🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

By creating everything, what does the highest create? – Himself.
But what does he create before he creates everything? – Me.

“What was the Almighty doing at the moment he created creation? – Himself: self.
What existed before he created anything? – Me: myself.”
[See 15-06-1955]

Daniel VON CZEPKO [1605-1660]

This distich from Angelus Silesius* [lapsus] might reappear shortly. At least, I hope so, if I manage to lead you today to where I intend.

The principles of this teaching inherently reflect something of its meaning. What are we attempting to do here?
I do not claim to do better than what reading FREUD’s works could offer if you devote yourself to them, nor do I claim to replace that reading if you choose not to engage with it.

Indeed, be assured that you cannot fully grasp the meaning and scope of the form I try to impart to FREUD’s teachings here unless you refer to the texts themselves and confront the insights I offer with the issues posed by those texts. These texts can sometimes be challenging, marked by a problematic structure—a web of questions that, as you may have noticed (I hope you have read enough FREUD to see this), manifest in what can be called contradictions. These are organized contradictions, but contradictions nonetheless.

I say “contradictions” and not merely antinomies, noting that FREUD, in following his path and method, sometimes arrives at positions that appear contradictory even to himself, leading him to revisit certain stances. This does not imply he deemed those stances unjustified at the time they were held. In short, the entirety of FREUD’s thought process, unfinished and never formulated as a definitive or dogmatic edition, is what you must learn to apprehend for yourselves.

To facilitate this apprehension, I aim to communicate what I have gleaned from my reflection on FREUD’s works, enlightened by an experience that, at least in principle, was guided by them. I say “at least in principle” because, as you know, I often question here whether FREUD’s thought has always been properly understood and rigorously followed in the development of analytic technique.

Ultimately, everything I propose here points toward practical applications in a spirit of technique.

Naturally, if things are as they are, if I teach you that FREUD discovered in humanity the weight and axis of a subjectivity that transcends individual organization as a sum of personal experiences—even as a line of individual development—then that is what we shall also strive to realize here: a subjectivity.

If we understand it as I have attempted to define it before you, as a possible definition—a system organized by symbols that claim to encompass the totality of an experience, to animate it and give it meaning—then it is to the extent that you draw inspiration (and inspiration is indeed the word) from the directions and openings offered here. These concern how to comprehend our experience and practice so that something concrete may develop in action. This will not merely be directed but will properly extend a particular perspective I am trying to impart to you.

This is not always a straightforward operation. As in analysis, this kind of teaching confronts resistances, which invariably arise precisely where they must.

Analysis teaches us that resistances reside in the ego, in what corresponds to the ego, which I sometimes call the sum of prejudices inherent in all knowledge and in each of us individually. Here, it concerns something that includes our knowledge—that is, ultimately, what we believe we know, for knowing always, in some respect, involves believing we know.

This phenomenon, called resistance, is observable in experience when a new perspective is presented to you—a perspective that is decentered relative to your own experience. Already, in the mere act of attempting to regain equilibrium and the habitual center of your viewpoint, rather than opening yourselves to what this new perspective brings—its concurrence, complementarity, and its challenge to your most problematic notions, notions born of a different experience—you exhibit the very resistance I describe.

Let us take an example: one of you, for instance… Suppose—though I regret his absence today—that it were PERRIER who articulated or revisited the meaning of his intervention regarding what M. LÉVI-STRAUSS presented to us the other day. This concerned what we might term the relativization of family reality—its radical relativization. Valid from his perspective, it provided us, I hope, with an opportunity for openness and a chance to reassess what might otherwise seem overly captivating, immediate, or absorbing in a reality we must handle daily.

The companion on our journey being discussed raised the question—after all, before addressing all these questions about conventionalism and the symbolism of the family system—let us recall one thing: in the family, it is not only about the parents. There is something essential, involving everyone, namely that there are children.

From the child’s perspective, the reality of the family reestablishes itself within a framework that allows us, on any occasion, to lose ourselves in a highly disorienting relativism. It asserts that what we are dealing with is the child’s relationship with the parents, through which the child feels the need to grasp and is compelled to anchor themselves in relation to the parent group—father and mother—with all the implications this will have regarding the meaning of each of these two experiences.

To emphasize how much we continually have to struggle against this kind of false self-evidence in analytic experience—which is vividly captured here—I would simply say this stems from an experience that was not long in coming…

Ah, here he is, the one involved!

