🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

There is a distinction that this experience confronts us with, between:
– what we must call desire in the subject,
– and the function in the constitution of this desire, in the manifestation of this desire, and in the contradictions that, during treatment, erupt between the subject’s discourse and their behavior,
…a distinction, I say, that is essential, between desire and demand.

If there is something that not only the original data—the Freudian discourse—but precisely the entire development of Freudian discourse maintains over time, namely the contradictions that will emerge, it is indeed due to the problematic character played by demand. Because ultimately, everything toward which the development of analysis has moved since FREUD has increasingly emphasized what has been variously called and ultimately converges toward a general notion of dependency neurosis.

That is to say, what has been concealed, what is veiled behind this formula, is indeed the emphasis placed by a kind of convergence of theory, its shifts, and also its failures in practice, that is to say, a certain conception concerning the reduction that must be achieved through therapeutic means.

It is indeed what is concealed behind the notion of dependency neurosis.
The fundamental fact of demand, with its imprinting, compressing, and oppressing effects on the subject,
which is there and which must precisely be interrogated as to whether, regarding this function…
that we reveal as formative, according to the formation of the genesis of the subject,
…we adopt the correct attitude, meaning the one that, in the end, will be justified,
namely elucidation on one hand and, simultaneously, the resolution of the symptom.

It is indeed clear that:

– If the symptom is not simply something we must consider as the legacy of a kind of subtraction or suspension called frustration,

– If it is not merely a kind of deformation of the subject, however one views it, under the influence of something that is measured in relation to a certain connection to the real:
as I have said, an imaginary frustration always relates to something real,

– If it is not that, if between what we effectively discover in analysis—its consequences, its sequences, its effects, even its lasting effects, these impressions of frustration—and the symptom, there is something else, a dialectic infinitely more complex, called desire,

– If desire is something that can only be grasped and understood at the most tightly knotted intersection, not of some impressions left by the real, but at the narrowest point where the real, the imaginary, and its symbolic sense intertwine for man, which is precisely what I have tried to demonstrate.

– And this is why the relationship between desire and the phantasm is expressed here [d→$◊a)] in this intermediate field between the two structural lines of all significant enunciation [between s(A)→A and S(Ⱥ)→$◊D)].

– If desire is indeed there, if it is from there that the phenomena, let us say metaphorical, arise—that is, the interference of the repressed signifier on an overt signifier that constitutes the symptom,

…then it is clear that failing to seek to structure, organize, and situate the place of desire is to miss everything.

This, we began to do this year by taking a dream on which I have long dwelled,
a singular dream, a dream that FREUD happened to emphasize on two occasions…
I mean, one that he later incorporated into the Traumdeutung after having given it a particularly useful place in the article “The Two Principles of Mental Functioning: Desire and the Reality Principle,” published in 1911.
…This dream is that of the appearance of the dead father.

We have tried to locate its elements within the double chain as I have shown its structural distinction,
in what can be called the graph of the inscription of the elementary biological subject, of the subject of need,
in the pathways of demand, which I have elaborately articulated.

I have laid out for you how we must consider this fundamentally dual articulation:
insofar as it is never a demand for something, insofar as behind every specific demand, every demand for satisfaction, the very fact of language, by symbolizing the Other…
the Other as presence and as absence
…as capable of being the subject of the gift of love, which it gives by its presence and nothing more than its presence, I mean insofar as it gives nothing else, that is to say:
– precisely what it gives is beyond anything it can give,
– what it gives is precisely this nothing, which is everything in the determination of presence-absence.

We articulated this dream by didactically projecting onto this duplicity of signs something that allows us to grasp, in the structure of the dream, the relationship established by this phantasmatic production, whose structure FREUD sought to elucidate throughout his life—masterfully in The Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung). We are trying to understand its function for this son mourning a father who was undoubtedly loved, attended to until the very end of his agony, and whom he makes reappear under conditions that the dream articulates with exemplary simplicity:
that is to say, this father appears as he was in life, he speaks, and the son, before him, mute, seized, gripped by pain—the pain, as he says, of thinking that: “his father was dead and that he did not know it.”

FREUD tells us, it must be completed: “that he was dead, according to his wish.” He did not know—what?—that it was “according to his wish.”
Everything is there, then, and if we try to delve more closely into what constitutes the construction, the structure of this dream, we notice this: it is that the subject confronts a certain image under certain conditions.

