🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will begin by keeping my promises. Last time, I mentioned to you the article by SARTRE titled:
The Transcendence of the Ego: Sketch of a Phenomenological Description. This article can be found in the sixth volume of Recherches philosophiques…
an excellent journal that ceased publication during the war and with the disappearance of its publisher, BOIVIN… pages 85 to 103.

FREUD’s remark that:

“The assertion that all dreams have a sexual meaning—or, more precisely, ‘require a sexual interpretation’…
against which the literature has tirelessly polemicized…
is absolutely alien to my Traumdeutung.”

In the seven editions of this book—naturally, this is written in the seventh—it stands in a particularly striking contradiction with the rest of the content found in the Gesammelte Werke No. II-III,
which contains the Traumdeutung, on page 402.

Many of you heard last night the clinical account from one of our colleagues, an excellent psychoanalyst, on the subject of obsessional neurosis. You heard him speak regarding desire and demand. Here, we aim to highlight…
because it is not merely a theoretical question but is tied to the essence of our practice…
this issue around which revolves the problem of the structure of desire and demand,
and which is something that undoubtedly applies directly to the clinic, enlivens it, and, I would say, renders it comprehensible.
I would almost argue that it is a sign that, by handling it too much on the level of comprehension,
you might experience some sense of insufficiency.

And indeed, it is true that the level of comprehension is far from exhausting the mechanisms of the structure we seek to penetrate,
because it is upon this structure that we aim to act.
The key around which we must pivot this distinction between demand and desire is such that it immediately clarifies demand,
while situating, on the other hand, the position of human desire precisely at its enigmatic point.

The key to all of this is the subject’s relationship to the signifier.
What characterizes demand is not merely that it is a relationship of one subject to another;
it is that this relationship occurs through the medium of language—that is, through the system of signifiers.

Since we are now approaching—I announced this to you—the question of what desire is,
inasmuch as it is the foundation of the dream, you know at once that it is not simple to determine what this desire is.
If it is the driving force of the dream, you know at the very least that it is dual:

1. First, this desire lies in the preservation of sleep. FREUD articulated this in the clearest terms:
   it is that state in which reality is suspended for the subject.
2. Desire is a desire for death. It is this as well, simultaneously, and perfectly compatibly, I would say,
   insofar as it is often through the medium of this second desire that the first is satisfied.
   Desire is that in which the subject of the Wunsch [desire, wish, longing] finds satisfaction, and this subject,
   I would like to place in a sort of parenthesis: we do not know what the subject is.
   As for the subject of the Wunsch, of the dream, the question is to determine who it is.
   When some say “the ego,” they are mistaken. FREUD definitively affirmed the opposite.
   And if one says it is “the unconscious,” that amounts to saying nothing.

So, when I say “the subject of the Wunsch finds satisfaction,” I place this subject in parentheses, and all FREUD tells us is that it is a Wunsch that finds satisfaction. What does it satisfy itself with? I would say it satisfies itself with being…
understand, being that satisfies itself.
This is all we can say, because, in truth, it is very clear that the dream brings no satisfaction other than satisfaction at the level of the Wunsch, that is, a satisfaction that one could call verbal.

The Wunsch contents itself here with appearances, and this is clear if we are dealing with a dream. Moreover, the nature of this satisfaction is reflected in the language through which it is expressed to us, by this “satisfaction with being” to which I just referred, and where the ambiguity of the word “being” betrays itself—
as it is present, slipping everywhere—and likewise, by formulating it in this grammatical way,
“being satisfied,” I mean:
Can it be taken for something substantial?

There is nothing substantial in being other than this very word, “it satisfies itself with being.”
We can take it for what is of being, if not literally. Ultimately, it is indeed as something belonging to the order of being that the Wunsch finds satisfaction. In sum, it is only in the dream, at least on the plane of being, that the Wunsch can find satisfaction.

I would almost like to make here something I often do, a little preamble, if you will—a look back, a remark that allows you to lift the veil over your eyes, over something that encompasses no less than the entire history of psychological speculation. This speculation, as you know, began with modern psychology formulating itself in terms of psychological atomism, all the associationist theories. Everyone knows that we are no longer there—at associationism, as it is called—and that we have made considerable progress since we have introduced considerations of totality, the unity of the field, intentionality, and other forces.

