effectively occurs in symptoms. Freud goes still further, and you can find it worded in a roughand-ready fashion in A Child is Being Beaten. Why do so many elements from pregenital relations come into play in the Oedipal dialectic? Why do frustrations from the anal level or the oral level tend to arise, and to bring about the frustrations, accidents and dra­ matic elements of the Oedipal relation, when going by the premises this should only come about in the genital elaboration? Freud’s reply is that this is related to something obscure that occurs at the level of the ego - because of course the child has no experience of this - in that the objects that form part of the pregenital rela­ tions can be more easily apprehended in verbal representations, in Wortvorstellungen. Freud goes so far as to say that pregenital objects are brought into play in the Oedipal dialectic to the extent that they lend themselves more readily to verbal representations. The child can tell himself more easily that what the father gives to the mother on occasion is his urine, because urine is something that the child is very acquainted with in use, in its function and existence as an object. It is easier to symbolise an object - that is, to endow it with a plus sign or a minus sign - that has taken on a certain reality in the child’s imagination, than this something that in spite of everything remains exceedingly hard to grasp, and which for the girl is difficult to access. Freud tells us that the girl’s first introduction into the dialectic of the Oedipus complex hinges on the fact that the penis she desires will be received from the father in the form of a substitute, namely a child. But in the example we are looking at, that of the young homosexual woman, a real child is involved. She has been doting over a real flesh-and-blood child who is part of the interplay. real child

symbolic father

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On the other hand, what does this child whom she dotes over satisfy in her? Well, the child is the imaginary phallic substitu­ tion through which, as a subject, she constitutes herself, without knowing it, as an imaginary mother. She derives satisfaction from looking after this child because it amounts to an acquisition of the imaginary penis, which was the object of the fundamental frustra­ tion that resulted from her having placed this imaginary penis at the level of the minus. I’m doing no more than highlighting what is characteristic of originary frustration, namely that any object that is introduced by a frustration that has become a reality can only be an object that the subject takes up in this ambiguous position of the body’s appurtenances. I’m underscoring this for you because when people speak about primordial relationships between mother and child, they put all the emphasis on the notion of frustration taken passively. We are told that the child makes the first test of the relation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle in the frustrations he feels from his mother, and after that you can see the terms frustration o f the object or loss o f the love object being used indiscriminately. Now, if there is one thing on which I insisted in the previous lessons then it’s precisely the bipolarity or the highly marked opposition that there is between the real object, in so far as the child can be deprived of it, namely the mother’s breast, and the mother, in so far as she is in a position to grant or not to grant this real object. This distinction between the breast and the mother as a complete object is made by Mrs Melanie Klein. She distinguishes between, on the one hand, the partial objects, and on the other, the mother who is established as a whole object. This is the mother that can create the famous depressive position in the child. Indeed, this is one way of seeing things. But what is passed over in the stance Klein takes is that these objects are not of the same nature, because irrespective of whether they are set apart or not, it is still the case that the mother is established as an agent by the function of the appeal. It is still the case that already, in her most rudimentary form, she is taken as an object that is marked and connoted by a possibility of plus or minus, as presence or absence. It is also the case that the frustration brought about by anything that refers to the mother as such is a frustration of love, and that everything that comes from the mother by way of response to this appeal is a gift, that is to say, something other than the object. In other words, there is a radical difference between, on the one hand, the gift as a sign of love, which aims radically at something else that lies beyond, namely the mother’s love, and on the other hand, whichever object that might arise for the satisfaction of the child’s needs.

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The frustration of love and the frustration of jouissance are two distinct things. The frustration of love is pervaded by all the intersubjective relationships that can be constituted thereafter. Meanwhile, the frustration of jouissance is on no account pervaded by just anything, contrary to what people say. As Mr Winnicott has understood very sharply, through the usual confusion to be read in the analytic literature, it is not the frus­ tration of jouissance that generates reality. We cannot ground the faintest genesis of reality on the fact of whether the child has or doesn’t have the breast. If he doesn’t have the breast, he is hungry and he carries on crying. In other words, what is it that is produced by the frustration of jouissance? It produces at the very most the rekindling of desire, but it produces no kind of object constitution whatsoever. This is ultimately what leads Mr Winnicott to remark on what is truly there for the grasping in the child’s behaviour, and which allows us to shed light on how there is indeed a progression that calls for an original explication. It’s not simply because the child is deprived of his mother’s breast that he conjures up his fundamental image of it, nor is it just any kind of image. It is necessary that the image should in itself be taken as an original dimension. It’s not the breast but the tip of the breast, the nipple, that is absolutely essential. It is this nipple that will be replaced by the phallus, which will be superposed onto it. When this happens, the nipple and the phallus show that what they have in common is this character of bringing us to a standstill, in so far as they are constituted as images. What follows on from the child’s frustration of jouissance is an original dimension that persists in the subject in the state of an imaginary relationship. This is not simply something that polarises the kindling of desire in the way that, in animals, there is always a certain lure that orients. The animal’s behaviour always carries something of significance, in the feathers or in the fins of its adversary, which turns it into an adversary. One can always ascertain whatever it is that individualises the image in the biological realm. This is certainly present in mankind, but it is accentuated, and in such fashion as to be observable in children’s behaviour where these images are referenced to the fundamental image that gives the subject his comprehensive status. We find this complete shape, this form of the other party as such, which he clings to and which means that he too has this image, around which subjects may band together or disband, as appurtenances or non-appurtenances. All in all, the problem does not concern the more or less large degree to which narcissism is elaborated - a narcissism which to

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begin with is conceived of as a kind of imagined and ideal auto­ eroticism. On the contrary, it’s a matter of finding out what the function of original narcissism is in the constitution of an objectal world as such. This is why Winnicott pauses over these objects that he calls transitional objects. Without them, we would have no account of the way in which the child is able at the start to constitute a world from his frustrations, because of course he does constitute a world, but don’t go telling us that this has to do with the object of his desires that is the cause of his frustration at the beginning. He constitutes a world to the extent that in heading towards something that he desires, he will come up against something that he bumps into, or which burns him. This is not an object that is generated in any way whatsoever by the object of desire. It’s not something that can be modelled by the stages of the development of desire as would be established and organised in child development. It’s something else. In so far as it is generated by frustration itself, the object leads us to admit the autonomy of this imaginary figment in its relationship with the body image. This is an ambiguous object, which lies betwixt and between. One can speak neither of reality nor of unreality in its regard. This is how Mr Winnicott puts it, with great pertinence. Instead of presenting this with all the problems that it raises with respect to the introduction of this object into the symbolic order, he comes to it despite himself, because one is obliged to go there once one has committed oneself to this path. These half-real, half-unreal objects - the transitional objects that he designates - are objects to which the child clasps, like the corner of his blanket or a piece of his bib. This cannot be observed in all children but is there in most of them. Mr Winnicott spots very clearly the relationship these objects must have at their terminal point with the fetish. He is wrong to call them primal fetishes but they are indeed its point of origin. He pauses and tells himself that, after all, this object that is neither real nor unreal is something to which we grant neither a full reality nor a fully illusory character. The same goes for your philosophical ideas and your religious system, in the midst of which a good English citizen lives and knows in advance how he ought to behave. No one dreams of telling you that you believe in thus-and-such a religious or philosophical doctrine, nor does anyone dream of trying to pull you out of it. This is the realm of betwixt and between. Indeed, Mr Winnicott is not wrong. Life is situated in the midst of all this. How could the rest be organised were it not for this? Mr Winnicott also remarks that one ought not to be too exact­ ing. The intermediate state in which these things are established

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is firmly marked by the one thing that no one dreams of - unless one is forced to impose it on others as an object to which they must adhere, the authenticity or the unwavering reality of what you promote as a religious idea or a philosophical illusion - in short, the well instituted world indicates that everyone has the right to be mad on the condition that one remain mad separately. Madness begins when one imposes one’s private madness on the entirety of subjects who are each constituted in a sort of nomadism of the transitional object.

3 To end, let’s come back to the case of the young woman in love, who has her transitional object, this imaginary penis, due to the fact of having her child. This is no different from what we are told when it is asserted that, all in all, she has her imaginary penis from the moment she starts doting on the child. What does it take for her to pass to the third phase, that is, the second stage of the five situations that we shan’t manage to see today? She is homosexual, and Freud tells us that she loves as does a man, mannlichen Typus, even though the [French] translator has rendered this as feminin. She is in a virile position. This can be translated onto our diagram. The father, who at the previous stage was at the level of the big Other, has now passed to the level of the ego, to the extent that the girl has taken the male position. At a’, there is the lady, the love-object who has replaced the child. Then, at the level of the Other there is the symbolic penis, that is to say, what stands at its most elaborated point in this love, which stands beyond the beloved subject. What is loved in love is what lies beyond the subject. It is literally what the beloved subject does not have. The lady is loved precisely in so far as she does not have the symbolic penis, though she has all it takes to get it because she is the chosen object of the subject’s every adoration. real lady (a)

imaginary father (ego)

symbolic penis

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So, a permutation has been produced whereby the symbolic father has passed over into the imaginary through the subject’s identifica­ tion with the function of the father. By the same stroke, the lady has now appeared up here, on the right, as the love object, precisely by harbouring what lies beyond, the symbolic penis that at the outset was on the imaginary level. What has happened between these two phases? The distinguishing feature of the observation, which appears in the second phase and which can be found again in the fourth, is that at the level of the imaginary relationship the real action of the father has been introduced, this symbolic father who was previously down here in the unconscious. The child that the father will give the girl as a substitute for the desire for a penis is a child that is either imaginary or real. In the present case, it’s rather troubling that the child is real, but so it was. The father nevertheless remains unconscious as a progenitor, and all the more so given that the child is real. Yet here we have the father really giving a child not to the daughter but to the mother. So, the real child unconsciously desired by the daughter, and which she gave to herself in the substitute from which she derived her satisfac­ tion, already shows without a shadow of doubt an accentuation of need, which lends the situation its dramatic aspect. The subject has been frustrated in a very particular way by the fact that the real child from the father qua symbolic father has been given to her own mother. This is what amounts to the distinguishing feature of the obser­ vation. When people say that in a case such as this, things have taken the turn of a perversion, owing surely to some accentuation of the instincts or the drive tendencies, or of some primal drive, are they managing to sift out these three elements, which are absolutely essential so long as one distinguishes between them - the imaginary, the symbolic and the real? You can see that the situation has revealed itself to be a rela­ tionship of jealousy, for eminently structural reasons, and that the imaginary satisfaction to which the girl entrusted herself has assumed an untenable character because the real has been intro­ duced, a real that has responded to the unconscious situation on the level of the imaginary plane. Through a sort of interposition, the father has now become a reality on the plane of the imaginary rela­ tionship. He has effectively come into play as an imaginary father, and no longer as a symbolic father. Another imaginary relationship has now been established, which the girl will fill out as best she can. This relationship is marked, however, by the fact that what was articulated in a latent fashion at the level of the big Other is starting

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to link up in an imaginary fashion, in the fashion of a perversion and, moreover, it is for this reason, and no other, that this will cul­ minate in a perversion. The girl identifies with her father. She takes on his role and herself becomes the imaginary father. She also keeps his penis, and attaches herself to an object to whom necessarily she must give this something that the object doesn’t have. This necessity of centring her love not on the object but on what the object doesn’t have, brings us to the heart of the love relation­ ship as such and to the heart of the gift. And it is this something that the object doesn’t have that makes the tripartite constellation of the subject’s history a necessity. This is where we shall pick things up next time. It will allow us to delve deeper into the dialectic of the gift as it is beheld and expe­ rienced altogether primordially by the subject, and also to see its other face, the one that earlier we left to one side. I accentuated the paradoxes of frustration on the side of the object, but I didn’t say what is produced, and what is signified as such, by the frustration of love. 16 January 1957

VIII D O R A A N D THE Y O U N G H O M O SEX UA L W O M A N

The symbolic insistence of transference Potent father, impotent father Love, lack and gift Dora between question and identification Perverse metonymy, neurotic metaphor This latest instalment, the second issue of the journal La Psychanalyse, contains some texts that will allow you to see a new foray into logic, to see it right where it is, in a particularly vivid fashion, that is to say, in our practice. I’m alluding to our much-touted game of odds-andevens, and I’m referring you to the Introduction I have given to my lesson on The Purloined Letter. You can very easily find there the three temporal phases of subjec­ tivity, in so far as subjectivity bears a relation to frustration, and on the condition that frustration is taken in the sense of a lack of object. You can find them easily if you reflect on what the baseline of the problem is, namely the opposition brought about by the institution of the pure symbol - plus or minus, presence or absence - in which there is nothing less than a sort of objectifiable positioning of what is given in the game. You will easily see there the second temporal moment in the fact that the declaration you make in saying odd or even is a sort of bid whereby you put yourself in the position of being gratified or not by the response from the other party. However, since he already has the cubes in his hands, he is quite incapable of doing so. Whether or not what he has in hands corresponds to your bid is no longer some­ thing that depends on him. So, here you have the second stage in the dual relation in so far as it sets out this appeal and its response, upon which the level of frustration is established. At the same time you will see its utterly evanescent character, which is literally impossible to accommodate.

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If the game possesses something that is of interest to you then clearly it’s because you introduce the third dimension, which gives it its meaning, the dimension of law, in a form that is always latent in the playing of the game. From the standpoint of the bidder, what is at stake? From one moment to the next, the other party is clearly supposed to be hinting at some regularity, in other words a law, which at the same time he endeavours to shield from him. This dimension of a law, of a regularity that is being established, is conceived of as something possible yet is being shielded from the bidder by the one who is hinting at it in the hidden part of the game, even as he hints fleetingly at its emergence. It is at this moment that what is fundamental to the game is established, thereby lending it its intersubjective sense, locating it in a dimension that is no longer dual but ternary, and essentially so. The value of my introductory text hinges on this, namely on the fact that for there to be the beginning of an articulation of some­ thing that resembles a law, it is necessary to introduce three terms. We are going to try to see how the object is introduced into these three intersubjective phases. By the mere fact that it falls within our scope, our purview in analytic practice, this object is an object that has to enter the symbolic chain. This is the point we reached last time in the unfolding of our case of female homosexuality.

1 We reached what I called the third phase, which I am going to sum­ marise for you by starting from the first situation that we are taking arbitrarily as the point of departure. Note that this chronological ordering of terms is already a conces­ sion to the progressive point of view, which runs from the past to the future. We are doing this to facilitate matters by shifting closer to what is usually done in the dialectic of frustration, while not forget­ ting that in conceiving of it in a perfunctory fashion, that is to say, without distinguishing between the planes of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, one ends up in impasses. The further we go, the more I hope to give you a sense of these impasses. For the time being, however, we shall try to set out the principles behind these relationships between the object and the constitution of the symbolic chain. First we have the young woman’s position when she is still in her pubescent phase. The initial symbolic and imaginary structuration of her position happens in the typical way, as is ordained by the

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theory. The equation between imaginary penis and child sets the subject up as an imaginary mother in relation to what lies beyond, namely her own father who steps in at this moment as a symbolic function, that is, as the one who can give the phallus. The potency of the father is at this moment unconscious. This is after the dissolu­ tion of the Oedipus complex, and so the father qua he who can give the child is unconscious. It is at this stage that occurs what might be called the fatal moment, when the father intervenes in the real, giving a child to her mother, that is to say, turning the child that was formerly in an imaginary relationship with the subject into a real child. Something becomes a reality, and as a result she can no longer sustain it in the imaginary position where she had set it up. We now find ourselves in the second phase, where the intervention of the real father at the level of the child, which is now the object of her frustration, produces the transformation of the whole equation. Henceforth, this will be posited with the following terms - the imaginary father, the lady, and the symbolic penis. Through a sort of inversion, the subject’s relationship with her father, which was previously in the symbolic realm, veers in the direction of the imaginary relationship. Or, if you prefer, there is a projection of the unconscious formula, that of her first equilibrium, into a per­ verse relationship, an imaginary relationship, which is her relation to the lady. This is the third phase. real lady (a)

symbolic penis

So, after a first application of our formulae we can briefly pause over this positioning of the terms in play, which is undoubtedly enigmatic. None the less, it does need to be stressed that these terms, whichever they may be, impose a structure. That is to say, were we to change the position of any one of them, we would have to place each of the others elsewhere, and not just anywhere. Let’s try now to see what this means. The signification is yielded by the analysis. What does Freud tell us at the crucial moment of the observation? Due to a certain conception he has formed of the position at issue,

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and due also to an intervention he makes on this basis, he crystallises the position between himself and the patient in a way that is unsat­ isfactory, since he avouches that this was the moment at which the analytic relationship was broken off. Either way, whatever Freud thought about it, he is a long way from laying the full burden of this on an impasse in the patient’s position. His intervention, his concep­ tion, his prejudices about her position, must count for something in the fact that the situation is broken off. Let’s remind ourselves what this position is and how Freud formulates it for us. He tells us that the patient’s resistances were insurmountable. How does he substantiate these resistances? What examples does he provide and what meaning does he give them? He reads these resistances being expressed in particular in a series of dreams that might paradoxically have given rise to hopes that the situation was normalising. These are effectively dreams where what is at issue is nothing else but union, conjugo, and a fruitful marriage. In these dreams she is submissive to an ideal husband and bears his children. In short, this series of dreams indicates a desire that is steering in the direction of what is most wished for - if not by Freud then by society as here represented by her family - as the best outcome for the treatment. Armed with everything the patient has told him about her posi­ tion and her intentions, far from taking the dream-text at face value, Freud sees in it no more than what he calls the patient’s ruse, expressly designed to disappoint him, or more precisely to deceive him and disillusion him at the same time, in the same manner as the intersubjective guessing-game I mentioned just a moment ago. It is remarkable that this presupposes, as Freud says it does, that one may object - What! The unconscious too can lie! Freud dwells at length on this point. He discusses it and makes sure to reply in a carefully worded manner. He takes up a passage from The Interpretation o f Dreams, which he had also revisited in another observation, the Dora case study, which we shall be coming to presently. At a congress five years ago, after Lagache’s report on transference I gave a short paper sum­ marising the positions in which I think the Dora case ought to be appreciated. Regarding the relations between unconscious desire and pre­ conscious desire, the Traumdeutung makes an analogy between the capitalist and the entrepreneur. Preconscious desire is the entrepre­ neur of the dream, but the dream would have no sufficient outlay to set itself up as the representative of this something that is called the unconscious were it not for another desire that provides the funds for the dream, and this is unconscious desire. Freud distinguishes

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very sharply between the two, though he doesn’t go quite so far as to tease out their most far-reaching consequences. Ultimately there is a distinction between what the subject brings along in his dream, which is at the level of the unconscious, and the factor of dual rela­ tions, which hinge on his addressing someone when he recounts the dream in analysis. It is in this sense that I tell you that a dream that arises in the course of an analysis always bears a certain steering towards the analyst, and this steering is not always necessarily the unconscious steering. The whole question is as to whether or not the stress should be laid on intention. In the case of the young homosexual woman, Freud tells us that this intention remains the patient’s avowed inten­ tion to play the game of deception with her father. She manages to formulate this game that consists in feigning to undergo treatment while maintaining her positions and her fidelity to the lady. But should this something that is being expressed in the dreams be con­ ceived of purely and simply from the perspective of deception, that is to say, in its preconscious intentionalisation? I don’t think so, because when we look closely, what can we see being formulated? This is undoubtedly a dialectic of deception, but when brought back to the signifier, what is being formulated is precisely what was deflected at the outset, in the first position, and which at that stage was in the unconscious just as it is in the unconscious now at the third stage. What is being formulated comes from the father. In the way that the subject receives his own message in an inverted form, in the form of You are my wife or You are my master, here the message is You will bear my child. Upon entering the Oedipus complex, or so long as the Oedipus complex has not been resolved, this is the promise on which the girl’s entry into the Oedipus complex is grounded. This is the point of departure for her position, and if indeed we find in this series of dreams something that is articulated as a situation that fulfils this promise, then it’s because it is always the same unconscious content that is borne out. Freud hesitates when faced with this precisely because he hasn’t yet managed to provide a fully pared down formulation of what transference is. In transference, there is an imaginary element and a symbolic element, and consequently there is a choice to be made. If there is a meaning to transference and to what Freud later contrib­ uted with the notion of Wiederholungszwang - on which I made sure to spend a year, so that you could see what was meant by it - then it’s that there is an insistence that is inherent to the symbolic chain as such. By definition, this insistence inherent to the symbolic chain is not taken on by the subject. None the less, the mere fact that here

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it reproduces and survives into the third stage, to be formulated in a dream - even though this does appear to be a misleading dream on the imaginary level of the direct relationship with the therapist - makes it strictly speaking, by itself alone, the representative of the transference in the proper sense. This is where Freud could have soundly and boldly placed his confidence, grounded on a less waver­ ing positioning of his notion of transference. He would have been able to intervene if only he had perceived that transference happens essentially on the level of symbolic articulation. When we speak of transference, when something takes on meaning from the fact that the analyst becomes the locus of the transference, this is very precisely in so far as symbolic articulation as such is at issue. Of course, this is before the subject has taken it on board, as we can see here in this transference dream. Freud notes how there and then something occurred that belonged to the realm of transfer­ ence, yet he draws from it neither the strict consequence nor the correct method of intervention. I’m pointing this out because in truth this is not valid for this par­ ticular case alone. We also have another case in which the problem arises on the same level and in like fashion, except that Freud makes the exact opposite mistake. This is the Dora case. These two cases balance each other out admirably. They criss­ cross, the one with the other, and strictly so, not only because the conflating of the symbolic position and the imaginary position occurs in either case in an opposite direction, but still more because in their overall constellation they are in strict correspondence, with the sole proviso that they are correlated as positive to negative. I might say that there is no finer illustration of Freud’s formula that perversion is the negative of neurosis. This still has to be developed. 2 Let’s quickly review the terms of the Dora case, through their com­ monality with the terms of the constellation that is present in the case of the young homosexual woman. In the Dora case we find exactly the same protagonists on centre stage - the father, a daughter, and also a lady, Frau K. This is all the more striking in that the whole problem revolves around the lady, though this is hidden from Freud in the girl’s presentation. Dora is a case of petite hysterie and she has been brought to see Freud because of certain symptoms she has. These symptoms are undoubtedly mild, but striking all the same. Above all, the situation

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has become intolerable following some sort of token of suicidal intention that ultimately caused her family some alarm. When she is taken to Freud, the father presents her as ill, and without a shadow of a doubt this move to consult is an element that in itself denotes a crisis in the social circle, in which previously the situation had been maintained with a certain equilibrium. Nevertheless, this peculiar equilibrium had already been upset two years hence, an equilib­ rium constituted by a positioning that was initially concealed from Freud, namely that Dora’s father had taken Frau K. as his mistress. This woman was married to a gentleman named Herr K., and they lived in a sort of foursome relation encompassing the couple formed by father and daughter. Dora’s mother is absent from the situation. We can already see, as we keep pressing forward, the contrast with the previous situation. In the case of the young homosexual woman, the mother is present because she is the one who takes the father’s attention away from the daughter, thereby introducing the real element of frustration that will be decisive in shaping the perverse constellation. Furthermore, in the Dora case the father is the one who brings the lady into the picture and seems to be keeping her there, while in the other case the daughter is the one who brings her in. What is striking in this positioning is that Dora straightaway emphasises to Freud her exceedingly sharp reproach concerning the affection from her father, which she says has been stolen from her by the affair. She shows right away that she has always been privy to the existence of the affair, to its permanence and its regularity, and that she has reached a point where she can stand it no longer. Her entire deportment is indicative of her reproach in this regard. With a step that is most decisive, possessing as it does the dialec­ tical quality, strictly speaking, of the Freudian experience, Freud brings Dora to the question - Is it not the case that what you are rebelling against, as though it were something out o f line, is the very thing that you yourself participated in? And, indeed, he promptly offers evidence of how, up until a critical moment, this position had been supported most efficaciously by Dora herself. She had shown herself to be far more than accepting of this singular situation. She was truly its kingpin, protecting the private moments of the couple formed by her father and the lady, even on occasion taking over the lady’s duties, such as looking after her children. On the other hand, as one moves further into the structure of the case, she is even to be seen staking out an altogether special bond with the lady, whose confidante she is. Indeed, it seems that the confidences they exchanged went very far indeed. The case bears such wealth of detail that there are still discoveries

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to be made in it, and so this quick reminder can on no account replace an attentive reading. Among other items, let me point out the lapse of nine months between the scene by the lake and the hys­ terical symptom of her dragging her leg, which Freud believes he has uncovered because the patient yields it to him in a symbolic fashion, but if one looks more closely one will notice that in reality it was a lapse of fifteen months. These fifteen months carry meaning because fifteen crops up throughout the observation, and this element is useful for our understanding in that it is grounded on number and on a purely symbolic value. Today I can do no more than remind you of the terms in which the whole problem is set out, from beginning to end of the observation. It’s not merely that Freud realises, after the event, that he has failed, due to the patient’s resistance to admitting the love relation that binds her to Herr K., as Freud suggested to her with all the weight of his insistence and authority. It’s not merely the footnote added, with hindsight, in which he points out that doubtless there was an error, namely that he should have understood that the homosexual attachment to Frau K. was the true signification of both the estab­ lishing of her initial position and her crisis. What is important is not merely that Freud acknowledges this after the event, but rather that throughout the observation you can read that Freud remains in the greatest ambiguity concerning the real object of Dora’s desire. In what terms is the problem to be articulated? Yet again, it’s a matter of how this ambiguity might possibly be formulated, an ambiguity that is in some sense unresolved. It’s quite clear that Herr K., in his person, is of overarching importance for Dora and that something along the lines of a libidinal bond has been established with him. It is also clear that something that belongs to another realm, yet which also carries considerable weight, is playing a con­ stant role in Dora’s libidinal bond with Frau K. How are they each to be appreciated in a way that would account both for the further­ ance of the affair and for the moment at which it stops, its crisis point when the equilibrium is upset? When I made my first inroad into the observation five years ago, I pointed out that, in conformity with the hysteric structure, the hysteric is someone who loves vicariously. You will find this in a whole host of observations. The hysteric is someone whose object is homosexual and who approaches this homosexual object by iden­ tifying with someone of the opposite sex. This was a first clinical approach, as it were, to the patient Dora. I went further still. Taking as my point of departure the notion of the narcissistic relationship insomuch as it founds the ego, insomuch as it is the matrix, the Urbild, of the constitution of this imaginary

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function known as the ego, I showed how this affords trace elements for the observation. The full quadrille can be understood only to the extent that Dora’s ego - and the ego alone - has identified with a virile protagonist, who is Herr K., and that for her the men are so many possible crystallisations of her own ego. In other words, it is through the intermediary of Herr K., it is in so far as she is Herr K., at the imaginary point constituted by the personality of Herr K., that she is attached to the personage of Frau K. I went a little further still. I said that Frau K. is someone of importance. Why so? She is not important merely because she has been chosen among other objects. She is not merely someone of whom we might say that she is vested by the narcissistic function that lies at the bottom of any enamoration, any Verliebtheit. No. As the dreams show - since the essential point of the observation hinges on the dreams - Frau K. is Dora’s question. Let’s try now to transcribe this onto our present formulation, and to pinpoint what in this foursome comes to be arranged on our fundamental schematic. Dora is a hysteric, that is to say, someone who reached the level of the Oedipal crisis and who was both able and unable to pass through it. There is a reason for this, which is that her father, unlike the father of the young homosexual woman, is impotent. The whole observation leans on this central notion of the father’s impotence. Here, then, is an opportunity to highlight in a particularly exem­ plary fashion what the function of the father might be in relation to the lack of object that led the girl into the Oedipus complex. What might the function of the father be qua giver? This situation hinges on the distinction I made regarding primary frustration, the frustration that can set in between child and mother. There is the object of the child’s frustration, but after this frustrating the child’s desire persists. Frustration means something only to the extent that the object is the subject’s appurtenance and persists as such after the frustrating. What is distinct in the mother’s interven­ ing belongs to another register, in that she gives, or doesn’t give, and in that this gift is a sign of love. Now comes the father, who is cut out to be the one who gives, symbolically, this missing object. Here in the Dora case he doesn’t give it because he hasn’t got it. Her father’s phallic shortcoming resounds throughout the entire observation like the root of a chord, constitutive of the positioning. But yet again, do we find ourselves on just the one plane? Will the whole crisis be established solely in relation to this lack? Let’s consider what is at stake. What does it mean to give? Isn’t there another dimension that is introduced into the object relation on the level where it is raised to the symbolic

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degree by the fact that the object may or may not be given? In other words, is it ever the object that is given? This is the question, and in the Dora observation we can see one of its outcomes, which is utterly exemplary. Dora remains very attached to this father from whom she does not receive, symbolically, the virile gift. She is so attached to him that her story begins exactly at the age of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, with a whole series of hysterical mishaps that are very clearly linked to shows of love for the father, who at that time appears more than ever, and decisively so, to be a wounded and sick father, stricken in his very vital forces. The love she has for this father is at that time strictly correlative and coextensive with his diminution. So, we have a very clear-cut distinction here. What intervenes in the love relationship, what is asked for as a sign of love, is only ever something that carries worth merely as a sign. Or, to go yet further, there is no greater possible gift, no greater sign of love, than the gift of what one hasn’t got. Let’s take note, however, that the dimension of the gift comes into existence only with the introduction of the Law. As is posited and asserted in sociological thought as a whole, a gift is something that circulates. The gift you give is always the gift you have received. But when the giving occurs between two subjects, the cycle of gifts comes from yet elsewhere, because what establishes a love relationship is that the gift is given, so to speak, for nothing. Rien pour rien is the principle of exchange. You get nothing for nothing. This formula, like any formula in which the ambiguous rien occurs, seems to be the very formula for interest, but it is also the formula for what is wholly free of charge. Indeed, in the gift of love there is merely something that is given for nothing, and which can only be nothing. In other words, a subject gives something for free in so far as behind what he gives there is everything he lacks. What constitutes the gift is that the subject sacrifices beyond what he has. Moreover, this holds true for the primitive gift such as it effectively used to be practised at the origin of human exchanges in the form of the potlatch. Imagine if you will a subject in possession of all the riches poss­ ible, the maximum possible amount of what may be possessed. Well, a gift from such a subject would literally have no value as a sign of love. Believers imagine that they love God because He is deemed to possess within Him this total plenitude and fullness, but it’s quite certain that if this recognition is so much as thinkable, for anything whatsoever, when it comes to someone who might have gauged that at the root of any belief there is this Being who is supposed to be thought of as a Whole, even so, without any doubt He lacks the

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foremost thing in Being, that is to say, existence. At the root of any belief in God as perfectly and totally munificent, there is this je ne sais quoi that He forever lacks and which means that, all the same, it is always supposable that He doesn’t exist. There is no reason to love God save that perhaps He doesn’t exist. What is certain is that this is where Dora is when she loves her father. She loves him precisely for what he doesn’t give her. The whole situation is unthinkable outside of this initial position, which is maintained through to the end. It still needs to be seen how this situation could be tolerated and put up with once the father got involved in something else, right before Dora’s very eyes, and which she even seems to have induced. The observation hinges on the following. We have the father, Dora, and Frau K.

Frau K.

Dora

Father

The whole situation is established as though Dora had to ask herself the question, What is it that my father loves in Frau K. ? Frau K. is presented as something that her father can love beyond herself. What Dora latches on to is this something that is loved by her father in another, in so far as she doesn’t know what it is. This is in full conformity with what is supposed by the whole theory of the phallic object, namely that the female subject can enter the dialectic of the symbolic order only through the gift of the phallus. There is no other way. This supposes that real need, which is not denied by Freud and which belongs to the female organ as such, to woman’s physiology, is something that never enters automatically into the establishing of the position of desire. Desire targets the phallus to the extent that it must be received as a gift. To this end, the phallus has to be raised to the level of the gift, which moreover may be absent or present. It is in so far as it is raised to the dignity of the gift-object that it leads the subject to enter the dialectic of exchange, which will normalise each of the subject’s positions, up to and including the essential prohibitions that ground the overall movement of exchange. It is from within this that real need, the existence of which Freud never dreamed of denying, and which is linked to the female organ as such, will fall into its place and be satisfied, as it were, laterally. But it is never marked out symbolically as something that carries meaning. It is always essentially problematic unto itself, positioned shy of a certain symbolic crossing-point.

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Indeed, this is precisely what is at stake throughout the unfurling of these symptoms and the unfurling of the observation. Dora asks herself, What is a woman? And it’s in so far as Frau K. embodies this feminine function as such that for Dora she is the representation of the very thing into which Dora projects herself, as the question of femininity. It is to the extent that Dora herself is on the path of the dual relation with Frau K., or rather that Frau K. is what is loved beyond Dora, that Dora feels herself to be concerned in this position. Frau K. is the living incarnation of what Dora can neither know nor cognise in this situation, where she finds nowhere to accommodate herself. When it comes to love, someone is loved over and above what that someone is. Ultimately it’s something this someone is lacking, whoever they are. Dora places herself somewhere between her father and Frau K. Insomuch as her father loves Frau K., Dora feels satisfied, but on the condition, of course, that this positioning should be maintained. Moreover, this positioning is symbolised in umpteen different ways. The impotent father compensates by every kind of symbolic gift, including material gifts, for what he does not embody as a virile presence. And, in passing, he effectively makes Dora benefit from this through all sorts of generosity that are shared out equally to the mistress and to the daughter, thereby having her partake of this symbolic position. Yet this is still not enough, and Dora tries to restore access to a manifest position oriented in the opposite direction. I mean that it’s no longer vis-a-vis the father but vis-a-vis the woman she has in front of her, Frau K., that she tries to re-establish a triangular situa­ tion. This is where Herr K. comes in, through whom the triangle can effectively be closed, but in an inverted position. Herr K.

Owing to her interest in the question, Dora will regard Herr K. as someone who participates in what symbolises the question aspect of Frau K.’s presence, namely the adoration that is further expressed by a very patent symbolic association that is given in the observa­

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tion, the Sistine Madonna. Frau K. is an object of adoration to everyone around her, and Dora ultimately positions herself in rela­ tion to her as a participant in this adoration. Herr K. is the means whereby she makes this position normative by trying to reintegrate the male element into the circuit. When does she slap him? Not when he is courting her or making declarations of love, nor even when he approaches her in a way that is intolerable for a hysteric. Rather, it’s at the moment he tells her, Ich habe nichts an meiner Frau. The German wording is particularly telling. It has a particularly vivid sense, if we allow the term nothing to have its full scope. What he says in essence removes him from the circuit that had been thereby constituted, and which in its ordering is set out as follows -

Dora can readily accept that her father loves in her and through her what lies beyond, Frau K. But for Herr K. to be tolerable in this positioning he has to occupy the exact opposite function, which balances it out, namely, Dora herself has to be loved by him beyond his wife, but in so far as his wife means something to him. This something is the same as the nothing that must lie beyond, that is to say, in this instance, Dora. He doesn’t say that his wife means nothing to him. He says that on the side of his wife, there is nothing. This an can be found in countless locutions in German, for example in the expression Es fehlt ihm an Geld. The particular wording here in German shows that this an is an additional link into the beyond of what lacks. This is precisely what we meet here. He means that there is nothing beyond his wife - My wife is not included in the circuit. What is the upshot of this? Dora cannot tolerate that he should be interested in her, Dora, only in so far as he is interested in her alone. By the same stroke, the whole situation is broken off. If Herr K. is only interested in her, then her father is only interested in Frau K., and at that point she can no longer tolerate it. Why not? In Freud’s eyes, this nevertheless falls within a typical kind of

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situation. As Claude Levi-Strauss explains in Elementary Structures o f Kinship, the exchange of ties of alliance consists in the following - I have received a wife and I owe a daughter. Yet while this is the very principle behind the institution of exchange and of Law, it turns woman purely and simply into an object of exchange. She is not integrated into this by anything. In other words, if she has not renounced something, namely the paternal phallus conceived of as a gift-object, she can conceive of nothing, subjectively speaking, that she might receive from others, that is to say, from another man. To the very extent that she is excluded from this first institution of the gift and of the Law in the direct relation of the gift of love, she cannot experience this situation otherwise than by feeling reduced to the state of a mere object.1 This is indeed what happens at that very moment. Dora rebels absolutely and starts to say, My father is selling me to someone else. In effect, this is a clear and excellent assessment of the situation, to the extent that it has been kept in this half-darkness. As a matter of fact, from the father’s standpoint, allowing Frau K.’s husband to carry on his courting of Dora over these long years in a sort of veiled tolerance has been a way of repaying his indulgence. So, Herr K. has admitted that he has no part in a circuit where Dora could either identify him with herself or think that she is Herr K.’s object beyond the woman, through whom she is attached to him. There is a breaking of these bonds, which are undoubtedly subtle and ambiguous but which in each case carry a meaning and are perfectly oriented. She can no longer find her place in the circuit except in an extremely unstable fashion, but she does find it in some way, and in a way that is constant. When the bonds break, the situ­ ation loses its balance and Dora finds herself having slid into the role of a mere object. She then sets about staking a claim to the very thing she was inclined to consider she had been receiving up to the present time, though it was through the intermediary of another, namely her father’s love. From this moment forth, she demands it exclusively, because it has been refused her totally.

3 So, what difference becomes apparent between these two registers and these two situations in which Dora and the homosexual woman are respectively implicated? To go quickly, so as to end on something that will give you a clear picture, I will tell you the following, which we shall confirm later. If it is true that what is maintained in the unconscious of the young

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homosexual woman is the father’s promise, You will bear my child, and if what she shows in her exalted love for the lady is, as Freud says it is, the very model of absolutely selfless love, of love given for nothing in return, can’t you see that it’s as though the young woman wanted to show her father what true love is, this love that her father has refused her? Undoubtedly the father was implicated in the subject’s unconscious, and no doubt this was because he was finding further favour from the mother. Indeed, this relationship is fundamental whenever a child enters the Oedipus complex, namely the crushing superiority of the adult rival. What she demonstrates to him is how one can love someone not only for what that person has, but literally for what the person doesn’t have, for the symbolic penis she knows she will not find in the lady. For she knows full well where the symbolic penis is to be found. It is with her father who, for his part, is not impotent. In other words, what is called perversion is expressed in this case between the lines, through contrasts and allusions. It’s a way of speaking about something altogether different, but which necessar­ ily implies, through a rigorous sequence of terms that are in play, its return as what is meant to be heard. You will find here what I once called, in the widest sense, metonymy, which consists in getting something across by speaking about something utterly different. If you cannot appreciate this fundamental notion of metonymy in its most comprehensive form, it is quite inconceivable that you should manage to form any notion whatsoever of what perversion in the imaginary can mean. This metonymy is the principle behind everything that may be called realism in the realm of art and invention. Realism literally carries no sort of meaning whatsoever. A novel, which is made up of a heap of tiny lineaments that mean nothing, has no value if it doesn’t make something pulsate harmonically, something that carries a meaning beyond. Thus, near the beginning of War and Peace, the theme that emanates from the women’s bare shoulders stands for something else.2 If the great novelists are tolerable, it’s in so far as everything they endeavour to show us finds its meaning not at all symbolically, nor allegorically, but rather through what they allow to reverberate at a distance. The same goes for cinema. When a film is good, it’s because of the metonymic function. And so too, the subject’s function of perversion is a metonymic function. Is it the same for Dora, who is a neurotic? It’s actually quite dif­ ferent. When we look at the diagram, we notice that in perversion we are dealing with a signifying line of conduct that points to a signifier that lies further along in the signifying chain, to the extent that it is

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linked to it by a necessary signifies In the Dora case, however, taken as a subject, Dora places herself at each step of the way beneath a certain number of signifiers in the chain. She finds in the situation a sort of perpetual metaphor. Literally, Frau K. is her metaphor, because Dora can say nothing of what she is. Dora knows neither where to locate herself, nor where she is, nor what she is meant for, nor what love is meant for. She knows simply that love exists, and she finds an historicisation of this, wherein she finds her place in the form of a question. This question is focused by the content and the articulation of each of her dreams - the jewellery box, then Bahnhof, Friedhof, Vorhof - which signify nothing more than this question. In short, it is in so far as Dora questions herself about what it means to be a woman that she expresses herself as she does, through her symptoms. These symp­ toms are signifier-elements, but to the extent that beneath them runs a perpetually shifting signified, this being the way in which Dora implicates herself in this and concerns herself with it. Dora’s neurosis takes on its meaning to the extent that it is meta­ phorical, and to the extent that it can be unravelled. And it was precisely in so far as Freud forced the real element into this meta­ phor, the real element that tends to be reinserted in any metaphor, by telling her This is who you love, that something did, of course, tend towards a normalisation in the situation when Flerr K. entered the game, but this something remained in a metaphorical state. Proof of this is the sort of pregnancy that befalls Dora after the crisis when she breaks off from Herr K., and which Freud perceives with his prodigious intuitive feeling for signification. It is indeed an odd sort of signifying still-birth that occurs at term, after nine months. Freud says nine months because Dora herself tells him so. She thereby confesses to a sort of pregnancy, but it actually happens after that, after what for Dora would be a normal term pregnancy. It is of significance that Dora sees in this the final reverberation of what still binds her to Herr K. We find here, in a certain form, some equation with a kind of copulation that translates into the realm of the symbolic in a purely metaphorical fashion. Yet again, the symptom is but a metaphor here, an attempt to join the Law of symbolic exchanges to the man with whom one unites or disunites. In contrast to this, the childbirth that is also to be found at the end of the observation on the homosexual woman, before she comes to see Freud, manifests in the following way - she abruptly throws herself from a little railway bridge when, once again, the real father steps in, evincing his irritation and wrath, which is in turn acknowl­ edged by the lady who is beside her. The lady tells her that she no longer wishes to see her, and the young woman then finds herself

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stripped utterly of her last resources. Up until that moment, she was frustrated, since she was without the paternal phallus that was sup­ posed to be given to her, but she had found the means to maintain desire along the path of the imaginary relationship with the lady. Now that the lady has rejected her, however, she can no longer sustain anything. The object is lost once and for all, and this nothing in which she had set herself up, in order to demonstrate to her father how to love, has no more reason to be. At that moment, she makes her suicide attempt. As Freud underlines for us, this also carries another meaning, that of a definitive loss of the object. The phallus that has been firmly refused her has fallen, niederkommen. This falling away has the value of a definitive privation, and also mimes a sort of symbolic childbirth. The metonymic aspect I was telling you about is to be found here. If Freud can interpret the act of jumping off the railway bridge at the critical and terminal moment of her relationship with the lady and the father as a demonstrative way of herself becoming this child that she has not had, and at the same time of destroying herself in a final act that signifies the object, this is grounded solely on the existence of the word niederkommen. This word indicates, metonymically, the final term, the term of suicide, in which is expressed what is at stake in the young homosex­ ual woman, this being the sole mainspring of her entire perversion, in keeping with what Freud asserted time and again concerning the pathogenesis of a certain type of female homosexuality, namely a steady and particularly reinforced love for the father. 23 January 1957

THE FETISH OBJECT

IX T H E F U N C T IO N O F T H E V E IL

The symbolic phallus How lack is actualised The screen-memory: coming to a halt on the image Alternation between perverse identifications The structure of reactional exhibitionism Pursuing our reflections on the object, today I’m going to be putting forward what can be gathered from them in connection with a problem that actualises the question of the object in an especially keen fashion, namely fetishes and fetishism. You are going to see from this how the fundamental schema with which I’ve been trying to furnish you these last weeks certainly finds special expression in the following paradoxical assertions - that what is loved in the object is what the object lacks and that one gives only what one hasn’t got. The fundamental schema that in any symbolic exchange, irre­ spective of how it may function, implies the permanence of the constituent character of what lies beyond the object allows us to see in a new light the perversion that has taken on the role of exemplum in analytic theory and to establish what I might call its fundamental equations in a different way. So, this is about fetishism.

1 Freud makes an inroad into the question of fetishism in two funda­ mental texts, one from 1905 and the other from 1927. While further texts take up the question later, these two - the paragraph on fetish­ ism in the Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality and the article entitled Fetishism - are the most precious.

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In his article, Freud tells us at the outset that the fetish is the symbol of something, but adds that in saying this he shall certainly create disappointment. A great deal has been said about the fetish for as long as people have been speaking about analysis, and also since Freud first spoke about it. The something in question is, once again, the penis. Yet immediately after this comment, he stresses that this is not any chance penis. The detail seems scarcely to have been exploited in its structural grounding, in the fundamental suppositions that it implies on reading it naively for the first time. To spell it right out, the penis at stake is not the real penis. It’s the penis in so far as the woman has it, that it to say, in so far as she does not have it. I’m underscoring this point of oscillation, on which we ought briefly to pause, so as to see what is ordinarily passed over, and which we must not pass over. For someone who does not make use. of the keys we possess, all this is merely a matter of misrecognising the real - it’s about the phallus that the woman doesn’t have, and which she must have for reasons relating to the child’s doubtful rela­ tion to reality. This is the common path, which usually supports all manner of speculation on the future, the development and the crisispoints of fetishism, and, as I have been able to confirm through an extensive reading of all that has been written on fetishism, it leads to all sorts of impasse. Here, as always, I have ventured not to expand too far into this forest of analytic literature. In truth, this is something that, to be treated effectively, would require not just hours but a more con­ trolled study, for there is nothing more delicate and more fastidious than to locate the precise point at which some matter shrinks away, at which the author avoids the crucial point in a discrimination. So, I will be showing you here, in one part of what I’m about to expatiate, the more or less settled result of my readings, and I will be asking you to follow me. To avoid the aimless wandering into which the authors have grad­ ually been led over the years whenever they avoid this point, and to restore the proper position to what is at issue, the differential sinew by which to broach this is that on no account is this a real phallus, a phallus which, as real, would exist or not exist. It’s a symbolic phallus, in so far as it's in its very nature to present in exchange as an absence, as an absence that functions as such. Indeed, everything that can be tralatitious in symbolic exchange is always something that is as much absence as presence. It is made in such a way that it has a sort of fundamental alternation, which means that, having appeared at one point, it disappears then to reappear at another. In other words, it circulates, leaving behind

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it the sign of its absence at the point from which it came. In yet other words, we can immediately recognise that the phallus that is involved here is a symbolic object. On the one hand, by means of this object a structural cycle of imaginary threats is established, which limits the use and wielding of the real phallus. This is the meaning of the castration complex, in that this is how the man is caught in it. But there is another use, which is hidden, so to speak, by the more or less fearsome fantasies in the man’s relation to these prohibitions bearing on the use of the phallus, and this is the symbolic function of the phallus. I mean that the fact of whether it is there or not there, and solely in so far as it is there or not there, is what sets up the symbolic differentiation between the sexes. Symbolically, woman does not have the phallus. But not to have the phallus symbolically is to partake of it in the capacity of absence, and so to have it in some way. The phallus always lies beyond any relationship between man and woman. It can on occasion form the object of a woman’s imaginary yearning to the extent that she has only a very small phallus, yet this phallus that she might feel to be insufficient is not the only one that functions for her because, in so far as she is caught in the intersubjective relationship, there lies, beyond her, for the man, the phallus that she doesn’t have, that is to say, the symbolic phallus that exists qua absence. This is completely independent of the inferiority she might feel on the imaginary plane, for as much as she has a real partaking of the phallus. This symbolic penis, which the other day I positioned in the diagram for the young homosexual woman, plays an essential role and function in the girl’s entry into symbolic exchange. It is in so far as she does not have this phallus, that is to say, in so far as, also, she does have it on the symbolic plane, it is in so far as she enters the symbolic dialectic of having or not having the phallus, that she thereby enters the ordered, symbolised relationship of differentia­ tion between the sexes, where the inter-human relationship is taken on board as something disciplined, typified, ordered, struck with prohibitions and marked by the fundamental structure of the incest law. This is what Freud means when he tells us that it is through the intermediary of what he calls the idea of castration in woman - and which is precisely that she does not have it symbolically, and so therefore she may have it - that she enters the Oedipus complex, whereas this is the boy’s way out if it. In this we can see how, structurally speaking, the androcentrism that marks the elementary structures of kinship in Levi-Strauss’s schematisation is in a certain way justified. The women are exchanged between lineages founded on the male line, the one that is chosen

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precisely because it is symbolic and improbable. It is a fact that the women are exchanged as an object between male lineages. They enter here through an exchange, that of the phallus they receive symbolically and in exchange for which they give the child that for them takes on the function of an ersatz, a substitute, an equivalent for the phallus, and whereby they introduce natural fecundity into this patricentric symbolic genealogy which in itself is sterile. Yet it is in so far as they latch onto this sole and central object that is dis­ tinguished by the fact that it is precisely not an object, but an object that has undergone symbolic valorisation in the most radical way, it is by the intermediary of their relation to this phallus, that they enter the chain of symbolic exchange, that they set themselves up within it and assume their place and value. Once you have noticed this you can see it finding expression in umpteen different ways. When we look closely, what is ultimately expressed in this fundamental theme of the woman giving of herself, if not precisely the need to affirm the gift? Here we can see the con­ crete psychological experience such as it is given to us, and which is so paradoxical in this instance because it’s quite clear that in the act of love, the woman receives, for real. She receives far more than she gives. Everything indicates, and the analytic experience has accentuated this, that no position is a more capturing one, indeed a more consuming one, on the imaginary plane, than hers. If this gets turned around into the contrary assertion, namely that the woman gives herself, it is to the very extent that symbolically it must be so. She must give something in exchange for what she receives, that is, the symbolic phallus. So - Freud tells us - here we have the fetish, representing the phallus qua absent, the symbolic phallus. How can we not see here, right away, that this sort of initial turnaround is indispensable if we are to understand items that are otherwise utterly paradoxical? For example, it is invariably boys who are fetishists, and never girls. If everything lay on the plane of imaginary deficiency, or even of imaginary inferiority, it might seem on first approach that of the two sexes fetishism would break out most overtly in the one that is deprived of the phallus for real. Yet this is hardly the case. Fetishism is exceedingly rare in women, in the proper and individualised sense that it is incarnated in an object that we can regard as itself cor­ responding in a symbolic way to the phallus qua absent. Let’s try to see first of all how this singular relation to an object that is not one can be generated.

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2 Analysis tells us that the fetish is a symbol. In this respect, it is placed at the outset almost on the same footing as any other neu­ rotic symbol. When it is not a neurosis that is at issue but rather a perversion, this is not so palpable. This is how things are classified nosographically for reasons of clinical resemblance that indubitably harbour a certain value, but one has to look fairly closely to confirm this in the structure from the standpoint of analysis. In truth, a good many authors show hesitation here and go so far as to place fetishism on the borderline between the perversions and the neuroses, precisely due to the especially symbolic character of the crucial fantasy. Having started with the full weight of structure, let’s pause for a moment on this position of interposition, which means that what is loved in the love-object is something that lies beyond it. This something is undoubtedly nothing, but it possesses the property of being there symbolically. Since it is a symbol, not only can it be this nothing, but also it must be. What can materialise for us, as it were, in the sharpest way this relationship of interposition, which means that what is aimed at lies beyond what presents itself? Well, some­ thing that is truly one of the most fundamental images of the human relationship with the world, namely the veil, the curtain. The veil or curtain that hangs in front of something is still what best affords an image of this fundamental situation of love. One can even say that with the presence of the curtain, what lies beyond as a lack tends to be actualised as an image. The absence is painted onto the veil. This is nothing less than a curtain’s function per se, whichever it may be. The curtain assumes its value, its being and its consistence from being precisely that onto which absence is pro­ jected and imagined. The curtain is, so to speak, the idol of absence. If the veil of Maya is the most commonly used metaphor to express man’s relation to all that captivates him, this is surely due to his sense of a certain fundamental illusion in all his relations of desire. It is precisely here that man embodies and idolifies his sense of this nothing that lies beyond the love-object. You should hold this fundamental schema in your minds if you want to locate in the right way the elements that come into play in the setting up of the fetishistic relationship, at whichever moment we might consider it.

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•

•----------------------------•

subject

object

nothing

curtain Here, then, is the subject, and the object, and what lies beyond is the nothing, or else the symbol, or else the phallus insomuch as woman lacks it. But once the curtain is in place, something can be painted onto it that indicates that the object lies beyond. The object can then take the place of lack, and also, as such, be the support of love, but in so far as it is precisely not the point to which desire is tethered. Desire appears in some way as a metaphor for love, but what tethers it, namely the object, appears as something illusory and as something that is valorised as illusory. The notorious splitting of the ego when the fetish is involved is explained to us by saying that here woman’s castration is at once affirmed yet denied. Since the fetish is there, she has not lost the phallus, but by the same stroke she can be made to lose it, that is, she can be castrated. The ambiguity of this relationship to the fetish is constant and is relentlessly manifested from one moment to the next in symptoms. This ambiguity, which is borne out in lived experience, an illusion both sustained and cherished as such, is at the same time experienced in a fragile balance where at any moment the curtain could be raised or come tumbling down. This is the relation that is at issue in the fetishist’s relationship with his object. When we follow Freud’s article further, he speaks of Verleugnung with regard to the fundamental stance of disavowing in the relation­ ship to the fetish. But he also says that it’s about making the complex relationship hold up, aufrechtzuhalten, as though he were speaking about a stage set. Freud’s language, which is so full of imagery, while being so very precise, employs terms that here assume their value. He says that the horror o f castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation o f this substitute. The fetish is a Denkmal. The word trophy doesn’t feature, but in truth it is there, doubling up as the token o f triumph, das Zeichen des Triumphes. Authors who approach the typical phenomenon of the fetish will speak over and again of the way in which the subject heraldises his relation to sex,1 but Freud is making us take a step further here. Why does this come about? Why is it necessary? We will be

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coming back to this afterwards. As always, people press ahead too quickly. If one goes straight to the whys and wherefores, one slides immediately into a kind of pandemonium where all sorts of leanings come crowding in to explain why the subject can be more or less remote from the object and feel himself to be arrested, threatened and in conflict.2 Let’s stay for the time being at the level of structure. The structure is here in this relation between the veil and what lies beyond it. An image can be formed on the veil, that is to say, it can be established as an imaginary capture and as the place of desire. This relationship with a beyond-zone is fundamental whenever a symbolic relationship is being set up. It’s a matter of descending onto the imaginary plane of the ternary order of subject / object / beyond-zone that is fundamental to the symbolic relationship. In other words, it’s about projecting the intermediary position of the object into the function of the veil. Before going any further and examining the subject’s requirement of this veil, we are going to look at another angle from which a symbolic relation is established in the imaginary. When last time I was speaking about the perverse structure as such, I spoke about metonymy, or allusion, or a relation that lies between the lines, these being the elevated forms of metonymy. Here Freud puts it in the clearest possible way, though he does not use the word metonymy. What constitutes the fetish, the symbolic element that fixes down the fetish and projects it onto the veil, is taken from the historical dimension. It’s the moment when the image comes to a standstill. I recall previously making a comparison with a film that all of a sudden freezes, just before the moment when what is being sought in the mother, that is, the phallus that she has and which she does not have, has to be seen qua presence-absence, qua absence-presence. The historical reminiscence is halted and suspended at the moment just before. I’m saying historical reminiscence because there is no other meaning to be given to the term screen-memory, which is so fun­ damental in Freud’s conceptualisation and phenomenology. The screen-memory, the Deckerinnerung, is not merely a snapshot. It’s an interruption in the subject’s history, a moment at which it becomes halted and frozen, and so by the same token a moment when it indicates the pursuance of its movement beyond the veil. The screen-memory is linked to the subject’s history by a whole chain. It is a stopping point in this chain, and it’s in this respect that it is metonymical, because history, by its very nature, goes on. In coming to a halt there, the chain indicates its ensuing sequence,

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which is thenceforth veiled. It indicates its absent sequence, namely the repression at stake, as Freud says very clearly. We speak of repression solely in so far as there is a symbolic chain. If a phenomenon that may pass for an imaginary phenomenon can be designated as the point of a repression - because the fetish is in a certain sense an image, and a projected image - it’s precisely in so far as this image is merely the limit point between history insomuch as it goes on and the moment at which it is interrupted. It is the sign, the marker, of the point of repression. If you read Freud’s text carefully you will see that this way of spelling things out is the clearest way of giving his expressions their full weight. Once again we can see the distinction between the relationship with the love object and the relationship of object frustration. These are two different relationships. On the one hand, love transfers via metaphor to desire, which latches onto the object as something illu­ sory, while on the other hand the constitution of the object is not metaphoric but metonymic. The latter is a point in the chain of history at which history has come to a halt. It’s the sign that this is where the beyond-zone that the subject has constituted begins. Why so? Why does the subject have to constitute this zone that lies beyond? Why is the veil more precious to man than reality? Why does the order of this illusory relationship become an essential constituent that is necessary for his relation to the object? This is the question posed by fetishism. Before going further, from what I’ve just said you can see all sorts of things becoming clearer, including for instance the fact that as the first example of an analysis of a fetishist Freud gives us the wonder­ ful story of a play on words, concerning a gentleman who had been brought up in England and later became a fetishist in Germany, and who was forever seeking out a little shine on the nose. Moreover, he would actually see this shine, this Glanz auf der Nase. It meant nothing other than a glance at the nose, the nose itself being, of course, a symbol. The German expression simply transposed the English expression of his early years. You can see here the histori­ cal chain coming into play and projecting onto a point on the veil insomuch as it can even encompass an entire sentence, and indeed a sentence from a forgotten tongue.

3 What are the causes behind the setting-up of the fetishistic struc­ ture? The Kleinians won’t ascertain anything for you in this matter.

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In any case, the various authors have been in a bind for some time now. On the one hand, we cannot lose sight of the notion of the essential articulation that is the relation between the genesis of fetishism and the castration complex. On the other, it is apparently most certain in preoedipal relationships, and not elsewhere, that the phallic mother is the central element and the decisive mainspring. How are the two to be joined together? These authors are more or less happy to do so. Just look how confortable the members of the English school are - fair to mid­ dling, actually - thanks to Mrs Melanie Klein’s system. It structures the first stages of the oral drive tendencies, and particularly their most aggressive moment, by introducing the presence of the pater­ nal penis into the very heart of this moment by means of retroactive projection, that is to say, by retroactivating the Oedipus complex in the earliest relationships with objects that are introjectable. Clearly, in this way they have easier access to the material that will allow for an interpretation of what is at issue. Since I have not yet embarked on an exhaustive critique of what Melanie Klein’s system means, we shall leave aside for the time being what one or another author might be able to contribute on this score. To stick to what we have brought to light here, let’s start with the fundamental relationship between the real child, the symbolic mother and her phallus, which for her is imaginary. So, this is a scheme to be handled with caution inasmuch as it is focused on a single plane, despite corresponding to various planes and coming to function at successive stages of the story. Indeed, for a long while the child is not in a position to appropriate for himself the relationship of imaginary appurtenance that produces the mother’s profound division on her side. We are going to try this year to elu­ cidate this question. We are on the path of seeing how and at what moment this is taken on board by the child, and how this comes into play when the child himself enters this relationship with the symbolic object in so far as the phallus is its main currency. This poses ques­ tions of chronology, temporality, order and succession, which are questions that we try to broach quite naturally - as is indicated by the history of psychoanalysis - from the angle of pathology. What do the observations show us here? When we scrutinise them carefully they show that it is very exactly around and correlative to this singular symptom, which places the subject in an elective relationship with a fetish - the mesmerising object inscribed upon the veil - that his erotic life gravitates. I’m saying gravitates because although it is a mesmerising object, it is understood that the subject maintains a certain freedom of movement, which can be perceived

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when one analyses and doesn’t merely make a clinical description. When we take an observation we can see those elements that I have been spelling out today, and which Binet himself had already seen, for instance this gripping point of the screen-memory and the stand­ still at the hem of the mother’s dress, even her girdle. We can see the essentially ambiguous relation of illusion with this fetish being lived through as such and, moreover, being preferred. We can see the particularly satisfying function of an object that in itself is inert and entirely at the mercy of the subject for the handling of his erotic relationships. All of this can be seen, but it takes analysis to see what is at stake a little more closely, namely what happens whenever, for whatever reason, the recourse to the fetish founders, becomes exhausted and worn out, and simply gives way. What we can see in the subject’s deportment in his love life, and more simply in his erotic relationship, boils down to a defence. You can inspect this by reading observations in the International Journal, by Mrs Sylvia Payne in the second issue of volume 20, by Mr W. H. Gillespie in volume 21, and by Mr Dugmore Hunter in the third issue of volume 35, or those by Mrs Greenacre and others in the Psycho­ Analytic Study o f the Child. This was also glimpsed by Freud, and is spelt out in our diagram. Freud tells us that fetishism is a defence against homosexuality and Mr Gillespie too notes how narrow may be the margin between fetishism and homosexuality. In short, what we find in the relationships with the love object that organise this cycle for the fetishist is an alternation of identifications. There is an identification with the woman confronted with the destructive penis, the imaginary phallus of the primordial experiences from the oralanal period focused on the aggressiveness of the sadistic theory of coitus, and indeed a good many experiences that are brought to light by analysis include some observation of the primal scene perceived as cruel, aggressive, violent and even deadly. And, conversely, there is the subject’s identification with the imaginary phallus, which for the woman makes it a pure object which she can devour and, at the furthest limit, destroy. The child is faced with this oscillation between the two poles of the imaginary relationship in what might be called a brutal fashion, not yet established in its Oedipal lawfulness by the introduction of the father as a subject, as a central point of order and legitimate ownership. The child is offered up to this bipolar oscillation of the relationship between two irreconcilable objects which either way culminate in a destructive and even deadly outcome. This is what is to be found at the base of love relations whenever they arise in the subject’s life as they assume order and shape. Along a certain path of understanding analysis, which is precisely the new-fangled path

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and which in this respect has forged its own path, the analyst will intervene to make the subject perceive the alternation between these positions at the same time as their signification. It might be said that in a certain way the analyst intervenes to open the symbolic distance that is necessary for the subject to perceive meaning. The observations are exceedingly rich and profitable here, when they show us for example the umpteen forms that the actuality of the subject’s early life can take, the fundamental dis-completion that means that he is offered up as such to the imaginary relationship, either along the path of identification with the woman or along the path of taking the place of the imaginary phallus. That is to say, either way there is an insufficient symbolisation of the ternary rela­ tionship. For example, the authors say that very often they note the absence of the father, sometimes repeatedly in the subject’s history, his shortcoming as a presence - he goes on a trip, off to war, and so forth. Furthermore, they note a certain type of subjective position that is sometimes peculiarly reproduced in the fantasies, that of a forced immobilisation. It is sometimes manifested by the fact of the subject having actually been tied down. There is a very fine example in the observation by Sylvia Payne. Following some excessive medical advice, a child was prevented from walking up until the age of two. He had to be tied down in his bed, and this was not without conse­ quence, including the fact that he lived in this way closely monitored in his parents’ bedroom. This put him in the exemplary position of being entirely given over to a purely visual relationship, without any first signs of muscular activity emerging from their source. His relationship with his parents was thus lived through in the style of rage and anger that you can imagine. While such exemplary cases are rare, some authors have insisted on the fact that certain phobic mothers who keep their child at a distance from their contact, a little as though such contact were a source of infection, are certainly not without consequence on the supervalence accorded the visual relationship in the constitution of the primal relationship with the maternal object. Be that as it may, far more instructive than any such example of a vitiation of the primary relationship is, as it were, what appears as a pathological relationship, which presents as the flipside or the complement to the libidinal adherence to the fetish. Fetishism is a classification that, nosologically speaking, encompasses all sorts of things for which our intuition merely gives us an indication of their affinity or kinship with fetishism. That a subject like the one Mrs Payne tells us about should be attached to a mackintosh seems to be of the same nature as being

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attached to a shoe. We make no mistake in thinking so. Structurally speaking, however, this mackintosh contains relations on its own account and indicates a position that is somewhat different from that of the shoe or the girdle in so far as strictly speaking they are themselves directly in the position of the veil between subject and object. Yet it is quite certain that this mackintosh, like any other kind of clothing fetish that is more or less enveloping, aside from the special quality that the rubber entails, possesses a feature that is very often met and which cannot fail to harbour some final mystery that would doubtless be clarified psychologically by the sensoriality of the special contact with the rubber itself. Perhaps it does harbour something that might, more easily than anything else, be the outer lining of skin, or else perhaps harbour special insulating capacities, but whatever the case may be concerning the structure itself of the relations such as they are delivered up in some centres where the observation is made analytically, we can see that the mackintosh plays a role here that is no longer exactly that of the veil. It is much rather the role of something behind which the subject aligns himself, not as though he were in front of the veil but as though he were behind it, that is, in the mother’s place, and, more specifically, adhering to the position of identification with the mother in which she needs to be protected, right here, by this envelopment. This is what affords the transition between cases of fetishism and those of transvestism. The envelopment is not a veil but a protec­ tion. It’s an aegis in which the subject identified with the female personage envelops himself. Another typical relationship that can be particularly exemplary is evidenced in outbreaks of an exhibitionism that in some cases is truly reactional, even sometimes in alternation with fetishism. It always occurs in connection with some effort the subject makes to leave his labyrinth, and when the real comes into play in some way, putting the subject in these positions of unstable equilibrium that give rise to this type of crystallisation or swing-around of his position. This is very plainly illustrated by the outline of Freud’s case of female homosexuality, to the extent that we can see that the introduction of the real element in the shape of the father leads to an interchange of the terms such that what was located in the beyond-zone, the symbolic father, takes up a place in the imaginary relationship in the form of the exemplary homosexual position that she assumes, and which is demonstrative in relation to the father. Similarly, among the observations we have a very fine case in which we can see a subject who, having attempted in certain condi­ tions to gain access to a full relationship by artificially forcing the

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real, expresses what was symbolically latent in the situation by means of his acting-out, that is to say, on the imaginary plane. Here is the example. The subject is about to attempt actual intercourse with a woman for the first time, but he positions himself in the experience as venturing into it in order to show, as it were, what he is capable of doing. He manages more or less successfully thanks to the help of the woman but, within the hour, even though there was nothing to suggest any possibility of his developing such symptoms, he gives himself over to a most peculiar and very highly calculated exhibi­ tionism that consists in exposing his organ just as an international train is passing by. In this way, he could not be caught red-handed. He was compelled, therefore, to follow-up on something that was implicit in his position. His exhibitionism was merely the expression or the projection on the imaginary plane of something of which he had not understood the symbolic reverberations, namely the act he had just engaged in, which ultimately was but the act of trying to show, and merely to show, that he was capable of having normal intercourse just like anyone else. We find this sort of reactional exhibitionism time and again in those observations that are proximate to fetishism, or which are even quite indisputably fetishism. One has a very clear sense of what is at stake in Delinquent Acts as Perversions and Fetishes by Melitta Schmideberg, though at the same time it is very curious to see how far she manages to avoid the main and essential aspect of the thing. She depicts a man who married a woman nearly a head taller than he and o f about one and a half times his weight. He was truly victimised by his wife, becoming her awful punch-bag. One fine day this young man, who had been doing his best to face up to the situation, is informed that he is going to be a father. He rushes off to a public park and starts showing his organ to a group of young women. Mrs Schmideberg, who certainly sounds a bit too Anna-Freudian in this, finds all sorts of analogies with the fact that the lad’s father was already something of a victim for his wife, but had one day managed to get out of the situation by being caught with the maid. The intermediary of the jealous protest had brought his wife some­ what to heel. This explains nothing. It seems to Mrs Schmideberg that she has managed to make a short analysis of a perversion. But there is no cause for wonder, because it wasn’t perversion at all, and nor has she managed to analyse it in the slightest. She leaves out of account the fact that, even so, it was through an act of exposing himself that the subject on this occasion manifested himself. There is no other way to explain this act of exposing himself than to refer to the mechanism of triggering whereby what arises in the real as a surplus that cannot be symbolically assimilated tends to precipitate

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what lies at the bottom of the symbolic relationship, namely the equivalence between phallus and child. Unable to assume this paternity in any way whatsoever, or even to believe in it, the intrepid fellow went off to show the equivalent of the child in the right place, namely the use of his phallus that still remained to him. 30 January 1957

X ID E N T IF IC A T IO N W IT H THE PH ALLUS

Transvestism and garment use Showing oneself Ф offering oneself to view Girl = phallus The object and the ideal in Freud Frustration of love and satisfaction of need Last time, I took a step forward in the elucidation of fetishism as an especially fundamental example of the dynamics of desire. Desire is of the utmost interest to us for a reason that is twofold. On the one hand, we deal with this desire in our practice. It’s not a constructed desire but a desire with all its paradoxes, just as we deal with an object with all its paradoxes. On the other hand, it’s quite clear that Freud’s thought took these paradoxes as its starting point. In particular, as far as desire is concerned, the starting point was perverse desire. It would be a great shame to lose sight of this in our attempt at unification or reduction in the face of the most naively intuitive theories on which psychoanalysis today has been drawing. Every now and then I get some feedback on how you have received each fresh little finding that I bring you from one time to the next. At least this is what I hope for. Now, the little step I took came as a surprise to some people, who already found the theory of love quite satisfactory enough in the way I present it to you, in being grounded on the fact that the subject addresses the lack that is in the object. This had already given a number of them the opportunity to reflect in a way that seemed sufficiently enlightened, though they did have some trouble realising that there is a beyond-zone and a lack in this subject-object relation. Last time, I brought in an extra complica­ tion with a term that is situated in front of the object, namely the veil or curtain, the site of the imaginary projection where something appears that becomes the figuration of this lack and which as such can be the support offered to something that finds its name there

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- desire, but desire qua perverse. It is upon this veil that the fetish comes as a figuration of precisely what lacks beyond the object. This schematisation is designed to set up the successive planes that should allow you in certain cases to find your bearings more easily in this sort of perpetual ambivalence and confusion, where yes is equal to no, where steering in one direction is equal to steering in exactly the opposite direction, along with everything that analysts unfortunately make use of to get out of the bind under the name ambivalence.

1 Right at the end of what I told you last time regarding fetishism, I pointed out how a position becomes apparent that is in some sense complementary. This position is also apparent across the different phases of the fetishist structure, even in the attempts that the fetishist makes to join up with the object from which he has been separated by something that has a mechanism and function which he does not, of course, understand. This position, which might be called symmetrical - the corresponding pole that lies opposite fetishism is the function of transvestism. In transvestism the subject identifies with what lies behind the veil, with the object that lacks something. The authors have spotted this very well in their analyses and have expressed it in their lan­ guage, saying that the transvestite identifies with the phallic mother insomuch as, further to this, she veils over the lack of phallus. This transvestism takes us a long way into the question, because we didn’t have to wait for Freud to tackle the psychology of garments. In any use of the garment there is something that partakes of the function of transvestism. While the immediate commonplace view of the function of the garment is that it conceals the pudendum, the question has to be slightly more complicated than this in the eyes of an analyst. All it would take would be for one of these authors who go on about the phallic mother just to notice the meaning of what he is saying. Garments are not made solely to conceal what one has, in the sense of having it or not, but also precisely on account of not having. Both functions are essential. It is not always and essentially a matter of hiding the object but also of hiding the lack of object. This is a straightforward application in this case of the imaginary dialectic of what is too often overlooked, namely the function and presence of the lack of object. Conversely, in the sweeping use they make of the scoptophilic relationship,1 they always imply, as though it went without saying,

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that the fact of showing oneself is quite straightforward, that it is the correlative of the activity of viewing in voyeurism. Yet again, one dimension is being wilfully overlooked. It is not true that always and in every instance the subject simply puts himself on view, as though this were the correlative and cor­ responding relation to the activity of viewing. It is not about the subject’s involvement in a couple of visual capture. In scoptophilia there is also the supplementary dimension of involvement that is expressed in language by the presence of the reflexive form, a verbal form that in other languages exists in the middle voice. It is to offer oneself to view. If you combine these two dimensions, what the subject offers to view across a whole range of activities that get mixed up under the heading of voyeurism/exhibitionism is some­ thing other than what he shows. This gets drowned out in what is sweepingly called the scoptophilic relationship. Authors like Fenichel - who are very poor theoreticians under their apparent clarity but who, even so, are not lacking in analytic experience - saw this very well. While the effort at theorisation comes to a head in hopeless failure, which is the case in a number of Fenichel’s articles, you can occasionally light upon some very fine clinical gems in them, and even his good feeling for a whole range of facts that, through a kind of flair that the analyst has fortunately drawn from his experience, are grouped together around a theme or a branch chosen from the analytic articulation of the fundamental imaginary relationships. Around scoptophilia and around transves­ tism, various factual stems are grouped together which are utterly distinct from one another but which the author feels more or less obscurely to share some kinship or commonality. In particular, while taking in this expansive and bland literature - a necessary undertaking if one is to give an account of just how far analysts have penetrated into an actual articulation of these facts - I recently turned my attention to an article by Fenichel that was published in 1949, in the third instalment of the eighteenth volume of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. It concerns what he calls The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus. This is not unrelated to the well-known series of equations faeces child = penis that Freud himself authorised. Even though we can see a blatant lack of orien­ tation being demonstrated here by Fenichel, which constantly leaves us wishing for a logic that would be otherwise, a series of facts can be ascertained which are grouped around these analytic encounters. From these it can be seen that, in the subject’s unconscious, and especially the unconscious of the female subject, the child may be held to be equivalent to the phallus. All in all, here lies the phylum of everything that attaches to the fact that the child is given to the =

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mother as a sort of substitute for, or even an equivalent to, the phallus. However, alongside this there are many further facts, and that they should be bracketed together with this one is rather surprising. When I spoke about the child, it was not especially the female child, but this article sets its sights very specifically on the girl. Certainly the article has to start with a number of well-known features of fetishistic or quasi-fetishistic specificity, with certain perversions that are interpreted as the equivalent of the subject’s phallus. It is part and parcel of analytic data that the girl herself - and even the child in a more general way - can conceive of herself as being posited as equivalent to the phallus and can demonstrate this in her deportment. That it is to say, a woman can experience the sexual relationship as being what leads her to bring the male partner his phallus. This is sometimes noticeable even in the details of her pre­ ferred position in love-making, as something that comes to append to the partner, that nestles into a certain locality of her partner’s body. This is yet another kind of fact that cannot fail to be quite striking and to catch our attention. Then, in some cases, the male subject can likewise give himself to the woman as the thing she lacks, and bring her the phallus in the capacity of what she lacks, imaginarily speaking. The full range of facts that are highlighted here might seem to point in one direction, but it can also be seen that in this way of com­ paring them and bringing them all into a single equation, the facts that are being gathered together are actually extremely different. In each of the four different orders of relationship that I have just sketched out, the subject is absolutely not in the same relation with the object. Either the subject brings it, or else gives it, or else desires it, or else replaces it. Once our attention has been drawn to these registers, we cannot fail to see that the author’s grouping together of these facts into the equivalence that he thereby sets up goes far beyond a straightforward theoretical requirement. We also read that the young girl can, for one type of subject, be the object of a supervalent attachment, and that a mythical function can emerge both from these perverse mirages and from a whole series of literary constructions which, depending on their author, we can place in more or less illustrious groupings. Some have spoken quite readily of a Mignon type. You are all familiar with Goethe’s crea­ tion of Mignon the bohemian, whose bisexual position is very firmly underscored by the author himself. She lives with a sort of enormous and brutal protector, who clearly is highly paternal, known as the Harper. All told, he serves as her high servitor, but at the same time she is of great necessity to him. Goethe says somewhere, the Harper

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whom she needed, and Mignon whom he could not do without? We find here a sort of couple with, on the one hand, what could be called might in its solid and brutal embodied state, and, on the other, some­ thing without which this might would be stripped of its efficacy, something that it is missing and which is ultimately the secret of its true might. This something is nothing less than a lack. This is the final site where the infamous magic comes to be located, which is always so confusedly attributed in analytic theory to the idea of almightiness. As I have told you, the structure of almightiness, contrary to what people believe, lies not in the subject but in the mother, that is, in the primal Other. The Other is the one who is almighty. However, behind this almightiness there is indeed an ultimate lack on which the might of the Other hinges. I mean that as soon as the subject perceives, in the object whose almightiness he expects, this lack that renders powerless, the final resource of almightiness is deferred yet further beyond, to the very site where something does not exist, and to the utmost degree. It is that which, in the object, is nothing but the symbolism of lack, nothing but fragility and smallness. This is where the subject has accentuated the true and secret mainspring of almightiness, and it’s what constitutes the considerable interest of what today I’m calling the Mignon type, which in literature has been reproduced in a great many examples. Three years ago, I nearly announced a lecture on Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux. There are few testimonies that are so exemplary when it comes to a profound divination of the imaginary dynamic I’ve been trying to develop for you, and today especially. My recol­ lection of it is as a major illustration that accentuates and imparts the meaning of this magical being that lies beyond the object, to which a whole series of idealising fantasies can become attached. The tale begins in Naples, in a cave to which the first-person narrator has taken himself at the beckoning of the devil. In accord­ ance with certain formalities, the devil appears in the guise of a formidable camel’s head with disproportionately large ears. The camel’s head says to him, in the most hollow voice - Che vuoi? What wouldst thou? I believe that this fundamental questioning is indeed what pro­ vides us in the most gripping way with the function of the superego. But the interest does not lie in the fact that the image of the superego has found a gripping illustration, but rather in the creature who is supposed to transform, no sooner has the pact been concluded, into a little dog who, through a transition that surprises no one, becomes a charming young man and, then, a charming young woman. Furthermore, until the end they intermingle with total ambiguity. This beloved protagonist, who goes by the significant

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name of Biondetta, becomes for a while the stunning source of the narrator’s every happiness, the fulfilment of his every desire, the properly magical satisfaction of everything he might wish for. Yet all this is steeped in an atmosphere of fantasy, of dangerous unreal­ ity, of abiding menace that doesn’t fail to taint the surroundings. The situation is resolved at the end by the sudden collapse of this accelerating and crazy race, and by a catastrophic dissipation of the mirage, when the subject returns, as is only proper, to his mother’s castle. Another novel, Henri de Latouche’s Fragoletta, presents a curious character who is clearly a transvestite because until the end, and without anything being brought to light unless by the reader, it has to do with a girl who is a boy and who plays a role that is function­ ally analogous to the one I’ve just described as the Mignon type. After a number of details and refinements, the novel culminates in a duel in which the protagonist kills Fragoletta. Fragoletta had presented herself to him as a boy and he had failed to recognise her. This shows very well the equivalence between a certain female object of Verliebtheit and the other party as a rival, the same other that is at issue when Hamlet kills the character of Ophelia’s brother. Here we are in the presence of a character that is fetishised or made fay, these being fundamentally the same word since they both connect via the Portuguese feitigo to the Latin factitius. Historically speaking, the word fetish derives from this and is none other than the factitious. The ambiguous feminine creature represents the subject himself, embodying in some way, beyond the mother, the phallus that she lacks, and doing so all the better in that he doesn’t possess it himself. Instead, he is fully engaged in its representation, its Vorstellung. We are in the presence of a yet further function of the love relation on the perverse paths of desire, paths which can be exemplary for us in clarifying the positions that have to be singled out when we analyse this desire. So, we have been led finally to ask the question of what is subja­ cent and constantly put into question by this very critique, namely the notion of identification.