I would say that between what is assumed in the dream by the subject and this image to which he confronts himself, a distribution, an allocation is established that will show us the essence of the phenomenon. Already, we had tried to articulate it, to delineate it, so to speak, by distributing the characteristic signifying themes across the signifying scale.

On the upper line, the “he did not know,” an essentially subjective reference in its essence, which goes to the heart of the subject’s structure: “he did not know” as such, concerns nothing factual. It is something that involves the depth, the dimension of the subject—and we know that here it is ambiguous—that is to say, what he did not know, as we will see, cannot be solely and purely attributed to the one to whom it is applied…
paradoxically, absurdly, in a way that resonates contradictory, even nonsensical…
to the one who is dead, but it also resonates within the subject who partakes of this ignorance.

Precisely this is something essential. Moreover, here is how the subject positions himself in the suspension, so to speak, of the dream articulation. He, the subject as he positions himself, as he assumes himself, knows—if one can say so, since the other does not know—the “subjective” position of the other.

And here, the “being in defect,” so to speak, whether he is dead, of course, this is ultimately a statement that cannot reach him: any symbolic expression such as this—of “being dead”—ultimately sustains him, ultimately preserves him.
This is precisely the paradox of this symbolic position: there is no “being” to “being dead,” no assertion of “being dead” that, in some way, does not immortalize him.
And it is precisely this that is at issue in the dream.

But this “subjective position” of the “being in defect,” this subjective devaluation, does not aim at the fact that he is dead; it fundamentally targets this: that he is the one who does not know it.

Thus, the subject positions himself opposite the other, as well as this sort of protection exercised toward the other…
which means that not only does he not know, but that ultimately, I would say, he must not be told.
…This is something that is always more or less at the root of all communication between beings—what one can and cannot let them know. This is something whose implications you must always weigh every time you deal with analytical discourse.

Last night, we spoke of those who cannot speak, who cannot express themselves: of obstacles, of resistance, strictly speaking, to discourse. This dimension is essential for linking this dream with another dream borrowed from the last page of TROTSKY’s journal, at the end of his stay in France, at the beginning of the last war, I believe—a dream that is singularly moving.

It is at the moment when—perhaps for the first time—TROTSKY begins to feel within himself the first tolls of a bell signaling some decline in the vital energy that was so inexhaustible in this subject. And he sees his companion LENIN appear in a dream, congratulating him on his good health, on his indomitable character.

And the other—in a way that derives its value from the ambiguity always present in dialogue—lets him understand that perhaps this time, there is something in him that is not quite at the same level as his old companion has always known. But what he thinks—this old companion who reappears in such a significant manner at a critical moment, a turning point in vital evolution—is to spare him.

And wanting to recall something that specifically relates to the moment when he, LENIN, himself faltered in his efforts, he refers to this moment of his death by saying: “the moment when you were very, very ill,” as if some precise formulation of what it was about could, by its mere utterance, dispel the shadow in the face of which TROTSKY, in his dream, at this same turning point in his existence, maintains himself.

Well then, if on the one hand, in this division between the two confronted forms:
– ignorance attributed to the other,
– which is imputed to him,
…how can we not see that, conversely, there is something there that is nothing other than the subject’s own ignorance—his not knowing:

– not only what the meaning of his dream is, namely everything underlying it, what FREUD evokes, that is, his unconscious history, his ancient, mortal wishes against the father,
– but even more so, what the nature of the very pain is in which, at that moment, the subject participates, that is, this pain…
which, in tracing its path and origin, we have recognized as this pain experienced, glimpsed in the participation in the father’s final moments…
…of existence as such, insofar as it persists to the limit, in this state where nothing more is grasped, the fact of the inextinguishable character of existence itself, and the fundamental pain that accompanies it when all desire fades, when all desire vanishes.

It is precisely this pain that the subject assumes, but as a pain that he also absurdly justifies, since he justifies it solely by the ignorance of the other, by something which, in the end, when looked at very closely, is no more a cause of what accompanies it as a motivation than the emergence, the affect, in a hysterical crisis, which apparently organizes itself within a context from which it is extrapolated but which, in fact, is not motivated by it.

This pain, it is precisely by taking it upon himself that the subject blinds himself to its proximity, to the fact that in the agony and disappearance of his father, it is something that threatens him, that he has lived through, and from which he now separates himself by this re-evoked image, this image that connects him to something that separates and soothes man in this sort of abyss or vertigo that opens before him whenever he is confronted with the ultimate term of his existence. That is to say, precisely what he needs to interpose between himself and this existence, in this instance, a desire.