It concerns, PERRIER, your intervention to bring the family back to the solid reality of the child’s experience, which I demonstrated holds significant weight. I recall the point you made, emphasizing the center of what might be called our analytic experience, namely that every individual is a child. Consequently, the family inevitably derives from the relativism, conventionalism, and symbolism that underpin it—the system of exchange we highlighted from a non-analytic perspective.

I wanted to show how, regardless of your exact intentions at the time you made your point, this already demonstrates the mind’s tendency to center analytic experience within individual, psychological experience. I will now illustrate the difference in perspective by recounting something from the very next day during a session of what is called supervision. We encountered something along these lines:

A subject dreamed precisely of a child in a state of utter helplessness, lying on its back like a small overturned turtle, flailing its four limbs—a completely primitive state of an infant. He dreamed of this child.

For specific reasons, I was immediately led to tell the person reporting the dream:

“This child is the subject. There is no doubt.”

You will see later why I said this, and there was a second dream—after all, it wasn’t initially certain that the child represented the subject—which wonderfully illuminated the matter in every detail. So, a subject dreams of a child, an isolated image. I say to the person reporting this dream, “This child is the subject.” What follows is another dream, which confirms this imagery, presenting the subject. How does it confirm this? In the second dream, the dreamer is bathing in a sea with very specific characteristics.

To provide the immediate associative context—both imaginary and verbal—this sea is simultaneously the analyst’s couch, the cushions of the analyst’s car, and, of course, the sea itself. Furthermore, numbers appear on this sea, manifestly relating to the subject’s birthdate and age. Nothing could be clearer.

But what is the background of all this? In this particular case, the subject is entangled in a vital situation, fantasizing about an imaginary paternity. Previously, during our case discussions, we noted that the subject’s preoccupation with paternity—his sense of responsibility toward a child about to be born—stemmed from a situation so ambiguous that it inevitably raises profound questions.

For the reality remains deeply unclear: the subject reproduces, with a semi-delirious anxiety about his generative responsibilities, a fundamental question for him: Is he, himself, a legitimate child?

It is precisely because the analyst remarked, “This is about you,” that the subject produced a dream containing the latent message: “Am I not, after all, your child, you—the analyst?”

You see how the focus here is not, as one might think, the concrete, affective dependency of a child on adults—adults presumed to be somewhat parental or paternal. Instead, the problem emerges at a second level, asking:

“Where is my true family? What do I know? Not as a child who is more or less dependent, but as a recognized or unrecognized child, one with or without the right to bear the name of such-and-such?”

In other words, the issue arises on the symbolic plane of the subject’s assumption of their destiny—their destiny within a register of relationships already elevated to the symbolic degree. This is the case, in the instance raising the problem I am discussing with you. Are you following what I mean?

I will not claim that everything always unfolds in the analytic dialogue at this same level, but bear in mind that this is the essentially analytic level. Here, you are touching upon an experience that is that of autobiography, the recounting of one’s life.

Many children have the fantasy of belonging to another family, of being the child of people other than those who care for them, feed them, and look after them. This is extremely common and can be described as a typical, normal phase of child development. This phenomenon gives rise to numerous offshoots in experience and should not be neglected, even outside of the analytic context.

So what, in the end—this is where I aim to arrive—is the analysis of resistances?
The analysis of resistances is not, as it is sometimes described or formulated (and I could give you many examples of such formulations, though they are more often practiced than explicitly stated), about intervening with the subject to make them aware of how their attachments, prejudices, or the equilibrium of their ego prevent them from seeing:

• Resistance analysis is not persuasion, which quickly veers into suggestion.
• It is not about “strengthening the ego” of the subject or “allying oneself with the healthy part of the ego,” as is sometimes said.
• Nor is it about convincing the subject of something through dialogue.

Rather, it involves understanding precisely at which level—at every moment when the text or so-called “material” is presented—it is appropriate to respond in the analytic relationship. At certain moments, the response may indeed need to be directed at the level of the ego. However, as illustrated by the case I am describing, the point is to help the subject understand that the question they are asking is not so much related to their experiences of deprivation, abandonment, or any vital lack of love or affection. Instead, it concerns what their behavior inadvertently expresses: their story as they misrecognize it, their obscure attempt to recognize it, and the extent to which their life is oriented by a problematic that is not so much about their lived experience as about the meaning of their history and, properly speaking, their destiny.

