🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

There is something instructive, I would not say solely in errors, but especially in errors or in wanderings, if you prefer. You can see that I often use hesitations themselves, even dead ends, that manifest within analytic theory, as inherently revealing a structure of reality with which we are dealing.

In this regard, it is clear that there is something interesting, remarkable, and significant for us in works that are not so old, as, for example, the one to which I will refer, from 1956: the July-October issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Volume XXXVII.

It is an article, I believe, authored by some of our Parisian colleagues. I will not mention their names since it is not their personal position that is being targeted here. It is an effort to refine the meaning of perversion. And it is clear that in this article—extremely curiously—reserved in its conclusions, it emerges only with this formally articulated conclusion:

– “There is, therefore, no specific unconscious content in sexual perversions since the same findings can be recognized in cases of neuroses and psychoses.”

There is something quite striking here that the entire article illustrates, though not in an entirely convincing way, because, without even needing to take a significant step back, one notices that the entire article starts with a confusion that is consistently maintained between “perverse fantasy” and “perversion.” The fact that there are conscious and unconscious fantasies that overlap, and that fantasies manifest with an appearance of overlapping in neuroses and perversions, leads to the astonishingly facile conclusion that there is no fundamental difference, from the perspective of the unconscious, between neurosis and perversion!

This is one of the most astonishing points, where certain reflections, themselves presented without much caution, quite free from analytic tradition, appear as a sort of revision of values and principles. The only conclusion ultimately reached is that perversion involves an abnormal relationship that becomes eroticized. It is not, therefore, a matter of a relationship to the object but rather a valorization of a relationship […] that, as such, is erotic. Yet, upon even a slightly reasonable reexamination, upon rereading, it becomes evident that this cannot genuinely appear as anything other than some form of “dormitive virtue.” It corresponds to the object; that it is eroticized is beyond doubt!

In fact, it is precisely this question of the relationship between fantasy and perversion that we are led to address today, following what we approached last time, namely, we began to outline the most general terms of the relationship between fantasy and neurosis.

A brief historical note. What happened in analysis—and it is important to recall here, and I would say, in light of our progress, it can be approached and grasped more rigorously—is essentially the following: very shortly after articulating the functions of the unconscious—specifically regarding hysteria, neuroses, and dreams—FREUD was led to posit the presence in the unconscious of what he called “polymorphously perverse tendencies,” polymorph perverse Anlage (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905).

It is from there—and it remained there for a certain time—though this is now greatly surpassed. What seems to have been overlooked is articulating that what is at issue—this notion of “polymorphously perverse tendencies”—is nothing other than this: he discovered the structure of unconscious fantasies. The structure of unconscious fantasies resembled the relational mode that unfolds, is displayed openly, and is demonstrated in perversions. Thus, the notion of the “polymorphously perverse tendency” in the unconscious was initially posited.

Ultimately—this can be said—it arose from the fact that the form of these unconscious fantasies overlaps with what? With part of the perversion, with what presents itself to us in perversion under the following aspect, which we can attempt to articulate, namely, something that occupies the imaginative field: desire, that which constitutes the desire of the pervert.

And this something that, in essence, the pervert stages, this something as it presents itself in its evident clinical aspect, is something that, for us—with what we know and the connection we have established between these fantasies and the subject’s history, where we manage to link it, if you will, to this history—this fantasy of the pervert ultimately appears as:

– something that could be called a sequence, by which I mean something akin to what one might refer to in a movie, in a cinematic film—a sequence cut from the development of the drama,

– something akin to what appears under the term—I am not certain of the term—“rush”: that element which, in trailers, appears on the screen as those few illuminated images designed to excite our appetite to return the following week to see the film itself, as thus announced.

What makes these images so alluring indeed lies in their disconnection from the chain, their rupture from the theme. And it is precisely something of this order that we are dealing with in the fantasy of the pervert. This, we know to the extent that analysis has taught us to see it.

It is indeed something that, to a certain degree, when replaced in its context, in its dramatic continuity—that of the subject’s past—can, to varying degrees and even at the cost of some modifications, retouches, or reversals, regain its place and its meaning.

Furthermore, this relationship that the pervert’s fantasy has with their desire is not for nothing. I mean to say: it lies within the framework of what we have already identified in our formulation as the value, the position of desire in relation to the subject. That is, this beyond-the-namable, this beyond-the-subject in which desire is situated.