But I would argue that the matter is far from settled, and it is far from settled precisely because of FREUD’s psychoanalysis.
However, one cannot see how the matter has, in reality, played out through this reckoning, which is not one. By this, I mean that the essence of the issue has been entirely missed, and at the same time, the persistence of what was allegedly reduced has also been missed.

At the start, it is true, there was the associationism of the tradition of the English psychological school,
where articulated play emerged, and a vast misunderstanding, if I may put it that way,
where I would say the field of the real is marked—in the sense that the question concerns the psychological apprehension of the real.
And where the issue is ultimately to explain not merely that there are men who think but that there are men who move in the world while apprehending the field of objects in an approximately adequate way.

So, where is this field of objects, with its fragmented and structured character? What is it made of?

It is simply made of the signifying chain, and I will genuinely try to choose an example to make you feel that this is nothing else. All that is brought into the so-called structured associationist theory to conceive the progressive psychological apprehension,
from its ascension to its ordered constitution in relation to the real, is nothing more, in fact, than the initial attribution of these fields of the real with the fragmented and structured character of the signifying chain.

From this point on, one naturally realizes that there is a misalignment and that there must be more original relationships, so to speak, with the real.
To this end, we start with the proportionalist notion and venture into all cases where this apprehension of the world is, in some way, more elementary—less structured by the signifying chain.

Without realizing that this is what it is about, we move towards animal psychology. We evoke all the stigmatic outlines through which the animal can structure its world and attempt to find its point of reference in it. One imagines that, by doing so, one has resolved these famous elements in a kind of animated field theory or the vector of primordial desire—that one has dissolved these initial and false apprehensions of the real’s field by the psychology of the human subject.

Nothing has been done at all; something else has been described, and another psychology has been introduced. However, the elements of associationism have survived perfectly well alongside the establishment of a more primitive psychology, one that seeks to grasp the level of coaptation in the sensorimotor field of the subject with their Umwelt, with their surroundings.

Nevertheless, everything related to and every problem raised in connection with associationism survives perfectly intact. There has been no reduction, only a kind of displacement in the field of focus. The proof of this lies precisely in the analytic field, where the principles of associationism still reign supreme.

Because nothing so far has undermined the fact that when we began exploring the field of the unconscious—something we continue to do daily—it was through something fundamentally called “free association.” And to this day, in principle…
though of course, it is an approximate and imprecise term to designate the analytic discourse…
the aim of free association remains valid. The original experiments contained induced words and still retain—
though they admittedly no longer hold therapeutic or practical value—
their orienting value for exploring the field of the unconscious. This alone suffices to show us that we are operating in a field dominated by the word, by the signifier.

If this is not enough, let me expand this parenthesis to remind you of the foundation of associationist theory, the experiential basis upon which it rests, and the progression that follows. This includes how things are coordinated in a subject’s mind at a given level or, to revisit the exploration as initially directed, how the elements, the so-called “atoms” or “ideas,” present themselves. These terms are, of course, approximate and insufficient but not without reason and are framed in this initial context.

What, we are told, was the original entry point for these ideas? It was through relations of contiguity. Refer to the texts, examine the examples provided, and you will see clearly that contiguity is nothing more than that discursive combination upon which the effect we call metonymy is based. Without a doubt, contiguity exists between two things that have occurred together, to the extent that they are evoked in memory under the laws of association. What does this mean?

It means that an event was experienced within a context we might broadly call random: one part of the event is evoked, and the other comes to mind, forming a contiguity association that is nothing other than a coincidence.

What does this mean?

It means, in essence, that it fractures and its elements are caught within the same narrative text.
It is precisely because the event recalled in memory is a recounted event, that the narrative forms its text,
that we can speak of contiguity at this level. Contiguity, moreover, is what we distinguish in, for example, an experiment with induced words. One word will follow another: if, for instance, I mention the word “cherry” and subsequently “table,” this will form a relation of contiguity because, on a particular day, there were cherries on the table.

However, it is a relation of contiguity if we speak of something that is nothing other than a relation of similarity.
A relation always of similarity is equally always a relation of the signifier insofar as similarity is the passage from one to the other through a likeness of being, a similarity from one to the other, between one and the other, such that although the two are different, there is some essence of being that makes them alike.

I will not delve into the entire dialectic of sameness and otherness with all its complexities and infinitely richer nuances than a first glance might suggest. Those interested can turn to Parmenides and will find that they will spend a considerable amount of time exhausting the question.