He does not summon just any support for his desire, not just any desire, but the closest and most urgent one, the best, the one he has long dominated, the one that has now brought him down.

He must bring it—temporarily—back to life imaginatively, because in this rivalry with the father, in the fundamental power of the fact that he ultimately triumphs, the fact that the other does not know, while he does.
Here lies the slender bridge by which the subject does not feel himself directly invaded, directly engulfed, because what opens to him is an abyss, a pure and simple confrontation with the anguish of death, as we know that, in fact, the father’s death, whenever it occurs, is felt by the subject as the disappearance—in coarser language—of that sort of shield, interposition, substitution that the father represents to the absolute master, that is, death.

We begin to see here the outline of a kind of figure constituted by what?
The formula that I am trying to present to you as the fundamental formula of what constitutes the support,
the essential intra-subjective relationship in which all desire, as such, must be inscribed.

It is in this simplest form, the one inscribed here, this separate relationship in the quadrilateral framework,
that of the L schema, the one between the subject and the big Other, insofar as this partially unconscious discourse
coming from the big Other comes to interpose itself within him.

The tension a–a′, which can still, under certain conditions, be called the image tension of a in relation to a′,
depending on whether it concerns the relationship a–a′ of the subject to the object, the image relationship of a to the other,
to the extent that it structures this relationship.

It is precisely the absence that characterizes the relationship of desire in relation to the subject $,
with the imaginary functions, which is expressed in the formula $◊a, in the sense that desire as such,
and in relation to any possible object for man, raises for him the question of his subjective elision.

I mean that insofar as the subject, in the register, in the dimension of speech, inscribes himself as a demander,
in approaching that something which is the most elaborated, the most evolved object…
what, more or less skillfully, the analytic conception presents to us as being the object of oblative love.
This notion, as I have often emphasized, is problematic. It is this notion that we also attempt to confront,
to formulate in a more rigorous way…
…the subject, insofar as he is desire…
that is to say, in the fullness of a human destiny, which is that of a speaking subject…
in approaching this object, finds himself caught in this kind of impasse, which ensures that he could not
attain this object as an object, except in some way by finding himself, as a subject—a subject of speech—in this elision,
which leaves him in the night of trauma, properly speaking, beyond even anxiety,
or by finding himself having to take the place, to substitute, to subsume himself under a certain signifier which…
I articulate here purely and simply for the moment, without justifying it since our entire development must justify it,
and all analytical experience is there to justify it…
…to be the phallus.

From there stems the fact that in every assumption of the mature position, the position we call genital,
something occurs on the imaginary level that is called castration and has its impact at this level.

Why? Because the phallus, among other things…
only in this perspective can we understand the entire problematic
raised infinitely by this fact, from which it is otherwise impossible to escape…
…the question of the phallic phase for analysts, the contradiction, I would say, the FREUD-JONES dialogue
on this subject, which is singularly poignant…

This entire sort of impasse into which JONES enters…
when, rebelling against FREUD’s overly simple conception of the phallic function as the univocal term
around which the entire concrete, historical development of sexuality in man and woman revolves…
he emphasizes what he calls the “defensive functions” linked to this image of the phallus.
In the end, both say the same thing; they approach it from different viewpoints.

They cannot meet, assuredly, for lack of this central, fundamental notion that requires us to conceive the phallus
as, in this instance, being taken, subtracted, so to speak, from the imaginary community, from the diversity,
from the multiplicity of images that assume bodily functions, isolated from all the others
in this privileged function that makes it the signifier of the subject.

Let us shed further light here and say this: fundamentally, on the two planes, which are:
the first immediate, apparent, spontaneous plane, which is the appeal…
– which is “Help!”,
– which is “Bread!”,
– which is ultimately a cry,
– which, in any case, is something where, in the most total way, the subject is identical for a moment to this need…
must nonetheless articulate itself at the “interrogative level” of demand, which is found, initially, in the primary relationship, in the experience between the child and the mother, a function of what is articulated and will increasingly be articulated, of course, in the relationship between the child and the mother, and of everything that substitutes for it in the broader society that speaks its own language.

Between this level and the “votive level,” that is, where the subject, throughout his life, must find himself, meaning to find what has escaped him because it lies beyond, outside everything, the form of language…
which, as it develops more and more,
…lets pass, filters out, rejects, or represses what initially tended to express itself as his need.

This second-degree articulation, precisely as it is shaped, transformed by his speech—that is, this attempt,
this endeavor to go beyond this very transformation…
this is what we do in analysis.