This, I say retrospectively and in passing, explains the unique quality that fantasy assumes when it is confessed, whether or not it is the fantasy of the pervert. Namely, this kind of embarrassment that must be acknowledged—at its peak—the very aspect that often keeps subjects from revealing it for a long time. This ridiculous facet can only be explained or understood if we have already discerned the relationships we have established between desire in its proper position and the field or domain of comedy. This is merely a reminder.

Having recalled this position, this function of fantasy, especially regarding the pervert, and the problems it immediately raises:

• understanding what their true nature was,
• whether it was of a radical, natural kind,
• whether this nature of perverse fantasy was a terminal aspect,
• or whether it should be understood as something just as complex, just as elaborated—in short, just as significant as the neurotic symptom.

This is why an entire body of work, integrated into the problem of perversity, has played an essential role in the development of what is called “object relations” or the relationship to the object, to be defined in an evolutionary, genetic manner: as governing the stages, the phases of the subject’s development—not simply as “moments” of the subject’s Eros […], thus sexual, erogenous phases of the subject—but as modes of a relationship to the world that each of these phases defines. It is from there that developments were made—by ABRAHAM, FERENCZI, and others; I do not need to remind you of their initiators here—that resulted in these so-called “correlative phases” tables, described as:

• on the one hand, “reservoirs of tendencies,”
• and on the other, “libidinal forms of the ego.”

In this libidinal form, this structure of the ego seemed to respond to and specify a type of special relationship to reality. You know what this kind of development has brought in terms of clarity and even enrichment on the one hand, and the problems it has raised on the other. It is enough to refer to even the slightest of works—at the very least, concrete works attempting to articulate, in relation to a specific case, a specific form—to find the correspondences, always somewhat theoretically established, to realize that the problem itself is sometimes, in its unfolding, suggestive of something—a missing assessment […] that it lacks.

I remind you, therefore, that it is this—to this term “investigation of the overall object relation”—that we refer. It is this that I designate when it concerns, for instance, opposition as such between “partial object” and “total object,” which appears in an elaborated form that we, in our view, find inappropriate.

In more recent developments, such as the famous notion of “distance to the object,” so dominant in certain works and technical rules that I have often referenced here, this notion of “distance to the object,” as a particular French author (M. Bouvet) seeks to make decisive in the relationship to obsessive neurosis.

As if it were not evident—and far more evident, for example—that this notion of “distance” plays a decisive role when one attempts to articulate certain perverse positions, such as fetishism, where the distance of an object is far more visibly manifested through the very phenomenology of fetishism.

Many other forms can obviously be articulated in this sense, and the first truth we could bring to bear here is that this notion of “distance” is so essential that, after all, perhaps it is ineliminable as such from desire itself. I mean necessary for the maintenance, support, and safeguarding of the very dimension of desire.

Indeed, it suffices to consider that if something could finally respond to the myth of a relationship to the object without distance, it is difficult to see how what is properly called desire could be sustained. There is something here that, I say, has a properly mythological form, that of a kind of agreement.

I would say that there are two sides, two mirages, two appearances of agreement:

• I would say “animal” on one side,
• and on the other side, one could just as well say “mystical,” could one not?

… with the object, which is indeed a residue within analytic elaboration of something that does not at all coincide with experiential data.

Similarly, what is indicated in analytic technique as needing to correct or rectify this so-called “poorly maintained distance to the object” of the obsessive—everyone knows most clearly that this is indicated as something to be overcome hic et nunc in the analytic relationship, and this through an ideal or even idealizing identification with the analyst, who is considered on this occasion not as the object but as the prototype of a satisfying relationship to the object!

We will need to return to what exactly such an ideal might correspond to when it is realized in analysis. I have already touched on this, but perhaps we will need to situate and articulate it differently later on.

Indeed, these issues have been addressed much more rigorously and seriously, always along the same lines, in other contexts and by other groups. As I have already indicated to you here, I will place Edward GLOVER’s articulations at the forefront. I remind you of the significance of the article I have already cited, in Volume XIV of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, October 1933, titled The Relation of the Formation of Perversion to the Development of the Sense of Reality. [Cf. 13-05]

GLOVER approaches these perversions in his pursuit of:

• a genetic elaboration of the relationships of the subject to this world, to the surrounding reality,
• and an evolution that must be closely examined, both through the reconstruction provided by the analysis of adults and the direct observation of children’s behavior, as closely as possible, within a perspective renewed by analysis.