2 The notion of identification is present from the first in Freud’s writing in a latent fashion, emerging from one moment to the next only to disappear again. Implications of identification are already there in The Interpretation o f Dreams. It was to reach its major point of explication when he wrote Mass Psychology and the

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Analysis o f the Ego, which includes a chapter expressly devoted to identification. One feature of this chapter is to show us - as very often this is so, and the value of Freud’s writing is to show us this - the author’s very great perplexity. This is an article where Freud admits that he is in a bind, and even that he is quite powerless to get out of the dilemma posed by the constant ambiguity that presents between the two terms he specifies, namely identification and object-choice. These two terms appear in a great many cases, one being substituted for the other with such a disconcerting power of metamorphosis that the transition itself is not grasped. Nevertheless, it is clearly necessary to maintain the distinction between the two because, as Freud says, standing on the side of the object is not the same thing as standing on the side of the subject. It’s quite clear that, should an object become the object of choice, it is not the same as becoming the support for the subject’s identification. In itself this is wonderfully instructive. It is no less instructive to behold the disconcerting ease with which each author seems to accommodate himself to this and uses one and the other in a way that is strictly equivalent, whether in his observation or his theorisa­ tion, without asking for more. When one does ask for more, this produces an article like the one by Gustav Hans Graber, in the 1937 edition of Imago, on two types of mechanism in identification, Die zweierlei Mechanismen der Identifizierung, which really is the most staggering thing you can imagine because everything seems to be resolved for him by the distinction between active identification and passive identification. When one looks more closely it is impossible not to see, and indeed Graber himself notices this, that the two poles of active and passive are present in any kind of identification, and so we really have to come back to Freud and take up his articulation of the question point by point. Chapter VIII of Mass Psychology and Analysis o f the Ego, which follows the chapter on identification, opens with a sentence that shifts right away into the atmosphere of something that in its purity is quite different from what we usually read - Even in its caprices the usage o f language remains true to some Wirklichkeit, to some effective reality. As a side note, I would like to point out that Freud had made a first inroad into identification in the previous chapter by speaking about identification with the father as the example through which we enter most naturally into this phenomenon. We come to the second paragraph, and in the German text we read - At the same time as this identification with his father, possibly even earlier, the boy has begun to undertake a true object-charging o f his mother. As

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an example of the poor translation of Freud’s texts in French, even earlier is translated as un peu plus tard, a little later, leaving the reader to wonder whether the identification with the father might not come first.3 We find another example in the passage I want to come to this morning, and which I have chosen for you because it is the most condensed and the most apt to show you Freud’s perplexities. It con­ cerns the state of love in its relations with identification. Following Freud’s text, we read that identification is the more primal and fundamental function in that it entails an object-choice, but one that still has to be articulated in a way that is itself highly problematic, because Freud’s entire analysis ties it profoundly to narcissism. To go as far as we can in the direction that Freud spells out perfectly, we see that this object is a sort of other ego within the subject The difference between identification and the condition o f being in love, Verliebtheit, in its highest forms, calledfascination or amorous dependence, Horigkeit, is now easy to describe. In the former case the ego has enriched itself with the qualities o f the object. To use Ferenczi’s expression, it has ‘introjected’ the object into itself. In the latter case the ego has become poorer, it has abandoned itself to the object, setting the object in place o f its most important constituent. In the French translation we read that the ego s’assimile the object, but all one has to do is read what Ferenczi wrote to see that it’s not about assimilation but introjection. It’s a matter of introjection in its relations with identification. Then, the French translator gives s’etant efface devant lui for dasselbe an die Stelle seines wichtigsten Bestandteils gesetzt. The German has been completely lost in the French sentence, which on no account translates what is so fully articulated in Freud’s text. Freud is pausing here on the contrast between, on the one hand, what the subject introjects and is enriched by, and on the other, what takes something from him and impoverishes him. Indeed, Freud had previously dwelt at some length on what occurs in the state of love, where the subject becomes increasingly dispossessed, to the benefit of the loved object, of everything that is himself. The subject is humbled and falls into complete subjection in relation to the object he has invested in. Freud is spelling out how this object, for whose benefit the subject has become impoverished, is the very same that he sets in place of his most important constituent, his wichtigsten Bestandteils. This is Freud’s approach to the problem. He tackles it by tracing backwards. He doesn’t spare us the moves he makes. He moves forward and sees that it’s incomplete, so he retraces his steps and says Closer examination shows that this account erects sham opposites -

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that do not in fact exist. We are not talking about impoverishment or enrichment in economic terms; the condition o f being deeply in love can also be described as the ego having introjected the object into itself. It may be that another distinction comes closer to the essence here. In the case o f identification, the object had become lost or been given up. The French translation, however, tells us that the object se vola­ tilise et disparait. We are better off consulting the German text, because this is a reference to the fundamental notion that can be found consistently in Freud’s notion of the formation of the object from the very start. He says that das Objekt verloren gegangen oder aufgegeben worden. It is not, therefore, about evaporating or vanish­ ing, because the object does not vanish. On the contrary, the object is reinstated in the ego, with the ego undergoing a partial change, modelling itself on the lost object, or, in the case of Verliebtheit, the object is preserved and is as such ‘over-charged’ by and at the expense o f the ego. Freud continues - But in this respect too there is some doubt. I f it is established that identification presupposes the relinquishment o f object-charging, can there be no identification where the object is pre­ served? And before we allow ourselves to become involved in debating this delicate question, it may already have dawned on us that another question captures the essence o f this situation, namely whether the object is set in the place of the Ich or o f the Ichideal. So, in going about things in this way the text leaves us in quite a pickle. It seems that nothing of any great sharpness emerges from these movements to-and-fro. The very place that is to be given to the object in these different back-and-forth movements, in which it is constituted either as an object of identification or as an object of loving capture, remains almost entirely in the state of a question. At least the question is being posed, and this is simply what I wanted to highlight. It can’t be said that this is one of those texts that would be testamentary, but it’s one of those in which Freud reached the summit of his theoretical elaboration. Let’s try, therefore, to take up the problem on the basis of the reference points that we have been afforded in the elaboration we have been trying to undertake here concerning the relations between frustration and the constitution of the object.

3 First of all, it’s a matter of conceiving of the bond that we commonly establish, both in our practice and in our parlance, between identi­ fication and introjection. You have seen how this is quite apparent

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right from the start of the passage from Freud that I’ve just read out to you. I propose the following - the metaphor that underlies introjection is an oral metaphor. People speak indiscriminately about introjection and incorporation, allowing themselves to slide in the most common way into all the articulations that were produced in the Kleinian era. They would evoke, for instance, the infamous constitution of primordial objects that divide in just the right way into good and bad objects that are alternately introjected. These objects are held to be something that is simply given in this infamous primitive world that knows no bounds, where the subject would form a whole from his being subsumed into the maternal body. From this standpoint, introjection is held to be a function that is strictly equivalent to and symmetrical with the function of projection. Furthermore, the object is constantly in a kind of movement, passing from without to within only to be pushed back out from the inside when it has become too much to bear. This leaves introjection and projection in a perfect symmetry. What I am about to try to articulate for you now takes a stand against this excess, which is certainly not a Freudian excess. I believe that it is strictly impossible to conceive of phenomena such as manifest oral impulses - and I’m not talking simply in terms of conceptualisation or something that is shaped in thoughts, but in terms of clinical practice - of such evocations of the oral drive, cor­ relative with turning points in the symbolic reduction of the object that we endeavour to bring about from time to time, with more or less success, if we stick with this vague notion of regression that is always put at our disposal in such cases. In cases of young children where this leads to the appearance of bulimic impulses, or at some such turning point in the treatment of a fetishist, we are told that the subject is regressing because, of course, that’s what he’s there for. Why? Because at the very moment he is progressing in his analysis, that is to say, trying to take in a full perspective of his fetish, he regresses. You can always say this and no one will contradict you. I say, on the contrary, that each time the drive appears in the analysis, or elsewhere, it should be conceived of in relation to its economic function, in relation to the unfolding of a particular defined symbolic relationship. Isn’t there something that allows us to shed light on this in the rough outline I gave you for the dialecti­ cal structure of the gift? On one side, the child is faced with the mother as the support of the first love relation, in so far as love is something that is symboli­ cally structured, in so far as she is the object of an appeal, an object which therefore is as much absent as present. This is the mother

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whose gifts are signs of love, and which as such are just that. Ipso facto, these gifts are cancelled out whenever they are anything else but signs of love. On the other side, there are the objects of need that she presents to the child in the form of her breast. Can’t you see that between the two it’s a matter of equipoise and compensation? Whenever there is a frustration of love, this is compensated by the satisfaction of need. It is in so far as the mother is missing for the child who calls out to her, that he clings to her breast and turns it into something more significant than anything else. So long as he has it in his mouth and derives satisfaction from it, he cannot be separated from this thing that leaves him nourished, relaxed and satisfied. Here, the satisfaction of need is both a compensation for the frustration of love and, I would almost say, the beginning of the distraction from it. The supervalence that the object assumes - the breast in this instance, or the nipple - is grounded precisely on the fact that a real object assumes its function as a part of the love object. It takes on its signification qua symbolic and, as a real object, becomes part of the symbolic object. The drive aims at the real object as a part of the symbolic object. It is on this basis that any understanding of oral absorption, of the mechanism of so-called regressive oral absorp­ tion that can intervene in any love relation, becomes possible. Once a real object that satisfies a real need has become an element of the symbolic object, any other object that can satisfy a real need can come in its stead, and first in line is the one that is already symbol­ ised but which is also perfectly materialised, namely speech. To the extent that oral regression to the primal object of devoration comes to compensate for the frustration of love, this reaction of incorporation imparts its model, its cast, its Vorbild, to the kind of incorporation that is the incorporation of certain words among others, which lies at the origin of the early shaping of what is known as the superego. What the subject incorporates under the name of the superego is something analogous to the object of need, not in the sense that it would itself be the gift but in that it is the substitute for the failing of the gift, which is really not the same thing. It is on this basis, too, that the fact of possessing or not possessing a penis can take on a double meaning and enter the subject’s imagi­ nary economy by two paths that are initially very dilferent. First, the penis can, at a given moment, locate its object somewhere in the lineage and the stead of the object that is the breast or the nipple. It is thus an oral form of the incorporation of the penis that plays its role in determining certain symptoms and functions. But there is another way in which the penis enters the imaginary economy. It can enter not as an object that compensates for the frustration

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of love, but as what lies beyond the love object and which the love object lacks. Let’s call the first one the penis. With all it entails, even so, it is an imaginary function in that it is incorporated imaginarily. The other one is the phallus inasmuch as the mother lacks it and it lies beyond her and her power of love. It is with respect to this missing phallus that I’ve been posing you the question, since the start of this year’s seminar - at what moment does the subject discover this lack? When and how does he make this discovery in such a way that he can find himself committed to sub­ stituting himself for it, that is to say, to choosing a different path in the re-finding of the love-object that slips away, by himself bringing in his own lack? This distinction is crucial, and it will enable us today to set down a first sketch of what is more or less requisite for this temporal phase to come about. We have symbolic structuration and possible introjection, which as such is the most characteristic form of primal identification that Freud posited. It is in a second temporal phase that Verliebtheit occurs. This Verliebtheit is absolutely inconceivable, it cannot be articulated anywhere, except in the register of the narcissistic rela­ tionship, in other words in the specular relationship, such as I have defined and articulated it. I remind you that this occurs at a date that can be isolated. Of necessity, it cannot be before the sixth month. Sometime thereafter, this relationship with the image of the other comes about, insomuch as this image affords the subject the matrix around which can be organised what I called his incompletude vecue, his lived experience of incompleteness, of the fact that he is wanting. He realises that he is lacking something in relation to the image that presents itself as total, not only as fulfilling, but also as a source of jubilation for him. It is in so far as there is a specific relationship between man and his image, in so far as the imaginary comes into play, that upon the foundation of these first two symbolic relationships between the object and the mother it will become apparent that both he and his mother lack something imaginarily. It is in the specular relationship that the subject has had the experience and the apprehension of a possible lack, the apprehension that something that lies beyond can exist and that this is a lack. Therefore, it is only beyond the narcissistic realisation, and to the extent that these tense and deeply aggressive comings and goings start to be organised, around which the successive layers of what will constitute the ego will crystallise and form a kernel, that there can be an introduction of what leads to the appearance, for the

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subject, beyond what he constitutes for the mother as an object, of the impression that either way the object of love is itself caught, captured, withheld in something that he, as an object, does not manage to reach, namely a yearning that bears on the mother’s own lack. In fact, at the point we’ve reached, all of this hinges on the effect of transmission whereby we suppose - because experience forces this upon us and because Freud adhered to this completely, right through to the last of his formulations - that no satisfaction by any real object whatsoever that comes to replace it will ever manage to fill this lack in the mother. Alongside the relationship with the child, the lack of the phallus remains as a point of attachment of her inser­ tion in the imaginary. It is only after the second phase of imaginary specular identification with the body image as such, which lies at the origin of the ego and which provides its matrix, that the child, the subject, can gain access to what the mother lacks. But the precondi­ tion for this is the specular experience of the other as forming a totality in relation to which he is the one who can lack something, because the subject broaches, beyond the object of love, the lack for which he can be led to substitute himself. He can propose himself as the object that will fill this lack. I have led you today as far as the presentation of a form that you must simply hold in your minds so that we can pick up from the same spot next time. To what does this form correspond? What you can see drawn up here is a new dimension, a new property, of what is given in the actual state of the subject once he has completed this process and the functions of superego, Ego-ideal and ego have been differentiated. It’s a matter of knowing, as Freud puts it very well at the end of his article, what is meant by this object coming to position itself either in the place of the ego or in the place of the Ego-ideal. In what I have thus far explained about narcissism I have had to stress the shaping of the Ego-ideal - 1 mean, the shaping of the ego insomuch as it is an ideal shaping and insomuch as it is from the Ego-ideal that the ego is detached. I have not sufficiently articu­ lated the difference between them. However, if you simply look into Freud, with his fruitful obscurities and his diagrams that pass from hand to hand without anyone deigning for an instant to reproduce them, what do you find in the one that he offers us at the end of this chapter?

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Here [on the central vertical axis] is where he places the egos of the different subjects. It’s a matter of knowing why different subjects are in communion with the same ideal. He explains that there is an identification between the Ego-ideal and all these objects that are supposed to be the same. Yet when we look at the diagram we notice that he has taken care to link these three objects, which may be supposed to be the same, to an external object that lies behind them. Can you not see that this bears a glaring resemblance to what I’ve been trying to explain to you? Regarding the Ichideal, it’s not merely a matter of an object but indeed of something that lies beyond the object and which comes to be reflected, as Freud says, not purely and simply in the ego - which doubtless feels something of this and can be impoverished by it - but rather in something that lies in the ego’s very footings, in its first requirements and, to spell it right out, upon the first veil that is projected in the form of the Ego-ideal. Next time I will be picking up from where I’ve left off today, with the relation between the Ego-ideal, the fetish, and the object qua missing object, that is to say, the phallus. 6 February 1957

XI THE PH A LLU S A N D THE U N F U L F IL L E D M O T H E R

The gift manifests itself on appeal Substitution of satisfactions The eroticisation of need The mirror, from jubilation to depression The signifying role of the imaginary phallus I intend today to take up the terms with which I’ve been trying to formulate the necessary revision of the notion of frustration. Indeed, without this revision it is quite possible that the gap will continue to grow between the dominant theories in psychoanalysis today - what are called the current proclivities of psychoanalysis - and Freudian doctrine. As you know, in my view Freud’s doctrine constitutes nothing less than the only accurate conceptual formulation of the practice that this very same doctrine founded. What I am going to try to spell out today might be a little more algebraic than usual, but everything we have done so far has paved the way for it. Before we set off again, let’s punctuate what has been brought out by certain terms that we have been led to voice here.

1 I have tried to locate frustration for you on the three-tier chart between castration, which Freud’s doctrine took as its point of departure, and privation, to which certain authors refer it. Let’s say that they have referred privation to castration in various ways. Psychoanalysis today has been putting frustration right at the heart of all these failings that are purportedly marked out in their analysable consequences, in the symptoms properly speaking that fall in our remit. We need to understand frustration so that we can

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turn it to valid use, because, to be sure, if the problem of analytic experience has brought it to the forefront of the terms in use, this cannot be entirely without reason. While its prevalence does not substantially modify the economy of our thought as a whole in the presence of neurotic phenomena, it does nevertheless lead it in some respects into dead-ends. This is indeed what I’ve been endeavouring to demonstrate, I hope with success, using a number of examples. The further you venture into the analytic literature with an open eye, the more you will see these dead-ends being demonstrated. Let’s posit here at the outset that frustration is not the refusing of an object of satisfaction in the pure and simple sense. Satisfaction means the satisfying of a need. I don’t have to insist on this point. On the whole, when one speaks in terms of frustration, one is using the word without reading more into it. We have frustrating experiences and we think they leave traces. We simply forget that for things to be so simple an explanation would have to be found for how the desire that would supposedly have been frustrated might correspond to the distinctive property that Freud accentuates so firmly from the time of his very first writings, namely that desire in the repressed unconscious is indestructible. I’ve been indicating to you how the entire development of his life’s work is undertaken to examine this riddle. This property is strictly inexplicable within the perspective of need alone. Any experience we might have of what goes on in an animal economy shows us this. The frustration of a need must entail various modifications that are bearable for the organism to a greater or lesser extent, but certainly if there is one thing that experience confirms, it’s that frustration cannot give rise to the maintaining of desire as such. Either the individual succumbs or the desire alters or wanes. Either way, no coherence whatsoever is imposed between frustration and the permanence of desire, even its insistence, to employ the term I was led to foreground when we were speaking about Wiederholungszwang, the automatism of repetition. Furthermore, Freud never speaks of frustration. He speaks of Versagung, which falls more adequately in line with the notion of reneging, in the sense that one says to renege a treaty, to withdraw from an engagement.1 This is so true that one can even on occa­ sion place Versagung on the opposite side, because the word can mean both pledge and the breaking o f a pledge. Very often this is so with these words that carry the prefix Ver-, which is so essential in German and which has held an eminent place in word-choice in analytic theory. Let’s come straight out with it. The triad frustration / aggression / regression, when it is given like this, is far from having the more or

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less seductive character of immediately comprehensible signification that is often read into it. One has only to consider it for a moment to notice that in itself it is not comprehensible, and that it raises the question of how comprehensive it is. There is no reason not to offer some other sequence of terms instead. Quite randomly, I could tell you - frustration / depression / contrition. I could invent others. For us, it’s a matter of posing the question of the relations between frus­ tration and regression, and this has never been done in a satisfactory way. I wouldn’t say that what has been done is false. Rather, I’m saying that it’s not satisfactory because the notion of regression is never developed in these efforts. So, frustration is not the refusing of an object of satisfaction. It hinges on something else. I’m going to content myself with lining up a series of formulas that have already been worked through here, and so I am relatively unburdened from having to prove their worth, save through veiled references. I want to work through a chain in such a way that you will be able to retain its chief points of articulation, so that you can make use of it and see whether these articulations are helpful to you. Let’s move on to the path that consists in taking things up at the start. I’m not saying that this is the start of development, because it doesn’t have the character of a development, but rather at the level of the child’s primal relation with his mother. Let’s say that, originatively, frustration - not just any frustration but a frustration that can be utilised in our dialectic - is thinkable only as the refusing of a gift, in so far as the gift is itself the symbol of something that is called love. In saying this I’m saying nothing that isn’t spelt out in black and white by Freud himself. The fundamental character of the love relation, with all that it entails in and of itself, elaborated not at one remove but twice removed, does not imply merely that one is faced with an object but that one is faced with a being. This is set out by Freud in a number of different passages as the relation that lies at the beginning. What does it mean? It doesn’t mean that the child has practised the philosophy of love, that he has made the distinction between love and desire. It means that he is already steeped in the implied existence of the symbolic order. We find evidence of this in his behaviour. Certain things come to pass that are only conceivable if this order is already present. Here we are faced with an ambiguity that arises from the fact that we have a science that is a science of the subject and not a science of the individual. Yet we succumb to the need to place the subject at the point of departure, forgetting that the subject qua subject cannot be identified with the individual. Even if the subject is detached, as

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an individual, from the order that concerns him as a subject, this order exists none the less. In other words, the law of intersubjec­ tive relationships, given how it profoundly governs the very thing upon which the individual depends, implicates him, whether he is conscious of this or not, as an individual in this order. Trying to make the image of the father emerge from the child’s anxieties in the dark is a desperate attempt that can only be under­ taken by pulling strings so conspicuous they fool no one. I’m alluding to Mallet’s articles on phobia. I can qualify their outlook as desper­ ate because the order of paternity exists as such. Whether or not the child has experienced such childhood dread, it only takes on its articulated meaning in the intersubjective father/child relationship, which is deeply organised symbolically and forms the subjective context in which the child will have to develop his experience. This experience is taken up from one moment to the next, and retroac­ tively reshaped, by the intersubjective relation in which he engages himself incrementally, taking the bait piece by piece. I spoke about the gift. In itself the gift implies the full cycle of exchange, and the subject enters this as early as you can imagine. There is a gift only because there is an immense circulation of gifts that covers the entire intersubjective whole. The gift arises from a zone that lies beyond the object relation, precisely because it presup­ poses behind it the full order of exchange that the child has entered, and it can arise from this beyond-zone only with the character that constitutes it as specifically symbolic. Nothing is a gift unless it has been constituted by the act that cancelled it out or dismissed it beforehand. The gift emerges against a backdrop of revocation, and it is against this backdrop, and as a sign of love that is first annulled so as then to reappear as a pure presence, that the gift is given or not on appeal. I shall say more here. I’ve said that the appeal lies on the foremost plane, but recall if you will what I told you when we were dealing with psychosis. I said that the appeal was essential to speech. I would be wrong to stick at this level, because the structure of speech implies in the Other that the subject receives his own message in an inverted form. Here, we are not yet at this level because what is at issue is the appeal. However, already, the appeal cannot be sustained in isolation. Freud’s image of the infant with his Fortl Da shows this very well. Already, at the level of the appeal, it has to have its contrary diametrically opposed. Let’s call it a marker. It is to the extent that the very thing that is called out for can be rejected that the appeal is already fundamental and foundational in the symbolic order. Either way, the appeal is already a fully engaged introduction into the symbolic order.

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When it is not there, the gift manifests itself following the appeal for what is, and when it is there, it manifests itself essentially as the mere sign of the gift, that is to say, as nothing, as no object of satisfaction. It is there precisely to be pushed away in so far as it is this nothing. This symbolic interplay therefore has a fundamen­ tally disappointing character. This is the essential articulation on the basis of which satisfaction itself is situated and takes on its meaning. I don’t mean that the child does not on such occasions obtain the satisfaction that is granted to a pure vital rhythm. I’m saying that any satisfaction that is in question in frustration arises there against the backdrop of the fundamentally disappointing character of the symbolic order. Here, satisfaction is a mere substitute, a compensa­ tion. The child quashes, as it were, the disappointing aspect of this symbolic interplay by orally seizing the object of satisfaction, the breast in this instance. What sends him to sleep in this satisfaction is precisely his disappointment, his frustration, the refusal that he has experienced. The painful dialectic of the object that is both there and never there, in which the subject becomes practised, is symbolised for us in the exercise that is brilliantly seized upon by Freud as the pareddown interplay of what constitutes the backdrop to the subject’s relationship with the presence-absence couple. Of course, Freud seizes upon it in its pure state, in its detached form, but he recognises this interplay insomuch as it is absence that constitutes presence. So, in his satisfaction, the child quashes the fundamental unfulfilment of this relationship. He stifles the interplay by grasping the oral object. He quashes what arises from this fundamentally symbolic relationship. From this point forth, there is nothing astonishing for us in the fact that it is in sleep that the persistence of his desire on the symbolic plane should manifest itself. I will add here how even the child’s desire in the dream is never tied to a pure and simple natural satisfaction. You can see this in the dream of the young Anna Freud, which is claimed to be exceedingly straightforward. She says - stwawbewwies, pudden, etc. These objects are all tran­ scendental objects. They have already entered the symbolic order to such an extent that they are all forbidden objects. Nothing obliges us to think that the young Anna was unfulfilled that evening, quite the contrary. What is maintained in the dream as a desire - certainly one that is expressed undisguisedly, but with the full transposition of the symbolic order - is desire of the impossible. And if you might still be in doubt as to whether speech plays an essential role here, I will point out to you that had the young Anna

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Freud not voiced this in words, we would never have known a thing about it.

2 Let’s pursue now the dialectic of frustration and ask what happens when the satisfaction of need comes into play and replaces symbolic satisfaction. Due to the very fact that it is substituted for symbolic satisfaction, this satisfaction of need itself undergoes a transformation. When the real object itself becomes a sign in the demand for love, that is to say, in the symbolic plea, it brings about an immediate transforma­ tion. What is this transformation? Given that I’ve been telling you that the real object here takes on the value of a symbol, I could tell you that it has thereby become a symbol, or almost become one, but to do so would be a sheer sleight of hand. What takes on a symbolic accent and value is the activity, the mode of apprehension, that puts the child in possession of the object. This is how orality becomes what it is. Being an instinctual mode of hunger, it is the vehicle of a libido that maintains one’s body, but that’s not all it is. Freud wonders about this libido, asking whether it is the libido of vital preservation or sexual libido. Of course, in itself it is the former, and this is even what implicates destrudo, but it is precisely because it has entered this dialectic of substituting satisfac­ tion for the demand for love that it is indeed an eroticised activity. It is libido in the strict sense, and it is sexual libido. All this is not merely some nugatory rhetorical articulation, because it responds to certain objections - and in a different way, in a way that does not evade them - voiced by people who are certainly not especially astute, regarding certain analytic remarks on the eroticisation of the breast. One such objector is Charles Blondel. In the most recent issue of Les Etudes philosophiques, dedicated to the centenary of Freud’s birth, Mme Favez-Boutonier quotes Blondel from one of his articles where he says that he’s quite pre­ pared to entertain all of this, but still wonders what analysts make of those cases where the child is not suckled at his mother’s breast but is instead bottle-fed. What I’ve just structured for you provides a reply precisely to this. Once it has entered the dialectic of frustra­ tion, the real object is not in itself irrelevant, but it has no need to be specific. Even if it is not the mother’s breast, it will lose nothing of the value of its place in the sexual dialectic, from which emanates the eroticisation of the oral zone. The object is not what plays the essential role here, but rather the fact that the activity has taken on

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this eroticised function on the plane of desire, and which becomes organised in the symbolic order. I shall also point out to you in passing that this reaches so far that it is quite possible for the same role to be played when there is no real object whatsoever, because what is at issue here is to give rise to a substitutive satisfaction for symbolic saturation. This and this alone can explain the true function of symptoms like those of ano­ rexia nervosa. I’ve already2 told you that anorexia is not a matter of not eating anything, but of eating nothing. I insist - it means to eat nothing. Nothing is precisely something that exists on the symbolic plane. It’s not a nicht essen, but a nichts essen. This point is indis­ pensable if one is to understand the phenomenology of anorexia. What is at issue in the detail is that the child eats nothing, which is something other than a negation of activity. From this savoured absence as such, he makes use of what he has in front of him, namely the mother on whom he depends. In virtue of this nothing, he makes her dependent on him. If you do not grasp this, you cannot under­ stand anything, not only about anorexia but about other symptoms besides, and you will make the gravest errors. So, I have located for you the moment of reversal that brings us into the symbolic dialectic of oral activity. Other types of activity are then seized upon in like fashion in the libidinal dialectic. But this is not all that happens. Conversely, and consequently, at the same time as the symbolic reversal of the substitutive activity is introduced into the real, the mother - who hitherto was the subject of the symbolic demand, the simple locus where presence or absence could manifest itself, which raises the question of the unreality of the primary relationship with the mother - becomes a real being. Since she can endlessly decline, she can literally do anything. As I said, it is at this level - and not at the level of goodness knows what hypothesis of some kind of megalomania, which merely projects onto the child what is in the mind of the analyst - that there appears for the first time the dimension of almightiness, Wirklichkeit, which in German means what is really and effectively so. The essential effectiveness initially presents as the almightiness of the real being upon whom the gift or the non-gift depend, absolutely and with no recourse. I’m telling you that the mother is primordially all-powerful, and that this cannot be eliminated from this dialectic if we are to under­ stand anything worthwhile. It’s one of its essential conditions. I’m not telling you, as does Mrs Melanie Klein, that the mother contains everything. That is another matter, to which I’m alluding only in passing. I will note, however, that we are now afforded a glimpse of how all the primitive phantasmatic objects can be found gathered

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together in the immense container of the maternal body. Mrs Klein has always shown us quite wonderfully that this is possible, but she has always been in a great bind when it comes to explaining how it is possible, and her opponents have not held back from arguing as much in order to say that she is surely daydreaming. For sure, she has been daydreaming, and she has been quite right to, because the fact is possible only through a retroactive projection of the whole gamut of imaginary objects into the heart of the maternal body. But these objects really are there, because the mother constitutes a virtual field of symbolic annihilation, from which each of the objects to come will in turn draw their symbolic value. If we simply take the subject at a slightly more advanced level, for example a child at around two years of age, it is not surprising in the least that Mrs Klein should find here objects that are re-projected retroactively. And one can say in a certain sense that, just like all the others, since they were ready to appear there one day, they were indeed already there. So, we find ourselves before a point at which the child is faced with the presence of maternal almightiness. Since we are on Mrs Melanie Klein’s level, you will note that if I have just alluded briefly to what can be called the paranoid position, which is what she herself terms it, we are already at the level of maternal almightiness in what is suggested to us as constitutive of the depressive position, because, faced with this almightiness, we may suspect that there is something that cannot be unrelated to the relationship to almighti­ ness, this kind of annihilation, this kind of micromania, which, contrary to megalomania, takes shape, according to what she tells us, at this stage. Clearly we should not go too quickly, because this is not given in itself by the mere fact that the mother who emerges as almighty is real. For the real almightiness to generate a depressive effect in the subject he still has to be able to reflect upon himself and upon the contrast with his own powerlessness. Clinical experience allows us to locate the thereabouts of this point at around the sixth month, the same that Freud picked out, and when the phenomenon of the mirror stage is already being produced. You will object that I taught that when the subject is able to grasp his own body in its totality, in its specular reflection, this total other in which he completes himself and presents himself to himself, it is rather a sense of triumph that he feels. Indeed, this is something that we reconstructed, and not without experiential confirmation. The jubilatory character of this encounter was not in doubt. But there are two things here that we must not conflate. On the one hand there is the experience of mastery, which will impart to the child’s relation with his own ego an utterly essential

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element of splitting, of being distinct from himself, and which will last until the end. On the other hand there is the encounter with the reality of the master. Insomuch as the form of mastery is given to him in the shape of a totality that is alienated from his own self, though closely bound to him and dependent upon him, there is jubi­ lation, but it’s a different matter once this form has been given and he encounters the reality of the master. This is when the moment of his triumph bespeaks also his defeat. When he finds himself in the presence of this totality in the shape of the mother’s body, he is forced to observe that it doesn’t obey him. Therefore, it is in so far as the reflected specular structure of the mirror stage comes into play that we can conceive of maternal almightiness as being reflected upon solely from a distinctly depressive position, namely the child’s sense of powerlessness. It is here that we can insert what I was alluding to earlier in anorexia. We could go a little quickly and say that the only power the subject wields against almightiness is to say no at the level of action and to bring in the dimension of negativism, which of course is not unrelated to the moment I’m driving at. Nevertheless, I will note that experience shows us, and surely not without reason, that resistance to almightiness in the relationship of dependence does not develop at the level of action or in the form of negativism, but rather at the level of the object insomuch as it has appeared to us under the sign of the nothing. It is at the level of the annulled object qua symbolic object that the child holds his dependence in check, and precisely by feeding on nothing. It is here that he turns his relation of dependence around, making himself by this means the master of the almightiness that is so eager to keep him alive, he who is initially the dependent one. From this point forward, the almighti­ ness becomes answerable to his desire. It is blown wide open by a show of his capriciousness and is henceforth at the mercy of his own almightiness. So, we do indeed need to be clear in our minds about how the symbolic order is, as it were, the necessary breeding ground on which the first imaginary relationship can come into play, on which the projection of a contrary can be played out in full. To illustrate this now in psychological terms - but which amount to no more than a downgrading alongside the expose I’ve just given - the intentionality of love constitutes very early on, prior to any beyond-zone with respect to the object, a fundamental symbolic structuration that it is impossible to conceive of if we do not posit the symbolic order itself as already established and present. Experience shows us this. Quite early on Mrs Susan Isaacs noted that from a very tender age a child can distinguish between a scolding and an

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accidental knock. Even before a word is uttered, the child does not react to an inadvertent bump in the same way as to a slap. I’ll leave you to reflect on what this implies. You will tell me that, curiously enough, it’s the same with animals, at least with pets. You would be raising an objection that I believe can easily be overturned, but which perhaps could be used as a counterargument. Indeed, this proves that the animal is able to accede to this sort of sketching out of a beyond-zone that brings him into highly particular relations with his master. Yet it is precisely because, unlike mankind, the animal is not inserted in an order of language with his whole being that this yields nothing further in the animal. The animal does, however, manage something as developed as telling the difference between some unintended whack on the back and being beaten. Since for the time being it’s a matter of sharpening the contours, you might have seen the journal that came out in December 1956 as the fourth number of volume 37 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It looks as though they told themselves that, after all, there is something to this thing called language, and it looks like a few people were solicited to respond to the call. I’m basing myself on the article by Mr Loewenstein, which betrays a certain cautious distance, not without competence, that consists in calling to mind how Ferdinand de Saussure taught that there is a signifier and signified. In short, Loewenstein shows that he’s a little abreast of what’s going on, but this is absolutely devoid of any links with our experience here, save for underscoring that one ought to think about what one says. So, remaining at this level of development, I can forgive him for not citing my teaching, because we’ve gone a great deal further. There is also in the same issue an article by Mr Charles Rycroft, who on behalf of the Londoners tries to put a bit more into it, that is, to tell us what we’re doing, the analytic theory of the intra-psy­ chical agencies and their articulations one with the other. Perhaps we ought not to forget, says the author, that communication theory exists. We are reminded that when a child cries out, this can be regarded as a total situation that encompasses the mother, the cry, and the child. Consequently, we find ourselves fully in communica­ tion theory - the child cries out and the mother receives his cry as a sign-stimulus of need. If we could only take this as our point of departure, says the author, perhaps we might manage to reorganise our experience. This is absolutely not how things are in what I have been teaching you. The cry that is at stake is a cry that already, as is shown by what Freud highlights in the child’s manifestation, is not taken as a signal. It is already a call inasmuch as it calls for a reply. It calls out,

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if I may say so, against the backdrop of a response. The cry is pro­ duced in a state of affairs where not only is language set in place for the child, but indeed he is steeped in a language-environment and is capable of seizing upon and voicing his first scraps of language as an alternating pair. The FortIDa is utterly essential. It’s a cry, but the cry that is at issue here, the one that we take into account in frustration, is inserted into a synchronic world of cries that are organised in a symbolic system. The cries are already virtually organised in a sym­ bolic system. The human subject is not merely conversant with the cry as something that on each occasion signals an object. Indeed it is perverted, deceptive, and wrong to pose the question in terms of a sign when the symbolic system is at issue, because from the very first the child issues his cry for someone to take it into account, and even for someone to have to account for it to someone else. You need only observe the interest that the child takes in receiving these moulded and voiced cries that we call language, and the interest he takes in the system of language for its own sake. The model gift is precisely the gift of speech, because here the gift is indeed equal in its principle. From the very first, the child feeds on words as much as on bread. As the Gospel says, Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out o f the mouth, this defileth a man. You have noticed the following - or more precisely, you didn’t notice it but I insist on underscoring it for you so as to bring this to a close - the term regression can have a repercussion here that is dif­ ferent from how it usually appears. The term regression is applicable to what happens when the real object, and by the same stroke the activity that is exerted to secure it, comes to be substituted for the symbolic demand. When I said that the child quashes his disap­ pointment in his saturation and his unfulfilment by the contact with the breast, or with whichever other object, what is strictly speaking at stake is what will enable him to enter the necessity of the mecha­ nism. This means that a symbolic frustration can always be followed by, can always open the door to, regression.

3 We need to make a jump now. It would be quite artificial if we were to make do with the remark that, based on this opening that has been made for the signifier by the entry of the imaginary, everything else from here on in is plain sailing. Indeed, with all the relationships that will now be

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established with the subject’s own body, through the intermediary of the specular relationship, you can see very well how the advent of the signifier can come into play for each of the body’s appurte­ nances. That excrement should become the choice object for the gift during a certain period should certainly come as no surprise to us because it’s quite obvious that the child can on occasion find the real in a ready state to feed the symbolic in the material that is avail­ able to him in relation to his body. That retention can occasionally become refusal should not surprise us either. Whatever richness and refinement the analytic experience has uncovered in the phenomena of anal symbolism, this doesn’t lead us to dwell on it at any length. If I spoke of making a jump, it’s because it’s now a matter of seeing how the phallus is brought into the dialectic of frustration. Once again, please abstain from pointless demands bearing on natural genesis. If you want to deduce the fact that the phallus plays an absolutely supervalent role across the entire genital aspect of the symbolic from something in the makeup of the genital organs, you will simply never manage. You will merely surrender to the very contortions that I hope to be able to show you in detail, those of Dr Ernest Jones when he tries to offer a satisfactory commentary on the phallic phase, which Freud had asserted in a rough-and-ready way, and tries to show us how it is that the phallus that woman doesn’t have can assume such importance for her. It’s really very strange to behold. In truth, the question absolutely does not lie here. The question is first and foremost a question of fact. It’s a fact. Had we not uncovered, in the phenomena, this supervalence and pre-eminence of the phallus across the entire imaginary dialectic that governs the misadventures, the mishaps, and also the failures and breakdowns of genital development, there wouldn’t be any problem. There can be no doubting that it’s quite needless to tire oneself out, as many have, observing that the female child must surely have little sensations in her tummy too, and an experience that is surely distinct from the boy’s. As Freud notes, this is not the question. Moreover, this is utterly self-evident because if woman, by her own admission, finds it much harder than the boy to bring the reality of what happens on the side of the uterus or the vagina into a dialectic of desire that would satisfy her, it’s because she has to pass through something to which she has a completely different relation from that of the man, namely the thing she lacks, the phallus. But the reason why things are like this is certainly not to be gathered, in any case whatsoever, from anything that originates in any physiological leaning of either of the two sexes. One has to start with the existence of an imaginary phallus.

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The imaginary phallus is the pivotal point in a whole series of facts that require it as a postulate. One has to study this labyrinth in which the subject generally loses his way, and in which he can even wind up being devoured. The thread that leads out of it is provided by the fact that what is to be discovered is that the mother lacks the phallus, that it is because she lacks it that she desires it, and that it is only insomuch as something gives it to her that she can be satisfied. This might appear, quite literally, stupefying. Well, we have to start with this stupefaction. The first virtue of cognisance is to be capable of confronting what is not self-evident. All the same, we have perhaps been somewhat prepared to accept that lack is the main desire here if we accept that this is also the distinguishing feature of the symbolic order. In other words, it is in so far as the imaginary phallus plays a major signifying role that the situation presents in this way. It’s not that each subject invents the signifier in accordance with his or her sex and his or her leanings or frolickings at birth. The signifier exists. That the phallus as signifier plays a subjacent role cannot be doubted. It took analysis to discover it, but it’s absolutely essential. Let’s leave for a moment the terrain of analysis to take up a question I put to Monsieur Levi-Strauss, the author of Elementary Structures o f Kinship. He sets out the dialectic of the exchange of women down through the lineages. By means of a sort of postulate and choice, he sets out how women are exchanged between genera­ tions. I have taken a woman from one line, I owe another woman to a following generation or to another line. And so there is a moment when this must come to a close. If this is done through the law of exchange and preferential marriages between cross cousins, things will circulate with great regularity in a circle that will have no reason to close or break, but if this is done with what are known as parallel cousins this can give rise to things that are rather awkward because after a while the exchange starts to converge and to produce cracks and fragments in the lineages. So, I asked Levi-Strauss, what if you were to describe this circle of exchange by turning it around, to say that the female lineages produce men and exchange them between one another? For, in the end, we are already aware that the lack that we have been speaking about in women is not a real lack. Everyone knows that they can have phalli, and what is more they produce them. They beget boys, phallophores. As a consequence, one may describe the exchange down through the generations in a more straightforward way, in the opposite order. One can imagine a matriarchy whose law would be - I've given a son, I shall now receive a man? Levi-Strauss’s reply is the following. From the standpoint of

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formalisation one could doubtless describe things in exactly the same way, symmetrically, by taking a reference axis, a system of coordinates founded on women or founded on men, but then a heap of items would remain inexplicable and in particular the following. In every case where the political power is androcentric, even in matriarchal societies, it is represented by men and by male lineages. Very peculiar anomalies in these exchanges - a modification, an exception, or a paradox that might appear in the laws of exchange at the level of the elementary structures of kinship - can be explained only in relation and reference to something that lies outside the interplay of kinship, and this is the political context, that is to say, the order of power, and very precisely the order of the signifier, the order in which sceptre and phallus merge into one. It is for reasons that are inscribed into the symbolic order, which transcends individual development, that the fact of having or not having the imaginary and symbolised phallus takes on the economic importance that it holds at the level of the Oedipus complex. This is what explains both the importance of the castration complex and the primacy of the infamous fantasies of the phallic mother, which has been creating the problem you know about for as long as it has been on the analytic horizon. Before leading you into how the dialectic of the phallus is articu­ lated, completed and resolved at the level of the Oedipus complex, I want to show you that I too can remain for a while in the preoedipal stages, on the sole condition of being led by the guiding thread of the fundamental role of the symbolic relationship. What role does the phallus play at the level of its imaginary func­ tion, at the level of the claimed requirement of a phallic mother? I want to show you once again how absolutely essential this notion of the lack of object is, just by reading the decent analyst-authors, among whom I include Karl Abraham. In an admirable article from 1920 on Manifestations o f the Female Castration Complex, Abraham gives us the example, on page 341, of a little girl of two.4 After coffee-time, she goes to her father’s cigar box, takes a first cigar and gives it to her father, takes a second and gives it to her mother, who doesn’t smoke, then takes a third and places it between her legs. Her mother put the three cigars back in the box. It is not by chance that the girl waited a little while and then played the same game over again. This comes to just the right place. I regret that the commentary is not spelt out further, because if we accept that the third move indicates that the young girl lacks this symbolic object, which is what Abraham implicitly admits, she thereby manifests this lack and it is no doubt in this capacity that she first gave it to he who does not lack, thereby showing she who does

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lack, namely her mother, what to do with it. The girl marks out very well how she can desire it, as experience proves, in order to satisfy the one who lacks it. If you read Freud’s article on Female Sexuality, you learn that for the young girl it’s not simply a matter of lacking the phallus, but of giving it or its equivalent to her mother, just as the boy wants to. I’m recalling this vignette simply by way of an introduction to what you need to represent in your own minds, which is the fact that nothing is conceivable in the phenomenology of the perversions - 1 mean in a direct way - if you don’t start with the idea that what is involved is the phallus. This is a far simpler idea than what is usually given to you in that kind of obscurity of identifications, re-entifications, and projections all enmeshed into a labyrinth where you lose your way. It’s a matter of the phallus and of seeing how the child realises, more or less consciously, that his all-powerful mother is fundamentally in want of something. The question is always to see by what path he will give her this object that she is in want of, and which he himself is forever in want of. Indeed, let’s not forget that the young boy’s phallus is not a great deal more robust than the young girl’s. Naturally the finer authors spotted this, and Dr Jones realised all the same that Mrs Karen Horney was rather favourable to the one with whom he was in conflict, in this instance Freud. The fundamentally deficient character of the little boy’s phallus, even the shame that he can feel about it, his keen sense of insufficiency, is something that she was able to stress very firmly, not as a way of trying to bridge the gulf of difference that lies between the young boy and the young girl, but as a way of clarifying one through the other. In this light, in order to understand the exact value of the little boy’s attempts at seducing his mother, let’s not forget the importance of what he discovers on his own person. These attempts at seduction, which people are still speaking about, are deeply marked by narcissistic conflict. This is always the occasion of the first narcissistic wounds, which are merely preludes here, and even presuppositions, with regard to the later effects of castration. They still need to be looked at, though. Rather than mere sexual drive or aggression, what is ultimately at issue is the fact that the boy wants to make-believe that he is a male or a bearer of the phallus, when he is only half way to being one. In other words, what is involved throughout the whole preoedipal period in which the perversions find their point of origin is a game that is kept up, a game of hunt-the-ring or find-the-Lady, or even our game of odds-and-evens, where the phallus is funda­ mental as a signifier in this imaginary of the mother that it’s a question of joining, because the child’s ego is reliant on the mother’s

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almightiness. It’s a matter of seeing where it is and where it is not. It is never truly there where it is, and it is never altogether absent where it is not. The classification of the perversions as a whole must encompass this. Irrespective of the worth of some contributions on identification with the mother and identification with the object, and so on, what is essential is the relation to the phallus. Take for example transvestism. In transvestism the subject calls the phallus into question. People forget that transvestism is not merely a matter of homosexuality more or less transposed, nor is it a matter of fetishism particularised, a fetish that is worn by the subject. As Fenichel shows very well in his article The Psychology o f Transvestism, which came out in 1930 in the eleventh issue of The International Journal o f Psychoanalysis, the woman with whom the transvestist identifies himself is conceived of by him as phallic. However, she has a phallus in so far as it is hidden, and here we can see that the phallus must always partake of something that veils it. The essential importance of what I called the veil, the existence of garments, lies in the fact that it is through them that the object is materialised. Even when the real object is there, one has to be able to think that it may not be there. And it always has to be possible that it is thought to be precisely where it is not. Likewise, in male homosexuality - to confine ourselves to this for today - what is at stake for the subject is still his phallus but, curiously, it is in so far as he will seek out his own phallus in another party. To spell it right out, all the perversions can be placed within this measure, where they always play from some angle with the signifi­ cant object insomuch as it is, in itself and by its very nature, a true signifier, that is to say, something that in no case whatsoever can be taken at face value. And when one does get one’s hand on it, when one finds it and attaches oneself to it definitively, as is the case in the perversion of all perversions known as fetishism - for this is the one that shows not only where it truly lies, but also what it is - the object is tantamount to exactly nothing. It’s just a worn-out garment, a cast-off rag. A part of this fetishism can be seen in transvestism, where at the end of the day it’s just a tatty old shoe. When it does appear, when it is unveiled for real, it is the fetish. What does this mean? It’s that the crucial stage stands just before the Oedipus complex. It stands between the first relationship that was my point of departure today and which I have grounded for you, namely the primary relationship of frustration, and the Oedipus complex. It’s the stage at which the child engages in the dialectic of the lure. To satisfy what cannot be satisfied, namely the moth­ er’s desire, which in its very fundament is unfulfillable, the child

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commits, by whichever path, to the route of making himself a decep­ tive object. I mean that it’s a matter of tricking this desire that cannot be fulfilled. It is very precisely to the extent that he shows his mother that he is not, that the whole movement from which the ego derives its stability is constructed. The most characteristic stages have now been marked by the fun­ damental ambiguity between subject and object, as Freud showed in his final article, on splitting. It is to the extent that the child turns himself into an object meant to trick, that he finds himself committed to a position vis-a-vis the other where the intersubjec­ tive relationship has been fully constituted. This is not merely a sort of immediate lure, as can be produced in the animal kingdom where the one that is decked out in all the colours of display has to establish the whole situation by parading around. On the contrary, the subject supposes desire in the other. What has to be satisfied is a desire at one remove, and since it’s a desire that cannot be satisfied, one can only trick it. It is always overlooked how human exhibitionism is not an exhi­ bitionism like others, like that of the robin redbreast, for instance. It involves opening one’s trouser fly then closing it again. If there are no trousers then a dimension of exhibitionism is missing. We also meet the possibility of regression. The unfulfilled and unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other unfulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, quaerens quem devoret. What the child once found as a means of quashing the symbolic unfulfilment is what he may possibly find across from him again as a wide-open maw. We also find this projected image of the oral situation at the level of imaginary sexual satisfaction. The gaping hole of the Medusa’s head is a devouring figure that the child encounters as a possible outcome of his search to satisfy his mother. To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents. We find it again when we look at the fears of little Hans. The case now presents with somewhat greater clarification with respect to one of its conditions. With the support of what I have shown you today, you will better see the relationships between phobia and perversion. Furthermore, you will better see what I indicated last time, namely the function of the Ego-ideal that takes shape against this backdrop. I shall go so far as to say that you will interpret the case better than did Freud himself, because there is a wavering in the observation over how what the child calls the big giraffe and the little giraffe ought to be identified.

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As Monsieur Prevert has put it, Les grandes girafes sont muettes Les petites girafes sont rares. While this is very poorly interpreted in the observation, there is nevertheless an inroad to what is at stake. Isn’t it clear enough from the simple fact that little Hans crumples the little giraffe and sits on top of it, in spite of the cries of the big giraffe who is incontestably the mother? 27 February 1957

MYTHICAL STRUCTURE IN THE OBSERVATION ON LITTLE H ANS’S PHOBIA

XII O N T H E O E D IP U S C O M P L E X

The equation Penis = Child The ideal of woman’s monogamy The Other, between mother and phallus The symbolic father is unthinkable Male bigamy agent

lack

object

castration S

i

frustration symbolic mother

I

r

privation R

s

Last time, we tried to spell out afresh the notion of castration, or at the very least how this concept is used in our practice.1 In the second part of the lesson I pinpointed the locus at which the imaginary comes to interfere in the relationship of frustration that unites the child to his mother, this relationship being vastly more complex than the use that has on the whole been made of it. I told you that it was only in an apparent way, and in keeping with the requirements of its expounding, that we found ourselves thereby moving backwards, depicting a sort of succession of stages that would follow on in a line of development, because, quite to

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the contrary, it’s always a matter of grasping what at each stage intervenes from the outside, retroactively to reorganise what had been initiated at the previous stage. This is for the simple reason that the child is not alone. The fact that he is not alone is due not only to his biological surroundings but also to surroundings that are of far greater import, namely the lawful environment, the symbolic order. As I underscored last time, the particularities of the symbolic order are what impart accentuation and supervalence to the element of the imaginary known as the phallus. So, this is the point we reached, and to open the third part of my expose I set you on the trail of little Hans’s anxiety, since from the first we have been singling out two exemplary objects, the fetish object and the real object. It is at the level of little Hans that we are going to try to articulate today’s remarks. This will not be an attempt to rearticulate the notion of castration, because goodness knows it was powerfully and insistently articu­ lated by Freud, but simply to speak about it once more because for as long as people have avoided speaking about it, the use and refer­ ence that can be drawn from it have become increasingly rare in the observations. To tackle this notion of castration today, we need only follow the same line as our disquisition last time.

1 What is at issue at the end of the preoedipal phase, on the cusp of the Oedipus complex? The child has to take the phallus on board as a signifier, and in a way that turns it into the instrument of the symbolic order of exchange that presides over the constitution of lineages. All told, he has to be confronted with the order that, in the Oedipus complex, will make the function of the father the pivotal point of the drama. This is not so straightforward. At the very least, I have thus far told you enough about it for it to strike a chord with you when I tell you that it’s not so straightforward. The function of existence on the symbolic plane in the signifier Father, with everything that this term entails that is so deeply problematic, raises the question of the way in which it has come to the centre of the symbolic organisation. This gives us to think that we shall have a few questions to ask ourselves regarding the three aspects of the paternal function.

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During the first year of our seminars, when the second semester was dedicated to the study of the Wolf Man, we learnt to single out the paternal repercussions in the conflict under the threefold heading of the symbolic father, the imaginary father and the realfather. We saw that it was impossible to orient oneself in the Wolf-Man case if one doesn’t draw this essential distinction. Let’s try to tackle the point we reached, namely the introduction into the Oedipus complex that arises for the child, in chronological order. All in all, we saw the child in the luring position that he takes up vis-a-vis his mother. I told you that this is not a lure in which he would be fully implicated. It’s not the simple lure of the game of sexual parade, in the ethological sense, where we on the outside can perceive the imaginary elements that captivate one of the partners in virtue of the appearances of the other. In this case, we don’t know to what extent the subjects themselves act as a lure, though we do know that we can do so on occasion, presenting a mere coat-of-arms to the desire of the adversary. Here, the lure that is at issue is very sharply delineated in the very actions and activities that we can observe in the young boy. For example, in his seducing of his mother, when he exhibits himself, this is no mere showing. It is the showing o/himself by himself to the mother that exists as a third party. And behind the mother looms something that is tantamount to good faith, in which she can be caught, so to speak. This is already an entire intersubjec­ tive trinity, even a quaternary, that is taking shape. What ultimately is at stake in this entry into the Oedipus complex? Well, it’s about the subject himself having to be caught in this lure in such a way that he finds himself committed to an existent order, an order that is different from the psychological lure through which he came into it. This is where we left him last time. While analytic theory ascribes a normalising function to the Oedipus complex, we should recall that our experience teaches us that this normalising function is not enough to culminate in the fact of the subject making an object-choice. Just as we know that for there to be heterosexual object-choice it is not enough to play by the rules of being heterosexual, so do we know that there are all shapes and sizes of apparent heterosexuality. Sometimes the candidly het­ erosexual relationship can harbour an atypical positioning that will come to light through analytic investigation as being derived from a clearly homosexualised position, for instance. So, after the Oedipus complex, the subject, boy or girl, must not only arrive at heterosexu­ ality but also reach it in such a way as to situate him- or herself in the proper manner in relation to the function of the Father. This lies at the heart of the whole Oedipal problematic.

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We indicated on our inroad into object relations, and Freud spells it out expressly in his 1931 article on Female Sexuality, that taken from this angle, and from the preoedipal angle, the woman’s problematic is much simpler? While it can appear far more complicated in Freud’s writings, this is consistent with the order of discovery. He discovered the Oedipus complex before he uncovered what is preoedipal, and indeed how could he have done otherwise? If there is something that is preoedipal, it’s because first of all the Oedipus complex has been posited. We can speak of this greater simplicity of the female position on the developmental level that we qualify as preoedipal only because we first know that we are going to arrive at the complex structure of the Oedipus complex. That said, we are also able to say that, for the woman, the phallus that she has more or less situated and approached in the imaginary - which is where it is to be found, beyond the mother, in the progressive uncovering of the fundamental dissatisfaction that the mother feels in the mother/child relationship - slides into the real. There is a sliding of the phallus from the imaginary to the real. This is what Freud explains when he tells us that in the yearning for the originary phallus, at the imaginary level where it starts to emerge for the young girl in the specular reference to her semblable - another little girl or a little boy - the child will be the substitute for the phallus. This is actually a somewhat summary way of grasping what occurs in the phenomenon under observation. If you look at the position such as I have drawn it out - here is the imaginary, that is, the mother’s desire for the phallus, and here the child, our centre, who has to discover this beyond-zone, this lack in the maternal object in one of the possible outcomes, from the moment the child becomes the pivotal point of the situation and finds himself saturating it, he gets out of it by conceiving of the possibility of this way out. What effectively do we find in the young girl’s fantasy, and also in the young boy’s? To the extent that the situation pivots around the child, the young girl then finds the real penis right where it is, beyond the child herself, with the one who can give her the child, says Freud, with the father. It is precisely in so far as she does not have it as an appurte­ nance, and even in so far as she sharply renounces it on this plane, that she will be able to have it as a gift from the father. This is why it is through the relation to the phallus that, as Freud tells us, the young girl enters the Oedipus complex in a straightforward way, as you can see. Thereafter, the phallus will just have to slide from the imaginary to the real by means of a sort of equation. Gleichung is

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the term that Freud uses in his 1925 article on Some Consequences o f the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes. He writes, Nun aber gleitet die Libido des Madchens - man kann nur sagen: Icings der vorgezeichneten symbolischen Gleichung Penis - Kind - in eine neue Position. The young girl will have been sufficiently introduced into the Oedipus complex to make this a reality. I’m not saying that there is not to be a great deal more, including thereafter all the anomalies in the development of female sexuality, but here there is already the fixation upon the father as the bearer of the real penis, as he who can give the child for real. For her this is already of sufficient consistence for it to be said that ultimately the Oedipus complex, as the pathway to integration into the typical heterosexual position, is far more straightforward for the woman, even though it does usher in all sorts of complications and impasses in the development of female sexuality. Obviously this should not astonish us, insomuch as the Oedipus complex is essentially androcentric or patricentric. This asymmetry calls upon all kinds of particular quasi-historical considerations to make us perceive the supervalence on the sociological and ethno­ graphic plane of the individual experience that Freud’s discovery allows us to analyse. Conversely, since I spoke of an ordering, of a symbolic order or a subordinated ordination, it’s quite clear that the object of woman’s love is the object of the sentiment that is addressed, strictly speaking, to the element of lack in the object. In so far as she has been led to this object, the father, along the path of lack, he becomes the one who gives the object of satisfac­ tion, the object of the natural relationship of childbirth. From this point forward, all it takes is a little patience for the father to be replaced by he who will play exactly the same role, the father’s role. This brings with it a feature that we will be coming back to, and which lends its particular style to the development of the female superego. There is a kind of balance between the renun­ ciation of the phallus and what has quite rightly been called the supervalence of the narcissistic relationship in women’s devel­ opment. Hanns Sachs saw the importance of this very clearly.3 Indeed, once this renunciation has been made, the phallus is given up as an appurtenance and becomes the appurtenance of the one to whom she now attaches her love, the father from whom she effectively awaits a child. This expectation of what henceforth is for her no less than her due places her in a very peculiar depend­ ence that paradoxically gives rise at one point to specifically narcissistic fixations, as the various authors have noted. Indeed she is the being who is most intolerant of a particular frustration.

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We might come back to this later, when we speak about the ideal of monogamy in women. Furthermore, it is with this simple reduction of the situation, which identifies the object of love with the object that gives satisfac­ tion, that the especially fixed aspect of women’s development, and even its precociously arrested aspect, is located in a development that may be qualified as normal. At certain junctures in his writings Freud assumes a peculiarly misogynistic tone, complaining bitterly of how very difficult it is, at least with some female subjects, to get them to shift away from the logic o f soup, with dumplings for argu­ ments, from something so imperiously requisite in the satisfaction that they must derive, for example, from their analysis. I’m doing no more than indicating a certain number of begin­ nings. We will have to come back to the development that Freud contributed on female sexuality. Today we are going to focus on the boy. In the case of the boy, the Oedipus complex appears to be far more clearly destined to allow him to identify with his own sex. All in all, it arises in the ideal relationship, in the imaginary relationship with the father. Conversely, the true aim of the Oedipus complex, which is to situate the subject in the right way in relation to the func­ tion of the father, that is to say, for him one day to gain access to the altogether paradoxical and problematic position of being a father, presents a mountain of difficulties. People have not been taking less and less interest in the Oedipus complex because they’ve failed to see this mountain. It’s precisely because they have seen it, and they prefer to turn their backs on it. Let’s not forget that Freud’s questioning as a whole, not only in the doctrine but in his very experience, which we find traced out for us in the confidences he shares - his dreams, the progress of his thought, everything that we now know of his life, his habits and even his attitudes at home with his family, which Dr Jones has reported in a way that is fairly thoroughgoing, but of which we may be sure - boils down to the question of what it means to be a father. This was the central problem for Freud, the productive point from which all his research took its true orientation. Observe too that while this is a problem for every neurotic, it’s also a problem for every non-neurotic in the course of his childhood experience. What is a father? This question is one way of tackling the problem of the signifier of the father, but let’s not overlook the fact that in the end they do become fathers. To pose the question What is a father? is something different from being a father oneself, from acceding to the paternal position. Let’s look at this more closely.

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Even if acceding to this position is an article of faith, a quest, it’s not unthinkable to say that, in the end, no one has ever truly been a father through and through. In this dialectic, we suppose - and this supposition has to be the starting point - that somewhere there is someone who can fully take on the position of the father, someone who can respond, I am the father. This is a supposition that is essential to the whole furtherance of the Oedipal dialectic, but in no way does this settle the question of the particular intersubjective position of the one that fulfils this role for the others, and especially for the child. So, let’s start again with little Hans. 2 The observation on little Hans is a whole world unto itself. Among the collection of five of Freud’s case studies,4 this is the one I have left until last in the labour of commentary I have been pursuing, and with good reason. Last time, I left you with the material from the first few pages of the text, and Freud is well justified in presenting things in this order. The question is that of the Wiwimacher, which has been translated [into English] as widdler. When we follow Freud to the letter, the questions that little Hans poses concern not only his widdler but also the widdlers of all living creatures, and especially of those that are bigger than himself. You have seen the pertinent remarks concerning the sequence in which the child poses his questions. In sequence, he first asks his mother, Have you got a widdler too? We will speak later about what his mother replies, and whereupon Hans utters, I was onlyjust think­ ing. That is to say, he has been mulling over a good many things. Next he puts the question to his father. Then he delights in seeing the lion’s widdler, which is not altogether by chance. And back at this time, that is, prior to the appearance of the phobia, he clearly indicates that if his mother has a widdler, as she asserts to him that she has - not, in my opinion, without impudence - then it ought to be visible. One evening, not long after this questioning, he watches her undressing and remarks I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a horse. The word Vergleichung has been translated [into English] as comparison. We could almost say that the word equalisation would be better in this instance, at the very least in economic terms if not by strict tradition. From the imaginary phallicist perspective, in which we left the subject last time, there is an effort of equalisation

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between a sort of absolute object, the phallus, and the fact of putting it to the test of the real. It’s not a matter of all or nothing, as it was in the game of find-the-Lady or in the game of hide-and-seek where it is never where one is looking and never where it was found. It’s a matter now of finding out where it truly is. Up to this point the child was the one who was affecting a sem­ blance, or who was playing at affecting a semblance. It’s not for nothing that, a little further on in the observation, little Hans has a dream - his first account o f a dream, we are told by Freud and his parents - in which an element of distortion, a displacement, arises, precisely through the intermediary of a game of forfeits. Moreover, when you follow the whole imaginary dialectic - if you remember how I approached it in the previous lessons - you will be struck by how it is being played out here on the surface at this pre-phobic stage in Hans’s development. It’s all there, up to and including the fantasmatic children. All of a sudden, after the birth of his little sister, he adopts a bevy of imaginary little girls to whom he does everything that can be done to children. The imaginary game is out in force, almost without intention. It’s a matter of bridging the full distance that lies between the one who affects a semblance and the one who knows that he has the power. What affords us a first approach to the Oedipal relationship? When we look at what is being played out on the plane of this act of comparing, we could conceive of it as the continuation of the game on the plane of the lure, on the imaginary plane, with the child merely subjoining the maternal model to his own dimensions. The image is larger, but essentially homogenous. Yet it still remains that if this is how the dialectic of the Oedipus complex gets under way, then ultimately he will only ever be dealing with a double of himself, an enlarged double. In this introduction, which is perfectly conceivable, of the maternal image in the form of the Ego-ideal, we remain in the imaginary dialectic, in the specular dialectic of the subject’s relation to the little other. The inevitable consequence of this does not allow us to get out of the eitherlor, of the either him or me, that remains bound to the first symbolic dialectic, that of presence or absence. We do not get out of the game of odds-andevens. We do not leave behind the plane of the lure. What results from this? We know the answer from the side that is as much theoretical as it is exemplary. The only thing we see coming out of this is the symptom, the manifestation of anxiety. So Freud tells us. Freud underscores near the start of the observation that, when it comes to anxiety and phobia, there is good reason for keeping the two separate. They are two things that come in succession. One

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comes to the aid of the other. The phobic object fulfils a function against the backdrop of anxiety. On the imaginary plane, however, nothing enables us to envisage the jump that makes the child shift away from the luring game with his mother. As someone who is all or nothing, the one who suffices or the one who does not suffice, she surely remains on the plane of fundamental insufficiency in virtue of the sole fact that the question has been posed. This is the first outline of the notion of the entry into the Oedipus complex - the almost fraternal rivalry with the father. We are being led to nuance this far more than in how it is commonly put together. Indeed, the aggressiveness at issue there is an aggressiveness of the type that comes into play in the specular relationship, in the it’s either him or me that is always being defined as the fundamental mainspring. On the other hand, the fixation remains wholly attached to she who, after the first frustrations, has become the real object, that is to say, the mother. It is due to this stage, or more precisely to this essential and central Oedipal experience on the imaginary plane, that the Oedipus complex reaches out with all its neurosis-inducing consequences, which can be found in countless aspects of analytic reality. In particular, it is here that we can see one of the first terms of the Freudian experience making its entry, the debasement in the sphere of love to which Freud devoted a special study. In virtue of the subject’s permanent attachment to this real primal object that is the mother qua frustrating mother, any female object will there­ after be no more for him than a depreciated object, a substitute, a broken, refracted and forever partial mode in comparison with the first maternal object. We will be seeing shortly what we ought to think of this. However, don’t forget that while the Oedipus complex can have perdurable consequences with respect to the imaginary mainspring that it causes to intervene, this is not the whole story. As a rule, and from the very first in Freud’s doctrine, it is in the nature of the Oedipus complex to resolve itself. When Freud speaks about it, he tells us that surely what we can appreciate concerning the pushing into the background of the hostility against the father is something that we can legitimately link to a repression. But in the same breath, he makes sure to underscore that this is one more opportunity to note that repression is applied always to a particular articulation of the subject’s history, and not to a permanent relationship. He says, I see no reason for denying the name o f a ‘repression’, but at this age, between five and five-and-a-half years when the dissolution of the Oedipus complex occurs, it is as a rule equivalent to a destruc­ tion and an abolition o f the complex. Thus, there is something more

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in relation to what we have thus far described, and which would in some way be the effacement, the imaginary attenuation, of a relationship that in itself is fundamentally perdurable. There is a veritable crisis, a revolution. There truly is something that leaves a result, this being the shaping of the superego, which is both highly particular and precisely datable in the unconscious. It is here that we come face-to-face with the necessity of bringing out something new and original, and which has its specific solution in the Oedipal relationship. To see this, we need only turn to our usual scheme. At the point we reached last time, the child was offering the mother the imaginary object of the phallus in order to give her complete satisfaction, and was doing so in the form of a lure, that is to say, by bringing in the Other that is in some way the witness, the one who can behold the situation as a whole. The young boy’s exhibitionism to his mother is meaningless without this term. It is implicated by the mere fact that what we describe in the presenta­ tion, even in the offering, that the little boy makes to his mother, plainly arises at the level of this Other. This term must be produced at this level for the Oedipus complex to exist. It requires the pres­ ence of a term that hitherto was not in the game, the presence of someone who always and in any circumstance is poised to play and to win.

countless other hints that are there to be read in the observations and which one can see being played out in the child’s very activity at this stage. We meet it in umpteen different forms in the case of little Hans, for example in his way of suddenly taking himself off to the wood-cupboard and standing in the darkness. It is his W. C., where previously he was using the family W.C. There is a moment when everything oscillates around this game-playing, with the notion of something that adds the dimension that was to be expected on the plane of the symbolic relationship. What previously, in the broaching of the symbolic relationship, was no more than the calling and the calling back that I spoke about last time, and which characterises

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the symbolic mother, now becomes the notion that at the level of the big Other there is someone who can respond come what may, and who in every case answers that he is the one who’s got the true phallus, the real penis. He is the one who holds the trump card, and who knows it. The introduction of this real element in the symbolic order is the inverse of the first position of the mother that is symbol­ ised in the real by her presence and her absence. Until then, the object both was and wasn’t there. It was with this point that the subject began in relation to any object, namely that an object is both present and absent, and that one can always play with the presence or the absence of an object. After the turning point, however, the object is no longer the imaginary object that he can use in his luring but an object the power of which is always in the hands of an Other, who can show that the subject does not have it or that he has it insufficiently. Castration plays its absolutely essential role throughout his ensuing development solely on the basis of the fact that, in having to take on board the maternal phallus as an essentially symbolic object, in the essential Oedipal experience the child can conceive that this same symbolic object will be given to him one day by the one who has it, who knows that he has it in every instance. In other words, taking on board the very sign of the virile position, of male heterosexuality, implies castration at its point of departure. This is what Freud’s Oedipal notion teaches us. Precisely because the male, contrary to the female position, is already in perfect pos­ session of a natural appendage, he has to have this appurtenance from someone else, in this relationship to something that is real in the symbolic - the one who truly is the father. And in the end no one can say what it means to be the father for real, except that it’s something that is already to be found in the game. It’s in relation to this game played with the father, this game of loser wins, as it were, that the child can win the faith that leaves him with this first inscription of Law.

3 What becomes of the subject in this drama? As it is described for us in the Freudian dialectic, he is a little criminal. It is by the path of the imaginary crime that he enters the realm of Law. But he can enter this realm of Law only if he has had, at least for an instant, a real partner across from him, someone who has effectively brought to this level something that is not merely calling and calling back, that is not merely a pairing of presence and

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absence, the fundamentally annihilating element of the symbolic, but rather someone who responds to him. Now, while things may be expressed in this way on the plane of the imaginary drama, it is on the level of the imaginary game that this must be experienced. It is not without reason that no particular dialogue is generated by this requirement of a dimension of abso­ lute alterity, by the one who simply possesses the power and who answers for it. This dimension is incarnated by real protagonists, but they themselves are always dependent upon something that ulti­ mately presents as an eternal alibi. The only one who might respond absolutely from this position of the father qua symbolic father is the one who could say, like the monotheistic God, I AM THAT I AM. But this is a thing that, aside from the sacred text in which we find it, can literally be uttered by no one. You will tell me then, You have taught us that the message we receive is our own in an inverted form, and so everything will be resolved by - THOU A R T THAT THOU ART. Don’t believe it, because who am I to say that to anyone else? In other words, what I want to indicate here is that the symbolic father is strictly speaking unthinkable. The symbolic father is nowhere. He intervenes nowhere. The proof of this is laid out in Freud’s work. It took a mind as bound to the requirements of positivist and scientific thought as was the mind of Freud to produce the construction that Jones reveals he esteemed above all the rest of his life’s work. He didn’t put it in the front line, because his major work, and the only one - as he affirmed in writing and never went back on - was The Interpretation o f Dreams, but the one he held most dear, as an achievement that in his eyes was a feat, is Totem and Taboo. Totem and Taboo is no less than a modern myth, a myth constructed to explain what remained as a gaping hole in his doctrine, namely, Where is the father? You need only read Totem and Taboo with an open eye to realise that if it is not what I say it is - a myth - then it’s quite absurd. However, if Totem and Taboo is designed to tell us that there are such things as fathers who linger on, then the true father, the only father, the one and only father from before the dawn of history, has to be the dead father. Further still, this father has to have been killed. And truly, how could this even be thinkable beyond its strictly mythical value, because as far as I know, the father at issue is not conceived of by Freud, nor by anyone, as an immortal being? Why is it that the sons should have in some way hastened him to an untimely end? Why go to such lengths when ultimately they forbade themselves what it was a matter of stealing from him? That is to say, they killed him only to show that he cannot be killed.

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The essence of what Freud introduces in relation to a major drama hinges on a notion that is strictly mythical in so far as it is the very categorisation of a form of the impossible, even of the unthinkable, namely the eternalisation of a one and only Father at the origin, whose characteristics amount to his having been killed. And why so, if not to maintain him? I point out to you incidentally that in French, and a few other tongues, in German in particular, tuer comes from the Latin tUtare, which means to guard. This mythical father who shows us what kinds of difficulties Freud was facing also shows us on what he was well and truly setting his sights in the notion of the father. It has to do with something that does not intervene at any moment of the dialectic unless through the intervention of the real father who at any given moment comes to fulfil the role and function thereof, and who allows the imaginary relationship to be invigorated and afforded a new dimension. The real father does not bring in the pure specular interplay of either me or the other, but rather affords an embodiment to the unutter­ able sentence, THOU A R T THAT THOU ART, which just now we said cannot be uttered by someone who is not so himself. If you will allow me to play on the words and the ambiguity that I made use of when we were studying the paranoiac structure of President Schreber, it’s not tu es celui que tu es, but rather tu es celui qui tuais, thou art the one that hath killed. The end of the Oedipus complex is correlative with the establish­ ing of the Law as repressed, but permanent, in the unconscious. It is to this extent that there is something that responds in the symbolic. The Law is not simply this thing about which we ask ourselves why the whole community of man has been introduced into it and is implicated in it, but also something that has passed into the real in the form of the kernel left by the Oedipus complex, in the form of something that analysis has shown, once and for all, to be the real form that is the superego. This is the form that the philosophers had latched on to, to show us with greater or lesser ambiguity the density, the permanent kernel, of moral conscience. We know that in each individual this is very precisely incarnated in a superego that can take multiple forms, that comes in every shape and size, the most twisted and the most contorted. It takes this form because its introduction at the level of the Es, as an element that is homogenous with the other libidinal elements, always partakes of some accident. One does not necessarily know at what point in the imaginary game the passage has been made, nor who was there momentarily to respond. This tyrannical superego, in itself fundamentally paradoxical and contingent, represents in itself alone, even in non-neurotics, the

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signifier that leaves its mark and its imprint on man, that seals his relationship with the signifier. There is in man a signifier that marks his relationship with the signifier, and this is called the superego. There are even many more than one, and they are called symptoms. It is with this key, and with this key alone, that you may under­ stand what is at issue when little Hans is fomenting his phobia. What is distinctive, and I think I can demonstrate this for you in this observation, is precisely how in spite of all the father’s love, all his kindness, all his intelligence, in virtue of which we have this observa­ tion, there is no real father. The ensuing part of the game is played out in the luring in the relationship between little Hans and his mother, which in the end is unbearable, anguishing and intolerable, in that it is either him or her. It is one or the other, without ever knowing which, he the phallophore or she the phallophore, the little giraffe or the big giraffe. Despite the ambiguities in the ways the various authors have appraised the observation, it’s quite clear that the little giraffe is precisely this maternal appurtenance around which the matter of knowing who has it and who will have it plays out. Hans is in a kind of waking dream, which for a moment makes him - to a chorus of cries from his mother, and in spite of this calling out - the possessor of the main stake. Indeed, it is there to underscore for us this very mechanism in the most vivid fashion. To this I would like to add a few considerations that will allow you to familiarise yourselves with the strict handling of the category of castration that I have been trying to spell out for you. The perspective that I’ve laid out for you allows both the imagi­ nary game of the Ego-ideal and the sanctioning intervention of castration - in virtue of which these imaginary elements take on stability and a fixed constellation in the symbolic - to be located in their reciprocal relationships, each on their own plane. Let’s try to see whether it really is necessary, from this perspective and with this distinction in mind, to deign to articulate something that would stem directly from the notion of an object relation conceived of in advance as harmonious and uniform, as though by some happy con­ vergence of Nature and Law each Jack should come to find his Jill, ideally and constantly, to the couple’s greatest satisfaction, without so much as a moment’s pause to find out what the community as a whole happens to think about this. If, on the contrary, we know how to distinguish the order of Law from imaginary harmonies, indeed from the very position of the love relationship, and if it is true that castration is the essential crisis in which each and every subject becomes authorised, as it were, to be rightfully Oedipalised, we shall gather from this that it is quite

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natural - even at the level of complex structures, indeed structures that are altogether free of kinship, like those we live with at our level, and not only in elementary structures - to posit, at least at a push, the formula that any woman who is not permitted is forbidden by Law. This formula allows us to appreciate the very sharp echo of castration that all marriage bears within it, and not simply for neu­ rotics. While the particular civilisation we are living in, which has produced marriage symbolically as the fruit of mutual consent, will explain to you that the ideal conflation of love and conjugo has been able to flourish as an ideal, it is nevertheless quite clear that this is so to the extent that it has thrust the fact of mutual consent to the fore, that is to say, it has pushed the freedom to unite as far as it possibly can, so far indeed that it is always verging on incest. Besides, you need only dwell a little on the very function of the primitive laws of alliance and kinship to realise that any conjoining whatsoever, even an instantaneous conjoining, arising from indi­ vidual choice within the bounds of the law, any conjoining of love and law, even when it is desirable, even when it is a kind of necessary crossing point of union between beings, is something that partakes of incest. It ultimately follows from this that, if Freudian doctrine ascribes the failures and indeed the debasements in the sphere of love to the lasting fixation to the mother as a permanent constancy of goodness knows what that strikes the ideal of monogamous union with an originary flaw, it should not be believed that there might be something else here. It should not be believed that there is a new form of either/or that would show us how, if incest does not arise where we wish it to, in actuality or in perfect marriages, as they say, this is precisely because it arose elsewhere. Rather, incest is very much at issue in both cases. In other words, there is something here that bears its limit within it, that entails a fundamental duplicity, an ambiguity that is always ready to rise again. This is what allows us to affirm, in keeping with experience but with the sole advantage of coming as no surprise, that while the ideal of conjugal conjunction is monogamous in women, for the reasons we stated at the outset, there is no cause for astonishment when we realise that what always tends to be reproduced on the man’s side is the split that makes him fundamentally bigamous. One has only to refer to the initial scheme of the child’s relation to his mother. To the extent that the typical, normative and lawful union is always marked by castration, this division tends to be reproduced in men. I’m not saying that it makes him polygamous, contrary to what people think, though of course once the twain has been introduced there is no longer any reason to stem the play in this mirror palace. Fundamentally, however, while the real father authorises the one

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who has entered the Oedipal dialectic to fix down his choice, what is always targeted in love lies beyond this choice, and it is neither the lawful object nor the object of satisfaction, but Being, that is to say, the object that is grasped in precisely what is wanting. It is for this, that whether in an institutionalised or anarchic fashion, we can see how love and consecrated union are never conflated. I repeat - either this is produced in an institutionalised fashion, as numerous evolved civilisations have had no hesitation in asserting in doctrine and in putting into practice, or, when one is in a civilisation like ours, where no one knows how to make anything hang together, everything happens almost by accident. It happens because one is more or less an ego that is more or less weak, more or less strong, and because one is more or less tied to some such archaic or even ancestral fixation. It is in the primary imaginary relationship, the one in which the child has already been introduced to what lies beyond the mother, that, through his mother, he can already behold, touch upon and experience how the human being is a deprived being and an abandoned being. The very structure that imposes the distinction between this imaginary experience and the symbolic experience that normalises it - though solely through the intervention and the inter­ mediary of Law - implies that many things are maintained that on no account allow us to speak of the sphere of love as though it were merely an object relation, even the most ideal one, one that is motivated by choice and by the deepest affinities. This structure leaves entirely open a problematic that is inherent to the love life of each and every subject. Freud’s experience, and our day-to-day experience, are there to bring us up against this and by the same stroke to confirm it. 6 March 1957

XIII O N T H E C A S T R A T IO N COM PLEX

Critique of aphanisis The imaginary father and the real father Being loved Anxiety, from the lure to the stirring penis The animals in phobias agent

lack

object

real father

symbolic castration

imaginary phallus

symbolic mother

imaginary frustration

real breast

imaginary father

real privation

symbolic phallus

Today we are going to try to speak about castration. Castration runs throughout Freud’s writings, as does the Oedipus complex, yet they are treated differently. It was only late in the day, in a 1931 article dedicated to some­ thing entirely new, that Freud tried to spell out in full the formula of the Oedipus complex, despite its having been present in his thinking from the first. Indeed, it may be reckoned that here lies the chief per­ sonal issue that was his point of departure - What is a father? There can be no doubt about this because we know from his biography and the letters to Fliess are confirmatory - that he was preoccupied by the presence of the Oedipus complex from the outset. It was only much later that he explained himself on this matter. As for castration, nowhere is there anything of the sort. Not once did Freud spell out in full the precise meaning, the precise psychical

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impact, of this fear, or this threat, or this instance, or this dramatic moment. Each of these words may equally be posited, with a ques­ tion mark, in regard to castration. When I started to tackle the issue last time through the emergence of castration at a lower level than frustration and the imaginary phallic game with the mother, many of you, even when you had grasped the role I was ascribing to the father’s intervention - his symbolic personage being purely the symbolic personage of dreams - were still wondering what this castration is. What does it mean that, for the subject to come to genital maturity, he has to have been castrated? We are going to see how to respond to this.