And this is why we can say that, just as everything that must articulate itself at the interrogative level exists in the A:
– as a pre-determined code, a code that predates the subject’s experience,
– as what is offered in the Other to the play of language, to the initial significant framework
that the subject experiences as he learns to speak.

What do we do in analysis? What do we encounter?
What do we recognize when we say that the subject is at the oral stage, the anal stage, etc.?

Nothing other than what is expressed in this mature form, the complete element of which must not be forgotten:
it is the subject insofar as he is marked by speech and in a specific relationship with his demand. It is this, literally,
that in such and such an interpretation, where we make him sense the oral, anal, or other structuration of his demand:
– we do not simply acknowledge the anal character of the demand; we confront the subject with this anal or oral character,
– we are not merely interested in something immanent in what we articulate as the subject’s demand; we confront the subject with the structure of his demand.

And it is precisely here that the emphasis of our interpretation must balance, oscillate, and even falter.
For emphasized in a certain way:
– we teach him to recognize something which, so to speak, belongs to that higher level, the votive level, the level of his wishes, of what he desires insofar as they are unconscious.
– We teach him, so to speak, to speak, to recognize himself in what corresponds to D at this level, but we do not, for that matter, provide him with the answers.

By entirely maintaining the interpretation within this register of recognizing the unconscious significant supports
hidden in his demand, we do nothing else. If we forget what is at stake, which is to confront the subject with his demand,
we fail to realize that what we produce is precisely the collapse, the erasure of the subject’s function as such
in the revelation of this unconscious vocabulary; we invite the subject to efface himself and disappear.
And indeed, in many cases, this is exactly what happens.

It is to say that in a “certain learning” that can take place in the analysis of the unconscious,
in a certain way, what disappears, what flees, what is increasingly reduced, is nothing other than that demand
which is the subject’s requirement to manifest himself beyond all this in his being.

By constantly bringing it back to the level of demand, one inevitably ends up, in some way…
and this is what is called, in “a certain technique,” the analysis of resistances…
…by purely and simply reducing what constitutes desire. Yet it is simple and easy to see:
– that in the relationship of the subject to the Other, the response is made retroactively and elsewhere,
– that something then circles back onto the subject, confirming him in the sense of the demand,
occasionally identifying him with his own demand.

It is equally clear, at the level where the subject seeks to situate himself, to recognize himself precisely in what he is beyond this demand:
– that there is a place for the response,
– that this place for the response, schematized here by S, the signifier of the barred A, S(Ⱥ).
…This is to say, the reminder:
– that the Other, too, is marked by the signifier,
– that the Other, too, is abolished in some way within discourse.
…This is merely to indicate a theoretical point, the form of which we shall later examine.

This form is essentially the recognition of the castrated nature of anything from the living being that attempts to approach the living being as it is evoked by language. And, of course, it is not at this level that we can initially provide the response.

However, respecting, aiming at, exploring, and utilizing what already expresses itself beyond this locus of response in the subject,
and which is represented by the imaginary situation where he positions himself, maintains himself, suspends himself,
as if in a sort of stance that, undoubtedly, partakes in some ways of the artifices of defense—this is precisely what creates the ambiguity of so many manifestations of desire, such as perverse desire, for example. It is insofar as something expresses itself there, which is the most essential point where the being of the subject attempts to assert itself.

This is all the more important to consider because it must be acknowledged that it is precisely there, in this very locus,
that what we so easily call “the finished object,” “genital maturation” must occur—that is to say, everything that will constitute, as Mr. JONES expresses biblically somewhere, the relations between man and woman. These relations, due to the fact that man is a speaking subject, will be marked by the structural difficulties that manifest in this relationship of $ with a [$◊a]. Why?

Because precisely, if we can say that up to a certain moment, a certain state, a certain stage of development, the vocabulary, the code of demand, can pass through a certain number of relationships involving a removable object…
namely food in the case of the oral relationship, excrement in the case of the anal relationship,
to limit ourselves for now to these two…
…when it comes to the genital relationship, it is clear that it is only through a kind of borrowing,
an extension of this fragmentation of the subject as a signifier in the relationship of demand, that something can appear to us—and indeed does appear to us—but as something morbid, symptomatic in all its manifestations: namely, the phallus.

For a very simple and good reason: the phallus is not, in fact, a removable object; it only becomes so through its transition to the rank of signifier. And everything involved in complete genital maturation rests on this: that everything in the subject, which must present itself here as the fulfillment of his desire, is ultimately, to put it plainly, something that cannot be demanded.