GLOVER tries to situate these perversions somewhere along a chain. He has already established a chain marked by dates, so to speak, representing the insertion of the various psychic anomalies dealt with in analysis. This led him to construct a series, the order of which, as usual, lends itself to critique. Without dwelling on it, the series is constituted by the primitive, primordial character of psychotic disturbances, specifically paranoid disturbances, followed by the various forms of neurosis that articulate and are situated in a progressive order, moving from earlier to later stages, beginning with obsessive neurosis, which thus lies exactly at the boundary with paranoid forms.

It is for this reason that he has located…
somewhere within the interval, in a previous article from Volume XIII, July 1932, Part 3, pages 298–328 of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, titled On the Aetiology of Drug-Addiction—what we call toxicomania—
…the relationship between paranoid forms and neuroses, seeking to situate the function of perversions, identifying their stage, timing, and mode of the subject’s relationship to reality.

Since the paranoid form is linked to entirely primitive mechanisms of projection and introjection, it is at this point—let us state it clearly—that he works entirely on the same plane as, and is expressly in agreement with, though explicitly formulated, Melanie KLEIN. You know that he was, in another respect, a brilliant opponent of hers.

It is on this plane that he adheres to Klein’s elaboration, and it is to the extent that a mode of object relation…
very specific to this paranoid-type stage, considered primitive, exists…
that he situates, elaborates, articulates, and understands the function of drug addiction or toxicomania.

This refers to the passage I read to you a few sessions ago, where, in a very brilliant metaphorical style and in a highly instructive manner, GLOVER does not hesitate to compare the primitive world of the child to something that partakes of:

• “a slaughterhouse, a public lavatory under bombardment, and a morgue combined” [p. 23].

To this, the transformation of this initial, inaugural spectacle of life brings a more benign organization: the succession at this stage of a “pharmacy” with its reserves of objects, some beneficial, others harmful. [Cf. 13-05-59]

This is articulated in the clearest manner and is instructive insofar as it indicates the direction of the research into the function of fantasy, in the direction of its operation as structural, as an organizer of the subject’s discovery and construction of reality. On this, there is indeed no difference between GLOVER and Melanie KLEIN.

Melanie KLEIN articulates this specifically: that ultimately, objects are successively conquered by the child insofar as…
this is articulated in her article Symbol Formation and the Ego…
…as objects become less immediately tied to the child’s needs, they are apprehended and burdened with the anxiety linked to their use in aggressive, sadistic, fundamental relationships, which are those of the child’s initial interactions with their environment as a consequence of frustration.

It is to the extent that the subject shifts their interest to more benign objects, which in turn will carry the same anxiety, that the expansion of the child’s world is conceived as such. Observe what this represents. It represents the notion that we must seek in a mechanism, ultimately, that we might call counter-phobic. Namely, it is to the extent that objects initially and primitively serve a counter-phobic function, and that the phobic object, so to speak, is sought elsewhere. Through a progressive extension of the world of objects in a counter-phobic dialectic, this constitutes the very mechanism of the conquest of reality.

Whether or not this corresponds to clinical reality is a question that does not directly fall within the scope of our discussion here. I believe that directly in the clinic, many things may counter this idea; there is a unilateralization, a partialization of a mechanism that undoubtedly interacts with the conquest of reality but does not, strictly speaking, constitute it.

But it is not our purpose here to critique Melanie KLEIN’s theory, since we are bringing it into consideration in connection with something entirely different—a function, which is desire.

And it is precisely this point that immediately reveals its consequences. That is to say, GLOVER arrives at a paradox which, assuredly, seems more instructive for him than for us, as it hardly appears surprising.

He concludes that if he tries to concretely situate the various perversions in relation to his dialectic, to the mechanism as he attempts to elaborate, reconstruct, and reintegrate it into the notion of a regular development of the ego—inasmuch as this would parallel the modifications of the libido—it becomes possible, so to speak, to inscribe the destiny and structuring of the subject in terms of pure individual experience of the conquest of reality. This is, indeed, the core of the matter.

The difference between the theory I present to you regarding phobias, for instance, and what you will find in certain recent French authors—
insofar as they attempt to indicate the genesis of phobia within structural forms of childhood experience (for example, the way a child manages their relationships with those around them, moving from light to darkness)—
is that they propose a purely experimental genesis, a fear-based experience from which the possibility of phobia is engendered and deduced.