This is significant because, ultimately:

• If the analytic symptom is what I describe—since this is explicitly written into our experience—
• If the symptom is tied to the level of speech, which is the matrix of this unacknowledged part of the subject, and not merely to their individual experience but to an entire historical text that indicates it is not solely about them but about something between them and others,
  and even so much between them and others that it is because of speech that there is a “them” and “others.”

If this is the case, it is clear that the subject’s symptom will dissolve to the extent that the intervention is carried out at this decentered level, not at the level of a more or less preconstructed, prefabricated reconstruction based on our knowledge or theoretical ideas about the so-called normal or normative development of the individual. This includes what they lacked or how they reacted at various stages and what they must learn to endure in terms of frustrations, for example. The key question is whether a symptom resolves within one register or another.

This issue becomes even more problematic when we recognize that interventions aimed at the inter-egoic dialogue—normalizing or aligning development according to certain models—may indeed have effects, and in some cases, therapeutic ones. After all, psychotherapy has always been conducted, even without fully understanding what was being done. However, it has invariably involved the function of speech.

The critical question is whether this function of speech operates within subjective analysis, meaning:

• Whether it acts by substituting the authority of the analyst for the subject’s ego.
• Whether the framework established by FREUD demonstrates that the axial reality of the subject lies not in their ego but elsewhere.

Intervening by essentially substituting oneself for the subject’s ego—common in certain approaches to resistance analysis—is merely suggestion and not true analysis. This must have consequences, as the symptom, whatever it may be, cannot be genuinely resolved unless analysis prioritizes the proper action of the analyst:

• Knowing where to intervene,
• Determining the essential point of analytic intervention,
• Identifying the point of the subject, if I may put it that way, to be targeted.

Step by step, I believe I have sufficiently emphasized over these past months or even years what I mean when I say that the unconscious is precisely the unknown subject of the ego, unrecognized by the ego. It is this point of the subject, or their human being, properly speaking, which FREUD refers to somewhere as der Kern unseres Wesen (the core of our being). In the chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams on the dream process—which I urged you to read—when FREUD speaks of the primary process, he is clearly referring to something with an ontological sense. He calls it the core of our being.

If the core of our being does not coincide with the ego, and this is the meaning of the analytic experience, and if, once grasped, this insight organizes an entire experience and lays down strata of knowledge that are now taught and have proven fruitful, revealing hidden aspects of development, then we must ask: Is it enough to assert that this “I,” the unconscious subject’s “I,” is not the ego?

Hardly, because once you make that statement, nothing—at least for those who think spontaneously—implies the reciprocal. For when you understand this, you instinctively conclude:

• That this “I” is the true self,
• And that, ultimately, the ego is merely one of the appearances, an incomplete or erroneous form of this “I.”

In other words, this decentering—essential to FREUD’s discovery—occurs, but immediately… as if, like vision prey to artificial diplopia (a well-known optical experiment), where two closely positioned images merge into one through slight misalignment, the ego is reabsorbed into this discovered “I,” restoring unity.

This precisely occurred in analysis when it was realized—though the reasons remain retrospectively to be clarified—that the original fecundity of analytic discovery was being depleted. In practice, the field shifted toward what is called “ego analysis,” claiming to find in it the exact opposite of what had originally been intended to demonstrate to the subject.

For we were already dealing with the puzzle, with the level of demonstration. By thinking that purely and simply analyzing the ego would somehow reveal the reverse of what needed to be understood, something was being done that precisely belongs to the order of reduction I am describing—a reduction of two distinct images into one, a kind of point of unity.

What is important to emphasize now is not merely that the true “I” is not the ego, but also the fact that this ego exists:

• It is not merely an error of the “I.”
• It is not a partial perspective that could be corrected simply by raising awareness to broaden the outlook enough to grasp and reveal the reality that analytic experience aims to reach.

It is necessary, in a way, to demonstrate the reciprocal and to keep it firmly in mind:

• That this ego is not the “I.”
• That it is not an error in the classical sense of being a partial truth.
• That it is literally something else.
• That it is a specific object within the subject’s experience.