The essence of neurosis, and what we are dealing with, consists very precisely in this:
that which cannot be demanded on this terrain…
in the neurotic, or in the neurotic phenomenon, that is, in what appears more or less sporadically in the development of all subjects who partake in the structure of neurosis…
consists precisely—and we always return to this structure—in this:
what belongs to the order of desire is inscribed, formulated, in the register of demand.

In a recent re-reading of Mr. JONES, I revisited everything he wrote on The Phallic Phase.
It is striking at every moment what he brings from his most refined and direct experience:

“I could relate cases of a number of male patients whose failure to achieve manhood—in relation to either men or women—was strictly to be correlated with their attitude of needing first to acquire something from women, something which of course they never actually could acquire.”
(The Phallic Phase, Baillière… 1950, p. 461)

“Why?” asks JONES, and when he says “Why?” in his article and context, it is a genuine “Why?”.
He does not know why, but he observes it. He punctuates it as a horizon point, an opening, a perspective,
a point where the guides elude him.

“Why should imperfect access to the nipple give a boy the sense of imperfect possession of his own penis?
I am quite convinced that the two things are intimately related, although the logical connection between them is certainly not obvious.”
(The Phallic Phase, Baillière… 1950, p. 461)

“Why should imperfect access to the breast give a boy this sense of imperfect possession of his own penis?
I am entirely convinced that the two things are intimately related, even though the logical connection between these two things is certainly not evident.”

In any case, it is not evident to him… At every moment, we rediscover these details on the most immediate phenomenology,
I mean the necessary sequences by which a subject maneuvers to arrive at the full action of their desire,
the prerequisites they require. We can reconstruct them, rediscover what I would call the labyrinthine pathways
where the essential fact of the position the subject has taken in this reference,
this structurally significant relationship for them between desire and demand, is marked.

And if the maintenance of the incestuous position in the unconscious has any meaning, and if it indeed has diverse and sometimes devastating consequences on the manifestations of desire, on the fulfillment of the subject’s desire,
it is precisely for this reason:
the so-called incestuous position preserved somewhere in the unconscious is precisely this position of demand.

At a certain moment, it is said—and this is how Mr. JONES expresses it—the subject must choose between their incestuous object and their sex.
If they wish to preserve one, they must renounce the other.
I would say that what they have to choose between, at this initial moment, is their demand and their desire.

Now let us return, after these general observations, to the path I want to introduce you to,
to show you the common measure of this structuration of desire and how it is effectively implicated.
The imaginary elements, insofar as they… must be shaped, must be integrated into the necessary play
of the signifying framework, as this play is governed by the dual structure of the “votive” and the “interrogative.”

Let us take a fantasy, the most banal, the most common one, the one FREUD himself studied
and to which he gave special attention: the fantasy “A child is being beaten.”

Let us now reconsider it with the perspective we are approaching,
to try to grasp how the necessity of the fantasy as the support of desire can be formulated.

FREUD, speaking of these fantasies as he observed them in a number of subjects at the time, with a predominance in women,
tells us that the first phase of the Schlagfantasie is reconstructed…
insofar as it can be re-evoked, either in the fantasies or the memories of the subject…
by the following phrase:

“Der Vater schlägt das Kind”

And the child who is beaten in this instance is, in relation to the subject, this:

“The father beats the child I hate.”

Here we are, led by FREUD, from the initial point to the very heart of something situated in the most acute quality of love and hatred, that which targets the other in their being. And insofar as:
– this being, in this instance, is subjected to the maximum degradation in symbolic valuation,
– through paternal violence and caprice, is there.

The insult here, if we call it narcissistic, is something that is, ultimately, total. It targets, in the hated subject, what is demanded beyond all demand. It targets the fact that he is utterly frustrated, deprived of love.

The subjective degradation associated with the child’s encounter with the first corporal punishment leaves diverse traces depending on its repeated nature.

And anyone can observe in our contemporary era, where such things are extremely sparingly imposed on children, that if it happens, after a child has never been beaten, that they are subjected to even a single instance of punishment, even if fully justified, particularly at a relatively late age, one cannot imagine the effects—at least immediate and paralyzing—that this experience has on the child.

Be that as it may, we can consider as “given” that the primitive experience in question is exactly what FREUD describes:

“Between this phase and the next, some significant transformations must occur.”