1 If you take things at the simple level of reading, it may be said that castration is the sign o f the Oedipal drama, just as it is its implicit fulcrum. Even though it is not spelt out like this anywhere, it is literally implied throughout Freud’s writings. People may seek to sidestep this, and it can be taken as a sort of make-believe, which is what keeps cropping up when you listen to current-day analytic discourse. However, once you allow the text to bring you to dwell on this, as I am doing right now, so that the abruptness of this assertion can become apparent as something problematic, which indeed it is, you can take this formula as the point of departure, however paradoxical it may be. What, then, is meant by this formulation? What does it presup­ pose? Moreover, this is precisely what the authors have latched on to because, even so, there are some who have not failed to pause over the singularity of such a consequence. Foremost among them is Ernest Jones. You will notice this if you read his collected papers. He never managed to overcome the difficulty of how to handle the castration complex as such. He tried to formulate a term which is peculiar to him, though of course like everything that has been introduced into the analytic community it has wended its way and borne echo, having been cited chiefly among the British authors. The term is aphanisis. The Greek term dcpavioiq means disappearance. The solution that Jones tried to offer to the pattern of insistence behind the psychical drama of castration in the subject’s history runs as follows. First, the dread of castration cannot, at least from his perspective, be made to hang on the accidental occurrence, on

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the contingency, of threats, which nevertheless are always so singu­ larly reproduced in subjects’ histories, expressed in the well-known parental threat of We shall send for someone to cut it off. The para­ doxically motivated aspect of the threat, which is un-rooted, in a sort of necessary constant of the inter-individual relationship, is not the only aspect that has given the authors pause for thought. So, the question and difficulty concerns how castration is to be handled when it comes to integrating such a singular thing in its positive form, which Freud nevertheless spells out clearly as something that threatens the penis, the phallus. This is what pushed Jones, when he was starting to broach the problem of establishing the mechanism of development around which the superego must be constituted, to foreground the notion of aphanisis. I think I need only spell it out for you myself for you to see to what extent it cannot help but present great difficulty. Aphanisis is indeed disappearance, but the disappearance of what? For Jones, it is the disappearance of desire. The castration complex qua aphanisis, substituted for castration, is the subject’s fear of seeing his desire extinguished. I think you cannot fail to see how such a notion in itself amounts to a relationship that has been highly subjectified. It may indeed be conceivable that this is the source of some primordial anxiety, but this is certainly an anxiety that has been reflected on in a very peculiar manner. One really has to make a leap of understanding that leaves an immense gulf gaping wide, all the while assuming it to have been bridged, if one is to suppose, on the basis of data derived from a subject’s very first relational movements with respect to his objects, that he is already in a position to take a step back in such a way as not only to experience an articulated frustration as such, but also to hang upon it the apprehension of a drying-up of desire. It was actually around the notion of privation, as what purport­ edly gives rise to the fear of aphanisis, that Jones tried to articulate his entire genesis of the superego as the formation in which the Oedipus complex naturally culminates. Of course, he promptly found himself faced with the distinctions to which I believe we are succeeding in giving a slightly more manageable form. When Jones uses the term privation, he doesn’t manage for an instant to dis­ tinguish between sheer privation, which means that the subject is not satisfied in any given need he might have, and the privation that he calls deliberate deprivation, which presupposes, across from the subject, another subject who refuses him the satisfaction he is seeking. Furthermore, since it is not easy, based on such indistinct data, to unite the passage from one to the other, especially when they are being kept in the state of synonyms, he quite naturally

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comes to suggest that, more often than not, privation is taken as frustration. He suggests that, for the subject, privation is equivalent to frustration. Of course, on this basis a good many things are facili­ tated in the articulation of a process, but while they are facilitated for the speaker, this does not mean that the same holds true for a moderately exacting listener. In point of fact, on my chart I don’t give the term privation any­ thing like the meaning that Jones gives it. The privation that is involved on the chart, where it features as one of the terms, is the very thing in relation to which the notion of castration has to be located. I have tried to restore to the term frustration its complexity as a veritable relation. As you were able to see in the session just before the February break, I did so in a highly articulated way, and you ought to be able to retain enough from this to see that I do not employ the term in the summary form in which it is usually employed. In my schematic, privation and castration feature as distinct simply because it’s not possible to articulate the impact of castra­ tion onto something else without isolating the notion of privation as what I have called a real hole. Rather than throwing out a red herring, let’s try on the contrary to isolate the herring. Privation is the privation of the herring.1It is, in particular, the fact that woman does not have a penis. I mean that this fact has a constant impact in the evolution of practically all the cases that Freud lays out for us. Taking on board the fact that woman is deprived of a penis affords the boy the most salient example, which we can meet at every turn in the Freudian case histories, of how castration, if indeed it is this that we are seeking out, takes as its base the apprehension of woman’s absence of penis in the real. This is the crucial point in the majority of the cases. In the male subject’s experience, this is the fundament upon which the notion of privation sits in a way that is especially efficacious and anguishing. There is a share of beings in humanity who are, as it is put in the texts, castrated. This term is, of course, utterly ambiguous. They are castrated in the subjectivity of the subject. In reality, when it comes to what they are in the real, and which is invoked as a real experience, they are deprived. I am alluding to the reference to the real around which the experi­ ence of castration turns in the teaching to be derived from Freud’s texts. I mentioned to you in this connection that to spell out the thinking correctly we must correlate to this privation in the real the fact that it necessarily concerns our own way of apprehending what is at issue. This is due to the simple fact that we are setting things out in reference, not to the patient’s experience, but to the experiences of our own thinking.

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The very notion of privation is exposed in this kind of experience - which entails the symbolisation of the object in the real - as some­ thing markedly tangible and visible. In the real, nothing is deprived of anything. Everything that is real is sufficient unto itself. By defini­ tion, the real is full. If we introduced the notion of privation into the real, this is because we already symbolise it quite enough, and even altogether fully, to indicate that if something is not there it’s because we suppose its presence to be a possibility. That is to say, we introduce into the real, in order to cover it over and to hollow it out in some way, the elementary order of the symbolic. This is why I say that, at the level of this progression, the object at issue in this instance is the penis. It’s an object that is given to us in a symbolic state on the tier at which we have been speaking about privation. I’m reminding you of the necessity of the chart. It’s quite clear that castration, insomuch as it is effective and felt in lived experience, and present in the genesis of a neurosis, is the castration of an imaginary object. In its impact in a neurosis, no castration is ever a real castration. Castration enters the game to the extent that it is played out in the subject in the form of an action that bears on an imaginary object. The issue for us is precisely to conceive of why and through what necessity this castration is introduced into a development that is the subject’s typical development. It’s a matter of the subject joining this complex order that constitutes the relationship between man and woman and which means that genital realisation is submitted to a number of conditions in humankind. So, our starting point will be, as it was last time, the subject in his originative relation with the mother at the stage that is being quali­ fied as preoedipal. We have seen that there is much to say about this stage, and we hope to have spelt it out better than is usually done, with greater differentiation. Even when these authors do demon­ strate what is at issue, we believe that they do not handle it so well and fail to reason it out. We are going to start again from this point so as to try to seize at its moment of emergence the necessity of the phenomenon of castration as something that symbolises a symbolic indebtedness, a symbolic castigation inscribed into the symbolic chain, and as something that snatches hold of this imaginary object as its instrument. To serve us as a guide, and so that we may refer to terms that I laid out previously, I ask you to accept for the time being the hypothesis, the supposition, that our articulation will lean on and which we saw last time, namely that behind the symbolic mother stands the symbolic father. The symbolic father is in some sense a necessity of symbolic

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construction, but one that we can locate only in a beyond-zone, I would almost say in a transcendence, in any case in something that, as I indicated in passing, can only be joined through a mythical construction. I have often insisted on the fact that ultimately this symbolic father is not represented anywhere, and the next part of our disquisition will confirm for you whether this is valid, whether it is effectively useful in allowing us to find this element of the drama of castration in complex reality. We now have on our chart the real father and the imaginary father. While the symbolic father is the signifier about which one can never speak without encountering both its necessity and its character - which we have to accept as a kind of irreducible given from the world of the signifier - the imaginary father and the real father are two terms that present far less difficulty for us. We are constantly dealing with the imaginary father. The imagi­ nary father is the commonest point of reference for the whole dialectic of aggressiveness, the whole dialectic of identification, and the whole dialectic of idealisation whereby the subject gains access to what is called identification with the father. All of this occurs on the level of the imaginary father. We also say that this father is imaginary because he is integrated into the imaginary relationship that forms the psychological support for dealings with the semblable, these being strictly speaking relationships of kind, the same that lie at the root of any libidinal captivation or any aggressive stand-off. The imaginary father also participates, ipso facto, with typical characteristics. This imaginary father is the terrifying father with whom we are acquainted, who is behind so many neurotic experiences and who bears no mandatory relation to the child’s real father. We frequently see cropping up in the child’s fantasies a figure of the father - and also of the mother - who twists into a grimace and who is very far removed from the real father who was present for the child at the time. He is linked solely to this period, and to the function that this imaginary father will hold at this stage of development. The real father is an altogether different matter. The child has only ever had a very difficult apprehension of this real father, due to the interposition of fantasies and the necessity of the symbolic relationship. Indeed, this is how it is for any human being. If there is one thing that lies at the base and the foundation of all analytic experience, then it’s that we find it so very hard to apprehend what is most real around us, that is to say, human beings such as they are. The whole difficulty of psychical development and everyday life alike is that of knowing with whom we are really dealing. This is no less the case for the person of the father, who under ordinary condi­

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tions may rightly be regarded as a constant element in what these days is called the child’s entourage. I ask you therefore to take on board what might strike you as paradoxical in the first approach to the stationed character of the chart, namely that, contrary to a sort of normative or typical notion that people seek to pin on the insist­ ence of the castration complex in the Oedipal drama, it is effectively to the real father that the prominent function of what occurs with respect to the castration complex is deferred. So, you can see from the way I’m formulating it what can already appear as a contingency, as something scarcely explicable. Why is this castration here? Why is there this strange form of intervention in the subject’s economy that is called castration? In itself it has something shocking about it. I will double this contingency by telling you that it is no accident, it is no strangeness ascribable to the first approach to this topic, that physicians were the first to dwell on these things that were recognised as being more fantasmatic than people believed, namely the scenes of primary seduction. You know that this is a stage in Freud’s thought, even before he had analysed this topic and pro­ duced the doctrine on it. When it comes to castration, however, it’s not a matter of fantasmatising the whole affair, as was done with the scenes of primary seduction. While castration does effectively warrant being isolated by naming it in the subject’s history, this is always linked to the impact, to the intervention, of the real father. Or, if you prefer, it may equally be marked, and profoundly so, by the absence of the real father, which throws it deeply off balance, and this necessity, which introduces something of a profound atypia, then calls for the substitution of the real father by something else, which is deeply neuroticising. i We will take as our point of departure the supposition of the fundamental character of the link between the real father and cas­ tration, so as to try to find our bearings in these complex dramas that Freud elaborates for us. Very often we have the sense that he is allowing himself to be led in advance by a sort of guiding thread that occasionally is so assured - as in the case of little Hans - that we too have the impression of being guided, from one instant to the next, yet without grasping anything and without the motives that lead us to make a choice at each fork in the path. I ask you, therefore, tentatively to accept this position, on a provi­ sional basis, as the position around which we shall try to understand this necessity behind the signification of the castration complex, by now taking up the case of little Hans.

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2 From the age of four-and-a-half, little Hans develops what is called a phobia, that is to say, a neurosis. This phobia was taken in charge by Hans’s father, who as it hap­ pened was one of Freud’s acolytes. He was a good honest fellow, which is the best thing for a real father to be. We are also told that little Hans had every positive feeling for him, whom he had always loved, and that he is far from fearing such abusive treatment as castration from the father. On the other hand, it cannot be said that little Hans has been frustrated of something for real. In the way we see it at the begin­ ning of the observation, little Hans, still an only child, is as happy as can be. He is the object of an attentiveness that his father certainly didn’t wait until the appearance of the phobia to lavish. He is also the object of the most tender care from his mother, so tender, in fact, that everything is handed over to him. In truth, it takes Freud’s sublime serenity to approve her actions, when nowadays all manner of anathema would be pronounced upon her, she who every morning allows little Hans into the conjugal bed as a third party, against the express reservations voiced by the husband and father. Not only does the latter show himself on this occasion to be very peculiarly tolerant, but also we may deem him not to be in on what’s going on, because regardless of what he says, things carry on no less in the most determined fashion. Not for a second do we see the mother in question taking even slightly into account the observation that has been respectfully suggested to her by the person of the father. Little Hans is in no way frustrated. He is not deprived of anything for real. Nevertheless, at the start of the observation, his mother does go so far as to forbid his masturbation. Not only is this no small matter in itself, she even goes so far as to utter the fatal words, I f you do that, I shall send for Dr A. to cut off your widdler. This is reported at the start of the observation, but we don’t have the impression that it is decisive. The child continues of course. This is not an element that is assessed, but certainly her intervention needs to be taken note of given the qualm with which the observation is picked up on, and due to the fact that the parents are sufficiently well informed, which moreover doesn’t stop them from behaving exactly as though they knew nothing. Nevertheless, Freud doesn’t entertain, even for a second, bringing in at that moment anything whatsoever that would be decisive with respect to the appearance of the phobia. The child harkens to this threat, I would say almost as is fitting. You will see that after the event there even emerges the impli­

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cation that one could say nothing more to a child, that it’s precisely what will serve him as the material from which to construct what he needs, that is, the castration complex. However, the question of why he needs this is precisely another question. This is where we are, and we are far from being able to give an immediate reply. For the time being, it’s not about castration. It’s about phobia and the fact that on no account can we tie it in a direct and straight­ forward way to the forbidding of masturbation. As Freud puts it very well, the child’s masturbation does not by any means explain his anxiety. The child will continue to masturbate. Of course, in what ensues he will integrate it into the conflict that will become manifest at the time of his phobia, but this is certainly not anything appar­ ent. What occurs at this moment is not some traumatising impact that would allow us to understand the outbreak of the phobia. The conditions that surround the child are optimal, and the issue of the scope of the phobia remains an issue that one has to know how to introduce with its truly dignified character, though it is a question­ able one on occasion. It is on this basis that we shall be able to uncover the cross-references that will enlighten and indeed enhance our attempt at theorisation. I want to give due consideration - and this will be a reminder - to what we can call the fundamental situation with regard to the child’s phallus in relation to the mother. What do we have in the child’s relation to the mother, which we spoke about in the preoedipal relationship? There the mother is an object of love, an object desired for its presence, an object that presupposes a relationship that is as simple as you may imagine, but very early on in the child’s experience, in his deportment, his sensi­ bility and his reaction, this relationship is very soon made manifest in its articulation in a presence-absence pair. As you know, this is our point of departure. Some difficulty has arisen regarding what might be called the child’s first objectal world due to insufficient distinction of the term object. That there should be a primordial object that we can on no account constitute ideally, that is, in our ideation - the child’s world as a bare state of hanging on to the undetermined limits of the organ that satisfies him, the nourishing organ - is something that I am not the first to contradict. The entire life’s work of Alice Balint, to take one example among others, is there to articulate what I am telling you in a different way, one that I believe to be less sustainable, namely that the mother exists but that this does not presuppose that there is already such a thing as me and not-me. The mother exists as a symbolic object and as a love object. This will be confirmed both by experience and by what I’m formulating

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for you in the position I’ve given to the mother on the chart. The mother is first of all, so we are told, a symbolic mother, and it is only in the crisis of frustration that she starts to become a reality through a certain number of confrontations and peculiarities that arise in the relationships between mother and child. The mother qua love-object can at any moment become the real mother in so far as she frustrates this love. The child’s relationship with the mother, which is a relationship of love, has something about it that can open the door to what is usually called, for want of knowing how to articulate it, the first undifferentiated relationship. But, in fact, what is it that occurs fun­ damentally in the first concrete stage in this relationship of love as such, this something that constitutes the ground on which the child’s satisfaction may or may not be produced, along with the signification that it carries? It’s that the child includes himself in this relationship as the object of the mother’s love. It’s that the child learns that he brings his mother pleasure. This is one of the child’s fundamental experiences. He comes to know that if his presence commands, however little, the presence of the one who is necessary to him, it’s because he himself introduces something into the experi­ ence, namely the radiance that means that this presence is there and that it surrounds him as something to which he brings a satisfaction of love. The fact of being loved, geliebt werden, is fundamental. It is the ground upon which everything that will develop between mother and child is played out. As I have indicated to you, the question that is brought to the fore by the facts themselves is that of how the child apprehends what he is for the mother. Our starting hypothesis, as you know, is that he is not alone. Little by little, something is articulated in the child’s experience which indicates to him that, in the mother’s presence beside him, he is not alone. The whole dialectic furtherance of the mother’s relationship with the child will be articulated around this. One of the most commonplace experiences is that first of all he is not alone because there are other children, but our starting hypoth­ esis is that there is another term at stake, which is constant, radical, and independent of the contingencies and peculiarities of his history and the presence or not of another child. This hypothesis is that the mother maintains, at varying degrees depending on the subject, her Penisneid. Her child may fulfil her or not, but the question is posed. The two discoveries, of the phallic mother for the child and of Penisneid for the mother, are strictly coexistent with the problem that we are now trying to broach. They do not lie on the same level. I have chosen to start from one particular point in order to get to another, and it’s on this level

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that we must take Penisneid as one of the fundamental givens of the analytic experience, as a constant term of reference in the mother’s relationship with the child. Experience proves that there is no means of articulating the perversions in any other way, insomuch as, con­ trary to what is said, they are not fully explicable by the preoedipal stage, though they do indeed necessitate the preoedipal experience. We can see that it is in the relationship with the mother that the child experiences the phallus as the central focus of the mother’s desire. And he places himself there in different positions, through which he is led to maintain, but more exactly to lure, the mother’s desire. The articulation from the lesson I was alluding to earlier bears on this. Either way, the child presents himself to the mother as being the very thing that offers her, in himself, the phallus. This happens to varying degrees and from different positions. He may identify with the mother, he may identify with the phallus, he may identify with the mother as bearer of the phallus, or present himself as the bearer of the phallus. Here, there is a high degree, not of abstraction, but of the generalisation of this level of imaginary relationship, of the relation­ ship that I’ve been calhng a luring relationship, wherein the child attests to his mother that he can fulfil her, not only as a child, but also with respect to her desire and, to spell it right out, with respect to what she lacks. The situation is certainly a fundamental and structuring one, because it’s around this, and only around this, that the fetishist’s relationship with his object can be articulated. Take for example the whole intermediary scale that links him to such a complex and elabo­ rate relationship as transvestism, and to which analysis alone has been able to furnish its accentuation and its terminal point. Homosexuality is here set apart for what is at issue in homosexuality, that is to say, a need of the object, of the real penis, in the other party. At what point will we see that something brings an end to the relationship that is sustained in this way? What, for example, brings this to an end in the case of little Hans?

3 At the start of the observation, through a kind of lucky encounter, through the illumination of a miraculous stroke of fortune, which is what has happened whenever we make a discovery, we see the child fully committed to a relationship in which the phallus plays a most evident role. The father’s notes on what he picked out from the child’s develop­ ment, up until the hour of reckoning when the phobia began, tell us that little Hans was constantly fantasising the phallus, questioning

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his mother about the presence of her phallus, then about his father’s phallus, and then about the phallus of animals. He speaks about nothing but the phallus. Going by the comments that are reported to us, the phallus is truly the pivotal object, the central object in the organisation of his world. We have Freud’s text before us, and we are trying to make sense of it. What was it, then, that changed, since nothing of especial impor­ tance, nothing critical, occurred in the life of little Hans? What changed was that his penis started to become something altogether real. It began to stir, and the child started to masturbate. The important element is not so much that his mother intervened at that moment, but rather that his penis became real. This is the solid fact in the observation. From that point forth, it’s quite clear that we need to ask ourselves whether there might not be a relationship between this fact and what appears at that time, that is to say, anxiety. I have yet to tackle the problem of anxiety here in this Seminar, because things need to be taken in sequence. As you know, the question of how anxiety is to be conceived of is one of the abiding questions that runs throughout Freud’s work. I’m not about to give you a single-sentence synopsis of the path Freud took, but I will note that, as a mechanism, anxiety is constantly present at each stage of his observation. The doctrine comes afterwards. How are we to conceive of the anxiety that is at issue in this instance, while staying as close as possible to the phenomenon? I ask you to try out for a moment the fashion that consists in showing a little imagination and to notice that anxiety appears in this extraor­ dinarily evanescent relationship when the subject peels away from his existence, however imperceptible this may be, and when he real­ ises, though scarcely so, that he is on the verge of being drawn back into something that you may label as you wish depending on the occasion - image o f the other, temptation, and so on - in short, the instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and a shift towards a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again. That’s what anxiety is. Can’t you see that right when there appears in the child, in the form of a drive in the most elementary sense of the term, this thing that stirs - the real penis - what formerly had long been the very paradise of happiness starts to feel like a snare? This snare is what formerly was the game of being what one is not, of being for the mother everything that she wants. I can’t speak about everything at once, so I shall make do with saying that all of this depends after all on the fact of what the child is

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really for the mother. Presently we shall be trying to introduce some difference into this, and to get much closer to what Hans was for his mother, but for the time being we shall stick with this crucial point that yields us the general scheme of things. Until this point, the child is in the paradise of the lure. It may be satisfying or not, but either way there is no reason for us not to see that he can keep up this game for a very long while in a satisfying way. The child tries to slip into, to integrate himself into what he is for the mother’s love, and, with a bit of good fortune, and even very little, he manages, because that’s all it takes to authorise this relationship that is so very delicate. But as soon as his drive, his real penis, starts to interfere, the unsticking that I have just men­ tioned becomes apparent. He is caught in his own snare, the dupe of his own game, and falls prey to every discordance now that he is confronted with the particularly immense gap that lies between sat­ isfying an image and having something to present - to present, so to speak, in full. What invariably happens is not merely that the child simply fails in his attempts at seduction, for one reason or another, or that he is rejected by the mother. The decisive factor is that what he ultimately has to present is something that seems to him to be something quite meagre. There are countless such experiences in analytic experience. The child comes face-to-face with the opening where he is the captive, the victim, the pacified element in a game in which he now becomes prey to the significations of the Other. There is a dilemma here. As I indicated last year, it is very precisely at this point that the origin of paranoia branches off. Once the game starts to become serious, while still being a mere game of luring, the child is entirely left hanging on what the partner indicates to him. The partner’s every expression becomes for him the verdict on his sufficiency or his insufficiency. This is what happens to the extent that the situation evolves, that is to say, when the term of the symbolic father does not intervene, having been left on the outside due to Verwerfung. We are going to see, concretely, just how necessary this term of the symbolic father is. But when the situation evolves without this term, it turns into the highly peculiar situation of being thenceforth delivered up entirely to the eye and the gaze of the Other. Let’s leave to one side, however, this future paranoiac. On the other branch, in and of itself there is literally no way out of the situation. Of course, there is a way out, because I’m here to show you how the castration complex is the way out. The castration complex takes up, on the purely imaginary plane, everything that is at stake in the phallus. This is precisely why it is most fitting that the real penis should in some sense be placed out of

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range. The Father introduces an order that intervenes with its prohi­ bitions, with the fact that he introduces the reign of Law here, which means that the affair is taken out of the child’s hands but is settled elsewhere. The Father is the one with whom there is no more chance of winning but to accept the distribution of stakes as they stand. The symbolic order intervenes precisely on the imaginary plane. It is not for nothing that castration bears on the imaginary phallus, but in some sense outside of the real couple. Order is thus re-established, within which the child will be able to wait out events as they evolve. This might strike you as straightforward for the time being as a solution to the problem. It’s an indication. It’s not a solution. It’s a bridge that’s been quickly flung across the divide. Were it really so easy, were there just one bridge to be made, there would be no reason to do any bridging. What is of interest is the point we’ve reached, namely the point that little Hans had reached precisely when nothing of the sort had been laid out for him. What is little Hans faced with? He is poised at the meeting point between the real drive and the game of the imaginary phallic lure, and this is in relation to his mother. What happens at that moment, because there is a neurosis? It will come as no surprise to you when I tell you that a regression occurs. I would nevertheless prefer you to be surprised by this because I’m giving the term regression neither more nor less than the strict scope I gave it in the last session before the break, when we spoke about frustration. I told you back then that in the presence of the mother’s failing, the child brings about a quashing in the satisfac­ tion of being fed. Here too, where the child stands at the centre, regression occurs when it’s no longer enough to give what is there for the giving, and he finds himself in the disarray of no longer sufficing. There is a feigning of the same shortcut by which primary frustration is satisfied, where the child snatches hold of the breast in order to fence off all his problems. The only thing that opens up before him as a yawning gap is exactly what is now happening elsewhere - to be devoured by the mother. This is the first coat that the phobia dons, and this is exactly what appears in the case of our young fellow. Whichever horse becomes the object of his phobia, it is always a horse that bites. The theme of devouring is always to be found, in one aspect or another, in the structure of the phobia. Is this the whole of it? Of course it is not. It’s not just anything that bites or that devours. We find ourselves confronted with the problem of phobia whenever a certain number of fundamental relationships come about, some of which have to be left to one side in order to be able to articulate something cogent. What is certain is that the

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objects of phobias, which are animals in particular, are marked out from the first, even to the eye of the most casual observer, by something that turns them by their very essence into objects of the symbolic order. Whether the object of the phobia is a lion, a wolf, or even a giraffe, and above all when the child doesn’t live in parts where this animal presents the faintest sign, not of danger, but simply of actual presence, they are foreign objects - among which we can see on this occasion that the horse presents as an extremely precise limit - which show very well to what extent they are objects that have been lifted, as it were, from a sort of list or category of signifiers that share the same nature, consistent with what can be found on coats-of-arms. These objects are the same that led Freud, when putting together Totem and Taboo, to the analogy, which even became a necessity, between the father and the totem. They have a very special function, which is to stand in for the signifier of the symbolic father. We cannot see what the final term of this signifier is. One can wonder why it takes one form or another. There must be something in what we encounter that belongs to the realm of fact or experience, both of the positive and the irreducible kind. This is not a deduction but an apparatus necessitated by the support of what we find in experience. Besides, we are not here to sort out why the phobia takes the form of such and such an animal. This is not the question.

4 I ask you to take up, between now and next time, the text of the observation on little Hans. You will see that it’s a phobia without a shadow of a doubt, but it’s a phobia that is, so to speak, in motion. His parents seized the thread the moment it first appeared, and his father doesn’t let go until it’s over. I should like you to read this text. You will have all the flitting impressions that one can have from it. You will even on several occasions have a sense of being utterly lost. Nevertheless, I would like those of you who will have been willing to put yourselves through the test to tell me next time whether you have been struck by a contrast in the text. At the first stage, we see little Hans in full flow developing all sorts of extraordinarily fictionalised imaginings concerning his relations with all the children whom he adopts as his own. This is a theme of the imaginary in which he shows himself to be very much at ease, as though in this state he were extending in some way the luring game with his mother. He feels himself quite at ease in a position

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that combines an identification with the mother. At the same time, adopting the children entails a series of loving relationships of every stripe, going from the little girl whom he woos and courts at close quarters - the daughter of the landlord of their holiday lodgings - to the girl who inspires his long-range love. This locates him as already inscribed in all the forms of loving relationship, which he can pursue with great ease on the plane of fiction. All of this contrasts with what will come to pass when, after the father’s interventions under the pressure of a more or less directed analytic questioning, he gives himself over to a sort of fantasy nov­ elising in which he constructs the presence of his little sister, years before her actual birth, in a box, in a carriage, and on a horse. In short, the coherence of this draws a firm line in the analysis of little Hans between what I would call the imaginary orgy and the inter­ vention of the real father. In other words, while the child reaches a most satisfactory cure - and we will be seeing what satisfactory cure means with respect to his phobia - this is quite clearly to the extent that the real father has intervened, a real father who hitherto had intervened so very little. Moreover, he was able to intervene because he had the sym­ bolic father, Freud, behind him. However, commensurate with this intervention, everything that was tending to crystallise on the plane of a sort of premature real sets off again in a radical imaginary, so radical indeed that one no longer knows very well where one is. One keeps wondering whether Hans might not be making fun of every­ thing, or producing a refined brand of humour, which moreover is incontestably the case because what we have here is an imaginary that is being played out to reorganise a symbolic world. One thing is certain, however, which is that his recovery comes about when he expresses castration in the clearest way in the form of an articulated story, namely the plumber who comes and unscrews his widdler and gives him another one. It is right there that the observation stops. We can gather from this that the solution of the phobia is linked to the constellation of this triadic intervention of the real father. We will be coming back to this next time. Supported and assisted as he is by the symbolic father, the real father enters here as a schmuck. Freud is constantly forced to say that it’s better than nothing, that the child had to be allowed to speak. Above all, says Freud at the bottom of one page, It is not in the least our business to understand’ a case at once. With all the questions that the father obviously presses on his son, he goes barking up the wrong tree. No matter. The result is punctuated by these two points - Hans’s imagi­ nary orgy, and the advent, as it were, of fully articulated castration.

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This castration is spelt out as follows - what is real will be replaced by something more impressive, something bigger. The bringing to light of castration is both what puts an end to the phobia and what shows, I would say, not its finality, but what it stands in for. You must have a fair sense of how this is but an intermediary stage in my disquisition. I simply wanted to give you enough to see where his repertoire of questions opens up. Next time we will take up this dialectic of child and mother, and we shall set about isolating the value, the true signification, of the castration complex. 13 March 1957

XIV T H E S IG N IF IE R IN T H E R E A L

The network of The Purloined Letter Quite alone with Mariedl A metonymic child The black on the mouth A world structured phobically I should like to begin by setting things straight regarding the article published in the second issue of La Psychanalyse under the title Seminaire sur ‘La Lettre volee', and especially its Introduction. A number of you have had time to read it and to go into it more deeply. I am grateful for the attention of those who have devoted themselves to this inspection. It is to be believed, however, that the memory of the context in which what is there laid out in the Introduction was first delivered is not so easy for everyone to get back in touch with, because some have fallen back into a sort of real-ising error of another kind, which is what a few people allowed themselves to be overtaken by when I was first setting out these terms. For example, they imagined that I was denying that there is such a thing as chance. I allude to this in my text and I won’t be coming back to this point. I’m now going to clarify what is at issue.

1 It will be useful for me to remind you of the basic data. We take the signs + and - , randomly ordered in a temporal suc­ cession, in groupings of three. We order these groupings as 1, 2 or 3, depending on whether they represent a succession of identical signs + + + , ------, or an alternating succession + or on the contrary a succession that is distinct from the others in that it has no

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symmetry, such as + + -, but also - - +. I call this last grouping odd, using an English term that cannot be translated into French. It’s the one that is asymmetrical, and which stands out as being uneven and lopsided. It’s a simple question of definition. It’s enough to set it out like this for it to be established as a convention, as the existence of a symbol. While this was laid out unambiguously in my text, though perhaps in a way that was dense enough for some to have found it difficult, the context prevents one from taking it even so long as a second for anything but this definition, this convention that is the point of departure. Next, it’s a matter of using the letters a, P, y and 5, to label a third series of symbols that is built from the second series. This is founded on the remark that when one knows the beginning and end term in the second series, the middle term is univocal. So, in order to define the terms a, p, y and 8, we take into account only the two extremes of the series. In a case like this one here, y, you can see that it goes from odd to odd. Therefore, the convention has been established whereby a sign is set down that captures within its range the five previous symbols from the first line. This will give the sign a when going from same to same, that is, from symmetrical to symmetrical, whether it’s a matter of going from 1 to 1, from 1 to 3, or from 3 to l.1Going from odd to odd gives y. Starting from the same to arrive at odd will give p. Coming back to the same from odd will give 8. These are the conventions. On this basis, if we want to define all the possibilities by means of a network, we can construct it as a parallelepiped formed of vectors. This has been found by one of the people who has best understood and best examined this thing, in the most precise way and even, I would almost say, in the most competent way.

The network has to be oriented, which is exactly how it is here. The a can reproduce indefinitely, which is not the case for the other

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points unless it is expressly indicated by the loop defined thus. So, this network provides an exhaustive summary of all the possible sequences. These are the only ones. A series that cannot be set into this network is an impossible series. Why didn’t I put this in my text? First of all, because I hadn’t represented it for you here. It’s a simple device for checking the calculations, which allows for the definitive envelopment and lock­ ing-down of the problem in such fashion as to ensure that none of the possibilities has been pretermitted. What is convenient about it is that you can always refer to it as something trustworthy. It will indicate when you might perhaps in a certain case have overlooked a possible solution, whichever the problem may be that you are posing with respect to the series, or even when you have gone com­ pletely wrong. This brings me to a point of contention, which you can see in the network. The network shows you that there are in some sense two kinds of y, two kinds of 8, and so on. If you look at any of the vertices, which have been labelled with these letters, you can see that a dichotomous division is always posited when starting from any one of them. Take for example y. After y there can be a P, and there can also after y be an a, because this vector here has the privilege of running in both directions. Likewise, down here you can see a 8, and there are two possible outcomes - it can go to this 8 up here, or to y. So, there is another 8 up here - which is not the same as the 8 down here - after which there can be a p or an a. The objection that some people have levelled at this way of laying out the evidence for functional diversity is that, according to them, one could for example label the vertices with eight different letters instead of four, or else put a lower-case a or a subscript 2. It was put to me that there was no clear and distinct definition of the symbol here, and that consequently everything I was representing and spell­ ing out in my text was merely a sort of opacifying of the mechanism for how the symbols play out. It would be a sort of creation that would make some kind of internal law emerge from within. This is where a disquiet began to arise in some people’s minds regarding one implication of something that is introduced by the creation of the symbol and which goes beyond the pure randomness that is given at the outset. I think I have to explain myself on this matter. It’s exactly that. And in one sense it can indeed be said that in the choosing of the symbols there is a certain ambiguity that is given at the outset, from the moment you set down the symbols, with the simple indication of oddity, that is to say, asymmetry, when in fact, given that we’ve spoken of a temporal succession, these items are oriented. Obviously 2 followed by 1 is not the same thing as 1 fol­

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lowed by 2. To confound them would be to introduce an ambiguity into the symbol itself when this can be expressed more clearly in the reference that has been set out. However, what is at issue here is to find out what is meant by the clarity in question. There is something that you may call ambiguity, but be sure to tell yourself that this is precisely what one has to get a sense of. At every level, the symbol that is a + presupposes the - , and the symbol that is a - presupposes the +. The ambiguity is still there as we move further into the construction. By grouping them in threes, I took the smallest step one can take. I didn’t demonstrate this in the article because my sole aim was to remind you of the context in which the purloined letter was introduced. Please accept for the moment that this is the smallest possible step, because it is precisely to the extent that the symbol harbours this ambiguity that what I have called law becomes apparent. In other words, were you to assume that you could replace four of the vertices by e, £, r|, and 0, you would effectively obtain possible sequences that would be different and which would be extremely complicated because you would be dealing with eight terms, each of which would pair up with two others in keeping with an order that would be far from immediately obvious. Yet this is precisely the convenience of choosing these ambiguous symbols that pair up, because they do indeed pair up with something, this vertex a with another vertex that we have also labelled a, and which do indeed have different functions. It is in this respect that it’s convenient to group them in this way, and from which, as you can see, there arises the exceedingly straightforward law that I expressed for you in one of the schematics in the text. a, 6 Y. P Phase 1

a, P, y, 6 Phase 2

a, P " Y.8 Phase 3

This schematic allows you to say that, while in the first or second phase you can have any one of the symbols, the third phase is subject to a dichotomy that rules out any possibility of obtaining y or 5 in the third phase if you began with a or 5 in the first. Likewise, there is no possibility of obtaining an a or a p in the third if you began with a y or a p in the first. In my text I indicated some of the sequential effects this entails, certain properties that are interesting in that they always bring out other phrases of the same form, laws of syntax that can be deduced from this exceedingly straightforward formula. I tried to put them

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together in such a way that they would be metaphorical, that is to say, so that they would enable you to glimpse how the signifier truly is the organiser of something that is inherent in human memory. This is so to the extent that, by always implicating elements of the signifier in its weft, human memory turns out to be structured in a fundamentally different way from any possible conception of vital memory, of the persistence or the effacement of an impression. Why so? Because it’s important to see that as soon as we introduce the signifier into the real - and it is introduced into the real simply from the moment we start speaking, less still from the moment when simply we count - everything that is apprehended in the realm of memory is taken up in something that essentially structures it in a way that is fundamentally different from anything that can be con­ ceived of in a theory that is founded on the theme of vital property, pure and simple. This is what I try to illustrate, clearly in a metaphorical way, when I speak to you about the future perfect, and when I bring in a fourth phase after the third. If one takes the fourth phase as a point of arrival, any one of the four symbols can feature there because the fourth phase has the same function as the second phase. If you set down an a, (3, y, or 5 in this fourth phase, certain eliminations will result from it at the second and third phases. This can serve as an image of what comes into focus in an immediate future once it has become - in relation to a goal, a determined project - the future perfect. That certain signifier-elements should be rendered impossible by this simple fact is something that I will illustrate metaphorically as the function that we can give to what on this occasion I shall call the impossible signifier, the caput mortuum of the signifier. What I want to stress today is that this is, of course, where I broke off my development. However, as people might quibble in the name of some kind of false evidence that might arise from the fact that not every facet of mystery vanishes away, because laws can be extracted from it - laws that are just as straightforward - upon consideration, in a differentiated fashion, of the terms at the different vertices in the parallelepipedic construction I have given you, this is not the question. What I would like you to hold in your minds for a moment is simply that this means that as soon as there is graphia, there is orthographia. I’m going to illustrate this for you right away in a different manner, which might have a more conclusive value in your eyes, even though I didn’t just concoct all this as some kind of mathematical excursion, with the incompetence that characterises me as much as everyone else. You would be wrong to think that. First, these are not items

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that I merely tarried with overnight. Second, I got a mathematician to check it. Please don’t think, just because I’ve added this further precision, that the slightest element of incertitude or fragility might have crept into it. So, as soon as there is graphia, there is orthographia. I begin with this simple hypothesis, but not in the sense that the word hypothesis is usually understood, rather in the sense of a definition of the action or the exceedingly straightforward premises that result therefrom. I begin with the odd, and do not do what I could equally have done at the start, which would be to distinguish, as I was told, between the odd with two light feet at the beginning and the odd with two light feet at the end, the anapaest and the dactyl. I didn’t do that, and the interest of the question lies precisely here. I’m using certain defini­ tions, which perhaps indeed are quite rudimentary, and from which certain intuitive elements have been purged, and especially this par­ ticularly gripping intuitive element that is grounded on scansion, which already entails a whole bodily engagement. This is where poetry begins. But we are not even moving into the realm of poetry. We are bringing in solely the notion of symmetry or asymmetry. I’m going to tell you why it seems to me to be of interest to curb the creation of the first signifier to this strict element. Here I’m reproducing my table, with the second indeterminate phase, here - a, p, y, 8. Now we come to the fifth phase. If we note down what is possible after an a, then what is possible after a p, and what is possible after each of the symbols, we can see that here [in the fourth phase] there can be a, P, y or 8. You can see the excess of possibilities that we have. We have all the possible symbols, and we have them at two levels. Yet the most cursory examination of the situation shows you that if you choose this fifth phase as the point of arrival, and if you choose here for example the letter p —it could be any letter - and if you take as the point of departure another letter, for example the letter a, you will realise right away that in no case whatsoever can you have a letter from this line here [below the bar in the third phase - y, 8]. By virtue of starting with a, you can have at the third phase only what features here above the line of dichotomy, that is to say a or p. However, what [exactly] is required in the third phase for you to have P in the fifth phase? It has to be an a, because P can only have a as its provenance. The result of this is that when your design is to form a series in which two letters are determined at either end of a spacing of five moves, the middle letter, the one that stands at the third phase, is determined in an absolutely univocal way. I could show you other properties that are just as striking but I’m confining myself to this one in the hope that this will succeed

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in bringing into your minds the dimension that has to be evoked. Indeed, what results from this property is that if you take any term in a sequence, by considering the term that lies two moves before and the term that lies two moves after, you can always check, and in a straightforward way that can be reckoned by eye without difficulty - this is a check that a typographer can perform - whether there is a fault at any point in the chain. It is enough to refer to the term that stands two moves before and the term that stands two moves after to see that in this case there can only be one possible letter here in the middle. In other words, as soon as there is the faintest emergence of a graphia, an orthographia emerges at the same time, that is to say, a means of checking for a possible fault. This example has been put together for this purpose. It shows you how, from the most elementary emergence of the signifier, law emerges quite independently of any real element. On no account does this mean that chance is being steered. It means that law emerges with the signifier, in a way that is internally independent of any experience. This is what this speculation on the alphas, betas, gammas and deltas is intended to demonstrate. It seems that for some minds these items entail very consider­ able resistance. This path nevertheless struck me as being a more straightforward one, to give a sense of a certain dimension, than recommending for example that you undertake a reading of Frege, or offering a commentary on his work. Frege was a mathematician of this century who dedicated himself to a science that at first blush looks to be as simple as can be, that of arithmetic. He thought it necessary to take wide detours - because the closer a thing is to simplicity, the harder it is to grasp - but detours that were surely altogether convincing when it came to demonstrating that there is no possible means of deducing the number 3 on the basis of experi­ ence alone. Of course, this leads us into a series of philosophical or mathematical speculations, and I didn’t think it necessary to put you to this test. Yet this is no less important because while, contrary to what Jung believed, no deduction from experience can make us accede to the number 3, it’s quite certain that the symbolic order, as distinct from the real, enters the real like a ploughshare and introduces an originary dimension. In so far as we operate on this register of speech, we analysts have to take into account the originariness of this dimension. This is what is at stake in this instance. I’m afraid I might wear you out, and I’ll tell you something else. I’m going to share with you a more intuitive idea that occurred to me, one that is less certain in its affirmation. This remark popped into my head one day when I was in a

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wonderful zoo, some thirty-odd miles north of London, where apparently the animals enjoy the greatest freedom since the bars are sunk into the ground at the bottom of concealed ditches. I was contemplating a lion surrounded by three magnificent lion­ esses that bore an altogether peaceful look of good temper and concordance. I asked myself why there was such good concordance among these animals, when as a rule, given what we know, I should have been seeing unmistakeable eruptions of rivalry and conflict. It seems to me that I didn’t make such a big leap in my mind when I gathered that it’s simply because lions don’t know how to count up to 3. You understand that it’s because lions don’t know how to count up to 3 that the lionesses do not feel the faintest sense of jealousy for one another, at least apparently. I offer this to your meditation. In other words, we ought never to neglect the introduction of the signifier when it comes to comprehending the emergence at issue whenever we find ourselves across from the appearance of the reality that is our principal object in analysis, the reality of inter-human conflict. One could even go further and say that ultimately conflict exists because men don’t know how to count any better than lions do, namely because this number 3 is never fully integrated. It is merely articulated. Of course, the dual relationship, which is fundamentally animal, maintains no less its supervalence across a certain zone, pre­ cisely that of the imaginary, and to the very extent that man does, even so, know how to count, in the final analysis something that we call conflict occurs. Were it not so difficult to manage to articulate the number 3, then this gap between the preoedipal and the Oedipal wouldn’t be there. This is the same gap that of late we have been trying to cross as best we can, with the aid of little rope ladders and other contraptions. What I simply want to make you realise is that once one has started to try to cross it, one is always falling back on such contraptions. There is no veritable experiential crossing of the gap between 2 and 3. This is exactly the point we have reached with little Hans. 2 We left little Hans at the moment when he is about to tackle the passage we defined, and which is called the castration complex. We can clearly see that at the start he has not yet come to it, because he is playing with the Wiwimacher which is there and is not there. It’s the Wiwimacher of his mother, or of the big horse, or the

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little horse, or his father’s, and which is also his own, but ultimately it does not seem to amount to much more for him than a very fine object in a game of hide-and-seek, from which he is even capable of deriving the greatest pleasure. I think that a certain number of you have consulted the text. This is the starting point, and it’s the only thing at issue. At the start the child presents, without doubt to the attention of his parents, a sort of problematic of the imaginary phallus, which is everywhere and nowhere. It is presented as the essential element in his relation to what at that time is for him what Freud called the other person, in the most clear-cut fashion, namely the mother. This is the point Hans has reached, and everything looks to be moving along perfectly well, as Freud underscores, thanks to a kind of liberalism, or even an educative laxity that was fairly typical of the pedagogy that, so it seems, emerged from these early days of psychoanalysis. We can see the child developing in the strongest, clearest, and happiest way. Now, it is after these fine antecedents that, to everyone’s surprise, he comes to what we can call, without being too dramatic, a small hitch, the phobia. That is to say, from a certain point forth, the child took great fright at one privileged object, which happens to be the horse whose presence was already heralded in the text, metaphorically, when the child said to his mother, I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a horse. It’s clear that if we can see the image of the horse appearing on the horizon, it’s from this moment forth that the child enters the phobia. In order to pursue this trajectory metaphorically through the observation on little Hans, it has to be understood how the child will pass from such a simple relationship, which ultimately is altogether blithe and clearly articulated, to the phobia. Where then is the unconscious? Where is the repression? There doesn’t seem to be any. It is with the greatest liberty that he ques­ tions his father and his mother about the presence or absence of the widdler, and tells them that he went to the zoo and saw an animal, a lion as it happens, endowed with a large widdler. The widdler plays a role that tends to become presentified for all sorts of reasons, which are not quite spelt out at the start of the observation, but which we can see appearing in hindsight. The fact that the child takes great pleasure in exhibiting himself, and some of his games too, show very well the essentially symbolic character of the widdler at the time. He will exhibit it in the dark. He will show it at the same time as a hidden object. He will also make use of it as an intermediate element for his relationships with the objects that catch his interest, that is, the young girls whom he asks to assist him and allows to watch him. The fact that his mother or his father assist him, which

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is also underscored, plays a major role in establishing his organs as an element of consideration from which he doubtless derives further pleasure by catching attention, interest, and even caresses from a certain number of people around him. This is the point we’ve reached when this thing is about to arise. To get some idea of the prevailing harmony prior to the phobia, note how Hans is showing on the imaginary plane the most formally typical attitudes one may expect from what in our harsh language we call virile aggression. With the little girls he is performing a courtship that is present to a greater or lesser extent, and which is differenti­ ated into two patterns - there are the young girls whom he hustles, clasps and molests, and there are others whom he treats in the manner of Liebe per Distanz. These two patterns of relationship are highly differentiated, and are already very subtle, I would almost say very civilised, very ordered and very cultivated. The term kultivierte is used by Freud to designate the differentiation that Hans makes between his objects. He doesn’t conduct himself in the same way with little girls whom he considers to be refined ladies, ladies of his world, as he does with the landlord’s young daughters. So, this has every appearance of opening out onto the favourable prospect of what one might call the transference towards other female objects, the reinvestment of his sentiments with respect to the female object in the guise of the mother. We can conceive of there being something that was produced which contributed to this development that was facilitated, so we are told, by the particularly open relationship of dialogue, which didn’t forbid the child any mode of expression in the slightest. What happens? How might we try to broach this problem, because now it’s a matter of pursuing step by step a critical reading of the observation and not merely offering a conspectus, which is what I’ve done so far? I don’t think I’m forcing the text when I tell you already what the sign of the underlying structuration is. This is the same struc­ turation as the one I pointed out to you, of the child’s relationship with the mother, on the basis of which the onset of the crisis can be conceived of in the form of the entrance, the bringing into play, of the real penis. There is something in the text that has never been commented on. The child dreams he is with little Mariedl, one of his playmates from the summer resort in the Austrian lakes. He gives his account of being with the young girl, and then, when his father is retelling the dream to the mother in his presence and saying how amusing it is that he should have dreamt about being with her, Hans makes a very nice rectification, Not with Mariedl, but ganz allein mit der Mariedl, quite alone with Mariedl. Like many other

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elements that abound in the observations, people cast this aside as mere childish talk, but this retort has all its importance. Freud puts it very well, everything carries a signification. Hans’s retort is conceivable only within the imaginary dialectic which I laid out for you as the initial plane of the child’s relations with his mother. Indeed, this scene occurs when he is three and three-quarters, his little sister having been born just three months before. So, not only with, but quite alone with, that is to say, one can be quite alone with her, and not have this intruder there, as is the case with the mother. There is no doubt about it, Hans takes six months to get used to the presence of his little sister. I think that on the plane of such typical and classical remarks, this can only strike you as evident and satisfactory. Nevertheless, you know very well that this is not the plane on which I shall be staying. While the real intrusion of the other child in the relationship between the child and his mother certainly has all it takes to bring about some such critical moment or some such decisive anxiety, it still remains that I have no hesitation in accentuating this quite alone with because, whatever the position may be, a child is never alone with his mother. The full progression of a child’s apparently dual relationship with his mother is marked by one absolutely essential element, which is that the child comes in - as the experience of the analysis of female sexuality assures us, this being the referential axis that has to be staunchly maintained given what Freud upheld to the very end concerning female sexuality - only as a substitute, as a compensation, in short as a reference to what the mother essentially lacks. This is what means that the child is never left quite alone, ganz allein, with the mother. Little by little the child learns that the mother situates herself as being marked by this fundamental lack, which she strives to fill, and in relation to which the child only ever brings her a satisfaction that we could provisionally call substitutive. It is essentially on this basis that we are to conceive of any kind of fresh opening of the gap, any kind of reopening of the question, and especially the question that arises with real genital maturity, that is, in the boy, with the introduction of masturbation, this real jouissance with his own real penis. Nothing can be understood unless within this initial constellation, through which the crucial elements can be introduced that open onto the various outlets that constitute either an Oedipus complex with a normal outcome or an Oedipus complex that is broached more or less in a way that is negativised to a greater or lesser extent, and which is not at all a neurosis, as you are usually taught. So, let’s pick up from the point we’ve reached and make a brief remark.

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The child has to uncover this dimension wherein the mother desires something beyond him, that is, beyond the object of pleasure that at first he feels himself to be for her and which he aspires to be. This situation can be conceived of, like any analytic situation, as I have taught you, only within the essentially intersubjective reference that always includes, simultaneously and correlatively, the originary dimension of each subject, yet also the reality of this intersubjective perspective such as it anchored in each subject. In other words, I am making the passing remark that something is veiled at the start and we will only come to unveil it at the end. Yet you already know the observation well enough at least to be able to ask yourselves the question, and to refer to terms that I have used in the past, whether wisely or unwisely, namely the two essen­ tial terms of an altogether major division in the signifying approach to any reality whatsoever in a subject, metaphor and metonymy. This is very much a case where this distinction is to be applied, at least giving vent to so many question marks. In any intersubjective situation such as it becomes established between child and mother, we will have, as it were, a preliminary question to ask ourselves. It will be preliminary, and probably it will be settled only at the end. In this function of substitution, what ultimately forms an image, as a way of expressing it, doesn’t mean a thing. It’s easy to say substitution. But try substituting a pebble for a hunk of bread when you put it in an elephant’s trunk. He won’t take it with quite the uniform tone you might suppose. It’s not about substitution. It’s about what this signifying substitution signifies. To spell it right out, it’s a matter of finding out, in relation to the phallus that is the mother’s object of desire, what the function of the child is for her. It’s clear that if the child is the metaphor of her love for the father, this is not quite the same thing as being the metonymy of her desire for the phallus, which she does not have and never will have. Which is it in this case? Everything in the mother’s conduct with little Hans, whom she literally drags around with her everywhere, from the WC to her bed, clearly indicates that the child is an abso­ lutely indispensable appendage for her. Hans’s mother, of whom Freud is very fond, to whom Freud had previously been o f assis­ tance, this excellent and devoted mother, sehr besorgte, and pretty to boot, still finds the wherewithal to take off her knickers in front of her child. This is a very peculiar dimension. If there is one thing that illustrates very well what I just said about the essential dimension that lies behind the veil, then the observation on little Hans is it. Though there are many others too. Can’t you see that in this case the child is the metonymy of the phallus for the mother?

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This doesn’t mean that she has greater consideration for the child’s phallus. In truth, she shows very well - this person who is so liberal in matters of childrearing and what may be spoken of - when it comes to deeds and to laying a finger on the little thingummy that the child whips out for her, she is seized by a sudden dread - Das eine Schweinerei ist. After all, this is how it is in this kind of live dynamic. We need to try to give another lick of polish to this observation on little Hans to restore its shine. So, you see, saying that the child is taken as a metonymy of the mother’s desire for the phallus does not mean that he is taken up in the metonymy as a phallophore, but on the contrary that he is metonymic as a totality. This is where the drama takes shape. Everything would be all well and good for him were it a matter of his Wiwimacher, but it’s not. It’s him as a whole that’s in question, and this is why the difference starts to become very seriously apparent when the real Wiwimacher comes into play. This real Wiwimacher becomes an object of satisfaction for Hans, and this is when what is called anxiety starts to be created. What is called anxiety hinges on the fact that he is able to gauge the full difference that lies between what he is loved for and what he is able to give. Given the child’s originary position in relation to the mother, what can he do? He is there to be an object of pleasure. Therefore, he is in a relationship that is fundamentally an imagined one. The best thing that can happen to him is to come out of this purely passive state. This primordial passivation is what is essential, and if we fail to see that this is where it is inserted, we understand nothing of the Wolf Man case study. Beyond this imaginary capture in which he has become ensnared on account of being his mother’s object, and in which he gradually becomes aware of what he truly is, the best thing he can do is to imagine himself such as he is imagined, to pass over, so to speak, to the middle road. Once he starts also to exist as real, he doesn’t have a great deal of choice. He can quite certainly imagine himself to be fundamentally other and rejected, something other than what is desired and as such outside the imaginary field where hitherto his mother could derive satisfaction from the place he occupied. Freud underscores this. What is at issue is something that super­ venes. An anxiety. But anxiety over what? We have traces of it. There is a dream from which he wakes up in tears because his mother was going to leave. On another occasion he says to his father Suppose you were to go away. It’s about separation. We can comple­ ment these terms with numerous further details. His anxieties arise when he is separated from his mother and when he is with someone else. What is quite certain is that the anxieties are the first to appear,

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and Freud underscores how the sense of anxiety is distinct from phobia. But what is a phobia? It’s not so easy to grasp. We are going to try now to ascertain what it is.

3 One can, of course, blithely skip forwards and say that the phobia is the representative element in this. Fine, but where does it get you? Why is it such a singular representation? What role does it play? Another trap consists in telling oneself that there is a finality and that the phobia must serve some purpose. Why, then, would it serve a purpose? Might there not also be things that serve no purpose? Why take it as settled in advance that the phobia serves a purpose? Maybe it serves precisely no purpose and everything would have come equally to pass had it not been there. Why have preconceived ideas about finality in this instance? We are going to try to find out what the function of the phobia is. What is the phobia in this instance? In other words, what is the par­ ticular structure of little Hans’s phobia? This will perhaps lead us to form some notions about what the general structure of a phobia is. Either way, at this stage I would like to point out how the differ­ ence between anxiety and phobia is altogether tangible here. I don’t know whether the phobia is as representative as all that, because as we are going to see, it’s rather hard to figure out what Hans is afraid of. He voices it in umpteen different ways, but an altogether singular residue remains. If you’ve read the observation, then you know that this horse, which is white, brown, black . .. and these colours are not devoid of a certain interest - poses a riddle that through to the end of the observation is never solved. It has to do with goodness knows what black stain that it has around its muzzle, lower than the bridge of the nose, which turns it into a pre­ historic animal. His father asks him, What do you mean? The piece o f iron they have in their mouths? Hans replies No. It doesn’t seem to be the harness either. And then when later Hans says it looks like a muzzle, for the last three days not a single horse has passed on which he could point out this 'muzzle’. Then finally, worn out, Hans says, Here comes a horse with something black on its mouth, and wants no more to do with it. What is most certain is that we never know what this black on the horse’s mouth is. A phobia is not, therefore, such a straightforward matter because it even includes these quasi-irreducible elements and so can scarcely be a representative. If there is one thing that gives a good sense of the negative hallucinatory element on which someone has recently

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expressed himself in one of those theoretical forays that periodically sprouts up in analysis, it’s this kind of blurriness, because ultimately this is what appears to be the clearest thing about this horse’s head. It is somewhat reminiscent of the horse’s head above Venus and Vulcan in Titian’s painting.2 One thing, however, is quite certain, and this is the radical dif­ ference between the two feelings, the sense of fear and the sense of anxiety that is created when all of a sudden the child feels himself to be something that in one fell swoop can be completely side-lined. Of course, the little sister prepares the question to the highest degree. The crisis opens against a backdrop that reaches much deeper, when the ground falls away from under his feet upon his realisation that he can no longer fulfil his erstwhile function in any way whatsoever. He can no longer be anything. Quite simply, he is nothing more than something that looks like it is something, but at the same time is nothing, and which is called a metonymy. I’m using a term which we have already seen. Metonymy is the procedure of realist novels. If a realist novel can hold our interest it’s not because of all the minor realistic glimmer that is put before us, because ultimately such a novel only ever amounts to a piling up of snapshots. If these snapshots hold our interest it’s precisely because, behind it, they always aim at something else. They take aim exactly at what looks to be most contrary, that is to say, everything that is missing. This means that, far beyond these many details, beyond the entirety of scintillating pebbles laid out for us, there is something that tethers us. The more metonymic the novel is, the more it aims at this beyond-zone. So, our dear little Hans suddenly finds himself precipitated, or at the very least precipitable, through his metonymic function. To say this word in a way that is more vivid than theoretical, he imagines himself as a nothingness. What happens once the phobia has entered the fray of his exist­ ence? One thing in any case is certain - faced with the anxiety-horses, the Angstpferde, it’s not anxiety that he feels, it’s fear. He is afraid that something real will happen. He tells us that there are two things that make him afraid - that the horses might bite, and that they might fall. The difference between anxiety and phobia is quite liter­ ally that anxiety is without object. Here, I’m merely repeating what Freud said, because he spelt it out perfectly. What is at stake in the phobia is not at all anxiety, in spite of the tonality that Hans here lends to the horses. The horses arise from anxiety, but what they bring is fear. In a certain sense, fear always bears on something real that can be voiced and named. These horses can bite, and they can fall.

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They have a good many further properties that can harbour within them the trace of the anxiety that is at issue, and perhaps indeed there is some relation between them. We will be taking a look at the relations between this blurriness, this kind of black stain, and something that appears beneath, which shines through from behind the blackness that starts to blur, but in the lived experience of anxiety. Little Hans is afraid, but afraid of what? It’s not a fear of one horse, but of horses, such that from this moment forth the world seems to be punctuated by a whole series of points of danger, points of alarm, which in a certain sense restructure it. In keeping with the indication from Freud, who on one page poses himself questions about the function of phobia and advises us to refer to other cases to settle these questions, let’s not forget that one of the most widespread and typical forms of phobia is agoraphobia. Afterwards we will be seeing what constitutes a phobia, whether is it a morbid entity or a syndrome, but agoraphobia is surely something that in itself brings its own value. Here we have the world punctu­ ated by alarm signals which sketch out a field, a domain or an area. If we have to try absolutely to indicate in which direction takes shape not the function, because we mustn’t rush here, but rather the sense, of the phobia, it’s that it introduces a structure into the child’s world. In a certain sense it brings to the fore the function of an interior and an exterior. Until then the child was, all in all, in his mother’s interior. He has now been rejected from it, or has imagined himself to be rejected from it, into anxiety. And so here he is, trying, with the aid of the phobia, to establish a new order of interior and exterior. A series of thresholds starts to bring structure to the world. It’s not so easy. I’m sure there would be a great deal to learn here from a study of certain elements that have been furnished by ethnography, from the way spaces are constructed in a village. In primitive civilisations, villages are not built just any old how. There are fields that have been cleared and others that have been left untouched, and in the midst of all this there are further limits that signify things that are truly fundamental with respect to the bearings at the disposal of these people who stand in greater or lesser proxim­ ity to their extrication from Nature. There would be much to learn from this and perhaps in time I shall say a word or two about it. Either way, there is a threshold, and there is also something that presents as an image of what protects the threshold, the Schutzbau or the Vorbau, the defensive outpost or the barrier, these being the terms with which Freud expressly articulates phobia. It’s something that is erected further out towards the point of anxiety. Already, something is becoming apparent to us here. It is starting to hold together and to show us its function. I simply want to avoid

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going too quickly, and I ask you not to stick at this level. One gener­ ally contents oneself with little. And after all, to have transformed anxiety into fear is a nice idea. Fear is apparently more reassuring than anxiety. But nor is this certain. Today I simply want to punctuate how we absolutely cannot mark out fear as a primary element, a primordial element, in the construction of the ego, contrary to what has been voiced in the most categorical manner, as the base of his entire doctrine, by someone whom I’m not about to name and who occupies a leader­ ship position in a certain school that is more or less rightfully termed Parisian. On no account can fear be regarded as a primitive element, as a final element, in the structure of neurosis. We can see that fear intervenes in neurotic conflict as an element that defends, from a point that is posted further out, against something that is utterly other and which of its very nature is without object, namely anxiety. Phobia is precisely what allows us to articulate this. I shall stop for today on this Vorbau of my disquisition, having led you to the precise point at which the question of phobia is posed, in relation to what it is led to respond to. I ask you to take the word respond in the most profound sense of the term. We shall try next time to see where the ensuing sequence of items can lead us. 20 March 1957

XV W H A T M Y T H IS F O R

Functions and structure of myth Orgasm and the Krawall The fantasy of the two giraffes Fixing in | Boring a hole | Screwing and unscrewing Symbolic transposition of the imaginary Let’s resume our walk through the observation on little Hans. Walking is not a bad way of recognising that one is within a considered space. For me, however, it’s a matter of teaching you to imagine the topography of a field without falling back onto the routes that have already criss-crossed it. It’s a matter of perceiving when, for example, you might have come back to your starting point without realising, or else to reflect, when you are in a place as perfectly independent and familiar to you as your bathroom, that were you to drill through the wall you would be on the first floor of the neighbouring bookshop. This is not something that will often pop into your minds. I would even say that it’s a matter of perceiv­ ing, when you take your bath each day, that work is going on in the bookshop next door and that this is an arm’s length away. And then they say, He’s one hell o f a metaphysician, this Lacan fellow! Yet this is more or less what it’s about. It’s about enabling you to spot certain connections and, by the same stroke, making you perceive the elements of the overall plan such that you will not be reduced to what I would call, quite intentionally, the ceremonial, the protocol, of charted itineraries.

1 So, here we are with little Hans, having reached the point at which, in a situation where everything had been moving along fairly well,

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anxiety and phobia arise. I remind you that I distinguished one from the other and in this respect I was in strict conformity with what you can find in Freud’s text. It’s about topography, and not some random walk, though indeed it’s by taking you on an unusual walk that I hope to represent this topography for you. Unusual as it is, this walk has already been paced out. It was paced out in the observation on little Hans. I simply want to show you the kinds of things that the first imbe­ cile who comes along could find here - except a psychoanalyst, because an analyst is not the first imbecile who comes along. agent

lack o f object

object

castration real father

symbolic indebtedness

phallus

frustration

sym bolic sym bolic m other father

imaginary detriment

real breast

privation im aginary father

real hole

sym bolic object

The symbolic mother becomes real precisely in so far as she mani­ fests herself in her refusing of love. The object of satisfaction itself, the breast, becomes symbolic of frustration, the refusing of the love object. The real hole of privation is this thing that does not exist. The real being full by its very nature, one has to introduce a symbolic object into it in order to make a real hole. What’s at stake? We have arrived at a point in the so-called preoedipal process that can be defined as follows. To turn himself into an object of love for this mother, who for him is the most important thing there is and who is even what essentially carries import, the child is progressively led to realise that he must shift into a thirdparty position. He must slide in, squeeze himself in, somewhere between his mother’s desire, which he learns to experience, and the imaginary object that is the phallus. We have to posit this because it’s the most straightforward rep­ resentation that allows us to synthesise a whole series of accidental happenings that are inconceivable unless they are taken as the product of this structure of the imaginary and symbolic relationship during the preoedipal period. As I told you, this is strictly spelt out in the chapter from the Three Essays on Sexuality entitled Die infantile

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Sexualforschung, that is to say, The Sexual Researches o f Childhood or Infantile Theories on Sexuality. There you will find it formulated that what are broadly called perversions are to be conceived of and explained in relation to the childhood theory of the phallic mother and the necessity of passing through the castration complex. One can still hear people maintaining that perversion is some­ thing fundamentally instinctual, an underlying trend,1 something like a direct cutting of corners in the direction of the satisfaction that constitutes its true density and balance. They think that in this way they are interpreting Freud’s notion that perversion is neurosis in negative, as though perversion were in itself the satisfaction that is repressed in neurosis, as though the latter were the same thing in positive. It’s actually the exact opposite, because the negative of a negation is on no account necessarily its positive, as is demonstrated by the fact that Freud roundly affirms that perversion is structured in relation to everything that takes on an order around the absence and presence of the phallus. Perversion always bears some relation, even if only on the horizon, to the castration complex in its own right. In consequence it stands - as it were from the genetic point of view - on the same level as neurosis. It is structured in such a way as to be its negative or, more exactly perhaps, its inverse, but it is just as structured as neurosis. It is structured by the same dialectic, to employ a vocabulary that is closer to the one I use here. The importance that Freud ascribed at a very early date to the notion of childhood sexual theories and their role in the child’s developing economy means that it is incontestably worthwhile us tarrying with this, though its full opening-up, in the form of the chapter I just mentioned, was only added to the Three Essays long after its first edition, in 1915 I believe. One shortcoming of the German edition is that it doesn’t include any mention of the date on which each chapter was integrated into the book’s composition. The importance of childhood theories of sexuality in libidinal development ought in itself to instruct a psychoanalyst to maintain some sense of proportion when it comes to the sweeping notion of intellectualisation which has been wielded here, there and everywhere with its somewhat pejorative tone. I mean that it ought to teach us to realise that something which on first blush might present as being situated in the intellectual domain clearly holds an importance that the simple and sweeping opposition between the intellectual and the affective could never account for. What are called childhood theories, or the child’s activity of research concerning sexual reality, correspond to a necessity that is quite different from what we label - unduly, but it has to be recognised as a kind of diffuse notion - as the superstructural character of intellectual activity which is more

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or less implicitly admitted in what might be termed the font o f belief with which common consciousness aligns. Something quite different is at issue in this activity. It concerns something that lies, if this term may also be employed, in the body as a whole, where its common sense runs much deeper. It lies much deeper because it envelops all of the subject’s activity and motivates what might equally be called the affective themes, which means that it steers the subject’s affects or affections along the lines of key images. All in all, it is correlative to a whole series of things carried out in the widest sense, things which become manifest in actions that are fully reducible to utilitarian ends. Let’s classify this full set of actions or activities under a term that is perhaps not the best, nor the most encompassing, but which I select for its expressive value when I qualify such activities as ceremoniales [in the sense of protocolic], and not only as ceremonielles. I’m referring to the entirety of everything that can be included within this register in both individual and collective life, and you know that there is not a single example of a human activ­ ity that supresses them. Even civilisations with a firm utilitarian and functional bent peculiarly see these ceremonial activities being reproduced in the most unexpected corners. There has to be some reason behind this. To spell it right out, what we must refer to in order to bring into focus the exact value of what are called childhood theories o f sexuality, and indeed the full order of the child’s activities which are structured around them, is the notion of myth. There’s no need to be a mental giant, I mean, to have gone into this notion of myth in detail, though this nevertheless is my inten­ tion here. I’m going to try to do so carefully, stage by stage, because it also strikes me as necessary to accentuate further the continuity between our field and the referential elements to which I believe they need to be linked. Not that I claim on any account, as I once was told, to be offering you a general metaphysics, nor to be covering the whole field of reality, but simply to be speaking to you about our reality and the realities that border on it, those that are most immediately connected to it. This is precisely so as not to fall into an unwarranted world-system, into a projection that is quite insuf­ ficient and impoverished yet very often performed when our domain is projected into a whole series of realms and layered fields of reality on the pretext that they might have something to do with what we do, since the macro can always be found in the micro. No such projection could ever exhaust reality, or even the sum of human problems. On the other hand it would be wrong to isolate our field completely and to refuse to see what within it is, not analogous to, but directly in connection with, I mean directly geared into, a

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reality that is accessible to us through other disciplines and other human sciences. This has to be done if we are properly to situate our domain and even, simply, to find our bearings within it. This is how we are now coming quite naturally to the notion of childhood theories, because for as long as I’ve been speaking to you about Hans you’ve been able to note that this observation is a labyrinth and even, on first approach, a muddle, precisely due to the place held by a whole series of Hans’s flights of fancy. Some of these flights of fancy are very rich and give the impression of a prolifera­ tion, a wealth, which cannot fail to strike you as falling within this class of theoretical elaborations that plays such a major role. We are going to approach myth simply as though it were a primary fact. What is called myth, whether it’s religious or folkloric, at which­ ever stage of its passing down it might be taken, is something that presents as a sort of narrative. Many different things may be said about this narrative and various structural aspects may be taken up. For example, it may be said to be atemporal. One might also try to define its structure with respect to the sites it defines. One can take it in its literary form, which quite strikingly shares some kinship with poetic creation while at the same time being very distinct from it, in the sense that myth is linked to certain constants that are absolutely not submitted to subjective invention. It is also something that would allow us at least to indicate the problems it poses. I think that on the whole we can say that myth has a Active character but that in itself this fiction harbours a stability which means that it is scarcely malleable to any modification that might be brought to it. Or, more specifically, it entails that any modifica­ tion implies, ipso facto, another modification, and this invariably suggests the notion of a structure. On the other hand, this fiction is but a singular relation to something that is always implied behind it, and which even carries within it its formally indicated message, to wit, a singular relation to truth. This is also something that cannot be detached from myth. Somewhere in the Seminaire sur ‘La lettre volee’, I wrote, in con­ nection with the fact that I was analysing a work of fiction, that at least in a certain sense this operation was quite legitimate because in any correctly structured fiction one can lay one’s finger on the structure that in truth itself may be designated as the same as that of fiction. The structural necessity brought forth by any expression of truth is precisely a structure that is the same as that of fiction. Truth has a structure, so to speak, of fiction. These truths, or this truth, this aim of myth, presents with a character that is still utterly striking, a character that presents first

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and foremost as inexhaustible. I mean that it partakes of what may be called - to employ, briefly, an old term - the character of a schema, in the Kantian sense. It’s much closer to structure than to any content, and can be found again, re-applied, in the most material sense of the word, across all sorts of data, with the kind of ambiguous efficacy that typifies all myth. That which is structured, that which is most adequate to this kind of cast furnished by the category of myth, is a certain type of truth, and, to restrict ourselves to our field and our experience, we cannot fail to see that what is at issue here is a relationship of man - but with what? We are not about to give an immediate reply to this with what?, and when we do, it will be neither randomly nor lightly. Were we to reply with Nature, this would, I think, quickly leave us dissatis­ fied, in view of the remarks I’ve made on the fact that Nature, such as it presents to man, such as it coapts to him, is always deeply denatured. Were we to reply with Being, we would certainly not be inexact, but perhaps we would be going a little too far and ending up in philosophy, indeed the most recent philosophy of our friend Heidegger, as pertinent as this reference is. We surely have refer­ ences closer at hand and terms that have been more fully articulated, which we can immediately broach in our experience. We need only perceive that this has to do with themes of life and death, of existence and non-existence, and especially of birth, that is, the appearance of what does not yet exist. On the one hand, this is linked in particular to the existence of the subject himself and to the horizons that his experience brings him. On the other, this is linked to the fact that he is the subject of a sex, and most especially his own, his natural sex. Our experience shows us that the mythical activity is limited to these themes, and it is deployed in the child. Therefore, we can see here, and with ease, that in its content and its aim, this mythical activity is at once in agreement yet not completely in coincidence with what we find under the specific term of myth in ethnographic exploration. In their presentation as fiction, myths always aim to a greater or lesser extent not at man’s individual origin but at his origin as a species - the creation of man, the genesis of his fundamental nurturing relationships, the invention of the so-called major human resources such as fire, agriculture, animal domestication, and so on. This is also the fiction that explains how man came to be in relation with something that is constantly brought into question in myths, namely a secret force which may be maleficent or beneficent but which is essentially typified by its sacred character. This sacred might is variously designated in the mythical narra­ tives, but it certainly allows us to situate it in a manifest identity with

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man’s relationship to the power of signification and most especially to its power as a signifying instrument. This power is what means that man introduces into Nature something that, on account of dis­ tancing him, brings him closer to the universe. It makes him capable of introducing into the natural realm not only his own needs and factors of transformation submitted to these needs, but something that certainly goes beyond this, the notion of a profound identity, which is never completely grasped nor even grasped in anything but a roundabout way, between the power that he possesses, to wield or to be wielded on account of being included in a signifier, and the power that he possesses to incarnate the agency of this signifier in a series of interventions that, at the start, are not posited as gratui­ tous activities, as the pure and simple introduction of the signifying instrument into the chain of natural things. These myths, whose relation of contiguity with the mythical crea­ tion of childhood is indicated well enough by the comparisons I have just set out, pose us the problem of something that has already been going on for some time now, namely the investigation of myths or, if you prefer, scientific or comparative mythology. This has steadily developed into a method of formalisation which is already indicat­ ing that a certain step forward has been taken. The fruitful character of this formalisation further indicates that this is the direction that ought to be pursued, rather than turning to the method of analogies and the various culturalist or naturalist references that have thus far been employed in the analysis of myths. This formalisation extracts from myths what might be called ele­ ments or units which at their own level possess the character of a structural functioning that is comparable, without for all that being identical, to the one that in the study of linguistics extracts elabora­ tions of various modern taxemic elements. It has been possible to build and to put into effective practice an isolation of elements that we may define as the units of mythical construction, which have been labelled mythemes? By pursuing the experiment through a series of myths that have been put to this test of decomposition so as to see how their re­ composition functions, a surprising unity has been noted between myths that in appearance stand very far apart, on the condition that analogies between the face-value of the different myths are set aside. For example, saying that an act of incest and a murder are two equivalent things is not something that would come to mind on first approach, but the comparison of two myths, or two stages of a single myth, can bring such a thing to light. Consider for instance what happens to a myth across two different generations. By posit­ ing a constellation that looks altogether comparable to the little

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cube I drew on the blackboard last week, and by arranging at the different vertices of this construction the terms father and mother, a mother who is unknown to the father-subject, you will also find, in this first generation, incest. When you move on to the following generation, you will find point by point, and in keeping with laws of which the sole interest is that they can offer a strict and unambigu­ ous formalisation, the overlapping notion of twin brothers, which is in some sense the predicted transformation of the father-mother couple from the first generation. Thus you can see the murder of Polynices taking up its place, through this operation of transforma­ tion, in the stead of the incest. This operation is already regulated by a certain number of structural hypotheses about how myth ought to be treated. So, this gives us an idea of the weight, the presence, and the instance of the signifier as such, its specific impact. What is isolated here is always in some sense what is most hidden, because it has to do with something that in itself signifies nothing but which assuredly bears the full order of significations. If something of this nature exists, nowhere is this more tangible than in myth. This necessary preamble indicates the angle from which I think we should approach, in order to put them to this test, the abundance of themes that we meet in the observation on little Hans and which on first blush look, quite frankly, as though they have been made up.

2 How genuine are Hans’s imaginative themes? Freud himself men­ tions the possibility that they might have been suggested to him by comments that could be supposed of an interlocutor. But is the term suggestion to be taken in its simplest sense? Is it to be taken as something that is voiced by one subject then to pass into another subject in the state of an admissible truth, at the very least in a form that is accepted with a certain character of belief, like a garment that clothes the reality that is being received? The very term suggestion implies some doubt as to how genuine the construction in question is. It’s a construction that is received by the subject, and of course there is no notion that can more easily be seen - why not? - as a legitimate critical element. And who more than us could imagine that there is something here that warrants fuller consideration still? We maintain that the cultural elements of the symbolic organisation of the world are elements that, by their very nature, belong to no one and so have to be received and learnt. Isn’t this something that furnishes the incontestable fundament to this notion of suggestion?

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What is equally striking is that not only does this suggestion exist in the case of little Hans, but we are able to see it unfolding, out in the open. The father’s way of questioning Hans is tantamount to a continual and sometimes insistent inquisition, even bearing the signature of a steering of the child’s responses. As Freud under­ scores several times, the father certainly intervenes in a way that is rough, coarse and even downright heavy-handed. Furthermore, he shows all kinds of misunderstanding in his reception of his son’s responses, which he scrambles to understand, but all too hastily. This is also underscored by Freud. What is likewise utterly explicit when reading the observation is that something occurs that is far from independent of this paternal interference, with all its defaults which are pointed out and designated by Freud. One can see Hans’s deportment, and his constructions too, responding in the most palpable manner to one or another of his father’s interventions. One can even see this taking on its own momentum from a certain point forth, and the phobia assumes a character of acceleration and hyper-productivity that is quite tangible. Of course, it is of the utmost interest to see what these different moments of Hans’s mythical production correspond to. There is something else that is quite manifest, which is the fact that this production, while having a character that is implicitly made-up, in the sense of gratuitously invented, is playful. After a recent patient presentation that I conducted, someone pointed out the imaginative character of some of the patient’s constructions, which seemed to him to indicate an hysterical note of suggestion, of suggested effect in what the patient produced, when in fact it was easy to see that it was not that at all. Even though it was provoked or stimulated by a question, the patient’s pre-delusional productivity manifested itself with its own stamp and force of proliferation, in strict accordance with its own structures. This is not at all the same impression one has with Hans. At no point whatsoever does one have the impression of a delusional production. I would further say that one has the distinct impression of a playful production. It’s not only about play, yet it’s quite clear that everything is so playful that even Hans himself is in something of a pickle when it comes to bringing the whole thing to a close and sustaining a single path to which he can commit, after having come out with goodness knows what magnificent tall story verging on farce, for example the story of the stork’s intervention in the birth of his little sister Hanna. He is quite capable of stating, I say, what I ’m telling you isn’t a bit true. Nevertheless, it still remains that what is apparent in this very game is not so much constant terms but rather a certain configuration. And while this configuration is

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sometimes fugitive, at other moments it can be grasped in a striking fashion. This is what I wanted to introduce, this sort of structural necessity that presides over not only the construction of each of what may be called, with caution, Hans’s little myths, but also their furtherance and transformation. I would especially like to draw your atten­ tion to the fact that what is important is not always necessarily their content. By content I mean the revival, which is arranged to a greater or lesser extent, of previous states of the soul, the anal complex for example. The anal complex will be exhausted in everything that Hans allows himself to demarcate with respect to the lumf. Its appearance was perfectly unexpected for the father, and Freud tells us that he entirely concealed from Hans’s father my expectation that there would turn out to be some such connection. Freud names the two themes that arise in the course of Hans’s probing by his father - the anal complex3 and, no more no less, the castration complex. Let’s not forget that in the analytic theory of the time, around 1906-1908, the castration complex was already a kind of crucial key for Freud but had not yet been brought into the full light of day that would reveal it as the central key. Far from it. It was one small key, lying around among others, that almost seemed to be nothing at all. What Freud ultimately means here is that the father was in no respect aware of something that is related to the essential relation that makes the castration complex the major peg through which passes both the establishment and the resolution of the constella­ tion, the ascendant and descendent phases of the Oedipus complex. So, we can see little Hans reacting. He reacts all along to the interfer­ ence of the real father, to being put in the hothouse under the crossfire of the father’s interrogation to which he is exposed for a certain while, and which, when the observation is taken as a whole, proves to have been favourable to a veritable development in little Hans, even to a veritable culture. This is something that, given its richness, allows us to think that the phobia would not have borne such extensions and echoes without the paternal intervention, nor would it have borne in its centre this development and this richness, nor even perhaps a certain insistence that at one stage is so prevalent. This is admitted by Freud, and I would even say that he takes it on board when he admits that there might have been a momentary flaring-up, a precipitation, an intensification of the phobia under the father’s action. These are just some basic truths, but they still needed to be said. Let’s pick things up from the point we’ve come to. So as not to leave you completely at a loss before this wealth of elements, I’m going to indicate the general scheme of what we will be trying to understand

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in the phenomenon of the analysis of Hans, its point of departure and its results. I think that with this scheme these elements will fall into order for us in a satisfactory way. So, Hans is in a certain relation with his mother, into which is mixed his direct need for his mother’s love and something that we have called the game of the intersubjective lure. It is enough to read the beginning of the observation to see that this luring game is mani­ fest in the clearest fashion in the child’s remarks, and this indicates that for him his mother must have a phallus. This doesn’t mean, however, that this phallus is something real for him. On the con­ trary, in his remarks there is a constant eruption of the ambiguity that is made apparent by this relation within a playful perspective. In the end the child is fully aware of something, and at the very least indicates as much when he says, I was only just thinking. . ., and then breaks off. What he was thinking was, Does she have it or not? And he asks her, and he gets her to say - and who knows whether or to what extent the reply was satisfactory - that she has a Wiwimacher. This is the word in the observation. The French rendering, fait-pipi, does not fully translate this macher. It’s a maker of wee, with the suggestion of a worker, an agent, as in Uhrmacher. A masculine gender is implied here, which can be found in other words that carry the prefix Wiwi.4 The child is in this intimacy, this connivance of the imaginary game with his mother, when suddenly he finds himself in a situation where, from one angle or another, a decompensation arises, because something happens that manifests itself through an anxiety that touches precisely on these relations with his mother. Last time, we tried to see what this anxiety was responding to. We said that it was linked to various real elements that complicate the situation in some way. These real elements are not univocal. Among the mother’s objects there are real elements that are new, for instance the birth of the little sister with all the reactions that this leads to in Hans, but these reactions do not come about immediately. It’s only after fifteen months that the phobia breaks out. There is also the interference of the real penis, but this had also been there for a while before the complications arose. At least a year had gone by following the masturbation to which the child confessed thanks to the good relations that exist on the plane of speech between him and his parents. We also noted, last time, whence these elements of decompensa­ tion can come into play. From one angle, Hans is excluded. He falls out of the situation. He is ejected by the little sister. From another angle, something else is at stake. This is the interference of the phallus in a different

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form. I’m speaking about the masturbation. It’s the same object, but it presents in an altogether different form. Let’s say it right out. It has to do with the integration of sensations linked at the very least to turgescence and very possibly to something that we can go so far as to qualify as orgasm. Of course, it’s not a matter of ejaculation. There is a question and a problem in this regard, which Freud doesn’t resolve. At this stage he hasn’t amassed enough observations to broach this difficult problem of orgasm in childhood masturbation. I’m simply pointing out to you that this lies on the horizon of our questioning. It’s peculiar that Freud doesn’t ask himself the question of whether the row, the racket, the Krawall, which is one of the dreads that the child feels when faced with the horse, might not bear some relation with orgasm, and even an orgasm that would not be the child’s own. It might be related to some scene he perceived between the parents, for example. Freud readily accepts his parents’ assertion that the child could not have glimpsed anything of the sort. This is a small riddle, and we shall have the absolutely certain solution to it. All of our experience indicates to us that in children’s pasts, in their lived experience and their development, there is something that is very hard to integrate yet which is clearly manifested. I’ve been insisting for a long time now - I believe it’s in my medical thesis or an almost coeval text - on the ravaging character, most especially for paranoiacs, of the first climactic, orgasmic sensation. Why for paranoiacs? We shall try to answer this en route, but we assuredly find in a very constant way such testimony of a character of harrowing invasion, of destabilising upsurge, that this experience presents for certain subjects. This is enough to indicate for us, here at this turn in the path, that the fact that the real penis is something new must play a role as an element that is integrated with difficulty. None the less, given that this had already been going on for some time, it’s not what presents at the forefront with respect to the out­ break of anxiety. What is it, in the end, that causes anxiety to arise at this moment, and only at this moment? The question plainly remains.

