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I announced this year the title of my seminar: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
I do not think that this is a subject whose choice in itself should surprise anyone, although it might leave open the question for some as to what exactly I might place under that heading. It is certainly not without some hesitation, even fear, that I decided to approach what I am going to discuss with you today, what I intend to place under this title.

I made this decision because, in truth, it follows directly from what we did last year, provided we consider that what we did reached its full completion.
Nevertheless, we must move forward, and I believe that what falls under the term Ethics of Psychoanalysis is something that will allow us to test, more than in any other domain, the categories through which, in what I teach you, I aim to provide you with the most suitable tool for highlighting what Freud’s work—foremost, the experience of psychoanalysis derived from it—brings us that is new regarding something both very general and very particular.

New, insofar as I believe that the experience of psychoanalysis is highly significant of a certain moment of humanity—the moment we are living in—without always being able, far from it, to discern what this collective work, this historical moment in which we are immersed, actually signifies.

On the other hand, this particular experience is the one involved in our daily work, that is, the manner in which we must respond to what I have taught you to articulate as a patient’s demand—a demand whose exact meaning is given by our response. A response that must be maintained under the strictest discipline so as not to adulterate the deeply unconscious meaning of this demand.

In speaking of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, I have chosen a term that does not appear to have been selected at random: I could have said “morality.” If I chose “ethics,” you will see why—it is not out of a mere fondness for using a rarer, more scholarly term.
Indeed, let us begin by noting this, which in a way makes the subject eminently accessible, even tempting: I believe there is no one who has not been tempted to address the topic of an Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

It is impossible to overlook the fact that we are steeped in moral problems in the strictest sense of the term, and I am certainly not the one who invented this term. Our experience has led us to delve deeper than ever before into the universe of guilt. It is the term used by our colleague, with an additional adjective: the morbid universe of guilt, he says.

Indeed, it is undoubtedly under this morbid aspect that we approach it most profoundly. The truth is, this aspect is impossible to dissociate from the universe of guilt itself as such. This link between guilt and morbidity is something that has indelibly marked all moral reflection in our era. To the point that—as I have occasionally noted here in passing—it is sometimes remarkable to see the kind of vertigo that seems to seize those engaged in moral reflection, even in religious circles, when faced with what our experience offers them.

How striking it is to see them sometimes seemingly give in to a kind of temptation towards an optimism that appears almost excessive, even comical, as if the reduction of morbidity might suggest the evaporation of the concept of guilt itself.

What we are actually dealing with, however, is nothing less than the allure of guilt.
When we speak of the need for punishment, it is indeed something along the path of this need that we designate with that term.

And to achieve this punishment sought through guilt, we are merely deferred further along to some deeper, more obscure guilt that calls for this punishment. What is this guilt?
Certainly, it is not the same as the one the patient commits in order to be punished or to punish themselves. What is this guilt?

• Is it a guilt such as Freud’s early work identifies: the murder of the father, the grand myth Freud placed at the origin of all cultural development?
• Or is it the more obscure and more primal guilt that he proposes at the end of his work: the death drive, to put it bluntly, insofar as man, at his most profound, is anchored in his fearsome dialectic?

It is indeed between these two terms that Freud’s reflection stretches, a progression that we will have to revisit when we measure its exact implications.

In truth, this is not all, either in the practical domain or in the theoretical domain, that leads us to highlight the importance of the ethical dimension in our experience and in Freud’s teachings. Not everything in ethics is—as it has rightly been pointed out—solely tied to the sense of obligation. The moral experience as such, namely this sanctioning reference that places man in a certain relationship with his own actions, is not merely one of articulated law but also one of direction, a tendency, and, to put it plainly, a Good that it calls upon, generating an ideal of conduct. All this is, properly speaking, what constitutes the ethical dimension.

And beyond what is properly the commandment, beyond what may present itself, as has been said, with a sense of obligation. Without doubt, in certain reflections on moral experience—and I am precisely alluding to one of them, that of Frédéric Rauh, whose work we will need to consider as one of the reference points for this exercise—I believe it is necessary to situate the dimension of our experience in relation to the reflection of someone among those of our time who sought to advance moralist thought.