Literally, the ego is an object—a particular object performing a specific function we call here the imaginary function—and it is crucial to maintain this idea firmly. Why? For two reasons:

• First, it is absolutely essential for your technique.
• Second, if you do not see that this is what is at stake, I challenge you to understand anything—or conversely, which amounts to the same thing, I challenge you not to discern this in the reading of FREUD’s writings gathered under the heading of “Metapsychology” after 1920, specifically everything he discusses regarding the ego and its topology.

FREUD’s research on the ego and its topology was undertaken precisely to restore the ego, which had begun to reappear in a place where it did not belong. Initially, due to a kind of mental accommodation effort (the squinting effect), one fell back into the core of classical illusion—I do not say error, for it is, properly speaking, an illusion—and to reestablish the correct vision and perspective of this difference, this eccentricity of the subject relative to the ego: all of FREUD’s writings aim at this.

I present this today as an essential orientation system, a coordinate framework for your experience. Let each person read these texts and bring me their questions if you like. Why do I claim this is essential and that everything must be organized around it? The dialogue is delivered to you and your initiative.

I illuminate my lantern at the outset. I will light it starting from the basics, from the alphabet, and even from what deserves to be revisited: the level and plane of what is falsely assumed to be self-evident. For despite all I explain—whether it is or is not—something remains [the “I”] that you cannot currently, within the framework of your psychological experience, link to something else [the ego]. This, upon closer examination, is a conceptual confusion.

But you do not realize it because, contrary to what might be believed, we live far more effectively at the apparently most immediate level of concepts than we are aware. Ultimately, the point of reduction in analytic experience—what must be fought against, as you will see even in FREUD, who struggles with it like a fish with an apple—are the illusions of consciousness. These illusions dominate a certain mode of reflection, which is nevertheless essential to how a being of a given cultural era perceives themselves and, simultaneously, conceives of themselves.

We are dealing, properly speaking, with the illusions of consciousness. I am confident there is no one among us who does not think, ultimately, that in consciousness, as such, a particularly elevated state is experienced, one in which… however partial the apprehension of consciousness may be, and consequently the ego… it is nonetheless here that something fundamental, called our existence, is given.

The ego, as such, if not entirely explored, is at least apprehended in its unity, in the very fact of consciousness as such. The highly developed, elevated nature of the phenomenon of consciousness is admitted—regardless of what is said—as a postulate by everyone at this date, 1954. There are aspects of this that could be approached from various angles. And if we were to approach this as a critique of texts, it would be fascinating to show you, for instance, in the sketches and drafts of a theory from FREUD’s early period, such as 1895, which I mentioned:

• How, in an already developed schema of the psychic apparatus, FREUD fails—though it is straightforward—to precisely locate the phenomenon of consciousness.
• And how much later, in Metapsychology, when he addresses what happens in different pathological states—dreams, delirium, mental confusion, hallucinations—explaining them through disinvestments and systems, he repeatedly encounters a paradox when trying to make the system of consciousness function and admits, “There must be special laws.” He fails to integrate the system of consciousness into his theory.

One can say that FREUD’s psychophysical theory of intra-organic system investments, which explains what happens in the individual, is highly ingenious. It is remarkably well-constructed and, up to a point, theoretically and biologically precise. While much of it remains hypothetical, our subsequent experience with the diffusion and distribution of nerve impulses supports FREUD’s biological construction.

But it never works for consciousness. You might say, “That proves nothing.” What it proves is that FREUD became entangled. But let us examine this from another angle. What seems apparent—I hope the philosophers will not contradict me—is that something grants consciousness its seemingly primordial status in the formation of structured reality, convincing forms, such that even the philosopher, when grasping and trying to comprehend themselves, appears to start from something essentially incontestable:
“the transparency of consciousness to itself.”

If, from the moment something is conscious, it cannot avoid perceiving itself as consciousness, and if this something reaches its maximum expression in what we might call clear consciousness—for instance, the distinct field of what I currently see before me, all of you grouped together forming a small painted surface, which I might interpret as such, perhaps to question whether my farsightedness is worsening with time and to experiment, in a way, with my field of consciousness, as one says, as such, as an object.

We are told that something cannot be experienced without the subject being placed within this experience in a kind of immediate reflection. Much has been said about this, and undoubtedly philosophers have taken steps forward since the first decisive step was made by DESCARTES, who took it with such audacity that one might say he truly… distinguished between what we call thetic consciousness and non-thetic consciousness.