The difference between this position and the one I teach you is typically this: to assert that there is no correct deduction of phobia except by acknowledging the function, the necessity as such, of a signifier function. This presupposes a specific dimension that is not about the subject’s relationship with their surroundings, nor about any reality, except the reality and dimension of language itself, as the subject must position themselves as a subject in discourse and manifest themselves as a being, which is a different matter.

There is something striking in the evaluation of these phobias, even by someone as perceptive as GLOVER. He attempts to explain the genesis and stabilization of a phobia. When he declares:

– “It is assuredly more advantageous to have a phobia of tigers when one lives as a child in the streets of London than to have the same phobia if one lived in the middle of the Indian jungle.” [p. 21]

One might wonder whether it could not be retorted that, in fact, this is not the framework in which the problem is posed. After all, one might even reverse his proposition and say that a phobia of tigers in the Indian jungle is, on the contrary, the most advantageous for adapting the child to real adaptation.

However, it is undoubtedly burdensome to suffer from a phobia of tigers, given what we know of its correlates. Namely, that the phobia experienced by the child, or even by the more advanced subject in their development, at the moment they are gripped by a phobia, is assuredly one of the most restrictive behaviors and one entirely disconnected from reality.

In fact, something arises here that poses GLOVER’s problem in these terms: realizing that the greatest diversity of distortions of reality is realized in perversions. He concludes that perversion can only be situated within a genetic perspective by fragmenting it and interpolating it into all the supposed or presupposed stages of development. This requires acknowledging the existence of very archaic perversions—
more or less contemporaneous with the paranoid stage, or even the depressive stage—
as well as other perversions situated at much more advanced phases, not only phallic but properly speaking Oedipal or even genital stages of development.

This does not appear to him to be an objection for the following reason: he ultimately provides a definition of perversion as follows: perversion, for him—
and he cannot arrive at any other conclusion from his starting perspective—
is a form of “reality testing.”

According to GLOVER, it is to the extent that something in “reality testing” fails or does not succeed that perversion comes to cover this “hole,” this “gap,” by a particular mode of apprehending reality as such. In this instance, reality is a psychic reality, a reality both projected and introjected.

Thus, properly speaking, perversion functions as a means of maintaining or preserving a reality that would otherwise be threatened as a whole. In this sense, perversion serves, so to speak, as a “patch,” in the sense of mending a fabric, or as a keystone—a discharge, a weak point, and simultaneously a point of threat that compromises the equilibrium of the subject’s overall reality.

In short, it is only, unequivocally, as a form of salvation in relation to a presumed threat of psychosis that perversion is conceived by Edward GLOVER. This presents a perspective. Perhaps certain observations may effectively seem to illustrate it, but many elements compel us to distance ourselves from it.

Beyond this: it seems entirely paradoxical to make perversion into something with this economic role—
an economic role contradicted by many elements—
as it certainly does not suggest that the instability of the pervert’s structure is something that strikes us clinically or in analytic experience, at least not at first glance!

To illustrate something here, I will not abandon this Kleinian dialectic without pointing out how it intersects with and initiates the problem we are posing.

Indeed, if we consider what is involved in the Kleinian dialectic—namely, the two stages she distinguishes between: the paranoid phase and then the depressive phase, which, as you know, is characterized, in relation to the former, by the subject’s relationship to their primary and prevailing object, the mother, as a whole.

Previously, the subject interacts with disjointed elements. Then comes the splitting into good and bad objects, with all that this phase of projection and introjection establishes within the subject. This is how the paranoid barrier is characterized. Finally, what can we say from our perspective? Let us attempt to understand, from the perspective in which we articulate it ourselves, what is involved in this process, this entirely inaugural process situated at the beginning of the subject’s life. The reality of the first apprehensions of the object, as shown by Melanie KLEIN, originates in the fact that, beyond whether the object is good or bad, beneficial or frustrating, it is significant.

For the notion, the distinction, if the opposition is strict—
and I would say without nuances, without transitions, without any recognition that it is the same object (e.g., the mother) that can be both good and bad at different times—
here, there is not an experience in the young subject, nor any transitional habits it might involve. Instead, there are stark oppositions, a transition from the object as such to a function of significant oppositions, which forms the basis of the entire Kleinian dialectic. It seems to me that too little attention is paid to the fact that, however well-founded, this is entirely opposed to, at the opposite edge, at the opposite pole of, what our experience highlights. Namely, the importance of living communication, equally essential at the start for development, which expresses itself and manifests in the dimension of maternal care.