Certainly, this relegation of the sense of obligation to a secondary plane is not something we are naturally inclined to pursue. For if psychoanalysis has brought to light anything, it is—beyond the sense of obligation properly speaking—the importance, even omnipresence, of the sense of guilt. And assuredly, in certain internal tendencies of ethical reflection, there is an effort to evade this aspect—let us call it by its name—the disagreeable facet of moral experience. We are certainly not among those who attempt to mitigate, dull, or attenuate it, because we are too insistently brought back to it, referred to it, by our daily experience.

Nevertheless, it remains true that analysis, on the other hand, is the experience that, at the highest level, has reinstated the fruitful function of desire as such. To the extent that one might even say that the entirety of the theoretical framework provided by Freud concerning the genesis of the moral dimension cannot be situated elsewhere, nor rooted anywhere else, than in desire itself. It is the energy of desire from which emerges the function, the instance of what will, in its ultimate elaboration, present itself as censorship.

Thus, something closes within a circle that has been imposed upon us, deduced from what characterizes our experience—namely, that in the appearance, in the given of the experience, what one might call the naturalistic liberation of desire is something that could present itself as the aim of a certain philosophy, the one that immediately preceded the philosophy we will identify as the closest relative of Freud’s outcome, the one transmitted to us in the nineteenth century. We will determine which one.

Just before that, we have the eighteenth-century attempt at this naturalistic liberation of desire, this practical reflection that can be characterized as belonging to “the man of pleasure.” The naturalistic liberation of desire has failed. The more theory, the more the work of social critique, the more the scrutiny of an experience aimed at reducing obligation to precise functions within the social order, might have led us to hope for a relativization of the imperative, constraining, and, to put it plainly, conflictual character of moral experience, the more, in fact, we have seen pathological incidences, in the proper sense of the term, of this experience increase.

The naturalistic liberation of desire failed historically because we do not find ourselves confronted with a man less burdened by laws and duties than before the great critical experience of libertine thought. And, in truth, if—if only through retrospection—we are led to allude to this experience of “the man of pleasure,” we will see…
and we will be led there through an examination of what psychoanalysis has contributed to the understanding and positioning of perverse experience…
we will quickly see that, in truth, within this moral theory of “the man of pleasure,” it was easy to foresee everything that destined it for failure.

For if it presents itself with this ideal of naturalistic liberation, it suffices to read the major authors—I mean both those who, in their expression, took the most accentuated libertine paths, even erotic ones—to realize that this experience of the man of pleasure carries within it a note of defiance, a sort of ordeal proposed to what remains the ultimate term—reduced but certainly fixed—of this articulation of the man of pleasure, which is none other than the term “divine.”

God, as the author of nature, is summoned to account for the most extreme anomalies, the existence of which the likes of the Marquis de Sade, Mirabeau, Diderot, and others present to us. And this very notion of defiance, of summons, of ordeal is clearly something that could not lead to any other outcome than the one that history has, in fact, realized. For he who submits to the ordeal ultimately finds in it its premises, namely the Other before whom this ordeal is presented: the judge, ultimately the arbiter of the said ordeal. This is something that gives its own particular tone to this literature, in which we encounter a dimension of the erotic perhaps never again equaled or matched.

Certainly, the affinity, kinship, and root that psychoanalysis retains in a certain type of experience is something we must propose to our own judgment over the course of our investigation. In fact, we touch here—this being a direction rarely explored in analysis—on analysis in its general orientation: it seems that from the probing, the flash of Freud’s experience cast upon the origins of desire, upon the polymorphous perversity of desire in its infantile forms, a movement, a general tendency to reduce these paradoxical origins of desire and to show their convergence toward a harmonious end ultimately characterizes the progress of analytic reflection as a whole. This allows us to pose the question of whether, in the end, the theoretical progress of analysis does not converge toward what we might call a “moralism” more comprehensive than any other that has existed to date, aimed, in a way, at appeasing guilt.