What I simply want to state here and make you feel is…
since I mentioned cherries earlier…
that there are other uses beyond the metonymic use of this word. I would say it serves precisely for metaphorical use: I can use it to speak of lips, saying that these lips are like cherries, thus associating the word “cherry” as an induced word with “lip.” Why are they connected here? Because both are red, similar through some attribution.

It is not solely because of this or because they both share an analogous shape,
but what is entirely clear is that, whatever the case may be, we are immediately—and this is palpable—
within the fully substantial effect known as the metaphorical effect.

Here, there is no ambiguity whatsoever when I speak, in an experiment involving induced words, of the cherry in relation to the lip.

We are on the plane of metaphor in the most substantial sense of what this effect, this term, contains. And in the most formal sense, this always presents itself—as I have reduced it to this metaphorical effect—as an effect of substitution within the signifying chain.

It is to the extent that the cherry can be placed in a structural or non-structural context in relation to the lip that the cherry is there.

To this, you might say: the cherry can appear in relation to the lips in a function of contiguity:
the cherry has disappeared between the lips, or she offered me the cherry to take from her lips.
Yes, of course, it can also present itself this way. But what is the issue here?

The issue here is a contiguity that is precisely that of the narrative I mentioned earlier.
The event into which this contiguity is integrated, the fact that the cherry is, for a brief moment, in contact with the lip,
is something that, from the real perspective, should not deceive us.
It is not that the cherry touches the lip that matters; it is that it is swallowed. Similarly, it is not that it is held between the lips in the erotic gesture I evoked; it is that it is offered to us within this erotic movement itself that counts.

If, for a moment, we stop this cherry at the contact of the lip, it is due to a flash—precisely the flash of the narrative—where it is the sentence, the words, that for a moment suspend this cherry between the lips. And it is precisely because this narrative dimension exists, as it establishes this flash, that conversely, this image, as it is created by the suspension of the narrative, indeed becomes, on occasion, one of the stimulants of desire.

To the extent that the tone it imposes here is nothing but the implication of the language of the act, language introduces into the act this stimulation afterward, this truly stimulating element that is arrested as such and that occasionally nourishes the act itself with this suspension that takes on the value of fantasy, that holds erotic significance in the detour of the act.

I believe this is sufficient to show you this instance of the signifier, inasmuch as it is at the foundation of the structuring of a particular psychological field—not the entirety of the psychological field but specifically that part of the psychological field that, to a certain extent, is conventionally within what we can call “psychology.” This is true insofar as psychology would constitute itself on the basis of what I would describe as a kind of unitary, intentional, or appetitive theory of the field.

This presence of the signifier is articulated in an infinitely more pressing, powerful, and effective way in Freudian experience, and this is what FREUD reminds us of constantly. It is also what tends to be forgotten in the most peculiar way, to the extent that some attempt to turn psychoanalysis into something that moves in the same direction as psychology, aligning with where psychology has placed its focus.

By this, I mean the direction of a clinical field, a field of tensions where the unconscious is imagined as some kind of well, a path, a drilling, so to speak, running parallel to the general evolution of psychology. It is thought that this would also allow us access to those more elementary tensions, to the depths of the field, where things are reduced to the vital, the elementary, compared to what we see on the surface—the so-called field of the preconscious or conscious. I repeat: this is a mistake.

It is precisely in this sense that everything we discuss takes on its value and significance.
If some of you followed my advice last time and referred to the two articles published in 1915, what would you read there?
You would read and see this: if you refer, for example, to the article Unbewußte,
the most striking point, I would say, is contrary to what a superficial description would suggest, particularly when it involves things other than signifying elements. This is aimed at those who completely misunderstand what I am articulating here and who daily describe it as an intellectualist theory.

We will therefore place ourselves at the level of unconscious feelings, as FREUD discusses them, because, naturally, the objection will arise that speaking of signifiers does not address affective life or dynamics. This, of course, I am far from disputing, since I aim to explain it clearly by passing through the level of the Unbewußte.

What will you see FREUD articulating for us?
He articulates precisely this—it is the third part of Das Unbewußte: FREUD explains to us very clearly this:
that only what he calls “Vorstellungsrepräsentanz” [representation of an idea] can be repressed.

This alone, FREUD tells us, can properly be said to be repressed. So, what does this mean as “representation within representation”?
It refers to the drive’s motion, here termed Triebregung. The text leaves no ambiguity at this point.
It states explicitly that the Triebregung is, in any case, a concept and targets as such what could more precisely be called the unity of drive motion. It is made clear that the Triebregung is to be considered neither unconscious nor conscious. This is what is stated in the text.