There is something here of a different register, contemporary but not to be conflated. What Melanie KLEIN brings us is a sort of primitive algebra, which, indeed, completely aligns with what we try to emphasize here under the name “function of the signifier.” These are the primary, primitive forms of this function of the signifier as such, which, rightly or wrongly—
whether actually present at that time or merely Rück-Phantasie (“retroactive fantasy”)—
we must simply acknowledge as described by Melanie KLEIN.

From there, what value does this transitional phase acquire between the paranoid period—with its order of good objects internalized (as she says, internalized) by the subject—and bad objects that are rejected? What happens? How can we describe what occurs from the moment the notion of the subject as a whole intervenes, which is essential for the subject to consider themselves as having an inside and an outside?

Ultimately, it is only from this point that the processes of internalization and externalization, introjection, and projection—which Melanie KLEIN sees as decisive for the structuring of the primitive animal—can be conceived. With the points of reference we use, we see that what is at stake is something that repositions this relationship, this splitting—as she herself called it—of objects into good and bad, in relation to this other register of the subject’s inside and outside.

This is something that, I believe, we can, without excessively forcing Kleinian perspectives, relate to the moment described as the mirror stage. It is to the extent that the image of the other gives the subject this sense of the other’s unity as such that the division of inside and outside can be established. It is against this division that good and bad objects are reclassified:

• the good insofar as they must come inside,
• the bad insofar as they must remain outside.

Well, what becomes most clearly defined here—because it is imposed by experience—is the same as what we might say in our own discourse. Namely, that the discourse that actually organizes the world of objects, I would say according to the being of the subject from the start, goes beyond the discourse where the subject recognizes themselves in the narcissistic trial, the so-called mirror stage. This is the stage where:

• the subject recognizes themselves as mastery and as a unique “I,”
• where they recognize themselves in a narcissistic identification between an image and the other,
• where they recognize themselves as the mastery of an ego.

It is to the extent that something defines the subject in a first identification—
in what is expressed here at the level of the first identification with the mother,
as the object of the first identification with the mother’s symbols—
that this retains for the subject an assimilative value exceeding what they can internalize. This is because this internalization is defined by their initial experiences of mastery and presence, to the extent that they are the i of the other (i(a)), the typical and ideal i of the young peer, with whom the subject most clearly conducts their experiments in mastery.

It is to the extent that the two experiences do not overlap—
and I do not say that the entire experience of development is ordered around this—
that we must necessarily acknowledge this to understand what Melanie KLEIN describes. Indeed, what defines this difference, this field x where i(a) both belongs to the subject and does not belong to the subject, is what?

It is this object, the paradox of which, given Melanie KLEIN’s premises, does not seem to be questioned. This is what she calls the “bad internal object.”

The bad internal object is presented to us from the outset in the Kleinian dialectic as the most manifestly problematic object. In the sense that, seen from the outside, so to speak—where the subject is not a subject but must be taken as a real being—we can ask ourselves: this bad object, with which the subject is allegedly identified, does the subject ultimately identify with it or not?

Conversely, from the inside, from the perspective of the subject’s mastery of their first exercises—standing, asserting themselves, containing themselves—we must ask whether the subject possesses this bad object whose role we know to be absolutely decisive from this point onward. The question that arises is: does the subject have it or not?

For if we have defined good and bad objects as determining the structuring process by which:

• the subject internalizes good objects, making them primitively part of themselves,
• and rejects bad objects as that which is not them, all the rest,

then the paradox of the internalized bad object comes to the forefront.

What does this [zone?] of the first object mean insofar as the subject internalizes it, makes it their own, while simultaneously, as a potentially bad object, they deny it? It is clear that the subsequent function of prohibition is precisely what holds the delineating value by which the bad object ceases to present itself as a kind of permanent enigma, an anxiety-provoking enigma concerning the subject’s being.

Prohibition is precisely what introduces this essential delineation within the problematic function of the bad object. Its role as a prohibition lies in this: if the bad object exists as such, the subject does not possess it. Insofar as the subject identifies with it—it is forbidden to possess it. The French euphony between the subjunctive of the verb avoir (to have) and the indicative of the verb être (to be) is worth utilizing. In other words:

• insofar as the subject is it, they do not have it,
• insofar as they have it, they are not it.

In other words, at the level of the bad object, the subject experiences, so to speak, the servitude of their mastery.