Even though, as our practical experience shows, such an endeavor involves difficulties, obstacles, and even reactions: a domestication, so to speak, of perverse enjoyment, stemming from a sort of demonstration of its universality on the one hand, and its function on the other. Undoubtedly, the term partial, used to designate perverse drives, is particularly significant in this context.

We already know that last year we circled around this term partial drive. Part of our reflection focused on the depth that analysis attributes to the function of desire, essentially on the profound purpose of this remarkable diversity that gives value to the investigation and to the catalog of human tendencies that analysis enables us to establish. Here, something already leads us to ask a certain question that we might only fully appreciate in its true perspective by comparing, to measure the distance traveled, the point to which our understanding of the term desire has brought us, with what, for example, is articulated in the work—an oeuvre to which we will devote significant attention in our reflection—of Aristotle when he speaks of ethics.

The place of desire in something as developed as the Aristotelian ethic, particularly in the most elaborate form of this work: Nicomachean Ethics. In Aristotle’s oeuvre, two key points where this ethic is articulated show us to what extent a whole field of desire is, quite literally, placed outside the realm of morality.

There is, surrounding a certain type of desire—and you will see when we revisit this: a very broad, expansive field—no ethical problem. This type of desire, which he discusses…
and this concerns none other than the very terms of desire that, for us, are at the forefront of our experience, encompassing a vast realm of what constitutes for us the body of sexual desires…
is, quite simply, classified by Aristotle among either monstrous or bestial anomalies.

Specifically, Aristotle uses the term bestiality to describe them. And regarding these terms, there is no ethical problem. The problems he addresses—and I will outline the core and essence of them later—are located entirely elsewhere. What occurs at this level, from the moment it manifests, is no longer within the scope of moral evaluation. This is a point of considerable significance.

On the other hand, if we consider that the entirety of Aristotle’s ethics has not lost its relevance in theoretical morality, we can measure precisely at this point the subversive nature of our experience. What, for us, renders such a formulation surprising, primitive, paradoxical, and, truthfully, incomprehensible, deserves to be assessed. However, this is not merely a tangential remark; it is integral to what I wish to outline this morning in our program.

We find ourselves, in essence, around the question of what analysis allows us to articulate regarding the origin of morality. We will need to assess whether its contribution is limited to the elaboration of a mythology more credible, more secular, than the one that positions itself as revealed—a mythology reconstructed as in Totem and Taboo, which is part of the experience of the “original murder of the father,” of everything it generates, and of the chains it creates. It is this transformation of the energy of desire that allows us to conceive the genesis of its repression. The point is that desire, and guilt, in this context, are not merely formal impositions but are also something for which we might, in a sense, be grateful. To the extent that this characteristic of felix culpa—a fortunate fault—leads to the generation of a superior complexity, through which the entire dimension of civilization as such could be elaborated.

Does everything ultimately reduce to this genesis of the superego, whose outline is developed, refined, deepened, and becomes increasingly complex as Freud’s work progresses? This genesis of the superego, which we will see is not merely a psychogenesis or a sociogenesis, and, in truth, cannot be articulated simply within the register of collective needs. There is something in it that imposes itself, which we must distinguish from the instance of pure and simple social necessity. This, properly speaking, is the dimension I am attempting to help you isolate under the framework of the relationship to the signifier, the law of discourse—something whose autonomy we must preserve if we wish to rigorously and correctly situate our experience.

Certainly, there is something in this distinction between culture and society that might appear new, even divergent, compared to what is typically presented in certain types of teaching regarding the analytic experience. Let us say that this distinction, this dimension—whose importance and emphasis I am far from the only one to stress—is something I hope to make clear to you by pointing out its identification and scope as they appear in Freud himself.