What does this mean?

It simply means that we must regard what we call Triebregung as an objective concept.
It is an objective unit insofar as we observe it, and it is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is simply what it is:
an isolated fragment of reality that we conceive of as having its specific action incidence.

In my view, it is even more remarkable that its representation within representation—
this is the exact meaning of the German term—
is the sole representative of the drive (Trieb) that can be said to belong to the unconscious.
This is because the unconscious precisely implies what I earlier questioned: an unconscious subject.

I do not need to go much further here. What I aim to clarify—and you should grasp this—is precisely what this “representation within representation” is.
And you already see, of course—not necessarily where I am heading, but where we must inevitably arrive—
that this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz…
although FREUD, in his time, expressed things as they could be formulated within scientific discourse…
this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is strictly equivalent to the notion and term of the signifier.

It is nothing other than this, though it is only hinted at, and of course, the demonstration seems to us already implied. Otherwise, what would be the point of everything I have been explaining to you so far?
This will, of course, be made clearer, always more so. It is precisely this that is at stake.

That FREUD opposes this notion is also articulated in the clearest terms by himself. Everything that can be connoted under the terms he uses—such as “sensation,” “feeling,” or “affect”—what does FREUD say about these?

He states that it is only through a laxity of expression—whether permissible or impermissible depending on the context, with its drawbacks like all such lapses—that one would say these are unconscious. He categorically denies that they can, in principle, ever be unconscious. He explicitly denies them any possibility of unconscious incidence.

This is expressed and repeated in a manner that leaves no room for doubt or ambiguity.
When speaking of an unconscious affect, it means only that it is perceived and known. But known in what way? In its connections!

It does not mean that it is unconscious, because it is always perceived, FREUD tells us.
It is simply that it has attached itself to another representation, one not repressed.
In other words, it has adapted to the context persisting in the preconscious, allowing it to be taken up by consciousness—which, in this instance, is not difficult—as a manifestation of its most recent context.

This is articulated in FREUD’s writings. And it is not merely articulated once; it is reiterated countless times and revisited constantly.

It is precisely here that the enigma of what we call the “transformation” of affect inserts itself. This transformation is singularly plastic, and every author who approaches the question of affect—
“each time it catches their eye,” so to speak—
has been struck by this, as far as they dare to address it.

What is striking is that I, who am accused of engaging in “intellectualist psychoanalysis,” will spend a year discussing it, whereas you could count on one hand the articles devoted to the question of “affect” in psychoanalysis. This is despite the fact that psychoanalysts cannot stop invoking it when discussing clinical observations, as they invariably fall back on affect!

To my knowledge, there is only one worthwhile article on this question of affect: an article by GLOVER, often cited in the writings of Marjorie BRIERLEY. This article attempts a step forward in uncovering the notion of affect, which FREUD’s writings on the subject leave somewhat underdeveloped.

However, the article itself is dreadful, as is the entire book it appears in. The book, dedicated to what is called “the trends of psychoanalysis,” is a glaring example of the many untenable directions into which psychoanalysis has ventured. It traverses areas like morality, personology, and other so-called practical perspectives, around which the idle chatter of our era likes to proliferate.

If we return now to matters that concern us—serious matters—what will we read in FREUD? We will read this:

“The problem with affect is understanding what becomes of it when it is detached from the repressed representation and no longer depends on the substitute representation to which it has attached itself.”

The “detachment” corresponds to the possibility of annexation that is its property. This is what makes affect appear in the analytic experience as something problematic. For example, in the lived experience of a hysteric—
this is where analysis begins, where FREUD begins when he starts articulating analytic truths—
it is that an affect emerges within the ordinary text—
understandable, communicable within the everyday experience of a hysteric.
It is that this affect which is there—
which, moreover, seems to fit within the entirety of the text except for a slightly more discerning gaze—
this affect which is present is the transformation of something else—
and this is something worth pausing over—
something else, not another affect that would itself be in the unconscious. This FREUD absolutely denies.

There is absolutely no such thing; it is the transformation of a purely quantitative factor.
There is absolutely nothing at that moment that exists in the unconscious as a transformed form of this quantitative factor. The entire question is how such transformations are possible in affect,
that is, for example, how an affect located in the depths can be conceived in the unconscious text,
restored as such or such, and how it appears in a different form when it surfaces in the preconscious context.