Indeed, this second phase, FREUD expresses as follows:

“The person doing the beating remains the father, but the child being beaten becomes, regularly and as a rule, the child of the fantasy itself. The fantasy is imbued with a very, very high degree of pleasure and is realized in a completely significant manner to which we will return later.”

And for good reason!

“Its articulated formula is now thus: I am beaten by the father.”

But FREUD adds that this, which is:

“the most important and most consequential of all the phases, we can say, nonetheless, in a certain sense, that it never actually exists. It is never in any case recalled, it is never brought to consciousness. It is a construction of analysis, but it is nonetheless a necessity.”

I believe we do not weigh sufficiently the consequences of such a statement by FREUD. In the end, since we never encounter it—this most significant phase—it is nonetheless crucial to see… since it leads to a third phase, the phase in question…
that we must conceive of this second phase as something sought out by the subject.

And of course, this “something” being sought interests us to the highest degree, for it is none other than the formula of primordial masochism, which is precisely that moment when the subject seeks their closest realization as a subject within the dialectic of signification.

Something essential, as FREUD rightly says, occurred between the first and second phases.
This is to say, something where the subject saw the other precipitated from their dignity as an erected subject, as a little rival.

Something opened within him, allowing him to perceive:
– that it is in this very possibility of subjective annulment that his entire being resides as an existing being,
– that it is here, by brushing closest to this abolition, that he measures the very dimension in which he subsists as a being, a subject of desire, as a being capable of formulating a wish.

What does the entire phenomenology of masochism reveal to us, as we must inevitably seek it in masochistic literature, whether we find it pleasing or not, whether it is pornographic or not? Let us take a famous novel or a recent one published by a semi-clandestine press. What, in the end, is the essence of the masochistic fantasy?

It is the subject’s representation of something—a slope, a series of imagined experiences—whose descent, whose shore fundamentally lies in this:
that, ultimately, he is treated purely and simply as an object, as something that is, at the extreme, bartered, sold, mistreated, annulled in any possibility, properly speaking, of “votive” autonomy. He is treated as a fantasy, as a dog, so to speak—not just any dog, but a dog that is mistreated, precisely as a dog that is already mistreated.

This is the point, the pivot, the foundational base of the transformation presumed in the subject, who seeks to find where this point of oscillation lies, this point of balance, this product of that $ which is precisely what he must enter—if he enters—once he has stepped into the dialectic of speech and found a way to formulate himself as a subject.

But ultimately, the neurotic subject is like PICASSO: “He does not search; he finds”—for this is how PICASSO once expressed himself, in a truly sovereign phrase.
(Cf. Pablo Picasso: Le désir attrapé par la queue, Gallimard, 1995.)

And indeed, there are those who search and those who find, believe me: the neurotics…
in other words, all that is spontaneously produced in this embrace of man with his speech…
they find.

I would point out that the word “find” comes from the Latin tropus, directly linked to what I am constantly discussing: the difficulties of rhetoric. The word that designates “to find” in the Romance languages…
contrary to what happens in Germanic languages, where a different root serves for this…
is curiously borrowed from the language of rhetoric.

Let us pause for a moment at this third stage, the point where the subject has found.
This point is worth stopping at for reflection.

In the fantasy A child is being beaten, what do we find? What beats is “one” (on), that much is clear, and FREUD emphasizes it.
There is no point in asking, “But who is beating? Is it so-and-so?” The subject is truly evasive.
Only after a certain interpretative elaboration—when the first phase has been rediscovered—can we trace back a certain paternal figure or image in this form, the form where the subject has found their fantasy,
insofar as this fantasy serves as a support for their desire, for masturbatory fulfillment.

At this point, the subject is perfectly neutralized. He is “one”. And as for who is being beaten, that is no less difficult to grasp; it is multiple: immer nur Buben (“always boys”), many children, boys, nur Mädel (“only girls”) when it involves girls, though there is no mandatory relationship between the gender of the fantasizing child and the gender of the imagined figure.

The greatest variations and uncertainties reign over this theme, where we know that, in some sense:
whether it is a or a’,
whether it is i(a) or (a),
the child, to some extent, participates, since it is he who creates the fantasy. But still, nowhere…
in a precise, unequivocal manner, in a way that is not indefinitely oscillating…
does the child establish a fixed position.

But what we want to emphasize here is something closely related to what I earlier called the distribution between the intra-subjective elements of the dream. On the one hand, in the sadistic fantasy…
this is evident in fantasies observed in their broadest scope…
I ask, where is the accentuated affect?