To bring to the forefront the text where we will examine this problem, I direct your attention to Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud’s 1929 work written after the development of his second topography and after he had brought forward the highly problematic notion of the analysis of the death drive. In this work, you will find, formulated in striking expressions, something he conveys by telling us that, ultimately, what occurs in the progress of civilization is something…
and the phrasing is quite remarkable; I will have you assess its weight and implications in the text…
he tells us that in relation to man…
man as he stands at this pivotal moment of civilization, where Freud himself and his reflections are situated, measuring the discontent…
what occurs happens far beyond him.

We will revisit the implications of this statement. I believe it is sufficiently illuminating for showing the originality of Freud’s reversal, his rethinking of the relationship between man and logos. I consider it significant enough to have pointed it out already, and to urge you to read or reread Civilization and Its Discontents. This is assuredly not a marginal work in Freud’s oeuvre, something akin to notes or what one might indulgently allow a practitioner or a scientist—no matter how eminent, as Freud certainly was—as an excursion into philosophical reflection, perhaps without granting it the technical weight that might be given to such reflection by someone explicitly classifying themselves as a philosopher.

I urge you to dismiss this view, too common in analytic circles, entirely: Civilization and Its Discontents is an absolutely essential, foundational work for understanding Freud’s thought and for grasping the culmination of his experience. We must assign it its full importance and weight. It clarifies, emphasizes, and resolves ambiguities regarding entirely distinct aspects of the analytic experience and our position concerning man, insofar as it is to man, and to a constant human demand, that we are confronted in our most routine experience.

As I have told you, the moral experience is not limited to a “concession to fire,” so to speak, to the form it takes in individual experiences. It is not solely tied to the slow recognition of the function Freud defined and autonomized under the term superego, nor to the exploration of its paradoxes, to what I have called “that obscene and ferocious figure” in which the moral instance presents itself when we trace it to its roots. The moral experience in analysis is also summarized in an original imperative, precisely the one proposed by what we might call, in this context, the Freudian asceticism: the “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where id was, there ego shall be”), which Freud arrives at in the second series of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. This imperative is nothing less than something whose root is given to us in an experience deserving the term moral experience, situated at the very foundation of the patient’s entry into psychoanalysis.

For this I that must come into being where “it was,” this something that analysis teaches us to measure, this I is nothing other than what we already find rooted in the I that questions itself about what it wants. It is not merely interrogated. As it progresses in its experience, this question arises in the very place of the often strange, paradoxical, even cruel imperatives posed by its pathological experience: will it or will it not submit to this duty it feels within itself, as alien, beyond, at a second remove?

Must it or must it not submit to this paradoxical, morbid, semi-unconscious imperative of the superego, which reveals itself increasingly as an instance as the analytic discovery progresses? And the more it sees itself engaged in this path, the more evident this becomes. This is something intrinsic to our experience.

Its true duty, if I may put it this way, is it not then to go against this imperative? And here is something embedded in the pre-analytic data. One only needs to observe how the experience of an obsessive subject structures itself at the outset to understand that this enigma surrounding the term duty, as such, is something always already articulated for them, even before they arrive at the plea for help that drives them to seek analysis.

The question, in truth, is what we, here, provide as a response to such a problem, which, though manifestly illustrated by the conflict of the obsessive subject, retains—precisely for this reason, and this is why ethics exists, why ethical reflection is necessary—its universal scope. In other words, duty, on which we have shed various lights—genetic, original—duty itself is not merely the concern of the philosopher seeking to justify it. This justification, of what presents itself as an immediate sense of obligation, of duty, not merely in its specific commandments but in its imposed form, is something that lies at the center of an interrogation that is, itself, universal.

– Are we, as analysts, simply the ones who provide asylum to the supplicant in this instance, offering them a place of refuge?
– Are we merely—and this is already significant—those who must respond to a certain demand: the demand not to suffer, or at least not to suffer without understanding, with the hope that through understanding, the patient will be freed not only from their ignorance but also from their suffering itself?
– Is it not evident here that, quite naturally, analytic ideals find their place?