What does FREUD tell us? The first text:

[Der ganze Unterschied rührt daher, dass Vorstellungen Besetzungen – im Grunde von Erinnerungsspuren – sind, wahrend die Affekte und Gefühle Abfuhrvorgangen entsprechen, deren letzte Ausserungen als Empfindungen wahrgenommen werden. (Das Unbewusste, 1915, p. 19-20)]

“The whole difference arises from the fact that in the unconscious, Vorstellungen are essentially investments and memory traces, whereas affects correspond to discharge processes, whose ultimate manifestations are perceived as sensations. Such is the rule of affect formation.”

As I have explained to you, affect refers to the quantitative factor of the drive. This means that it is not only mutable and mobile but subject to the variable nature of this factor. FREUD articulates this explicitly, stating that its fate can be threefold:

[Wir wissen, dass dies Schicksal ein dreifaches sein kann;
– der Affekt bleibt entweder – ganz oder teilweise – als solcher bestehen,
– oder er erfahrt eine Verwandlung in einen qualitativ anderen Affektbetrag, vor allem in Angst,
– oder er wird unterdrückt, d.h. seine Entwicklung überhaupt verhindert. (Das Unbewusste, 1915, p. 19)]

– *”The affect remains, either wholly or partially, as it is.

– Or it undergoes a transformation into a quantitatively different affect, above all into anxiety…
This is what he writes in 1915, foreshadowing a position that the article Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety will articulate topically.

– Or it is suppressed, meaning its development is entirely obstructed.”*

The difference, we are told, between affect and Vorstellungsrepräsentanz lies in the fact that the representation, after repression, remains as a real formation in the unconscious system (ICS), while unconscious affect corresponds only to an ancillary possibility that had no necessity, FREUD writes, to unfold.

This is an entirely unavoidable preamble before delving into the mode in which I intend to pose questions here about interpreting the desire in dreams. I told you I would use a dream from FREUD’s text because, after all, he remains the best guide for understanding precisely what he means when he speaks of the desire in dreams.

We will take a dream from the article titled Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911), published just before the SCHREBER case.

I borrow this dream—and the way FREUD discusses and treats it—from this article because it is articulated there in a simple, exemplary, significant, and unambiguous manner. It serves to illustrate how FREUD understands the manipulation of these Vorstellungsrepräsentanz when it comes to formulating unconscious desire.

What emerges from FREUD’s entire body of work regarding the relationship between this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and the primary process leaves no room for doubt. If the primary process operates under the first principle, the so-called pleasure principle, there is no other way to conceive the opposition that FREUD marks between the pleasure principle and the reality principle except by recognizing that what is presented as hallucinatory emergence—
where the primary process, that is, desire at the level of the primary process, finds its satisfaction—
concerns not merely an image but something that is a signifier.

It is, moreover, surprising that this has not been more explicitly recognized, particularly from the clinical perspective. It seems this has never been properly acknowledged precisely because the notion of the signifier was not developed at the time of classical psychiatry’s major flourishing.

For in the massiveness of clinical experience, in what forms do the most pressing and problematic major phenomena concerning hallucinations present themselves to us? They appear, primarily, in verbal hallucinations or hallucinations of a verbal structure. In other words, they manifest as intrusions or impositions into the field of reality:
– not just any intrusions,
– not merely an image,
– not merely a fantasy,
– not simply what might often support an ordinary hallucinatory process.

If hallucinations present specific problems, it is because they involve signifiers, not images, things, or perceptions—nor even so-called “false perceptions of reality,” as the expression goes.

At FREUD’s level, there is no doubt about this. At the end of the article, to illustrate what he calls Neurotische Währung—
a term worth noting, as Währung means “duration.” It is not a common German word and is tied to the verb währen, a durative form of wahren. The idea of duration here also conveys valuation, as this is the most common usage. When Währung relates to duration, its most familiar use is to signify value or valuation—
to discuss neurotic valuation specifically, that is, insofar as the primary process intrudes upon it, FREUD takes as an example a dream. And here is the dream:

It is the dream of a subject mourning his father, who, FREUD tells us, he attended through the long torments of his final days. The dream unfolds as follows: The father is still alive and speaks to him as he once did. Yet despite this, the dreamer experiences the extremely painful sensation that his father is nevertheless already dead, only that “he does not know it”—that is, the father is unaware.