The true master…
as everyone knows, lies beyond all faces, somewhere in language, though not precisely located within it…
delegates to the subject a limited use of the bad object as such. This is an object not situated in relation to demand, an object that cannot be requested. Indeed, this is where the significance of our data begins.

Before continuing, let me point out something striking in the specific cases Melanie KLEIN presents to us. It is precisely because the child is evidently in this deadlock, in this field of the unaskable as such, that we encounter the child so uniquely inhibited in her work, as presented in the article The Development of the Ego and Its Relation to Symbol Formation [op. cit.].

Is it not clear that what immediately emerges when she begins speaking to this child is something that crystallizes at once into a demand—a panic demand: “Nurse coming?”, “Is the nurse coming?”

And immediately afterward…
to the extent that the child allows themselves to reconnect with objects from which, at the start of the experience, they appear strikingly separated…
this demand becomes something Klein notes as a very surprising, decisive fact.

For, as you may recall, it is in the exercise of a sort of small cutting, a tearing-away with scissors—
performed by a child who is far from clumsy, as they use various tools such as door handles—
that this child, who had never managed to hold scissors before, now grasps them to detach—and successfully so—a small piece of coal from something not without significance. This coal is a part of the chain of a toy train, specifically the tender, which they managed to engage the child with.

Without delving into the curious wordplay or symbolism surrounding this tender—
both the English tender and its homophone connections—
we find the child isolating, defining, and situating themselves in this small piece detached from the chain of signification.

It is within this remnant, this minuscule pile, this embryonic object, appearing here only as a small fragment—a very small piece—that we witness the same fragment provoke the child’s “panic sympathy” when they later see pencil shavings on Melanie KLEIN’s chest. For the first time, the child is moved in the presence of this other, exclaiming, “Poor Mrs. Klein!” [p. 272].

Desire, therefore, is not demand. This first intuition, experienced at every moment and recalling us to the original conditions, must not hinder attention. A subject approaches us. Why? What do they demand? In principle, satisfaction and well-being. Except that not all satisfaction brings them well-being—far from it!

What do we offer in response? To organize the subject’s story—like the story of analysis, like the story of technique—in the direction of something that must respond to this demand for satisfaction. By what means? By attempting to respond to the subject’s demand for satisfaction through a reduction of their desires to their needs.

But is there not a paradox here, given that all our experience, one might say, is grounded in a dimension equally evident to both the subject and ourselves? To us, because everything we articulate boils down to what I am about to say. And to the subject, because ultimately, the subject knows this well when they come to us.

I have been told that someone is working on an important thesis on the social significance of psychoanalysis, and this leads me to believe that it will contain extremely rich and well-pursued insights and experiences. I dare to hope so because I believe that, in fact, the social representation of psychoanalysis is far less distorted within the community at large than one might imagine. What will emerge most clearly from this, I hope, is something that is fundamentally at the core of, or indeed the principle behind, what a subject implies before us through their very presence. What is it?

It is that, within the data of their demand, there is the fact that they do not trust their desire. The common factor before which subjects approach us is this: they do not trust their desire. Even if, as a result of our methods, they engage with us in referencing their needs, their desires, or even their sublimation along the elevated paths of love, it remains that the essential characteristic of desire, from the outset, is that there is something that, as such, cannot be demanded. It is about this that the question arises, and it is this that properly defines the field and dimension of desire.

You know—when introducing this division, this dialectic of desire—what I did at a very specific date, now two and a half years ago. Where did I begin? With what FREUD says about the Oedipus complex in women. Is it not clear, based on what I have just articulated, that at the level of analytic experience, at the level of unconscious experience, we must extract this: what is it that the woman demands at the outset, through which, as FREUD tells us, she enters the Oedipus complex?

It is not to have satisfaction, but to have what she does not have as such. This concerns, as you know, the phallus. This is nothing other than the wellspring of all the problems that arise when trying to reduce the dialectic of desire maturation in women to something natural.

Whether or not we succeed in this reduction, what we must contend with is an experiential fact: that the little girl, at a certain point in her development—
after all, it matters little to us whether this is a primary or secondary process; it is a striking and irreducible process—
what she demands to have, namely the phallus, is to have it at that critical developmental moment highlighted by FREUD: to have it in the place where she would have it if she were a man. This is indeed the issue, and there is no ambiguity here.