Already, certain questions have been posed that remain unresolved for philosophers themselves. The question is whether an “I” is immediately apprehended in this activity. I will propose something to you. I will not call it a “working hypothesis,” because I claim it is not a hypothesis. In truth, it is not something to be taken as a… in this metaphysical investigation of the problem. It is something entirely different, a kind of way to cut through a Gordian knot.

I would like you to accept this hypothesis, so it can be sustained and maintained. I do not pretend to offer you a way of thinking here, but rather a kind of resolution. This is not solely about experience; it also encompasses a whole mental tradition, a way of approaching a problem. Some problems must be abandoned without being resolved. I will propose a method for abandoning one.

You will immediately perceive the problematic side. I will take one of the forms of the phenomenon of consciousness, which is undeniably a phenomenon of consciousness, and show you where it leads us. Once again, this involves, not by chance but also not essentially, the phenomenon of the mirror image. What is the image in the mirror? It is nonetheless essentially a phenomenon of consciousness; it is not a real image. The rays reflected back from the mirror situate an imaginary object in a space, and undoubtedly, you would say there is no problem here. Yet, it is not the object you see in the mirror.

There is, therefore, in this experience, something that is a phenomenon of consciousness as such. Regarding this phenomenon of consciousness, I will propose a little parable, which is not strictly necessary but serves as a guide for reflection. Imagine that all humans have disappeared from the earth—I say all humans because, given the high value you attribute to consciousness, it seems sufficient to pose the question—what remains in the mirror?

Now suppose that all living beings have also disappeared. Only waterfalls and springs remain; still, there are flashes of lightning and thunder. Does the image in the mirror, or in the lake, still exist? It is quite clear that it does, for the simple reason that at the advanced level of civilization we have reached—far beyond our illusions about consciousness—we have created devices, such as cameras, which we can imagine being as complex as possible, developing their own films and storing them in small refrigerated containers. Ultimately, the camera records your image of the mountain in the lake or your image of the Café de Flore disintegrating in complete solitude, continuing to reflect itself in its own mirror.

I know that philosophers will have all sorts of clever objections to this. Yet, I ask you to continue paying attention to my parable. Imagine humans return. This occurs through an arbitrary act of MALEBRANCHE’s God, who sustains us in existence at every moment. He could erase us and reinstate us centuries later. Let us not make too many assumptions. But I will follow you if you do, including that humans will have to relearn everything, such as how to interpret an image. But no matter! One thing is certain: as soon as they see the image of the mountain on the film, they will also see its reflection in the lake. It is a film. They will also see all sorts of things, the movements that occurred in the mountain, and those of the image.

We can take this further. If the machine were more complex, it could be designed so that a photoelectric cell aimed at this image in the lake triggers some explosion—since, after all, to make something appear effective, there must always be an explosion somewhere—and another machine might record the echo of this explosion or harness its energy.

This is ultimately something I propose for you to consider as essentially a phenomenon of consciousness that would not have been strictly perceived by any ego, that would not have been reflected in any egoic experience since all forms of ego, and consequently all ego consciousness, are absent at this time.

You might say: “Hold on a minute! The ego is somewhere—it’s in the camera.”

Well, I would say no, there is not the slightest trace of an ego in the camera. However, I would willingly admit that the “I” is involved—not in the camera, but with it. And I will show you later what it means to say that the “I” is involved.

There is also not the slightest trace of an “I” in the machine. But what constructs the order of the “I”—that is, precisely the fact that humans are the decentered subject I am discussing, the subject engaged in a game of symbols and a symbolic world—is indeed one and the same thing as the fact that we can construct extremely complex machines. It is tied to words. Words, inasmuch as language is not always—or as language is, at its root, this kind of exchange object by which recognition occurs: for someone approaching you as an enemy who refrains from attacking because you have said the password, and so forth.

It is through speech, as it begins in this way, initiating this particular circulation that swells to the point of constituting this very world of the symbol…

• enabling algebraic calculations,
• enabling us to know one another, to call one another with words and speech,
  …that the symbolic world is constructed, and the machine is nothing other than this.

It is, if you will, the detached structure of this distinctly subjective activity, which I leave aside for the moment. You will see there is still more to say about it—indeed, the entire problem lies there: how its being becomes engaged and is constituted within this symbolic world. But this symbolic world is the world of the machine.