It is a brief dream. Like all dreams FREUD analyzes, it is presented as transcribed because the essence of Freudian analysis always relies on the dream’s narrative, as first articulated. This dream, then, recurred insistently in the months following the father’s death. How does FREUD approach it?

There is no doubt that FREUD never believed, even for a moment, that a dream—
not even considering the distinction he always maintained between manifest and latent content—
could be immediately linked to what one might call (and what is frequently referred to in analysis using a term, I believe, without an exact equivalent) “wishful thinking.”
I would almost attempt to draw some equivalence between this term and a kind of alarm.
This alone should put an analyst on guard or even defensive, convincing them that they have veered onto the wrong path.
FREUD never indulges this “wishful thinking” notion or suggests that the dream arises simply because the dreamer needs to see his father, and it pleases him to do so.

Such an explanation is utterly inadequate, for the simple reason that this dream does not appear to provide any satisfaction at all. On the contrary, it is accompanied by elements and a context so profoundly marked by pain that they clearly preclude such a hasty conclusion. I underscore this possibility only to highlight its extreme unlikelihood.

Ultimately, I do not believe any psychoanalyst would go so far when interpreting a dream.
But it is precisely because one cannot take such an approach with dreams that psychoanalysts no longer show interest in them.

How does FREUD approach these matters? Let us remain anchored in his text:

“No other means,” he writes at the very end of this article, “leads to the understanding of the dream in its nonsensical resonance than the addition of ‘according to his wish’ or ‘as a result of his wish’ after the words ‘that his father was nevertheless dead.'”

And the corollary, if you will, that he wished it, comes at the end of the sentence, giving us this:

“But that the father, only he did not know, this was the son’s wish.”

The meaning of the dream is thus understood as:

“It would be painful for him to remember that he would have to wish for his father’s death, and how dreadful it would be if the father had suspected it.”

This brings us to the way FREUD treats the problem: it is a matter of a signifier. These are clauses, phrases that we will attempt to articulate linguistically to understand their precise value as components that allow access to the dream’s meaning. They are given as such, and their placement and adaptation within the text provide the key to the text’s meaning.

I urge you to note what I am saying. I am not asserting that this constitutes the interpretation—although it may indeed be the interpretation—but I am not claiming it yet. Instead, I suspend you at this moment where a certain signifier is identified as being produced by its absence.

What is at stake here? What is the phenomenon of the dream? It is by placing it back into the dream’s context that we are immediately provided with something meant to give us the dream’s understanding—namely, that the subject is in the well-known situation of self-reproach concerning a loved one. This reproach brings us back, in this example, to the infantile significance of the wish for death.

We are thus presented with a typical case where the term transference (Übertragung) is employed in its original sense, as first used in The Interpretation of Dreams. It refers to the transference of an original situation—here, the original wish for death—into something current, something analogous, homologous, parallel, or similar in some way, introduced to revive the archaic wish in question.

This is worth pausing over, as it is only from this point that we can begin to elaborate what “interpretation” means. For we have left aside the interpretation of “wishful thinking.”

To address this interpretation, only one remark is necessary: if we cannot translate “wishful thinking” as pensée désireuse or pensée désirante (desiring thought), it is for a very simple reason. If “wishful thinking” has a meaning—
and of course, it does—it is often used in contexts where its meaning is invalid.

To test the appropriateness of the term “wishful thinking” whenever it is used, one must distinguish that “wishful thinking” is not “taking one’s desires for reality,” as commonly expressed.
It pertains to the notion of thought as it slides, as it bends. Therefore, this term should not be given the meaning of “taking one’s desires for reality” but rather “taking one’s dream for reality.”

In this sense alone, it becomes entirely inapplicable to dream interpretation. For it would merely mean, in such an understanding of the dream, that one dreams because one dreams—a tautology. This is why such an interpretation, at this level, is not applicable to a dream at any moment.

We must therefore consider the method FREUD refers to as the addition of signifiers, which presupposes the prior subtraction of a signifier.
I am referring to what FREUD’s text implies: subtraction here corresponds exactly to the meaning of the term he uses to describe the operation of repression in its pure form, or, I would say, in its effect: unterdrückt (suppressed).

At this point, we are confronted with something…
which would not pose an objection or obstacle to us unless we were predisposed to “find everything agreeable,”
or, as Jacques Prévert would put it, to “believe in belief.”

One must nevertheless stop at this: the pure and simple restitution of the two terms nach seinem Wunsch (“according to his wish”) and dass er wünschte (“that he wished it”)—that is, that the son wished for his father’s death—fails to yield anything significant.