And they do not fail to appear; they flourish abundantly. Measuring, identifying, situating, and organizing them will be part of our work.
To name three of these ideals—these values, as one might say in a certain framework of moral reflection—that we propose to our patients and around which we organize our estimation of their progress and the transformation of their path into a coherent course, they are: the ideal of human love.

I hardly need to emphasize the role we assign to a certain notion of consummate love. You know this; it is a concept you must have learned to recognize, and not only here, since, in truth, there is no analytic author who does not mention it. You have seen, however, that I often target here the vague, approximate, and insufficiently emphasized character, marked by a certain optimistic moralism, of the original articulations of this form referred to as the “genitalization” of desire—or, in other words, the ideal of genital love.

This love, supposed to alone form a satisfying object relationship, this “therapeutic love,” if I might use the term to emphasize, in a somewhat comic sense, the ideology behind it—this hygiene of love, as I might specifically term it, to identify the scope of analytic ambition—raises questions we will not dwell on endlessly, as I have continuously presented it to your reflection and meditation since this seminar began.

Yet, to perhaps mark the point more sharply, it seems that there is a sort of avoidance or evasion in analytic reflection when confronted with the field of convergence in our experience. This convergent aspect is undeniable, but it also seems that analysts encounter a limit there—a point beyond which it becomes difficult for them to proceed further.

To assert that the moral issues of experience are fully resolved in something we might call, for instance, “monogamous union” would, I believe, be an imprudent, excessive, and inadequate claim.

Why…
in a field where analysis, by placing itself at the center of ethical experience, introduces an original note, one distinctly different from the way love has hitherto been employed by moralists and philosophers, involving a certain economy of human relationships…
why has analysis, which has introduced such a significant change in perspective here, not pushed further in the direction of investigating what we must call a properly erotic framework?

This is undoubtedly a question worthy of reflection.

Do I need to point out that what I describe as the limitations or the nonexistence of an analytic eroticism is illustrated by something I proposed as a topic for our next congress—female sexuality? This is one of the most evident signs, in the evolution of analysis, of the shortfall I identify in the direction of such a development.

It is hardly necessary to recall what Jones recorded from a source, one that is not particularly authoritative in our eyes, but which, at the very least, purportedly transmitted accurately what it heard from Freud himself. Jones reports that this person once confided to him that Freud had said something like the following:

“After thirty years of experience and reflection, there is still one question to which I cannot provide an answer: ‘Was will das Weib?’ What does a woman want?”

And more precisely: “What does she desire?” The term will in this context in German can carry the sense of desire.
Are we much further advanced on this issue? Assuredly not. I believe it would not be futile to show you, on occasion, the kind of gaps, the kind of progress in analytic research this represents concerning a question that analysis did not originate.

Let us say that analysis, and specifically Freud’s thought, is tied to an era that articulated this question within a particular framework: the Ibsenian context of the late nineteenth century, in which Freud’s thinking matured, cannot be overlooked here. The problem of sexuality, viewed through the lens of feminine demand, is something where it is rather striking that analytic experience has tended to stifle, dampen, or evade certain areas.

The second ideal, which is also striking in the analytic experience, I will call “the ideal of authenticity.”
I don’t think I need to place too much emphasis on this: I believe it is evident to you that, if analysis is a “technique of unmasking,” it presupposes this perspective, this ideal. But, in truth, this goes further.

Authenticity is not merely presented to us as a path, a stage, or a ladder of progress. It also appears as a certain standard for the finished product, as something still desirable—thus a value—something ideal, and something for which we are even led to set very fine, clinical norms.

An example of this can be seen in the subtle clinical observations of Hélène Deutsch, concerning a certain type of character and personality. These individuals cannot be said to be poorly adapted, nor do they lack any of the requisite norms of social relations, yet their entire attitude, their behavior, is perceived—in whose recognition?—in the recognition of the Other, of others, as marked by the accent she calls in English “As if” or in German “Als ob”. This signifies something that brings us face to face with a dimension not strictly defined nor simple but rather present, guiding, and required throughout our experience. It is something that must be acknowledged and measured to understand to what extent we meet its demands.