I would say that some are quite uneasy to see me refer, as I apparently alluded the other day, to this divine world. Yet I will say that this is a God we apprehend ex machina—from the machine—unless we extract machina ex Deo. At this point, we are not quite sure which it is. This is the crux of the matter.

Of course, this machine ensures the continuity that not only allows men, absent for a certain interval, to have the record of what occurred during that time but also, strictly speaking, provides phenomena of consciousness. And in saying “phenomena of consciousness,” you can see I do so without invoking any cosmic soul or inherent presence in nature.

At the stage we have reached, and perhaps precisely because we are sufficiently advanced in the construction of the machine, we no longer confuse symbolic intersubjectivity with cosmic subjectivity; we are entirely detached from that.

This does not settle the open question, but it becomes indifferent to us. In this sense, I say this is not a hypothesis I am developing but merely an example to illustrate that, from the outset—and simply as a matter of intellectual hygiene, to begin to genuinely pose questions about what the ego is—we can start by considering the ego, contrary to the deeply religious view of consciousness as the pinnacle of creation, as the fabrication of modern man. This is something utterly extraordinary, for modern man implicitly believes that everything that has occurred in the universe since its origin converges toward this “thinking thing,” the creation of life, the precious being: Man. Among men, this unique being is himself, containing the privileged point called consciousness. From this perspective, we enter into such a delirious anthropomorphism that we must begin to open our eyes:

• to realize the type of illusion we are victims of,
• and to recognize how new this is in human history,
• and also to understand, for example (this is a passing remark), what I would call the naivety of scientistic atheism.

This atheism truly serves as a defense against the kind of vertigo that, within the classical and traditional perspective of consciousness as the culmination of being, forces man to struggle against something so overwhelming that the defense we see within science itself—against anything that might resemble recourse to a Supreme Being—stems only from this primary, immediate defense against the notion that the only thing left to do would be to prostrate oneself, that is, to stop trying to understand, because everything would already be explained. After all, consciousness must ultimately emerge—this marvel that is contemporary modern man, you and me, running through the streets.

In this perspective, everything is already explained by the existence of this consciousness. There is a kind of deification of the human individual, which is precisely the source—and the sole source—of this sentimental, truly incoherent atheism. This atheism, in turn, drives all so-called scientific and scientistic thought to elevate consciousness to the summit of phenomena, making it, as one would an overly absolute king into a constitutional monarch, the masterpiece of masterpieces, the reason for everything, the pinnacle of appearances, the perfection of realization.

But these epiphenomena, as they are called, are useless. If we now turn to approach the phenomena, we will proceed as though disregarding them. Yet, this very effort to disregard them clearly shows that if we do not destroy their influence, we will become imbeciles, unable to think of anything else. This serves as a reminder that these utterly contradictory and childish forms of aversions, prejudices, and supposed tendencies to introduce vitalist forces or entities reflect precisely this.

For example, in embryology, when we speak of the intervention of a formative center, an organizing center in the embryo, we immediately think that since there is an organizing center, there must be consciousness. It is natural to think this way. Consequently, this organizing center must have eyes and ears—therefore, there must be a little demon inside the embryo.

We should cease attempting to organize what may appear, manifest, or become apparent in the phenomenon. Everything superior implies consciousness for us, and we know consciousness is tied to something entirely contingent—just as contingent as the surface of a lake in an uninhabited world—namely, the existence of our eyes and ears.

Of course, there is something unthinkable here, a kind of impasse at which various conceptual formations crash and contradict themselves. Against these, common sense has reacted with certain taboos, producing all sorts of premises, such as behaviorism in clinical investigation, which claims: “We will observe total behaviors; let us ignore consciousness.” It is well known that behaviorism has not been particularly fertile in placing consciousness in parentheses.

Consciousness is not the monster it is believed to be. Excluding or chaining it offers no true benefit, even though it has been said for some time that behaviorism has reintroduced it stealthily, under the name of “molar behaviorism.” Following FREUD, behaviorism learned to handle the notion of the field. Without this, its slight progress outside would have depended on observing phenomena at their proper level, such as considering total behaviors as objects in their own right, at their level, without overcomplicating the understanding of lower or higher apparatuses.