The accentuated affect…
just as it was in the dream, borne by the dreaming subject as a form of pain…
is unquestionably a sadistic fantasy, borne by the fantasized image of the partner: it is the partner,
not so much as someone who is beaten, but as someone who is about to be beaten,
or even who does not know how they will be beaten.

This extraordinary element, to which I will return in discussing the phenomenology of anxiety, already hints at a distinction present in FREUD’s text…
but which, naturally, no one has ever addressed regarding anxiety…
between these nuances that separate:

– the pure and simple loss of the subject in the night of subjective indeterminacy,

– and something entirely different, which is already an alert, an erection—if we may say so—of the subject in the face of danger, and which FREUD articulates as such in Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety. There, FREUD introduces an even more astonishing distinction, as it is so subtle, so phenomenological, that it is not easily translated into French:
the distinction between abwarten, which I would attempt to translate as “to endure,” “to bear it,” “to wait passively,” and erwarten, which means “to expect,” “to anticipate.”

It is within this register, this range, that the accentuated affect in the sadistic fantasy is situated, insofar as it is attached to the other, to the partner, to the one who stands opposite—here, the small a. Ultimately, where is the subject who, in this situation, is prey to something precisely lacking in him to know where he stands?

It would be easy to say that he is between the two. I will go further: I will say that, in the end, the subject is so deeply, truly between the two that if there is something here with which he identifies or which he exemplifies in a paradigmatic way, it is the role of that which strikes—it is the role of the instrument.

It is the instrument [Φ] with which he is, in the end, identified here, since the instrument reveals to us…
and always to our amazement, and always as a profound reason for surprise—unless we refuse to see it…
that it frequently intervenes as the central figure in what we try to articulate about the imaginary structure of desire.

And it is precisely this that is the most paradoxical, the most alerting for us: that, ultimately, it is under this signifier…
here entirely revealed in its nature as a signifier…
that the subject comes to abolish himself, inasmuch as he seizes himself, in this moment, in his essential being, if it is true that, with SPINOZA, we can say that this essential being is his desire.

Indeed, it is at this same crossroads that we are led each time we encounter the problematics of sexuality. If the pivotal point from which we started two years ago—precisely the phallic phase in women—is constituted by this relay point, to which JONES always returns in his discussions, from which he departs, elaborates, and refines his thoughts, then JONES’s text on this subject holds the value of an analytical elaboration. The central point is this relationship between hatred of the mother and desire for the phallus; this is where FREUD started.

It is around this that FREUD situates the truly fundamental, genetic character of the phallic demand at the culmination of the Oedipus complex in boys and at the entrance to the Oedipus complex in women. This is the point of connection: hatred of the mother, desire for the phallus, which is the precise meaning of Penisneid.

JONES, rightly, highlights the ambiguities encountered whenever we use this concept. If it is the desire to have a penis in relation to another—in other words, a rivalry—then it must nonetheless present itself in an ambiguous manner, showing us that its meaning must be sought beyond this point. The desire for the phallus means desire mediated by the mediating-phallus, the essential role the phallus plays in mediating desire.

This leads us to posit…
to introduce what we will later develop in our analysis of the construction of fantasy at this crossroads…
that the problem, in the end, is to understand how the relationship of the phallic signifier can be sustained within the imaginary experience, insofar as it is profoundly structured by the narcissistic forms that regulate the subject’s relations with their counterpart as such.

It is between $, the speaking subject, and (a), meaning this other to whom the subject speaks within himself.
(a) is, therefore, what we have identified today.

It is the imaginary other; it is what the subject holds within himself as “drive,” in the sense where the term “drive” is placed in quotation marks—not yet the drive elaborated and taken into the dialectic of signification, but the drive in its primitive state, where it represents this or that manifestation of need in the subject.

The image of the other, namely that through which, by means of the specular reflection of the subject, one situates their needs, is, on the horizon, something else: what I initially referred to as the first identification with the other, in the radical sense—the identification with the marks of the other, namely the signifier, the great I on a.

I will present a diagram that will be familiar to those who attended the first year of my seminar, where we discussed narcissism. I introduced the diagram of the parabolic mirror, through which the image of a hidden flower—whether illuminated from below or from the base—can appear on a surface, in a vase. Thanks to the property of spherical rays, the image projects itself here as a real image, creating for a moment the illusion that the vase contains this flower.