From the perspective of what FREUD himself designates as the ultimate goal of interpretation, namely, the restoration of the unconscious desire, what is achieved by this restitution? It yields absolutely nothing.

This is something the subject knows perfectly well: during the extremely painful illness, the subject did indeed wish for his father’s death as a solution and an end to his torment and suffering. Naturally, he did not show this wish to his father; he did everything possible to hide it. The desire, the wish, in its immediate, lived context, is perfectly accessible.

There is no need to speak here of the preconscious but of a conscious memory, entirely accessible within the continuous narrative of consciousness. So, if the dream subtracts something from a narrative—something that is in no way hidden from the subject’s consciousness—then this subtraction itself becomes a phenomenon that takes on positive value, so to speak.

This is precisely the problem: it concerns the relationship to repression, specifically because it undoubtedly involves Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and, indeed, in a very typical form. If anything deserves this term, it is precisely something that is, I would say, in itself a meaningless form: “according to his wish,” isolated in itself.

It means nothing; it only means “according to his wish”—the wish previously mentioned. What did he wish for? That depends on the preceding sentence. And it is in this sense that I want to guide you, to show the irreducible nature of what is at stake here in relation to any conception rooted in a kind of imaginary elaboration or abstraction from the objectal data of a field. When it comes to the signifier and its originality, the field that it establishes in the psyche, in the lived experience, in the human subject, is created by the action of the signifier.

This is what we have here:
these signifying forms, which are conceivable and sustainable only insofar as they are articulated with other signifiers.
This is the crux of the matter.

I understand that I am venturing into something that would require a much longer articulation than what is possible here. This is connected to various experiments pursued with great persistence by the so-called “Marburg School,” the school of “thought without images.” This was a sort of intuition developed—
in the small, closed circle of psychologists associated with this school—
to consider forms that are not precisely imagistic but signifying forms devoid of context and in their nascent state. The notion of Vorstellung, especially in light of the problems before us, deserves to be recalled. We know, unequivocally, that FREUD attended BRENTANO’s lectures for two years, and BRENTANO’s psychology, which offers a particular conception of Vorstellung, provides us with the precise weight of what this term could mean—
not only in FREUD’s thinking but also beyond my interpretation.

The problem lies precisely in the relationship between repression—
if repression is said to apply exactly and specifically to something of the order of Vorstellung—
and, on the other hand, the emergence of something entirely different. At this point in our discussion, this is different from repression itself. It is what we might call, in the context of the preconscious, the elision of two clauses.

Is this elision the same as repression?
Is it its counterpart, its opposite?
What is the effect of this elision?

It is clear that it produces an effect of meaning. To explain this on the most formal level, we must consider this elision—I say elision, not allusion.

This is not, to use everyday language, a figuration. This dream does not allude—far from it—to what preceded it, namely the father-son relationship. Instead, it introduces something that resonates absurdly, something with an entirely original significance on the manifest level.

It is indeed a figura verborum, a figure of words, of terms, to use the same term as before. It is an elision, and this elision produces a signifying effect.

This elision is equivalent to substituting the missing terms with a blank, with a zero. But a zero is not nothing.
The effect in question can be described as a metaphorical effect. The dream is a metaphor.

In this metaphor, something new arises—a meaning, a signified.
A signified that is undoubtedly enigmatic, yet one we must account for as one of the most essential forms of human experience. This is the very image that, for centuries, has driven individuals, in their detours through the mourning of existence, onto those more or less hidden paths that led them to the necromancer. What the necromancer conjured within the circle of incantation was something called a “shadow.”

Before this shadow, nothing occurred other than what happens in this dream: an entity that is there, existing without any clear indication of how it exists, and before which one is literally left speechless, for this entity—naturally—speaks.

Yet, it matters little. I would say that, to a certain extent, what the shadow says is as much what it does not say.
The dream itself does not even articulate this speech; the words gain their value from the fact that the one who summoned the loved one from the realm of shadows is literally unable to communicate the truth of their heart to the being called forth.

This confrontation, this structured scene, this scenario—does it not suggest that we must try to determine its significance?

What is it?
Does it hold that fundamental, structured, and structuring value that I am attempting to clarify for you this year under the name of fantasy? Is it a fantasy?
Are there a certain number of requisite characteristics that allow us to identify such a presentation, such a scenario, as bearing the attributes of a fantasy?