3 Here then is our little Hans, who has now arrived at the moment of the apparition of the phobia. It wasn’t Freud, but rather and without doubt - as the ensuing part of the text of the observation shows - the father who is cor­ responding with Freud who promptly forms the notion that there is

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something going on here that is linked to a tension with the mother. As to what triggers the phobia in particular, he states in the very first lines of his letter to Freud, with clarity that lends its full bearing to this first communication in the case history proper, that he is not able to specify the actual exciting cause. Whereupon he begins his description of the phobia. What is it? Let’s leave to one side the appearance of the phobia, and reflect. We have attributed all this importance to the mother and to the child’s imaginary symbolic relation with her. We have been saying that for the child the mother presents with the requirement of what she lacks, of this phallus that she doesn’t have. We have said that this phallus is imaginary. For whom is it imaginary? It is imaginary for the child. Why have we been speaking about it like this? Well, because Freud told us that this always plays a role for mothers. Why so? Well, you will tell me, it’s because he discovered this. But let’s not forget that if he discovered it, it’s because it’s true. So, if it’s true, why is it true? It’s a matter of finding out in what sense it is true, because ana­ lysts, and especially analysts of the feminine sex, regularly raise the objection that it’s not so clear why women should be given over more than the rest to desiring precisely what they don’t have, or to believing themselves endowed with it. Well, it’s precisely for reasons that belong - let’s limit ourselves to this - to the order of the existence of the signifier and its specific insistence. It’s because the phallus has a symbolic value in the signifying system and is thereby retransmitted through each and every text of inter-human discourse in such a way that it imposes itself among other images, and in a supervalent way, on woman’s desire. Isn’t the problem, precisely at this turn in the path, at this moment of decompensation, that the child should be taking this step that is literally an insuperable hurdle for him on his own? What is this step? Hitherto, he was playing with the phallus desired by his mother, with the phallus that for him became an element of his mother’s desire, and so this was something he had to pass through in order to captivate his mother. This phallus was an imaginary element. What is at stake now is for him to manage to do something that in itself is insurmountable, namely to realise that this imaginary element has a symbolic value. In other words, the system of the signifier, or the system of lan­ guage, to define it synchronically, or the system of discourse, to define it diachronically, is something that the child enters at the outset, but without entering the full breadth, the full scope, of the system, because he enters on an occasional basis in connection with

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his relations with his mother, who is there or who is not there. However, this first symbolic experience is something that is utterly insufficient. The full system of relations with the signifier cannot be constructed around the fact that something that one loves is there or is not there. We cannot content ourselves with just two terms. There have to be others. A minimum of terms is necessary for the symbolic to function. It’s a matter of knowing whether it’s three of them, whether it’s four of them - it’s certainly not three, because the Oedipus complex gives us three terms, yet certainly implies a fourth when it tells us that the child has to come through the complex. This means that there has to be someone who intervenes in this business, and this is the father. We’ve been told how the father intervenes. We’ve been told the whole little story about rivalry with the father and inhibited desire for the mother, but at the level we’ve reached, moving forward stepby-step, when we found ourselves in one particular situation we said that the father has a very curious presence. We shall see whether it’s simply this role of presence, in other words this degree of paternal shortcoming, that plays its role in the affair. Are we to fall back on these so-called real and concrete characteristics to which it is hard to bring a final word? For what does it mean that the real father falls more or less short in this instance? On this point, each commentator contents himself with an approximation. In the end, we are told, and we are not supposed to linger over it, in the name of goodness knows what logic that is purported to be our own, that things are even more than contradic­ tory. Well, we are going to see that, on the contrary, all of this falls into order in accordance with the fact that certain images have a symbolic functioning for the child. What does this mean? It means that those images which thus far reality has afforded Hans may well be abundant, present and profuse, but they lie in a state of manifest incoordination. For Hans, it’s a matter of aligning the world of the maternal relationship which, up to now had been functioning harmoniously for him - with this element of imaginary opening, or lack, which made him so amusing and even so exciting for his mother. At one point we are told that his mother becomes somewhat fretful when the father tells her to send the child out of the bed, and she protests, she plays around and starts to flirt. What has been translated as rather irritated is wohl gereizt, which here means to be all worked up. There’s a reason for Hans’s being there of course. We will learn why he is there in his mother’s bed. It’s one of the main axial lines of the observation. I’m going to illustrate what I’ve just said about these images which

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are first and foremost those that arise from the relationship with the mother, but which are also other images, new images, which the child confronts rather well. Since his little sister has been around, and since things have simply no longer been holding together in the world with his mother, two notions have arisen, which he knows how to face up to very well on the plane of reality - the notion of big and small, and the notion of what is there and what is not there, but which appears. So, there is a notion of growth and emergence, a notion of proportion and size. These are different phases in which big and small find themselves confronted with different antinomies, depending on the pairings. We can see him handling all this exceed­ ingly well. When he speaks about his little sister, he says, She’s not got any teeth yet, which implies that he has a very accurate notion of this emergence. Freud ironises on the side, because he has no need to think that the child is a metaphysician. What the child says is quite sane and normal. He very rapidly faces up to notions which are by no means self-evident. First, there is emergence, the appearance of something new. Second, the growth of the other - she will grow, or what she doesn’t have will grow. There’s no reason to be ironic about this. And then there is a third term, which seems to be the simplest but which is not given immediately - that of proportion or size. They will speak to the child about all this, and it seems that it’s still too soon for him to accept the explanations they will give him. The father will tell him that there are some who are without, that the feminine sex has no phallus. But this child - who is quite capable of handling these notions in a cogent manner because previously he handled them both deftly and pertinently - far from being content with these explanations, takes detours that on first approach look astounding, frightening, morbid, and which look to be part of the phobia. Where does this lead him? Well, to something that we shall see at the end, to the solution that he finds to the problem. But what is quite plain to see is that there are paths to this solution, paths that he must follow, and which, while they amount to this apprehen­ sion of forms that might be satisfactory for objectifying the real, nevertheless take a frightfully wide berth in relation to it. From one instant to the next we will meet this passing over, this raising up, from the imaginary to the symbolic, and you will see of course that this cannot be produced without something that is invariably a structuration in circles that are at least ternary. Next time I shall be showing you some consequences of this. For now, however, Fm going to choose an example for you. On Freud’s instruction - and you will be seeing next time what these instructions of Freud’s mean - the father hammers it home to

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Hans that women do not possess a phallus and so his searching for one is futile. That it should have been Freud who told the father to step in in this way is an enormity unto itself, but let’s leave that to one side. What happens after this intervention by the father? Hans reacts with the giraffe fantasy. In the middle of the night the child comes into his parents’ bedroom to take refuge. They ask him whether perhaps he is afraid, but it’s not clear whether he’s afraid or not. Either way, he falls back to sleep in his parents’ bed and they carry him into his room. The next morning they ask him what it was all about. It’s a fantasy. There are two giraffes.5 A big giraffe, and a little giraffe that is zerwutzelte, which is translated as crumpled but really means rolled into a ball. They ask him what he means and he shows them by taking a piece of paper and scrunching it up into a ball. How is this interpreted? Right away, the father has no doubt that of the two giraffes, the big one is the symbol of the father. The little one, which the child grabs and sits on top of while the big one cries out, is a reaction to the maternal phallus. The longing for the mother and her lack are named, perceived, acknowledged and pin­ pointed by the father, straightaway, as the signification of the little giraffe. Moreover, this doesn’t stop him, in a way that doesn’t strike him as contradictory, from reading the couple of the big and small giraffe as the father-mother couple. Naturally, all of this poses the most interesting problems. One can endlessly debate whether the big giraffe is the father, whether the little giraffe is the mother. Indeed, for the child it’s a matter of regaining possession of the mother, to the father’s greatest irritation and even anger. Yet this anger is never a real anger. The father never allows himself to slip into anger, and little Hans puts his finger on this - You ought to be cross, you should be jealous. Unfortunately, the father is never there to embody the god of Thunder. Let’s pause for a while on what is quite obvious and visible. A large giraffe and a small giraffe are of the same stuff. One is the double of the other. There is the aspect of big and small, but there is also the aspect of always being a giraffe. In other words, here we find some­ thing that is altogether analogous to what I was telling you last time when I said that the child was caught in the mother’s phallic desire as a metonymy. The child is the phallus in his totality. So, when it’s a matter of restoring to the mother her phallus, the child phallicises the mother as a whole entity in the form of a double. He produces a metonymy of the mother, which hitherto was merely the enigmatic phallus that is at once desired, credited and not credited, submerged in ambiguity, in belief, and in the term of reference, namely the luring

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game with the mother. All of this turns into something that starts to hang together as a metonymy. And as though it weren’t enough simply to show us the creation of the image and its introduction into a properly symbolic game, in order to explain to us that we’ve passed from the image to the symbol - this little giraffe about which no one in the observation comprehends anything, even though it’s so visible - Hans tells us that the little giraffe is so very much a symbol that it can be crumpled like a little giraffe on a sheet of paper. We have come to the point that the little giraffe is no more than a drawing. The passage from the imaginary to the symbolic can be no better translated than in these things that in appearance are absolutely contradictory and unthinkable, because you always turn what children say into something that from either side partakes of the domain of three dimensions when actually there is also something in the play of symbols that is in two dimensions. I pointed out to you in The Purloined Letter the moment when there remains nothing more of the letter than something that the queen holds in her hands, when there is nothing more to be done but to scrunch it up into a ball. This is the same gesture by which Hans strives to make his parents understand what is at issue in the little giraffe. At that moment, the little crumpled up giraffe signifies something that belongs utterly to the same realm as the drawing of the giraffe that had been made once before.

widdler

T he draw ing o f th e giraffe

Here it is, with its widdler, which was already on the path to the symbol. Whereas the drawing of the giraffe is freely sketched and each of the members is in its right place, the widdler that has been added to it is something that is truly graphic. It’s a linear stroke, and, to boot, so that we are fully aware of this, it is separate from the giraffe’s body.

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We are now entering the major play of the signifier, the game on which I gave a seminar, on The Purloined Letter, The little giraffe is a double of the mother, reduced to the support that is always neces­ sary as a vehicle for the signifier as such. It is something that can be held, crumpled and sat on. It’s such a loving testimony that, even so, it has something of a draft or a jotting about it. Observe if you will that this is not the only point at which we can grasp the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic. There are all kinds of other points. We can see a parallel gradually settling in between the Wolf Man case study and the observation on little Hans, which allows us to compare these paths along which the phobic image is approached. We have yet to determine the significa­ tion of this phobic image, but in order to determine it we need to turn to how it is approached in the child’s experience. In the case of the Wolf Man, it is plainly an image, but an image that is in a picture-book, and the child’s phobia is the wolf from the book. In the case of Hans, this is not absent either. The image comes from a page of his picture-book, the same page that shows the stork bring­ ing children to a chimney top, which Hans reads as a red box. As chance would have it, on this same page there is a picture of a horse being shod. Now, what are we going to find? Since we are looking for struc­ tures, what we are going to find throughout this observation are logical instruments being played out in a kind of turning game where each complements the other, forming a kind of circle through which little Hans seeks a solution, but a solution to what? In this series of elements or instruments that are called mother, child and phallus, the phallus is the new element that is no longer merely something that is played with, because it has become unruly. It has, if it may be expressed like this, its whims and fancies. It has its needs, its demands, and it wreaks havoc everywhere. It’s a matter of finding out how this is going to be settled, that is to say, how, at least within this original trio, things are going to be fixed down. We are going to see a triad emerging. First, my penis is angewachsen, fixed in. Here we have a form of guarantee. Unfortunately, no sooner had he been led to profess that his penis is fixed in than the phobia promptly flared up. It has to be believed, therefore, that there is also some danger to its being fixed in. Then we see another term appearing, the boring o f a hole. We can see it appearing in umpteen different forms when we know how to hunt it out in a way that conforms to the mythical analysis of themes. First of all, in a dream, Hans himself has a hole bored in him.6 Then he cuts a hole in a rubber doll. There are things that are

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bored with a hole from the inside out, and others from the outside in. Next, Hans comes across a third term, one which is particularly expressive because it cannot be deduced from natural forms. He introduces it as a logical instrument in his mythical passage, and it truly constitutes the third term at the apex of the triangle formed together with the fixing-in and with the gaping hole that leaves an open void. If the penis is not fixed in, then there is no longer anything. So, there is a mediation. It can be put there and put back, removed, and put back again. In short, it is detachable. What does the child use for this? He introduces the screw thread. The plumber or the fitter come by and do their unscrewing. Then the plumber comes by and unscrews his penis so that another, bigger one can be screwed in. The introduction of this logical instrument, of this theme bor­ rowed from his limited childhood experience, of this mythical element, will lead to a veritable resolution of the problem, which is that ultimately, through the notion that the phallus too is something that is taken up in the symbolic play, this phallus can be combined. It is fixed in when it has been put in, but it can be mobilised, it can circulate, and it is an element of mediation. It is from this moment forth that we find ourselves on the slope upon which the child will find his first respite in this frantic search for concihatory myths that are never satisfactory, and which will lead us right to the final term of the solution that he will find, the approximate solution of the Oedipus complex. This is to indicate for you the direction in which we need to analyse the terms and the child’s use of the terms. Another problem, a no lesser one, is taking shape, which is the problem of the signifierelements that he brings in by borrowing them from symbolised elements. The horse being shod is just one of the solutions, buried in the observation, to the problem of fixing-in the missing element and which as such can be represented by anything at all. Indeed, it is most readily represented by any object that in itself possesses sufficient hardness. We will see that ultimately the object that sym­ bolises the phallus in the simplest way in the mythical construction is the stone. We find it everywhere in the major scene from the true resolutive dialogue with his father. The role of the stone can also be found in the horseshoe that is hammered into the horse’s hoof. It also plays its role in the child’s auditory panic, in his fright when the horse is pawing with its hoof, to which something is attached that surely is not properly attached, for which the child will at last find the solution of the screw thread. In short, this progress from the imaginary to the symbolic

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constitutes an organising of the imaginary into myth, or at the very least into something that is on the way to a true mythical construc­ tion, that is to say, a collective mythical construction. This is why it reminds us in every respect of myth, to the point that in some cases it reminds us of the systems of kinship. Strictly speaking, it never reaches these kinship systems because it’s an individual construc­ tion, but it’s along this path that something has to be accomplished, that a certain minimum number of detours have to be taken in full, so that the efficacy of the relation between terms can be found. A model for this is presented in the skeleton or, if you prefer, in the metonymy, of my stories of a, p, y, 5. Up to a certain point, the child needs to have roamed something of this order, to have crossed this difficult passage that becomes a reality in a certain gap or shortcom­ ing, in order to find his rest and his harmony. Perhaps not every Oedipus complex needs to pass in this way through such mythical construction, but it’s absolutely certain that each Oedipus complex needs to make a reality of this same plenitude in symbolic transposi­ tion. It might take another shape that is more efficient, because it is in action, because the presence of the father would have symbolised the situation by his Being or by his non-Being. The crossing of something of this order is implicated in everything we find in the analysis of little Hans, and I hope to show you this in greater detail next time. 27 March 1957

XVI H O W M Y T H IS A N A L Y S E D

Offering to view and being surprised The Professor’s divine position Levi-Strauss’s method Naked in her chemise Capture in the permutative mechanism agent

lack

object

real father

symbolic castration

imaginary phallus

symbolic mother

imaginary frustration

real breast

imaginary father

real privation

symbolic phallus

What have we been trying to do this year? It’s been a matter of preserving the depth and the Freudian articulation of what is infamously claimed to be an object rela­ tion, which on examination, as they say, proves not only to be not so straightforward, but never to have been as straightforward as all that. Otherwise one wouldn’t really see why Freud’s oeuvre in its entirety gives such a prominent place to two dimensions in particular - which are perhaps still enigmatic, and now even more so - known as the castration complex and the phallic mother. This has led us over the course of our research to focus our examination on the case of little Hans, in which we are now trying to broach the application of our analysis to the disentangling of the subject’s fundamental relationships, to what in one analytic persuasion of relational types is called his environment.

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Yesterday evening we were able to see how this instrument leaves a lot to be desired. When we try to approach the relationship between child and mother as a fundamental reference and we tell ourselves that by sticking to the general terms of the dual relationship as fixed upon the phallic mother - as enveloped by the mother or not enveloped by the mother - we find ourselves faced with characteris­ tics that are perhaps like those we were told about yesterday at our Society’s meeting, characteristics that are excessively general when it comes to allowing us to circumscribe the points of impact - 1 mean, the efficient points of impact - that stand to be pointed out. Indeed, it is quite peculiar that categories as flexible as those that Freud introduced cannot, in this current use, be corroborated in a way that would be fairly commonplace and would enable us to differenti­ ate, at any given moment, within a single family of relationships, between a character trait and a symptom, for example. It’s not enough to establish an analogy between them. Since they occupy different functions, there must be a different structural relation. This is precisely what we have been trying to put a finger on in these eminent examples that are Freud’s case studies. As you know, over the years we have been giving a direction to the experience, a direction that we have been striving to make more specific, because there is no better way of defining a concept than to put it to use. We claim that without the distinction introduced by the three relations that are called symbolic, imaginary and real, these three essential and profoundly distinct modes of our experience, it is utterly impossible to orient oneself in the most everyday experience.

1 Last time, we arrived at the notion that little Hans, whom we are taking at a particular biographic moment, is marked by a certain type of relationship with his mother, the fundamental terms of which are defined by the manifest presence of the phallic object between him and his mother. This should come as no surprise to us after our previous analyses because we have already seen, through other case studies and then since the start of this academic year, the extent to which the term of the phallus as an imaginary object of the mother’s desire constitutes an absolutely crucial point in the mother-child relationship. We saw the extent to which, during a first stage, the child’s accession to his proper situation in the presence of his mother could be defined as the necessity of his recognising, and indeed his taking on board, the essential role of this imaginary object, the phallic object, which

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enters as an altogether primary compositional element in the pri­ mordial structuration of the mother-child relationship. No other observation can serve us better in this regard than the observation on little Hans. Indeed, everything begins with the game between Hans and his mother - seeing, not seeing, being on the lookout for where this phallus is. Let’s underscore how at this point we remain in total ambiguity regarding what might be called Hans’s belief. When the observation begins, we have a firm impression that for some time, from the real standpoint, he has formed, as people say, his own little idea. Ich hab’ gedacht, he says, I ’ve already been thinking about all this, which comes in response to the glib replies designed to cloud the issue, these being the kind of replies that his parents feel obliged to make whenever he poses a somewhat abrupt question. While the imaginary relationship might be taken for the reaction of seeing and being seen par excellence, I want to punctuate how it is important to uphold, already at this level, an intersubjective articu­ lation that is far from being a dual one, as you are about to see. If the relationship that is called scoptophilic, with its two opposing terms of showing and showing oneself, deserves to hold our attention for a moment, it’s because it is already distinct from the primordial imaginary relation, which is this kind of mode of capture in the field that we may call a reciprocal visual confrontation. I insisted on this at length, back when I was referring to the animal kingdom and these peculiar visual duels between pairs of animals in which one can see the animal, be it a lizard or a fish, caught in certain typical reactions which [in French] are called parades. Between the two adversaries or partners, everything is set up through an array of adnexa and signals, through apparatuses of visual capture that are present in each of the two, and then, solely on the plane of this visual confrontation, something in one of them gives way. The animal yields. One might say that the animal effaces itself, to use a term that conjoins in some way the motor withdrawal and the paling of colour. One animal turns away from the vision of another that has taken the dominant position. Experiments have shown that it’s not always a matter of something that occurs strictly to the benefit of the male against the female, because sometimes a manifestation of this type arises between two males. What occurs on this plane of visual communication prepares, and extends directly into, the act of seizure, indeed the act of oppression, of ascendency, which bends one of the subjects to the other, whereby the latter gains the upper hand. While certainly we have here the point of biological or ethological reference that allows us to provide the right accentuation to the

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imaginary relationship in its articulation with the whole process, not of parade, but of pariade, of courtship displays, I don’t want there to be any doubt about how one can see from the outset that everything that is being referred to this domain, which I have called the child’s divining of the mother’s imaginary world, is actually quite different from it. We can see that what is at issue here is not so much to see and to submit to being seized by what has been seen, but rather to seek to behold, to be on the lookout for, what is both there and not there. What is aimed at in this relationship is something that is there in so far as it remains veiled. In other words, what is at issue in this fundamental relationship is to sustain the lure so that something can be maintained that is literally there and not there. This culmi­ nates in the fundamental situation the crucial character of which we cannot fail to recognise in the imaginary drama such as it tends to be inserted into something else, which will give it a yet more elaborate meaning - the fact of surprise. Don’t overlook the ambiguous character of the French term sur­ prise, in the sense that it refers to the act of surprising, as in, I glimpsed him by surprise. There is the surprising of an enemy force, or else the surprising of Diana, which is indeed the surprise that culminates in the mythology that I’m not mentioning again just for the sake of it because the whole Acteonesque dimension that I allude to at the end of my text La Chosefreudienne is grounded on this essential moment. Yet there is another facet to this word. If there is a surprise, it’s not the astonishment that is felt. On the contrary, being surprised is something that happens through an unexpected discovery. Those of you who have been attending my patient presentations might have noticed in one of our transsexual patients the truly harrowing character that he depicted for us of the painful surprise he felt the day he saw his sister naked for the first time. So, at a higher degree than mere seeing and being seen, the imagi­ nary dialectic culminates in offering to view and being surprised by an unveiling. This dialectic is the only one that enables us to com­ prehend the fundamental sense of the act of seeing. We have seen how essential it is in the very genesis of everything that amounts to perversion, for example. Or, conversely, how it is only too clear in the technique of the exhibitionist act that the subject shows what he’s got precisely insomuch as the other party hasn’t got it. The exhibitionist strives, as he himself asserts to us in his declarations, to capture the other party, by means of this unveiling, in something that is far from merely holding her in a visual enthrallment, but which literally gives him the pleasure of revealing to the other party what she is supposed not to have, in order to plunge her at the same time into the shame of what she lacks.

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It is on this ground that each of Hans’s relationships with his mother is played out. We can also see that his mother fully partici­ pates in this and, with great indulgence, allows the child to partake of everything to do with her bodily functioning. However, when little Hans solicits her exhibitionist participation, she loses her mastery and issues rebuffs, severity, and even condemnations. It is on this basis that we see the imaginary object, which is already caught in this dialectic of veiling and unveiling, playing its fundamental role. This is the turn in the path at which we shall now take up little Hans. We shall ask ourselves why he produces his phobia after an interval of a whole year subsequent to the major occurrences that arose in his life, notably the birth of his little sister and his discovery that she too is an essential term in his relationship with his mother. We have already indicated that this phobia needs to be mapped into a process that cannot be conceived of unless we see that what is at stake for the child is profoundly to change his entire pattern of relationships with the world and to accept - which will ultimately be accepted at the end - what subjects sometimes require a whole lifetime to take on board, namely that in this privileged field of the world which is that of their fellow semblables, there are effectively subjects who are deprived, for real, of this infamous imaginary phallus. You would be wrong to think that it’s enough to have a scientific notion or even an articulable notion of this for it to be accepted among the subject’s beliefs as a whole. The deep complexity of men’s relationships with women emanates precisely from what we could call in our coarse language the resistance of male subjects effectively to admitting that female subjects are truly not endowed with something, and all the more so given that they are endowed with something else. This is what needs to be firmly articulated on the basis of facts and support from our analytic experience. It is literally on this level that a misrecognition takes root which is often maintained with a tenacity that influences the subject’s entire world-conception and especially his conception of social relationships. It is maintained beyond any limit in subjects who would never fail to deem them­ selves, and with a smile, to have roundly accepted reality as it is. The effacing of this fact from our experience shows the extent to which we have been incapable of benefiting from the most elementary terms of Freud’s teaching. Why this is so hard to accept surely needs to be accounted for, and this is perhaps what we shall manage to do by the end of this year’s path. For the time being, our point of departure is the observation on little Hans, so let’s articulate how the problem of a similar

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recognition is posed for him. Why does an acknowledgement such as this suddenly become necessary when hitherto what had been most important was precisely to play at this not being so? It is retroactively that we shall clarify why it was so important to play at this not being so. Let’s also look at how it is that, for this real privation to be somehow taken on board, it cannot not be operative, if it is to produce, results that are subjectively liveable for the subject, by which I mean that they enable him to integrate into the sexual dia­ lectic in such a way that it allows the human subject to live it and not merely to endure it. This necessitates the integration of a fact that is already given, the fact that the mother is already an adult and that she is taken up in the system of symbolic relationships in which inter-human sexual relationships have to be situated. The child himself has to take this path. He has to experience the Oedipal crisis and its essential moment of castration. This is what the example of little Hans illustrates, but perhaps neither completely nor perfectly. It is perhaps indeed in this incompleteness that we can find the hardest evidence of what I have indicated as the essential movement of the observation. This is a privileged case of analysis in that the transition from the imaginary dialectic can be seen being produced out in the open. We can see the child passing from this intersubjective game with the mother around the phallus to the game of castration in the relationship with the father. This passage occurs through a series of transitions that are precisely what I have called the myths that little Hans creates. Why are we seeing this in such a pure way? I started to spell this out, and now I shall pick up from the point we were at last time. 2 I left you, last time, on the riveting phenomenon of Hans relating the fantasy of the two giraffes, in which we can truly behold, like an illustration given in a seminar, the passage from the image to the symbol. Quite literally, little Hans is showing us, like a conjurer, the duplicated image of the mother, what I called the metonymy o f the mother, to become a piece of paper, to become a crumpled giraffe that the child sits on. There is something like a sketching out of the overall scheme here, which is the sign that we are on the right path. Had I wanted to invent something by means of a metaphor that would spell out

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the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, I could never have invented the tale of the two giraffes in the way that little Hans dreamed it up and articulated it with these elements. He shows that it’s a matter of transforming an image into a ball of paper, into something that is wholly a symbol and, as such, an element that can be mobilised. He sits on his mother, reduced at last to a symbol, to this scrap of paper, which they snatch hold of and exclaim, Ah! Le bon billet qua le petit Hans!' Of course, this is not enough. Otherwise he would have been cured. But through this act he shows what he has been ruminating, because the spontaneous acts of a child are far more direct and lively than the mental conceptions of an adult, after the long years of deepening cretinisation that make up the common run of what is called upbringing. Let’s see what happens when we turn to our chart, as though it had already been proved correct. What does it mean that it should be an imaginary father who definitively sets the order of the world, namely that not everyone has a phallus? It’s easy to recognise that the imaginary father is the all-powerful father. This is the grounding of the world in the commonplace conception of God, the guarantee of universal order. All things real and physical, the Lord God made them all. When I tell you this, I’m not merely forging my table. You have only to turn now to the observation on little Hans. When he speaks about God, which he does on two occasions, he speaks very nicely of him. His father has started to clarify certain matters for him, and there is an improvement, though it is fleeting. Then, on 15 March, when he goes outside and notices that there are fewer horses and carriages than usual, he says, How sensible! God’s done away with horses now. What does this mean? We don’t know. Does it mean that on this day there is less need of horses? It could mean that, but the word gescheit doesn’t mean kind, but rather indisputably clever. People tend to believe that the good Lord has spared him some difficulty, but if one deems that the horse is not merely a difficulty for Hans but an essential element, then it could indeed mean that there is less need of horses. Whichever is the case, it tells you that God is there as an essential point of reference. It’s utterly striking to see that after the meeting with Freud - on 30 March, just after he had turned mother into a ball of paper, which is not entirely satisfactory for Hans but had set him on the right path - the child alludes to God once again. Hans supposes that the Professor must talk to the good Lord, to be able to say every­ thing he has just said. Freud himself doesn’t fail to be tickled by this, though scruples to note that he had provoked it himself, because out

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of his own vainglory he had peculiarly taken the high and mighty position of bragging to the child, Long before you were in the world, I had known that a little Hans would come who would be so fond o f his mother that he would be bound tofeel afraid o f hisfather because o f it. It is certainly quite striking to see Freud taking this position. On no account have we dreamt of reproaching him for this. A long while ago I noted the original and exceptional dimension that Freud would open in each of his analyses precisely by uttering such interpretative words to the subject. It’s not something that he is transmitting. It’s truly something that he has found himself, that comes in some way directly from the lips of Freud. I’ve given you a reference that seems to me to be altogether essential regarding the authenticity of speech, namely that it has to be seen how different is an interpretation by Freud from all the rest that we might give in his wake. As we have very often seen, Freud doesn’t impose any kind of rule on himself here. He truly takes what I could call the divine posi­ tion. He speaks to young Hans from Mount Sinai, and Hans doesn’t fail to feel the force of this. Mark well that on this occasion the position taken by the symbolic articulation - the symbolic father also remains veiled to Hans - is that of Freud’s poising himself as the absolute master, as something that is not the symbolic father but the imaginary father. This is important because we are about to see that this is how Freud tackles the situation. It is very important to appreciate the particularities of Hans’s relationship with his analyst. I mean that if we want to comprehend this observation we should note that it has something about it that is absolutely exceptional compared with all other child analyses. The situation is developed in such a way that the element of the symbolic father is rather distinct both from the real father and, as you can see, from the imaginary father. It is doubtless to this - which we will be able to confirm later - that we owe the absence of phenomena that could be qualified as transferential, for example. Likewise there are no phenomena of repetition, and this is why we have pointed out the pure state of the functioning of the fantasies. A further interest of this observation is to show us that the Durcharbeitung is not, contrary to what is commonly accepted, ani­ mated merely by some endless iteration at the end of which what had not been intellectually assimilated will at last work its way under the subject’s skin, like gnawing on a bit or slowly permeating. Durcharbeitung is doubtless a necessary thing because a number of circuits need to be travelled in several different directions so that the function of symbolising the imaginary can be efficiently completed. This is why we can see little Hans roaming along a whole labyrin­

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thine path, to the extent that we can indeed reconstitute this path because of course it is broken off from one moment to the next, chopped up by the father’s interventions which, as Freud underlines for us, are certainly neither the best oriented nor the most respectful. Nevertheless, we can see a series of constructions being produced and reproduced, in which it’s a matter of discerning what the veri­ table component-elements are. Rather than constantly contenting ourselves with covering each fact with a catch-all term of such-andsuch a complex - anal relation or mother attachment - we would be better off trying to see what functions, what representative and figurative elements, are brought before us in the tight articulations of ancient myths. We have got used to matching sweeping equivalents to these terms and functions - saying that this represents the father, or that represents the mother, or something else represents the penis - but were we to try to perceive these elements, this effort would show us that each of them, the horse for example, is conceivable only in its relationship with a certain number of other elements that are equally significant. It is impossible to make such an element correspond to a univocal signification. I’ve taken the example of the horse, but this is so for all the other elements of these Freudian myths. At the start the horse is the mother. At the end, it’s the father. Between the two, it might have been little Hans himself, who plays horsey once in a while, or even the penis, which is manifestly represented by the horse at several points in the case history. This is true in the most evident way for the horse but is no less so for any other signifier that you might care to pluck from the dif­ ferent modes of mythical creation in which little Hans indulges and which, as you know, are exceedingly profuse. For example, at one point the bathtub is clearly the mother, but at the end it is Hans’s behind. This is understood in the observation as much by Freud, by the father and by little Hans himself. You can equally perform the same operation for each of the elements that is involved, the biting or even the nakedness for instance. In any case, in order to perceive these things it is absolutely nec­ essary to force yourselves, at each point of the observation, not to understand straightaway. This is a point of method. You must strive, as Freud expressly recommends twice in the observation, not to understand immediately. The best way of not understanding on this occasion is to jot down some brief notes, to record day-by-day on a piece of paper the elements that Hans broaches and which have to be taken as such, as signifiers. I insisted for example on Quite alone with Mariedl. While you understand nothing about it, you retain this signifier-element and, as the intelligence will come to you

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when you sit down to eat, you will see that this overlaps strictly with something else that you can write down on the same page. What is supposed in the fact of being, not alone with someone, but quite alone with someone? It supposes that there could be someone else. This method for analysing myths is the very same that Monsieur Claude Levi-Strauss has set out for us in an article in the OctoberDecember 1955 issue of The Journal o f American Folklore under the title The Structural Study o f Myth. By proceeding in the way he describes, you will see that each of the elements of the observa­ tion on Hans can be ordered in such a way that, when read in a certain direction, it forms the sequence of these myths. After a while, however, one is compelled by the element of recurrence alone, which is not a straightforward recurrence but a transformed recurrence of the same elements, to put them in order not merely on a single line but by making bundles of lines that take on an order as though they were an orchestra score, and then you can see a series of suc­ cessions being established which can be read both horizontally and vertically. The myth is told in one direction, while its meaning or its understanding are referred to the bundles of analogous elements that recur in various forms. At each point these elements are trans­ formed, doubtless in order to complete a certain path that goes very precisely from the point of departure - to state the obvious - to the point of arrival, and which means that by the end something has been integrated that at the start was inadmissible and irreducible. So, in the little Hans case history, the point of departure is the eruption of the real penis in the play between mother and child, and the end point is when this real penis comes to be accommodated in a way that is sufficient for life to go on without anxiety. I said sufficient. I didn’t say necessary. This sufficient means that it could be even fuller, and this is indeed what we shall see. In the end, little Hans’s Oedipus complex perhaps doesn’t lead to a solution that would be completely satisfactory. It suffices simply to free him from the interference of the phobic element. It renders unnecessary the conjunction between the imaginary and anxiety that is known as phobia. In other words, it culminates in the reduction of the phobia. Indeed, let’s not forget something that can be gleaned from the 1922 postscript. When Freud meets Hans again at the age of nine­ teen, the youth had just read the full case history for the first time, but the whole o f it came to him as something unknown. Freud draws a very neat comparison - Any one who is familiar with psychoanalysis may occasionally experience something similar in sleep. He will be woken up by a dream, and will decide to analyse it then and there; he will then go to sleep again feeling quite satisfied with the result o f his efforts; and next morning dream and analysis will alike be forgotten.

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This is indeed something we are familiar with, and Freud’s compari­ son is highly appealing. It allows us to think, as does Freud himself, that what is at stake in the observation on little Hans, as we our­ selves can grasp, is in no way comparable to the subject’s integration or reintegration of his history as a lifting of amnesia that allows for the elements that have been won back to be preserved. On the contrary, what is at issue here is a very special activity that stands on the borderline between the imaginary and the symbolic, and which does indeed belong to the same realm as dreams. This dream realm is equally the realm of the mythification that is involved through­ out the observation on Hans, which plays an economic role that is comparable in every respect to that of Hans’s fantasies and even his mere games and inventions. However, let’s not overlook what Freud tells us in passing. He says that, even so, as Hans was reading his case history, there dawned on him a kind o f glimmering recollection that it might have been he himself that it happened to. It has to do with all the fantasmatisations in the case concerning the younger sister. Hans’s parents are now divorced, as might have been anticipated from reading through to the end of the observation, and Hans is no less spirited as a result. There is just one thing that he still harbours as a wound, and this is the fact that he lives apart from his sister. This little sister has come to represent for him, over the course of his life, the term that has been distanced beyond what is accessible to love. She is the idealised love-object, the girl-phallus that we took as a point of departure in our analysis and which will remain - there is no cause for doubt here, even though this is just a supposition, an extrapolation - the mark that will lend its style and its type to Hans’s love life in its entirety thereafter. So, in spite of the masterful analysis of which Hans was the object, not everything was fully brought to a close, nor did it culminate in an object relation that would in itself be fully satisfactory.

3 Let’s come back to the starting point, to Freud, to the child’s father who is Freud’s acolyte, and to the instructions that Freud gives him, because we have now seen how Freud assumes his role here. How will he tell the one who is his agent to conduct himself? He gives two recommendations. The first recommendation has two aspects. After being informed of little Hans’s demeanour and the painful and anguishing phenom­ ena of which he is the object, Freud tells the father to explain to the

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child that the phobia is a piece o f nonsense, eine Dummheit, and that the nonsense in question is linked to his desire to get close to his mother. Furthermore, since Hans has for some time been greatly preoccupied with Wiwimachers, he needs to be told that this is not right, unrecht, and that this is why the horse is so bad and wants to bite him. This goes a long way. We have here a sort of direct and immedi­ ate manoeuvre bearing on guilt, which on the one hand consists in easing the guilt by saying that such things are quite natural and straightforward but simply need to be put in order and dominated a little. On the other hand, however, Freud doesn’t hesitate to accen­ tuate the element of prohibition, at least relative prohibition, of the masturbatory satisfactions. We shall see what the result of this is for the child. The second recommendation that Freud gives is even more char­ acteristic of the language he uses. Since Hans’s satisfaction is clearly derived from hunting out - this was why earlier I took up the dialec­ tic of discovery and surprise - the hidden object that is the penis or the phallus of the mother, this desire is to be taken away from him by taking away the object of his satisfaction. You are to tell him that this desiredphallus does not exist. This is voiced by Freud at the start of the observation, on pp. 263-4 of volume VII of the Gesammelte Werke. It has to be said that as an intervention from the imaginary father, it would be hard to do any better. He who puts the world in order is saying that there is nought to be found. One can also see the extent to which the real father is incapable of taking on such a function. In truth, when he tries to do so, Hans reacts by taking a completely different path from the one that has been suggested to him, just as previously he had reacted by producing the story of the two giraffes. Right after the absence of the phallus has been asserted to him, he fantasises a very nice story - I saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and she let me see her widdler. I showed Grete, my Grete, what Mummy was doing, and showed her my widdler. This is a superb response, and utterly in line with what I was trying to spell out for you earlier. What is at stake is very precisely to see what is veiled insomuch as it is veiled. The mother is both naked and in her chemise, just like Alphonse Allais’s tale L ’engraisseur, about a friend of his who was wont to exclaim with a flamboy­ ant gesture, You see that woman over there, she is naked under her clothes! It’s quite possible that you have never gauged the impact and scope of this remark in the metaphysical underpinnings of your social deportment, but it is fundamental to interhuman relation­ ships as such.

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With that, Hans’s father, who doesn’t distinguish himself by any especially shrewd perception in these matters, tells him that she can only be one or the other. He could only mean ‘in her chemise’ or ‘quite naked'. Yet this is the whole issue. For Hans, she is at once naked and in her chemise, just like all of you here. Hence the impos­ sibility of taking on board the order of the world simply through an authoritarian intervention that stipulates there is nought. Clearly the imaginary father has existed for a long time, for all time. The imaginary father is also a certain form of God. But this is not what will resolve our difficulties in a way that is any the less permanent and experiential. Before this attempt, Hans’s father had made a first approach, under Freud’s instruction, to easing the child’s guilt. He made a first clarification concerning the relationship between the horse and the forbidden act of putting his hand on his penis. Analysts of our gen­ eration, after some twenty or thirty years of experience, now know that such an intervention aiming to alleviate guilt-ridden anxiety is always doomed to fail. Guilt should never be confronted head on, lest it should be transformed into the various metabolic forms that will never fail to arise. So, once the child has been told that the horse is merely a more or less frightful substitute for something that he ought not to be making such a fuss about, we see him here in the observation, in the most articulate fashion, starting to feel compelled to look at the horses. He says, I have to look at horses. Let’s pause for a moment on this mechanism, which is altogether noteworthy. What does everything that he has just been told mean? In the end, it amounts to saying that looking at the horses is per­ mitted. Just like in totalitarian systems, which are defined by the fact that everything that is permitted is compulsory, he now feels himself compelled. Little Hans has been told that he is allowed to go towards the horses because the problem lies elsewhere. The result of this is that he feels ordered, forced, to look at the horses. What can this mechanism mean, which I have summarised as the permitted becoming the compulsory? We have first a transition, that is, the elimination of what was previously forbidden. Doubtless this transformation - because it does indeed amount to a transformation - must be caused by the fact that what is permitted is clad at the same time with the term of obligation. This must be something like a mechanism that preserves the right to what was forbidden, yet in a different form. In other words, what now has to be looked at is precisely what previously was not supposed to be looked at. As we have already seen, something was forbidden by means of the horse. We know that the phobia is an outpost, a protection against anxiety. The horse marks out a threshold, and we know that

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at this level this is what it does above all else. But now there is also what has just been said to the subject, and so the horse also bears a relation to what is at stake in the new element that has sown disor­ der across the subject’s play as a whole, namely the real penis. Even so, does this mean that the horse is the real penis? It most certainly does not. As umpteen examples hereafter will show you, the horse is a long way from being the real penis because, over the course of the transformations of Hans’s myth, the horse is also the mother, at the end the father, and also on occasion little Hans himself. Let’s bring in here an essential symbolising notion, the same that I developed for you during the Seminar of the year before last concerning the play on words that Angelus Silesius makes on Ort/Wort.2 We shall say that, on this occasion, this is the place where the real penis must be accommodated, and not without giving rise to fear and anguish. With this first contribution from the father, which is still hardly reassuring, we can nevertheless see the child reacting and committing to the structure that is strictly speaking the signifier-structure, the structure that resists against imperative interference, the structure that will nevertheless react to the father’s addled and clumsy inter­ ventions, and which will produce the series of mythical creations that, through a series of transformations, will gradually integrate the new element of the real penis into Hans’s system. This new element necessitates no longer merely the intersubjectivity of the lure - which even so is fundamental and allows Hans to play at surprising, at being caught by surprise, and at presenting himself as absent - but at the same time, through this play which is still on­ going, a third-party object, which is the first element in his relation with his mother and which ultimately must itself be integrated into it. This new and inconvenient element - which actually turned up a while ago - the real penis, Hans’s own penis, with its own reactions that run the risk of throwing the whole thing up in the air, as they say, is clearly for him, as you will see in the series of imaginary crea­ tions, the element of perturbation and disturbance. Since today is the 3rd of April, let’s go straight to what happens on the 3rd of April 1908, when father and child are at their apart­ ment window speculating as to what is going on in the courtyard across the street. The elements that will become the first props to Hans’s problem are already to be found in this yard. With these he will produce his first mythical construction under the sign, as Freud tells us, of means of transport. All this is going on constantly under his nose - the horses and carts that shift around, that load and unload, that bring boxes onto which the street-boys climb. What will Hans make of it all? Do you think that there was some kind of preadaptation, planned for all eternity

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by the eternal imaginary father, between these means of conveyance in use during the imperial reign of Franz Joseph in pre-war Vienna, and each drive and natural tendency that surges up hereabouts in accordance with a solid order of instinctual development in a child like little Hans? It’s exactly the opposite. These elements also have their order of reality, but the child will make use of them as elements that are necessary to his game of permutation. Let me say it again. The use of the signifier is conceivable and comprehensible only when you take as your starting point the fact that the elementary and fundamental playing-out of the signifier is permutative. However civilised and learned you might be, as you go about your everyday life you couldn’t be clumsier when it comes to exhausting all the possible permutations. I’m going to prove this for you with the example of myself. I have a necktie that is lighter on one side and darker on the other, and for the lighter side to be underneath and the darker side showing on the front, I have to make a mental permutation. I get it wrong every time. The permutative order is what is being played out in everything that little Hans will construct. Before you try to understand anything about what the horse means, about what the cart means, about little Hans getting onto it, or the unloading of the cart, you have to retain the fact that there is a cart, a horse, and little Hans who wishes to get onto it and who is afraid. But afraid of what? Well, that the cart might set off without him before he gets up onto the loading dock. There’s no need to rush and to start saying that we are familiar with this, that he must be afraid of being separated from his mother, because little Hans reassures you straightaway, I can always come back to Mummy, in the cart or in a cab. Little Hans stands quite firm in reality. Something else is thus at stake. What counts is the fact of being on a cart looking onto something that can separate from the cart, that can displace. Once you have isolated the element in relation to which the cart can displace, you will find it in countless features in the observation on little Hans, for example in connection with one of the fantasies that crops up later, that of travelling in the train to Gmunden, when they don’t have time to put on their clothes before getting off and the train carries them on. There are many others. For instance, one of his last fantasies, on 22 April - A street-boy was riding on a truck, and the guard came and undressed the boy quite naked and made him stand there till next morning, and in the morning the boy gave the guard 50,000 florins so that he could go on riding on the truck. You cannot fail to see the patent kinship between these different stages and moments in Hans’s fantasmatisation. You will also see all the fantasmatisation around the splendid and

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intrepid little Hanna. At one point she is with little Hans in another carriage that greatly resembles the previous ones, because it has the same anxiety-horses. Hanna will go and ride on one of the horses, in this first myth that we may call the carriage myth. You will try to see how these different signifiers constitute the hitching, because this really is what is at issue. Everyone goes on all the time about the horse, but it can be hitched or unhitched to a carriage. You will see how these different elements that compose the hitching, both the coachmen and the referring of the carriage to a fixed map, turn out to have different significations as the case history progresses. You will try to see what is most important in all this. Is it the role of the signifier, as I explained for you in my Seminaire sur ‘La Lettre volee’, or more precisely the displacement of the signifier-element onto the different personages who each find themselves caught in some way under its shadow and inscribed in its possession? Does the vital part of Hans’s progress consist in the movement of the signifier as it turns around the different personages in whom the subject shows greater or lesser interest, and who may be caught, captivated, or captured in the permutative mechanism? Or, on the contrary, does it lie in something else? On this occasion, we can’t really see what kind of progress this would be if it’s not a progress through the order of the signifier. One can say that at no point do any of the elements of reality that surround little Hans really lie beyond his means. There is no trace in this observation of what might be called regression. If you think that there is regression at one point because little Hans produces all that immense anal phantasmagoria around the lumf, you are sorely mis­ taken. It’s a fantastic mythic play, which at no point entails any kind of regression. From beginning to end of the observation, little Hans holds onto his right, so to speak, to masturbation, without allow­ ing himself to be ruffled. If there is one thing that distinguishes the overall style of Hans’s progress, it’s precisely its irreducible aspect. As Freud underlines in his discussion, it is precisely because the genital element is utterly solid, present, resistant, and firmly installed in a subject such as this, that he doesn’t come out with a hysteria but a phobia. This is very sharply articulated in the observation. This is what we will be trying to see next time. We are going to see that little Hans doesn’t employ just one myth, just one alphabetic element, to resolve his issue, the issue of passing from a phallic apprehension of the relationship with his mother to a castrated apprehension of relations with the parental couple as a whole. There is also the infamous story of the bathtub and the borer, to which last time I referred with the element of the screw thread. It’s something that revolves entirely around what I would call the logical function

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of manufactured instruments. One cannot help but be quite struck by the way in which this child takes elements that are grouped around highly developed patterns of coaptation in human adap­ tation and turns them into logical instruments. They enable him to create an opposition between that which is enrooted, or even simply that which is naturally fixed in, and that which has a hole bored through it. The latter is the point of apprehension, in the sense of fear. It is the formidable polarity before which the child effectively comes to a standstill. The introduction of the element of the unscrewing, or else the pincering - 1 mean, that which is gripped in the pair of pincers3- plays an absolutely essential role in what I shall call the other myth, the myth of the bathtub and the tap. All the progress that Hans brings about over the course of the observation hinges on the detail of this mythical structuration, that is, on the use of imaginary elements in order to exhaust a certain exercise of symbolic exchange. This is what will allow the threshold element to fall into disuse, the element that was the first symbolic structuration of his reality, which is exactly what his phobia was. 3 April 1957

XVII T H E S IG N IF IE R A N D

DER WITZ

A golden rule The combinatory value of the signifier Hans through the looking-glass Raillery and naivety What passes out through the hole Our progress through the observation on little Hans has led us to highlight the function of myth in the psychological crisis that the child is going through, a crisis that is inseparable from the paternal intervention being guided by Freud’s counsel. This all-pervasive notion of the function of what is called myth not metaphorically but at the very least technically - is something that we suppose may be appreciated in its rightful scope to the extent that Hans’s imaginative creation always follows on from his father’s interventions, which can be adroit, not so adroit, or mala­ droit, but which are certainly sufficiently well oriented not to stem this series of productions but ultimately to stimulate it. This series presents to us as something that it would be hard to separate from his symptom, his phobia, and indeed it can be put into order in rela­ tion to this symptom.

1 Last time, we arrived at the anniversary day of 3 April, when Hans’s remarks on the content of his phobia are aired. The father says, all in all, that while that same afternoon his son became more courageous in his conduct under the effect of the most recent occurrences, and notably the effect of Freud’s unmediated intervention to Hans on 30 March, the phobia too had plucked up courage. Indeed, in this ambiguity which clearly was indiscernible,

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the phobia seemed to be just as much enriching itself from details of finer scope and incidence, of higher complication, now that Hans knew better how to make such confidences about the way in which the phobia was pressuring and oppressing him. I’m venturing to overturn in your minds, or more exactly to re­ establish in your minds, the true function both of the symptom and of its variously qualified productions which have been rounded up under the name transitory symptoms o f analysis. To summarise for you the scope of what is meant by our approach, I shall try to set out a certain number of terms, definitions and, while I’m at it, rules. I told you last time that if we want to work in a way that is truly analytic, that is truly Freudian, and which is in true conformity with the major examples that Freud developed for us, then we ought to become aware of something that can be understood and confirmed only on the basis of the distinction between signified and signifier. As I told you, not one of the signifier-elements of the phobia carries a univocal meaning or is equivalent to a single signified. There are many such signifiers that we could tarry with. The first of them is, of course, the horse. It is impossible to regard the horse in any way whatsoever as something that could be the pure and simple equivalent of the function of the father, for example. One can take this easy route and hastily declare that, like in the classic formula from Totem and Taboo, the horse is responding to some shortcoming of the father, as a sort of neo-production or equivalent that somehow represents him or incarnates him, thereby playing a role determined by what does indeed seem to be the difficulty at that time, namely the passage from the preoedipal state to the Oedipal moment. The word moment is here intended in the sense it carries in physics, and this passage is in effect what I have been teaching, but of course such a declaration about the horse would be utterly incomplete and insufficient. The horse is not merely the horse that perhaps at the end it may indeed become, when Hans sees a proud horse trotting past in the street and associates it with something equivalent to the virile pride of the father. At one moment near the end of the treatment, Hans has the much-vaunted conversation with his father when he tells him some­ thing along the lines of, You ought to be cross with me, you must hold it against me that I ’m in this place, that I monopolise mother’s attention and take your place in her bed. And this comes in spite of the father’s denegations, telling Hans that he has never scolded him. Das mufi wahr sein, Hans says again. It must be true. Thus, for a brief instant, doubtless having been duly indoctrinated some time hence, the child makes the Oedipal myth loom up with an altogether special imperiousness. Moreover, this has not failed to strike a few authors,

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notably Robert Fliess, who wrote an article on this in the JanuaryFebruary 1956 issue of the IJP devoted to Freud’s centenary. Before it came to fulfil this metaphorical function in a terminal fashion, so to speak, the horse played a good many other roles. On 3 April, Hans gives all the possible explanations on this matter. Is the horse to be hitched, or not? Is it hitched to a cart with just one horse, or two horses? In each case there is a different signification. What becomes apparent to us is that at this time the horse is symbolic of something. As the next part of the observation will show in a more developed way, on one side the horse is symbolic of the mother. It is also symbolic of the penis. At any rate, it is irreducibly linked to the cart, which is itself a loaded dray, as Hans insists all along the session of 3 April when he is explaining his interest and the brand of satisfaction he derives from all the traffic that passes in front of their apartment, these drays that drive into the yard and drive back out again, and which, while they are there, are unloaded and reloaded. Gradually the equivalence becomes apparent between the function of the dray, together with the horse, and something that obviously belongs to a very different realm, suggestive of what refers essen­ tially to the mother’s pregnancy. As we are told in the observation, by Freud and by the father, it refers essentially to the problem of the situation of children in their mother’s belly and how they come out. So, at this moment, the horse has a very different scope and a very different function. Similarly, another element becomes a subject of lengthy exami­ nation both for the father and for Freud, namely the notorious Krawall, the idea of noise, of a row, of a disorderly racket, with some Austrian overtones whereby it seems that the word can further be used to designate a fracas or a rumpus. In each case, there appears the troubling and especially anguishing character of this Krawall, which is apprehended by little Hans when it arises with the bushorse that fell down, umfallen. In Hans’s own words, this was one of the events that precipitated the phobic value of the horse. This fall, which occurred but once, will thereafter be found as the constant backdrop to the fear. He fears that this may happen to certain horses, especially big horses hitched up to large, heavily laden vans. The fall and the attendant noise of the horse’s pawing, the Krawall, keep cropping up, from more than one angle, during the question­ ing of little Hans, yet not once in the observation will anything be yielded that would amount to an overt interpretation of the Krawall. Furthermore, it should be noted that for the full run of the case history of little Hans, Freud and the father alike are led to remain in doubt, to float, and even to abstain, when it comes to the inter­ pretation of a certain number of elements. It turns out that, try as

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they might to press the child to come out with it, try as they might to suggest every possible equivalent and solution, they obtain from him no more than evasions, allusions and side-stepping. Sometimes one even has the impression that the child is to some extent making fun. Actually, this is not to be doubted. The parodic character of some of the child’s figments and confabulations is patent in the observation. I’m thinking above all of what happens in relation to what could be called the stork myth, which in Hans’s rendition is so rich and lush, teeming so with humorous elements - The stork came up the stairs . . . and he had the right key . . . and then he took his hat and went away again, and so on and so forth. This parodic and caricatured aspect of the child’s figments has just what it takes to have struck the various commentators. In the end this brings us to the heart of something that is re­ established not from a perspective that deems the observation to be incomplete, but on the contrary from a perspective that appreciates its distinctive demonstrative phase. This is not an insufficiency. On the contrary, it is along this path that it must show us the way to a mode of comprehending what is involved both in the symptomatic formation - the phobia, which is already so simple and yet already so rich - and in the working-through itself. This aspect is expressed, and it finds its place. There is no better illustration of this obser­ vation, to the extent that it’s a Freudian observation, that is, an intelligent observation. What we can see essentially is the signifier as such in its distinction from the signified. The symptomatic signifier is constituted in such a way that by its very nature, all along its development and evolution, it covers signifieds that are the most multiform and the most varied. Not only is it in its nature to be able to do this, it is its function to do so. The full set of signifier-elements that are put before us in the course of this portion of the observation, its kit of signifiers, is assembled in such a way that if we want the observation to be some­ thing more than a mere riddle, a confused and failed observation, then we need to impose upon ourselves a certain number of rules about how we tackle it. Why should this case be singled out as a failed one, and not any other case to which we customarily refer? Even so, we cannot help but be struck by the arbitrary, solicited and systematic character of the interpretations made in the case history in particular, yet also of the analytic interpretations vis-a-vis the child. Precisely inasmuch as this observation is so remarkably rich and complex, we have here a testimony given in a register that is exceedingly rare on account of its abundance. If there is one

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impression that one receives upon moving into it, it’s the sense of constantly getting lost in it. The rules that I would Uke to propose in this regard are as follows. Be it the analysis of a child or of an adult, no element that we may regard as a signifier - in the sense that we have been promoting here, that is to say, whether the signifier is an object, a relationship or a symptomatic act, and however primal or vague it may be - fails to appear as bearing already the firm and singular stamp of something that is dialectical. Such vagueness is characteristic of the first emergence of the horse, when it appears after a certain interval during which the child’s anxiety manifests itself. The horse will hold a function that needs to be defined, but this dialectical stamp is already apparent. This is precisely what we are going to try to grasp, and it is already quite palpable enough in the fact that the anxiety emerges exactly when it’s a matter of Hans’s mother leaving. He is afraid that the horse will come into the bedroom. But what comes into the room? It is he, little Hans. In every aspect of this we can see a highly ambiguous double relationship that is linked on the one hand to the function of the mother by way of a sentimental tonality of anxiety, but on the other hand to little Hans through his movement and his act. From its very first appearance, the horse is already loaded with profound ambiguity. It is already an all-purpose sign, just like any typical signifier. We take just three strides forward into the observation on little Hans and we can see this come pouring in from every side. So, we posit the following rule. No signifier-element, thus defined as an object, a relationship or a symptomatic act, in neurosis for example, can be regarded as having a univocal scope. In no way is it equivalent to any one of these objects, relationships, or even these imaginary actions in our register upon which the currently used notion of the object relation was founded. In our time, object rela­ tions, with everything that is normative and progressive about them in the subject’s life, with how they are genetically defined as mental development, belong to the register of the imaginary. This register is not, of course, without value, but when one tries to articulate it, it presents all the characteristics of untenable contradiction that I told you about when I was sharply caricaturing the texts that had been published at the start of the academic year in a two-volume collection. We had before our eyes the flagrant contradictions in how this notion of the object relation plays out when it starts to be expressed in terms of a pregenital relation that is becoming genital, with the idea of progress that this entails. These contradictions are upon us immediately, and so the task ahead is to arrange the terms in the most basic fashion.

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If we follow what for us is a golden rule, and which draws on our notion of the structure of symbolic activity, the signifier-elements must first be defined by their articulation with the other signifierelements. This is what justifies our rapprochement with the recent theory of myth. This theory has imposed itself in a way that is peculiarly anal­ ogous to the way in which the simple apprehension of the facts compels us to articulate things. What guides Monsieur Levi-Strauss in his article in the Journal o f American Folklore! What does he use to introduce the notion of The Structural Study o f Myth? He quotes a remark from one of his colleagues, A. M. Hocart, who says that if there is one thing that we need to overturn at the outset, then this is the stance that down through the ages has been taken in the name of goodness knows what deep-seated anti-intellectualist bias, which consists in withdrawing psychological interpretations from what is presumed to be an intellectual field only to introduce them again in a field that is qualified as one of affectivity. As the author categorically concludes, this thereby adds, to the inherent defects o f the psychological school. . . the mistake o f deriving clear-cut ideas. . . from vague notions. What is here called the psychological school is the school that seeks to find the source of myths in a so-called constant of human philosophy that is somehow generic. We are constantly dealing with such clear-cut ideas, as much in myth as in symptomatic produc­ tions. We ascribe to some vague drive something that presents in the patient in a way that is very broadly articulated, which is even what makes for the paradox of how it appears to our eyes as a parasite. It is enough simply to avoid conflating what amounts to a mental play, goodness knows what superfluity of intellectual deduction - which can only be qualified as such from a perspective of the rationalisa­ tion of delusion, for example, or of the symptom, but which is an utterly outmoded perspective - with our perspective, from which, on the contrary, the play of the signifier snatches hold of the subject and takes him far beyond all that he can intellectualise therein, but which amounts no less to the play of the signifier with its own specific laws. I would like to presentify this for you with an image. What is it that becomes palpable for us when little Hans starts coming out with his fantasies one-by-one, and also, from a certain perspective, when we have our eyes peeled for it, in the development of a neurosis when we start to perceive its history and development in a subject, the way in which he has been taken up by it and seized by it? I would say that it’s something that he doesn’t enter face on. He backs into it somehow. It seems that little Hans, from the moment the shadow of

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the horse is looming over him, gradually enters a stage-set that takes on an order and organisation, that is erected around him, but which captures him much more than being developed by him. What we see is the articulated aspect by which this delusion develops. I’ve just said delusion. It slipped out almost as a parapraxis because what is going on here has nothing to do with a psychosis, yet the term is not inappropriate. On no account can we content ourselves with deducing anything from vague emotions, as Hocart puts it, cited by Levi-Strauss. On the contrary, we have the impres­ sion that the ideational edification - if we can use this expression in the case of little Hans - has its own motivation, its own specific plane and occurrence. It might correspond to some need or other, to some function or other, but surely not to anything that might at any moment be justified by a drive, by an impulse, by a particular emotional movement that would be transposed here to find plain expression. A very different mechanism is at issue, and it necessi­ tates what has been termed the structural study o f myth, the first step of which is never to consider any of the signifier-elements indepen­ dently of the others that arise, and then to reveal this. When I say to reveal it, I mean to develop it on this same plane of a series of opposi­ tions that belong first and foremost to the realm of combinatorics. What we can see looming up in the course of the development of what is happening for little Hans is not a certain number of themes that would have more or less some affective or psychological equiva­ lent, but rather a certain number of grouped signifier-elements that progressively transpose from one system into another. An example will illustrate this for you. After the father’s first attempts at enlightenment, under Freud’s guidance, an especially penile element is isolated in the horse, which will lead Hans to react to this piece of enlightenment by the compul­ sion to look at the horse. Next, we find that the child is relieved at certain moments by the prohibitive aid that the father brings him concerning his masturbation. We are edging closer to a first attempt at analysing Hans’s concern over what has to do with his urinary organ, the Wiwimacher, as he calls it. Hans certainly absorbs the full force of the Aufklarung, the real enlightenment, this being the strong intervention that the father makes so as to connect more directly with what he reckons to be the only real support of the child’s anxiety, and which amounts to saying, as Freud incites him to say, that little girls don’t have one, while he does have one. And, in a way that does not escape Freud’s notice, Hans underscores that his widdler is angewachsen. It isfixed in or enrooted. It is something that will grow and get bigger with him. Isn’t this already a first adumbration of something that appears

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to lead in the direction of somehow allowing the phobia to fall into disuse, if indeed it is purely and simply the equivalent of the anxiety that is bound to the apprehension of a real that hitherto had not been fully realised by the child? It is then that we see the fantasy of the big giraffe and the little giraffe appear. I showed you that this fantasy casts us into the field of a creation characterised by a style and a symbolic exigency that are utterly riv­ eting. I’m repeating this for those of you who weren’t here. I restored its full scope - and this can only be done from our perspective - to the fact that for Hans there is neither contradiction nor even ambi­ guity in the fact that one of the giraffes, the little one, is a crumpled giraffe, just as one can crumple up a sheet of paper. He shows this for us. We have an object that until then had its imaginary function and which is now passing over to a sort of radical intervention of symbolisation. This is formulated as such by the subject himself and is underlined by the gesture that he then makes of taking pos­ session of this symbolic position, of occupying it, by sitting on top of the crumpled giraffe, in spite of how the big giraffe calls out and protests. There is something especially satisfying about this for little Hans. It’s not a dream. It’s a fantasy that he has come up with himself. He goes into his parents’ bedroom to speak about it, and he develops it. The bafflement they evince yet again as to what this is about is firmly underscored. You will have noted the wavering in the obser­ vation itself. According to the father, the big giraffe and the small giraffe are initially the father and the mother. Yet right after he says categorically that the big giraffe is the mother and the little one is her genital organ, ihr Glied, and so this is another form of the relational value of these two signifiers. But will this suffice us? Surely not, because the father makes a fresh intervention, telling the mother, Good-bye, big giraffe! Having so far accepted a differ­ ent interpretative register, the child doesn’t reply Oh yes! - which is what the French [and the English] translation has, and which fails to get across the point and the scope of his interjection - but rather Nicht wahr, that can’t be true! And he adds, and Hanna’s the crumpled giraffe, isn’t she? What are we touching on here? What is this other mode of inter­ pretation doing here? Does this really have to do with Hanna and her Krawall, in the sense that further on in the observation we shall see little Hanna appearing to be quite bothersome on account of her crying? We cannot fail - so long as we keep our ears open to the signifier-element - to identify this crying with the mother crying out in the fantasy. What ultimately, and what alone, is meant by this ambiguity?

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Hans’s moment of cheerfulness, which even carries a touch of rail­ lery, is something that all by itself designates for us the false path his father is taking in his attempts to make pairs of correspondences between the two terms of the symbolic relationship and some imagi­ nary or real element that they would be there to represent. Hans is right beside the father from one moment to the next to demonstrate that this is not the right path and never will be. Why will this never be the right path? What Hans is dealing with when the phobia emerges - this being the moment in the observa­ tion that we are talking about - is an apprehension of particular symbolic relations that so far have not been constituted for him and which have their own value as a symbolic relationship. Man, because he is man, is poised in the presence of problems that are problems of the signifier as such. The signifier is introduced into the real by its very existence as a signifier, because, for example, words are being spoken, or because sentences are being articulated and linked up, bound together by some medium, a copula, such as wherefore or because. The existence of the signifier introduces into the world of man something that I expressed near the end of the little Introduction I made in the first issue of La Psychanalyse, to the effect that it is in crossing the flow of things diametrically that the symbol is tethered, in order to lend it another meaning. These are problems to do with the creation of meaning, with everything that this entails in terms of freedom and ambiguity, and everything that might possibly be reduced at any moment to nothingness by the utterly arbitrary nature of a sudden spirited remark. Just like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice through the Looking-Glass, little Hans is quite capable of saying that this is how things are because this is just what I choose, because he is master. This doesn’t stop him from being completely subordinate to the solution of the problem, which arises from his having to adjust the way he had hith­ erto been relating to the maternal world, the world that was already being organised by the dialectic of the luring between him and his mother, the importance of which I have already underscored for you. Who out of the two of them has the phallus and who doesn’t? What does mother desire when she desires something other than me, the child? This was where the child was, but he can stay there no longer. The function of myth takes hold at this juncture. Once we are on the path to the right way of analysing myth - that of structural analysis - we can see that a myth is always an attempt to articulate a solution to a problem. It’s a matter of passing from a certain mode of explication, let’s say, bearing on the subject’s relationship with the world, or on a society’s relationship with the world, to a trans­

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formation that is necessitated by the fact that different elements have come to stand in contradiction to the first formulation. These new elements require a shift that as such is impossible, an impasse, and this is what affords the myth its structure. The same goes for Hans, who at this moment is faced with some­ thing that necessitates the adjustment of the first adumbration of the symbolic system that was structuring the relationship with the mother. This is what is at issue in the appearance of the phobia and, far more than this, in the development of everything that the phobia brings with it in terms of signifier-elements. Hans is faced with this, and, by like token, it is what makes his father’s every foray into a piecemeal reading appear derisory to the child.

2 Regarding the style of Hans’s responses, I simply must urge you to refer to the absolutely admirable passages that constitute Freud’s immense work - which has still scarcely been exploited for our experience - called Der Witz. This book perhaps has no equivalent in what might be called psy­ chological philosophy. I know of no other that has yielded anything so fresh and trenchant as this work. All the other books on laughter, be it Bergson’s or any of the rest, will always be of lamentable poverty alongside this one. What is the crucial thing that is put before us in Freud’s book Der Witzl It targets directly the essential nature of the phenomenon, without dipping off and without falling wide in its considerations. Just as in the very first section of the chapter on The Dream- Work in the Traumdeutung he foregrounds the notion that the dream is a rebus, and no one takes heed - the sentence has gone completely unnoticed - so it doesn’t seem to have been realised that section A, the analytic part of Der Witz, opens with the famous layout of his analysis of the phenomenon of condensation as grounded in the signifier. In the example offamillionar, there is a superposition of familiar and Millionar, and everything Freud will develop from it consists in showing us that it is on the level of the suppressed case that the truly destructive term is located, the term that disrupts the play of the signifier as such in relation to what could be called the existence of the real. By playing with the signifier, man calls his world into question, right down to the root. The value of the spirited quip, which distinguishes it from the comical, is its possibility of playing on the nonsense that is fundamental to any use of sense. It is pos­ sible, at any moment, to call any element of meaning into question

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insomuch as it is grounded on a use of the signifies That is to say, it is grounded on something that in itself is profoundly paradoxical in relation to any possible signification because, in establishing this use, the use itself is what creates what it is designed to sustain. The distinction between the domain of wit and the domain of the comic is one of the clearest there is. When Freud does touch on the comic in this book, he broaches it only as an ancillary by which to clarify wit by means of a contrast. First of all, he will come upon intermediate notions, highlighting for us the dimension of the naive, which is so ambiguous, and which is my reason for making this excursus. While on the one hand this dimension of the naive does indeed need to be defined - because it exists - in order to see what manifes­ tations of the naive can arise from the comic, we can clearly see on the other hand the extent to which this naivety is intersubjective. We are the ones who impute naivety to the child, and in a way that some doubt always lingers over it. Why so? Once again, let’s take an example. Freud begins his illustration of the naive with the story of the children who gather an audience of adults for their little drama piece. The show begins. The young actors tell the tale of a poor fisherman and his wife who have fallen on hard times. In an attempt to change their fortune, the husband decides to set off for faraway lands. He comes back after his many exploits, laden with riches, which he shows to his wife. She listens to him, then opens the door of their hut saying, Look, I too have not been idle. A dozen large dolls lie sleeping in a row. This is the example that Freud gives to illustrate naivety. It is one of the forms in which, were the definition of the comic to be implicated here, the discharge would arise from an economic gain brought about spontaneously by someone who is less naive, and in this different realm would entail a share of tension that even gener­ ates a certain degree of embarrassment. The fact that the child goes straight to this enormous gaffe without incurring the least trouble triggers something that transforms into laughter. That is to say, it becomes very droll, with all the overtones of the strange that this word can entail. But what is at issue here? While on this occasion we are in a zone that borders on the comic, the economy at stake is very precisely the gain that is made from bypassing what such a construction would have undergone if the same things were to be evoked from the lips of an adult. The child somehow makes a reality, directly, of something that takes us to the height of the absurd. He produces what is called naive wit. It’s a funny story that triggers laughter because it has come from the mouth of a child, leaving all the room for the adults

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to rejoice, These kids are priceless! They are assumed to have found, in all innocence and in one shot, what an author would necessarily have taken a great more trouble to find, or what he would have had to enrich with some further subtlety, so that it might pass for something droll, properly speaking. However, this allows us also to see that it is not altogether certain that the ignorance that has been given free run to hit the bulls-eye is really so complete. To spell it right out, when children’s stories possess this disconcerting character of triggering our laughter, we include them in the perspective of the naive, but we know that this naivety is not always to be taken at face value. There is being naive and there is feigning naivety. If we attribute a feigned naivety to the children’s drama play, we restore to it its full character of Witz in its most tendentious form, as Freud puts it. It takes very little, indeed it takes no more than for it to be assumed that this naivety is not so very complete, for the children to gain the upper hand and effectively become the masters of the game. In other words, what is called for is something that Freud highlights, and which I ask you to look up in the text, namely the third person who is always implied in the spirited remark. The first person makes a remark about a second to a third. Whether or not there really are three people standing there, there is always this ternarity which is essential for the remark to trigger laughter. The comic, meanwhile, can be triggered simply between two people, like Freud’s example of seeing someone slip and fall down, or when you see someone making a meal out of some task which for us is one of the most straightforward there is. This on its own suffices to trigger the comic relationship. However, in the naive, we can see essentially that the perspective of the third person, even if it remains virtual, is always implicit to some degree. Beyond the child whom we take to be naive, there is but another, who is precisely the one whom we suppose to be there for it to make us laugh so much. After all, it could be that he is feigning to feign, that his being naive is affected. This dimension of the symbolic is exactly what is there to be felt in the kind of hide-and-seek game, the perpetual mockery, that sets the tone of Hans’s every reply to his father. We see this kind of phenomenon being produced when, at another moment, the father asks Hans, What did you think when the horsefell down? This has to do with the fall from which Hans says he got the nonsense. His father blurts out the question, Was the horse dead when it fell down? As he notes just afterwards, Hans’s expression was quite serious when he first replied, Yes! But then the child has a sudden change of mind, and lets out a laugh - this too is noted saying, No, it wasn’t a bit dead. I only said it in jest, im SpaB.

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What can this mean? The observation is punctuated by all these little remarks. After Freud allows himself to take in for a moment the tragic resonance of the horse’s fall - though is it really certain that this tragic resonance is present on any occasion in the psychology of little Hans? - he becomes mindful of the other, this moustachioed father, the bespectacled one whom he depicts for us, whom he had seen during the consultation sitting beside little Hans. Beside the funny little fellow . .. with all his self-assurance, this other is there, heavy set, eyeglasses full of reflections, trying his hardest with the best will in the world. Freud wavers for a brief moment. The matter at hand is the notorious black on the horse’s mouth, which they are now wondering about, peering into it with a lantern, and Freud tells himself, Why, here he is, the long-headed one, it's this ass right here! And when I say this ass . . . Even so, get it into your heads that this kind of floating blackness around the horse’s mouth, which is never elucidated, is neverthe­ less the real gap that is always concealed behind the veil and the mirror, and which always stands out against the background like a stain. Ultimately, there is a sort of short-circuit from a divine character of professorial superiority, which Freud accentuates with some humour, and the appraisal - which the experience and con­ fidences of his contemporaries show us was always on the ready to come flying out of his mouth - which in French starts with the third letter of the alphabet followed by an ellipsis.1 What a great. .. president. . . this is, thinks Freud, telling himself that he has right there in front of him the figure that cuts across and joins up with the intuition of the fundamentally abysmal character of what stands out from the background. So, in these conditions, no doubt little Hans is leading the game rather well from one turn to the next when he corrects himself, when he laughs, and when in one fell swoop he cancels out a long series of what he has just been developing in front of his father. We have the impression that he is telling him, I saw you coming. On first approach, he accepts the word dead as an equivalent to fallen, but in a second moment he tells himself, You’re repeating the Professor’s lesson to me, that is, precisely what the Professor has just insinuated, namely that Hans is against his father to the point of wishing him dead. This is something that comes to contribute, therefore, to these rules of ours. As I said, first of all one maps out the signifiers in accordance with their essentially combinatorial value. The full set of signifiers that is brought into play is there to restructure the real by introducing this newly combined relationship. To take up again the reference to the first issue of La Psychanalyse, it is not merely

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for the sake of it that what you can see on the cover is the symbol of the signifier-function as such.2 The signifier is a bridge in a domain of significations. The consequence of this is that the signifier doesn’t reproduce significations. It transforms and recreates them. This is what is at stake, and this is why we always need to focus the lens of our question on the signifier.

3 We need to be attentive to the twist in the signifier that little Hans brings about. What is its point of departure and what is its point of arrival? So it is that in each of the stages that he travels through over the first five months of 1908, we can see him turning his interest successively to what is loaded and unloaded, or to what heaves into motion with more or less of a jolt, and which also might tear pre­ maturely away from its landing dock. Among all these linkages of variously fantasmatic signifier-elements revolving around the theme of movement, or more exactly, if you will allow this, within the theme of movement, the term of modification, acceleration, there is specifically the word Bewegung, motion. This element is absolutely essential in the structuration of the first fantasies and gradually brings out other elements, among which are the mother’s drawers, a pair of yellow ones and a pair of black ones. We must pay particular attention to what happens in relation to this element of the drawers. Without the perspectives that I have been trying to introduce for you, this passage is utterly incomprehensible. The father gets his knickers in a twist, if you will forgive the pun. As for Freud himself, he says simply that the father led the analysis to become obscure and uncertain, but nevertheless in a side note at the end of the exchange he indicates a certain number of perspectives, and in particular that doubtless the father had failed to recognise a funda­ mental distinction linked to the difference between the sounds made by a man micturating and a woman. Little Hans says things that are quite incomprehensible. Surely he wants to tell us that the longer a pair of drawers is worn, the blacker they become. This follows a number of developments in which one can see that when the drawers are yellow they have such-and-such a value, and when they are black they don’t. When he sees the yellow drawers separate from his mother, it makes him want to spit. When his mother is wearing them, it doesn’t make him want to spit. In short, Freud insists and says in a footnote that without doubt what little Hans wants to indicate here is that the drawers have a different

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function for him depending on whether his mother has them on or he sees them on their own account. We have, therefore, enough signposts to see that Freud himself is heading towards an adumbration of the total dialectical relativisation of this pairing of the yellow drawers and the black drawers. In the course of the long and complicated conversation in which little Hans and his father try to unravel the question together, it transpires that this pairing only takes on a value when it manifests a series of oppositions, which have to be sought out in remarks that at first go quite unnoticed. At any rate, they go drastically unnoticed when one tries sweepingly to identify the yellow drawers with something like urination, for instance, and the black drawers with something that in Hans’s language is called lumf. Furthermore, it is quite wrong to identify this lumf with def­ ecation, thereby overlooking what is essential to Hans about this element. We have his father’s own testimony that Hans’s word Lumpf is a transformation of the word Strumpf a stocking, and in another part of the observation little Hans associates it with a black blouse. It partakes of the crucial function of clothing as a concealing function. It is also the screen onto which is projected the major object of his preoedipal questioning, namely the missing phallus. The fact that excrement as such should be designated by a term allied to this symbolisation also shows us clearly enough that the instinctual relationship, the anality concerned in the mechanism of defecation, is a trifling matter alongside the symbolic function. Here, once again, this is the dominant register. For little Hans, the symbolic register is linked to a questioning that is vital for him - What can be lost? What can pass out through the hole? These are the first elements of what might be called a symbolic instrumentation which thereafter little Hans will examine while developing his mythical construction that includes, in the first dream, the bath that the fitter comes to unscrew, or later, in the second dream, his behind, which will also be unscrewed, along with his penis as well. All of this gives rise to the greatest delight in Freud and the father alike, it has to be said. They are in such a rush to impose their signification on little Hans that they don’t even wait for him to finish his remarks on the unscrewing of his little widdler before they tell him that the only possible explanation is that, quite naturally, this was so that he could be given a bigger one. Little Hans doesn’t say that at all, and on no account do we know whether he would have said it had he been allowed to speak to the end. Nothing indicates that he would have said it. Little Hans speaks only of replacement. This is an instance where we can touch on the countertransference. The

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father is the one who comes out with the idea that if Hans’s widdler and behind are being changed, it’s so that he can be given bigger ones. This is an example of the kinds of wrongs that are done all the time. After Freud, people have not held back from perpetuating this tradition, following a mode of interpretation that goes hunting out in goodness knows what affective proclivity whatever might prompt and justify what actually possesses its own laws, its own structure, its own gravitational pull, and which ought to be studied as such. We are going to draw to a close by saying that, in the mythical development of a symptomatic signifying system, one should always take into consideration its systematic coherence, at each step of the way, along with the kind of development that is specific to it in the diachrony of time. The development of any mythical system in a neurotic - I once called it the neurotic’s individual myth - presents as the issuing, the progressive dislocation, of a series of mediations that are resolved by a chaining-up of signifiers which always bears a circular character. This may be more or less apparent but is none the less fundamental in that the point of arrival bears a deep relation to the point of departure, without being exactly the same. I mean that the impasse that is always there at the start is to be found again at the point of arrival, where it can be regarded as a solution in an inverted form, just with a change of sign. But the impasse from which one began is always found in some fashion at the end of the operative displacement of the signifying system. I will be illustrating this for you in the next part, along the winding paths that we shall take after the holiday break, by taking up the hand that Hans was dealt. At the start, little Hans was faced with something that until then had been the game of the phallus, which was already a sort of luring relationship that was sufficient to maintain a progressive movement between him and his mother, and which offered him the meaningful prospect and goal of perfect identification with the object of mater­ nal love. But then a new element came on the scene. On this score, I concur with the authors, with the father and with Freud. A problem arises, the importance of which in the child’s development cannot be overestimated. It is grounded on the fact that nothing in the subject himself has been pre-established or arranged in advance which might allow him to take on board the prospect that sharply confronts him at two or three moments during his childhood development, namely the prospect of growth. Given the fact that nothing is pre-established or predetermined on the imaginary plane, what brings in an essential element of perturbation is very precisely a phenomenon that is quite distinct, but which for the child comes to be annexed imaginarily at the time of his first

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confrontation with the prospect of growth, namely the phenomenon of turgescence. That the penis should go from being smaller to larger during the first childhood masturbations or erections is no different from one of the most fundamental themes in the imaginary fantasia of Alice in Wonderland, and which lends this work its absolutely choice value in the matter of childhood imagination. Hans is confronted with a problem of this sort, that of integrating something that is linked to the existence of the real penis, the distinct existence of a penis that can itself become bigger or smaller, but which is also the penis that belongs to the small one or to the big one. To spell it right out, the problem of Hans’s development at this moment is linked to the absence of the penis of the big one, that is to say, of the father. And the phobia is produced in so far as Hans must face up to his Oedipus complex in a situation that necessitates a particularly difficult symbolisation. However, the fact that the phobia develops as it does, and that the analysis produces this abundance of mythical proliferation, indi­ cates to us, in the same way that the pathological reveals the normal, the complexity of the phenomenon at stake when it comes to the child integrating the real of his genitality, along with the deeply and fundamentally symbolic character of this moment of passage. 10 April 1957

XVIII C IR C U IT S

Wherefore the horse? From horse to railway Hans’s back and forth Wegert and Wagen If you needed reminding of the constitutive character of the impact of the symbolic in human desire, it seems to me that, for want of any accurate focus upon the most common and everyday experience, a quite riveting example may be found in the following formula, the immediacy and omnipresence of which should be lost on no one. What is at issue here is a formulation of the desire that is perhaps the keenest of all human desires, the most constant at any rate, which at certain turning points in the lives of each and every one of us we cannot fail to recognise, not to mention in the lives of those to whom we grant the closest attention, those who are tormented by some subjective unease. This desire, to name it at last, is called the desire for some other thing. What is meant, in terms of instinctual coaptation, by this desire for some other thing? What can it mean in the register of the object relation, which is conceived of as a sort of developmental evolution that is immanent to itself, arising by way of successive thrusts that it would be a mere matter of fostering? If the object relation is referred to a type object that is somehow preformed, where can this desire for some other thing come from? This preliminary remark is intended to put you, as Freud expresses it somewhere in his letters in connection with Egyptian realms, in [. . .].> What I have just said is not unrelated to my subject, namely little Hans.