This brings me to my main point: namely, that something harmonious, something whole—a sort of full presence, which we, as clinicians, are so adept at measuring in its deficit—is, in a sense, only partially realized by our technique. The technique I have referred to as the technique of unmasking seems to stop halfway to achieving this. Might there be something we could call a “science of virtues”, a “practical reason”, or a “sense of common sense”, and does our absence from this field carry a significant meaning? For, in truth, we never intervene in the domain of virtues. As I have said before, we clear pathways and trails, hoping that what we call virtue will eventually flourish there.

Similarly, there is another ideal we have recently forged, a third one, though I am not entirely sure it belongs to the original dimension of analytic experience. This is the ideal of non-dependence, or more precisely, a sort of prophylaxis of dependence. Can we say that here, too, there is a subtle limit, a fine line, separating what we designate as desirable in this register for the adult subject and the ways in which we permit ourselves to intervene to help them achieve it?

To understand this, it suffices to recall the fundamental, constitutive reservations of Freud’s position regarding anything that could properly be called education. No doubt we—particularly child analysts—are constantly drawn to encroach upon this field, this domain, operating in the dimension of what I have elsewhere called, in its etymological sense, an orthopedics.

Yet, it is striking that, both in the methods we employ and in the theoretical principles we prioritize, there is something that might be called an ethic. There is an ethic of analysis. It is the erasure, the overshadowing, the withdrawal, or even the absence of a dimension that, upon mentioning its term, makes clear what separates and divides us from all prior articulations of ethics: habit, whether good or bad.

This is something to which we refer even less because the register and articulation of analysis are rooted in entirely different terms: those of trauma and its persistence. Undoubtedly, we have learned to atomize trauma, to dissect its impression and mark, but the very essence of the unconscious belongs to a different register than that emphasized by Aristotle in his Ethics, where he makes a play on words: ἔθος (ethos)—habit—and ἦθος (êthos)—ethics. He centers ethics on the relationship between these two terms.

There are extremely subtle nuances we must revisit, which can be centered on the term character. In Aristotle, ethics is a science of character, the formation of character, and a dynamic of habits. It is more than a dynamic of habits; it is an action aimed at habits—a training, an education.

One must take a moment to engage with this exemplary work, if only to measure the difference between our modes of thought and those of a perspective that represents one of the most eminent forms of ethical reflection on this matter.

To pinpoint what today’s premises lead us toward, I will tell you this: no matter how abundant the material I have attempted to outline this morning, I will start next time from an entirely radical position. This position is nothing less than this: to identify the originality of Freud’s stance on ethics, one must highlight something indispensable—a shift, a change of attitude in the moral question itself.

You will see that, in Aristotle, the issue is the question of the Good, the Sovereign Good. And we will need to assess why Aristotle emphasizes the problem of pleasure and its role in the mental economy of ethics, a role that has always been central.

This is something we can hardly avoid addressing, as it is, as you know, the reference point of Freudian theory concerning the two systems Ψ and Φ, the two psychic instances he called primary and secondary processes.

Does pleasure serve the same function, the same role, in both cases, in each of these elaborations? You will see that it is nearly impossible to discern this difference or resolve this question unless we recognize something that occurred in the interim—a development that we cannot avoid considering, even though addressing it may not seem to be the primary function or requirement of my position here. What we must address, however, is a certain investigation of historical progress.

At this point, the terms I use—and as you know, the primary ones, Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, are nearly always the guiding references we encounter—are precisely those that allow us to establish within these three registers what I will call our reference points for the categories whose nature we must now carefully assess. What are these categories? Undoubtedly, some of you, during the time I was discussing the Symbolic and the Imaginary and their reciprocal interaction, wondered what the Real ultimately was.

Curiously, for a superficial mindset that assumes every exploration of ethics must target a domain of ideals, if not the unreal, you will see, on the contrary, that the progression involves a deepening of the notion of the Real. Conversely, it is precisely as we orient ourselves to locating man in relation to the Real that the ethical question—and I emphasize here the advancement Freud’s position allows us to make—takes shape and is articulated.