This is an initial question that, unfortunately, we can only begin to articulate next time.
Rest assured, we will provide very precise answers, enabling us to address:

1. In what way it is indeed a fantasy.
2. In what way it is specifically a dream fantasy.

Let me clarify immediately: a dream fantasy—
in the sense in which we can assign precise meaning to the term fantasy—
does not have the same scope as a waking fantasy, whether or not it is unconscious.

This is the first point I will address next time regarding the question posed here.

The second point, stemming from this, concerns the articulation of the function of fantasy.
It will involve understanding how we should conceive the workings of what can be called—what FREUD called—
the “mechanisms of dream construction.” This includes the relationships, on the one hand, with presumed antecedent repression and, on the other hand, with the relationship of this repression to the signifiers FREUD isolated and analyzed, emphasizing the impact of their absence in terms of pure signifying relations.

These signifiers—the relationships between the signifiers within the narrative:

• “He is dead,” on the one hand.
• “He didn’t know it,” on the other hand.
• “According to his wish,” in the third instance.

We will try to position, situate, and operate them along the lines and trajectories of the chains known respectively as the “chain of the subject” and the “signifying chain.” These chains are set before us, reiterated and insistent, in the form of our graph.

And you will see both what purpose this serves—nothing other than the topological positioning of the elements and relationships without which no functioning of discourse is possible—and how only the notion of the structures that allow this functioning can also give meaning to this: that the two clauses in question can, to a certain extent, truly be said to constitute the content—what FREUD calls the reality, the real verdrängten (the “truly repressed”).

But this is not enough. We must also distinguish how and why the dream uses these elements which are undoubtedly repressed, but precisely at a level where they are not repressed—that is, where the immediately preceding lived experience brought them into play as such, as clauses. In this context, far from being repressed, the dream elides them.

Why? To produce a certain effect—of what? I would say, of something not so simple, since ultimately it is to produce a meaning. There is no doubt about that. And we will see that the same elision of the same wish can, according to different structures, produce entirely different effects.

To spark your curiosity, let me point out that there may be a connection between the same elision of the same clause—”according to his wish”—and the fact that in other contexts, not those of a dream but of psychosis, for instance, this can lead to a denial of death. The clause “he didn’t know it,” or “he didn’t want to know,” articulated differently with “he is dead,” or even within yet another context, could benefit from being distinguished right away, as Verwerfung (foreclosure) differs from Verneinung (denial).

This could lead, in such moments, to those feelings of invasion or irruption—or to those “fruitful moments” in psychosis—where the subject genuinely believes they are confronted with something much closer to the image of the dream than we might expect. Specifically:

– That they are facing someone who is dead.
– That they are living with a dead person.
– And simply that they are living with someone dead who does not know they are dead.

And perhaps, we might even say, to a certain extent, that in entirely normal life, in the life we live every day, we might more often than we think encounter someone in our presence who, while displaying all the outward appearances of socially satisfactory behavior, is, in truth—
and I’m sure many of you will now begin identifying such individuals among your acquaintances once I point this out—
someone who is, in fact, dead. Truly dead, long dead, embalmed, awaiting only the faintest push of some seeming facade to crumble into that sort of dust that will carry them to their end.

Is it not true, too, that in the presence of this phenomenon—which is perhaps much more diffusely present in subject-to-subject relationships than we might imagine—this aspect of the half-dead, of which no living being is entirely devoid, leaves us far from at ease? And that much of our behavior toward our fellow beings:

– Is perhaps informed by something we must account for when we take on the task of listening to their discourse, their confidences, or their free associations during psychoanalysis.

– Introduces in us a reaction far greater in magnitude, far more present, incidental, and essential—a reaction that corresponds to a kind of caution we must exercise to avoid making the half-dead person aware that, as they speak to us, they are themselves halfway prey to death.

This is also because, for us, such a bold intervention would not be without repercussions—repercussions against which we are most defenseless. These are the most fictive, repetitive aspects of ourselves, which are, in their own way, also half-dead.

In short, as you can see, the questions are multiplied rather than resolved as we reach the end of today’s discussion. Without a doubt, if this dream is to provide you with anything regarding the relationship between the subject and desire, it is its inherent value—one we should not be surprised by given its protagonists: a father, a son, the presence of death, and, as you will see, the relationship to desire.

It is no coincidence, then, that we have chosen this example and that we will need to delve further into it next time.