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1 What have we been trying to detect in the mythical fomentation that is the essential characteristic of the observation on little Hans? What I’m calling mythical fomentation refers to each of the dif­ ferent elements, the ambiguity of which I have pointed out to you, along with how they are essentially designed to cover just about any signified, but not all the signifieds at the same time. When one of the signifiers covers one such element of the signified, the other signifierelements that are in play cover other signifieds. In other words, the signifying constellation operates by means of something that we may call a system o f transformation, that is, a turning motion which, when looked at more closely, covers the signified, from one moment to the next, in a different way, and by the same movement seems to exercise upon it an action that profoundly reshapes it. Why is this so? How are we to conceive of the dynamic function of this kind of sorcery, the instrument of which is the signifier and the goal of which, or the result of which, must be a reorientation of the signified, its repolarisation and reconstitution after a crisis? We are posing the question from this angle because we believe that it has to be posed in this way, for the simple reason that if we are turning our interest to the child’s mythical fomentation, or, to call it by a name that is more common, which says exactly the same thing yet in a form that is not so well adapted, childhood theories o f sexuality, it’s not because they are merely a kind of superfluity, an insubstantial dream, but rather because in themselves they harbour a dynamic element. This is what is at issue in the observation on little Hans, without which it wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. We ought to tackle this function of the signifier without any preconceived idea about the observation, because this observation is more exemplary than any other. It was seized in the miracle of origins where, if I may say so, the mind of the inventor and of those who followed him had not yet had time to become weighed down with all sorts of taboo elements, with the reference to a real that is founded on prejudices that somehow find goodness knows what support in earlier references, which are precisely those that are called into question, shaken up and discredited by the field that had just been discovered. In its freshness, the observation on Hans still main­ tains its revelatory power. I would almost say its explosive power. Over the course of this complex evolution, the dialogue with the father that Hans is caught up in plays a role that is inseparable from the furtherance of the said mythical fomentation. It may even be said that with each new intervention from the father, this mythi­

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cal fomentation that is in some sense prompted, bounces back and starts afresh, before falling back into a state of vegetation. However, as Freud expressly remarks at one turn, it has its own laws and its own particular necessities. What Hans gives us is not always what is expected of him, far from it. He comes out with things that sur­ prise, which the father in any case was not expecting. While Freud indicates that he had forewarned the father of them, Hans comes out with things that go beyond what Freud himself could foresee, because Freud doesn’t hide the fact that many elements remain unexplained and, on occasion, uninterpreted. But do we need all of them to be interpreted? We can sometimes press a little further the interpretation made by the two collabora­ tors, Hans’s father and Freud, but what we are trying to do here is to reconstitute the specific laws of gravitation behind the coherence of the signifier which appears to accrue around the horse. Freud tells us quite purposefully that we might be tempted to qualify the phobia by its object, the horse in this instance, so long as we perceive that the horse extends far beyond what appears as something of a supervalent figure, a heraldic figure, which focuses the entire field and is laden with all sorts of implications, and above all signifying implications. So, a certain number of reference points are necessary in order to mark out where our path is now to lead. We are not broaching anything new, because Freud himself articulates this in the most deliberate fashion. This passage is to be found after Hans’s first dialogue with his father in which the child starts to draw out of the phobia what I am calling its signifying implications. What Hans is able to construct around this is rich in mythical or even in novelistic aspect. It is rich in a fantasmatisation that bears not only on the past but also on what he would like to do with the horse, or in relation to the horse. There is no doubt that it accompanies and modulates his anxiety, but it also carries its own constructive force. After the dialogue that we are coming to now, between Hans and his father, Freud indicates that the phobia has plucked up courage, that it is developing, that it is venturing to show itself in its various phases. He writes the following - in this we get to see how diffuse it really is. It extends on to horses and on to carts, on to the fact that horses fall down and that they bite, on to horses o f a particular character, on to carts that are heavily loaded. I will reveal at once that all these characteristics were derived from the circum­ stance that the anxiety originally had no reference at all to horses but was transposed on to them secondarily and had now becomefixed upon those elements o f the horse complex which showed themselves well adaptedfor certain transferences.

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So, Freud formulates this in the most deliberate fashion. We have two poles. The first pole is that of the signifier, and this signifier will serve to support the full series of transferences, that is to say, the reshaping of the signified across all the possible permutations of the signifier. We may suppose as a working hypothesis, to the extent that it conforms to everything that our experience requires, that in principle the signified will be different from what it was at the start. Something has happened on the side of the signified. By means of the signifier, the field of the signified will be either reorganised or extended in some way. So, wherefore the horse? Things can be spun out in this regard. The horse is a theme that is rather rich in mythology, in legends and fairy tales, and in what is most constant yet opaque in the oniric thematic, namely the nightmare, the mare of the night. Dr Jones dedicated a whole book to this to show us that it is no accident that the mare of the night is not simply the anguishing apparition of the night-fiend, but that the mare is a substitute for the fiend. Of course, in keeping with the good old custom, Dr Jones goes searching in his analysis on the side of the signified, which brings him to the finding that everything is in everything. He shows us that there is no god in antique mythology, or even in modern mythology, who eludes this fact of having been a horse in some respect or other. And so Hippios, Mars, Odin, Hermes and Zeus are all horses. It’s a matter of finding out why. They are horses. And they have horses. Everything is a horse in this book. Clearly it’s not hard to show on this basis that the root MR, which is at once mare and the Gaelic mara, and also mer in French, is a root that in itself comprises a signification that is that much easier to find in that it covers pretty much everything. Obviously this is not the path along which we are to proceed. We are not about to imagine that all the explanations stand on the side of the horse. There is certainly on the side of the horse some­ thing that entails all sorts of analogous inclinations that turn it into something that, as an image, can be a favourable receptacle for all sorts of symbolisations of natural elements that come to the fore in childhood preoccupations, which indeed is the turn in the path at which we find little Hans. The accentuation that I’m trying to give here, which has always been neglected in every quarter, is that this is not what is essential. The essential point is that a certain signifier is brought in at a critical moment in Hans’s evolution, and this signi­ fier plays a polarising and re-crystallising role. Doubtless this looks to us like something pathological, but it is assuredly a constitutive factor. From this moment forth, the horse starts to punctuate the outside world with what Freud will much later qualify - looking back on Hans’s phobia in Hemmung, Symptom und Angst - as a

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signal function. These signals effectively restructure the world for Hans, a world that thereafter is profoundly marked by all sorts of limits, the property and function of which we must now try to grasp. What can it mean that, these limits having been constituted, there is by the same stroke a constitution of the possibility, through the fantasy or through desire, of a transgression of the limit at the same time as a constitution of an obstacle, an inhibition, that checks the subject within this limit? All of this is done with an element that is a signifier, the horse. To understand the function of the horse, the path to be taken is not that of trying to find what the equivalent of the horse is, whether it’s little Hans himself, or Hans’s mother, or Hans’s father, because it’s all of these and many other things besides. It can be any­ thing and everything in all this, in that little Hans makes successive attempts to apply to his world, in order to structure it, the signifying system that is coherent with the horse. Throughout these attempts, the horse manages to cover one or another of the major composite elements in the world of little Hans, notably his father, his mother, himself, his little sister Hanna, his little playmates, the fantasmatic girls, and many more. So, what is at stake, what we need to consider, is that the horse, when it is introduced as the central point of the phobia, introduces a new term that has precisely the property of being an obscure signifier. There is a wordplay here, in that I would almost say that un signifiant can be taken as a complete whole, as insignifiant. In some respect, it is insignificant. This is where it has its most profound function. It plays the role of a ploughshare that will furrow the real in a new way. We can conceive of how necessary this is.

2 Up to that point, everything had been all well and good for little Hans. The appearance of the horse is secondary. Freud firmly under­ scores how it is shortly after the appearance of the diffuse signal of anxiety that the horse will start to function. It is by following the development of this function step-by-step, right through to the end, that we can manage to comprehend what has happened. So, little Hans suddenly finds himself in a situation that has assur­ edly decompensated. Why did this come about? Up to a certain date, 5 or 6 February 1908, that is to say, a couple of months before his fifth birthday, he seemed to be bearing everything rather well. Something happens, and let’s take it as directly as possible in the

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terms of reference that are set out in the observation. The game was being pursued with the mother on the basis of the lure of seduction that thus far had been fully sufficient. The love relation with the mother introduced the child to the imaginary dynamic into which he would gradually be initiated. I would almost say, to introduce the relation to the bosom, in the sense of lap, from a new angle, that he insinuated himself into it. We have seen how at the start of the observation this was spreading out constantly as the game with the hidden object that Hans played in a sort of perpetual veiling and unveiling. Now, into these relationships with his mother, which were being pursued on a playful basis, certain real elements are introduced. The rules of the game, which revolved around dialogue on symbolic presence and absence, are suddenly violated for Hans. Two things appear. The first arises when Hans is no longer in a position to respond in full. I mean when he is no longer able to show, actually and in in its most glorious state, his little penis. Right there and then, he is rebuffed.His mother tells him word for word not only that it’s forbidden but that it’s eine Schweinerei. It’s piggish. It’s something repugnant. We assuredly cannot fail to see an element that is utterly essential here. Moreover, Freud underscores that the effects of the depreciative intervention did not arise straightaway but in the manner of aftershocks. He underscores the term that I’ve been repeating and pushing to the fore of analytic reflection, namely apres coup, retroaction. He says nachtragliche Gehorsam, which means deferred obedience. Gehor is hearing, an attentive audience. Gehorsam is submission, docility. Such threats and rebuffs are not brought to bear immediately, but after a lapse of time. And so my position would be far from a partial one. Freud also underscores, and not merely between the lines, a real element of comparison, of Vergleichung. In making comparisons between big and small, Hans has accurately assessed the reduced, minuscule and ridiculously insufficient character of the organ in question. It is this real element that comes to be added to the rebuff, lending it a weight that shakes the edifice of the relationships with his mother right down to its foundations. To this we may add a second element, the presence of little Hanna. At first this presence is taken from multiple angles of highly diverse patterns of assimilation. Further to this, however, it comes increas­ ingly to vouch for another element of the game that is very present here, and which also calls into question the whole edifice, all the principles and all the bases of the game, perhaps even to the point of rendering it superfluous in this instance. Those who have experience with children know that these are facts of common experience that the analysis of the child puts constantly before us.

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For the time being, what is occupying us is the way in which the signifier will operate in the midst of all this. What is to be done? One has to go to the text and make the construction. One has to know how to read. When we see things recurring in a certain way, with the same elements but recomposed in a different fashion, one has to know how to register them as such, without hunting out remote analogous references, without alluding to earlier events that we might extrapolate or assume in the subject. It is not, as we say in everyday language, the symbol of something that he is cogitating. It’s something else entirely. It’s a matter of laws that manifest this structuration, which is not real but symbolic. These laws will start to play out amongst themselves, to operate, as it were, by themselves in an autonomous fashion. At least they need to be regarded as such for a while, so that we can perceive whether this operation of reshaping, of reconstruction, is in itself something that is operative in this instance. I’m going to illustrate this for you. On 22 March, the father takes little Hans to see his grandmother in Lainz, as he does every Sunday. This is a crucial point. Let’s sketch out a map.

Vienna’s Innere Stadt is located on a bank of the Donaukanal, a former arm of the Danube. The home of Hans’s parents is in this part of the old town, delimited by the RingstraBe.

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Across from their apartment stands the Hauptzollamt, the Head Customs House, and a little further off stands the Hauptzollamt station that is frequently mentioned in the observation. Facing the Customs House [on the other side of the Wien river], you have a square where now stands the Kriegsministerium and a very nice museum, the Museum fur Kunst und Industrie. The Hauptzollamt is where Hans thinks of going once he has made some progress and is able to get beyond a stretch of space that lies in front of their apartment. I am inclined to think that their apartment is right at one end of the block, on the road behind the Customs House, because there is an allusion to the fact that the Nordbahn runs past opposite our house. Now, the Nordbahnhof is on the other bank of the Danube Canal. There are quite a few of these light railway networks in Vienna, feeding in from east and west and from north and south. But there are also a number of local lines, in particular a circle line that is sunk into a cutting. It’s probably the same one that the young homosexual woman, whom I spoke about at the start of the year, threw herself into. There are two lines that are of interest to us as far as little Hans’s adventures are concerned. There is a link-line, the Verbindungsbahn, connecting the Nordbahnhof to the Meidling Siidbahnhof, which runs nearby the apartment block in which Hans’s apartment is located, and it is on this line that Hans can see the truck, what Freud calls eine Draisine, on which he

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would like so much to ride. Before then, he had also been to another station, to take a train that for some stretches runs underground, and this is the line that goes to Lainz. On Sunday 22 March, Hans’s father proposes that they take a route that is slightly more complicated than their usual one. Hans’s apartment

/ Mauer!

They will take the Stadtbahn and stop at Schonbrunn palace, which is like a Viennese Versailles. This is where the zoological garden is that little Hans visits with his father and which plays such an important role in the observation. It’s far less grandiose than Versailles. The House of Hapsburg was probably much closer to the people than was the House of Bourbon, because you can see how even at a time when the city didn’t spread out quite so far, its profile was visible on the horizon. After the visit to Schonbrunn park, they will take the steam tramway, which at the time was line 60, and this will bring them to Lainz. To give you an idea of scale, Lainz is about the same distance from Vienna as Vaucresson is from Paris.2 The tramway carries on beyond Lainz to Mauer and Modling. Usually, when they just go to the grandmother’s house, they take a south­ bound tramway that goes straight to Lainz. A further tramway line links this direct line and the Stadtbahn. The connection is made at the station Unter-St-Veit. This will allow you to understand what little Hans will say on the day that he has the fantasy of coming back home from Lainz, when he says that the train left with him and his grandmother on it while his father

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missed it, and that he can see the second train coming from Unter-StVeit. The network forms a loop, a virtual loop because the two lines don’t connect. They simply allow each of them to get to Lainz. A few days later, in conversation with his father, little Hans will come out with something that is classified among the many things that he shows us he has been pondering. Even when everyone wants to make him say that he has been dreaming, he underlines very firmly that these are things he has thought - Nein, nicht getraumt; ich hab’ mir’s gedacht. The essential point to keep in mind is that this is where the Verkehrskomplex makes its entrance. Freud himself indicates that it is quite natural, given how matters stand, that what refers to the horse and everything that the horse will do, the Pferdekomplex, extends much further into the transport system. In other words, on the horizon of the circuits traced by the horse there are the circuits of the railway. This is so evidently true that the first explanation Hans gives his father on how he experiences his phobia concerns the fact that there is a large yard and a wide lane in front of their apartment. It’s easy to understand why it’s such a big deal for little Hans to cross over them. Across from the house, these horses-and-carts come to load and unload, and they line up along the length of the loading dock.

Lagerhaus ►Verladungsrampe —►Wagen l

11 I t 11 I И I I t И H + H ' / I I I H I I t I I t I Hansenge'planter Weg

The tangency, as it were, between the circuit system of the horse and the circuit system of the railway is indicated in the clearest fashion the very first time that little Hans starts to explain himself a little on the horse phobia.

3 What does little Hans say on 5 April? He says that he should so much like to climb onto the cart where he has seen the boys playing on the boxes. I f the cart stands still, then I can get on to the cart quick,

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geschwind, and get on to the board. By board he means the loading deck. What is he afraid of? He fears that the horses will set off and prevent him from making this swift movement, and then he will have to get straight back off again. There must be some meaning to this. To comprehend this meaning, and to comprehend anything in the functioning of the signifying system, one should not start with the question of what the board might be doing here, or what the cart might be doing here, or even what the horse is doing here. The horse certainly is something, and at the end we will be able to say what its purpose is, when we find this out from its functioning. But as yet we can’t know anything. We need to pause on this horse. His father pauses here. Everybody pauses here, except the analysts who pore endlessly over the obser­ vation on little Hans, trying to read something into it. The father takes an interest in this and asks him why he is afraid. Perhaps you’re afraid you won’t come home any more if you drive away in the cart? he says. Oh no! replies little Hans, I can always come back to Mummy, in the cart or in a cab. I can tell him the number o f the house too. There’s no difficulty. No one seems to have paused on this, yet it’s striking that while Hans is afraid of something, this something is absolutely not what it would suit us so well for it to be. This could even lead in the direc­ tion of the comprehension of things that I’ve been trying to mobilise for you, namely the theme of being dragged along by the situation. That would be a nice metaphor. But this is not at all the case. He knows very well that he will always come back to his point of depar­ ture. If we have just a little comprenoire,3we could tell ourselves that perhaps after all this is what is at stake, namely that, whatever is done, there’s no getting out of it. This is a simple indication that I’m making in passing, but to stick with this might well be overly subtle and insufficiently rigorous. We ought rather to perceive that there are situations in the obser­ vation that we are compelled to fetch alongside this one. We have to pause over this because this is the very phenomenology of the phobia. Here we can behold the total ambiguity of what is desired and what is feared. In the end, we might believe that it’s the fact of being dragged away, of leaving, that anguishes little Hans. But by his own testimony, this fact of leaving falls quite short because he knows full well that one always comes back. What, then, is meant by his wanting in some sense to go beyond? Surely this formula - that he wants to go beyond - is something that we can provisionally maintain in a sort of minimal construc­ tion. If his whole system is in disarray due to the fact that the rules of the game are no longer being respected, he can feel himself to

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be caught, purely and simply, in an untenable situation, the most untenable element in the situation being that of no longer knowing where to locate himself. I am now going to bring in other elements that in a certain way reproduce what is indicated in the fantasy of the phobic dread. In the first fantasy, Hans will drive off with the horses, carrying him further away from the loading dock. And he will come back to re-converge with Mummy, which maybe he desired too much, or feared too much, who knows? When we have read and reread the observation, we should remem­ ber at least two further stories. There is another fantasy, which doesn’t crop up at just any moment, and which is supposed to have happened. He imagined the rest with his father. The date is 11 April. We were travelling in the train to Gmunden. Gmunden is where they spend their holidays. In the station we put on our clothes; but we couldn’t get it done in time, and the train carried us on. It seems that at that time, gather­ ing together one’s luggage and getting it on board was more of a worry than it is for us these days. Freud himself hints at this in the case of the young homosexual woman when he makes his analogy with the two stages of a journey. The first entails all the necessary preparations, today so complicated and hard to effect, the second involves getting the luggage and oneself aboard. So, Hans and his father don’t have time to put on their clothes before the train starts off again. There is then a third fantasy, which Hans tells his father on 21 April and which we shall call the platform scene. These are just conventional labels to help us find our bearings later on. It occurs just before the major dialogue with his father to which we have been referring. Hans tells his father, There was a train at Lainz and I trav­ elled with my Lainz Grandmummy to the Hauptzollamt station. This grandmother is the woman they visit every Sunday, about whom we are told absolutely nothing in the observation, and I must say that this is rather suggestive of a fearsome character, because at that time it was much easier for contemporaries to situate the whole family than it is for me today. So, die Lainzerin, as Hans later calls her, is supposed to be on board the train with him. His father, meanwhile, hadn’t got down from the bridge yet, and they have left without him. Given that the trains pass frequently, and one can see down the line as far as Unter-St-Veit, Hans says that he arrives at the platform in time to catch the second train with his father. If little Hans had already left, how did he come back? This is pre­ cisely the impasse. In truth, it’s an impasse that no one has managed to elucidate, but the father does ask himself these questions. In the

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observation, a dozen lines are devoted to what might have occurred in Hans’s mind. As for us, let’s content ourselves with our schemas. In the first schema, the two of them leave, Hans and his grand­ mother. The second, mysteriously, is the path of the impossible, of non-solution. In the third, they end up leaving as two, Hans and his father. In other words, there is something that cannot fail to strike us if we are already roughly acquainted with the two poles of the obser­ vation on little Hans, namely, at the start, the whole maternal drama that is constantly underlined, and, at the end, I am now with father. One cannot overlook how there must be a certain relation between this implacable back and forth to his mother and the fact that one fine day he dreams of marching off with his father. This is a simple indica­ tion, but it’s clear. Only, it’s quite impossible. That is to say, one really can’t see how little Hans, having set off with his grandmother, can now set off again with his father. This is possible only in the imaginary. What we can see appearing here between the lines is the fun­ damental schema that I told you was the schema for mythical furtherance on the whole - one starts from a point of impossibility, or an impasse, to arrive at another impasse and another point of impossibility. In the first case, it is impossible to leave the mother behind, one always comes back to her. Don’t tell me that this is why I ’m anxious. In the second case, one may indeed think that all that has to be done is to permute and to leave with the father, as Hans himself thought, to the point of writing as much to the Professor, which is the best use one can make of one’s thoughts. Only, what also appears in the text of the myth is that this is impossible, that there is always something left half-open somewhere. If we start with this schema, we will see that matters are not limited to these elements alone, in that they offer us quite easily, all by themselves, the opportunity of placing them alongside the schema of the hitching. What is hitched to what? This is surely one of the absolutely primary elements behind the appearance of the choice of the horse signifier, or the use of the horse. It is quite useless to discern in which direction the coupling is made, because the sense in which Hans operates is dictated just as much by the favourable occasions provided by the horse function. We can even say that this is what guided his choice of the horse. In any case, he is careful to show the origin of this when he tells us about the moment he got the nonsense. He tells us this on 9 April, in dialogue with his father, at a moment that is no less noteworthy than any of the other moments, and we shall see what this comes on the heels of. Hans tells us that he was playing horsey, when something happened that will be of great importance in that it will furnish the

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first model of the fantasy of injury that will manifest later on with respect to his father. First of all, however, it was extracted from the real, precisely from one of these horsey games, when his friend Fritzl sustains an injury to his foot. In response to his father’s query, Hans says that they played at horses ohne Wagen, without carts, and in this case, the cart can stay at home. However, the horse can also be hitched to a cart. Hans himself articulates how first and foremost the horse is an element designed to be hitched. It is detachable and attachable. This ambo­ ceptor characteristic, which we meet constantly in the functioning of the horse, is yielded in the very first experience from which Hans extracts it. Before being a horse, the horse is something that links, that coordinates, and, as you will see, it is precisely in this mediat­ ing function that we will find it throughout the development of the myth. If a basis needed to be established for what will be confirmed in every corner of what I am going to develop for you next in the function of the horse signifier, here we have immediately, from the mouth of Hans himself, that it is in the direction of the gram­ matical coordination of the signifier that we must head. Indeed, it is at that very moment, when he is articulating this in connection with the horse, that Hans himself says, I think that was how I got the nonsense, Mir scheint, da hab’ ich die Dummheit gekriegt. The verb kriegen is used each time in connection with the nonsense. It means to get or to catch. It is also used in the colloquial expression ein Kind kriegen, to denote a woman falling pregnant, like in French when we say unefemme attrape un enfant. Once again, this was not lost on the authors, on the father and on Freud. Freud provides a long footnote on it, which everybody has leapt on, to the point that the phrasing has posed something of a difficulty for the translators, who for once have resolved it elegantly. Hans keeps saying, wegen dem Pferd. He comes out with this refrain, that he got the nonsense ’cos o f the horse. Freud makes no mistake in iden­ tifying this with an association between the word wegen, because of, and the word Wagen, which means carriage, coach, cart, vehicle, and so on, and which Hans would have heard pronounced Wagen. This is how the unconscious works. In other words, the horse pulls the cart just as something pulls behind it the word wegen. So, there is nothing excessive in saying that it’s precisely at this moment, when Hans is prey to something that is not even a wherefore - because beyond the point where the rules of the game are respected there is nothing else but trouble, a lack of being and a lack of any wherefore - that he gives rise to the dragging along of his ’cos of, which doesn’t correspond to anything, by something that is the pure and simple x of the horse.

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In yet other words, at the begetting of the phobia, at its very point of emergence, we find ourselves faced with the typical process of metonymy, that is to say, the passage from the weight of meaning, or more exactly from the questioning that the comment brings with it, the passage from one point of the textual line, to the point that follows. This is the very definition of metonymy in its structure. It’s because the weight of the wegen is entirely veiled, and because it has been transferred to what comes just afterwards, dem Pferd, that the term assumes its articulatory value and accrues to it every hope of a solution. The balance of Hans’s situation hangs on this transfer of grammatical weight. In the end, we are simply meeting again the concrete associations - and not associations imagined in goodness knows what psycho­ logical hyperspace - that fall into two kinds. On the one hand there is metaphorical association, where one word corresponds to another for which it can be substituted. On the other hand there is meto­ nymic association, where one word yields the following word that can come next in a sentence. These are the two kinds of response in psychological experience, and you call them associations because you want absolutely for this to occur somewhere in cerebral neu­ rones. I don’t know anything about that. At any rate, as an analyst I don’t want to know anything about it. I come across these two types of association, called metaphor and metonymy, where they stand, in the text of this pool of language in which Hans is immersed. It was here that he lighted upon the originative metonymy that brought with it the horse, the first term around which his whole system would be reconstituted. 8 May 1957

XIX P E R M U T A T IO N S

Don’t race off from me! The whole house decamping Be a true father Pincers So, we’ve arrived at what is being played out between 5 and 6 April. This spatial-temporal moment is not necessarily to be conflated with chronological distance. We have followed the explanation that little Hans gave his father, on 5 April, of the fantasies he came out with, in which he expresses how he would like to climb up on to the cart that usually unloads in front of their building. I remind you that we insisted on the ambiguity of the anxiety to which Hans gives shape and form in the fantasy. It might seem that this anxiety arises from the simple perspective of a fear of separa­ tion, but we pointed out how what is dreaded here is not necessarily separation from his mother, because when his father asks him about this he specifies that he is quite sure, and almost over sure, of being able to return. It is on the afternoon of 9 April that the wegen dem Pferd arises, in the course of Hans’s revelation of a moment that seems to him to be significant with respect to how he got the nonsense. You know that it’s not for nothing that, in the retrospections of memory, the moment when Hans gets his nonsense is far from univocal. He says each time, with equal conviction, I got the nonsense. Everything is grounded upon this, because what is at issue here is nothing other than a symbolic retrospection linked to the signification that is presentified at each moment of the signifying plurivalence of the horse. There are at least two moments, which we are already familiar with, when Hans says, I got the nonsense. There is the moment when this wegen dem Pferd arises, which

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provided me with the peroration to my last lesson, but at the cost of a jump that didn’t leave me time to indicate the context in which this manifest metonymy appears. It is in correlation with the story of Fritzl’s fall when they are playing horsey in Gmunden. On another occasion he told us that he got the nonsense when he was out with his mother, and the same text notes the paradox of this explication, because if he didn’t peel away from his mother once throughout the whole day, it was because she already had his intense anxiety on her hands. So, the anxiety had already begun, and I would further say that the horse phobia had already been declared in the context of this outing in her company. This is the point we’ve reached, in Freud’s text on the one hand and in our initial decipherment on the other. Last time, I laid this out for you at the level of something that is taking shape, and I indicated its graphical aspect across its three forms. It concerns things that Hans has thought and concocted. They are never dreams. He always tells his father that he has thought, gedacht, these things. We can recognise here the very material with which we are usually working when we work with children, imaginary mate­ rial that is always so richly resonant, but what I’m trying to show you is that all these imaginary resonances that can be sounded out here are no match for the succession of structures, the series of which I’m going to try to complete for you today. These structures are each marked by the same exemplary feature. The fantasy of 5 April, which is complemented by the father’s ques­ tioning, traces out the idea of Hans’s return to his mother. In the fantasy of 21 April there is another important moment of evolution when Hans imagines, not without reason, that he will set off with his grandmother and then, on the other side of a gap, that his father will join him again in a move that may equally be inscribed into this cycle, with the proviso that we have an enigmatic impossibility here when it comes to the two protagonists joining again after having been separated just an instant before.

circuit 2

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Before moving further into a confirmative exploration of this exhaustion of the possibilities of the signifier, which here is the object at the originary level that I’m putting before you, I shall mention again the tangency I indicated. There is the enigmatic circuit of the horse, which is clearly anguishing in the first example and which manifests as impossible in the other, and then its tangency with the larger circuit constituted by the wider system of traffic. Freud himself notes that Hans’s imagination was advancing systematically from horses, which draw vehicles, to railways. Everything takes place between two longings - two nostalgies in the sense of voaxoq, a return home - to come and to come back. Freud asserts that the function of return is fundamental to the object, insisting that it ought to have been engendered in the form of something that is re-found, but that, through the subject’s devel­ opment, a necessity is constituted which is strictly correlative to the distance taken from the object. This necessity is correlative to the symbolic dimension, which distances the object, yet so that the subject may re-find it. This is the truth that is half-eluded, even lost, in the insistence of psychoanalysis today on accentuating the term frustration without understanding that frustration is only ever the first stage of the return to the object which, in order to be reconstituted, must be re-found. 1 Let’s remind ourselves what is at issue in the case history of little Hans. For Freud, what is at issue is none other than the Oedipus complex, the drama of which brings of its own account a new dimension that is necessary to the constitution of a replete human world and to the constitution of the object. This object is not merely the correlate of what is claimed to be instinctual genital maturation, but rather the fact of having acquired a certain symbolic dimension. What is this symbolic dimension? To aim directly at what is at stake, given my disquisition thus far with which I am assuming you are already familiar, we can say that it consists in what is involved each time that we are dealing with the appearance of a phobia. Here in the case of little Hans it is manifest. It has to do with what comes to be revealed to the child, from any angle, concerning the fundamental privation by which the image of the mother is marked. It concerns the moment of this intolerable privation, because ulti­ mately the fact that the child himself appears to be threatened by

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this supreme privation, that of not being able to fulfil her in any way whatsoever, hangs on this moment. Moreover, it is to this privation that the father must bring something. It’s as easy as pie - copula­ tion. He gives her what she doesn’t have. Good Lord, won’t he just give her one!1This is precisely what is at stake in little Hans’s drama, and we can see it gradually being revealed as the dialogue wears on. People tell us that the environmental image, as they put it these days, of Hans’s family circle has not been traced out sufficiently. What more do they want? It’s enough to read the case - and not even between the lines - to see the father’s constant and diligent presence spreading out, while the mother is mentioned only to the extent that the father asks her whether what she has just said is accurate. Ultimately, the mother is never with little Hans in the observation. Meanwhile, this very sensible, very kind and very Viennese father is right there, sparing no effort in mollycoddling his little Hans and toiling away. And then, every Sunday, he goes to see his mum, with little Hans of course. One cannot help but be struck by the ease with which Freud - knowing as we do what his main ideas were at the time - accepts that little Hans, who slept in his parents’ room until he was four years old, could certainly never have beheld any scene that might have unsettled him regarding the fundamental nature of coitus. The father asserts this in what he writes to Freud, and Freud doesn’t challenge the affirmation. He probably had his own idea about it, since Hans’s mother was Freud’s patient. At one point in the major scene of the dialogue with his father, Hans says du tust eifern. The phrase is almost untranslatable in French, as has been noted by Fliess’s son who has focused his atten­ tion on this scene. While Fliess’s handling is not fully to his credit, his remarks are quite right on this score. He highlights how the expression is almost untranslatable and invokes the resonance of the jealous God in Luther’s Ich Dein Gott bin ein eifriger Gott, a God that is identical to the figure of the father in Freudian doctrine. You ought to be a father, you ought to be cross with me, it must be true. By the time Hans manages to say this, much water has flowed under the bridge. He takes a while to reach this moment. Let’s also ask without further ado whether little Hans is in any way gratified in this regard during the course of the crisis. Why would he be gratified, if his father is in this critical position, the apparition of which in the background needs to be conceived of as a fundamental element of the opening from which the phobic fantasy has surged up? It is certainly unthinkable that this very dialogue should have, as it were, psychoanalysed, not little Hans, but his father, making him more virile at the end of the story - which is rather happily settled in four months - than he was at the start. In other words, if it is to the

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real father that little Hans addresses so urgently his appeal, there is no reason that this should make him rise up in reality. If, therefore, little Hans reaches a happy solution to the crisis he has entered, it is surely worthwhile asking ourselves whether at the end of this crisis we may deem this to be a completely normal dis­ solution of the Oedipus complex. Is the genital position, in inverted commas, at which little Hans arrives, something that in and of itself suffices to assure you that his future relation with a woman will be all that one might imagine desirable for it to be? The question is an open one. And not only is it open but a number of remarks can be made in this regard. If little Hans is destined for heterosexuality, this guarantee might not be enough to make us believe that this heterosexuality would be sufficient in and of itself to ensure a full consistence, so to speak, to the female object. You see that we are compelled to move forward by a concentric nudge. We have to stretch the canvas, and the picture upon it, over the different poles at which it is attached if we are to be sure of its normal tethering, if we are to be sure that this is the screen upon which we are to pursue this particular phenomenon, namely the development of the phobia, which is correlative with the develop­ ment of the treatment itself. A simple example of this kind of panting aspect of Hans’s father comes to mind, to get our investigation moving again. After Hans’s long explanation of his love for his father - they have spent the morning on this - they have breakfast together and, when the father gets up from the table, Hans tells him, Vatti, renn mir nicht davon! The [French] translation bears the overwhelming stamp of good­ ness knows what that the translator has cooked up, but all the same her rendition is not wrong here - Papa reste! Ne t’en va pas au galop! [Stay Daddy! Don’t go off at a gallopf] The father notes that he was struck by his saying renn. It’s rather, Don’t race off like that! One might even add, because in German this is allowed, Don’t race offfrom me like that! We are bringing the question of the analysis of the signifier to the level of the hieroglyphic decipherment of the mythological function, but this doesn’t mean that paying attention to the signifier isn’t first and foremost a matter of knowing how to read. Obviously this is the precondition for being able to translate correctly. This [French] translation is regrettable given the sound resonance that Freud’s oeuvre ought to have for French readers. So, here we are with the father. Already, we have practically inscribed onto our chart the place that he must occupy. It is through him, through the identification with him, that little Hans ought to be able to find the normal path to the larger circuit onto which it is now time for him to pass. There is so much truth in this that it is

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confirmed by what is in some sense a doubling of the consultation of 30 March. The consultation of 30 March is the one to which Hans is brought by his father. In my opinion this is an illustration of the doubling, or indeed the tripling, of the paternal function on which I have been insisting as crucial to any comprehension of the Oedipus complex and of analytic treatment itself, to the extent that the Name-of-the-Father must come into play. Hans’s father brings the child before Freud, which allows for a representation of the supra-father, the symbolic father. I must say that when Freud simply prophesises the Oedipal schema, not without a touch of humour which he points out himself, broaching it at the outset, little Hans’s harkens to this with a sort of amused interest, with an overtone of How can he know all this? The Professor is surely not God’s confidant! The humoristic relation, properly speaking, that sustains little Hans’s relation with the remote father that Freud represents is exemplary and marks out also the necessity of this transcendent dimension. Moreover, how wrong one would be to seek always to embody it in the style of terror and respect. It is no less fruitful in this other register where its presence allows little Hans to unfold his problem. However, as I said, many other things come to pass in parallel with this, which have a great deal more weight for little Hans’s progress. Read the observation and you will see that on this day of Monday 30 March, when he is taken to see Freud, the father’s account points out two things. The exact function of these two moments is slightly obfuscated due to the fact that he reports them in the preamble, even though the second was a remark that Hans made following the consultation, but he certainly doesn’t minimise their importance. So, the first item. I remind you that it’s a Monday, just after the Sunday when they took a slightly more complicated route to the grandmother’s house, first going for a stroll in Schonbrunn.2 Hans recounts to his father a fantasy of a transgression. You can’t call it anything else because it’s the very image of a transgression. There can be no finer than this utterly unmitigated transgression desig­ nated by a rope under which the two of them crawl together. The father explains that this is the rope they had seen in the Schonbrunn gardens, preventing them from crossing a stretch of lawn to see the sheep. Hans had observed that it would be quite easy to slip under the rope, to which his father had replied that respectable people don’t crawl under ropes. So, Hans’s doesn’t fail to respond to this, later, with the fantasy in which they perform the transgression together, zusammen. The fact of doing it together is the important

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element. And then we told the policeman at the end o f the garden, and he grabbed hold o f us, uns zusammengepackt. The importance of this fantasy seems to be amply graspable from its context. Surely what is at stake is to pass over to the register of the father and for them to do something together that will get them taken off, zusammengepackt. This allows for a clarification of the missed embarkation. Of course, the schema has to be taken in reverse to be understood. It is in the very nature of the signifier to present things in a strictly operational fashion. The whole question revolves around embarkation - it’s a matter of knowing whether he will set off with his father. Now, setting off with his father is out of the question, precisely because the father cannot make use of this function, at least not the embarkation that is made a reality in their being carted off together. We are going to see what use each of little Hans’s successive elaborations have when it comes to getting closer to this goal that is both desired and impossible, but what is already initiated in this first fantasy, just before the consultation with Freud, is already amply indicative. Here, now, is the second fantasy, which comes as though we simply must make sure we don’t overlook the reciprocal function of the two circuits - the small maternal circuit and the large paternal circuit. This fantasy gets even closer to the goal. Returning from Freud’s office in the evening, little Hans will give himself over to another transgressive fantasy. He says to his father, I went with you in the train, and we smashed a window. You can’t do much better than that when it comes to the signifier of a breakout. Yet again, they are mitgenommen, taken off, by a policeman. And once more this is the full stop, the terminus, of the fantasy. On 2 April, that is, three days after the consultation, there is the first improvement, which moreover we may suspect to have been overstated because no sooner was Hans seemingly in remission than the father was revising his judgement, writing to Freud that the improvement perhaps was not so complete as I may have represented it. Even so, the lifting spirits that little Hans is starting to show manifest themselves in his being able to stay a little longer in front of the Haustore, the street-door. Let’s not forget that in the context of the time, the street-door has the function of representing the family’s propriety and decorum. When circumstances force the Gide family to seek a new home, moving a few floors up is of little consequence, but the porte-cochere is another thing altogether. Gide’s aunt instructs his recently widowed mother that leaving the building is out of the question - Tu te le dois; tu le dois a tonfils? So, the street-door is no small matter in the topology of what relates to little Hans. As I told you last time, this street-door and the borderline that

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it marks is something that is duplicated point-by-point by what stands a little farther off, perhaps not as close by as I said it was last time, but still within view of the main facade of the station on the local Vienna line, the one that regularly takes them to the grandmother’s. Indeed, trusting in information I had gathered with some care, last week I drew up a schematic map on which the parents’ apart­ ment lay behind the Customs House, on Hintere Zollamtstrasse. That was not quite right. I realised this thanks to something that reveals yet again how blind we are to what is right under our noses, and which is called the signifier, the letter.

In the very diagram that we have in the observation that Freud has given us, the name of the street is there, Untere Viaductgasse.

v;

Lagerhaus Wagen

-Verladungsrampe

—.

Ho f r a u m

1 □ lllll ■Ц 11111111i n 11111111 HHU t H l in Gitter Einfahrttor

Unt e r e V i a d u c t g a s s e

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There is a hidden street, which allows us to suppose that on one side of the byway there is a building, which indeed is indicated on the maps of Vienna, that corresponds to what Freud calls a Lagerhaus. It’s a special depot for the Office for the Taxation of Food-Stuffs. This accounts for all the different connections that converge here - on one hand the Nordbahn with the little truck that will play a role in Hans’s fantasy, and then on the other the possibil­ ity of having right opposite their apartment the depot that Freud speaks about, while still keeping the station entrance in full view of their street-door. So, the stage-set is in place in which the drama is to unfold. Hans’s poetic spirit and, if you will, his tragic spirit, will allow us to follow its construction.

2 How are we to manage to conceive of the fact that the passage to a wider circle was a necessity for little Hans? I have already said often enough that everything hinges on the stranglehold, the deadlock, that has arisen in Hans’s relationship with his mother. We find constant indications of this. The ground­ ing of the child’s crisis, insomuch as his mother is the one who until then had ensured the propping up of his insertion into the world, is something that we can grasp at face value in the anxiety that prevents him from roaming beyond a particular radius that cor­ responds to the sight of his home. Obsessed as we have been with a certain number of supervalent significations, it so happens that we have often overlooked what has been set out in the clearest way in the text, articulated through a symptom as close to the level of the signifier as the phobia is. His father writes of Hans’s venturing outside the house but not going away from i t . . . , turning round at the first attack o f anxiety. He is turning round to look at their house. Why not try to understand that we merely have to translate this in the same way that Hans pre­ sents it to us? What he is afraid of is not simply that one person or another might no longer be at home when he comes back, especially given that his father - and it seems that the mother also has a hand in this - is not always in the circuit. What is in question at the point Hans has reached is, as is expressed in the cart fantasy, that the whole house might just decamp. What is essentially at stake is the house. The house has been the main issue since he first understood that this mother can be missing and at the same time is completely united with him. What he fears is not to be separated from her but

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to be led goodness knows where with her. We scent this element coming to the surface in the observation from one moment to the next. To the extent that he is joined to his mother, he no longer knows here he is. I shall simply cite one episode here. It’s the occasion I highlighted earlier, on 5 April, when little Hans mentions the outbreak of his nonsense. In a somewhat arbitrary fashion, he says that it arose when he was out with his mother, just after they bought the waist­ coat. They saw a bus-horse fall down. These bus-horses are the large horses that used to pull the omnibuses. When the horse falls, Hans thinks, Now it’ll always be like this. All horses in buses'llfall down. To allow the Japanese flower to come back to life in the water of the observation, let’s ask ourselves, by simply following the father’s line of curiosity, what significance this moment during the day spent with his mother might have. His father asks him, Where did you go with Mummy that day?, and Hans lists the day’s programme. They went to the skating rink, then to the Kaffeehaus, then to buy the waistcoat, and from there they went directly to the Zuckerbacker, the confectioner’s shop. Hans says, dann beim Zuckerbacker mit der Mammi, then to the confectioner’s shop with Mummy. This contrasts sharply with what came before. Given the fact that he had been with his mother the whole day, this seems to indicate, not a hole or a censure on the child’s part, but certainly that something had happened at that point for him to underscore in this way that he had indeed been with Mummy. He underscores that he had been with his mother, and not with someone else who might have been around. This mit der Mammi carries altogether the same value of accen­ tuation in his discourse as what he said at the start, Nicht mit der Mariedl, ganz allein mit der Mariedl. It surely plays the same role. The overtone of the father pressing his questioning rather far and then abandoning it fairly suddenly allows us to perceive a trait that is confirmed no less by an earlier occurrence when, talking with little Hans who had just come into his bed, the child said, When you’re away, I ’m afraid you’re not coming home. His father replies, And have I ever threatened you that I shan’t come home? Not you, says Hans, but Mummy. Mummy’s told me she won’t come back. Whereupon, to caulk the gap, his father says, She said that because you were naughty. Indeed, you can see very well what is going on. Without pushing the character of a police investigation any further, it is right here that we have something that for little Hans calls into question the solidity of his parents’ marriage, which in the catamnesis of the observation we learn has come completely undone. It is around this point that revolves the anxiety of being carried off with the maternal love, which has shown its presence since the very first fantasy.

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While the horse is there with its property of representing the fall that threatens little Hans, on the other hand there is the danger expressed by the horse’s biting. To the extent that the deepening crisis is commensurate with Hans no longer being able to satisfy his mother, oughtn’t we to be struck by the fact that this biting is the retaliation for the fall? One might see some implication here of what is brought into use in a confused way in the idea of a return of a sadistic impulsion - an idea that, as you know, is so important in Kleinian themes - but this isn’t really what I have been indicating for you. I said that it was a matter of the child quashing his disappointment in love. Conversely, if he in turn is disappointing, how could he fail to see that he is equally within reach of being consumed? This has become all the more of a threat in view of the privation, and all the more ungraspable because he cannot bite back. The horse is what represents both falling and biting. These are its two properties. I am pointing this out to the extent that, in the first circuit, we can see the element of biting only in an elusive way. Anyway, let’s move on and punctuate now what ensues from a certain moment forth. We will have to pick out how this thing arose, even if it means going back over the sequence of little Hans’s fantasies one by one. This sequence includes a number of further fantasies that punctuate in some way what I have called the sequence of mythical permutations. Here at the individual level the myth certainly cannot, due to all sorts of characteristics, be fully restored to a kind of identity with the developed mythology that lies at the base of any social seat, anywhere in the world, wherever myths are functionally present. And don’t imagine that even where they appear to be absent, in our scientific civilisation, they are not there somewhere. Nevertheless, even if this identity cannot be restored, there is one characteristic of mythical development that is maintained at the individual level and this is its function as a solution to a situation that is in dead­ lock, in impasse. This is little Hans’s situation between his father and mother. The individual myth reproduces on a small scale the fundamental character of mythical development such as it presents wherever we can get a sufficient purchase on it. All in all, it’s a matter of how to face up to an impossible situation through the successive articulation of all the different forms of the impossibility of a solution. It is in this respect that mythical creation responds to a question. It roams, as it were, around the full circle of what presents both as a possible opening and an opening that it is impossible to take. Once the circuit has been run through, something has become a

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reality, signifying that the subject has placed himself at the level of the question. It is in this respect that Hans is a neurotic and not a pervert. There is nothing artificial about distinguishing in this way the direction of Hans’s evolution from another possible direction. This direction is indicated in the observation itself, as I am going to show you next time, but I can already point out that all these goings-on in relation to the mother’s drawers indicate in negative the path Hans could have taken on the side of what culminates in fetishism. The little pair of drawers is there for no other reason than to present to us the resolution that Hans could have taken, of becom­ ing attached to these drawers behind which there is nothing, but upon which he might have depicted what he would have wished. It is precisely because little Hans is not a mere nature lover, but a metaphysician, that he conveys the question to its proper place, that is to say, right where there is something that lacks, and where he asks what the reason is - in the mathematical sense of raison, the common difference - behind this wanting being. And he will conduct himself, just like the collective mind of a primitive tribe, with the rigour we have come to expect of him, doing the rounds of the possible solutions and making certain choices so as to constitute a battery of signifiers. Never forget that the signifier is not there to represent signification. It is there much rather to stand in for the gaps in a signification that signifies nothing. It is because the signi­ fication is literally lost, because the trail is lost as in the fairy tale of Hop-o’-My-Thumb, that the white stones of the signifier surge up to fill this hole and this void. Today I shall content myself with zooming in on the ensuing sequence of fantasies that follow on from the three examples I gave you last time - the fantasy of the cart by the loading dock, the fantasy of the missed stop at Gmunden, and the fantasy of setting off with the Lainz grandmother and returning with the father, in spite of its evident impossibility. We are now going to see another series of fantasies that, when we know how to read them, cover in a certain sense, and modify, the permutation of elements.

3 The first fantasy in the series will show you straightaway where the point of passage is to be found. It lies at a moment that is somewhat further on in the progressing dialogue between little Hans and his father, on 11 April. It is the fantasy of the bathtub, which everyone

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pores over with a kind of addle-brained tenderness, as though some familiar face were to be found here, while they are still utterly inca­ pable of saying which. The bathtub fantasy runs as follows. Hans is in the bath, and I’ve told you enough for you to have a sense of how this in the bath is something that lies as close as can be to the in the cart that is at issue here, in other words the fundamental in the house. It has to do with a connection, a link, with this thing that is already poised to slip away, namely the plateau of maternal support. And so, here we have someone different making his entrance, a certain form of the eagerly awaited third party, the Schlosser, the fitter who unscrews the bathtub. Nothing more is said about him. He unscrews the bath, and then, with his Bohrer, his gimlet, he bores a hole in Hans’s belly. In a footnote Freud introduces the possibility of an equivoque with geboren, bom, without resolving it. With the usual methods of interpretation that we make use of, people have raced headlong into a forcing of matters, and Lord knows all that is to be found in this fantasy. Hans’s father, at any rate, can’t help but relate it to the scene that is regularly played out in the mother’s bed, when little Hans chases his father away and supersedes him in some way, so that here in the fantasy Hans is the object of his father’s aggression. All of this is not necessarily tainted with error, but to stay strictly at the level of the elements themselves, we shall say that if the bathtub corresponds to something that has to be overcome, namely this unison between little Hans and his mother, it is quite certain that the fact that it is unbolted is surely something to be noted. More to the point, the fact that in his fantasy little Hans is the one who has a hole in his belly is something that we should also take note of as corresponding to what we may conceive of within the system of a permutation in which ultimately he is the one who takes on board, in his person, the mother’s hole. This hole is precisely the gulf that is the crucial and ultimate point in question, the thing that cannot be looked at, the thing that floats in the shape of the blackness that is forever ungraspable around the horse’s head, and precisely around where the horse can bite. Somewhere in this vicinity is this thing into which he was not to look. When I say that he was not to look there, you will see when you refer to the episode of the mother’s drawers that little Hans says as much himself. Questioned by his father, who flies in the face of good sense, little Hans brings in two elements, and two alone, to counter the father’s suggestions. I will tell you about the second element next time, when we shall be coming back to the analysis of this moment, but the first is as follows. Hans dictates that his father should write to the

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Professor to say that, When I saw the yellow drawers I said ‘Ugh! That makes me spit!’ and threw myself down and shut my eyes and didn’t look. In the bathtub fantasy, little Hans doesn’t look either, but he takes on board the hole, the maternal position. Here we are precisely at the level of the inverted Oedipus complex, and from a certain perspective, that of the signifier, we can see just how far it is necessary, how it is literally a phase of the positive Oedipus complex. What happens next? In one of the following fantasies, on 22 April, we come back to another position, that of the so-called Wagerl, the little truck. Little Hans, who is perfectly recognisable in the guise of the young street-boy who has climbed onto the truck, spends the whole night there ganz nackt, quite naked. This is something altogether ambiguous, both a desire and a dread. It is tightly bound to what immediately precedes it, when Hans says to his father, in the dialogue that I have pointed out as a crucial one, du sollst als Nackter, you’ve got to be naked. In the article I mentioned, Robert Fliess underscores how the texture of the child’s idiom acquires a cross-threading that is almost biblical in its force, and indeed this does disconcert everyone to the point that they rush to plug up the hole by inserting a parenthesis - er meint: barfufiig, he means ‘barefoot’. Fliess argues quite rightly that the style of the term als Nackter is noteworthy, falling strictly in line with Hans’s invocation du tust eifern. He’s asking his father to do his job, to do this thing that ultimately cannot be seen, namely how the mother is satisfied. So long as she is, and you’re the one who must do it. It must be done. In other words, be a true father. It is just after he has come out with this formula, thereby showing what is being appealed to in reality, that little Hans foments his fantasy of spending the whole night on the truck, on the wider plane and circuit of the railway. He spends a whole night there, when thus far the relationships with his mother have essentially been sustained geschwind, at great speed. Up to that point, this was what he had wished for. He explains to his father, still in the same dialogue of 21 April, You’ve got to knock your foot up against a stone and bleed, and then I ’ll be able to be alone with Mummy for a little bit at all events. When you come up into our flat I ’ll be able to run away quick so that you don’t see. We find here again the rhythm of what we might call the primal game o f transgression with the mother, which is only sustained clandestinely. In the fantasy of 22 April, little Hans spends the whole night on the little truck, and the next morning, 50,000 Gulden - which at the time of the observation was a tidy sum - are given to the guard so that the boy can go on riding on it. Another fantasy, on 2 May, seems to be the last in the line, its

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summit and terminus. Little Hans ends by saying that this time, not merely the plumber but der Installateur, the fitter, which accentu­ ates the aspect of unscrewing, comes with a pair of pincers. It is quite wrong to translate Zange as Schraubenzieher on the grounds that it is a pointed instrument. A Zange is a pair of pincers, not a screwdriver. What is unscrewed is Hans’s behind, so that another can be fitted. So, here we have another step being taken. The superposition of this fantasy onto the previous one of the bathtub is highlighted well enough by the fact that the relations of size between the behind and the bathtub are articulated in the most precise and complete way by little Hans himself. It so happens that in the small bath that they used to have at home, his little behind filled it. I sat in that one. I couldn’t lie down in it, it was too small. In the small bath, he is hefty. This is the whole question - is he or isn’t he hefty enough? He fills the little bath, and even has to sit in it, but wherever there are baths that do not offer such guarantees, the fantasies of being engulfed resume. These anxieties mean that whenever he had to have a bath elsewhere, like in Gmunden, he would protest with passionate tears. Without there being any equivalence of signification, there is a superposition of the schema of the unscrewed behind onto the bathtub that was previously unscrewed. This is also something that we can place at the level of an opening, where what is at issue is a correspondence - and at the same time something that has changed - with the fact that the cart drives off or doesn’t drive off, at higher or lower speed, from the dock to which it is momentarily hitched. To conclude the last fantasy, it is said that the fitter tells little Hans to turn around, and instructs him, Let me see your widdler. This widdler is the insufficient reality that has not succeeded in seducing the mother. With that, everyone completes the interpreta­ tion by saying that the fitter unscrews the widdler so that Hans can be given a better one. Only, this is not in the text. Nothing indicates that little Hans has run through the castration complex to the end and in a significant way. If the castration complex is anything it’s that, while somewhere there is no penis, the father is capable of furnishing another one. We shall further say that, insomuch as the passage to the symbolic order is necessary, the penis always needs to have been removed to a certain extent, then to be given back. Naturally, it can never be given back, because all that is symbolic is by definition quite unable to be given back. The drama of the castration complex revolves around the fact that it is only symbolically that the penis is removed and given back. However, in a case like this one, we can see that it is symbolically

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removed but is not given back. Therefore, it’s a matter of knowing to what extent the fact of having completed this round might suffice for little Hans. One can say that it’s equivalent to the exam perspective, that Hans has done an extra circuit, and the mere fact that this is a cycle and a circuit suffices to turn it into something that ensures the rite of passage, lending it a value that is equal to what it would be if it had been fully completed. At any rate, the question has been posed. It still remains that we cannot move forward in our comprehen­ sion of symptomatic formations if we stray outside of this strictly bounded terrain of the enumeration of the signifier. Before I take leave of you, and because I always try to end with a remark that will amuse you, I want to show you this by pointing something out to you. What are these pincers? Where do they come from? In the end, they are never referred to anywhere else in the case history. The father has never said, It will be screwed back in for you. Yet again, by staying at the level of the signifier there can be no doubt that what the fitter uses to unscrew the behind is a pair of pincers, or long-nosed pliers. It so happens that long ago I happened to learn that these large teeth with which a horse could bite the finger of the likes of little Hans used to be called, in nearly every language, pincers. Not only are teeth called pincers, but the front of the hoof with which the horse makes his little Krawall is also called a Zange in German. This word carries the same two meanings as the word pince in French. I shall also tell you that in Greek, уг\Хц has exactly the same meaning. I didn’t come across that by flipping through the Greek smithery handbook, which doesn’t exist. I chanced upon it in the prologue to Euripides’ Фотооаг. Jocasta, before telling the story of Antigone, offers a very curious detail concerning what occurred at the time of the death of King Laius. With as much care as I have devoted to the construction of these little Viennese avenues and rail networks, she explains how the routes of Laius and Oedipus led them to the same spot. They were each making their way to Delphi when the quarrel broke out over who had right of way, the one on the great chariot or the other on foot. There is a to-do, but then Oedipus, being the stronger, walks on in front. It is then that Jocasta takes care to note - and this is a detail that I have found in no other version - that the quarrel revives because n&Xoi Se v iv yr/Xaiq revovraq eqstpoivwoov nod&v, one of the horses’ hooves bloodies the tendons of his feet, the ankles of Oedipus. So, for Oedipus to meet his fate, it was not enough that his feet

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should be swollen from the iron pins that had been driven through his ankles, it also required this injury to his foot, just like the father of little Hans, made precisely by a horse’s hoof, which in Greek, as in German, and as in French, is called pincer, because хчЦ desig­ nates pincers or tongs. This remark is intended to show that there is nothing exaggerated in my telling you that in the sequence of little Hans’s fantasmatic constructions it is always the same material that is in service and turning around. 15 May 1957

XX T R A N S F O R M A T IO N S

Phallus dentatus Unloading the signifier Anxiety of movement Biting then falling The penknife in the doll O f Children bound in Bundles O cities o f the Sea! In you I see your citizens - both females and males - tightly bound, arms and legs, with strong withes by folks who will not understand your language. And you will only be able to assuage your sorrows and lost liberty by means o f tearful complaints and sighing and lamentation among yourselves; for those who will bind you will not understand you, nor will you understand them.1 This short passage, which I extracted a few months ago from the Notebooks o f Leonardo da Vinci and then completely forgot, strikes me as apt to introduce our lesson today. This rather magnificent passage is to be heard allusively, of course.

1 Today we are going to resume our reading of the observation on little Hans by trying to hear the idiom in which he expresses himself. Last week, I pointed out for you a certain number of stages in the development of the signifier. Its enigmatic centre is the signifier of the horse that is included in the phobia, and the function of this signifier is that of a crystal in a supersaturated solvent. The

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mythical development that is the constituent factor in the case history of little Hans branches out in a sort of immense arborescence around the signifier of the horse. It is now a matter of immersing, so to speak, this tree-like network in the pool of what little Hans has experienced, and to see what the role of this arbo­ real development has been. I’m going to indicate right away what the report on little Hans’s progress that we are going to establish will tend towards. Since what is at stake here are object relations considered in terms of a progression, I will say that throughout the period when little Hans lives out his Oedipus complex there is nothing in the observation to suggest that the results should be deemed fully satisfying. If there is one thing that is accentuated by the observation at the start, then it’s something or other that could be termed the preco­ cious maturity of little Hans. It cannot be said that at that moment he is ahead of his Oedipus complex, but surely he is at its point of dissolution. In other words, the way in which little Hans experiences his relation with the young girls already possesses, as is underscored for us in the observation, all the characteristics of an advanced relationship. We won’t call it adult, but it has something about it that allows Freud himself to recognise him in a luminous analogy that presents little Hans as a kind of blithe seducer, even a tyrannical Don Juan. This complex term, which I came out with here a couple of months ago, to the outrage of some, is characterised through and through by little Hans’s precocious stance, indicative of his entry into a sort of happy adaptation to a real context. However, what do we see, on the contrary, at the end of the observation? It has to be said that at the end we meet again the same little girls inhabiting little Hans’s inner world, but if you read the observation you cannot help but be struck by how they are not only more imaginary, but radically imaginary. They are now fantasies, to whom little Hans talks. Moreover, his relation to these girls is pal­ pably different, because they are much rather his children. I would even say that if this is where we are to ascertain the matrix, left by the resolution of the crisis, of Hans’s future relations with women, then we can further say that while from the surface viewpoint the result of heterosexuality has been amply acquired by little Hans, these girls will still bear the stigmata that marked the way they entered his libidinal structure. We will even get to see him treating in detail how the girls came into it. The narcissistic style of their position in relation to little Hans is irrefutable, and we shall be seeing in greater detail what determines and locates this. Certainly, little Hans will be a lover of women, but

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they will remain fundamentally bound to a sort of testing out of his power. This is also why everything indicates that he will always dread them. They will be, so to speak, his mistresses. They will be and will remain the girls of his mind. Not only that, but as you will see, they have been robbed from the mother. These remarks are intended to show you, or at least to suggest, the interest of research such as this. Naturally, in order to be con­ firmed, it will require that we resume our trail. Since we have taken the phases of the signifying structure of little Hans’s myth as our point of reference, we need to chart the different stages of his pro­ gress in relation to these phases. Furthermore, since we have been speaking about object relations, we will ask what the objects are that come to the fore in succession and hold little Hans’s inter­ est across these different phases in the shaping of the signifying myth. All in all, what progress arises correlatively in the signified over the course of this particularly active and fruitful period when little Hans’s relationship with his world is undergoing a sort of renewal or revolution? In parallel to this, are we going to be able to grasp what these successive crystallisations punctuate in the form of fantasies? These are, without any doubt, the successive crystallisations of a signifying configuration. Last week, I showed you its cluster of figures. At the very least, I allowed you to perceive how the same elements permute with the others in these successive figures so as to refresh each time the signifying configuration while still leaving it fundamentally the same. On 5 April, we have the theme that I called the theme o f return. Of course, this label doesn’t explain the essence of the fantasy, but it does denote what it possesses as a base. It’s the theme of what we could call a departure, or more exactly an anguishing solidarity, with the cart, with the Wagen that stands at the edge of the loading dock. The fantasy develops this solidarity, because it doesn’t present in this form at the outset. It requires the questioning from Hans’s father to facilitate the avowal of these fantasies and at the same time to talk them through and to organise them, in order to reveal them to himself just as we are allowed to perceive them. On 11 April, we see the fantasy of the unscrewed bathtub appear, with little Hans inside it bearing the large hole in his belly, onto which we have been focusing an approximate profile. What has happened between 5 April and 11 April? On 21 April, we find the fantasy that we may call leaving anew with the father. It’s a fantasy that is manifestly represented as fantasmatic and impossible. Hans sets off with his grandmother before his father arrives. When the father joins him, we don’t know by

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what miracle little Hans is there. This is the order in which these things present. On 22 April, it’s the little truck in which Hans goes off by himself. And then, something else will probably mark out the limit of what we can come to today. What is at issue before 5 April? Between 1 March and 5 April, what was at stake was essentially and solely the phallus. It was in connection with the phallus that his father had suggested the motive behind his phobia, telling little Hans that the phobia arises to the extent that he touches himself, to the extent that he masturbates. The father goes even further, suggesting an equivalence between what little Hans fears and the phallus, to the point that he draws out of him the retort that a phallus - or rather a Wiwimacher, which is the exact term by which the phallus is inscribed into Hans’s vocabulary - doesn’t bite. This was back on 1 March, at the start of the series of misunderstandings that govern the dialogue between little Hans and his father. A phallus is very much what is at issue in what bites and injures. This is so true that someone to whom I gave this observation to read, someone who is not a psychoanalyst but a mythologist, and who has penetrated quite far into the topic of myths, told me how it is quite striking to see that what underpins the whole development of the observation is the function, not of the vagina dentata, but of the phallus dentatus. Except that, of course, the observation devel­ ops wholly in the register of misunderstanding. I would add that this is quite ordinarily the case in any kind of generative interpretation between two subjects. Indeed, this is how one should expect it to develop. It’s scarcely anomalous. And it’s precisely in the gulf of this misunderstanding that something else will develop that will have its own fruitfulness. So it is that, when his father is speaking to Hans about the phallus, he is speaking to him about his real penis, the one that Hans has been touching. He is certainly not wrong, because when the possibility of erection arises for this young subject, along with everything that it brings with it in terms of unfamiliar emotions, the deep balance of all his relationships with what until then had constituted the stable point, the fixed point, the almighty point of his world, namely his mother, is incontestably altered. On the other hand, what is it that plays the supervalent role in the fact that all of a sudden this fundamental anxiety arises which makes everything waver, to the point that anything is preferable to this, even the forging of an anguishing image that in itself is completely uncommunicative, like that of the horse, and which at the very least traces out a limit, a reference point, within this anxiety? What is it in

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this image that opens the door to the attack, to the biting? Well, it’s another phallus, the imaginary phallus of the mother. It is by way of the mother’s imaginary phallus that the intolerable phobia opens up. What had hitherto been a game of showing or not showing the phallus consisted in playing with a phallus that Hans had long known to be perfectly inexistent, yet which for him was the main stake in his relation with his mother. This was the plane on which the game of seduction was established, not only with his mother but with all the young girls as well. He also knows full well that they don’t have any phallus either, but he keeps up the game of their having one. Up to that point, the whole fundamental relation­ ship, not simply of the lure in the most immediate sense, but his playing at this luring, hinged precisely on this. The introductory part of the observation, prior to the declaration of the phobia, ends with a fantasy. Moreover, this is a fantasy on the limits of what a fantasy is, because it’s a dream. It is modelled on a game of forfeits. One person hides the forfeit in his hand, and the one who declares that it is his is condemned to do something. In Hans’s version, he has the right to get one o f the girls to widdle. It is underlined in the observation that the dream has no visual content whatsoever. It is of the purely auditory type, even though it concerns a game of showing or seeing, and is the grounding of the first scoptophilic relationship with the young girls. Isn’t the spoken element, the game that has passed over into the symbol, into speech, already supervalent here? Throughout this first period, the father’s every attempt to intro­ duce something that concerns the reality of the penis, along with an indication as to what should or shouldn’t be done with it, namely not to touch it, is met with the themes of the game being pushed back to the fore by little Hans with automatic rigour. For example, when he suddenly comes out with the fantasy that he saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and his father asks him whether he means in her chemise or quite naked, little Hans is not in the least ruffled. She was in her chemise, but the chemise was so short that I saw her widdler. That is to say, one could just about see, and also not see. You can recognise here the structure of the rim or the fringe that typifies fetishistic apprehension. It’s a matter of being at the point where one could just about see what is to appear, yet one does not see it. What is thereby educed as something hidden in the relation­ ship with the mother is the inexistent phallus, and he is playing at its being there. So, Hans somehow accentuates the character of what is at stake here, namely a defence against the destabilising element that the father contributes in his insistence on speaking about the phallus in real terms.

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Little Hans calls upon a witness in this fantasy, a little girl called Grete. She is a loan-element from his surroundings, from the holiday home and the little girls with whom he pursues his imaginary rela­ tionships, but at this point they are perfectly real personages. There is a point to this underlining of the fact that she is called Grete and that she steps into this fantasy, because we will meet her again later. In this fantasy, she is called upon as a witness to what he and his mother are doing, because he introduces the fact that he touches himself very quickly, almost stealing a touch. For Hans there is a necessity of bringing back onto the ground of the phallic relationship with his mother everything that is interven­ ing anew, not only due to the fact of the real existence of his penis but also due to the fact that this is where his father is trying to drag him. The resulting compromise-formation is something that struc­ tures the whole of this earlier period, prior to 5 April, such as we can read it in the observation. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything else. Indeed, a second such element will appear on 30 March, the date of the consultation with Freud. What appears on this date is not entirely artificial because, as I told you, it is heralded by what is implicit in the father’s collaboration in little Hans’s fantasies, in which Hans calls on his aid. So, between 1 March and 15 March, which is when the fantasy of Grete and his mother arises, it’s above all a matter of the real penis and the imaginary penis. Between 15 March and the consulta­ tion with Freud, the father is trying to make the phallus pass over entirely to the side of reality, telling little Hans that big animals have big widdlers and little animals have little widdlers, which is surely what leads little Hans to say that his widdler is fixed in, and it will get bigger and bigger. The same schema that I showed you earlier is being reproduced here. Faced with the father’s attempt to make the phallus a reality, little Hans’s reaction is not to approve what he is nevertheless gaining access to, but yet again to forge a fantasy. This time, on 27 March, it’s the fantasy of the two giraffes, in which what is essential becomes manifest, namely a symbolisation of the maternal phallus, which is sharply represented in the little giraffe. While little Hans is caught between his imaginary attach­ ment and the insistence of the real through the intermediary of his father’s words, the path he will now take will provide a punctuation, and even a schematisation, of everything that will go on to be devel­ oped in the myth of the phobia. That is to say, the imaginary term will become for him the symbolic element. In other words, far from our being able to ascertain in the object relation a path that would somehow lead directly to the passage to

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the signification of a new real, to an acquisition of a handling of the real by means of a symbolic instrument, pure and simple, what we see is, on the contrary - at least during the critical phase at issue here, which analytic theory pinpoints as the Oedipus complex - that the real cannot be reorganised into the new symbolic configuration unless one pays the price of a reactivation of all the most imaginary elements. A veritable imaginary regression is produced in relation to the first inroad that the subject makes. Here, in these first steps of little Hans’s neurosis - his childhood neurosis, I mean - we have both its model and its schema. To the father who is the spokesperson for reality and the new order of adaptation to the real, little Hans responds with a sort of imaginary profusion that becomes reinforced in a way that is all the more typical in that it is sustained by a pattern of profound disbelief. Moreover, you will see little Hans pursuing the full sequence of this, which will lead you in turn to perceive how it is laid out at the start of the observation in a way that is almost materialised. This is precisely what makes for the exceptional character, the heaven-sent quality, of the observation. It shows us how little Hans himself real­ ises how this can be taken, namely how not only can one play with this crumpled thing, but one can transform it into balls of paper. This first image of the little giraffe is already the beginning of the solution, the synthesis, of what little Hans is learning to do. He is learning how images can be played with. He doesn’t know what this thing is. He has simply been introduced to it by the fact that he already knows how to speak, by the fact that he is a little man, by the fact that he is in a pool of language. He is very much aware of the precious value that the fact of being able to speak affords him. Indeed, this is what he is constantly underscoring on his own account. Whenever he says this or that, and he is told that it’s good or bad, he says, No matter, it’s always good because it can be sent to the Professor. There is more than one remark of this kind, where little Hans shows his sense of the specific fecundity that has been opened up to him by the fact that, all in all, he has found someone to speak to. It would be quite astonishing were we to fail to perceive on this occasion how this, right here, is all that is precious and efficacious about analysis. Such was thisfirst analysis o f a child.

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2 The way that Freud brings in his Oedipus myth during the consulta­ tion of 30 March, in all its bluntness, fully constructed, without the faintest attempt to adapt it into something that might present as immediate or precise for the child, may be deemed to be one of the most striking points of the observation. Freud deliberately tells him that he is going to recount a big story that he has invented - Long before you were in the world, I knew that a little Hans would come who would be so fond o f his mother that he would be bound to feel afraid o f his father because o f it. The Oedipus complex is implied here by its author in an operation that lays bare the fundamentally mythical character, the character of an originary myth, that it carries in Freud’s doctrine. He makes use of it in the same way that people have always taught children that God created heaven and earth and all kinds of other things, depending on the cultural context in which one happens to be. It is a myth of origins that comes ready made, and because one puts faith in what it determines as an orientation, as a structure, as an avenue for speech in the subject who is its depository, what is at stake here is quite literally its function as a creation of truth. This is exactly how Freud brings it to little Hans, and what we see is little Hans responding with the same ambiguity with which he will assent to everything that will ensue - It’s very interesting, he seems to say, it’s very exciting. How fine it is. He really must have gone off to speak to the good Lord tofind something o f that calibre. What is the result of this? Freud articulates it very clearly for us in his own way - It was not to be expected that he should be freed from his anxiety at a single blow by the information I gave him. At this moment in the observation, articulating it as we have been articulating it here, Freud says that a possibility had now been offered him o f bringing forward his unconscious produc­ tions, unbewufiten Produktionen vorzubringen, and o f unfolding his phobia, und seine Phobie abzuwickeln. In short, it’s an incite­ ment. It’s a matter of implanting another crystal, as it were, in the incomplete signification that little Hans is at this point representing to himself, I mean in his whole Being. On the one hand there is what has been produced all by itself, the phobia, and on the other there is Freud bringing in, all of a piece, what this is fated to culminate in. Of course, Freud doesn’t imagine for one second that the religious myth of the Oedipus complex that he is broaching at this moment will bear fruit immediately. He expects just one thing, and he says what this is. It’s that it will assist, on

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the other side, the unfolding of the phobia. This clears the way to what earlier I called the development of the signifier-crystal. You can’t put it any more clearly than does Freud in these two sentences from 30 March. All that one can say about the immediate effect of the consulta­ tion with Freud is that, even so, there is a mild reaction on the side of the father. It won’t last long. I mean that we don’t really find the father in the object relations until the end. As I said earlier, we are seeking today to grasp the object relations across the different stages of the signifying formation. It should come as no surprise that we see the father coming to the fore in these object relations only right at the end of the crisis. As I mentioned the other day, this arises just before the fantasy of the little truck, at the time of Hans’s confronta­ tion with his father in the Oedipal dialogue. Why are you so jealous? asks Hans, or more exactly, he uses the term cross, eifern. The father protests, But that’s not true, and Hans insists, You must be. This is the moment of encounter with the father which here represents the shortcoming of the paternal position. What we find here, therefore, is just a first apparition, a small confrontation, that is yielded by the fact that, as we can see quite clearly, he is there in a way that is altogether conspicuous, in the way that it is commonly said, he was conspicuous by his absence. So it is that, the very next day [following the consultation with Freud], little Hans reacts. He comes to see his father and tells him he is frightened. Or more precisely, when his father asks why he has come, he answers, When I'm not frightened I shan’t come any more. Hans says, When you’re away, I ’m afraid you’re not coming home. This will go a long way, because his father promptly asks, And have I ever threatened you that I shan’t come home? Let’s pause here. Faced with this fear of the father’s absence, let’s find out how to punctuate what is truly involved in this fear. All in all, it’s a small crystallisation of the anxiety. Anxiety is not the fear of an object. Anxiety is the subject’s confrontation with the absence of an object, where he is drawn in and where he loses himself. Anything is preferable to this, up to and including the forging of an object that is the strangest and least objectal of all objects, the phobia. The unreal character of the fear that is at issue here is manifested precisely by its shape and form, if we know how to see it. It’s the fear of an absence. I mean the absence of the object that has just been designated for him. Little Hans comes to his father to tell him that he is afraid of its absence. You should hear this in the same way that I have told you that in anorexia nervosa, what needs to be heard is not that the child doesn’t eat, but that the child eats nothing. Here, little Hans is afraid of the

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absence of the object that is the father, and which here he is start­ ing to symbolise. Hans’s father, on his side, is racking his brain to work out what about-turn or backlash might have led the child to manifest a fear that would merely be the nether side of desire. This is not entirely wrong, but in a way it grabs the phenomenon only by its edges. In fact, this is the beginning of the subject’s realisation that the father is precisely not what he was told he would be in the myth. He says as much to his father, Why did you tell me I ’m fond o f Mummy .. . when I ’m fond o f you? What Hans has just said here does not match the myth. I f I ’m supposed to hate you, that’s not right. What is implicit here, beyond little Hans and what he is caught up in, is that while it’s altogether regrettable that things should be like this, even so, it’s no small matter to have been put on the path that is really at issue and to be able to spot where there is an absence in relation to this myth. This is something that is registered immediately, something that the observation takes note of, and in which, if you will, we need to hear a symbolisation. If we label the signifier around which the phobia organises its function capital I, let’s say that something at this moment is symbolised by what we can label with a lower-case sigma, and which is the absence o f the father, p°. Thus I (o p°) This is not to say that this is the whole of what is contained in the horse signifier. Far from it. As we shall see, the horse will not suddenly vanish just because Hans has been told that he should be afraid of his father. However, the horse signifier is certainly unloaded of something, and the observation records this - Nicht alle weifien Pferde beifien, Not all white horses bite. Little Hans is no longer afraid of all white horses. There are some that no longer frighten him. Whereupon his father, despite the fact that he isn’t travelling along the path of our theorisation, understands that there are some that are Vatti, Daddy, and when little Hans has a sense that there are some who are Vatti, he is no longer afraid of them. Why is he no longer afraid of them? Well, because Vatti is kind through and through. This is also what the father understands without quite fully understanding, without even mildly understand­ ing, through to the end. It’s that the drama lies in the fact that Vatti is kind through and through. If there had been a Vatti to be truly afraid of, everything would have followed the rules of the game, so to speak. That is to say, a veritable Oedipus complex could have taken form, the kind of Oedipus complex that helps you to untie

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from your mother’s apron strings. However, since there is no Vatti to be afraid of, since Vatti is too kind, this explains how evoking the Vatti1s potential aggressiveness in the myth leads the phobic signifier of the hatoq to be unloaded to such an extent. This is logged that same afternoon. I’m forcing nothing in what I’m telling you here, because it’s in the text, provided one shifts imperceptibly the point of perspective so that the observation ceases to be a labyrinth in which one gets lost and so that, on the contrary, its every detail can take on a meaning. While it might look like I’m going fairly slowly here, and that I keep going back to the start, I have to allow you to grasp how not a single detail of the observation eludes this bringing into perspective. As soon as you can see how the relation to the signifier is articulated which is reported in its raw state by Freud, along with the signified ready to emerge - we can see it reverberating mathematically in the functions of the signifier that is educed in a natural and spontaneous state in little Hans’s situation. In this same moment we can see these effects of subtraction, of unloading, being immediately recorded to the extent that the Father has simply been ushered in. This simple fact has to be inscribed in a way that is almost mathematical, like on a balance sheet. So, there is a share of white horses that do not make little Hans afraid, and Freud himself spells out how the anxiety is double-edged, which further bolsters what I have just said. Freud distinguishes between anxiety o f the father, vor dem Vater, and anxiety for or around the father, um den Vater. We need only take into account the way that Freud presents this to find the exact two elements that I have just described. The anxiety around this empty place, this hollow that the father represents in little Hans’s configuration, seeks out its support in the phobia. To the precise extent that an anxiety o f the father has been educed, even if only in the state of a requirement for something to be postulated, the anxiety around the father’s function is unloaded. The subject can at last have an anxiety o f something. Unfortunately, this cannot go very far, because Hans’s father, even though he is there, is on no account capable of sustaining the now established function that corresponds to the necessities of a correct and limpid mythical formation with the full universal scope that the Oedipus myth possesses. This is precisely what forces our little Hans to fall back into his difficulty. As Freud had predicted, after this his difficulty would start to unfold, to be embodied and precipitated in productions that would develop out of his phobia. We immediately start to see more clearly in this direction when the first fantasy of 5 April appears. I began with this fantasy as

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though it were a first term, the transformations of which we meet many times over right through to the end. With everything that surrounds it and everything that heralds it, this fantasy highlights the weight of a question that little Hans had started to articu­ late very well the previous afternoon, regarding what makes him afraid. We start to see the four modalities in which the horse frightens him. His father bucks up a bit and really performs an analysis here in that, when from time to time he doesn’t know where to turn, this still allows him to find things. He lays them out, a, b, c, and d. They are elements that bring a term into play that has a special value for man, that is to say, for an animal who is fated to know himself to exist, unlike the rest of the animals. This term shows its most perturbing impact here when it is developed and articulated by little Hans in the neo-productions of the phobia. This term is movement. Please understand that it’s not a matter of uniform motion, which is a movement that we have always known, or at least for a good while. It’s a movement in which one loses one’s sense of oneself, from which one tries to escape. It’s already there in Aristotle, in the discrimination between linear motion and circular motion. In more modern language, one would say that there is acceleration. This is what little Hans is telling us when he says that the horse that is pulling something behind it makes him afraid when it starts moving, and more so when it drives past quickly than when it trots up slowly. The anxiety arises wherever the one who is not involved in this movement, who has a minimum of detachment from life, can sense the dead weight rocking into motion. It consists in what I have just called knowing oneself to exist, in being a creature who is conscious of oneself, and who is caught in this movement that presents this sort of inert force. This is where the anxiety is to be analysed. It is as much the anxiety of being dragged into motion as its inverse, namely the fantasy of being left behind, of being left in the lurch. This introduction of something that all of a sudden carries him along in a movement represents for little Hans a hard fall. Profoundly modifying his rela­ tionships with the stability of the mother, it brings him into her presence as something that by the same token truly overhauls the very bases of this stability. Hans tells us this in the form of what he says at this stage regarding the horse. It can umfallen und beifien wird, fall down and bite. We know what the biting is linked to. It is linked to the surging up of what is produced each time the mother’s love happens to be missing. When the mother effectively falls away, she is at the same

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time this thing that has no other outcome than what for little Hans himself becomes the anxiety reaction by necessity, what is known as the catastrophic reaction? The first stage is the biting, the second stage is the falling down and rolling around on the ground. Now it’ll always be like this, little Hans tells us when he is trying to recreate, in a way that is completely fantasmatic, the moment when he got the nonsense. He continues, and his wording bears a structure that we must keep in mind, All horses in buses’ll fall down. This is the formula in which is embodied what is at stake for little Hans, namely the calling into question of the very foundations of everything that thus far constituted the seat of his world.