To grasp this, we must understand what transpired in the interim. What happened at the beginning of the 19th century is something we can call the utilitarian conversion or reversal. Until a certain moment—one undoubtedly conditioned by history and identifiable by a radical decline in the position and function of the Master—you will see how this decline governed all Aristotelian reflection and conditioned its endurance across the ages. This decline culminates in the extreme devaluation of the Master’s role, as seen in Hegel, who makes the Master, in some sense, the “great dupe,” the “magnificent cuckold” of historical evolution. Hegel portrays the virtue of progress as moving through the path of the vanquished, that is, the slave.

This transformation radically alters the perception of the Master, who, in Aristotle’s time, in his full existence, was far more than the Hegelian fiction. The Hegelian position is, in a sense, merely the reverse, the negative, the sign of the Master’s disappearance. Shortly before this terminus, in the wake of success, emerges a certain utilitarian philosophy, born of a revolution in interpersonal relations. This utilitarian shift is far from the simplistic platitude it is often assumed to be.

It is not merely about considering the goods available on the market and determining their optimal distribution. Instead, it represents a broader reflection. Here, I must credit Jakobson, who pointed me toward a rarely explored aspect of this philosophical development: Jeremy Bentham’s work—a thinker far from deserving the discredit or ridicule some philosophical critiques attach to his historical role in ethical progress.

Bentham’s effort develops around a philosophical critique—more precisely, a linguistic critique—that emphasizes the term Real, contrasted with the term fictitious in English.

Fictitious does not mean illusory or inherently deceptive. The term fictitious—which Étienne Dumont, who popularized Bentham’s doctrine on the continent, erroneously simplified—must be understood differently. Bentham uses fictitious in the sense I have previously articulated: “all truth has a structure of fiction.”

Bentham’s effort to situate the “Real Good,” understood as pleasure, unfolds within this dialectic of language and the Real. He articulates this notion of pleasure in a manner entirely distinct from Aristotle’s perspective.

This distinction between fiction and reality also frames the pivotal shift within Freudian experience. Freudian experience situates itself precisely in relation to this opposition between the fictitious and the Real, showing us:

• that once this division, separation, or cleavage is enacted, things do not align where one might expect;
• that the characteristic of pleasure—the dimension that binds man—is entirely on the side of the fictitious, insofar as the fictitious is not inherently deceptive but, rather, properly belongs to what we call the Symbolic.

The idea that the unconscious is structured according to the symbolic, that the pleasure principle drives man to seek the return of something that is a sign, that there is no distraction in what unconsciously directs man’s behavior, and that this is what brings him pleasure—because, in some sense, it is a kind of euphony, a rediscovery of his trace at the expense of the trail—is a concept whose importance in Freudian thought must be fully understood to grasp the function and role of reality.

Freud, no more than Aristotle, doubts that what man seeks, his ultimate goal, is happiness. Curiously, happiness in almost all languages is expressed as a matter of chance, as τύχη (tuché)—a favorable encounter, a stroke of luck. Happiness for us also resonates with augurum, a good omen or a favorable meeting. The term suggests an objective sense, Glück in German, which carries the sense of gelück, a fortunate encounter. Similarly, in English, happiness shares its root with happen, which also signifies a chance occurrence, though without the explicit particle that imbues it with positive fortune. However, these terms are not necessarily synonymous, as illustrated by the anecdote of a German immigrant in America:

– “Are you happy?”
– “Oh yes! I am very happy! I am really, I am very happy!
– Aber nicht glücklich!“

Happiness is something that Freud, no less than anyone else, acknowledges must be presented to us as the ultimate aim of any pursuit, ethical or otherwise. But what sets Freud apart, and what is often underappreciated—perhaps because people stop listening when a thinker seems to stray from their technical domain—is a key statement in Civilization and Its Discontents: Freud tells us that for happiness, there is absolutely nothing prepared in either the macrocosm or the microcosm.