And the entire process that unfolds implies that, in fact, even when she eventually attains it—
because women are in a very privileged position compared to men—
this phallus, which is a signifier, and I emphasize, a signifier, she can have it in reality. This is even what constitutes her advantage and the relative simplicity of her affective problems compared to those of men.

However, we must not let this relative simplicity blind us, because although she can have this phallus in reality, it remains that due to its initial introduction into her dialectic, into her development, as a signifier, she will always lack it at a certain level of her experience. I always reserve the limit possibility of perfect union with a being—that is, something that completely unites the beloved with their organ in an embrace.

But what constitutes the test of our experience and the very difficulties we encounter in the sexual realm lies precisely here: that this ideal moment—
in a way poetic, even apocalyptic, of perfect sexual union—
is located only at the limit. What the woman actually encounters in the common test of experience, even when she achieves her femininity, is the phallic object, always as something separate.

It is precisely because she encounters it as such, under this register, that her actions and influence can be perceived by the man as castrating. Moreover, this remains unconscious for her until analysis. Similarly, unconscious to her is this: that the phallus she does not have, she symbolically is, insofar as she is the object of the other’s desire. But she is no more aware of one than the other. This specific position of the woman holds value insofar as it is unconscious to her, which is to say, insofar as it only holds value for the other, for the partner.

Nevertheless, the singular formula that resolves her relationship to the phallus is, paradoxically, that in the unconscious she both is it and has it. This is one of the most peculiar effects of the relationship to discourse: that in this position of the ideal woman, of the woman in her fantasized world, in the unconscious she both is it and has it—at best—except that she does not know it, except through her desire.

And from this desire of hers arises—this will become clearer as I proceed—a striking similarity between her formula, if I may call it that, her trans-subjective formula, her unconscious formula, and that of the pervert.

If everything we have discovered about the unconscious economy of women holds in the symbolic equivalences of the phallus with all the objects that can separate from her—
including, first and foremost, the most natural object to separate from her, namely her “infantile product”—
if this is what she situates within a series of phallic equivalences—
and here I merely reiterate the very test of analytic doctrine—
we will find ourselves confronted with this: that for her, most naturally, these natural objects ultimately fulfill the function of the object of desire, as they are objects from which separation occurs.

And this, I believe, explains the lesser frequency of perversion in women. It is because, inscribed within the cultural context—there is no question of her existing outside it—her natural satisfactions naturally, if I may say so, situate themselves within the dialectic of separation as such, in the dialectic of objects signifying desire.

This is something that psychoanalytic authors—more than one—have expressed quite clearly, and in a way that will likely seem far more concrete than what I have just said. They suggest that the reason there are fewer perversions in women than in men is that women generally satisfy their perverse inclinations in their relationships with their children. This explains, not that “your daughter is mute,” but rather why there are some children we, as analysts, have to concern ourselves with. As you can see, we return to fundamental truths, but it is not useless to revisit them through a correct and clear path.

I will take this opportunity to address something intended, at least for the male portion of my audience, to temper any surprise—or even impatience—they might feel about one of the peculiar properties of their relationships with their opposite-sex partners. I am referring to what is commonly called jealousy. As usual, the analyst who has brought so much clarity has also brought an equal amount of obscurity:

– “No progress,” said NESTROY, so appreciated by FREUD, “is half as great as one imagines.”

The problem of jealousy, especially feminine jealousy, has been obscured in psychoanalysis by being conflated with the very different form of masculine jealousy.

Feminine jealousy, which distinctly marks the differences in the style of love between the two sexes, is truly something, I believe, that can only be situated at its most radical point.

If you recall my small graph of demand, the subject’s relationship to the other interrogates this relation, striking the other with the degradation of signification to appear themselves as degraded in the presence of what is ultimately the residue of this division—something irreducible, unaskable, which is precisely the object of desire.

It is because, for the subject, insofar as they make themselves the object of love—here, the woman—she sees in this residue the most essential part of herself that she places such importance on the manifestation of desire. After all, it is entirely clear from experience that love and desire are two different things. We must speak plainly and say that one can deeply love one person while desiring another.

It is precisely because the woman occupies this particular position and knows very well the value of desire—that beyond all sublimations of love, desire has a relation to being:

• even in its most limited, most confined, most fetishistic, and, to put it bluntly, most foolish form,
• even in its ultimate form, where, in fantasy, the subject appears blinded, reduced to nothing more than a support and a sign—a sign of that residual significance in their relationship with the other.