3 This brings us to 9 April. It’s an elaboration around the theme of the anxiety of movement. What can possibly temper this anxiety? The father is utterly without effect, because nothing indeed can resolve for a creature like man, whose world is structured in the symbolic, this sense of becoming carried away, this thing that will drag him along in a movement. This is why, in his signifying structuration, little Hans has to make the conversion that consists in changing the schema of move­ ment into the schema of substitution, stage by stage. First of all there will be the introduction of the theme of the detachable element. Next, with this, substitution will be produced. These are the two schematic stages that are expressed in the bathtub fantasy-formation. In the first stage, the bathtub is unscrewed. As I said, its unscrew­ ing comes at a cost, because little Hans has to undergo something from which we know one never gets off scot-free, whenever this passage is performed. This is something that is not gone into suf­ ficiently in the observation, namely that not only does he undergo castration, but it is formally symbolised by the borer, by this large gimlet that makes a hole in his belly. Then comes the second stage when Hans has something unscrewed. In its place, something else can be screwed in. Through its signifying form, what is at issue in the subject’s operation of transformation from movement into substitution, from continuity in the real into discontinuity in the symbolic, is what is demonstrated throughout the whole observation as the very coursing without which its stages and progress are incomprehensible. What happens in the signified, in the confusion and pathos that little Hans finds himself in? What is there between 5 April, when

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there appears the schema of the fantasy of the cart that sets off, with everything around the phobia that is attached to it, and the fantasmatic unbolting of the bathtub on 11 April, when this symbolisation of a possible substitution starts to be initiated? Between the two there is a whole surrounding theme, the material of which I am forced to put in a ready state. This is the lengthy passage that will last almost as long as the time it takes for there to be pro­ duced for little Hans the only element from the previous situation that could possibly introduce the detachable feature, this element that is fundamental to his restructuring of his world. What is this element? It is very precisely the element that I told you we must introduce into the dialectic of showing and not seeing, of the educing of what is not, yet which is hidden, that is to say, the veil itself. There ensue two days of anxious questioning from Hans’s father, who understands literally nothing and gives himself over to a heavy-handed groping around, which as Freud underlines had the consequence that the analysis began to be obscure and uncertain. No matter, there remains enough for us to see not only what constitutes the essential point but also what Freud himself takes care to under­ score as essential, namely all that happens around the veil, that is to say, the little pair of drawers. These little drawers are there in all their carefully polished detail, the little yellow drawers and the little black drawers. We are told that the black drawers are Reformhosen, a novel garment for use by women when out cycling. As we know very well, Hans’s mother likes to keep up with the cutting edge of progress. I think that a few judicious extracts from the splendid comedies of Apollinaire, in particular Les Mamelles de Tiresias, should help us to paint a closer portrait of her. As it is put in this admirable play Elies sont tout ce que nous sommes Et cependant ne sont pas hommes.3 The whole drama lies here. This is what everything has emanated from, right from the first. It’s not simply because little Hans’s mother is more or less a feminist, but because all in all what is at stake for little Hans is the fundamental truth inscribed into the lines of verse I have just quoted. Freud himself did not dissimulate for one second the essential and decisive value of this truth when he made his varia­ tion of Napoleon’s saying, Anatomy is destiny. This is precisely what it at issue, but what do we see when little Hans articulates what he has to say? The father’s vehement questions constantly interrupt little Hans,

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rendering the parsing of his responses a little difficult, but Freud manages to sift out what is essential. What we see more clearly from Freud’s note is that there are two stages in which little Hans recognises and differentiates the pairs of drawers, which project over their duality confusedly, as though each could hold more than one of the functions of the other. But what is essential is that the drawers in themselves are linked for Hans to a reaction of disgust. Much more than this, little Hans has dictated what should be written to Freud - When I saw the yellow drawers I said ‘Ugh! That makes me spit!’ and threw myself down and shut my eyes and didn’t look. This reaction shows us that his choice has been made. Hans will never be a fetishist. If, on the contrary, he had recognised these drawers as his object, namely as the mysterious phallus that no one could ever see, he would have been satisfied and would have become a fetishist. But fate has something else in store for little Hans. He is disgusted by the drawers. He does specify, however, that when his mother is wearing them, it’s another matter. In this instance, they are not at all repugnant. This makes all the difference. When they are on offer as an object, that is, on their own account, he is turned off. They conserve their virtue, so to speak, only when they are functional, when they continue to sustain the lure of the phallus. This is the nerve that enables us to apprehend the experience. The reality of things has been highlighted by the long questioning in relation to which little Hans tries to explain himself. If he does this poorly, it’s to the extent that he is being pressed in divergent and confused directions, but what is crucial is the introduction, through the intermediary of this privileged object, of the detach­ able element that we are going to meet in the next part, and which thenceforth leads onto the plane of instrumentalisation. We are going to see a formidable material array of instruments that will become dominant from this point forth in the evolution of the signifying myth. I have mentioned some of these instruments, and have even shown you just how far such singular things already find them­ selves inscribed into the ambiguities of the signifier, for example the extraordinary homonymy between Zange as a horse’s tooth and Zange as a horse’s hoof. I could develop this much further still, by telling you that the middle of the hoof is called the pince, and the two sides are called mamelles. When I spoke to you last week about the Schraubenzieher, which means screwdriver, I told you that this is precisely not what features in the fantasy of the fitter, namely that it’s rather a pair of pincers, or

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pliers, and that Freud pulls out his Schraubenzieher without having noticed very well the value that this instrumentation was offering him. Don’t assume that this is a unique case. In the objects that will progressively make themselves felt from here on in, you will see not only the mother-child relations becoming apparent, but also this fundamental detachability that is expressed for man in the question of life and death. You are going to see these being introduced now, and behind them the enigmatic, uncanny and burlesque character of the stork. Don’t forget that the stork has a wholly different style. You are going to see this Mr Stork - der Storch - arriving with his flamboy­ ant profile, his little hat and latch-key, not in his pocket because he doesn’t have one, but in his beak, which he also uses as a pair of forceps, not to mention for ringing bells and picking locks. By this point we are submerged with material, and indeed this is what will characterise the rest of the observation as a whole. However, to avoid leaving you with something imprecise, I shall tell you what the axial moment is, what the turning point is, in what will come to pass in relation to mother and child. Next time we will be taking this up step by step and we will be seeing precisely which signifying forms stand as intermediaries that transform this mother and child, while leaving them the same - the cart becomes a bathtub, and then a box, and so on and so forth, each nestling into the others. However, at one point, which clearly was very fine indeed, when sufficient progress had been made with the mother - and you will be seeing what this entails - on 22 April, a very nice fantasy arises. Little Hans takes a little rubber doll called, as though this were quite random, Grete. His father asks him, What were you playing at with your doll? And Hans answers, I said Grete to her. Why? asks his father. Because I said Grete to her, replies Hans. If one has read the observation carefully, one notices what seems to have rather escaped the father’s notice, namely that this is the same Grete who was the witness in his game with his mother. But by this point substantial progress has been made, since the mastery of the mother has already been carried quite far. This term mastery needs to be employed in its most technical sense, and you will see by whose intermediary he has learned to lead her by the rein, and even to give a few whacks. Little Hans pushes a small penknife through the doll, then manipulates it to make the knife drop out. He is remaking his own hole, but this time with a small penknife, which seems to have been pushed in through the hole where the doll lets out its squeaking voice.

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Little Hans has definitively found the last word, bringing down the final curtain on the farce. The mother had kept in reserve, in her head, a little knife with which to cut it off him. And he has hacked the route by which to make it drop out. 22 May 1957

XXI T H E M O T H E R ’S D R A W E R S A N D T H E F A T H E R ’S S H O R T C O M IN G Lumf and the garment Unscrewing the bathtub Fuck her a bit more A suppletion for the father Unproductive maternal castration The Idea of Hanna

9 April 11 April 13 April 14 April 15 April 16 April 21 April ft

22 April ft

24 April 26 April 30 April 2 May

the two pairs of drawers the bath and the borer Hanna’s fall the big box ... ... and the stork the whipped horse the imaginary embarkation with the father the major dialogue the initiation rite on the little truck the penknife in the doll the lamb Lodi bin ich der Vatti the fitter

Let’s resume today a few of our remarks on little Hans, who for a while now has been the object of our attention. I remind you of the spirit in which this commentary is being pursued. What, essentially, is this little Hans? It is the prattling of a five-year-old child from 1 January until 2 May 1908. This, for the first-time reader, is what presents as little Hans. If the reader is more prepared, and it’s not hard to be so, he will know that this prattling is of interest.

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Why is this of interest? It’s of interest because it has been posited, at least in principle, that there is a certain relation between this prattling and something that is utterly substantial, namely a phobia, with all the inconveniences that it brings to the life of this young subject, all the worry that it causes those around him, and all the interest that it arouses in Professor Freud. I consider the elucidation of this relation between his prattling and the phobia to be of the utmost importance, and there is no reason to go hunting this relation out beyond the prattling, because no such beyond-zone is presented to us in the observation. Any such zone only presents itself to our minds after the event, with the fully imperious character of prejudice. By way of example, take the point I left you with last time, the story of the doll through which little Hans cuts a hole with a penknife. Today I have drawn up a chronology. I think that you have now had time to read and reread the observation on little Hans, and that these indications should be vivid enough on their own.

1 Last week I concluded with little Hans’s reactions to his mother’s drawers, with everything that is problematic about the exchanges and questioning between the father and the child, and about the sort of deep misunderstanding in which the dialogue unfolds. I accentuated, as does Freud, what struck him as the most essen­ tial residue of this dialogue on the mother’s drawers, namely Hans’s assertion, which was neither suggested nor induced by his father’s questioning, that the two pairs of drawers carry an absolutely differ­ ent sense depending on whether they are being worn by his mother or are there on their own account. In this latter case, little Hans spits and rolls around on the floor, remonstrates, and makes a show of disgust, the key to which he doesn’t yield, but which he desires should be conveyed to the Professor in writing. When the drawers are on his mother, he says that they have an altogether different sense for him. Having accentuated this, I have since heard some people express­ ing some mild astonishment at my having eluded the connection between the said Hosen, the mother’s drawers, and the lumf. In little Hans’s vocabulary, Lumpf is excrement. It goes by this atypical name, just as it is exceedingly frequent in children that a fortuitous name, if not a random one, should be ascribed to this function on the basis of a first denomination linked to a certain con­ nection with the exercise of this function. We are going to see what this is in the case of this lumf.

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So, it has been imputed to me that, due to goodness knows what systems-inclined mindset, I have elided the anal stage that looms up in our minds right on cue, just like when the button is pressed to provoke some such conditioned reflex in Pavlov’s dog. No sooner have you heard mention of excrement than you’re barking out Anal stage! Anal stage! Anal stage! Well, let’s speak about the anal stage, because it’s only right that things should pass out normally! I would like you to stand back a little from the observation, and to see how either way there is one thing that is never really indicated throughout the process of this cure. Indeed, is there a cure? I cer­ tainly didn’t say so. I said it was something that has a fundamental function in our experience of analysis, as do each of Freud’s major case studies. To put it rapidly, the one thing that is never indicated is any rhythm, or any mechanism, that could be inscribed into the register of frustration. Throughout the whole period of the cure, not only does little Hans not undergo any frustration, but he is fully sated. Is there regression or aggression? Without doubt there is aggression, but it’s certainly linked neither to any frustration nor to any moment of regression. If there is regression, it’s not in the instinctual sense, in the sense of a resurgence of something from before. If there is indeed one phenomenon of regression, it’s in a register that belongs to the realm of what I have indicated for you many times as possible. It is effectively what occurs when, through the necessity of the subject’s elucidation of his problem, he requires, he pursues, the reduction of such and such an element of his being-inthe-world, of his relationships, from, for example, the symbolic to the imaginary, and even sometimes, as is manifest in this observa­ tion, from the real to the imaginary. In other words, there is a change of approach to the signifiers of one of the terms that is present. This is exactly what you are going to see occurring over the course of the observation when little Hans is pursuing his development. Goodness knows how rigorous and even urgent this is. Indeed, this is what characterises the signifying process of the unconscious, inso­ much as Freud defined it as unconscious, that is to say, as something that occurs without the subject being able to account for it in any way whatsoever, literally without his knowing what is he is doing. It’s enough for him simply to be aided, incited, in this development of the signifying incidence that he himself has introduced as neces­ sary to his psychological sustenance. In managing to develop it, he draws from it a certain solution that moreover is not necessarily a normative solution, nor the best solution, but certainly a solution that, in the case of little Hans, has the most evident effect of resolv­ ing the symptom.

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Let’s come back to the lumf. Freud refers the signs of disgust that are shown when little Hans sees his mother’s drawers to the Lumpf Zusammenhang, the context o f the lumf. His father has just posed a few questions that lead in this direction, Hans having surely evinced how the question of excrement was neither insignificant nor uninteresting for him. But of course this lumf context turns around. We can conversely say that the lumf appears to have been brought in with regard to the drawers. What is meant by this? It’s not simply the fact that little Hans is led to speak about these functions of excrement in relation to the reaction of disgust that he shows when he sees his mother’s drawers. In what way do excrement and everything to do with anality enter the fray of the observation? We are immediately told that this is not unrelated to the background, that it is not unconnected with his own excremental function which had once afforded him a great deal o f pleasure. However, what is surely at stake here is the desire for seeing his mother do lumf, to the extent that he tags on right behind her whenever she is putting on or taking off her drawers. Little Hans badgers his mother, and she excuses herself to his father - who has resumed his little inquiry and who overlooks very little of what is going on - by saying, he goes on pestering me till I let him in. So, there is this game between little Hans and his mother, of seeing and not seeing, and not only that, but also of seeing what cannot be seen, because it doesn’t exist, and little Hans knows this full well. To see what cannot be seen it has to be seen behind a veil, that is, a veil that has been held in front of the inexistence of what is to be seen. It is precisely behind the theme of the veil, of the pair of drawers, of this garment, that the essential fantasy of the relation­ ships between mother and child lies hidden. This is the fantasy of the phallic mother. It is in relation to this theme that the lumf is introduced. Consequently, if I have been leaving this lumf on its own plane, that is, on a secondary plane, it’s not because of some systematic mindset, it’s because in the observation it is only brought before us in this connection. In other words, it’s not sufficient in an analysis simply to be breathing an unfamiliar air to find oneself by the same stroke delighted at being back on familiar ground, to content oneself with telling us that here we can get back in touch with the same old tune, of the anal complex in this instance. Rather, it’s a matter of finding out at such a moment in the analysis what the precise function of this theme is. If this theme is always important for us, it’s not merely because of this purely implicit signification, which in itself is vague and linked to geneticist ideas that can constantly be called into question in this particular case, at any moment of the

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observation, but because of its connection with the complete system of the signifier in so far as it is evolving, as much in the symptom over the course of the illness as in the process of cure. The lumf carries an extra meaning within this system on account of its strict homology with the function of the drawers, that is to say, the function of the veil. Both the lumf and the drawers are a thing that can fall. The veil falls, and it’s precisely in so far as the veil has fallen that there is a problem for little Hans. He lifts, if I may say so, the flap of this veil, because it is in con­ sequence of the experience of 9 April, of the long explanation about the drawers, that we next see the bathtub fantasy appearing, that is to say, something that bears the closest relation to the fall. The com­ bination of this dropping with the other term that is present, and with which he is confronted in the phobia, namely the biting, yields the theme of detachability, of unscrewing, which will be pursued as an essential element in reducing the situation across the succession of fantasies. We need therefore to take a close look at this succession of little Hans’s fantasies and to conceive of them as a myth in develop­ ment, as a discourse. Furthermore, nothing else is involved in the observation but a series of reinventions of this myth with the aid of imaginary elements. It’s a matter of comprehending the function behind this turning progress, these successive transformations of the myth which, at a deep level, represent the solution to the problem for Hans, the problem of his own position in existence to the extent that it has to be situated in relation to a certain truth, in relation to a certain number of truthful reference points, where he can find his own place. Were some further proof required of what I’m telling you - and I’m insisting a little given the objection that has been levelled at me and, since I’ve come up against it, I want to see it through to the end - I would bid you refer to the text to see what this lumf ultimately turns out to be. When little Hans is coming back from his grandmother’s on the Sunday evening, on 12 April, Hans shows his disgust at the black upholstery of the seats in the carriage, because they are lumf In the explanation that follows, what is it that comes to be compared with the black, with the lump. Well, a black blouse and black stockings. The close relationship between the theme of the lumf and the mother’s garments, that is, the veil, is registered in the observation by little Hans himself. For that matter, what is this lump. Where does it come from? Why does little Hans call excrement lump We are also told in the observa­ tion that Lumpf comes by association with stocking, Strumpf and its dark colour.

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Throughout the segment of the observation that we are pursuing in an examination afforded by Freud’s analysis, it is quite clear that the lumf, the excrement, enters the fray here as a particular function of the far more crucial signifying articulation - which in truth is the only important thing for us to see - that is its relationship with the theme of the garment, the theme of the veil, behind which is hidden the denied absence of the mother’s penis. This is the essential signification. We alter nothing in the direction of the observation itself, and not by any biased mindset, when we take this axis to understand the progress of these mythical transformations through which the reduction of the phobia is brought about in the analysis. 2 We came as far as 11 April and the bathtub fantasy. I told you that the bathtub represented something that starts to bring about the mobilisation of the situation, that is, the situation of the stifling reality of the mother, the sole reality to which Hans feels bound, for some unspecified reason, and which produces a maximum level of anxiety. From the time that he feels that he is being delivered up to her, threatened by her and annulled by her, this reality of the mother represents a danger situation. Moreover, this is a danger that in itself is absolutely unnameable, strictly speaking. It’s a matter of seeing how the child will manage to get out of this situation. I remind you of the fundamental schema for the child’s situation vis-a-vis the mother, when he is at a moment of losing the mother’s love. child

mother S

m other’s breast

R This mother is the symbolic mother, the first element of reality that is symbolised by the child in that she can essentially be absent or present. When there is a refusing of love on her part, the com­ pensation for this refusal is found in the quashing brought about by a real satisfaction, derived from the real breast. This doesn’t mean that an inversion is produced. Indeed, to the extent that the breast becomes a compensation, it becomes the symbolic gift. The mother, meanwhile, becomes a real element, that is to say, an all-powerful element that refuses love.

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The progress in the situation with the mother lies in how the child has to discover, beyond the mother, what the mother loves. It is not the child himself, but the i, the imaginary element, that is to say, the mother’s desire for the phallus. Ultimately, what the child has to do at this level - which is not to say that he does do it - is to manage to formulate i S (/). This is what we are shown in the playful alternation in the deportment of the child who is still a toddler, which accompa­ nies his playful occultation of the symbolic part. For little Hans, this schema has been complicated by the intro­ duction of two elements that are real. child ------------------------ *• mother S

penis

m other’s breast R

Hanna

On the one hand there is Hanna, a real child who comes to com­ plicate the situation of the relations beyond the mother, and then on the other hand there is something that belongs to him but which he literally doesn’t know what to do with, a real penis that is starting to stir and which has received an unfavourable greeting from the person on whom it functions. Little Hans comes to ask his mother what she thinks of his widdler, an aunt having said a little while back, he has got a dear little thingummy. His mother, however, does not extend such a warm welcome, and the question then becomes very complicated. To fathom this complication, you need only take the two poles of the phobia, the two elements for which the horse is dreaded. As I explained, the horse bites and the horse falls. The horse bites, that is to say - Since lean no longer satisfy mother at all, she will take satisfaction, just as I did when she did not satisfy me at all, biting me as I bit her, for this is my last line o f recourse when I cannot be sure o f her love. The horse falls, that is to say - It falls just as I do, little Hans, at the instant when I am left in the lurch, when there is no more but for Hanna. However, it is quite clear on the other hand that, in a certain way, needs must that little Hans be eaten and bitten. Needs must, because ultimately this is what corresponds to a revalorisation of the penis that has been taken for nothing at all, that has been rejected by his mother to the full extent that it has to become something, and this is what little Hans aspires to. His being bitten, his being seized by the mother, is something that is as much desired as feared.

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The same goes for what is involved in the falling. The horse’s fall is also something that can be desired by little Hans. There is more than one element of the situation that little Hans desires to see fall, and the first of these, once we have introduced the category of the dropping into the observation, will present in the form of little Hanna. Hans says, I thought to myself Hanna was on the balcony and fell down off it. The father adds that the railing of the balcony was designed in the most unpractical way, by a metal-worker o f the Secessionist movement - we are in the home of folk who stand at the vanguard of progress - and had big gaps in it which I had to havefilled with wire netting, hideous as this must have been, so as to avoid little Hans pushing young Hanna a little too vigorously through one of the gaps. So, the function of the biting, like the function of the falling, are given in the most apparent structures of the phobia. They are its essential elements. As you can tell, these are double-edged signifierelements. Such is the true meaning of the term ambivalence. The fall, like the bite, is not merely feared by little Hans. They are elements that can also enter the fray in an opposite sense. From one side, the biting is desired, because it will play a crucial role in the solution of the situation, just as the fall is equally a desired element. While the girl herself must not fall, one thing is certain and this is that the mother will trace a falling curve, for the full run of the observation, starting from the moment conditioned by the curious appearance of the instrumental function of the unscrewing. This function appears for the first time, enigmatically, in the bathtub fantasy. As I said last week, what is in question here is an anxiety that con­ cerns not only the mother in reality, but the whole surrounding, the whole milieu, everything that thus far had constituted little Hans’s reality, the fixed bearings of his reality, what last time I called la baraque, the whole shack. With the first fantasy of the plumber coming along to unscrew the bath, this whole shack begins to be dismantled in detail. These connections are not in the least abstract connections. They are wholly contained within the experience. Don’t forget that the observation discloses how baths had already been unscrewed in front of little Hans, because when they went on holiday to Gmunden, a small bath had been packed in a box. On the other hand, we have some notion of an earlier house move, though we can only regret that the observation does not offer a precise date for this. It must lie in the space of time covered by the anamnesis of the observa­ tion, namely the two years, prior to the illness, on which we have a number of notes from the parents. Moving house, like the transporting of the bath to Gmunden,

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has already afforded little Hans the signifying material for what it means to dismantle the whole shack. He already knows that this can happen, and this was without any doubt an experience that had already been integrated to a greater or lesser extent into his specific handling of the signifier. The fantasy of the unscrewed bathtub is tantamount to a first step into the perception of what presents first of all with a character that is opaque, that is purely a signal of an inhibition, an arrest, a frontier, a limit beyond which one cannot pass, namely the phobia. This can only be mobilised in the phobia itself, where there are elements that can be differently combined. In other words, along with the horse’s bite - which brings to the fore these teeth, this pince, the plural signification of which I explained for you last time and which in French as in German and in many other tongues, notably in Greek, is both what the horse bites with and something that means pincers or pliers - there appears for the first time the character who, with his pincers and pliers, starts to come into play and to introduce an element of evolution. This evolution is, I repeat, a purely signifying evolution. You’re not going to tell me how there are already instinctual traces in the child that explain how his behind is unscrewed, how it’s both the same thing and in other respects something different. In other words, it is nowhere else but in the signifier itself, in the human world of the symbol, which also embraces the tool and the instrument, that the development will unfold of the mythical evolution in which little Hans is engaged through the obscure and fumbling collaboration between him and the two protagonists who have been looking into his case in order to psychoanalyse it. I will pause for a moment on the fact that there are not only the bathtub and the unscrewing in the fantasy, there is also at that moment the borer, the gimlet. Here, as always, there is a very keen perception, linked to the freshness of the discovery, which means that the onlookers who are at the explorative forefront of the analy­ sis are in no doubt as to what this borer is. They say that it’s the paternal penis. Here again there is something vague about the text. Is the target of this penis little Hans or his mother? I would say that this ambiguity is quite valuable, and all the more so because we shall better understand what is at issue. Once more, you can see the proof of what I’m telling you, namely that it’s not sufficient to have in your minds the more or less complete list of classic situations in analysis, including the inverted Oedipus complex where, perceiving the parents’ coitus, the child can identify with the feminine role. That we find little Hans identifying here with his mother, well, it’s true, why not? But on one condition, which is that we would not understand why it is true, because when one says

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this and nothing more, not only does it not hold any interest, but it doesn’t match, to any degree, anything that represents the ins and outs that come together in the apparition of the fantasy, where the child imagines, and himself articulates, that something has come along to make a big hole in his belly. This can take on meaning only in the context, in the signifying evolution, of what is at issue. Let’s say that at this point little Hans is explaining to his father Just bloody give her it for once, right where it belongs. This is indeed all that is in question in little Hans’s relation with his father. All along, we have a notion of this shortcoming and the effort that little Hans is making to restore, I wouldn’t say a normal situation - no such thing has been in question since the father started playing the role that he has been playing with Hans, namely that of begging him please to believe that Daddy is not unkind - but a structured situation. And in this structured situation, there are firm reasons for little Hans, at the same time as tackling the ousting of the mother, correlatively to provoke, and imperiously so, the father’s function­ ing in relation to the mother. I repeat that there are a thousand ways, a thousand angles, from which such fantasies of passivity can intervene over the course of the analysis of a young boy, sweeping him up in a fantasmatic relation with the father in which he identifies with the mother. To go no further than my own analytic experience, not so long ago I saw a man who was no more homosexual than little Hans could in my opinion have become, but who, even so, at one point in his analysis voiced how, without any doubt, in his childhood he had fantasised being in the maternal position, precisely so as to offer himself, if I may say so, as a victim in his mother’s place. His whole childhood situation was lived in the shadow of a sort of importunity of the father’s sexual insistence, the latter being highly rambunctious and, indeed, demanding in his needs upon the subject’s mother, who deflected him with all the force she could muster. The child perceived, rightly or wrongly, that she lived through the situation as a victim. This had been integrated into the development of the subject’s symptomatology, yet the subject was a neurotic. On no account can we come to a standstill merely at the feminised position, or even the homosexual position, represented functionally at a given moment of the analysis by the outcome of this fantasy, because its context lends it an utterly different sense. It even lies in opposition to what occurs in the observation on little Hans. Little Hans is saying to his father, fuck her a bit more, while the other subject, my patient, is telling his, fuck her a bit less. Clearly it’s not the same, even though they each have to make use of the term, fuck her, and even, fuck me instead o f her if need be. It is, therefore,

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the signifying connection of the term that enables us to appreciate what is at stake. In the way I have presented it, the situation that is thereby created apparently has no way out, because the father doesn’t step up. You will tell me that the father nevertheless exists, that he is there. What is the function of the father in the Oedipus complex? It’s quite clear that at some point, and regardless of the form in which the deadlock of the child’s situation with the mother might present, another element has to be introduced. These things need to be repeated. If we don’t repeat them, we lose track of them. This is why we are going once again to spell out the Oedipus complex.

3 Of course, this won’t be a re-articulation of the Oedipus complex because by definition, if the Oedipus complex is fundamental, it must be explained in a thousand different ways. Nevertheless, there are structural elements that we find every time and which are the same, at least with respect to their arrangement and with respect to their number. On one plane, the father comes in as a third party in the situation between the child and his mother. If we take it on another plane, he comes in as a fourth element, because there are already three elements due to the inexistent phallus. This is the en-soi, the in-itself of the situation, if you will excuse this expression of which I’m not especially fond but which I’m compelled to use in order to go quickly.11 mean that, for the time being, I’m considering the father insomuch as he must be in the situation together with the others, independently of what will come to pass for the pour-soi of the subject, his for-himself. Nor am I especially fond of this expression because you can take this pour-soi as something that is given in the subject’s consciousness, when in fact it lies for the greater part in the subject’s unconscious, to the extent that this has to do with the effects of the Oedipus complex. I’m using the term, however, to mark out the distinction that I am noting in the fact that the father must be here en-soi. What should his role be? I cannot rehearse the whole theory of the Oedipus complex. Nevertheless, we can say that the father is the one who possesses the mother, who possesses her as a father, with his true penis which is an ample penis, in contradistinction to the child who is in the grip of the problem of his instrument being both poorly assimilated and insufficient, not to say spurned and disdained.

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What does the analytic theory of the Oedipus complex teach us? What is it that makes the Oedipus complex necessary in some way? I’m not speaking about biological necessity, nor internal necessity, but a necessity that is at any rate empirical because it was discovered in the experience. If the existence of the Oedipus complex means anything, then it’s that the natural increase of the young boy’s sexual potency does not happen by itself, nor in one go, nor even in two goes. If we take it purely and simply on the physiological plane, it could effectively be seen to happen in two phases, but taking it solely at the level of this natural increase does not suffice to any degree when it comes to accounting for what is actually going on. The fact is that for the situation to develop in normal conditions, I mean in conditions that allow the human subject sufficiently to maintain his presence not only in the real world but in the symbolic world, that is to say, for him to tolerate himself in the real world such as it is organised with its symbolic weft, he needs to have not only this sort of perception of what last time I called movement, with its acceleration that carries the subject along and transports him, but also a point of arrest, a fixing down of two terms. The true penis, the real penis, the valid penis, the father’s penis, has to be function­ ing on the one hand, while on the other the child’s penis has to be situated in a Vergleichung with the father’s penis, in a comparison with the father’s penis that will somehow meet up with its function, its reality, its dignity and its integration as a penis, to the extent that there will be a passage through the cancelling out that is known as the castration complex. In other words, it’s to the extent that his own penis is momentarily annulled, in a dialectical moment, that the child is destined to accede to a full paternal function later on, that is to say, to be someone who feels himself to be in legitimate possession of his virility. And it appears that this legitimate is essential to the felicitous functioning of the sexual function in the human subject. Without this register, everything that we have to say about the determinism of premature ejaculation and the various disturbances of sexual function has no meaning. This has merely been an overall situating of the problem of the Oedipus complex. It is important to bear in mind that the experience has dictated this. Moreover, it was not to be predicted. Already, in what I have just set out, the schema of the situation was not necessarily predictable in itself. The proof of this is that the analytic experience, which uncovered the Oedipus complex as an integration into the virile function, allows us to push things further and to say that the symbolic father, the Name-of-the-Father, is essential to the structuration of the symbolic world.

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The symbolic father is pivotal in this sort of severance that is more essential than primordial weaning, and through which the child exits the pure and simple coupling with maternal almightiness. If the symbolic father is the mediating element that is essential to the symbolic world, if the Name-of-the-Father is so essential to any articulation of human language, then this is strictly speaking the reason behind Ecclesiastes telling us that, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.2 It is strictly speaking foolish to say in one’s heart that there is no God, quite simply because it is foolish to utter a thing that is in contradiction with the very voicing of language. You know very well that I’m not professing any deism here. There is the symbolic father. The experience teaches us that when it comes to the specific inci­ dence of the father’s entrance in the assumption of the virile sexual function, the real father is one that plays a role of essential presence. To the extent that the real father is truly playing the game of his function as a castrating father, his father function in a form that is concrete, empirical and, I was almost going to say, to a certain degree degenerate - the personage of the primordial father in his tyrannical and more or less horrifying form such as he is presented to us in the Freudian myth - to the extent, in other words, that the father, such as he exists, fulfils his imaginary function in what is empirically intolerable about it, which even leads to revolt when he makes his impact felt as a castrator, the castration complex can be lived through, and solely from this angle. What we have here is marvellously illustrated in the case of little Hans. There is a symbolic father, and little Hans, who is no fool, believes right away in this symbolic father. Freud is the good Lord. You can well imagine that this is one of the most crucial elements for balance to be established for little Hans. Naturally, he believes in God right away, and he believes in him like we all believe in God, namely, without believing in Him. He believes in Him because this reference to a sort of supreme witness is an element that is essential to any kind of articulation of truth. There is someone who knows everything, and he’s found him. It’s Professor Freud. What luck! The good Lord is here on earth. Not all of us are so lucky. In any case, this will be of service to him, but on no account will it make up for the shortcoming of the imaginary father, of the cas­ trating father. The whole problem lies here. Little Hans has to find a suppletion for this father who persists in not wanting to castrate him.3 This is the key to the observation. It’s a matter of seeing how little Hans will be able to bear his real penis, precisely in so far as it is not under threat. This is the fundament of the anxiety. What is intolerable in his situation is

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the shortcoming on the side of the castrator. In fact, throughout the whole observation, you will never see anything appearing that could represent the structuration, the real-isation, even the fantasmatic experience, of something that could be called a castration. Yet some kind of injury is imperiously called upon by little Hans, and anything can be turned to this purpose. Contrary to what Freud says here, there is nothing in the experience of Fritzl hurting his foot on a stone that is called of its own accord to make the connection [with the horse falling down]. The wish that the father should be exposed to this same injury, this kind of mythical circumcision, will appear thereafter in the long dialogue of 21 April, when he will say to his father, you’ve got to be naked, du sollst als Nackter. Everyone is so stupefied by this that they wonder what the child might mean. They tell themselves that the child is starting to speak biblically. Even in the observation, there is a parenthesis to say that he surely means barefoot. Yet little Hans is the one who is truthful here. It’s a matter of knowing whether the father will indeed prove himself, that is to say, will confront the fearsome mother like a man, and whether he, the father, has been through, or not, the essential trial by injury, knocking up against the stone. This tells you just how far this theme, in its most fundamental and mythical form, is something to which little Hans aspires with his whole Being. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort occurs. It’s not enough for little Hans to have uttered what he uttered in the dialogue with his father. He has only shown that he was burning with an imperious desire for the wrath of a jealous God - eifern is the German term used in the Bibel - namely a father who is against him, who wants to castrate him. But he doesn’t encounter this, and so the situation takes a very different turn. I shall be telling you presently how we can conceive of this. Note that while there is no castrator, because we are on the side of the father, we do have on the other hand a number of characters who have come in the stead of the castrator. We have the plumber who began by unscrewing the bath, then to bore a hole in him. Then in a short while we shall see someone else, the coachman, who is not strictly speaking implicated in the desired function of the father. In any case, there is what little Hans himself calls the Schlosser, the fitter, in the last fantasy, on 2 May, which brings the situation to a close. God does not carry out all of His functions very well, and so in comes the deus ex machina, the fitter, to whom little Hans assigns a share of the functions that he is there to fulfil. Note how everything boils down to the following. One just has to know how to read the text to see that it could not be more striking than how it is in the final fantasy, which literally closes both the cure

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and the observation, namely that what the fitter comes to change is little Hans’s behind, his rear. They started to dismantle the whole shack, but it wasn’t enough. Something had to be changed in little Hans. Without any doubt, this is where we find the fundamental schema of the symbolisation of the castration complex. Yet it can be seen in the observation just how far even Freud allows himself to be carried along by the schema. There is no trace in little Hans’s fantasy of a replacement for what he has on the front side. The father is the one who says, he gave you a bigger widdler, and Freud falls into step with this fantasising. Unfortunately, there is nothing of the sort in little Hans’s fantasy. His behind is unscrewed and he is given another. Then he is told to turn around, and that’s where it ends. The text has to be taken as it is. The specificity of the observation on little Hans lies in this, along with the very thing that ought to enable us to understand the full whole. If, indeed, after coming so close, things didn’t go any further, it’s because things couldn’t go any further, because if things had been able to go further, there wouldn’t have been a phobia but a normal castration complex and Oedipus complex instead, and there would have been no need for all this complication. It would have taken neither the phobia, nor the symptom, nor the analysis, to arrive at this point, which is not necessarily the stipulated point, the typical point. All of this is intended by and large to locate the function of the father in this instance, or more precisely to locate how he is both incontestably there, active and helpful in the analysis, but at the same time, due to the fact that he is there in the analysis - and this is predetermined by the situation as a whole - his functions are clearly incompatible with playing the role of the castrating father effectively. You will observe that, all in all, while there is castration to the extent that the Oedipus complex is castration, it’s no accident that what has been perceived but dimly, yet perceived nevertheless, is that castration bears just as much relation to the mother as to the father. We can see in the description of the primordial situation how maternal castration implies for the child the possibility of devoration and biting. In relation to this anteriority of maternal castration, paternal castration is a substitute that is perhaps no less terrible, but which is certainly more favourable. It is more favourable because it is open to development, whereas in the case of maternal castration, with its engulfment and devoration by the mother, it does not lead on to any development. With the term of the father, there is the possibility of dialectical development, namely a rivalry with the father, a possible murder of the father,

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and a possible eviration of the father. On the side of the father, the castration complex is productive in the Oedipus complex, whereas it is not so on the side of the mother for the simple reason that it is quite impossible to perform this eviration on the mother, because she has nothing that could undergo such eviration. Let’s take things up at the point where we left our little Hans, who is now standing at this crossroads. We can already see an adumbration of the mode of suppletion by which the primordial situation will be left behind, dominated as it was by the pure threat of total devoration by the mother. Something of this is already sketched out in what I’m calling the bath and borer fantasy. Like each of little Hans’s fantasies, it’s the beginning of an articulation of the situation. There is, as it were, a return to sender, that is to say, a returning of the threat to the mother. The mother is the one who is ousted, and the father is the one who is called upon to play his role of borer. Once again, I note that I’m doing no more than taking literally what Freud brings us. He is so riveted by the role of the borer that he makes a remark without resolving it himself. He doesn’t resolve it for a good reason, which is that it has to be considered in the light of philology, ethnography, myths, and so on. The remark bears on the relation there might be between Bohrer and geboren, being born. In fact, there is no etymological link between their respective roots. This is the whole distance that lies between the Latin ferio, to smite, and fero, to bear. They don’t share the same root, and when one traces the derivations across the different tongues they remain absolutely distinct. Then there is forare, to bore, which clearly is not the same thing as fero. It is again to the term of bearing that geboren is traced. The essential distinction between the two roots can be found as far back as it has been possible to trace, but what is important here is that Freud comes to a halt on this. He comes to a halt on something that is literally an encounter of the signifier with the purely signifying problematic that it posits, because ulti­ mately Bohrer evokes Prometheus - Pramantha, etymologically the borer.* Meanwhile, geboren is to bear, that is to say, the fundamental bearing of child, bringing him forth into the world. And so there are two distinct and even opposite elements. This is a parenthetical remark to show you the importance that Freud himself attaches to the signifying term. Along what line will the ensuing part of the solution, of the sup­ pletion, brought about by little Hans develop? The solution is mere suppletion in that he is somehow powerless to bring about a maturing - allow me if you will to use this expression, though it’s not about instinctual maturation - that would press the dialectic development

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of the situation in a direction that would not be a dead-end. It has to be reckoned that he arrives at something, because there is a development. At the very least, it’s a matter of comprehending it, and of comprehending it in its entirety. Today I can do no more than indicate this. By what means does the whole development unfold, starting from the point we’ve reached, around mid-April? Hanna is introduced as an element whose fall is possible and desired. The same goes for the maternal bite, which is taken on as an instrumental element, as a substitute for the castrating intervention. Moreover, it is diverted in its direction, because it doesn’t bear on the penis but on something else, something that in the final fantasy culminates in a change. It has to be believed that this change already has a certain degree of sufficiency in itself, or at any rate a degree of sufficiency when it comes to reducing the phobia. At the end, Hans has changed. This is what is obtained. Next time, we will be seeing all the consequences of this, which are absolutely crucial for Hans’s development, and quite intriguing to boot. So, Hanna comes into play. She is the other inassimilable term in the situation. The whole process of Hans’s fantasies consists in restoring this intolerable element of the real to the imaginary register where it can be reintegrated, through stages that we are venturing to describe one at a time. Read, or reread, the observation with this key in hand. See how Hanna is reintroduced in a completely fantasmatic form, as when little Hans tells us that Hanna had already gone with them to Gmunden two years ago, when in fact at that time she was still in her mother’s belly. Yet little Hans tells us that they had taken her in a little box on the back of the coach, where she had a jolly time, and even that they had taken her all the previous years as well, because little Hanna has always been there. What is intolerable in the situ­ ation is that little Hans cannot envisage that there should not be a Hanna during the holidays in Gmunden, and he makes up for this in his reminiscing. I’m employing this term very precisely, with its Platonic accent, in opposition to the function of repetition and of the re-found object. Hans turns the Hanna-object into an object that has always been there. Just as Plato needed something to explain how we gain access to the higher world, since we could purportedly enter it even though we’re not part of it, so too does little Hans reduce Hanna to some­ thing that is remembered as a permanent fixture. This reminiscence is the first stage in the imaginification of this real, and it carries a very different meaning from all those stories of instinctual regression. After this, there is a second stage, when she becomes an Idea,

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again in the Platonic sense of the term, even an Ideal. What does little Hans have her do at this stage? This is also in his fantasy - he has her ride on the horse. It’s humorous and brilliant, mythical and epic, all at once. At the same time, it displays all the characteristics of those epic texts for which we’ve been going to great lengths to describe the two states of condensation, the two states of the epic poem, and to suppose all sorts of pundits, hecklers and charla­ tans who will expound on what, in epic and myth alike, has to be explained as hinging at once on what happens in the imaginary world and on what happens in the real world. Little Hans cannot exclude the coachman here, while on the other hand little Hanna has to be on the horse, and also holding the reins. So, in the same sentence, he says, The coachman had the reins Hanna had the reins too. There you have the vivid state of this kind of internal contradiction which so often in myths leads us to suppose that two registers are blending confusedly, that there is an incoher­ ent overlap of two stories, when in reality it’s because the author, whether he is Homer or little Hans, is in the grip of a contradiction between two registers that themselves are essentially different. You can see this coming alive here in the case of little Hans through the intermediary of the sister, who becomes his superior ego once she has become an image. With this key you can read the signification of each of his appraisals which from a certain point forth are voiced on the subject of little Hanna, including the admir­ ing appraisals. They are not merely ironic. They are essential to the little other who is there across from him. He has her perform what will enable him to start to dominate the situation. Once little Hanna has been astride the fearsome horse long enough, little Hans will be able to start to fantasise that he too is taming the horse. It is right after this that there is the whipped horse. Little Hans is starting to experience the truth of the forewarning issued by Nietzsche - Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergifi die Peitsche nicht! We are coming to a stop, but please don’t read it as the essential part of the lesson that I wanted to bring you today. It’s merely a cut-off point that was necessitated by the late hour to which this disquisition has led us. 5 June 1957

XXII A N E S S A Y IN R U B B E R SH E E T L O G IC

Father in the Frigidaire Sheaf and sickle The paternal metaphor The duplicated mother An imaginary paternity The academic year is wearing on, and we may hope that little Hans is nearing his end. I should remind you here at the outset that this year we have set ourselves the goal of revising the notion of the object relation. I think it will not be misplaced briefly to take a step back so as to show you, not the ground that has been covered - one always covers some - but rather, I trust, a certain effect of demystification to which you know I am greatly attached in matters of analysis. It seems to me that a minimum requirement in analytic formation is to realise that while man has to deal with his instincts - instincts that I credit, whatever some might say, including the death instinct - what analysis has brought us is, even so, the awareness that not everything can be summed up and encapsulated in a formula as simplistic and sanctimonious as the one to which we can commonly see psychoanalysts rallying, namely that, on the whole, everything is resolved when the subject’s relations with his fellow man are, as they say, person-to-person relations and not relations with an object. It is certainly not because I have been trying to show you here the real complexity of object relations that I would be led to loathe the expression object relations. Why shouldn’t our fellow man be quite validly an object? I would even say, thank heavens that he is an object, because, in truth, in what analysis shows us, at the start he is commonly even less than an object. He is this thing that comes to fill the place of the signifier in our questioning, if indeed neurosis is what I’ve been saying and repeating that it is, namely a question.

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An object is not such a straightforward matter. It’s something that is assuredly to be conquered, and indeed, as Freud reminds us, it can never be conquered without first being lost. An object is always a re-conquest. Only by taking up once more a place that he initially dis-inhabits can man arrive at something that is improperly called his wholeness. As far as the person is concerned, you surely realise that it is desir­ able that something should be established between our self and some subjects who do indeed represent the plenitude of the person. Yet this is precisely the terrain upon which it is hardest to advance. It is also the terrain upon which every kind of sideslip and confusion sets in. People commonly imagine that a person is something for which we recognise the right to say /, as we do for ourselves. However, we are clearly very much in a bind whenever it’s a matter of saying I in the full sense, as has been powerfully highlighted by the analytic experience which has just what it takes to show us what we slide into whenever it’s a matter of thinking about the other party as someone who says I. At such moments, we make him utter our own /, that is to say, we induce him into our own mirages. In short, as I underscored for you last year at the end of my seminar on the psychoses, the hardest issue to come to grips with when it’s a matter of encountering the person is not the I, but the thou. Everything indicates that this thou is the limit-signifier. It’s the very thing in relation to which, when we’re halfway to it, ultimately we always have to halt. Nevertheless, it is from this thou that we receive each investiture. It was not without reason that I brought last year’s seminar to a close on Thou art the one who wilt follow me . . . or who wilt not follow me . . . or who wilt do this. . . or not do this. If analysis is an experience that has shown us one thing, it’s pre­ cisely that all inter-human relations are founded on this investiture that comes in effect from the Other. This Other is already within us in the form of the unconscious, but nothing can be accomplished in our development if not through this constellation that implies the absolute Other as the seat of speech. If the Oedipus complex has a meaning then it’s precisely that it yields, as the fundament of our installation between the real and the symbolic, and of our progress, the existence of He who possesses the Word, of He who can speak, of the Father. To spell it right out, the Father concretises the Oedipus complex in a function that, I repeat, is itself essentially problematic. The question What is the Father? is ultimately a ques­ tion that is posed at the heart of our analytic experience as an eternally unresolved questioning, at least for us analysts. This is the point from which I should like today to take up Little Hans’s problematic in order to show you where and in what way he

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places himself in relation to what the Father is and is not. The ques­ tion needs to taken up, however, from further back in the case history.

1 I shall start over by noting that the only locus from which a response may be uttered in a full and valid way to the question of the Father is the locus of a certain tradition. It’s not the next room along, as I often say about the phenomenologies, but rather the next door along. If the Father is to find somewhere its synthesis, its full meaning, then it’s in a tradition that is known as a religious tradition. It’s not without reason that over the course of history we have seen the Judeo-Christian tradition taking shape as the sole attempt to establish accord between the sexes upon the principle of an opposi­ tion between potentiality and actuality, which finds its mediation in a form of love. Outside of this tradition - let’s put this carefully - any relationship with the object implies the third-party dimension that we can see articulated in Aristotle. It’s a dimension that was thereafter eliminated by what I might call the apocryphal Aristotle, the Aristotle of a theology1 that was attributed to him much later. Everyone knows that the Theologia Aristotelis exists and that it is apocryphal. The crucial Aristotelian term with respect to the whole constitution of the object, which stands in opposition to it, is the third term of privation, охгрцощ. The whole object relation such as it has been established in the analytic literature and in Freudian doctrine revolves around the notion of privation. Indeed, you have seen this because it was my point of departure at the start of the year. The notion of priva­ tion is absolutely central to this doctrine, and when we leave it out of account we cannot understand how the progressive integration into one’s sex, as much for man as for woman, requires that one acknowledge something that essentially amounts to a privation that is to be taken on board for the one sex as for the other. This priva­ tion is to be taken on board equally in order fully to assume one’s sex. In short, Penisneid on one side, the castration complex on the other. Naturally, all of this joins up with the most immediate experi­ ence. It is fairly peculiar to see people taking up in a more or less camouflaged form, and which to a certain degree may be qualified as dishonest, the idea that all genital maturation entails an oblativity, a full recognition of the other party, by means of which the supposedly pre-set harmony between man and woman should be

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established. Yet we can see very well that the day-to-day experience of this is its constant failure. Go and tell a wife of this day and age that she is potentiality - as is said by the unknown theologian who went under the fictitious name of Aristotle throughout the whole medieval and scholastic tradition - and that you, the man, are actuality, you will receive a swift response. Not on your life! she will tell you, do you take me for a pushover? And this is surely quite clear. Woman has fallen into the midst of the same problems as us. There’s no need to tackle the feminist or social aspect of the question. It’s enough to cite the fine quatrain that Apollinaire fashioned for the profession of faith that comes out of the mouth of Theresa-Tiresias, or more precisely her husband, who says furtively to the policeman Je suis une honnete femme-monsieur Ma femme est un homme-madame Elle a emporte le piano le violon Vassiette au beurre .Elle est soldat ministre merdecin2 Certainly we need to be standing on our own two feet on the ground of our experience and to perceive that if analytic experience has made some headway into the problem that is most fully presentified by our whole experience of the development of life, even of neurosis, then it’s precisely to the extent that it has been able to locate the rela­ tions between the sexes on their different echelons of object relation. But what does this mean? It means, as has been noted - and after all, not to see this amounts truly to nothing more than drawing over it a sort of veil of the lowest form of modesty, a false modesty - that if analysis has led to progress in one thing, then it’s very precisely on the plane of what needs to be called by its name, eroticism. It is on this plane that the relations between the sexes do indeed come effectively to be elucidated, in so far as they are to be found on the path of something that is a fusion, a realisation, a response to the question posed by the subject regarding his sex, and in so far as he is both something that has entered the world and that, as for the rest, he is never satisfied by it, namely the infamous and perfect oblativity in which the ideal harmony between man and woman is purported ultimately to be found. We only ever find this on a distant horizon that doesn’t even allow us to name it as one of the goals to be accomplished in analysis. To afford a wholesome prospect on what is involved in the pro­ gress of our investigation we need to see that in the relation between man and woman, once it has been established, a gap still lies wide open. Something of this must ultimately remain admissible in the

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eyes of the philosopher, that is to say, the one who always plays his cards right. It’s that, after all, woman, namely the wife, essentially holds the function that she held for Socrates, to wit - the test of his forbearance, his forbearance of the real. To enter more vividly into what is set further to punctuate what I’m asserting, and which will bring us back to little Hans, I’m going to share with you a titbit that one of my most excellent friends spotted and brought to my attention. It’s a small news item that reached us a fortnight ago from the depths of America concerning a woman bound to her husband by a pact of eternal love, and you’re about to see how. Since her husband’s death, this woman has borne, every ten months, one of his children. This may strike you as rather surpris­ ing, but it’s no parthenogenetic phenomenon. On the contrary, it’s a matter of artificial insemination. Vowed as she was to eternal fidel­ ity, by the time a fatal illness had led her husband to his last breath, she had accumulated a sufficient stock of seminal fluid to allow her to perpetuate the race of the deceased at her own discretion, and, as you can see, in the shortest possible timeframe, at regularly repeated intervals. We were made to wait for this little piece of news, which doesn’t sound like such a big deal, though we might have anticipated it. In truth, it’s the most riveting illustration we could possibly find of what I’ve been calling the л: of paternity, because I think that you are quite able to form a grasp of the problems that such a possibility introduces. Here you have an illustration of what I’ve been saying when I’ve been telling you that the symbolic father is the dead father. However, the novelty that is here introduced, and which has just what it takes to highlight the importance of my remark, is that in this case the real father is the dead father as well. From this moment forth, it really would be very interesting to ask oneself what becomes of the Oedipus complex in such a case. On the plane that lies closest to our experience it would be easy to come out with a few quips on what lies behind the term frigid woman. As the latter-day saying goes, femme froide, mari refroidi. Frigid wife, husband on ice. I might also mention in this connection a slogan one of my friends came up with for a TV advertisement. It’s true that he had considerable difficulty getting the slogan accepted by British minds, but this is precisely where its worth lies. Picture a coolly attractive housewife, and then the voiceover, Tracey has a frigid air, before the shot cuts to her Frigidaire. This is very much how matters stand in the previous case. The question that is wonderfully illustrated here is that the real notion of the father is not to be confounded in any case with the

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notion of his fecundity. We can clearly see here that the issue lies elsewhere, and surely we cannot help but see it when we ask our­ selves the question of what becomes of the notion of the Oedipus complex. I will leave it to you to extrapolate. Once one has commit­ ted to this path, in a hundred years’ time we will be making women the mothers of children who are the direct sons of the men of genius alive today, who will have been carefully preserved in little jars. The question arises, therefore, if something of the father has been cut out in this instance, and in the most radical way, by cutting out his speech, then how and by what path, in what fashion, will the speech of the ancestor be inscribed into the child’s psyche? Ultimately, the mother will be the sole representative and conveyer of this speech, so how will she give voice to the bottled ancestor? As you can see, this is not science fiction. It simply has the advan­ tage of laying bare for us one of the dimensions of the problem. This is being said as a parenthesis, because just now I was speaking on the theme of an ideal solution to the problem of marriage, at the next door along. It would be interesting to see how, now that this problem of posthumous insemination by a consecrated husband has been made present, the Church will find a means of taking a position on this. In truth, were the Church to refer to what it pushes to the fore in similar cases, namely the fundamental character of natural practices, it could be remarked that such a practice has been made possible precisely to the extent that we have managed to set Nature apart from all that is not Nature. From this point forth, perhaps the term natural ought to be given greater precision, and of course one would then come round to accentuating the great artifice of what thus far has been known as Nature. In a word, we might not be unhelpful at this moment as a term of reference. By the same token, perhaps our good friend Fran?oise Dolto, or one of her students, will even become a Church Father. The distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real might not suffice to posit the terms of this problem, which, now that it has been engaged in reality, doesn’t appear to me to be all that close to resolution. However, this story will make it easier for us to formulate - which is what I desire to do today - the term under which may be inscribed, not in itself, but for the subject, the sanc­ tioning of the function of the father. 2 Once we have let in this gust of air that strips the decor from the columns, it becomes apparent to us that any kind of introduction

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to the paternal function belongs to the realm of metaphorical experience. I am going to illustrate this for you, not by overbur­ dening you with new items, but by recalling for you the heading under which last year I introduced what here I’ve been calling metaphor. Metaphor is the function, the use of the signifying chain, which unfolds not in its connective dimension - in which any metonymic usage of the signifying chain is installed - but in its dimension of substitution. I didn’t go any further when hunting out my example than something that is within everyone’s reach, the Quillet diction­ ary, from which I took the first example listed, namely the line of verse by Hugo, Sa gerbe n’etait point avare ni haineuse? You will tell me that fortune is favouring me, after what has come our way in my demonstration, like a ring slipped onto a finger. I would reply that any metaphor could serve as an analogous dem­ onstration, but I’m going to repeat this one because it’s specifically what leads us back to our subject of phobia. What is meant by metaphor? It is not, as the Surrealists say, the passing of the poetic spark between two terms that are as imaginarily remote as can be. Admittedly, this definition sounds right, because it’s quite clear that it’s not a question of this poor sheaf being avare or haineuse. Indeed, it’s about the very human strangeness of explaining oneself in this way, by relating subject to attribute though the intermediary of a negation, a negation that stands, of course, against the backdrop of a possible affirmation. To spell it right out, it’s not a question of the sheaf being neither avare nor haineuse, because meanness and hatefulness are attributes that belong to Boaz no less than to the sheaf. Boaz turns one and the other to use, suitably employing these properties as he does his merits, without asking their opinion or their feelings. The two things between which metaphorical creation is produced are what is being explained under the term sa gerbe and the term for which sa gerbe is substituted, namely the gentleman who has been spoken of just a moment before in balanced terms, and whose name is Boaz. The gerbe, the sheaf, has taken his place, a somewhat cumu­ lative place where he is already endued with these qualities of being neither avare nor haineux, having cleared out a certain number of negative virtues. This is where the sheaf comes in his stead and liter­ ally cancels him out for a moment. Here we meet again the schema of the symbol qua death of the thing. It’s even better here, because the name of the protagonist is abolished and his sheaf comes as a substitute for him. If there is metaphor here, if this has a meaning, if this is a phase

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of pastoral poetry, then it’s very precisely because his sheaf, that is to say, something that is essentially natural, can be substituted for him. And then Boaz reappears, after having been eclipsed, occulted, abolished, by the fecund splendour of the sheaf. Indeed, it knows neither meanness nor hatefulness, and is purely and simply a natural fecundity. This bears its meaning in the following part of the poem. What is at issue is to herald and to announce to Boaz, in the ensuing dream, how despite his advanced age - as he says himself, he is over eighty years old - he is soon to be a father. He dreams that he vit un chene Qui, sorti de son ventre, allait jusqu’au ciel bleu; Une race y montait comme une longue chaine; Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un dieu.4 Any creation of a new meaning in human culture is essentially metaphoric. It’s a matter of a substitution which at the same time maintains what it is substituting. In the tension between what is abolished or suppressed and what is substituted for it, this novel thing comes about that introduces so visibly what is being developed by the poetic improvisation. The new dimension that in this instance is manifestly incarnated by this Boazian myth is the function of paternity. Admittedly, the aging Hugo is, as usual, far from walking always the meticulous path. He dodders somewhat left, right and centre, but what is quite clear is that Pendant qu’il sommeillait, Ruth, une moabite, S ’etait couchee aux pieds de Booz, le sein nu, Esperant on ne sait quel rayon inconnu, Quand viendrait du reveil la lumiere subite.5 The style of this extract lies in an ambiguous zone where the realism blends with some sort of gleam that is a little too intense, even turbid, redolent of the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio’s paintings which, with all their popular starkness, are perhaps still in our times what can afford us most frankly a sense of the sacred dimension. So, a little further on, the same thing is still at stake Immobile, ouvrant Vail a moitie sous ses voiles, Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de Veternel etc Avait, en sen allant, negligemment jete Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des etoiles.6

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Neither in my teaching of last year, nor in what I have recently written on the sheaf in the poem about Boaz and Ruth, did I push the investigation up to the final point to which the poet develops the metaphor. I left the sickle out of account because, outside of the context of what we are doing here, readers might have found it a little forced. I think, however, that you cannot fail to be struck by how the whole poem points towards one image, the intuitive and comparative character of which has been a cause of wonder for nigh on a century. It has to do with the first waxing crescent of the moon, but you cannot help but notice that if this thing carries weight, if it is some­ thing more than a lovely stroke of paint, a touch of golden yellow on the deep blue sky, then it’s very precisely in so far as this skybound sickle is the eternal sickle of maternity, the one that has already played its role between Cronus and Uranus, between Zeus and Cronus. It’s the potentiality I was speaking about earlier, which is fully represented in woman’s mystical expectancy. With the sickle that is lying around in her arm’s reach, this gleaner will effectively cut the sheaf in question, the one from which the lineage of the Messiah will spring forth. Our little Hans, in the creation, development and resolution of his phobia, can inscribe himself properly into the equation only on the basis of these terms. Note if you will that here in the Oedipus complex we have some­ thing in the place of x, where the child stands, with all his problems in relation to the mother, M. In so far as something will be produced that is set to constitute the paternal metaphor, this signifier-element can be placed which is so essential in all individual development and which is called the castration complex. As I have said, this holds as much for woman as for man. Therefore, we have to posit the following equation -

P is the paternal metaphor. The x is more or less elided, depending on the case, that is, depend­ ing on the moment of development and the problems to which the preoedipal period has led the child in relation to the mother, M. It is in the link of the Oedipal metaphor that, with the phase that is crucial to any concept of the object, we can thus inscribe a crescent C or a sickle - its constitutive castration complex - plus something that is precisely the signification, s, that is to say, that in which Being finds itself again, and where x finds its solution. The formula situates the essential moment of the crossing of the Oedipus complex. This is exactly what we are dealing with in the case

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of little Hans. As I explained, having reached a particular degree of development, there arises the insoluble problem constituted by the fact that the mother is something as complex as the following formula, with all the complications it brings with it (M + tp + a)

This, which is to be read Mother plus phallus plus a for Hanna, designates the impasse that Hans has reached. He cannot get out of it because there is no Father. There is nothing to metaphorise his relations with his mother. To spell it right out, there is no way out on the side of the sickle, on the side of the capital C of the castration complex. There is no possibility of a mediation, that is to say, of losing his penis then to find it again. On the other side of the equation, he finds only the possible biting of his mother, which is the same mordaciousness with which he rushes up to her voraciously whenever he misses her. There is no other real relationship with the mother besides the one that is being highlighted by the whole of the contemporary theory of analysis, namely the relationship of devoration. In so far as he has arrived at this deadlock, he knows no other relationship with the real besides the one that is called, rightly or wrongly, oral-sadistic. This is what I am writing with a lower-case m. Indeed, it is m plus everything that is real for him at this moment, in particular the real that comes to light and which cannot help but complicate the situation, namely П, his own penis. This is set out in the following formula (М + ф + а ) М ~ т + П Once the problem is presenting itself to him in this way, it is neces­ sary for this element of metaphorical mediation to be introduced - for there is no other - in the form of the horse, noted 'I [for Imtoq] with its spiritus asper. The inauguration of the phobia is thus inscribed into the same formula I have just laid out -

This will be the equivalent of something that will not for all that be any the more resolved, namely the mordaciousness insomuch as for little Hans it is the chief danger in his whole reality, and most especially the reality that has just come to the surface, namely his genital reality. This might seem superficial to you. Don’t believe it. Start by making

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use of these formulae and you will see afterwards whether they can indeed be helpful. I can show you umpteen facets across which they are immediately applicable, and in particular the following. The horse is said to be at once what bites, what threatens the penis, and also what falls. According to what little Hans himself tells us, this is why the horse has been brought into play. It was brought in first of all as the horse that, standing in front of the cart that was to take Lizzi’s luggage to the station, turns its head and is capable of biting. It was then, on 1 March, that Hans told us he got the nonsense. At another point, on 5 April, Hans also tells us that he got the nonsense when, out with his mother, he saw a bus-horse fall down. More exactly, that which is hitched already has a signification for Hans, yet has also been retained by him as something that goes far beyond any signification, as something that he sanctions through a kind of aphorism or definitional assertion, Now it’ll always be like this. All horses in buses’llfall down. The function of the fall is precisely the term that is common to everything that is at issue in the lower portion of the equation. We have underscored the element of the mother’s fall, the mother’s phallus, cp, which is what is no longer tenable. It’s no longer in play, and yet Hans does all he can to keep up the existence of this game. In the end, little Hanna is very essentially the thing whose fall is most wished for, even if it means giving her a little push. So, the horse fulfils in an efficient way, as an image that is somehow active, each of these functions of the fall united in one. It is in this respect that it starts to be introduced as an essential term, as the term of the phobia in which we can see an asserting and a positing of what truly are objects for the human psyche. They may indeed warrant the name object, but one cannot over­ emphasise the special character of this qualification as an object which it is necessary to introduce once the objects we are dealing with are phobias or fetishes. We do know how far they exist as objects, because they will constitute veritable milestones in the sub­ ject’s psyche. They are milestones of desire in the case of the fetish, milestones of the subject’s displacements in the case of phobia. The object is therefore very much in the real and at the same time mani­ festly distinct from it. On the other hand, it is in no way accessible to conceptualisation unless through the intermediary of this signifying formalisation. Let’s state it clearly. Thus far, no more satisfactory conceptualisa­ tion has been given. While I might seem to be presenting the formula for the object in a slightly more complicated shape than has ever been done before, I point out to you that Freud speaks of it no differently at the end of his life’s work. Looking afresh at phobia in Hemmung,

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Symptom und Angst, he plainly states that the horse - because he takes little Hans again as an example - is an object that has been substituted for all the images and all the addled significations that have been rather poorly isolated and into which the subject doesn’t manage to decant his anxiety. Freud makes it an almost arbitrary object, and this is why he calls it a signal. Thanks to this, in this field of confusions, limits will be defined that, however arbitrary they may be, introduce no less the element of delimitation that will ensure, at least potentially, the beginning of an order, the first crystal of an organised crystallisation between the symbolic and the real. This is in effect what will be produced over the course of Hans’s progressing analysis, if indeed we can call what occurs in Hans’s case an analysis in the full sense of the term. The psychoanalysts don’t yet seem to have understood - at least not when you read Dr Jones - that Freud had a few reservations about the case, saying that it was quite exceptional in that the child’s father was the one who brought it about and saw it through, although steered by Freud. As a consequence, Freud was to ground very little on the possible extension of this method. The analysts seem to be surprised by Freud’s diffidence here. They would do better to take a closer look and ask themselves whether, given the fact that the analysis was conducted by the father, it might not present specific features that exclude, at least partially, the specifically transferential dimension. In other words, isn’t the usual yarn proffered by Miss Anna Freud, to the effect that no transference is possible in child analyses, appli­ cable precisely in this case, because the father is involved? It is only too evident that in any child analysis practised by an analyst there is well and truly a transference just as there is in adults, and perhaps a better one than elsewhere. Something rather particu­ lar is at issue here, the consequences of which we shall be led to show in the next part. Be that as it may, the formula allows us to scan in the most rigor­ ous way the full progress of the father’s intervention. I think I will be able to show you next time how this formula really allows us to grasp why some of the father’s interventions do not bear fruit while, on the contrary, others rock the mythical transformation into motion.

3 Across its development, the case of little Hans displays the transfor­ mations of this equation, while its possibilities of progress and its implicit metaphorical richness are made manifest right away. For

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today, I shall content myself with indicating its furthest and final extent, such as it is written into the same formalisation. I’ve already told you enough for you to be able to conceive of its scope. What we see at the end is certainly a solution that establishes little Hans in a register of object relations that is liveable. Is it fully suc­ cessful from the standpoint of Oedipal integration? Before coming back to this more closely next time, we can already see in what way it is and in what way it isn’t. If we read the text where little Hans formulates his position at the end, he tells us, now I ’m the Daddy, jetzt bin ich der Vatti. We don’t need to ask ourselves how it can be that he should have had this idea, given the father whom he is forced to stimulate throughout the observation, begging him to do his job as a father. The final and very fine fantasy that is produced with the father shows him somehow catching up with Hans on the train platform when in reality Hans had raced on ahead some time hence, having set off with whom? As if by chance, it was the grandmother. The first thing that his father asks him is, What would you like to do if you were Daddy? The reply comes straight out, I ’d like to take you to Lainz every Sunday, to see the Lainz grandmother. Nothing has changed in the relationship between father and son. We may presume, therefore, that this is not an altogether typical realisation of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, if we know how to read the text we can see this very quickly. All the bonds with the father are a long way from being broken. They are even being strongly tied through all of this analytic experience. However, as little Hans puts it very well, his father is now to be the grandfather. He says this, but when does he say it? Read the text carefully. He said it when he had begun by saying that he, Hans, was the father. The term grandfather stands utterly apart here. First the mother is mentioned, and we are going to see what sort of mother she will be. Then another woman is mentioned - the grandmother. But there is no link whatsoever between this grandfather and this grandmother from little Hans’s perspective in itself. Freud is surely not wrong to underscore, with a satisfaction that is far from offering us full relief, that the question of the Oedipus complex has been resolved by the little chap, now making himself the mother’s husband and sending his father back to the grandmother. It’s an elegant and even humorous way of sidestepping the question, but thus far nothing in all that Freud has written indicates that this solution, however cogent it might appear, could be regarded as a typical solution to the Oedipus complex. What we can see is that little Hans maintains a certain continuity

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in the order of lineages. Had this point at least not been reached, little Hans would have resolved nothing at all and the function of the phobia would have been null. In so far as he conceives of himself as the father, little Hans is a function of something that is inscribed approximately as follows P(M )(M ') It’s the mother and the grandmother. At the end of the process, the mother is duplicated. This is a very important point. Little Hans has recognised something that allows him to find a three-legged equipoise, which is the minimum upon which the relation with the object can be established. The thirdness that he has not found in his father is now found in the grandmother, whose absolutely deci­ sive and indeed overwhelming value in the object relations he has spotted only too well. It’s precisely insomuch as, behind the mother, a second is added, that little Hans establishes himself in a paternity. What sort of paternity? Well, an imaginary paternity. What does Hans tell us next? Who will have children? Well, he will. He says it very clearly. But when his father, putting his foot in it, asks him, Will you have children with Mummy? Hans replies, Not at all. What’s this all about? You told me that the father cannot have children on his own, and now you want me to have some. There is a moment of wavering in the dialogue between the child and his father, which is quite striking and which shows the repressed aspect, for little Hans, of everything that belongs to the realm of paternal creation as such, when what he voices on the contrary from this moment forth is precisely that he will have children, but imaginary children. He says in the most precise and articulate manner that he wishes to have children, but on another side he doesn’t want his mother to have any. Hence the assurances he wants to secure for the future. For the mother not to have any more children, anything is thinkable, up to and including the bribing - despite everything we are in the presence of a sprog of capitalists - of the great genitor par excellence, the stork, who cuts such a strange figure. Next time we shall be seeing what place and what function ought to be ascribed to the stork and what his true face is. Hans would go so far as to bribe the stork so that there would be no more real children. The paternal function that the child takes on board is an imagi­ nary one. The mother has been replaced and he will have children as she does. He will look after his imaginary children in the way that he

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has managed completely to resolve the notion of the child, including the notion of young Hanna. In what does all of his fantasy consist, with the box, the stork, and little Hanna who already existed long before her birth? It’s a matter of imaginarising his sister, of fantasmatising her. So, he will have fantasmatic children. He will become a character who is essentially a poet, a creator in the imaginary order. He will give the last of his imaginary creations the name Lodi. The father takes great interest in this. How did you hit upon the name Lodi? he asks. Perhaps you mean a Schokolodi? No, replies Hans, a Saffalodi. Indeed, Saffalodi relates back to Saffaladi, a kind of saveloy sausage. The phalloform character of the image indicates very well the imaginary transmutation that has been brought about by the phallus that is both unretumed and eternally imagined by the mother. We see it reproduced at the end in the shape of little Lodi. For Hans, woman will never be anything other than the fantasy of these little sister-girls around whom his entire childhood crisis is set to revolve. This is not altogether a fetish, because equally this will be the true fetish, if I may say so. He won’t stop at what is inscribed on the veil. Rather, he will find again the typical heterosexual form of his object, but this will not prevent his relationship with women being thenceforth and doubtless forever marked by the narcissistic genesis in the course of which he has found a way to place himself in an orthoposition in relation to the female partner. To say it all, the female partner will not have been generated on the basis of the mother, but on the basis of the imaginary children that he can make with the mother and who themselves are heirs to the phallus around which revolved the whole primordial game of the love relation, of the captivation of love in the mother’s regard. So, in reference to our equation, we ultimately have on the one hand the assertion of Hans’s relationship as a new father, as the Vatti, with a maternal lineage, and on the other hand little Hanna riding the horse and taking a dominant position in relation to the whole convoy, in relation to the whole train, to everything that the mother trails behind her. Indeed, it is through the intermediary of little Hanna that little Hans has come to do what we said he was doing last time, that is to say, to dominate the mother, not simply to whip her, but, as the next part of the case history shows us, to see what she has in her belly. Once the little castrating penknife has been extracted, she is far more innocuous. p (M) (M') ~ Q

П

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This is the formula that, in contrast to the previous one, marks the point of arrival of little Hans’s transformation. He will surely have every appearance of a normal heterosexual. Nevertheless, the path he will have taken through the Oedipus complex in order to arrive at this is an atypical path, linked to the father’s shortcoming. You might be stunned at how great this shortcoming is, but the main thrust of the observation constantly shows us the father’s faults and flaws which are underscored from one moment to the next by the appeals of little Hans himself. So, there is certainly no need to be stunned at how this shortcoming leaves the mark of a terminal atypia on the progress and resolution of the phobia. I ask you simply to keep these two furthermost terms in mind, so as to see that it is possible and conceivable to try to articulate the transformation of one into the other through a series of stages. Doubtless we ought not to be overly systematic here. This brand of logic is a new one. If it is to be pursued, perhaps it should merely be to introduce a certain number of questions regarding its for­ malism. Does it share the same laws with what has already been formalised in other domains of logic? Freud, in the Traumdeutung, had already initiated something that tells us about the logic of the unconscious, in other words signifiers in the unconscious. This is certainly not the same as the logic that we are accustomed to handling. A generous quarter of the Traumdeutung is devoted essentially to showing a number of crucial logical articulations. Either/or, contradiction and causality, can be transported into the order of the unconscious. This logic may be distinct from our usual logic. Since topology is a rubber-sheet geom­ etry, here it’s a matter of rubber-sheet logic. Rubber-sheet does not mean that everything is possible therein. Until further notice, nothing allows us to unlink two interconnected rings, even rubber ones. This remark is intended to show you that rubber-sheet logic is not doomed to complete and utter freedom. It requires us to define a certain number of terms and these definitions will have to be provided. In short, what we can see appearing at the end of the resolution of little Hans’s phobia is a particular configuration that is organised as follows. Despite the presence and even the insistence of the paternal action, little Hans inscribes himself into a matriarchal lineage of sorts, or to be more straightforward, and stricter too, a maternal duplication, as though it were necessary that there should be a third person, and that for want of it being the father, it should be the notorious grandmother. On the other hand, what is it that brings him into relation with

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the object that henceforth will be the object of his desires? I have already underlined how we have testimony in the anamnesis of something that attaches him essentially to Gmunden, to his little sister, to the little girls, that is to say, to children insomuch as they are his mother’s daughters, but also his own imaginary daughters. The originally narcissistic structure of his relationships with woman is indicated on the way out, with the opening out onto the solution of his phobia. What trace will remain of the passage through the phobia? Well, something very curious - the role of the little lamb, with which at the end he engages in some rather peculiar games, for example being butted by the animal. This is the little lamb onto which one day someone tried to put his sister. That is to say, she was in the same position as the horseback position that she holds in the fantasy of the big box, the last stage before the resolution of the phobia. The sister had to dominate it first, so that he, little Hans, might then treat the horse as it warrants being treated, that is, by whacking it. At this point, the equivalence between the horse and the mother is secured - to beat the horse is also to beat his mother. The little sister sitting astride the little lamb is a configuration that will remain through to the end. I cannot forego the pleasure, nor decline you the enigma, of showing you the work around which our master Freud made his analysis of Leonardo da Vinci revolve, namely, not the Virgin o f the Rocks, but The Virgin and Child with St Anne that is in the Louvre and which was preceded by a cartoon that is in Burlington House, this one here. Freud’s whole analysis of Leonardo da Vinci turns around this Saint Anne, who has such a strangely androgynous figure - moreo­ ver, she looks like Leonardo’s St John the Baptist - around the Virgin, and around the Christ child. Furthermore, as is stressed in the study, unlike the London Cartoon, His cousin, namely John the Baptist, is precisely a little lamb. This highly singular configuration did not fail to attract Freud’s attention and it is truly the core of his demonstration in the very peculiar study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory o f his Childhood. I do hope that you will take the trouble to read it before the end of the year, because I might manage to bring my seminar to a close with this. You cannot help but notice the incredibly enigmatic character of the whole situation in which the term narcissism is introduced for the first time and the almost insensate audacity of writing such a thing at the time it was written. Since then we have managed to scotomise, to misrecognise, the existence of such things in Freud’s oeuvre.

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Read it, and you will realise just how difficult it is to work out what ultimately it is he wants to manage to say. But also read it to see the extent to which it holds water, in spite of all its errors because errors there are, but that’s of no moment. We will have to come back to this singular configuration, which is there to present us with a humanissima Trinita, a very human trinity that is almost too human, in contrast to the divinissima that it substitutes. What I wanted to present to you as a toothing stone is the peculiar necessity of a fourth term, which here we meet as a residue in the shape of the lamb, this animal term in which we meet again the very term of the phobia. 19 June 1957

XXIII M E DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGENITURE’

From intersubjectivity to discourse The object as a function of the signifier Phobic metaphor From biting to unscrewing Hanna, mistress of the horse Freud tells us that the truth about Hans was not fully obtained. What is to be done now is to formalise the observation slightly dif­ ferently, the sole interest of which lies in how it allows for a more rigorous clasping and enveloping of what is going on. There are, of course, all these French windows in the observa­ tion, and since it also has to do with a horse phobia one could for example babble on endlessly about the horse, because it’s a highly singular animal, the same that crops up regularly in all mythology and which can be validly compared with little Hans’s horse. Robert Fliess, the son of Freud’s correspondent who occu­ pies an honourable place in psychoanalysis, has produced in the jubilee issue of the IJP commemorating the centenary of Freud’s birth a worthy study under the title Phylogenetic Vs. Ontogenetic Experience. Certainly, it is inordinately striking on account of its character of manifest incompatibility. Since there are unresolved riddles in the Hans case, he ventures to resolve them by contributing to the file a vast extrapolation, the only completely unjustified draw­ back of which is that it assumes something to have been resolved that precisely has not been resolved. One of the most riveting things is to see how he focuses every­ thing, quite validly, on the infamous dialogue between little Hans and his father, the one that I have called the major dialogue and which culminates on 21 April. It’s the one during which little Hans appeals to his father to play his role as a father by saying, You must be jealous. One cannot help but think that his father has played a

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role in the emergence of this sentence, which you can sense brewing up in everything that precedes it. Whatever happens, and whatever unnerved negations his father may utter, das mufi wahr sein, it must be true. These are the words that bring a dialogue to a close in which little Hans develops the fantasy of his father who, before arriving in the mother’s bedroom, hurts his foot on a stone as did previously little Fritzl. The father has to knock up against a stone and bleed. Our author, Fliess, insists with great finesse on the use of words that lend what little Hans is saying a style soutenu - in French in the text - more soutenu here than anywhere else. In this regard he brings out clearly the inadequacies of the English translation. These remarks, which surely have their value, show the sensitivity that people from the first analytic generation have shown to the properly verbal texture, to the accentuation of certain signifiers and their crucial role, but the most interesting thing in his text is its rather astute speculation on the father’s role on this occasion. Indeed, the father is the one who introduces for the first time the word Schimpfen, which has been translated [into English] as scold. Weshalb schimpf ich denn eigentlich? is rendered as What do I really scold you for? Fliess rightly notes that this is injected into the conversation precipitately andfrom nowhere, and speculates on what participation might be occurring on the part of the father in what at that moment is assumed to be a constituent part of Hans’s ego. All of this does not add up to an overly brazen extrapolation, conveying instead the need that the author feels to tell us that Hans’s superego is being constituted at that moment. Indeed, it must be like this because it is already implied in a sort of preformed register that has to be applied to the case. Either way, there is something here that allows us to grasp, there and then, his hesitations in his way of expressing himself. Fliess speaks of a superego in statu nascendi. Certainly Hans’s superego has not yet been formed. The forming of the superego is something strange indeed. The author refers to the work of Mr Isakower, who insisted a great deal on the predominance of the auditory sphere in the formation of the superego and who foresaw the whole problem that we have been posing and constantly posing again with respect to the func­ tion of speech in the genesis of a certain normative crisis that we call the Oedipus complex. He made equally interesting and perti­ nent remarks about how we can grasp the mounting of this kind of apparatus, this network of forms that constitutes the superego, perceiving it in elements in which the subject hears purely syntactic modulations, in words that are strictly speaking empty because their movement alone is at issue. He tells us that in these movements of

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some intensity we can grasp, there and then, something that must refer back to an altogether archaic element. The child integrates the adult’s speech, but will perceive only its structure and not yet its meaning. All in all, it’s a matter of interiorisation. This is purported to be the first form of what will allow us to envisage what the super­ ego is, properly speaking. It’s another interesting remark and in a seminar context it could be grouped together with the dialogue between Hans and his father, but not in order to find therein something that would match up neatly. On the one hand it’s a matter of the integration of speech in its overall movement, in its fundamental structure as the grounding of an internal agency of the superego. On the other, there is the precise moment of the dialogue with his father, which is wholly externalised. The former can certainly not be matched fully to the latter, even though one might believe that its paradoxes would thereby be sealed over. While we should always be seeking comprehensive references for what we are describing, I will stress now the necessity of doing something that brings out a point of progression in the handling of concepts of the analytic experience, and of doing so by grasping as closely as possible the movement of the observation on little Hans.