This might seem mysterious at first—the idea of needing a small screen here to receive this image in space—but it is not. I pointed out that this illusion, namely the sight of this real image standing in the air, can only be perceived from a certain spatial field, determined precisely by the diameter of the spherical mirror and its relation to the mirror’s center. That is to say, if the mirror is narrow, one must, of course, position themselves in a field where the rays reflected from the mirror converge at its center and, consequently, within a certain zone of expansion in space, to see the image.

The trick in my explanation at the time was this: if someone wishes to see this imaginary image appear—inside the pot, or slightly to the side, no matter where—it must appear somewhere in space where a real object already exists. If the observer is located there, they can use a flat mirror.

If the observer is symmetrically positioned relative to the mirror, the virtual position of the one in front of the mirror will, in the mirror’s inclination, situate itself within the cone of visibility of the image being produced here. This means that the observer will see the image of the flower precisely in this flat mirror, at the symmetrical point.

In other words, what occurs is this: the light ray reflected toward the observer is strictly symmetrical to the visual reflection of what is happening on the other side. It is because the subject, virtually, has taken the place of what is on the other side of the mirror that they will see, in this mirror, the vase—which is what one would expect, given their position—and, simultaneously, the real image, produced in a location they cannot directly perceive.

The interplay between the various imaginary elements and the symbolic identification elements of the subject can, in some ways, be illustrated by this optical device. This approach, I believe, is not entirely unconventional, as FREUD himself formulated it in The Interpretation of Dreams. He proposed somewhere a diagram of successive lenses through which the progressive passage from the unconscious to the preconscious is refracted, seeking analogous references—specifically optical ones.

These references effectively represent something in the fantasy that attempts to find its place in the symbolic. Thus, S is more than an eye; it is merely a metaphor. If S signifies an attempt to join its place in the symbolic, it does so in a specular manner, relative to the Other, here the great A. This mirror is purely symbolic; it is not the physical mirror in front of which the little child moves.

This means that, in a certain reflection carried out with the help of words in the initial learning of language, the subject learns to adjust, somewhere and at the proper distance, the marks where they identify themselves—namely, something that corresponds to the other side, reflecting their early identifications of the ego.

And within this…
insofar as something preformed, open to fragmentation, is already present, but enters this game of fragmentation only insofar as the symbolic exists and opens the field to it…
it is within this framework that the imaginary relation in which the subject becomes ensnared will develop. I emphasize that in the erotic relationship with the other—however complete or advanced one might imagine it—there will always remain a point of reduction. This can be understood as extrapolations from the schematic essence of the erotic relationship between subjects.

There is a transformation of this primary relationship between a and a′, i(a), of this fundamentally specular relationship that governs the subject’s relations with the other. This transforms, and there is a division between, on the one hand, the collection of fragmented elements of the body, and, on the other hand, that which we encounter insofar as we are the marionette, and insofar as our partner is the marionette.

But the marionette lacks only one thing: the phallus. The phallus is occupied elsewhere, in its signifying function. That is why there is always, I do not say within the […] that always oppose each other, but that can always be rediscovered at any moment in the […] interpretative dimension of the situation. The subject, insofar as they identify with the phallus in relation to the other, fragments themselves in the presence of something that is the phallus.

To clarify this further, I will say that between a man and a woman, I ask you to consider this: in their relationship, even in the most loving one, insofar as desire arises […], desire is situated beyond the amorous relationship from the man’s perspective.

By this, I mean insofar as the woman symbolizes the phallus, and the man finds in her the complement to his being—this is, so to speak, the ideal form. It is precisely to the extent that the man, in love, is genuinely alienated by this phallus—the object of his desire that, in the erotic act, reduces the woman to being an imaginary object—that this form of desire is realized. This is precisely why, within even the deepest and most intimate amorous relationship, this duplicity of the object remains—a point I have emphasized repeatedly regarding the so-called genital relationship.

Returning to the idea that if the amorous relationship is fulfilled here, it is insofar as the other gives what they do not have, which is the very definition of love.

On the other side, the relationship of the woman to the man, which everyone is inclined to believe is much more monogamous, nonetheless presents the same ambiguity. The only difference is that what the woman finds in the man is the real phallus, and thus her desire finds, as always, its satisfaction there.

Indeed, she finds herself in a position to perceive in it a satisfying relationship of enjoyment. However, it is precisely to the extent that the satisfaction of desire occurs on the real plane that what the woman truly loves, and not desires, is that being who is beyond the encounter of desire. This being is precisely the other, namely the man, insofar as he is deprived of the phallus, insofar as by his very nature as a complete, speaking being, he is castrated.