This point is profoundly new. Aristotle’s entire philosophy of pleasure hinges on the idea that pleasure is incontestable, that it represents the guiding pole of man’s fulfillment. For Aristotle, insofar as there is something divine in man, it lies in his alignment with nature. But this concept of nature differs greatly from ours: it involves, inversely, the exclusion of all base or bestial desires from what constitutes the proper fulfillment of man.

In the intervening time, we have undergone a total reversal of perspective. For Freud, what is the focus? Everything that approaches reality seems to demand a kind of tempering, a lowering of the tone of what we could call the energy of pleasure. This shift is of enormous importance. Yet, as people of our time, you may find it somewhat banal. As someone once conveyed to me, “Lacan’s teaching is essentially this: The king is entirely naked.” At least, this is how it was reported to me—perhaps even about myself. But let’s assume the best-case scenario: this is indeed what I teach.

Of course, I teach it with perhaps a touch more humor than my critic might assume, though I have no reason here to speculate on their ultimate intentions. My approach is not quite like the child who exposes the universal illusion, but more akin to Alphonse Allais, who gathers a crowd of passersby to exclaim dramatically: “Oh! Scandal! Look at this woman—under her dress, she’s naked!”

In truth, I don’t even say that. If the king is naked, it is precisely because he is clothed in a certain number of garments, fictitious no doubt, but absolutely essential to his nudity. His nudity itself, as another good story from Allais shows, can be seen as never quite naked enough. After all, one can flay the king—or the dancer.

The perspective of this entirely closed framework leads us back to the organization of the fictions of desire. These fictions of desire are where the formulas I provided you last year concerning fantasy take their full significance.

This is where they must be revisited. It is here that the concept of desire as the desire of the Other takes on its full weight. It is also here that I will conclude today, drawing from a note in The Interpretation of Dreams, itself borrowed from the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the following:

“A second,” writes Freud, “and much more important and profound factor to guide us—one that is entirely neglected by the layman—is the following: the satisfaction of a wish must undoubtedly bring pleasure, but one can also pose the question.” I do not think I am overstating matters in noting here the Lacanian emphasis on a certain way of formulating questions, naturally directed at those who have the wish, the desire, for such questions to be posed. Yet, it is well known to the dreamer that their relationship to their wish is neither simple nor unambiguous. They reject it. They censor it. They disavow it.

Here, we rediscover the essential dimension of desire as always being desire on a second level, a desire for desire. And, in truth, we may expect Freudian analysis to bring some clarity to what, in recent years, has culminated in critical inquiry: namely, the infamous, and perhaps overly famous, theory of values.

One adherent of this theory expressed it as follows: “The value of a thing is its desirability.” But pay close attention—this raises the question: Is it worthy of being desired? Is it desirable that it should be desired? Here we enter a sort of catalog, one that could often be compared to a wardrobe or a repository of cast-off garments representing the various forms of judgments that, over the ages—or even today—have dominated the diverse, even chaotic, aspirations of humanity.

The structure formed by the imaginary relation as such, by the fact that narcissistic man becomes enmeshed in the dialectic of fiction, is something that—perhaps in the end—will find its resolution and culmination in our research this year on the ethics of analysis. Ultimately, you will see the question emerge regarding the fundamental nature of masochism in the economy of the instincts.

Without a doubt, some questions will remain open concerning the point we occupy in the evolution of eroticism and in the remedy to be applied, not merely to particular individuals, but to civilization and its discontents. If we must perhaps abandon hope for any true innovation in the field of ethics—and to some extent, one might argue there are signs of this in our inability, despite all our theoretical advances, to originate a new perversion—this would nonetheless be a certain indication that we have indeed reached the heart of the problem, at least regarding existing perversions.

The deeper understanding of the economic role of masochism may, in the final analysis—and to provide us with an accessible conclusion—be the focal point where I hope we will arrive as we conclude this year’s exploration.