I Everything that we have done thus far hinges on a number of pos­ tulates from our earlier commentaries, which are not absolutely postulates. These included a great deal of work of commentary and reflection on what the analytic experience puts before us. One of the postulates is that neurosis is a question posed by the subject at the level of his very existence. What does it mean to be o f the sex that I am? Or What does it mean to be o f one sex? What does it mean that I can even ask myself this question? Indeed, the introduction of the symbolic dimension means that man is not simply male or female but that he has to situate himself in relation to something symbol­ ised that is called male or female. While neurosis refers back to this, it does so in a way that is more woeful still in obsessional neurosis where it is not only a matter of the subject’s relation to his sex but also of his relation to the very fact of existing. What does it mean to exist? How can I relate to the one that lam without being him, since I can somehow do without him? While neurosis is thus a sort of closed question for the subject himself, even though it is one that is organised and structured as a question, it is quite certain that we can also form a finer understand­

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ing of how symptoms are the living elements of this question that is articulated without the subject knowing what he articulates. The question is a living one, so to speak, and the subject doesn’t know that he is in the question. He is often an element of the question, and can be situated at various levels - at an altogether elementary and almost alphabetic level, but also at a higher syntactical level. It is within this register that we may speak of the hypnopompic and hypnagogic function.1On this basis, starting from the idea that the linguists have given us - at least certain among them - we can discern the two major aspects of the articulation of language. What makes it hard for us to be wholly in keeping with the linguists in our commentary on the observation is that we always have to refrain from pitching in a way that is overly absolute for one or the other of the two sides of what is put before us. For there to be an observation we have to begin by analysing. Since what is specific to the neurotic’s question is that it is totally closed, there is no reason for it to offer up anything more to he who would merely make a sort of rubbing of this hieroglyphic text that will remain undecipherable and enigmatic. This is why, before Freud came along, observations of neuroses had been made for decades without people even suspecting the existence of this lan­ guage. For neurosis is a language. Therefore, it is always in so far as something intervenes that is the beginning of a decipherment that we manage precisely to grasp its transformations and to see the manipulations that would be neces­ sary when it comes to confirming that what is really involved is a text, but a text in which we find ourselves by means of a certain number of structures that become apparent only insomuch as we grapple with it. We can do this at the simple level of decoupage, as is done for riddles. In some respects, this is how we proceed in particularly impenetrable and enigmatic cases, not altogether unlike what we find set out in The Psychopathology o f Everyday Life, which reminds us of common practices for deciphering telegrams, even when they have been sent in a style that is coded or scrambled. One can even tally the signs that recur with the greatest frequency, which allows us to make interesting suppositions, namely that such and such a sign corresponds to such and such a letter in whichever tongue is supposed as the object language. With the neuroses we are fortunately involved in operations of a higher order, where we meet certain syntactical groupings with which we are familiar. Yet the danger is always that one could go wrong by entifying these syntactical groupings, pressing them too heavily towards what might be called properties o f the soul, even

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pushing them a little too far in the direction of a sort of natural instinctualisation. This would be to fail to perceive that what sud­ denly comes to dominate is the organising nexus that lends some of these groupings the value of a unit of signification, which is com­ monly called a word. It was in this sense that I recently alluded to the infamous identification of the boy with his mother, and I tell you now that the general fact of an identification such as this can only ever be made in relation to the overall movement of analytic progress. As Freud points out emphatically in the observation on little Hans - it’s on page 319 of the German text - kann der Weg der Analyse niemals den Entwicklungsgang der Neurose wiederholen, the course o f the analysis can never follow that o f the development o f the neurosis. Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter. In our effort of decipherment we must follow what has effectively been woven into the text, and this text is itself subject to the use of an element from the subject’s past in a current situation, as a signifier-element for example. Here we have one of the clearest forms of the x of a condensation. It is quite certain that when we broach the signifierelement we cannot at that moment cut ourselves off from the fact that it breaks down into two terms, two points that lie very far apart in the subject’s history, yet we have to resolve these things in the mode of organisation in which they currently stand. This is what allows us and indeed compels us to seek out laws that are specific to the solution of each of these organised discourses, in keeping with whichever pattern by which the neuroses might present themselves to us. However, while there is organised discourse there is also some­ thing else that comes to complicate matters and this is the way in which a dialogue gets under way so as to offer a solution to the discourse. This cannot be done without us offering the place we hold as the locus in which a share of the terms of this discourse must be realised. In principle, simply by virtue of being a discourse, it entails somewhere, initially in a virtual form, the Other that is in sum the place, the witness, the guarantor and the ideal locus of its good faith. It is precisely here that we place ourselves and it is on this basis that we will see these elements of the subject’s unconscious coming to light, that is to say, terms that will take up the place we hold. This is how we will be called into the revelatory dialogue. The meaning of the discourse will be formulated through a dialogue that pro­ gressively decrypts it by showing us what function is held by the personage whose place we occupy. This is what is called transference. The said personage cannot help but change over the course of the analysis, and this is how we try to uncover the meaning of the dis­

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course. So, indeed, we are the ones, inasmuch as we are integrated as a person, as a signifier-element, who are positioned, and lastingly so, in such a way as to resolve the meaning of the discourse of neurosis. It is crucial always to keep these two planes of intersubjectivity in sight as the fundamental structure through which the history of the decrypting will develop. This must always be situated at its proper place in an observation. In the case of little Hans, we had to highlight the complexity of the relationship with his father. Let’s not forget that his father was the one who carried out the analysis. Therefore, this is the real, actual father dialoguing with his child. So, this is already a father who possesses speech, but beyond him there is the father to whom this speech is revealed as witness to its truth. This superior father is the almighty father who is represented by Freud, and this is something that cannot help but lend the observation an altogether essential characteristic that bears note. The structure involved here is to be mapped out in any kind of relationship between the one being analysed and the analyst. Likewise, this sort of higher agency is so inherent to the paternal personage or the paternal function that it tends always to be reproduced in one way or another. This is precisely what makes for the specificity of the time when the patient was dealing with father Freud himself. On that occasion, the duplication didn’t exist because the higher authority didn’t exist behind him, and the patient had a strong sense that across from him was someone who had made a new universe of signification loom up. This new relationship between man and his own meaning and condition is precisely what he was faced with. And it was there to be used by him. This explains what appears paradoxical to us in the sometimes very stunning results that Freud obtained, and also in the very stunning patterns of intervention he employed in his technique. This report enables us better to situate the direction in which our focus is shifting. Over the previous years you have seen me devel­ oping the fundamental subjective schema of the symbolic relation between the subject and this Other that is the unconscious person­ age who steers him and guides him, while the imaginary other, the little other, plays an intermediary role, that of a screen. Our focus has changed, little by little, and we have been led to reflect on the very structure of the discourse in question, which presents problems that are no less original and which are distinct from the previous ones. Over the course of this year we have gradually shifted focus. There are, of course, laws of intersubjectivity, which are laws that govern the subject’s relation to the little other and to the big Other,

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but this is not the be-all and end-all of what we are dealing with. The original function of discourse, where essentially it is language that is at issue, warrants broaching step by step. Discourse too has laws, and the relation between signifier and signified is something else, something distinct from intersubjectivity, even though it can overlap, as do the relations of the imaginary and the symbolic. This is how in our movement this year with regard to object relations we have seen coming into the open the originary place of elements that are truly and verily objects, which lie at a stage that is altogether originative and foundational and which even founds objects, but these objects are nevertheless utterly different from objects in the complete sense. At any rate, they are quite differ­ ent from real objects because it’s a matter of using objects that, while they may have been extracted from a subjective discontent, are made to function as signifiers.

2 The first object that I isolated in its function as a signifier was the fetish, and I won’t be going any further from now until the end of the year than a consideration of phobia. Even so, if you have properly understood what we have been trying to bring into play each time that we have spoken of little Hans’s phobia then this will have afforded you a mental model on the basis of which any further progress can be conceived of as a deepening or an extension into other neuroses, most notably hyste­ ria and obsessional neurosis. This is particularly straightforward and exemplary in phobia. Whenever you are dealing with a phobia in a young subject you will notice that what is at stake is always a signifier that is relatively straightforward in appearance. Of course, it won’t be straightfor­ ward to handle once you’ve entered his game, but elementarily speaking, it’s a signifier. This was the meaning of the formula I set out for you -

The terms under the bar represent what has progressively com­ plicated the elementary relationship with the mother, which was our point of departure when I spoke to you about the symbol of frustration, S(M), in so far as the mother is an alternating pres­ ence and absence. The child’s relationships with his mother become

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established here over the course of development from one age to the next. The case of little Hans led us first to this extremely taxing stage when the mother is complicated on account of all sorts of addi­ tional elements. First there is the phallus, cp. I told you that this was certainly the critical gap-element in any relation between the two, a relation which in contemporary analytic dialectics is being repre­ sented as something exceedingly closed. We need on the contrary to see the extent to which the child is himself in a relationship with an imaginary function on the mother’s side. Then, there is the other child, a, who momentarily expels the subject, driving him away from his mother’s affection. Here we have a critical moment that is typical for any kind of subject that our discourse supposes. It is always in this way that you will see a phobia appearing in a child. Something lacks, which at a certain point comes to play the fundamental role in the way out of the crisis in the child-mother relationship, which appears to have no way out. There’s no need to make hypotheses. The whole analytic construction is built on the consistency of the Oedipus complex, which can be schematised as follows ( P ) M~ If the Oedipus complex means something, then it’s that from a certain point on, the mother is regarded and experienced as function­ ing through the Father. Father warrants a capital P here, because we suppose that this is Paternity in the absolute sense of the term. It’s the Father at the level of the symbolic father. It’s the Nameof-the-Father, which establishes the existence of the Father in the complexity in which he presents to us. Each experience of psychopa­ thology breaks this complexity down for us as the Oedipus complex. In the end, it is none other than this, and the introduction of this symbolic element brings with it a new dimension that is completely radical with respect to the child’s relationship with his mother. To fill out the second part of the equation we need to start from the empirical data. These indicate the existence of something that, in a nutshell and perhaps subject to commentary, can roughly be established thus -

What I’m notating as П under x would be the real penis. The (-p) is what stands in opposition to the child as a sort of imaginary

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antagonism. This is the imaginary function of the father insomuch as he plays the aggressive and suppressive role that is entailed by the castration complex. If we are to formalise the Freudian experience then we need to take it literally and to accept it, at least provisionally, in that it asserts the constancy of the castration complex. Regardless of the discussions to which it might have thereafter given rise, we still maintain it as a reference. On the one hand, something happens in the relationships with the mother that introduces the father as a symbolic factor. He is the one who possesses the mother and who enjoys her legitimately. This is a function that is both fundamental and problematic, and which occasionally can crumble or weaken. On the other hand, something holds the function of bringing an essential articulation into the subject’s instinctual play and into his assumption of his functions. This essential articulation is a significa­ tion that is truly specific to the human genus insomuch as it develops with the supplementary dimension of the symbolic order. The sexual functions are struck by something that is well and truly something of the signifier, something almost instrumental, which the human subject has to take into account by bringing it into play so that it will be present and experienced, and which is called castration. Analysis represents castration in the most instrumental way, as a pair of scissors, or a sickle, or a hatchet, or a cutter. It’s some­ thing that participates, as it were, in the instinctual furnishing of the sexual relation in humankind. Clearly we could then try to single out some such furnishing in one or another of the animal species. It is probable that the robin’s coloured gorget could be regarded as a signal-element both for mating dances and for intersexual clashes. Either way, it’s quite clear that an equivalent can be found in animals for the constant character of this paradoxical element that in man is bound to a signifier that is called the castration complex. Here, then, is how we can write the formula of the Oedipus complex with its correlative, the castration complex. The Oedipus complex is itself something that is organised on the symbolic plane, something that presupposes for the subject the existence of the sym­ bolic order behind it, as constitutive. However, there is something else that we are going to see in the observation on little Hans. At a certain point in the dialogue with his father, when the latter is trying to nudge Hans towards a consideration of all sorts of physi­ ological explanation - though, timid as this father is, never pushing things right through to the end - it becomes apparent that poor little Hans doesn’t have a good understanding of the function of the female organ. And this swings around. When Hans comes out with

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this, his father ends up giving him the explanation in desperation, when in fact the fantasies that had already been developed with respect to the neurosis show quite clearly that the child knows full well that everything gestates in the mother’s belly, regardless of whether she is symbolised or not by a horse or a coach. But what the father doesn’t see is that Hans comes to this conclusion after a long talk in which he was interested only in a kind of genealogical construction. That is what interests Hans the most. This kind of interest is a normal moment in a subject’s progress, though it may be reinforced, as here, by the specific difficulties of the neurosis. It’s plain to see that this is normal and that little Hans has only produced this long discussion, which arises when we are a long way in to the observation, in order to construct the genealogi­ cal possibilities that exist, that is to say, the different ways in which a child can be related to a father and to a mother, and what this signifies. He goes so far as to construct one of the most original sexual theories, as Freud underscores because he has not come across many of the like. Indeed, as in any observation, there are peculiar features. At one point the child constructs a theory of reproduction, saying boys have girls and girls have boys. Don’t imagine that this is a theory that it would be impossible to find in the structure, in the genealogical organisation. It’s something that is consistent with the elementary structures of kinship and so there is ultimately some truth in this. It’s because women make men that men then return - in the symbolic order - this essential service of allowing them to continue their function of procreation, provided of course that we do consider it in the symbolic order, that is to say, in a certain order that ascribes a regular succession of generations to all of this. As I have set out for you on several occasions, in the natural order there is no obstacle to all of this turning exclusively around the female line, without any discrimination in what can come as a product, without any discrimination or any impossibility of it being, in a nutshell, the mother, commensurate with the possible duration of her fertility, who produces the succeeding generations. Now, what interests little Hans is the symbolic order, this being the gravitational centre of his whole construction which is so extraordinarily lush and fantastical. In other words, the questioning of the symbolic order emerges in the child in connection with the capital P of Paternity - What is a father? The Father is indeed the pivot, the Active and concrete hub that maintains the genealogical order, which allows the child to energise the world in a satisfying way. However this world is to be judged - culturally, naturally or supernaturally - this is the world into which he is born. He makes his appearance in a human world

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organised by this symbolic order, and this is what he has to face up to. The discovery of analysis is not, of course, to show us what the minimum necessary requirement is from the real father for him to give the child a sense of this notion of his place in the symbolic order by communicating and transmitting it to him. It is likewise taken as read that everything that occurs in the neuroses is designed in one respect or another precisely to make up for a difficulty, even an inadequacy, in how the child deals with this essential problem of the Oedipus complex. Something else comes to complicate the elements that are being produced with further elements that are called regressions. These intermediate elements stem from the primordial relationship with the mother and already include a certain double-edged symbolism. Between this primordial stage and the moment when the Oedipus complex properly speaking is constituted, all sorts of accidents can arise that hinge on nothing but the fact that the child’s other ele­ ments of exchange come to play their role in this relationship, in the construction and comprehension of the symbolic order. To spell it right out, all that is pregenital can be integrated at the Oedipal level and can come to complicate the question of the neurosis. In the case of phobia, we have something straightforward. No one challenges that in the case of phobia the child has reached, at least momentarily, what is called the genital stage, when the subject’s problems of integrating his or her sex are posed in their fullness. It is at this level, therefore, that we have to entertain the function of the phobic element. This was plainly spelt out by Freud, who included the phobic element as something homogenous with the so-called primitive func­ tion of the totem that had been isolated by the ethnography of his time. This is something that probably is no longer tenable in light of the current progress, in which structural anthropology is playing a prevalent and axial role.2 Others will replace these things, but for we analysts in our practical experience - and to the extent that ultimately it was hardly on the plane of phobia alone that Freud demonstrated how the totem took on its signification in the analytic experience - we nevertheless have to transpose it into a formalisation that would be less subject to caution than the totemic relationship is. This formalisation is what last time I called the metaphorical func­ tion of the phobic object. The phobic object comes to play the role that on account of some shortcoming - on account of a real shortcoming in the case of little Hans - has not been played. So, we can see the object of the phobia appearing, which plays the same metaphorical role that last time

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I tried to illustrate for you with the image - Sa gerbe n’etait point avare ni haineuse. I showed you how the poet used the metaphor to make the pater­ nal dimension appear in its original dimension in connection with this old man in his decline, in order to reinvigorate the old man with all the natural spurt of the sheaf. The horse has no other function but this in the living poetry that the phobia is. The horse introduces something around which revolve significations of various stripes which ultimately yield an element that makes up for what was missing in the subject’s development, that is, in developments with which he has been furnished by the dialectic of the entourage in which he is immersed. However, this element is there only in a possible way, in some sense imaginarily. What is at stake here is a signifier that is bare yet which carries some tendency that has already been conveyed by the whole convoy of culture that the subject drags behind him. In the end, the subject didn’t have to go any further than right where any kind of her­ aldry can be found, in a picture book. This means that they are not mere images but images drawn by the hand of man, entailing a whole history that is taken as given, in the sense that history is an historiole3 of myths and fragments of folklore. It was in his book, right alongside the picture of the red box which is the red chimney on which the stork is perched, that Hans came across the picture of a horse being shod. Here we can put our finger on what is involved. It’s a horse represented. Certainly, it is no wonder that such typical forms should always appear in certain contexts, in certain connections and in certain associations, which can elude those who are their vehicles, yet which the subject chooses in order to carry out a function. This function is the momentary allowing of certain states, and in the present case, the state of anxiety. It has to transform this anxiety into a localised fear, into something that presents a point of arrest, a terminal point, or else a pivot, a stilt in the shallows that fastens what is bobbing around and which runs the risk of being swept off by the whole inner current of the crisis in the maternal relationship. It is at this point that the horse plays a role in the case of little Hans. The horse does admittedly seem to hamper the child’s develop­ ment a great deal, and for those around him it is a parasitic and pathological element. Yet it is also clear that once the analytic process is in place we are shown that, further to this, the horse holds a fastening role as a major point of arrest for the subject. It is a point around which he can make something revolve that otherwise would settle into an anxiety that would be impossible to bear. In this case the whole progress of the analysis consists in extracting,

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in bringing to light, the potentialities that are offered by the child’s way of using this signifier that is so vital in compensating for his crisis. It’s a matter of allowing the signifier to play the role that has been set aside for it by the child’s fundamental relationship with the symbolic in the construction of his neurosis. He has taken it as an aid, as an absolutely crucial point of reference in the symbolic order. This is what the phobia develops. It will allow the child to handle the signifier in a particular way by drawing out possibilities of development that are richer than those it contains as a signifier. In itself, the signifier does not contain in advance all the significations that we will make it voice. It contains them rather through the place that it holds. To the extent that this is the place where the symbolic father ought to be, and to the extent that the signifier is there as something that corresponds metaphorically to the father, it allows all the necessary transfers to occur on the level of everything that is complicated and problematic on the lower line, namely the mother, M, her phallic function, cp, and the other child, a. This is а relationship that on each occasion necessitates a distinct triangle in relation to the real mother. For this, a term is required that cannot be mastered by the child, that makes him fearful, and which is even mordacious. This is why on the other line we have written the other term, m. ________ I _________ (М + ф + а ) М ~ т + П This term, П, is what is most under threat, namely the child’s penis.

3 What does the observation on little Hans show us? It shows pre­ cisely that, in a like structure, it is futile to tackle its plausibility or implausibility. It’s not by saying to the child that this is a nonsense, Dummheit, nor by making very pertinent remarks to him about the link that surely exists between his touching his widdler and his deeper fears over his nonsense, that one will seriously get things in motion. Quite the contrary. If you read the observation in light of the schema I have just set out for you, you will see that these types of intervention, which do have a certain effect, never have the direct suasive reach of the primordial experience. This initial experience has the efficacy one

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might wish for, and the whole interest of the observation is that it allows us to see how on such occasions the child reacts by reinforc­ ing the essential elements of his own symbolic formulation of the problem. He persists in replaying the drama of the phallic hide-andseek with his mother - Does she have it? Doesn’t she have it? - clearly showing that what is at issue here is a symbol, which he clings to as such and which should not be thrown into disorder for him. Hence the crucial importance of a schema such as the one we have set out here. What has to be done for the child is perhaps indeed to let this schema evolve, allowing him to develop the significations that pervade the system and which should enable him in turn not to stick merely with the provisional solution of being a little phobic child afraid of horses. Yet this equation can be resolved only in accordance with its own laws, which are the laws of a determined discourse, of one precise dialectic and not another. One won’t get anywhere if one doesn’t take into account what this equation is designed to support as a symbolic order. This is how we are now going to be able to set out the comprehen­ sive schema for the progress that is involved here. It was surely not fruitless for the father, the great symbolic Father who is Freud, to have intervened, along with the little father, the beloved father. The latter does only one wrong here, though it is a sizeable one, that of not truly fulfilling his function as a father, not even, at least for a while, his function of a father who is jealous, the eifern of young Hans’s invective, as in the wrath of a jealous God. While his father speaks to him with great affection and devotion, he is unable to be more than he has been up to the present because he is not a father who is fulfilling his function in the real, leaving the child literally to follow his own whims with his mother. This doesn’t mean that the child doesn’t love his father, but rather that his father isn’t holding for him the function that would allow for a direct and straightforward way out of the situation, far from it. We find ourselves faced with a complication of the situation. The father starts by intervening directly on the term П, in keeping with Freud’s instructions, which proves that Freud hasn’t yet got things straight in this regard. At this juncture, we may delve in detail into the sorts of articula­ tion that would allow us to formulate this in a completely rigorous way, through a series of algebraic formulations, transforming one into the next. I am somewhat reluctant to do so, for fear that your minds might not yet be quite used to this, not yet disposed to some­ thing that I believe, even so, to belong to the future in the realm of the clinical and therapeutic analysis of the evolution of cases. I mean

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that in any case, at least in its crucial stages, it ought to allow of being encapsulated in a series of transformations. Last week I gave you an example of this, first writing up the initial formula (М + ф + а ) М ~ т + П then the terminal formulation (м + ф + a ) M ~ m + П and lastly p (M) (M') ~ ( ~ ) П All of this is taken up in a logicification, Л. Л p (м + ф + a ) M ~ m + П Once it starts to be spoken of, once this Л is caught between the capital P and the lower-case p, we can provide a certain devel­ opment. We can ask ourselves on what occasion, at what major moment, we might regard the transformation to have occurred. That is to say, when does p step in here, in M ~ (m) П, and when does P step in at the level of'I? I have not as yet gone into its succes­ sive transformations, but even so, if we follow what happens in the observation and how things evolve, we see that soon after the day of Freud’s intervention, there appears, on 5 April, a fantasy that plays a major role and which thereafter will give rise to everything that is placed under the sign of Verkehr, that is, transport, with all the ambiguity that this word carries.4 Something arises which allows us to say that in a certain way the first term in our equation is being incarnated here. Indeed, the fantasy that Hans develops is that of seeing the cart onto which he wanted to climb suddenly driving off with the horse. The fantasy vouches for a transformation of his fears and consti­ tutes a first attempt at dialecticising the phobia. One cannot help but be struck by the extent to which all it would take is to be subject to something like this for what is written out here to become apparent. I mean that the horse is clearly a dragging element, while little Hans comes to place himself upon the same cart onto which sacks

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have been loaded, which as the next part of the observation shows represent all the possible and virtual children the mother can have. He holds nothing in greater fear than to see his mother loaded up once again, beladen, that is to say, big with child, carrying along, carting around, the children in her belly like all these loaded carts that give rise to so much fear in him. The rest of the observation will show that the cart, and on occasion the bath, hold the function of representing the mother. Therefore, the fantasy signifies - A heap o f little children will be loaded on, I ’ll pile them on myself and they will be driven off. We can say that what is at issue here is a first exercise pictured in an image that is truly as remote as can be from any kind of natural assent in psychological reality, while being exceedingly expressive from the standpoint of the structure of the signifying organisation. We can see little Hans reaping a first benefit from the dialecticising of the function of the horse which is the essential element of his phobia. We have already seen little Hans holding firmly to maintaining the symbolic function, for example in one of his fantasies, the giraffe fantasy. In everything that follows Freud’s intervention we can see little Hans testing out this grouping in every possible way. First he is on the cart, among all the heteroclite elements which he fears so strongly will be dragged off goodness knows where by a mother who henceforth is nothing more for him than an uncontrollable power that cannot be predicted. With this mother, there is no more playing, or, to use a very expressive argotic term, y ’a plus d'amour, that is to say, love is no more, the name of the game has changed, because others are entering the fray, and because little Hans is start­ ing to complicate the game by bringing in, not the symbolic phallus with which he plays hide-and-seek with his mother and the little girls, but a real little penis, which earns him a rap on the knuckles. This complicates the task and shows us that while the child didn’t believe a word of what he was told by a certain gentleman who spoke like the good Lord, he did find that the gentleman spoke well, and the upshot of this was that little Hans started to speak, that is, he started to tell stories. The first thing he will do is to maintain a distinction between the path of the real and the path of the symbolic. He will say to his father, Why did you tell me I ’m fond o f Mummy . . . when I ’m fond o f you? He has taken things into full consideration, and after this he will render unto the horse all its potentialities, all its possibilities. The horse is something which can bite and which can fall. We shall see what this is able to yield. This is where little Hans gets the whole movement of his phobia under way. He starts to render

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unto the horse everything he can, and this is why we have all these paradoxes. At the same time as the horse is the signifier that is teeming with all the dangers that it is supposed to cover, this is the same signifier with which little Hans, between 3 and 10 March, allowed himself to play horsey, with great carefreeness, in the company of a new nursemaid, which then provided the opportunity for him to give himself over, with great unseemliness and impertinence, to threats that he would undress her and so on. All of this is part and parcel of the role of maids for Freud. You can see that at this point, Hans was not in the least bit daunted by the horse. Hans is so undaunted by the horse that he can take its place. We find him at once faced with maintaining the function of the horse and, as it were, making use of every available opportunity to elu­ cidate and apprehend the problem, playing with the signifiers that have been grouped in this way, but on the condition that the move­ ment be maintained, because otherwise none of this would make any sense and there would be no reason for us to spend more time scrutinising what the child is going on about. As I said, the abso­ lutely radical transformation is the one in which the child uncovers one of the most essential properties of a situation such as this, once the set has been logified, once it has been played out sufficiently, once he has given himself over to a certain number of exchanges and permutations. The initial transformation, which will prove decisive, is no less than the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the bathtub, which is something utterly different, in particular for the relationship between the protagonists. Voraciously to bite the mother, as an act or an apprehension of her altogether natural sig­ nification, indeed to dread in return the notorious biting that is incarnated by the horse, is something quite different from unscrew­ ing, from ousting, the mother, and mobilising her in this business, bringing her into the system as a whole, for this first time as a mobile element5 and, by like token, an element that is equivalent to all the rest. The whole system then presents as a large set of bowls from which the child will try to reconstitute a tenable situation. Indeed, he will even introduce new elements that will enable him to recrystallise the situation. This is precisely what happens at the moment of the bathtub fantasy, which may for example be written out roughly as follows, with a permutation that will give -

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The symbol П represents the sexual function and the lower-case m represents the way of bringing the mother herself into the dialectic of the detachable elements, which will turn her, if I can put it like this, into an object like any other, and which will thereby allow him to handle her. It may be said therefore that all of this progress, which is what the analysis of the phobia amounts to, represents in some way the mother’s waning in relation to the child and his gradual mastery of her. The following stage - which I shall have to conclude next time - is focused entirely on something that will happen on the imaginary plane, in relation to what thus far has been in a certain sense regres­ sive, but in a different way. We will see little Hans bringing in his sister, this element that is so hard to handle in the real, deploying in her regard this sort of magnificent fantasia where she features in a stunning construction that consists first and foremost in supposing that she has always been there, in the big box, almost since the beginning of time, we might say. You are going to see how this is possible and how it already supposes an exceedingly advanced signifying organisation. Before his sister came into the world, he reckons that she was already there, but in what capacity? It is only too evident that this is an imaginary capacity. We have Freud’s own explanation, which is that something presents in an imaginary form that is repeated indefi­ nitely, that is constant and permanent, in the form of an utterly essential reminiscence. Little Hanna has always been there, and he underscores that she is all the more there in that in reality he knows full well that she wasn’t. He insists that she was there in the world precisely in the first year when she was not yet in the world, and that she indulged in everything that he had indulged in himself, logically and dialectically, in his discourse and in his games, over the course of the first part of the treatment. Imaginarily in his fantasy, not only does he articulate that his sister has been there forever in the big box that travels either on the coach or separately, depending on the circumstances, he also tells us at another moment that she sits beside the coachman - The coachman had the reins, Hanna had the reins too. There is some kind of difficulty here when it comes to distinguishing reality from imagination, an ambiguity that Freud notes between Wirklichkeit and Phantasie, but little Hans continues his fantasy through the intermediary of this imaginary child who has always been there, and who moreover will always be there. He also indicates that through the intermediary of this imaginary child a certain relation will take shape that is equally imaginary, in which, as I underscored for you,

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little Hans’s relationship with the maternal object will stabilise, that is to say, with the object of eternal recurrence with respect to the woman to which this little man must accede. In this imaginary game where he makes use of his little sister liter­ ally as a sort of Ego Ideal, she becomes the mistress of the signifier, the mistress of the horse, which she dominates. And it is through her intermediary that little Hans himself can come to whip the horse, to beat it and dominate it, to become its master. So it is that henceforth he will find himself in a relationship of mastery in relation to what thereafter will be inscribed in the register of creations of his mind, which will be developed in the ensuing part. The mastery of this other will henceforth be for him any kind of fantasy of the feminine, namely what I might call the girls of his dream, the daughters of his mind. This is what he will always be dealing with from this point forward as a sort of narcissistic fantasy in which the dominating image is incarnated. While it does resolve the question of the posses­ sion of the phallus, this image leaves the fundamental relation in an essentially narcissistic relation, in an essentially imaginary relation. To spell it right out, this relation is his domination of the critical situation. This is what will leave its mark of deep ambiguity on everything that will ensue as an outcome or as a normalisation of the situation. These stages are pointed out well enough in the observation. It is after the playful development of his fantasies, after the reduction of elements to the imaginary following their fixing down as signifiers, that the fundamental relationship will be constituted that will allow him to assume his sex. He will assume it in a way that, however normal it may remain, can still be reckoned to bear the mark of a deficiency. I will only be able to show you all the traces of this next time, but already I can say something that will give a good indication of where the fault lies that the child has reached in order somehow to fill or hold its place. I think that nothing is more telling in this regard than what is expressed in the final fantasy, the fantasy of the unscrewing, in which the child’s rear is changed and he is given a bigger one. WTiy? Ultimately it is to fill this place which he has made far more manage­ able, far more mobilisable, namely the bath, on the basis of which the dialectic of the falling can come into play and, eventually, be evacuated. This evacuation is only possible once the bath has been unscrewed. I would say that here too the atypical, anomalous and almost inverted character of the situation can be seen. In a normal formula, to speak only of boys, the child possesses his penis only to the extent that he finds it again as something that

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is given back to him, after losing it, after passing through the castra­ tion complex. In the case of little Hans, the castration complex is called upon constantly by the child, and indeed he himself suggests its formula. He clings onto its images. When he practically com­ mands his father to make him undergo this test, he foments and organises the same test in a reflected way on the image of his father, wounding him, wishing this injury to be inflicted. Isn’t it striking to see that after all these futile efforts for the subject’s fundamental metamorphosis to be achieved and overcome, what finally comes to pass does not concern his sexual organ but his rear? Ultimately it is his relation with his mother that allows him to occupy this place, but at the cost of something that doesn’t become apparent to us from this perspective. What is actually involved here is the dialectic of the subject’s relation to his own organ. For want of the organ itself being changed, at the end of the observation the subject assumes unto himself a sort of mythical father, such as he has managed to conceive of him. Goodness knows that this father is a father like no other, because this is a father who in Hans’s fanta­ sies is capable of engendering. As the husband says to the policeman in Les Mamelles de Tiresias Revenez des ce soir voir comment la nature Me donnera sans femme une progeniture.6 It is in this respect that it cannot be said that everything has been taken on board with regard to the relative position of the sexes, of the gap that remains from the integration of these relations. I want to insist on this. It’s precisely in the paradoxical inversion of certain terms, expressed through a notation with a plus or a minus, that we can truly judge the result of a certain furtherance. If therefore in the present case little Hans has not passed through the castration complex, then he has passed though something that had the capacity to transform him into another little Hans, as is indicated by the myth of the fitter who changes his behind. When Freud meets Hans again in his young adulthood, he sees someone who tells him that he remembers nothing of all this. Here we have the sign and the token of a kind of moment of essential alienation. You know the story that is told of a subject who went off to an island to forget something. Some people find him, go up to him and ask him what it was he wanted to forget, and he is unable to reply. As the end of the story has it - he has forgotten. In the case of little Hans, I would say that there is something that allows us to shift the emphasis, and almost the formula, of this

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story. If to a certain degree Hans may indeed bear one of the scars of the incompleteness of his analysis, and of the Oedipal solution that was predicated by his phobia, it’s for the following reason. After all of these salutary turns, which from a certain point forth rendered his recourse to the horse signifier needless and expendable, if the phobia was made gradually to disappear, then it was on the basis of something that allows us to say, not that Hans forgot, but that Hans has forgotten himself. 26 June 1957

FAREWELL

XXIV F R O M H A N S -T H E -F E T IS H TO L E O N A R D O -IN -T H E -M IR R O R

A way out via the maternal ideal Little Hans, descendant of two mothers The vulture was a kite The Other become little other Leonardo’s imaginary inversion Today is our last session of the year. I didn’t care to sum up by repeating myself, which, regardless of the effects it may have, is not a poor method. There are a number of things that I didn’t get round to last week, which meant that I was unable to push my analysis through to the end. I have produced a formalisation with some letters and have tried to indicate the direction in which an effort can be made so as to accustom oneself to writing out relations in such a way as to yield fixed reference points - reference points that there is no need to go back on in discussion. Once they have been set down they cannot be passed over by taking advantage of everything that usually is a little too flexible in the interplay between the imaginary and the symbolic, but which is so important for our comprehension of the experience. What I have initiated for you, then, is a beginning to this formali­ sation. I’m well aware that I haven’t explained every last term. A certain indeterminacy might therefore seem to have persisted in how these terms link up with one another. You can’t explain everything in one go. In the article that is set to appear in the third issue of the journal La Psychanalyse under the title L ’instance de la lettre, you will see what is perhaps a tighter justification for the ordering of some of these formulae, notably those for metaphor and metonymy. At the point we’ve reached, I believe that what is important is to have suggested to you the possibility of using formulae of this order so as to situate the relations between the subject and the different

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modes of the other, which, in sum, cannot be articulated otherwise, given how language in the usual sense does not furnish us with the necessary fundaments with which to do this. So, I left some things trailing behind. And, after all, why shouldn’t I? Why, even in what is specific to the case of little Hans, would I want to provide an absolutely complete formula for what little Hans poses as a question? You know that I mean to pursue my commentary within the register of questions posed by Freud. Yet this doesn’t imply that I should want to turn each of his works, nor even his work as a whole, into a closed system. What is important is for you to have picked up sufficiently, and better so each day, on how Freud shifts the very bases of psychological account by introducing a dimension that is foreign to it. The foreignness of this dimension in relation to any psychological fixing down of the object constitutes the originality of our science and the basic principle on the basis of which we must therein assess our progress. Either way, to seal up once again Freud’s examination, to reduce it to the field of psychology, leads to what I shall call, with no further formality, a delusional psychogenesis, the same psychogenesis that you can see being developed from day to day, implicitly, in how psy­ choanalysts have been contemplating the facts and the objects they deal with. This psychogenesis is so paradoxical, so foreign to all the neighbouring conceptualisations, so shocking, yet at the same time so well tolerated, that the mere fact that it is surviving needs to be added to the main thrust of the problem, and ought to be resolved at the same time in the solution that we will bring to the problem of the Freudian dimension, that is to say, of the unconscious.

1 So, I left to one side everything that you are now about to follow. You know the elements well enough to perceive on rereading the text the whole mythical game that plays out in what I shall call the reduction to the imaginary o f the sequence o f maternal desire. I wrote this sequence out in the formula М.ф.а, which is the notation for the mother’s relationship with this imaginary other that is her own phallus, then everything that may arise in terms of new elements, that is to say, other children. In this instance it is Hans’s little sister, Hanna. The child’s mythification in this imaginary game as triggered by the, let’s say, psychotherapeutic intervention, is something that in itself makes manifest a phenomenon the originality of which ought

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to be seized upon as a vital element of the Verarbeitung of the whole analytic progression. It’s a dynamic and crystallising element in the symbolic progress that constitutes the analytic cure as such. While indeed I didn’t push this any further, I should like, even so, to reveal the elements that I didn’t touch upon. Actually, I did sign­ post them in passing, but without explaining the exact function they hold in relation to these mythical doings in which the child indulges under the prompting of the analytic intervention. There is one element that is correlative with the major mythical invention relating to birth, especially the birth of young Hanna and her constant presence for all eternity, so nicely fomented by Hans in his mythifying speculation. This element is the mysterious personage of the stork, who is truly worthy of the finest tradition of black humour. The hatted stork comes when everyone is asleep, knocks on the door and unlocks it with his key. He presents with all these exceedingly quirky aspects. We need to know how to hear what little Hans says. He puts Hanna in your bed, he tells his father. In other words, the stork has come in his father’s place. Then, Hans corrects himself, No, the stork put her in her bed. Next, the stork goes away again leaving no one any the wiser, until he comes back and makes a bit of a din, just to wake up the household. In short, this character who comes and goes, who is seemingly so imperturbable, even uncanny, is surely one of the most enigmatic of little Hans’s creations. It would be worthwhile dwelling at greater length on this, and indeed his place needs to be indicated in the overall economy of the case at this point in little Hans’s progress. Little Hans cannot manage, under the suggestion of his psycho­ therapist father, himself groomed by Freud, to foment his imaginary manipulation of the different terms that are present unless by isolat­ ing something that is well and truly heralded just before the major mythical creation - Hanna’s birth and, at the same time, the stork - when we meet the theme of death, voiced by Hans and reported word for word by his father. Once he knocked on the pavement with his stick - we don’t know why he has one, since this cane has never been mentioned before - and said: 7 say, is there a man underneath? Someone buried?’ The presence of the theme of death is strictly correlative with the theme of birth. It is crucial to pick out this dimension for the com­ prehension and furtherance of the case, but, in truth, this theme, this potential of generation raised to its ultimate degree of mystery, between life and death, between existence and nothingness, is some­ thing that poses particular problems that are distinct from that of the introduction of the horse signifier. It is not its counterpart. It is something else, which perhaps we shall look at next year. I’m

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leaving it in reserve. The heading that I will most likely choose for what I shall develop next year is Les formations de I’inconscient. I will also underscore once again that it is significant that little Hans, at the end of the crisis that resolves and dissolves the phobia, moves into something so imperative as the refusal of any further births. A kind of treaty will be established with the stork and with his mother. You will see the meaning of the passage that has to do with his mother’s relations with God with respect to the possible arrival of more children, so elegantly transformed in the observation by Freud’s little footnote - Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. Indeed, this is just what Hans’s mother had said when she declared that if she didn’t want it, God didn’t want it either. On the other hand, little Hans says that he wishes to have chil­ dren, in this same move whereby he doesn’t want there to be any more. His desire is to have imaginary children, insomuch as the whole situation has been resolved for him by an identification with maternal desire. There will be his dream children, the children of his mind. To spell it right out, he will have children structured on the model of the maternal phallus, which ultimately he will turn into the object of his own desire. Yet it is fully understood, of course, that there will be none, and this identification with the mother’s desire as an imaginary desire only constitutes in appearance a return to the little Hans that he once was, the little Hans who played the primordial game of hideand-seek with the little girls, the object of which was his sexual organ. On no account does Hans still think of playing hide-andseek, or more exactly, he no longer thinks of showing them anything but, as it were, his fine stature as little Hans, that is to say, a person­ age who in some respect has become - and this is what I’m driving at - something like a fetish object. Little Hans places himself in a certain pacified position, and regardless of the heterosexual lawfulness of his object, we cannot regard this as exhausting the legitimacy of his position. In this respect, he blends in with a type that will strike you as no stranger to our era, that of the generation of a certain late nineteen-forties style that we are familiar with, these lovely fellows who wait for the initiative to come from the other side. To say it right out, they wait for their trousers to be pulled down. This is how I see the future of the charming little Hans, as fully heterosexual as he seems to be. Hear me well. Nothing in the observation allows us at any moment to think that it is resolved otherwise than through this domination of the maternal phallus, in so far as Hans takes its place, identifies with it, and certainly masters it. Everything that might correspond to the phase of castration, or to the castration complex, is no more

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than what we can see taking shape in the observation in the form of the stone on which one can injure oneself. The image of this that comes to the surface, so to speak, is much less that of a vagina dentata than that of a phallus dentatus. This kind of frozen object is an imaginary object that makes a victim of any male assault by causing injury. It is in this sense that we can also say that little Hans’s Oedipal crisis does not culminate strictly speaking in the shaping of a typical superego, I mean a superego such as it is produced in keeping with the mechanism that is already indicated in what we have taught here at the level of Verwerfung, namely what has been rejectedfrom the symbolic and reappears in the real. This formula is the true key, at a much closer level, to what happens after a Verwerfung of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, it is in so far as the castration complex has been come through, but without it being able to be fully taken on board by a subject, that he produces an identification with a sort of image of the father in the raw, an image that carries reflections of his real particularities in what is heavy and even overwhelming about them. Here we can see once again a fresh instance of the mechanism of reappearance in the real, but this time it’s a real on the borderline of the psyche, within the bounds of the ego. However, this is a real that forces itself upon a subject in an almost hallucinatory way, to the extent that at a certain point the subject has peeled off from the symbolic integration of the process of castration. Nothing of the like is manifested in the present case. Little Hans is surely not to lose his penis because at no moment does he acquire it. While little Hans has identified with the maternal phallus, this does not mean that he can thereby retrieve his own penis and take on board its function. There is no phase of penis symbolisation. The penis somehow remains on the margins, disengaged, as something that has only ever been reviled and reproved by his mother. Yet this thing that is produced allows him to integrate his masculinity. This occurs through no other mechanism but that of the shaping of an identification with the maternal phallus, which also belongs to a very different realm from that of the superego with its disturbing yet also balancing function. Rather, it’s a function that belongs to the order of the Ego Ideal. It is in so far as little Hans has a certain idea of his ideal, insomuch as he is his mother’s ideal, namely a substitute for the phallus, that he takes his place in existence. Let’s say that if, instead of having a Jewish mother in the progressive movement, she’d been a devout Catholic, you can see by what mechanism little Hans might have been gently nudged towards the priesthood, and even towards sainthood.

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In a case like this, where the subject has been introduced into an atypical Oedipal relationship, the maternal ideal is very precisely what offers a certain type of way out and positioning in the relation between the sexes. The outcome is produced through identification with the maternal ideal. This gives us a rough sketch of the terms in which I’m locating what the case of little Hans opens onto. We have confirmative hints of this throughout the observation, and those towards the end are sometimes very moving. When little Hans has become downright disheartened by the paternal shortcoming - since he wanted his father to step forward - he will somehow perform, himself, fantasmatically, his own ini­ tiation ceremony by placing himself quite naked on the little truck where he is due to keep watch all night, like a young knight, after which, thanks to a few coins given to the guard - the same money that will serve to abate the terrific potency of the Storch - little Hans will be riding on the larger circuit. The matter has been settled. Little Hans might not be anything other than a knight, a knight who is more or less covered by social security, but a knight all the same. And he will have no father. Moreover, I don’t believe that anything new in the experience of existence will ever afford him one. Right after this, there is a somewhat belated intervention from his father. The opening of the father’s comprenoire as the observation wears on is not an uninteresting item in itself. After playing with an open hand, firmly persuaded of all the truths he has learned from his good mentor Freud, the further he advances in the wielding of this truth the more he comes to realise that it is far more relative than he was given to believe. When little Hans starts to produce his big mythical delusion, he comes out with a sentence that is barely noted in the text but which carries all its importance. It has to do with the time when little Hans is playing up, contra­ dicting himself from one instant to the next, saying, It’s true - It’s not a bit true - It’s just for fun - But it’s actually quite serious. His father, who is no fool and who learns from this experience, tells him, Everything one says is a bit true. In spite of everything, this father who has not succeeded in holding his position - he is the one who ought to have been put through analysis - tries one more time, even though it’s too late. He says to little Hans, Perhaps you’re not fond o f Daddy. This delayed intervention leads little Hans to the very nice gesture that is given a special highlight in the observation. Just as the father says this to him, Hans knocks over his little horse. The conversation is out of date. The dialogue has expired. Little Hans has settled in to his new position in the world.

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Little Hans is now a little man with the power to have children, capable in his imagination of engendering indefinitely and of deriv­ ing full satisfaction from his creations. This is how the mother lives on in his imagination. As I told you, to be little Hans is not to be the descendant of one mother, but the descendant of two mothers.1 This is a remarkable and enigmatic point, on which last week I paused the observation. Certainly, the other mother is the one whose potency he has had ample occasion and reason to encounter - his father’s mother. None the less, that the subject should take on board the conditions of the final equilibrium in this duplication or doubling of the maternal figure still remains one of the structural problems posed by the observation. It was on this point that I concluded the lesson before last, drawing a comparison with the painting by Leonardo da Vinci and by the same stroke with the case of Leonardo. It is no accident that Freud devoted such attention to it. We will be dedicating the time that remains to this text. We cannot claim to exhaust Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory o f his Childhood in just a single lesson. This will be a short lesson for the end of term, as is my wont in my teaching as a way of winding down, for a crowd as attentive as you are, and I thank you for being so. Let’s leave little Hans to his fate. But before taking leave of him, I will yet point out to you that when I alluded in his regard to something deeply contemporary in a certain evolution in relations between the sexes, to the 1945 generation, this was surely not to slip inordinately into current affairs. I leave it to others to depict and define what the current generation might be, to lend them a direct and symbolic expression. There is Frangoise Sagan for one, whom I’m not name-dropping here for the sake of it, nor for the mere pleasure of being topical, but rather as an opportunity to advise you to read over the holiday period an article on two books from this best-selling author, Bonjour tristesse and Un certain sourire. The article is by Alexandre Kojeve in the August/September 1956 issue of Critique under the title Le dernier monde nouveau. You will be able to see what a serious philosopher who is used to operating exclusively at the level of Hegel and the highest political issues can draw from works that at first blush seem so frivolous. It will certainly enlighten you and, as they say, it won’t do you any harm. There’s no risk involved. Psychoanalysts are not recruited from the ranks of those who devote themselves wholeheartedly to the world’s fluctuations in psychosexual matters. You are, if I may say so, too well oriented for that, even a trifle swotty in such matters. Indeed, this is to lead you to a kind of immersion into current

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affairs, activating this perspective when it comes to what you do and what you should be ready to hear sometimes from your patients themselves. This will also show you something that we must take into account, namely the deep changes in relations between men and women that have come about during such a brief length of time as the one that stands between us and Freud’s era, when, as they say, everything that was to become our history was in the process of fomentation. All of this is intended to tell you also that the last word on donjuanisme, on Don-Juan-esque womanising, might not have been spoken, whatever the analysts might have to say about it. While they have made interesting contributions on this score, and while something correct has been glimpsed in the notion of Don Juan’s homosexuality, this is certainly not to be taken in the way it is usually taken. I firmly believe that Don Juan is a character too far removed from us in the cultural realm for analysts to have been able to perceive him accurately. Mozart’s Don Juan, if we take him as the apogee of the character and as something that effectively signifies the culminating point of a question, properly speaking, in the sense I intend here, is surely quite distinct from the character that Rank sought to construct for us as a reflection. It is certainly not from the angle of the double alone that he should be understood. I think that, again to adopt a counter-stance, Don Juan does not blend seamlessly - indeed far from it - into the seducer who’s got little tricks that work every time. I believe that Don Juan loves women. I would even say that he loves them enough to know on occasion not to tell them so, and he loves them enough so that when he does tell them, they believe it. This is no small matter, and it reveals many things. It shows that there is never any way out of the situation for him. I think that it’s in the direction of the notion of the phallic woman that we need to look. In Don Juan’s relations with his object, there is of course some­ thing related to a problem of bisexuality, but it lies precisely in the direction of this thing that Don Juan seeks out in woman, and this is the phallic woman. Since he truly seeks her out and goes after her, and is never content with attaining her or contemplating her, he doesn’t find her, or ends up finding her only in the form of the ominous guest who does indeed lie beyond woman, whom he doesn’t expect, and who is, not without reason, the Father. Let’s not forget, however, that when he does rear his head, what is yet more curious is that it’s in the form of a guest made of stone. To spell it right out, this is stone in its aspect of being absolutely dead and

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closed off, beyond all the life of Nature. This, in sum, is where Don Juan comes to a standstill and seals his fate. The problem that Leonardo da Vinci will pose us is quite different. *

2

That Freud should have turned his interest to Leonardo da Vinci is not something that we need to question. In general, why one thing came to pass instead of not coming to pass should be the least of our worries. Freud is Freud precisely because he took an interest in Leonardo. What is to be done now is to find out how he became interested in him and what Leonardo might have been for him. To find an answer, there is no better than to read the Kindheitserinnerung. I gave sufficient forewarning for some of you to have done so, and to have noticed how deeply enigmatic this book is. In 1910, Freud had arrived at what we might call the height of fortune in existence. This at least is how things look from the outside and, actually, he says as much himself. He had gained international renown, and had not yet been through the sadness and drama of the separations from his most highly esteemed pupils. This was just before the major crisis points, but at this point he was able to tell himself that he had made up for the setbacks of the previous ten years of his life. So, here is Freud taking Leonardo da Vinci as his subject. Of course, Freud’s background, his culture, his love of Italy and the Renaissance, give us to understand that he must have been intrigued by the character. What does he tell us in this regard? In what he writes he evinces a considerable appreciation of Leonardo’s profun­ dity, which he handles with great sensitivity. It may be said that on the whole Freud’s text on Leonardo is an interesting read and is read with even greater interest with the passing of time. By this I mean that, even though it is one of Freud’s most criticised works - and it’s paradoxical to see that it’s also one of those of which he was most proud - the people who are always most reticent in such cases, and goodness knows they might well be, I mean the specialists in painting and art history, with the passing of time, and even as the major faults in the text came to light, ultimately came to realise how important it is. By and large, Freud’s text came to be almost universally rejected, scorned and even disdained by art historians, and yet, in spite of all the lasting reservations that have become only more intense with the appearance of new docu­ ments proving that Freud had made mistakes, no less a figure than

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Kenneth Clark, former director of the National Gallery, in a book that is not all that old, acknowledges the great interest of Freud’s analysis of the painting that I showed you the other day, the St Anne in the Louvre, paired with the famous Cartoon in London. These are the two works on which Freud based the in-depth study he made, or believed he made, of the case of Leonardo da Vinci. Well, I suppose I don’t need to summarise for you the fate of this little book. First there is a brief presentation of the case of Leonardo, of his strange side. This strange side, which we will be coming back to with our own means, is doubtless accurately perceived, and everything that Freud says most certainly finds a sure axis in the enigma of the character. He then examines the painter’s singular constitution, even predisposition, along with his paradoxical activity. I’m calling him a painter, though he was so much else besides. Let’s say for the time being a great painter. Anyway, Freud turns to the fragment that he pushes very much to the fore across all his developments, the only childhood memory that we have from Leonardo, and which has been translated as follows - It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips. Freud tells us that this memory is of the strangest sort, then segues into something that will take us where he wants to lead us. We follow him because we are used to this kind of sleight of hand that consists in superposing in dialectics and reasoning what is very often conflated in experience and in clinical practice, when in fact these are very different registers. I’m not saying that Freud handles them improperly. On the contrary, I believe that he handles them bril­ liantly, that is to say, that he goes to the heart of the phenomenon. Yet we would be wrong to follow him with an idle mind, accepting in advance everything he tells us, namely that this is a sort of super­ position, or superimposition, between the relation to the maternal breast and fellatio, at least an imaginary act of fellatio. This is what he posits at the outset and which is purported also to carry the signification of a veritable sexual intrusion. Freud lays this out at the start, and it’s upon this base that he will tease out an articulation of his construction, gradually leading us to what is deeply enigmatic in the relation to the mother in the case of Leonardo. Onto this he builds all the particularities of this strange personage, namely his probable inversion first of all, then his alto­ gether unique and peculiar relation to his oeuvre, wrought by a kind of activity that always lies on the limits between the realisable and the impossible, as he himself writes in one instance - repeatedly

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breaking off the different ventures in his life - this singularity that sets him apart from his contemporaries and makes him a legend­ ary figure in his own lifetime, thought to possess every quality and ability, a universal genius. From all this that surrounds Leonardo da Vinci, Freud will deduce for us his relation with his mother. As I mentioned, Freud takes as his point of departure the child­ hood memory. The vulture with the quivering tail that comes to strike the child is, we are told, constructed as the screen-memory of something that is the reflection of a fantasy of fellatio. Freud doesn’t hesitate for one second to set it out in just this way, yet all the same it has to be acknowledged that for an unprimed mind this is something that raises a problem. The whole interest of Freud’s investigation is to reveal that, until an age that may be tied down to his third or fourth year, Leonardo very probably had no other presence around him but that of his mother, and doubtless no other elements of sexual seduction but what Freud calls innumerable pas­ sionate kisses pressed onto the child’s mouth by his mother, nor any other object to represent the object of his desire besides the maternal breast. Ultimately it is on the plane of fantasy that the revelation is posed by Freud himself, in so far as it can have this informative role. All of this hinges on one point, which is none other than the identification of the vulture with the mother herself, in so far as she would be the figure at the source of the imaginary intrusion. Now, let’s say it straightaway. It so happened that there was what may be called a mishap or an error in this affair - but it’s a fortunate error. Freud only read this childhood memory in the version that features in Herzfeld’s translation, from which he lifts the passage. That is to say, he read it in German, and what she translated as Geier, a vulture, was not a vulture at all. The fact has been pointed out by several scholars, most recently by Professor Meyer Schapiro in an article published last year in the Journal o f the History o f Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 2.2 Besides, Freud could have suspected as much because, as usual, he carried out his work with the utmost care and the reference from the manuscript folio from which the translation was made is given in a footnote. As it happens, it comes from the Codex Atlanticus, which is a bound folder of Leonardo’s drawings and writings housed in Milan. It’s been translated into practically every language. In French there is a complete though inadequate transla­ tion under the title Carnets de Leonard de Vinci. You can read what Leonardo left by way of manuscript notes, often in the margins of his drawings. Freud could have taken a look at where this reference is to be found in Leonardo’s notes, notes which in general are five, six or seven lines long, a half page at most, scattered amongst the

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sketches. This fragment is on a folio, just alongside a study of birds in flight. Such studies crop up in different places in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Leonardo says, It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with . . . not vultures, but precisely what he has drawn alongside, kites. That the kite should be particularly interesting for the study of bird flight is something that had already been remarked upon by Pliny the Elder. According to him, the kite’s tail is of especial interest to maritime pilots because its movement is particularly exemplary for the steering of the rudder. Leonardo deals with the same thing. It’s very nice to follow the fortune of this kite’s tail down through the ages. The fundamental character of its tail has been known since Pliny in Antiquity and has been taken up by several authors, some of whom I shall be mentioning in passing in a short while. I’ve been told that, in our own time, Mr Anton Fokker has studied first-hand the movement of the kite’s tail. Between the wars he concocted some lovely little preparations for the handling of planes in nosedive, a truly distasteful parody - 1 hope you share my opinion on this - of natural flight. But then, we couldn’t expect any better from human perversity. So, this is the kite, which, moreover, has just what it takes to provoke such perversity. It’s an animal that has nothing especially attractive about it. Pierre Belon, who put together a very fine book on birds, and who had been to Egypt and various other parts of the world on behalf of King Henri II, saw some in Egypt and described the bird as sordide & non gentil, both vile and unpleasant. I must say that for a minute I hoped that everything might fall into place and that Freud’s vulture, even if it was really a kite, might actually turn out after all to have something to do with Egypt, and that in the end it might be an Egyptian vulture. You can see how I always desire to sort things out. Unfortunately this is not the case. In fact, the situation is complicated. There are kites in Egypt and I can even tell you that one day when I was having breakfast in Luxor, I had the surprise of catching in my peripheral vision some­ thing that was flouncing around and which then darted sideways, making off with an orange from my table. For a second I thought it was a falcon, but then I quickly realised it wasn’t. It flew up to perch on the corner of a roof and set down the orange, to show that it was just teasing. You could see it was a reddish creature of a peculiar style. Soon enough, I could be sure that it was a kite. So, you can see what a familiar and readily observable creature it is. But there is something else. There is an Egyptian vulture that looks very much like it, and this is what might have made things fall into place. This is the one that Belon speaks about, which he calls the

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Sacre Egyptien and which since Herodotus has been known under the name of the Ispa£. There are many in Egypt and, naturally, it is sacred. Herodotus informs us that in Ancient Egypt it could not be killed without getting its slayer into great trouble. It is of inter­ est here because it looks somewhat like a kite and somewhat like a falcon. This is the one that in the Egyptian ideograms corresponds roughly to the letter alef which I speak about in my disquisitions on hieroglyphics and their exemplary function for us. Here is the vulture, that is to say, more or less the Egyptian saker falcon.

Egyptian vulture hieroglyph Everything would be just fine if it were this one that was used for the Goddess Mut, whom you know Freud speaks about in relation to the vulture, but that won’t work. Freud really did get it wrong, because despite all this effort towards a solution, the vulture that was used for the Goddess Mut is this one.

Griffon vulture {Gypsfulvus) hieroglyph Unlike the other one, this one doesn’t have a phonetic value. It serves as a determinative element, in the sense that it is added on. Either it designates on its own the goddess Mut, and in this case a little flail is added, or it is integrated into a whole sign that will write Mut plus the little determinative, or else one is content to make it equal to M, yet adding a little t to phoneticise the term. It can be found in more than one association, where it always has to do with the mother goddess.3 This very different vulture, a true Gyps, which doesn’t resemble in the slightest the previous one, the one that lies on the boundary between kites and falcons and other related animals, is the one to which refers everything that Freud reports of this tradition of the bestiary type, for example what was recorded by Horapollo at the

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time of the Egyptian decline. Horapollo’s writings, which moreover are fragmentary and have come down to us through umpteen trans­ positions, transcriptions and distortions, formed the basis for a few Renaissance collections, to which the engravers of the time added little emblems that were supposed to provide us with the signifying value of a number of major Egyptian hieroglyphs. This edition here dates from 1519, and so was brought out, by Aldus Manutius, in Leonardo’s lifetime. It ought to be familiar to you all because it’s the one from which I took the drawing that graces the cover of the journal La Psychanalyse. Horapollo gives the description that I can see written here - The image o f an ear signifies work to come. We will not, however, allow ourselves to fall into the bad habits of an era from which not everything is to be imitated. It was from Horapollo that Freud took the reference stating that the vulture carried the signification of mother, but he also found a far more interesting entry which leads him to take a step forward in the dialectic, namely that this is an animal that exists only in the female sex. This is an old zoological yam which, like so many others, goes way back. It is attested in Antiquity, though not in the finer authors, but was no less widely accepted in medieval culture. One would be quite wrong to believe it, and all it takes is to open up one of Leonardo’s notebooks, which are there to prove it, that his mind brought about a revolution within a certain perspective, and did not partake of these medieval fables. Freud accepts that, because Leonardo was widely read, he must know this story. This is likely and has nothing extraordinary about it, because it’s very widespread, but it hasn’t been proved. And it has all the less interest in being proved in that a vulture is not what is at issue. I’m passing over the fact that Saint Ambrose took the story of the female vulture as Nature deliberately affording us an example to foster the entry into our comprenoire of the virgin birth of Jesus. Freud seems to accept uncritically that almost all the Fathers of the Church told this story. I have to tell you that I haven’t been able to check because I only found out this morning that it’s in Saint Ambrose. Actually, I knew it already, because a certain Pierio Valeriano, who in 1556 brought out a collection of these captioned images of the time, seemed to me to be a particularly important source to consult in order to see what the kite might have been at that time, along with a certain number of other symbolic elements. He points out that Saint Ambrose mentions it, and singles out Saint Basil the Great as well, but there is no mention of all the Fathers o f the Church, as the author to whom Freud refers seems to suggest.

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Vultures were only female just as snails were only male. It was a tradition, and it’s interesting to compare one with the other given that the snail is a creature that slithers over land while the vulture is impregnated in the sky, offering her tail to the wind, as we can see in one very fine image. Where does all this lead us? It shows that the vulture story surely does have a certain interest, like many others of this nature. In truth, Leonardo’s writings are teeming with such stories. He showed a lively interest in different sorts of fables constructed upon such stories. Many other things could be drawn from the kite. One could for example note that it’s an animal strongly given to envy, and which mistreats its offspring. Imagine what the result would have been if Freud had chanced upon that, and the different interpreta­ tion that we could give of the relation with the mother. Am I to show you that nothing holds water in all of this, that there is nothing worth keeping in this part of Freud’s elaboration? Well, no. That’s not why I’m telling you this. I won’t give myself the easy advantage of criticising a great invention long after the event. It often happens that, with all sorts of defects, the eye of the genius has been guided by many other things besides these little investigations, and has gone far beyond the supports that some happenstance has afforded. The question is what it means and what all this allows us to see.

3 Six years after the Three Essays on Sexuality and ten or twelve after the first perceptions that Freud formed of bisexuality - in what he had thus far extracted from the function of the castration complex on the one hand, and of the importance of the phallus and the imaginary phallus on the other, in so far as the latter is the object of woman’s Penisneid - what is there that is new in Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci? He introduces very precisely, in May 1910, the importance of the function of the phallic mother, the phallic woman. She is phallic not for the subject herself, but for the child who is dependent upon this subject. Here we have the point of arrest, the original element in what Freud is bringing us here. That the child is bound to a mother who in turn is bound on the imaginary plane to the phallus qua lack is the relation that Freud is introducing as crucial and which is utterly distinct from everything he had said before then regarding woman’s relation to the phallus. This original structure is the one around which this year I have been

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making the fundamental criticism of the object relation revolve, in as much as the object relation is designed to instate a certain stable relationship between the sexes that would ostensibly be grounded in accordance with a certain symbolic relation. I believe I have made this abundantly clear - at the very least I think you have taken it as such - in the analysis of little Hans. Here, we find testimony in Freud’s thought of this being something that in itself alone enables us to gain access to the mystery of Leonardo’s position. In other words, the fact that the child, isolated through the dual encounter with woman, finds himself by the same token confronted with the problem of the phallus qua lack for his female partner, that is, in this instance, for the maternal partner, is the element around which everything that Freud constructs with regard to Leonardo turns. This is what makes for the depth and the originality of this observation, which moreover is Freud’s first work, and not by chance, in which the term narcissism is mentioned. So, this is the start of the structuring as such of the register of the imaginary in Freud’s oeuvre. We need to pause now for a moment on what I shall call the contrast, the paradox, of the personage of Leonardo and pose the question of the other term, which is not new but which appears here with a particular insistence, that of sublimation. Every now and then Freud refers to a certain number of what could be called Leonardo’s neurotic traits. I mean that from one point to the next Freud is seeking out traces of a critical point of passage, of a relation preserved in some kind of repetition of terms, in sorts of obsessional lapses. Freud will also turn whatever this paradoxical aspect is in Leonardo’s thirst for knowledge, in his cupido sciendi - this being the traditional designation for the curios­ ity that animated him - into an obsessional trait, because he calls it a Grubelzwang, a compulsive brooding. It cannot be denied that there is a certain such indication here. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s personal­ ity cannot be explained in its totality by neurosis. And, as one of the crucial outlets of what remains of the exhilarated and indeed fixed infantile tendency at issue in the case of Leonardo, Freud brings in the notion of sublimation that he had already introduced in the Three Essays. As you know, further to sublimation being a tendency that bears upon objects that are not primordial objects but the most elevated objects of what is offered to human and interhuman consideration, it was only later on that Freud was to add a few complements showing the role sublimation might play in establishing the interests of the ego. Since then, the term sublimation has been taken up by a number of

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authors from the psychoanalytic community who link it to a notion of the neutralisation and dis-instinctualisation of instinct. I must say that this is something that it is very hard to credit. A de-libidinalisation of libido. A dis-aggressivation of aggressiveness. These are the loveliest terms that we can most commonly find flowering up from the pen of Hartmann or Loewenstein. They hardly clarify anything when it comes to the mechanism of subhmation. The interest of a study like Freud’s Kindheitserinnerung is that we can take a few ideas from it and at the very least initiate something that will allow us to posit the term sublimation in such a way as to secure a more structured basis than the notion of an instinct that dis-instinctualises, indeed of an object that, as they say, becomes more sublime. For it would seem that, going by these ego psycholo­ gists, this is what the Saft of sublimation ought to be. Leonardo da Vinci was himself the object of an idealisation, if not a sublimation, which began in his own lifetime and which tends to turn him into a kind of universal genius and, equally, a stunning precursor to modern thought. This is what is maintained by some, including highly erudite scholars, who have started to get down to the crux of the problem, as indeed did Freud. Others have done the same on other planes besides that of art. Pierre Duhem, for example, says that Leonardo glimpsed the Law of Falling Bodies and even the Principle of Inertia. A slightly more rigorous and methodical examination from the standpoint of the History of Science shows that this is hardly the case. Nevertheless, it is clear that Leonardo made stunning discoveries and that the drawings he left us in the realms of the kinematic, the dynamic, the mechanical and the bal­ listic, often evince an extraordinarily keen perception far in advance of what was being done in his time. On no account does this allow us to believe that there were not on each of these planes works that were highly advanced in mathematisation, and especially those in kinematics, for example. Yet a remainder of Aristotelian tradition, that is to say, a tra­ dition founded on a certain evidential experience, meant that the fairly advanced mathematical formalisation that had been made in abstract kinematics had not yet been fully conjoined with the expe­ riential domain, the domain of real and existing bodies that seem to be subject to the Law of Gravity, which so occupied the human mind with its experiential prominence that they spent all the time of which you are aware on striving to produce a correct formulation for it. Think on the fact that we also find in Leonardo’s drawings and their attendant commentaries interpolations such as, a body falls more quickly the heavier it is. We find this explicitly and more often still implicitly. I think that you have retained enough of your

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secondary education to know that this theorem is deeply wrong, even though experience, as they say - experience at the broad level of common experience - does seem to impose it. Nevertheless, what is it that constitutes the originality of these drawings? I’m alluding to just one portion of what he left us, as the work of an engineer, properly speaking, which so aston­ ished, interested and even fascinated both his contemporaries and later generations. These are things that are often extraordinar­ ily advanced for their time but which cannot get beyond certain bounds that had not yet been crossed in terms of the use, the vivid entry, as it were, of mathematics in the realm of the analysis of phenomena of the real. In other words, what Leonardo brings us is often absolutely admirable in inventiveness, construction and creativity, and it is already quite enough to see for example the elegance with which he determines the theorems that can serve as the basis for evaluating the gradual change in the intensity of a force attached to a circumvolubile body, this being the term he uses for a body mobile about an axis. This force is linked to a spiritual arm, and the arm turns. What will the variation in the efficacy of this force be as the lever arm turns? These are problems that Leonardo will excel in translating by what I shall call a kind of overview of the field of force, determined not so much by his calculating as by his drawing. In short, the intui­ tive factor, the factor of creative imagination, is tied in Leonardo to a certain predominance accorded to the principle of experience, which is the source of all sorts of dazzling and original intuitions but which, despite everything, are partial at the level of the working drawing of an engineer. This is no small matter. As a scholar of the History of Sciences, Alexandre Koyre, tells us, here you have all the distance that lies between a drawing and an engineer’s blueprint. While a blueprint can display on its own account all sorts of intuitive elements in the relationship between certain quantities or values that are somehow materialised in an image simply through the layout of which­ ever apparatus, it is not capable of resolving certain higher-level primary-symbolic problems. Ultimately, we will see in Leonardo an inadequate and even false theory of the inclined plane, which will only be resolved with Galileo. With this revolution - to use another of Koyre’s terms - the mathematisation of the real gets under way when from a certain point forward it was resolved radically to purge the method, that is to say, to put experience to the test of terms, to the test of positionings of the problem, that roundly take the impos­ sible as the point of departure. Understand that only when one has set apart the formulation of

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those formulae that are to be submitted to hypothesis from any kind of claimed intuiting of the real can one renounce something that seems to be self-evident, like heavier bodies falling faster. Only then can one start to elaborate on the basis of another starting point, like the correct one of gravity, that is to say, a formula that in some sense cannot be actualised anywhere because one will always be in a condition that has too many impurities to make it a reality. It is because one is starting with a pure symbolic formalisation that the experiment can be realised in a correct fashion and a math­ ematical physics can start to be established. It may be said that after whole centuries of trying, they never managed to do so until they resolved to make this separation between the symbolic and the real at the point of departure. This was something that had never been allowed in the string of experiments and fumblings that researchers had been making from one generation to the next, and which moreover are fascinating to read about. This is the interest of a History of Science. Until then, they remained in a betwixt and between, in something incomplete, partial and imaginative, some­ thing fulgurous that led Leonardo da Vinci himself - and this is what I’m coming to - to formulate that his position was essentially one of a relation of obedience to Nature. The term Nature plays an utterly important, utterly essential, role in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Nature is for him a presence that must be con­ stantly turned to account. Nature is the absolutely primary element. Nature is an other against whom he pits himself, and whose signs have to be deciphered as lines of verse. He makes himself Nature’s double and, as it were, co-creator. All these terms are in Leonardo’s notes. This is the perspective from which he examines Nature in order to arrive at a sort of fusing of the imaginary with an other that is not the radical Other, that is not the one we deal with and which I have taught you to situate as the place, the locus, of the unconscious. What, then, is this other? It’s very important to see in this respect how insistent Leonardo is in saying that there is no voice in Nature, and he gives such curious and amusing demonstrations that it would be worthwhile taking the trouble to see to what extent it might have become an obsessional preoccupation for him, strictly speaking, to demonstrate that there cannot be anyone who could respond to him, and who would be what everyone then believed in, a spirit who speaks from somewhere up in the air. He insists on this. He often comes back to it. And indeed, there were people for whom to proclaim such a thing was an almost scandalous truth. Nevertheless, Leonardo examines Nature as an other who is not

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a subject but whose causes there is at the same time every reason to read. I’m saying this because it’s in Leonardo - Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience,4 The paradox of this formula, if we take Leonardo, as is often done, as a sort of precursor of modern experimentalism, is there to show the distance that lies between him and us, and the difficulty that lies in grasping only after the event, once a certain evolution in thought has been achieved, what the thought of the one who is being labelled a precursor was actually engaged with. Leonardo’s position with respect to Nature is one of a relation to an other who is not a subject, yet whose history, sign, articulation and speech are nevertheless to be detected. It’s a matter of grasping the creative power of this other. In short, this other transforms the radicalness of the alterity of the absolute Other into something that is accessible through a certain imaginary identification. It is this other that I would like to see you taking into considera­ tion in the Cartoon to which Freud refers, remarking on the fusing of bodies that makes it hard to tell that of St Anne apart from that of the Virgin, as though this were a riddle. This is so true that if you reverse the drawing and you compare it with the painting in the Louvre, you will notice that the legs of St Anne are on the side where initially the legs of the Virgin were, in the most natural pose and in almost the same position, while the Virgin’s legs are now where St Anne’s legs were. That this is a kind of twofold being, with the aspects of the one peeling away behind the other, is not in doubt. That the Infant in the London Cartoon extends His mother’s arm, not altogether unlike a glove puppet, is something that is no less striking. Aside from this, however, note that the other woman, without our really knowing which is which, raises alongside the Infant the pointing finger that we find throughout Leonardo’s oeuvre, and which is one of its enigmas. It’s in the St John the Baptist, in the Bacchus, and in the Virgin o f the Rocks. This is also something that offers a very fine image of the ambiguity between the real mother and the imagi­ nary mother, between the real child and the hidden phallus. I’m not reading the finger as the symbol of the hidden phallus because it roughly reproduces its outline, but because this finger, which is to be found right across Leonardo’s output, is the index to want-of-being, the term of which is also inscribed everywhere in Leonardo’s oeuvre. What is involved here is a position that the subject takes in rela­ tion to the problematic of the Other, which is either this absolute Other, the closed unconscious, this impenetrable woman, or else, behind her, the figure of death which is the ultimate absolute Other. The way in which a certain experience composes with this ultimate

From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

423

term of the human relationship, the way in which it reintroduces all the life of imaginary exchanges into this relationship, the way in which it displaces the radical relation to a certain essential alterity so as to cause it to be inhabited by a relationship of mirage - this is what is known as sublimation and this is what is exemplified con­ stantly by Leonardo’s oeuvre on the plane of genius and creation. It is also, I believe, what is expressed in the Cartoon in a sort of singular cryptogram. This drawing is not unique, but merely the double of another drawing for a painting he never made, for the chapel in the Servite Monastery. Reproduced there is the theme of St Anne, the Virgin, the Infant and the fourth term we spoke about, namely St John, who elsewhere is the lamb. In the fourth term of this fourfold composition we ought clearly to find - as on each occasion I have spoken to you about this, when­ ever the fourfold relation is incarnated - the theme of death. Where is it? Naturally it is everywhere. It passes from one to the other. Death is also what will leave Leonardo’s sexuality in a dead state, because this is his essential problem, around which Freud predi­ cated his examination. Nowhere in Leonardo’s life do we find any attestation of something that would represent a true bond, a true captivation that would be more than ambiguous and transient. But ultimately this is not the impression that his story has left. Rather, it is that of a dreamlike paternity. He was patron and pro­ tector to some young fellows whom he took in for their refined background painting, a number of whom passed through his life, yet without any major attachment really leaving its mark on his lifestyle. If there had to be one who ought to be classified as homo­ sexual, it would rather be Michelangelo. Is death there in this sort of double, the one who is there across from the Infant and who is so readily replaced by the lamb? On 3 April 1501, Pietro da Novellara wrote to Isabella d’Este5 that over two days all Florence had flocked to see the preparatory cartoon for the high altar in the Santissima Annunziata, a work which Leonardo was never to paint. Everyone lingered over the meaning of this fourfold scene in which the Infant is almost jumping out o f his mother’s arms to seize hold o f a lamb. They all understand the sign of the drama. It looks as though St Anne, rising slightly from her seat, wants to restrain her daughter from parting the child and the little lamb; perhaps she symbolises the Church, not wishing to prevent the Passion o f Christ. It is here, in this aspect of His destiny and His sacrifice, that the term of Leonardo’s relation to his mother can be situated, though it is his separation from her that Freud takes as the point of departure for the whole dramatisation that followed in Leonardo’s life.

424

Farewell

The last character, the most enigmatic of all, is the St Anne, restored and established in this purely female, purely maternal rela­ tion. This Other, with a capital letter, is necessary to lend balance to the scene. Of course, contrary to what Mr Ernst Kris tells us, this is far from being almost the first such setting of these characters. Even Freud didn’t believe for a second that the theme of Anne, the Virgin, the Infant and the fourth character that is introduced here, was an invention exclusive to Leonardo. The fourth character does indubitably pose a problem in the history of religious motifs that is rather specific to Leonardo, but when it comes to the representation of the set of St Anne, the Virgin and the Infant, it is enough to have garnered the faintest historical notion of what was going on at the time, by reading any one of the historical accounts, to know that it was precisely in those years, between 1485 and 1510, that the cult of St Anne was being elevated in Christianity, in connection with the dogmatic criticism of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. It was the outgrowth of a spiritual theme, but of many other things besides spirituality, because this was the time of the issuing of plenary indulgences, when across Germany there was a wave of these little tickets with wood­ cuts of Anne and the Virgin and Infant, the purchase of which could buy you ten or twenty thousand years of indulgence in the afterlife. So, this is a theme that was not invented by Leonardo, nor is it true that Freud imputed the invention to Leonardo. There is only Mr Kris to tell us that Leonardo was alone in representing a trio of the like, when in fact you have just to open Freud’s study to see the painting’s theme represented with the title Anna Selbdritt, that is to say, the Trinitarian Anne. It’s the same in Italian - Anna Metterza. This function of the trinity of Anne lies in the fact that at what was doubtless a critical moment, which we needn’t revisit since we can’t allow ourselves to be swept too far into this historical schol­ arship on Christian devotion, we meet again the constancy of a supra-Trinity, so to speak, that assumes its full worth when it finds its psychological incarnation in Leonardo da Vinci. I mean that while Leonardo was surely a man positioned in a profoundly atypical stance with respect to his sexual maturation, and this dissymmetry was tantamount to an encounter with a subli­ mation that reached exceptional degrees of activity and realisation, nothing in the elaboration of his work - which he was constantly starting over in a truly obsessional way - could be structured without there being something to reproduce this relation between the ego and the other. This is inscribed, along with the necessity of the big Other, here

From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

425

on the diagram to which I have been urging you to refer as a means of charting these problems.

But what are we to make of the atypia brought about through the especially dramatic engagement of this being along the pathways of the imaginary? That he can draw on the prowess of his essential creations only within this trinitarian scene - the same that we met at the end of the observation on little Hans - is one thing. But quite another thing is how this enlightens us on the matter of a perturba­ tion correlative with his own subjective position. Leonardo’s inversion, if indeed we can speak in terms of inver­ sion, is far from reducible to a paradox or an anomaly in his affective relationships. At any rate, this is a register that apparently bears the mark of a peculiar inhibition in this man endowed with every gift. Besides, the case that there are no erotic themes in Leonardo has perhaps been overstated. It might be going a bit too far, because what is true is that in Freud’s time they hadn’t yet uncovered the theme of Leda, that is, a very beautiful woman and a swan that all but conjoins with her in an undulating movement no less delicate than her forms. It is rather striking that once again it is a bird that represents the male theme, and certainly an imaginary fantasy. But let’s press on because there’s something else I must tell you. If we stay at the level of the experience that we are able to have of Leonardo, there is one element that we cannot eliminate, and this is his manuscripts. I don’t know if you have ever had occasion to leaf through one of the reproductions, but all the same it produces a certain effect when you see all these handwritten notes in mirror writing. Then, when you read them, you can see him constantly speaking to himself, calling himself thou. For example, Sell what you cannot take with you. Get from Jean de Paris the method o f painting in tempera. Or, You will go and get two sprigs o f lavender or rosemary from the corner shop. They are things of this order, where everything is mixed in together. It ends up becoming quite overawing and gripping.