It is nevertheless in this that the woman ultimately places the final proof that the desire is indeed directed at her. To love her, with all the tenderness and devotion imaginable, will still leave the fact that if a man desires another woman, she knows—even if what he loves is her shoe, the hem of her dress, or the makeup on her face—it is nevertheless in that direction that homage to being is rendered.

It is occasionally necessary to recall fundamental truths, and I hope you will excuse the slightly emphatic tone I have given to this digression. Now, let us see where things lead: namely, to this zone of the object where ambiguity arises.

What, then, is the function of the phallus as such? Already, it must appear to you as singularly outlined by what I have just said about the internal bad object. One can say that the paternal metaphor, as I have called it, introduces, through the phallus, a dissociation that precisely mirrors the general form—unsurprisingly—that I have described as that of prohibition. Namely:

• either the subject is not,
• or the subject has not.

Which means that if the subject is the phallus—
and this is immediately illustrated in its role as the object of the mother’s desire—
then they do not have it. That is, they have no right to use it, and this is the fundamental meaning of the so-called law of incest prohibition. Conversely, if they have it—that is, if they have achieved paternal identification—then one thing is certain: they are not the phallus.

This is what, at the most radical symbolic level, the introduction of the Oedipal dimension signifies. Everything elaborated on this subject will always return to this “either… or…” that introduces an order at the level of “the object that cannot be demanded.”

How, then, is the neurotic characterized? The neurotic, of course, uses this alternation. It is because they fully situate themselves at the level of the Oedipus complex, at the level of the Oedipal structure as such, that they employ it in a way I would call metonymic—and even, insofar as “they are not” is primary in relation to “they do not have,” in a regressive metonymy.

I mean that the neurotic is someone who employs the fundamental alternative in this metonymic form: for them, “not having it” is the form through which they assert themselves, and in a concealed way, “being it”—I mean the phallus.

They “do not have” the phallus in order to “be” it unconsciously, to avoid “having it” so that they can “be” it. This is the somewhat enigmatic “to be” on which I ended, I believe, our last discussion. It is another who has it, while they unconsciously “are” it. Observe carefully: the essence of neurosis lies in this—that in their function as desiring, the subject takes on a substitute.

Take the obsessive neurotic and look at what happens at the end of their complex maneuvers: it is not they who experience pleasure. Similarly, for the hysteric, it is not from her that one derives pleasure.

The imaginary substitution in question is precisely the substitution of the subject at the level where I teach you to situate it—that is, the S. It is the substitution of their ego, as such, for this subject S, concerning the desire at stake. It is to the extent that they substitute their ego for the subject that they introduce demand into the question of desire.

Because someone—not them, but their image—is substituted for them in the dialectic of desire, they ultimately can only demand, as experience repeatedly demonstrates, substitutes. What is characteristic of the neurotic’s experience, and what surfaces in their own feelings, is that everything they ask for, they ask for something else.

The continuation of this scene—where the imaginary, as you see, plays its role in what I have called the “regressive metonymy of the neurotic”—leads to another consequence, for in this domain, they cannot be stopped: the subject is substituted for themselves at the level of their desire and can only ask for substitutes while believing they are asking for what they desire.

And further still, experience shows that due to the form in question—namely, the ego as “the reflection of a reflection,” and the form of the other—the subject also substitutes themselves for the one from whom they are asking. For it is entirely clear that nowhere more than in the neurotic does this separate ego so readily take the place of that separate object, which I have designated as the original form of the object of desire.

The neurotic’s altruism, contrary to what is often said, is constant. And nothing is a more common path to the satisfactions they seek than what might be called “devotion to satisfying,” as long as they can, all the demands of the other—demands they are well aware perpetually fail to address desire. Or, put another way, blinding themselves in their devotion to the other, they mask their own dissatisfaction.

I believe these are not things that can be understood outside the perspective I am trying to articulate for you here. Ultimately, the formula $◊a for the neurotic transforms into something—if you will, tentatively and succinctly—of the identification of their unconscious being. This is why we assign it the same sign as the “barred S,” $, that is, the “barred phallus.” In the presence of an object, this becomes the most general form of an object of desire, which is none other than the other as it situates and finds itself there: Φ◊i(a).

We must now move on to perversion.

Well, it is late! I will therefore postpone the continuation of this discussion until next time. If I cannot progress more quickly, see this only as a reflection of the difficulty of the path we must navigate.