426

Farewell

To spell it right out, the relationship of identification between the ego and the other, the establishment of which appears to be crucial for an understanding of how identifications are constituted, and on the basis of which the subject’s ego can move forward, the idea seems to arise that, correlative to each sublimation, that is to say, to the process of the de-subjectification or the naturalisation of the Other which would constitute the essential phenomenon of the sublimation to the very extent of its greater or lesser totality or perfection, something always occurs on the level of the imaginary in a form that is accentuated to a greater or lesser extent, namely an inversion of the relations between ego and other. Here, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, we truly have someone who addresses himself and who makes comments to himself from his own imaginary other. We have to take his mirror writing as the bare fact of his proper position with respect to himself. Here we have the same radical alienation that I posed as a question at the end of the last session regarding the amnesia of Hans as a youth. I shall pose the same question today, as to whether the process that we shall call sublimation, or psychologisation, or alienation, or egoisation, might not entail in its very steering a correlative dimen­ sion whereby a being forgets himself as an imaginary object of the other. Indeed, in the imaginary ego, there is a fundamental possibility of forgetting. 3 July 1957

Note

The collective work cited in the opening chapter bears the title La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui [a selection of the articles appeared in ‘American Adaptation’ in the single volume Psychoanalysis of Today, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959]; further commentary on the same is given in ‘La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir’, Ecrits, pp. 585-645, passim. The bulletin referenced in chapters IV and V is the Bulletin d’activites de ГAssociation des psychanalystes de Belgique, no. 25, 118 rue Froissart, Brussels (cf. Ecrits, pp. 609-12). It has not been possible to identify the painting alluded to on page 328. It may be that the painting is not by Titian, but Veronese: the Venus and Mars United by Love in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Nor has it been possible to identify the letter by Freud mentioned on page 295. A number of annotations in Lacan’s own hand feature in the typescript that was given to me. Thereafter, I was able to consult notes taken down directly by Paul Lemoine; I thank my dear friend Gennie Lemoine for allowing me to draw on these notes for the etablissement of the present Book, as for the Books of the Seminar in their entirety. I would also like to thank: Claude Cherki, who now manages Editions du Seuil after Paul Flamand and Michel Chodkiewicz; Evelyne Cazade-Havas, who has taken over from Francois Wahl as copy-editor; she was the first reader of the [French] manuscript and kindly accepted my request to check the charts of Vienna, which Paul Lemoine had jotted down; and Jean-Claude Baillieul, who went through the [French] text at the various stages of putting this book together. Lastly, I would like to give a word of thanks for the warm welcome I received from the Library of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, 1 rue Huysmans, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris.

428

Note

Since the etablissement of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan is a work-in-progress, I would be grateful for any possible corrections and additions, which may be addressed do the editor. J. A. M. * The sketches on pages 257 (‘Giraffe with Widdler’), 304 (‘The Loading Dock’) and 317 (‘Untere Viaductgasse’) are taken from Analyse der Phobie eines 5-Jahrigen Knaben in the seventh volume of the Gesammelte Werke of Sigmund Freud, published by S. Fischer Verlag (©1941, Imago Publishing Co., London). The map of Vienna (pp. 430-1) is taken from the 1905 edition of the Baedeker handbook to Austria-Hungary; the title page is reproduced on page 429. J. A. M.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY INOLUDIHO

DALMATIA AND BOSNIA

HANDBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS BY

KARL BAEDEKER

WITH 38 MAPS AND U PLANS TXNTH EDITION, BBVUXD AMS AVWIMTBB

LEIPZIG: KARL BAEDEKER, PUBLISHER LONDON: DDLAU AND CO., 87 SOHO SQUARE, W. NBW YORK: CHARLES SORIBNBB'S SONS, 188/7 FIFTH AVE.

1905

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Translator’s Notes

I Introduction 1 C o n c e rn in g situation analytique, cf. B. F in k ’s e n d n o te (192, ЦЗ) o n p ag e 412 o f h is tr a n s la tio n o f Book VIII o f th e S e m in a r (C a m b rid g e : P o lity , 2015). 2 N o te th a t in th e la te 1950s, L a c a n uses tendance, o n a n d off, to tra n s la te F r e u d ’s Trieb a n d Regung. C f. ‘L a d ire c tio n d e la c u re e t les p rin c ip e s de so n p o u v o ir’, in Ecrits (P a ris: Seuil), p . 597: ‘Q u a n d il d e n o n c e u n e te n d ­ an ce, ce q u ’il [F reu d ] a p p e lle Trieb, [ . . . ] . ’ In m o s t in stan c es, th e p re se n t tr a n s la tio n re n d e rs tendance w ith th e p a ra p h ra s e ‘d riv e te n d e n c y ’. 3 L a c a n ’s re g u la r u se o f th e ad jec tiv e adequat to q u a lify th e o b je c t o f co g n isan c e is in referen c e to th e d o c trin e o f Veritas est adcequatio rei et intellectus, asc rib e d b y T h o m a s A q u in a s to Isa a c Isra e li b e n S o lo m o n (C f. ‘L a C h o s e fre u d ie n n e ’, in Merits, o p . cit., p p . 420, 434). H e re a n d th r o u g h o u t, th e p re se n t tr a n s la tio n o p ts fo r ‘c o rre s p o n d in g ’. 4 I t m a y b e n o te d th a t a t th e tim e o f th e p re se n t S e m in a r, th e o n ly a u th o ri­ ta tiv e in d ic a tio n in E n g lish o f th e title o f L a c a n ’s p a p e r w as th e in d ex ical reference: ‘T h e L o o k in g -G la ss P h a s e ’ in th e International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1937, 18(1): 78.I

II The Three Forms of the Lack of Object 1 C h o c o la t w as th e clo w n p e rs o n a o f th e p e rfo rm e r R a fa e l, o f A fro -C u b a n descent. B etw een 1895 a n d 1910 h e p e rfo rm e d in a d u o w ith th e clo w n F o o ttit, a n d th e ir skits o fte n fe a tu re d ‘co m ed ic sla p s’. T h e ex p re ssio n ‘e tre c h o c o la t’ h a s p a sse d in to c o llo q u ia l u se in F re n c h , m e a n in g ‘to be ta k e n fo r a rid e ’ o r ‘to m iss o u t’. T h e m e n tio n o f C h o c o la t a n d A u g u ste is u n a tte s te d in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t (cf. Ja c q u e s-A la in M ille r’s N o te , p ag e 427) a n d so, as w ith th e m a n y su b se q u e n t e d ito ria l in te rp o la tio n s (sig n alled b elo w ), m a y d eriv e fro m th e L em o in e n o te b o o k s. 2 P e rh a p s a n a llu sio n to D ra n e m a n d h is h a t, w h ic h h e n a m e d ‘P o u p o u te ’. D ra n e m also p o p u la ris e d th e so n g ‘N o u s n o u s p lu m e s’ (ly rics b y G e o rg e s S ibre), w h ich L a c a n w o rk s in to ‘F o n c tio n e t c h a m p d e la p a ro le e t d u la n g a g e ’, Ecrits, o p . c it., p . 276.

Translator’s Notes

433

3 T h e d ia g ra m re p ro d u c e d a t 000002.09 o f th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t is u n a tte s te d elsew h ere in th e se m in a r ty p e sc rip ts. T h e v a ria tio n s o n th e d ia g ra m , c o n s titu tin g th e figures o n p a g e s 57, 85 a n d 202 o f th e Seuil e d itio n , a re e d ito ria l. O f f u rth e r n o te a re L a c a n ’s tw o th u m b n a il sk etch es flan k in g th e d ia g ra m in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e scrip t: o n th e left, a sc h em a tic v e rsio n o f th e ‘R s c h e m a ’ (d e v e lo p e d in J a n u a r y 1958 a n d fe a tu rin g in its fully e x p a n d e d fo rm in Ecrits, o p . cit., p . 553; o n th e rig h t, th e u p p e r a n d d ia g o n a l v e c to rs o f th e ‘L sc h e m a ’ (as c o r­ re s p o n d in g to th e im a g in a ry tria n g le tpIM in th e R sch em a). 4 M e n tio n o f H ele n e D e u ts c h a n d M e la n ie K le in is u n a tte s te d a t 0 0 0 002.14 o f th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t. 5 L a c a n seem s to b e c o n fu sin g p u n is h m e n t fo r in c est w ith th e p e n a n c e fo r ‘sex w ith a n e ld e r’s w ife’ listed a s o n e o f th e ‘P e n a n c e s fo r G rie v o u s Sins C a u sin g L o ss o f C a s te ’ in th e Manusmrti. A m o n g th e v a rio u s a lte rn a tiv e p e n a n c e s is th a t th e p e n ite n t sh o u ld ‘c u t o ff his p en is a n d testicles by him self, h o ld th e m in his c u p p e d h a n d s , a n d w a lk s tra ig h t to w a rd s th e so u th -w e st u n til h e falls d o w n d e a d ’ ( Manus Code of Law; A Critical Edition and Translation of the Manava-Dharmasastra, tra n s la te d b y P. O livelle, O x fo rd U n iv e rsity P ress, 2005, p . 220).

Ill The Signifier and the Holy Spirit 1 T h is in te rro g a tiv e q u ip is u n a tte s te d in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t (cf. 000003.3). 2 T h e c l a u s e . . . , par Гintermediate du message de ГAutre,. . . is e d ito ria l (p. 46 o f th e Seuil e d itio n , u n a tte s te d a t 000003.11). 3 F re u d w rites ‘d ie E m p fin d u n g d es B e d iirfn isses als d ie d e r B e frie d ig u n g ’, w h ich Ja m e s S tra c h e y tra n s la te s as ‘th e ex p e rien c e b o th o f a n ee d a n d o f a g ra tific a tio n ’ ( Penguin Freud Library 7, p . 45n). 4 A th u m b n a il sk e tch in L a c a n ’s h a n d ju s t b elo w th is fig u re (sq u a re b ra c k e te d a t th e fo o t o f 0 00003.14) lin k s th e tw o levels o f signifier a n d signified to th e tw o levels o f th e g ra p h to b e d ev e lo p e d th r o u g h o u t th e fo llo w in g y e a r’s se m in a r, w h e re a re tro a c tiv e v e c to r rises, lo o p s b a c k , a n d falls, th u s to c ro ss e a c h h o riz o n ta l line tw ice. 5 L a c a n is o v e rlo o k in g th e 1924 e d itio n in th e fifth v o lu m e o f th e Gesammelte Schriften, w h ic h in c lu d e d fu rth e r a d d itio n s, in p a rtic u la r th e n o te a d d e d to th e su b se c tio n o n ‘A m b iv a le n c e ’ (in th e se co n d Essay) in c o rp o ra tin g th e fin d in g s o f ‘D ie in fa n tile G e n ita lo rg a n is a tio n ’. 6 C f. F r e u d ’s re m a rk : ‘U n fo rtu n a te ly w e c a n d escrib e th is s ta te o f th in g s o n ly as it affects th e m a le c h ild ’ ( PFL 7, p p . 3 0 8 -9 ) 7 T h is e n tire sen ten c e h a s b een in te rp o la te d e d ito ria lly (p. 55 in th e Seuil e d itio n , u n a tte s te d a t 000003.32 in th e ty p e sc rip t). C f. Ecrits, o p . cit., p. 155. B. F in k tra n s la te s somatognosie a s ‘a g n o s ia o f so m a tic fu n c tio n s ’.IV

IV The Dialectic of Frustration 1 T h e b ib lio g ra p h ic referen c e to A lice B a lin t’s 1939 a rtic le ‘L o v e fo r th e M o th e r a n d M o th e r L o v e ’ is su p p lie d in d efe re n ce to L a c a n ’s

434

Translator’s Notes

m a n u s c rip t a n n o ta tio n (p. 63 o f th e Seuil e d itio n gives th e m isre fe re n ce Mother’s Love and Love of the Mother), th o u g h h is sp o k e n re m a rk m ig h t eq u a lly en c o m p a ss h e r 1937 p a p e r, ‘H a n d h a b u n g d e r U b e rtra g u n g a u f G r u n d d e r F e re n c z isc h e n V e rsu c h e ’ (in Internationale Zeitschrift ftir Psychoanalyse, 22: 4 7 -5 8 ), m e n tio n e d b y M ic h a e l B a lin t in ‘E a rly D e v e lo p m e n ta l S ta te s o f th e E go. P rim a ry O b je c t-L o v e ’ w ith re sp e c t to Im re H e r m a n n ’s n o tio n o f ‘c lin g in g ’, th e re v iew ed fro m th e p e rsp e c tiv e o f th e m o th e r. T h e in te rje c tio n in th e en su in g s e n te n c e ... au Jardin des Hesperides. . . is u n a tte s te d a t 0 0 0 0 0 4 .1 0 -1 1 . 2 T h is n o ta tio n is e d ito ria lly su p p lie d , in a n tic ip a tio n o f th e a u th o ria l o c c u rre n ce o f th e sa m e in le sso n X X III (p. 386 below ). 3 C f. F r e u d ’s in tro d u c to ry le c tu re o n ‘F e m in in ity ’: ‘H e r h a p p in e ss is g re a t i f la te r o n th is w ish fo r a b a b y finds fu lfilm e n t in re a lity , a n d q u ite esp ecially so if th e b a b y is a little b o y w h o b rin g s th e lo n g e d -fo r p enis w ith h im ’ (PFL 2, p . 163). 4 In th e ‘O b se rv a tio n o f a P h o b ia ’, A n n eliese S c h n u rm a n n n o te s th a t th e b r o th e r is S a n d y ’s eld er sib lin g ‘B a rrie ’, w h o , like S an d y , is a ch ild o f th e first c o u p le fo rm e d b y M rs H . a n d h e r n o w d ec ea sed h u s b a n d . B a rrie h a d b een e v a c u a te d to live w ith his a u n t w h ere h e sta y e d u n til th e e n d o f th e w ar. I t is specified th a t th e b o y is ju s t tw o y e a rs o ld e r th a n th e su b je ct, n o t five y ea rs, th o u g h th e re is m e n tio n o f a n elev e n -y e ar-o ld ste p siste r in th e n ew h o u se h o ld . C f. (1949) ‘O b s e rv a tio n o f a P h o b ia ’, in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 4: 2 5 3 -7 0 . V

V On Analysis as Bundling and the Consequences Thereof 1 T h e n o u n subodoration is fa r less c o m m o n th a n th e a lre a d y a n tiq u a te d F re n c h v e rb subodorer. R a re r still is its E n g lish c o g n a te , w ith C h a rle s T a lb u t O n io n s c itin g ju s t tw o a tte s te d uses o f ‘s u b o d o r a te ’, b o th fro m th e n in e te e n th c e n tu ry , w ith th e sig n ific atio n ‘to sm ell o r sc en t o u t’ (A

New English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Vol. IX, Part II, Su-Th (O x fo rd : C la re n d o n P ress, 1919), p . 38). T h o u g h O n io n s p o sits a L a tin d e riv a tio n fro m suboddrat, th e v e rb a l ste m subodorari a p p e a rs to b e a m id -six te e n th -c e n tu ry c o n c o c tio n b y D e n is L a m b in (cf. T o u rn o y , G . a n d T u n b e rg , T . O ., ‘O n th e M a rg in s o f L atin ity ? N e o -L a tin a n d th e V e rn a c u la r L a n g u a g e s’ in Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo­ Latin Studies, V ol. X L V , 1996: 147) w h ich , in d e ed , m a y d eriv e fro m th e F re n c h , g iv en a n e a rlie r a tte s te d u se in G u illa u m e B rig o n n e t’s 1522 c o rre sp o n d e n c e w ith M a rg u e rite D ’A n g o u lem e: ‘se u lle m e n t sa v o u re r, s u b o d o re r e t g o u ste r n o s tre n a issa n c e celeste’ (M a rtin e a u -G e n ie y s, C ., V eissiere, M . a n d H eller, H . (eds) Correspondance (1521-1524): Tome I, Annees 1521-1522 (G e n e v a : D ro z , 1975), p . 172. L a c a n m a d e p re v io u s referen ce to th e sam e r e p o r t (re m a in in g d isc re et a s to w h e th e r it w as d eliv ered b y F a in o r M a rty ) in ‘F o n c tio n et c h a m p d e la p a ro le e t d u la n g ag e en p sy c h a n a ly se ’ (Ecrits, p. 267) u n d e r th e b iv o c al fo rm u la ‘u n e telle s u b o d o r a tio n d e so n s u je t’, w h ich ec h o es th e reflexivity o f ‘se flairer re c ip ro q u e m e n t’ fro m th e p re c e d in g sen ten ce. A . S h e rid a n re n d e rs th e f o rm u la w ith th e eq u a lly b iv o c al ‘su c h a sniffing o f h is s u b je c t’ ( Ecrits, A Selection (L o n d o n : T a v isto c k , 1977), p. 43), w hile B. F in k p re fe rs th e

Translator’s Notes

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u n iv o c a l ‘b ein g sm elled b y h is s u b je c t’ ( Ecrits in English (N e w Y o rk : N o r to n , 2006), p . 221). N o te a lso a sim ila r re c ip ro c ity im p lie d in th e la te r referen ce to th e o c c u rre n c e a s a n intersubodoration (Ecrits, p . 337) a n d its d e s c rip tio n a s a te c h n ic a l device ( Ecrits, p . 482, n. 1: ‘te c h n iq u e de s u b o d o r a tio n ’). F o r fu rth e r a llu sio n s to th e re p o rt, see Ecrits, p p . 267, 4 6 4 -6 . 2 L a c a n m a y b e c o n fu sin g S te n d h a l’s De Гamour w ith R e in h o ld G tin th e r ’s Kulturgeschichte der Liebe. Ein Versuch, B erlin: D u n c k e r, 1900, w h ich o n p ag e s 3 6 6 -7 m e n tio n s th e G e rm a n a n d Swiss p ra c tic e s o f Fensterin a n d z’ Chilt gehen. T h e sa m e o b s e rv a tio n h a d p re v io u sly fe a tu re d o n p a g e 191 o f his Weib und sittlichkeit; studien und darlegungen, B erlin: D u n c k e r, 1898. 3 R u t h L eb o v ici re p o rts th e se tw o stag es slig h tly d iffe ren tly (cf. Bulletin d’activites de ГAssociation des psychanalystes de Belgique, 25 (1956): 5). In th e first stag e, ‘il d essin e d es fem m es a c c ro u p ie s e n tra in d ’u rin e r o u b ie n il im ag in e q u ’u n e fem m e le v o it se m a s tu rb e r d a n s u n u rin o ir, q u ’elle est tre s excitee et q u ’elle se d o n n e a lu i’ [‘h e m a k e s d ra w in g s o f w o m e n u rin a tin g in a s q u a ttin g p o sitio n , o r im a g in e s to h im se lf th a t a w o m a n c a n see h im m a s tu rb a tin g in to a u rin a l, th a t sh e b eco m es very a ro u se d a n d offers h e rse lf to h im .’]. In th e se co n d sta g e, ‘il se tro u v e d a n s u n w .c. d o n t la c lo iso n in te r m e d ia te av ec u n a u tre est p erc ee d ’u n tr o u ; il ex h ib e s o n sexe ; re g a rd e u rin e r la fem m e q u i se tro u v e a c o te ; e t so u h a ite e m b ra sse r ses o rg a n e s g e n ita u x ’ [‘h e finds h im s e lf in a to ile t cu b icle th a t is d iv id e d fro m a n o th e r b y a p a r titio n w all w ith a h o le in it; h e ex p o ses h is pen is; w a tc h e s th e w o m a n o n th e o th e r sid e u rin a tin g ; a n d w ishes h e co u ld k iss h e r o n th e g e n ita ls’]. 4 L a c a n h ere in v e rts th e a ttrib u te s o f th e tw o w o m en as r e p o rte d in th e case h is to ry (ib id .). T h e first, a fish m o n g e r a n d a frie n d o f h is p a re n ts , is th e w o m a n th e su b je c t h a d seen u rin a tin g w h e n he w as a ch ild a n d w h o fe a tu re s in th e d re a m a s th e o n e w ith w h o m h e w a n ts to h a v e se x u al re la ­ tio n s. T h e seco n d , th e fish m o n g e r’s m a id , is th e w o m a n h e h a d lo v e d as a ch ild , a n d th e sig h t o f w h o m in th e d re a m sto p s h im in h is tra c k s. T h e su b je ct a d d s th a t a s a ch ild h e h a d b een a fra id o f th e m a id ’s h u sb a n d .

VI The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young Homosexual Woman 1 J. S tra ch e y tra n s la te s ‘D a s ty p isc h e M iB lin g en d e r k in d lic h e n S ex u alfo rs c h u n g ’ as ‘T y p ic a l F a ilu re o f In fa n tile S exual R e se a rc h e s’ (PEL 1, P- H 5 ). 2 F re u d uses th e F re n c h te rm demi-mondaine to d e sc rib e th e w o m a n ’s love o b ject. 3 J. S tra c h e y ch o o se s n o t to ‘s te re o ty p e ’ Schwdrmerei, in ste a d re n d e rin g v a rio u sly as ‘d e v o te d a d m ir a tio n ’, ‘in f a tu a tio n ’ a n d ‘a d o r a tio n ’.V I

VII A Child is Being Beaten and the Young Homosexual Woman 1 A m a rg in a l n o te in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t h ere rea d s: ‘L a n o n p lu s, L. n e v o it p a s le p ro b le m e ’ (000007.14), a n d th e n a fu rth e r n o te

436

Translator’s Notes

ju s t below , in d e x ed to ‘u n r a p p o r t d u el, e t d o n e a m b ig u ’, rea d s: ‘L . ici n ’a p a s e n c o re v u le p ro b le m e , q u ’il v e ra d a n s V ’ (000007.15). R e fe rrin g to h im se lf in th e th ird p e rs o n , th e se tw o n o te s a n tic ip a te L a c a n ’s rev ised re a d in g o f th e se c o n d sta g e o f th e b e a tin g fa n ta s y in th e le sso n o f 12 F e b r u a r y 1958. 2 A n o th e r n o te in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t h e re re a d s: ‘d istin c ­ tio n q u i n ’est p a s e n c o re b ie n acq u ise. S era d a n s [V]’ (000007.18). 3 A fu rth e r a u th o ria l a p o s til h e re rea d s: ‘C e n ’est p a s ain si q u e F [reu d ], n o u s p re se n te la c h o se ’ (000007.27).

VIII Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman 1 A m a rg in a l n o te in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t h ere rea d s: ‘C ’est ici q u e s u rg it p o u r la P re fo is le th e m e d e la V e rw e rfu n g d e la fem m e. Cf. V ’ (000008.27), th is b ein g a n a n tic ip a tio n o f th e le sso n o f 23 A p ril 1958. 2 T h is sen ten ce is e d ito ria l, seem in g ly p ro m p te d b y L a c a n ’s m a n u s c rip t n o te : ‘ici, J a k o b s o n ’ (000008.30). T h e e x a m p le is b o rro w e d fro m th e fifth se ctio n o f R o m a n J a k o b s o n ’s 1956 essay, ‘T w o A sp e c ts o f L a n g u a g e a n d T w o T y p e s o f A p h a sic D is tu rb a n c e s ’: ‘[ . . . ] in War and Peace th e sy n e cd o c h es “ h a ir o n th e u p p e r lip ” o r “ b a re sh o u ld e rs ” a re u se d [ . . . ] to s ta n d fo r th e fem ale c h a ra c te rs to w h o m th e se fe a tu re s b e lo n g ’ (in Fundamentals of Language, T h e H a g u e : M o u to n , 1956, p . 78).

IX The Function of the Veil 1 H e re , le sexe c o u ld also be u n d e rs to o d as ‘th e se x u al o r g a n ’. 2 A lte rn a tiv e ly , toutes les tendances m a y b e in te n d e d in th e sense o f ‘all th e d riv e te n d e n c ie s’. C f. e n d n o te 2 to C h a p te r I, ab ove.

X Identification with the Phallus 1 H e re a n d th ro u g h o u t, th e te rm s ‘sc o p to p h ilia ’ a n d ‘sc o p to p h ilic ’ h av e b ee n re ta in e d o v e r ‘s c o p o p h ilia ’ a n d ‘s c o p o p h ilic ’. T h o u g h th e fo rm e r h a d ev en a t th e tim e b ee n sin g led o u t as m is tra n s la tio n s o f F r e u d ’s Schaulust (cf. E rn e s t J o n e s ’s 1936 ‘R ev iew o f th e Dictionary of Psychology’, in IJP 17: 247), su c h w ere th e te rm s th e n b e in g u se d b y th e a u th o rs L a c a n is h e re c ritiq u in g a n d he re sp e c ts th e ir ch o ice o f v o c a b u la ry . See a lso J. S tra c h e y ’s la te r re m a rk in h is 1963 ‘O b itu a ry o f J o a n R iv ie re ’, IJP 44: 229. 2 A ssu m in g th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t to b e a n a c c u ra te tra n s c rip tio n , L a c a n h ere m isre m e m b e rs th e lin e fro m Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung re p ro d u c e d in F e n ic h e l’s article: ‘D ie b e id e n w a re n b ei ih m geb lieb en , d e r H a rfn e r, d e n e r b ra u c h te , u n d M ig n o n , d e n e r n ic h t e n tb e h re n k o n n te ’ (B o o k 6, C h a p te r 5). G o e th e is d e sc rib in g h o w b o th M ig n o n a n d th e H a r p e r h av e b e c o m e in d isp en sib le fo r W ilh elm . 3 T h e 1921 e d itio n o f Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse h a s ‘o d e r etw a s s p a te r’, a n d th e 1925 e d itio n h a s ‘v ielleich t so g a r v o r h e r ’. C u rio u sly ,

Translator’s Notes

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th e w o rd in g in S am u el J a n k e le v itc h ’s 1921 tr a n s la tio n ‘P sy ch o lo g ie co llective e t an a ly se d u m o i’ (th e e r ro n e o u s ‘o u u n p e u p lu s t a r d ’) finds a co rre la tiv e fo rm a tio n in J. S tra c h e y ’s 1922 tr a n s la tio n ‘G ro u p P sy ch o lo g y a n d th e A n a ly sis o f th e E g o ’ (w h ich gives, ‘o r a little la te r ’), p e rh a p s in d ic a tin g th a t b o th tra n s la tio n s w ere m a d e fro m a sa m e o r sim ila r fa ir c o p y th a t d iffered fro m th e c o rre c te d p r o o f u se d fo r th e first p rin t. T h e la te r tr a n s la tio n b y J. A . U n d e rw o o d u n d e r th e title ‘M a ss P sy ch o lo g y a n d A n a ly sis o f th e “ I ” ’ is m o re d e p e n d a b le h ere (in Mass Psychology and Other Writings, P en g u in , 2004). 4 A m a rg in a l n o te in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t h ere rea d s: ‘n o n ! e rre u r liee a la c o n fu sio n I /II ? L a I e st o ra le - II est a n a le ( S a fo u a n )’

( 000010. 20).

XI The Phallus and the Unfulfilled Mother R e a d in g renonciation a n d renoncer a fo r denonciation a n d denoncer (re c o rd e d a t 000011.4). C f. ‘S itu a tio n d e la p sy c h a n a ly se e t fo rm a tio n d u p sy c h a n a ly ste e n 1956’, Ecrits, p p . 4 6 0 -1 : ‘O r o n c h e rc h a it v a in e m e n t d a n s to u te l’oeuvre d e F re u d , d e ce te rm e [de fru s tra tio n ] la m o in d re tra c e : c a r o n y tr o u v a it se u le m e n t o c c a sio n a le rec tifier p a r celui de Versagung, leq u el im p liq u e re n o n c ia tio n [ . . . ] . ’ 2 In th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s p a g in a te d ty p e sc rip t, Je vous ai falls a t th e e n d o f p a g e 13, a n d p a g e 14 b eg in s relation primitive de la mere, &c. T h e d isc u s­ sio n o n anorexie mentale in th e Seuil e d itio n is th u s a n in te rp o la tio n b a s e d a p p a re n tly o n th e c o n je c tu re th a t th is la c u n a m u s t c o rre s p o n d to a n e n tire m issin g p ag e . T h e in te rp o la te d m a te ria l fe a tu re s in th e p re se n t tr a n s la tio n as th e te x t le a d in g u p to ‘. . . p rim a ry re la tio n w ith th e m o th e r . . . ’ in th e fo llo w in g p a ra g ra p h . 3 T h is sen ten ce is u n a tte s te d in th e ty p e sc rip t. It m a y f u rth e r b e n o te d th a t L a c a n ’s q u e s tio n to L e v i-S tra u ss b e a rs o n th e la te n t s tru c tu re o f th e c o m m u n itie s, n o t o n th e ir m a n ife st s tru c tu re a s p a tria rc h ie s o r m a tr i­ a rc h ies (cf. th e c o m m e n t o n a n d ro c e n tric p o litic a l p o w e r in m a tria rc h a l societies in th e fo llo w in g p a ra g ra p h ). C o m p a re also L e v i-S tra u ss’s c o m m e n t o n a d o p tin g th e ‘o p p o site c o n v e n tio n ’ a n d h is a llu sio n to ‘a few societies o f a h ig h ly d ev e lo p e d m a trilin e a l ty p e ’ a t th e clo se o f his 1956 a rticle ‘T h e F a m ily ’ (o rig in a lly w ritte n in E n g lish in H . L. S h a p iro (ed .) Man, Culture, and Society, O x fo rd U n iv e rsity P ress; la te r rev ised in The View From Afar, B asic B o o k s, 1985). O f fu rth e r in te re s t is th e m a n u s c rip t a p o s til a t 000011.26: [Cf. C resw ell], a lm o st c e rta in ly a re fe r­ ence to R o b e rt C ressw ell’s re se a rc h o n e n d o g a m y a n d k in sh ip p u b lis h e d in E n g lish a n d F re n c h in th e 1970s. 4 L a c a n ’s te x tu a l so u rc e is th e Selected Papers of Karl Abraham p u b lish e d in E n g lish tr a n s la tio n b y D o u g la s B ry a n a n d A lix S tra c h e y in 1927 ( H o g a rth P ress). 1

438

Translator’s Notes XII On the Oedipus Complex

1 T h is m e n tio n o f a p re c e d in g le sso n d e d ic a te d to th e th e m e o f c a s tra tio n in v ites th e in feren c e o f a n e r ro r in th e m a n u s c rip t d a te s a p p e n d e d to th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t, h a v in g led in tu r n to a n in v e rsio n o f th e sc rip ts fo r sessio n s 12 a n d 13. T h is in feren c e is s u p p o rte d te n ta tiv e ly by th e en su in g re m in d e rs o f h a v in g d e a lt ju s t p re v io u sly w ith th e re tr o a c ­ tive c o n s titu tio n o f sta g es a n d th e in tro d u c tio n o f th e O e d ip u s co m p lex (w h ich seem to c o rre s p o n d to th e d isc u ssio n o f reg ressio n a n d th e p reo e d ip a l sta g e o n p a g e s 2 1 5 -2 0 ), a n d m o re p ersu a siv e ly b y th e re m in d e r o f h a v in g in th e p re v io u s le sso n e x a m in e d little H a n s ’s an x ie ty a n d h av in g d e a lt w ith ‘m a te ria l fro m th e first few p ag e s o f th e te x t’ (th e la tte r su rely c o rre s p o n d in g to th e c o m m e n ta ry o n p ag e s 2 1 4 -1 5 , th e n 2 1 7 -2 0 ). 2 F r e u d ’s c o m m e n t th a t ‘th e g irl’s O e d ip u s co m p lex is m u c h sim p le r th a n th a t o f th e sm all b e a re r o f th e p e n is’ w as in fa c t fro m th e 1924 a rtic le ‘T h e D is s o lu tio n o f th e O ed ip u s C o m p le x ’, a n d w as n o t re p e a te d th e re a fte r. 3 T h is a llu sio n to S ach s’s 1927 p a p e r, d eliv ered a t th e In n s b ru c k co n g re ss a n d p u b lis h e d in 1929 a s ‘O n e o f th e M o tiv e F a c to rs in th e F o rm a tio n o f th e S u p e r-E g o in W o m e n ’, is u n a tte s te d in th e ty p e sc rip t. 4 In 1935 a first e d itio n o f F r e u d ’s case stu d ie s w as p u b lis h e d in F re n c h tr a n s la tio n u n d e r th e title Cinq psychanalyses. A lo n g sid e th e case re p o rts o n D o ra , th e R a t M a n a n d th e W o lf M a n , it in c lu d e s th e n o te s o n S ch reb e r a n d th e o b s e rv a tio n o n little H a n s, b u t n o t th e c a se o f th e Y o u n g H o m o se x u a l W o m a n . T h e co lle c tio n h a s re g u la rly b ee n re p rin te d a n d re-ed ited , su ch th a t its title h a s b e c o m e a m a jo r referen c e in F re n c h p sy ­ ch o a n aly sis. In his S e m in a r, L a c a n m e n tio n s th e b o o k b y n a m e , w h ic h in th e p re s e n t tr a n s la tio n is re n d e re d b y a p a ra p h ra s e . F u rth e rm o re , in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t, 000012.13 is h e a d e d b y th e m a n u s c rip t n o te : T m p [o rta n t] d e so u lig n e r q u ’ici, L. tie n t e n c o re les Sem . -1 e t - 2 p o u r p a rtie d e so n e n se ig n e m e n t.’ T h e se m in a r h e ld in L a c a n ’s ro o m s in 1951-1952 b o re o n th e cases o f D o r a a n d th e R a t M a n ; th e se m in a r o f 1952-1953 b o re , a s L a c a n m e n tio n s ab o v e , in p a r t o n th e W o lf M a n case. T h ese tw o se m in a rs a re n o t in c lu d e d in th e c a n o n ic a l Books o f th e S em in a r, w h ic h b eg in w ith th e 1 953-1954 S e m in a r a t S a in te -A n n e .

XIII On the Castration Complex

Au lieu de noyer le poisson, essayons au contraire de bien I’isoler. La privation, c’est la priva­ tion du poisson. T h e F re n c h id io m noyer le poisson, literally ‘to d ro w n th e

1 T h is is a fa r fro m sa tisfa c to ry a tte m p t to re n d e r:

fish’, m e a n s ‘to m u d d y th e w a te rs’ o r ‘to c lo u d th e issu e’.

XIV The Signifier in the Real 1 T h e re is a n o m issio n h ere o f th e fu rth e r po ssib ility o f ‘3 to 3 ’, w h ic h in th e In tro d u c tio n to ‘L e sem in a ire su r “ L a L e ttre v o le e” ’ is also listed u n d e r a (La Psychanalyse 2:5; c o m p a re also p ag e 48 o f th e rev ised a rtic le in th e 1966 Ecrits, w h ere th e In tro d u c tio n is m o v e d to th e e n d o f th e text).

Translator’s Notes

439

2 T h is referen ce to a p a in tin g b y T itia n is u n c h a ra c te ristic a lly v a g u e a n d is u n a tte s te d in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t, th u s d o u b tle ss d eriv in g fro m th e L em o in e n o te b o o k s . In th e ‘N o te ’ o n p . 427, V e ro n e se ’s Venus and Mars United by Love is m o o te d as a n a lte rn a tiv e . G iv e n th a t th e h o rse o n th is c a n v a s, s ta n d in g b e h in d th e co u p le , n o t lo o m in g ab o v e , b ea rs n e ith e r o n its m o u th n o r elsew h ere th e b la c k n e ss in q u e s tio n , V e ro n e se ’s Venus and Mars with Cupid and a Horse in th e T u rin S a b a u d a is p e rh a p s a m o re likely referen t.

XV What Myth is For 1 In th is c o n te x t, tendanciel v ery p ro b a b ly c a rrie s th e sense o f ‘d riv e te n ­ d e n c y ’. See a g a in e n d n o te 2 to C h a p te r 1, ab o v e . 2 T h e te rm ‘m y th e m e ’ h a s h e re b ee n in se rte d in d efe re n ce to L a c a n ’s r e tr o ­ sp ectiv e m a n u s c rip t n o te (a t 000015.14). T h e o rig in a l E n g lish -la n g u a g e v e rsio n o f L e v i-S tra u ss’s 1955 a rtic le re fe re n c e d in th e fo llo w in g lesson, ‘T h e S tru c tu ra l S tu d y o f M y th ’ (The Journal of American Folklore, 68(270): 4 2 8 -4 4 ), d id n o t c a rry th e te rm . T h e first a tte s te d u se o f mytheme is in th e F re n c h e d itio n o f th e te x t, w h ich w as n o t p u b lis h e d u n til J a n u a r y 1958 (c h a p te r 9 o f L’anthropologie structural, P aris: P lo n ). T h e se co n d E n g lish -la n g u a g e v e rsio n , in th e 1963 Structural Anthropology (N ew Y o rk : B asic B o o k s, p p . 2 0 6 -3 1 ), a c c o rd in g ly c a rrie s th e term . T h e m e n tio n o f P o ly n ice s in th e fo llo w in g p a r a g ra p h is also a n e d ito ria l in te rp o la tio n , ex p licitly m a tc h in g L a c a n ’s d e v e lo p m e n t h e re to its so u rce in th e sam e article. 3 O n th is o cc asio n F re u d uses th e te rm Exkretionskomplex, ‘ex c re to ry c o m p le x ’. 4 I t is n o t clear w h a t L a c a n h a s in m in d h ere . Wiwimacher b elo n g s to H a n s ’s id io lect, a n d w hile th e ch ild d o e s so m e tim es u se Wiwi in iso la tio n to d e n o te ‘w ee’, n o t o n ce d o e s h e in c o rp o ra te it in to o th e r lin g u istic c o n s tru c tio n s . T h e m o re c o m m o n ly h e a rd in fa n tile te rm in G e rm a n is Pipi machen. F u rth e rm o re , th e ex a m p le o f Uhrmacher (‘w a tc h m a k e r’) is e d ito ria lly in te rp o la te d . 5 In a p a re n th e sis h e re in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t (000015.32), th e re is a rec u rre n c e o f th e lines fro m P re v e rt’s L’opera des girafes p re v i­ o u sly q u o te d a t th e close o f th e e lev e n th lesson: Les grandes girafes sont muettes / Les petites girafes sont rares. 6 H a n s qualifies th e fa n ta sy o f th e p lu m b e r stic k in g a b o re r in to his sto m a c h as so m e th in g he im a g in e d o r rec alle d ( ‘ich h a b m ir w a s g e d a c h t’), n o t as a d rea m .

XVI How Myth is Analysed 1 T h is p h ra s e a llu d e s to a p ro v e rb ia l lo c u tio n , ‘A h! L e b o n b illet q u ’a L a C h a tre !’ d e n o tin g a n o a th o r p le d g e o n w h ic h n o re lian ce c a n b e p la ce d . A c c o rd in g to th e (a lm o st c e rta in ly fictitio u s) a c c o u n t p e n n e d u n d e r th e p se u d o n y m ‘M o n s ie u r B *’ (id en tified v a rio u sly as A n to in e B ret, L o u is D a m o u rs a n d C la u d e -P ro s p e r J o ly o t d e C re b illo n ), w h e n th e M a rq u is

440

Translator’s Notes

o f L a C h a tre w as o rd e re d to r e tu rn to h is reg im en t, h e m a d e h is lo v er, N in o n d e L en c lo s, sign a ‘b o n d o f c o n s ta n c y ’ p le d g in g h e r fid elity to h im . T w o d a y s la te r, sh e to o k a n o th e r lo v e r a n d , re m e m b e rin g th e n o te in th e th ro e s o f h e r se d u c tio n , u tte re d th e n o w in fa m o u s line ( Memoires sur la vie de Mademoiselle de Lenclos, par Mr. B****, C o rre c te d E d itio n , P a r t I, A m ste rd a m : F ra n c o is Jo ly , 1758, p p . 6 7 -9 ). V o lta ire , a fo rm e r a c q u a in ta n c e o f N in o n , gives a s h o rte r a c c o u n t in h is re m a rk s o n th e Souvenirs de Madame de Caylus (‘L e b e a u b illet q u ’a L a C h a tre !’) a n d re w o rk e d th e p h ra s e in to h is 1739 co m e d y La Prude: ‘L e b o n B illet q u ’a la l’am i B la n fo rd !’ (A c t I, Scene 3). L a c a n will u se th e p h ra s e a g a in th e fo llo w in g y e a r in Les Formations de I’inconscient. 2 T h e referen ce to A n g e lu s S ilesius in th e Seuil e d itio n su p p lie s a n ellipsis in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t (a t 000016.29). W h ile th e re is in d e e d in th e tra n s c rip t o f th e 16 F e b ru a ry 1955 a c o m m e n t o n th e w o rd p la y in th e Cherubinischer Wandersmann o n Ort and Wort, it is a little to o b rie f to w a r ra n t b ein g q u alified a s a ‘d e v e lo p m e n t’. T h e c o u p le t in q u e s tio n b e a rs th e title ‘D e r O rt ist d a s W o r t’ (22.205): D e r O rt u n d ’s W o r t ist E in s, u n d w a re n ic h t d e r O rt (B ei ew ’g er E w igkeit!) es w are n ic h t d a s W o rt. 3 W h ile H a n s is clea rly re fe rrin g to a p lu m b e r’s ‘g rip s’ o r ‘w re n c h ’, L a c a n ’s m o re ex p a n siv e d isc u ssio n o n th e sig n ific atio n a n d e ty m o lo g y o f th e F re n c h pince a n d th e G e rm a n Zange in lesso n X IX h a v e led to ‘p in c e rs’ b ein g fa v o u re d fo r th e p re se n t tra n s la tio n , a s u se d p re v io u sly b y J. S tra ch e y in h is tra n s la tio n o f th e case.

XVII The Signifier and Der Witz 1 T h e b are ly d isg u ised F re n c h w o rd is con. T h e m a id e n issue o f La Psychanalyse, o f w h ich L a c a n h im s e lf w as e d ito r-in -ch ie f, b o re o n its c o v e r a fig u re fro m a F re n c h tr a n s la tio n o f H o r a p o llo ’s Hieroglyphica illu stra tin g th e (d o u b tfu lly so u rc e d ) le m m a to b e m e n tio n e d in th e fin al lesso n (p. 416): ‘T h e im a g e o f a n e a r signifies w o rk to c o m e ’ (II, 23).

2

Translator’s Notes

441

XVIII Circuits 1 T h e Seuil e d itio n re p ro d u c e s th e h ia tu s in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t (000018.02). P e rh a p s th e m issin g c o n te n t is so m e th in g a lo n g th e lines o f ‘in a g o o d m o o d ’, as m a y b e te n ta tiv e ly re c o n stru c te d o n th e b asis o f F r e u d ’s le tte r o f 6 A u g u s t 1899 to W ilh elm F liess: ‘o n th e n ex t ra in y d a y I sh all tr a m p o n fo o t to m y b elo v ed S alz b erg , w h e re I a c tu a lly u n e a rth e d a few E g y p tia n a n tiq u itie s la s t tim e. T h ese th in g s p u t m e in a g o o d m o o d a n d sp e ak o f d is ta n t tim es a n d c o u n trie s ’ {The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, tra n s la te d b y J. M . M a sso n , C a m b rid g e , M A : H a r v a r d U n iv e rsity P re ss, 1985, p . 366). 2 L a in z is a little u n d e r seven m iles fro m W ien M itte (fo rm e rly th e H a u p tz o lla m t s ta tio n ), w hile V a u c re sso n is so m e te n m iles fro m c e n tra l P aris. 3 In itia lly u se d in d ia le c ts in W e ste rn F ra n c e b e fo re b e c o m in g m o re w id e­ s p re a d in th e ea rly tw e n tie th c e n tu ry , th e in fo rm a l te rm comprenoire a n d its sister te rm comprenette d e n o te th e fa c u lty o f u n d e rs ta n d in g o r m e n ta l g rasp .

XIX Permutations 1 T h e p h ra s e Bon Dieu, qu’il le luifoute is u n a tte s te d in th e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e scrip t. 2 A s H a n s ’s fa th e r re p o rts it in th e o b se rv a tio n , th e y w e n t d ire c tly to th e g r a n d m o th e r ’s h o u s e o n 29 M a rc h . T h e lo n g e r S u n d a y o u tin g , ta k in g in S c h o n b ru n n o n th e w ay to th e L a in z , o c c u rre d th e w eek b e fo re , o n S u n d a y th e 22n d . 3 D o ro th y B ussy tra n s la te s th is line fro m Si le grain ne meurt. . . as ‘Y o u ow e it to y o u rself; y o u ow e it to y o u r s o n ’ {If it Die . . ., L o n d o n : S eek er & W a rb u rg , 1950, p . 114).

XX Transformations 1 T h is ‘fa b le ’ is e x tra c te d fro m th e C o d e x A tla n tic u s, f. 393™ (fo rm e rly 145™). H e re o n 22 M a y , a n d c o n te m p o ra n e o u s ly in th e te x t ‘L ’in sta n c e d e la le ttre d a n s l ’in c o n sc ie n t o u la r a is o n d e p u is F r e u d ’ d a te d 1 4 -2 6 M a y 1957, L a c a n re p ro d u c e s th e L o u ise S ervicen tr a n s la tio n fro m Carnets de Leonard de Vinci, T o m e II, P a ris: G a llim a rd , p . 400. T h e E n g lish -la n g u ag e tr a n s la tio n h e re is b y R . C . B ell fro m The Notebooks of

Leonardo Da Vinci; compiled and editedfrom the original manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, V ol. II, O x fo rd U n iv e rsity P re ss, e n la rg e d a n d rev ised e d itio n , 1939, p. 354. T h e o rig in a l fo lio read s: D e ’fan ciu lli ch e s ta n n o le g ati nelle fascie. O c itta m a rin e , io v e d o in u o i i u o s tri c itta d in i co si fem in e co m e m a sch i s tre tta m e n te d a i f o rti leg am i co lie b ra c c ia e g a n b e esser leg ati d a g e n te che n o n Ite n d e ra n n o i u o s tri lig u ag g i, e sol u i p o tre te sfo g are li v o s tri d o lo ri e p e r d u ta lib e rta m e d ia n te i la g rim o si p ia ti

442

Translator’s Notes e li so sp iri e la m e n ta tio n e in fra u o i m ed esim i, ch e c h i vi lega, n o n v ’in te n d e ra , n e v o i lo ro in te n d e re te .

Katastrophenreaktion in 1934 in Der Aufbau des Organismus: Einfuhrung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berticksichtigung der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen, T h e H ag u e :

2 K u r t G o ld s te in c o in e d th e te rm

N ijoff, w h ich w as tra n s la te d (a n o n y m o u sly ) a s ‘c a ta s tro p h ic re a c tio n ’ in

The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derivedfrom Pathological Data in Man, N e w Y o rk : A m e ric a n B o o k C o m p a n y , 1939. T h e F re n c h tr a n s la tio n w as p u b lish e d in 1951. L a c a n w ill u se th e te rm a g a in in S e m in a r V II a n d , m o re ex tensively, in S e m in a r X . 3 F ro m A c t 1, S cene 9. L o u is S im p so n ’s 1961 tr a n s la tio n (The Breasts of Tiresias in M . B. G a le a n d J. F . D e e n e y (eds), The Routledge

Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance (L o n d o n : R o u tle d g e , 2010), p . 214, gives: T h e y are ju s t th e sa m e a s we Y e t th e y ’re n o t m e n a s y o u c a n see M e an w h ile , M a y a S la te r ( The Mammaries of Tiresias in Three Surrealist Plays (O x fo rd U n iv e rsity P ress, 1997), p . 187) gives:

Pre­

T h o u g h p h y sic ally sh e ’s ju s t th e sam e T o call h e r m a n ’s n o t p la y in g th e g am e

XXI The Mother’s Drawers and the Father’s Shortcoming 1 T h e tw o v a ria n ts: en-soi, th a t w h ich ex ists in itself, a n d pour-soi, th a t w h ich exists fo r itself, w ere p o p u la ris e d in S a rtre ’s L’etre et le neant. 2 T h e line:

D’n’jx ps

“пз tax m 1?

is fro m P salm s (13:1, a n d a g a in 52:1) a n d n o t th e B o o k o f E cclesiastes. L e m a istre d e S acy ’s Bible de Port-Royal, like th e A u th o ris e d V ersio n (w h e re th ese p sa lm s a re n u m b e re d 14 a n d 53), tra n s la te s th e p re se n t te n se t a x as a p a s t te n se v erb . 3 W h ile th e v e rb fo rm suppleer (‘to m a k e u p f o r ’ o r ‘to s ta n d in f o r ’) h a s a lre a d y o c c u rre d ex ten siv ely in th e p re se n t S em in a r, th is is th e first re c o rd e d u se in L a c a n ’s te a c h in g o f th e n o u n a l suppleance. T h e p re se n t tra n s la tio n fo llo w s R . G rig g in u sin g ‘s u p p le tio n ’ (The Seminar Book V, Formations of the Unconscious (C a m b rid g e : P o lity , 2017), p p . 6 ,1 7 3 , a n d 459, w ith a w o rd o f e x p la n a tio n fro m G rig g o n p . 493). 4 F re u d d ra w s o n K a rl A b ra h a m ’s 1909 b o o k Traum und Mythus, Eine Studie zur Volkerpsychologie, L eipzig: F . D e u tic k e , w h ic h re p ro d u c e s th e h y p o th e sis th a t Pramantha m e a n s ‘fo rth - r u b b e r ’, th e b rin g in g fo rth (Hervorreibende) b y ru b b in g (Reiben). A b ra h a m is a p p a re n tly d ra w in g in tu r n o n A d a lb e rt K u h n ’s c o n je c tu re o f a n o rig in a ry sig n ific atio n o f ‘F ire -d rille r’ (in ‘D ie S p ra c h v e rg le ic h u n g u n d d ie U rg e sc h ic h te d e r ind-

Translator’s Notes

443

o g e rm a n isc h e n V o lk e r’ in Zeitschrift fiir Vergleichende Sprachforschung 4 (1855): 124; a n d Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Gottertranks, B erlin: F e rd , D iim m le r, 1859, p p . 1 2 -18). I t w as su b se q u e n tly n o te d , h o w ev e r, th a t K u h n w as falsely c o n fla tin g month (‘tw irl’ o r ‘d rill’) a n d math (‘seize’), th e la tte r b e in g fre q u e n tly c o m p o u n d e d w ith pro to m e a n ‘fo rc ib ly sn a tc h to o n e s e lf. C f. J o h a n n a N a r te n , ‘D a s v ed isch e V e rb u m Math’ in Indo-Iranian Journal 4(2/3) (1960): 121-35; se c o n d e d by M a rc e llo D u ra n te in Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca. Parte seconda: risultanze della comparazione indoeuropea, R o m e : D e ll’A te n e o , 1976, p. 57, a n d C a lv e rt W a tk in s in How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, O x fo rd U n iv e rsity P ress: 1995, p . 256n.

XXII An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic 1 T h e a n n o ta te d ty p e sc rip t h ere b e a rs a n a s te risk lin k in g to a n a p o s til in L a c a n ’s h a n d : T o u v ra g e a p o c ry p h e T h e o lo g ia A risto te lis n ’est en fa it q u e P ro c lu s (e t/o u P lo tin ?) si je m e so u v ie n s bien. C f. G ils o n ’. T h e c o n c lu d in g n o te is su rely a referen c e to E tie n n e G ils o n ’s La philosophic au Moyen Age, Tome I: De Scot Erigene a S. Bonaventure, P aris: P a y o t, 1922, p. 98, ‘D e u x tra ite s e ssen tiellem e n t n e o p la to n ic ie n s, la Theologie d’Aristote et le Liber de Causis, p a s s e re n t p o u r des p ro d u c tio n s a u th e n tiq u e s d u m a itre e t in flu e n c e n t p ro fo n d e m e n t I n t e r p r e t a t i o n q u e T on d o n n e d e sa pen see. L e c o n te n u d u p re m ie r e st e m p ru n te a u x E n n e a d e s d e P lo tin (livres IV -V I), e t celu i d u se co n d a YElementatio theologica de P ro c lu s .’ 2 F r o m A c t 1, Scene 7. S im p so n (o p . cit. p . 213) gives: I a m a d e c e n t w o m a n -m iste r M y w ife is a m a n -la d y S h e’s ta k e n th e p ia n o th e v io lin th e b u tte r d ish S h e’s a so ld ier m in iste r m o v e r o f sh it A n d S la te r (o p . cit., p. 182) gives: I ’m a re sp e c ta b le w ife -m o n sie u r M y w ife’s a m a n -m a d a m e S h e’s g o n e o ff w ith th e p ia n o th e v io lin th e b u tte r-d is h S h e’s a so ld ier a m in iste r a p h y -sh it-ia n

The Penguin Book of French Verse, With Plain Prose Translation of Each Poem, Vol. 3,

3 A n th o n y H a tle y , in h is tr a n s la tio n ‘B o o z S lee p in g ’ (in

1957, p. 69), gives, ‘H is sh e av e s o f c o rn w ere n o t m e a n o r h a te fu l’. E. H . a n d A . M . B la c k m o re in th e ir ‘B o a z A sle e p ’ in Selected Poems of Victor Hugo; A Bilingual Edition (C h ic a g o : U n iv e rsity o f C h ic a g o P ress, 2001), p. 337, lo se th e m e ta p h o r so m e w h a t b y giving, ‘H e h a rv e ste d w ith n e ith e r g re e d n o r sp ite ’; so to o d o e s B ro o k s H a x to n , in h is tr a n s ­ la tio n ‘B o a z A sle e p ’ (in The American Scholar 70(4):66, re p rin te d in Victor Hugo; Selected Poems, P en g u in , 2002), giving, ‘H e b o u n d sh eav es w ith o u t th e s tra in o f h a te / o r e n v y ’. S tev en M o n te , in h is tra n s la tio n

444

Translator’s Notes

‘B o a z A sle ep ’ (Victor Hugo, Selected Poetry (R o u tle d g e , 2002), p . 219), gives, ‘H is sheav es w ere n e ith e r m iserly n o r filled w ith b itte rn e s s ’. J o h n R ic h m o n d , in h is tra n s la tio n ‘B o a z A sle e p ’ in My Proper Life - Poems 1975-2017 (C o tte slo e , W A : C h a lk fa c e P re ss, 2017), gives, ‘H is sh eav es c o n ta in e d n o h a te n o r m e a n n e ss in th e ir y ie ld .’ 4 H a tle y (ib id ., p . 71) gives, ‘B o o z sa w a n o a k , w h ich , issu in g fro m his sto m a c h , w en t u p to th e b lu e sky; a p e o p le a sc e n d e d it lik e a lo n g ch a in ; a k in g w as sin g in g a t th e b o tto m , a g o d d y in g a t th e to p .’ T h e B la c k m o re s (ib id ., p. 339) h av e , ‘B o a z saw a n o a k tre e g ro w / O u t o f h is lo in s, a n d re a c h u p to th e sky, / W h e re a lo n g c h a in o f p e o p le clim b ed ; b e lo w / A k in g sang, a n d a g o d w as sla in o n h ig h .’ H a x to n (ib id ., p . 67) gives, ‘he saw a live o a k g ro w o u t o f h is belly / f a r u p in to th e blue; a n d m a n y p eo p le / clim b e d it in a lo n g c h a in , w h ile a k in g s a t / sin g in g a t th e ro o t, a n d a g o d d ie d a t th e c ro w n .’ M o n te (ib id ., p . 221) gives, ‘B o a z sa w a n o a k tree g ro w o u t o f / T h e m id d le o f his sto m a c h a n d a sc e n d in to th e blue. / A n a tio n clim b e d u p w a rd like th e lin k s o f a c h a in : / A k in g su n g a t th e b o tto m a n d a G o d d ie d a b o v e .’ R ic h m o n d (ib id .) gives, ‘o u t o f his belly, like a sp ro u tin g ro d , / A n o a k tre e ro se in to th e sky. A c h o se n race, / L in k s in a lo n g c h a in , scaled its h eig h t; d o w n a t its b a se / A k in g sang; a t its to p , m e n p u t to d e a th th e ir g o d .’ 5 H a tle y (ib id ., p . 72) gives, ‘W h ile h e slep t, R u th , a M o a b ite , h a d la in d o w n a t th e feet o f B o o z, w ith n a k e d b re a st, h o p in g w e k n o w n o t w h a t u n k n o w n g leam , w h e n th e su d d e n lig h t o f a w a k e n in g s h o n e .’ T h e B lac k m o re s (ib id ., p . 341) give, ‘W h ile h e w as sleeping, R u th , a M o a b ite , / C a m e to h is feet a n d , w ith h e r b re a s t b a re d , la y / H o p in g fo r so m e u n k n o w n u n c e rta in r a y / W h e n , su d d e n ly , th e y w o u ld w a k e n in to lig h t’. H a x to n (ibid. p . 68) h a s ‘R u th , a M o a b ite , h a d co m e w h ile B o a z slept, / a n d n o w lay a t h is feet, w h o k n o w s w h a t lig h t / fro m w h a t d o o r in th e h ea v en s fin d in g h e r b re a s t / n a k e d , te n d e r to its s tirrin g as his d re a m s .’ M o n te (ib id ., p . 221) gives, ‘W h ile h e w as sleep in g th e re , R u th , a M o a b ite , / L a y d o w n w ith h e r b re a s ts b a re d a t B o a z ’s feet, / H o p in g fo r so m e s o rt o f u n fa m ilia r ra y / In w h ic h u n d e rs ta n d in g w o u ld flare u p like a lig h t.’ R ic h m o n d (ib id .) gives, ‘In h is o b liv io n , ca m e R u th , a M o a b ite , / A n d lay d o w n a t th e o ld m a n ’s feet. H e r b re a s ts w ere b a re . / S h e h o p e d w e k n o w n o t w h a t c h a n c e ra y m ig h t to u c h h e r th e re / W h e n h e sh o u ld s ta rt aw ak e, h is eyes re n e w e d w ith lig h t.’ 6 H a tle y (ib id ., p . 73) gives, ‘w h a t G o d , w h a t h a rv e ste r o f th e e te rn a l su m m er, h a d n eg lig en tly th ro w n d o w n th is g o ld e n sickle in th e field o f s ta rs .’ H a x to n h a s (ibid. p . 68) ‘w h a t g o d / o f th e e te rn a l su m m e r p a ssin g d ro p p e d / h is g o ld e n sc y th e th e re in th a t field o f s ta rs .’ T h e B la c k m o re s (ib id ., p. 343) give, ‘w h a t s tra y g o d , a s he c ro p p e d / T h e tim eless su m m er, h a d so idly d ro p p e d / T h a t g o ld e n sickle in th e s ta rry field.’ M o n te (ib id ., p. 223) gives, ‘w h a t re a p e r o f e te rn ity - w h a t k in d / O f G o d - h a d , leav in g us, carelessly to ss e d b e h in d / T h is g o ld e n sickle in th e d a r k field o f th e s ta rs .’ R ic h m o n d (ib id .) gives, ‘o n c e e te rn a l su m m e r’s c ro p w as m o w n , / W h a t g o d , w h a t h a rv e ste r so carelessly h a d th ro w n / H is g o ld e n sickle o n t h a t field o f sta rs, a n d g o n e?’

Translator’s Notes

445

XXIII ‘M e donnera sans femme une progeniture’ 1 T h e Seuil e d itio n m o d ifies th e p a ssa g e in th e ty p e sc rip t re a d in g , ‘n o u s n o u s p e rm e tto n s d e p a rle r d e la fo n c tio n h y p n o p o m p iq u e et h y p n a g o g iq u e ’ (000023.07), to ‘n o u s n o u s p e rm e tto n s d e p a r le r de fo n c tio n m e ta p h o riq u e e t d e fo n c tio n m e to n y m iq u e ’ (p. 392). In a 1911 fo o tn o te to th e Traumdeutmg, a n d in so m e c o n trib u tio n s th e re a fte r, F re u d m e n tio n s H e r b e r t S ilb e re r’s 1909 stu d y d e v o te d in p a r t to h y p ­ n ag o g ic p h e n o m e n a , ‘B e rich t fib er ein e M e th o d e gew isse sy m b o lisch e H a llu z in a tio n s -E rs c h e in u n g e n h e rv o rz u ru fe n u n d z u b e o d a c h te n ’ in

Jahrbuch fiir psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen,

2

3

4 5

6

1(2): 5 1 3 -2 5 (tra n s la te d in 1951 a s ‘R e p o r t o n a m e th o d o f elicitin g a n d o b se rv in g c e rta in sy m b o lic h a llu c in a tio n -p h e n o m e n a ’ in R a p a p o r t, D . (ed .) Organization and Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources, N ew Y o rk : C o lu m b ia U n iv e rsity P re ss, 1951 p p . 195-207). L a c a n w ill cite th is referen ce tw o y e a rs a fte r th e p re se n t S e m in a r in ‘S u r la th e o rie d u sy m b o lism e d ’E rn e s t J o n e s ’, a n d th e n in 1966 in ‘D ’u n sy lla b a ire a p re s c o u p ’. A n a u th o ria l a n n o ta tio n in se rts [L evi-S trauss?] to su p p ly th e ste­ n o g r a p h e r ’s ellipsis (000022.23), f o o tn o te d in tu r n to e x p a n d o n th e u n c e rta in ty d e n o te d b y th e q u e s tio n m a rk : ‘T o te m ism e d ’a u jo u rd ’h u i, o u K ro e b e r ? - Je d o u te ’. L e v i-S tra u ss’s b o o k w as n o t p u b lis h e d u n til 1962 (P aris: P U F ), a n d in its I n tro d u c tio n th e a u th o r claim s it w as b e g u n ju s t tw o y ea rs p re v io u sly , th u s th re e y e a rs a fte r th e p re s e n t lesso n . A lfre d L . K ro e b e r ’s te x t, ‘T o te m a n d T a b o o : A n E th n o lo g ic P sy c h o a n a ly sis’ w as p u b lis h e d in 1920 (in American Anthropologist 22(1): 4 8 -5 5 ), a n d its sequel, ‘T o te m a n d T a b o o in R e tro s p e c t’, in 1939 (American Journal of Sociology 45: 4 4 6 -5 1 ; b o th w ere re p rin te d in h is c o lle c te d p a p e rs, The Nature of Culture, C h ica g o : U n iv e rsity o f C h ic a g o P re ss, 1952, p p . 3 0 1 -5 , p p . 3 0 6 -9 ). L a c a n w ill m e n tio n K ro e b e r ’s w o rk in his ‘P ro p o s itio n d u 9 o c to b re 1967 su r le p sy c h a n a ly ste d e l’E c o le ’ a n d a g a in in S e m in a rs X V I a n d X V II. T h e Seuil e d itio n , h e re re sp e c te d , c irc u m v e n ts th e d o u b t b y in te rp o la tin g T a n th ro p o lo g ie s tru c tu ra le ’ (p. 399). T h e n o n c e w o rd historiole is a F re n c h c a iq u e fo r th e L a tin historiola, esp ecially as u se d b y S p in o z a in h is ex p re ssio n ‘h is to rio la m e n tis’ in th e 10 Ju n e 1666 le tte r to J o h a n n e s B o u w m e e ste r (E p . X X X V II). F u r th e r to its p rim a ry sig n ific atio n o f ‘tr a n s p o r t’ o r ‘traffic’, Verkehr c a n m e a n ‘c o n ta c t’ o r ‘d e a lin g s’ a n d also ‘se x u al in te rc o u rs e ’ o r ‘c o itu s ’. L a c a n ’s re tro sp e c tiv e m a n u s c rip t a p o s til a t 000023.35, ‘L a d o n n a e m o b ile ’, suggests th a t mobile m ig h t a lso be u n d e rs to o d w ith its Ita lia n o v e rto n e s o f ‘fick le’ o r ‘flig h ty ’. A g a in fro m A c t 1, S cene 9. S im p so n (o p . cit. p . 214) gives: R e tu r n th is n ig h t to see h o w n a tu re c a n P ro v id e m e w ith p ro g e n y w ith o u t a w o m a n . A n d S late r (o p . c it., p . 187) gives: I w ill h av e o ffsp rin g th o u g h I h av e n o w ife T o see h o w it is d o n e c o m e b a c k to m e to n ig h t.

446

Translator’s Notes XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

commeje vous Vai dit, non pas fille d’une mere, mais fille de deux meres, b u t th e re is little in th e

1 T h e s te n o g ra p h e r’s ty p e sc rip t (000024.13) h a s . . .

m a te ria l th u s fa r d ev e lo p e d to a n tic ip a te su c h a n a ttr ib u tio n o f d a u g h ­ te rly p o sitio n in g to little H a n s , n o r is th e p o in t h ere am p lified . W h ile th e te x t sh o u ld m o s t likely re a d e ith e r fils de deux meres, o r phi de deux meres, th e p h ra s e is m e re ly b ra c k e te d o u t in th e a u th o ria lly a n n o ta te d ty p e scrip t, n o t em en d e d . 2 J. S tra c h e y ’s ‘e d ito r ’s n o te ’ to A la n T y s o n ’s tra n s la tio n fo r th e Standard Edition claim s th e first sc h o la r to n o tic e th e e r ro r w as I rm a A . R ic h te r, in a fo o tn o te to h e r Selections fro m h e r fa th e r’s e d itio n s o f L e o n a rd o ’s N o te b o o k s (G a la x y , 1952, p . 286). A n e a rlie r ex a m p le h o w e v e r is th e 1923 artic le cited b y S c h a p iro : E ric M a c la g e n , ‘L e o n a rd o in th e C o n s u ltin g R o o m ’, Burlington Magazine, 42: 5 4 -5 7 ; see a lso th e 1948 article by R a y m o n d S tites, ‘A C ritic ism o f F r e u d ’s L e o n a rd o ’, College Art Journal 7 (4 ):2 5 7 -6 7 . T h e te x t fro m th e C o d e x A tla n tic u s f. 186v_i (fo rm e rly 66v~ft) read s: q u e s to scriu ersi d istin ta m e te d el n ib b io p a r ch e sia m o i d e stin o , p erc h e n e lla p rim a ric o rd a tio n e d ella m ia in fa n tia e ’ m i p a r e a che, essen d o lo in cu lla, ch e v n n ib b io venisse a m e e m i a p risse la b o c c a co lla s u a c o d a , e m o lte v o lte m i p e rc u o tesse co ta l c o d a d e n tro alle la b ra . 3 L a c a n m a y b e d ra w in g , h ere a n d in th e fo llo w in g p a r a g ra p h , o n L u d w ig K e im e r’s critica l n o te o f 1927 in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 43(3): 2 2 6 -3 1 . 4 F ro m th e I n s titu t d e F ra n c e N o te b o o k (M S 2180), f. I .1 1 8 r_a: ‘L a n a tu ra e p ie n a d ’in fin ite ra g io n i ch e n o f u ro m a i in isp e rie tia ’. T h e p re se n t tr a n s la tio n a g a in re p ro d u c e s R . C. B ell’s re n d e rin g . 5 T h e re is a b le n d in g h ere o f V a s a ri’s a c c o u n t (in Le Vite) o f L e o n a rd o ’s c o m m issio n fo r th e A n n u n z ia ta , w ith N o v e lla ra ’s a c c o u n t in h is lette r. F o r a m o re in v o lv e d e n q u iry , see V irg in ia B u d n y ’s 1983 a rticle , ‘T h e S eq u en ce o f L e o n a rd o ’s S k etc h es fo r The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist’, The Art Bulletin 65(1): 3 4 -5 0 ; th o u g h so m e d e ta ils h a v e since b een ch a lle n g e d b y m o re re c e n t fin d in g s (b risk ly su m m a rise d in C h a p te r 21 o f W a lte r Is a a c s o n ’s Leonardo da Vinci, N ew Y o rk , S im o n & S ch u ste r, 2017, p p . 3 1 5 -2 4 ). L a c a n is a lm o st ce rta in ly re a d in g o u t th e p a ssa g e fro m N o v e lla ra ’s le tte r as re p ro d u c e d in th e S c h a p iro artic le (p p . 1 6 8 -9 ), w h ich is a lso th e so u rc e o f th e m e n tio n s b elo w o f b o th K ris a n d th e in d u lg e n ce s. T h e le tte r w as first p u b lish e d in A . L u zio , Iprecettori di Isabella d’Este: appunti e documenti, A n c o n a : M o relli, 1887, p . 32, n o te 1. S c h a p iro q u o te s th e J o h n S h ap le y re n d e rin g in th e la tte r ’s 1925 a rticle , ‘A L o s t C a rto o n fo r L e o n a rd o ’s M a d o n n a w ith St. A n n e ’ The Art Bulletin, 7(3): 9 6 -1 0 2 , w h ere th e o rig in a l is p rin te d in full o n p . 98, n o te 3. F o r a n a lte rn a tiv e E n g lish in g , cf. D . S. C h a m b e rs, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, L o n d o n : P a lg ra v e M a c m illa n , 1970, p p . 145-6.

Index

a-a' see im aginary relationship A braham , K arl Traum und Mythus, Eine Studie zur Volkerpsychologie 442 -3 n Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido 10 ‘M anifestations o f th e Fem ale C astratio n C om plex’ 184-5 acting o u t 155 ad ap ta tio n 11, 13-14, 19, 54, 328, 333 affect, affectivity 13, 14, 5 1 ,2 4 3 -4 , 283, 284, 293 aggression 23, 69, 98, 172, 185, 233, 322, 346 aggressiveness 2 0 - 1 ,2 2 - 3 ,5 6 - 7 ,9 8 , 99, 104, 152, 168, 199,212, 337, 388,419 agent 31-2, 51, 59-60, 1 0 8 ,1 0 9 ,1 1 7 , 191,207, 242, 261 alienation 4, 179, 399, 426 Allais, A lphonse L’engraisseur 272 alm ightiness, all-pow erfulness 61, 161, 177, 178-9, 185-6, 267, 330, 349, 356, 385 altruism 55 am bivalence ( Ambivalenz) 6, 9, 54, 158, 3 5 1 ,433n am b o cep to r 308 A m brose, S aint (A urelius A m brosius) 416

am nesia 2 7 0 -1 ,3 9 9 -4 0 0 ,4 2 6 anaclitic (Anlehnung) relationship 74-7 anal sym bolism 182,276 anal stage 46, 54, 116, 250, 269, 346-7 see also object, anal A ngelus Silesius Cherubinischer Wandersmann 274, 440n anim al behaviour 1 1 8 ,1 8 0 ,1 8 7 ,2 6 3 , 388 anim als in p h o b ia 22 1 ,2 3 0 -1 an d ro cen trism 145, 184, 195 A nne, S ain t 3 7 8 ,4 2 2 ,4 2 3 -4 A n n a S elb d ritt/M etterza 424 an o rex ia nervosa 1 7 7 ,1 7 9 ,3 3 5 , 437n an th ro p o lo g y 390, 445n see also ethnography A n tig o n e 325 anxiety 11, 14-15, 16, 19,65, 174, 192, 1 9 8 -9 ,2 0 9 ,2 1 5 ,2 1 8 , 234

et seq. ca stratio n anxiety 15-16 signal fu n ctio n 1 5 ,2 3 9 ,2 9 8 -9 , 373 aphanisis 208-9 A pollinaire, G uillaum e Les mamelles de Tiresias 340, 365, 3 9 9 ,442n, 443n, 445n A quinas, S aint T h o m a s 432n A risto tle 338, 364

448

Index

artificial insem ination 366-7 appeal 5 9 -6 0 ,7 3 ,1 1 7 ,1 2 3 ,1 6 6 , 174-5, 314 see also cry appurtenance(s) 93, 117, 118, 131, 151, 182, 195-6, 201, 204 artefact see perverse artefact atypia, atypical position 54, 7 6 ,1 9 3 , 213,377, 3 98,408, 424-5 A uguste (clown) 2 1 ,4 3 2 n A urand, A m m on M onroe

Little Known Facts about Bundling in the New World 19 autoeroticism 55, 5 9 ,1 1 8 -1 9 Balint, Alice 5 5 -6 ,6 2 ,2 1 5 ‘H an d h ab u n g d e r U b ertrag u n g a u f G ra n d d er Ferenczischen V ersuche’ 434n ‘Love for th e M o th e r an d M o th e r L ove’ 5 6 ,433n Balint, M ichael 55 Belgian Psychoanalytic A ssociation Bulletin d’activites 56, 80 ,4 2 7 belief 100, 119, 132-3, 156, 244, 248, 256, 263, 265, 356 Bell, R. C.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci 4 4 In , 446n Belon, Pierre

L’histoire de la natvre des oyseaux II 414-15 Benassy, M aurice ‘E volution de la psychanalyse’ 5,

11-12 Bergson, H enri

Le Rire (Laughter)

287 beyond, beyond-zone 10, 7 9 ,1 0 2 , 117, 120-1, 125, 133 etseq. Bible O ld T estam ent see Ecclesiastes, Exodus, Psalm s N ew T estam ent see M atthew , Peter, bigam y 205 big O th er see O th er

Binet, A lfred ‘Le fetichism e d an s l’a m o u r’ 152 biting, m ordaciousness 64, 73, 220, 238, 269, 297, 320 et seq. see also devoration Blackm ore, Е. H & A. M. ‘B oaz A sleep’ 443n, 444n Blondel, C harles La psychanalyse 176 body im age 3 3 -4 ,4 8 ,4 9 , 119, 169, 178 ,1 8 1 -2 B onaparte, N ap o le o n 340 borer, gim let ( Bohrer) 276-7, 322, 339, 344, 352, 3 5 9 ,439n B ouvet, M aurice ‘L a clinique psychanalytique’ 5, 11-14, 2 0 -1 ,2 2 -3 ,6 8 Bouw m eester, Jo h an n es 445n b reast 27, 54-5, 60-1, 8 7 ,1 1 7 -1 8 , 167, 175-6, 1 8 1 ,2 0 7 ,2 2 0 , 242, 2 6 1 ,3 4 9 -5 0 ,4 1 2 -1 3 see also object, o ral object and real object B rigonnet, G uillaum e 434n Bryan, D ouglas 437n Budny, V irginia ‘T he Sequence o f L e o n a rd o ’s Sketches for T he Virgin an d C hild w ith S ain t A nne an d S aint John the B ap tist’ 446n bu n d lin g 7 8 - 9 ,435n Bussy, D o ro th y 44 In Caravaggio, M ichelangelo M erisi d a 369 C arroll, Lewis

Alice through the Looking-Glass (H u m p ty -D u m p ty ) 286

Alice in Wonderland 294 ca stratio n (com plex) 29, 51, 30-2, 4 1 ,4 6 , 5 3 ,6 6 , 7 3 ,7 4 , 76, 88, 92, 114, 145, 148,151, 171 et

seq. see also anxiety, ca stratio n

anxiety

catastro p h ic reaction

(Katastrophenreaktion) 442n

339,

Index C atullus, G aiu s Valerius 34 C azotte, Jacques Le Diable amoureux 161-2 child analysis 103-4, 282, 268, 300, 311,333, 373 child h o o d sexual theories see infantile sexual theories C h o co lat (R afael) 21 ,4 3 2 n C hrist, Jesus 3 6 9 -7 0 ,3 7 8 ,4 1 6 , 422-4, 425 C hristianity 424 Ju deo-C hristian trad itio n 364 C h u rch 367,423 C h u rch F athers 36 7 ,4 1 6 C lark, K enneth Leonardo da Vinci 412 cinem a 137 clitoris 89 co ach m an 2 7 6 ,3 5 7 ,3 6 1 ,3 9 7 C octeau, Jean Le potomak (M o rtim e r couple) 62 com m unication 108 com m unication th eo ry 180 visual 263 co m p ariso n ( Vergleichung) 197-8, 300,355 com plete object see object com prom ise-form ation (Kompromifibildung) 332 com pulsion 284 com pulsive b roodin g (Grubelzwang) 418 co n d ensation 2 8 7 ,3 6 1 ,3 8 4 conjugo 205,214 consciousness 10, 354 correspondence (adequation) 7, 10, 11,28, 57, 104-5 countertransference 8 1 -2 ,9 9 -1 0 0 , 292-3 Cresswell, R obert 437n C ronus 370 cry 180-1,285 see also appeal cu rtain 147-8, 157 see also veil

449

(Gefahr) 2 2 1 ,2 3 9 ,2 5 8 ,3 2 0 , 349, 3 71,396 d ea th 2 0 ,4 0 ,4 3 , 246, 342,405, 422-3 d ea th o f C h rist 369,423 sym bol as d ea th o f the th in g 368 d ea th in stin ct ( Todestrieb) 40, 4 2 ,4 3 , 65, 362 defence 41, 74, 105-6, 115, 152, 240, 331 defensive o u tp o st ( Schutzbau, Vorbau) 1 5 ,2 3 9 ,2 4 0 ,2 7 3 delusion 249, 283, 2 84,408 denegation 279 d epersonalisation 12 depressive position 57, 59, 117, 178-9 desire passim anim al 193 for a child 9 0 -1 ,9 7 -8 , 116, 121, 126 to deceive 100 disap p earan ce of, see aphanisis an d lack 3 0 -1 ,1 0 2 ,1 4 8 ,1 8 3 , 18 5 -6 ,2 1 7 an d love 1 4 8 ,1 5 0 ,1 7 3 indestructible, p erm a n en t 131, 172, 175, 203 m ortified 20 m o th e r’s 1 9 4 ,2 1 7 ,2 3 5 ,2 3 6 ,2 4 2 , 2 5 3 ,2 5 6 , 262, 286, 350,404, 406 perverse 157-8, 162 unconscious an d preconscious 126-7 see also object, o f desire detachability 259, 308, 339-40, 341-2, 348, 397 d etrim en t (dam) 29-30, 47, 49, 51, 242 D eu tsch , Helene 24, 433n ‘“F em inine” M aso ch ism a n d its R elation to F rig id ity ’ 90 d ev o ratio n 152, 183, 187, 220-1, 358-9, 371 see also biting, m ordaciousness D ia n a 264 d an g e r

450

Index

D iatkine, Rene ‘T he Ego in Perverse R elationships’ (w ith S. N a c h t an d J. Favreau) 105,158 disavowal ( Verleugnung) 148 displacem ent 12-13, 76, 89, 9 2 ,1 0 9 , 198, 275-6, 293, 372,423 distance (closing o f ‘neurotic d istan ce’) 7 0 ,7 1 -2 ,7 9 , 82^1 D o lto , Franpoise 33, 34-5, 48 -9 , 367 D on Juan, donjuanisme 3 2 8 ,410-11 D o ra see F reud, Sigm und,

Bruchstiick einer Hysterie-Analyse double 20, 198, 256, 2 5 8 ,4 1 0 , 421 D ran em 432n draw ers (o f H a n s’s m o th er) 291-2, 3 2 1 ,3 2 2 -3 ,3 4 0 -1 ,3 4 4 , 345, 347-8 drive (Triebe, pulsion, tendance) 7, 8-10, 1 3 ,3 8 ,4 0 , 5 2 ,1 0 5 , 113, 114-15, 121, 166, 167, 220, 275,283, 284, 43 In , 436n, 439n aggressive drives 57-8, genital drive 1 0 5 ,2 1 8 ,2 1 9 ,2 9 4 , 365 ‘m o to r m anifestatio n ’ o f 69 o ra ld riv e 1 5 1,1 6 6 -7 D uhem , Pierre Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci 419 D u ran te, M arcello

Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca 443n Durcharbeitung see w orking-through Ecclesiastes 356, 442n ego 4, 9, 12-13, 19-20, 66, 98, 109, 110, 116, 120, 130 etseq. see also n o t me Ego-ideal (Ich-Ideaf) 165,169-70, 187, 189, 204, 398 egoism 55 ego psychology 419 E gypt 2 9 5 ,4 1 4 -1 6 L uxor 414

ejaculation 252 p rem ature ejaculation 355 energetics, energy 2 5-6, 35-7, 38,41 environm ent, environm ental im age 66, 2 6 1 -2 ,3 1 3 erection phallus 4 1 ,4 3 , 62 in ch ildh o o d 294,331 E ros 77 eroticisation o f defences (N acht, D iatkine, F avreau) 105-6 Es see id ethnography 195, 239, 246, 359, 390 E uripides