It remains the case that the very notion of “behavior” involves a certain castration of human reality—not simply because it neglects the notion of consciousness, which in itself serves no purpose either for those who invoke it or for those who do not—but because the notion of “behavior” as such excludes the intersubjective relation. This relation not only underpins human behaviors but also human notions and passions, and it has nothing to do with the concept of consciousness.

I ask you to consider, for a time, in the introductory sense I bring today, that consciousness occurs whenever there is…
and this happens in the most unexpected and disparate places…
a surface such that—I offer you a materialist definition—it can produce what we call an image.

An image means that all the energetic effects emanating from a given point of reality, whatever it may be… imagine them in the realm of light, since that is what most vividly creates images in our minds…
are reflected off such a surface, striking corresponding points in space.

Do you understand what this means? It means that, in this context, the surface of a lake could be replaced by the area striata of the occipital lobe for the simple reason that something analogous occurs in the area striata. Thanks to fibrils and fibrillar layers, the entire spatial field of that surface is connected. Experiments show that we have clear images of a fairly extensive visual field, and the area striata resembles a mirror so closely that:

• Just as you do not need the entirety of a mirror’s surface—if such a notion even holds meaning—to perceive the contents of a field or a room, but can achieve the same result with a small piece by maneuvering it,
• Similarly, any small portion of the area striata serves the same function and behaves like a mirror.

Various things within the world behave like mirrors, provided the conditions allow for a correspondence such that, at one point in reality, no matter where the energetic effects strike the surface, a unique effect occurs at another point, forming a biunivocal correspondence between two points in real space, mediated by something. I said real space, but I spoke too quickly, for there are two spaces:

• Those in which these effects occur at points in real space (real image),
• And those in which they occur at points in imaginary space (virtual image).

This distinction made it easier to highlight earlier what happens at a point in imaginary space because it immediately reveals something that leaves us perplexed in light of our usual concepts: namely, that not everything imaginary or properly illusory is thereby subjective. There exists a perfectly objective, objectifiable illusion, and you do not need to banish your entire honorable company to grasp this.

Starting from similar perspectives, many things will become apparent to you, such as, for instance, the experience that this ego, presented to you as the supposed unity of a field of clear consciousness, is undeniably an object. What you perceive within the field of consciousness as its unity is precisely something toward which the immediacy of sensation is set in a certain tension with a unity that is not at all homogeneous with what is occurring on the surface of this neutral field.

This perspective, which we have called consciousness as a phenomenon of a sort of physical nature, generates this tension. The entire dialectic I am attempting to convey to you as a model, under the term mirror stage, concerns the relationship between a certain immediacy and certain tendencies—at a level deserving specification; indeed, this is the crux—a certain level of tendencies experienced, let us say for now, at a particular moment in life as disconnected, discordant, and fragmented. There always remains something of this fragmentation! That something is combined with and paired to a unity that simultaneously allows the subject, for the first time, to perceive themselves as a unity. However, it is an alienated unity, a virtual unity that does not partake of the inertial qualities of what we earlier called the phenomenon of consciousness in its primitive form. On the contrary, this phenomenon has a vital or counter-vital relation to the subject and grants man what appears to be a privileged experience.

Perhaps, after all, something of this kind exists in other animal species as well. But this is not the absolutely crucial point. For our purposes…
let us not forge hypotheses or question where this dialectic of the primitive universe, with a unity apprehended in a unique and alienating experience, representing the subject as alienated and dissipating their own unity within the order of the objective universe…
in the experience, it is something reflected, reverberated, and rediscovered to such a degree, at all levels of the structuring of what is called the human ego as such, that it suffices as a starting point.

To clarify this experience, I would like to have time to represent it to you in a way I have not yet provided. This form will seem subjective precisely because it is new and unfamiliar, as you have not yet had the time to dull its image, as inevitably happens with any schema expressing an original experience. For example, consider the image of the blind man and the paralytic. Subjectivity at the level of the ego as such is exactly comparable to this pair introduced in fifteenth-century imagery—doubtless emphasized at that time for particular reasons.

What is given in the subjective half, which precedes the mirror experience, prior to this apprehension of the unity of oneself as anticipated, is precisely the paralytic: that which cannot move independently except in the most uncoordinated, clumsy manner. Contrary to the usual image, you see here in this relationship that the master is the image of the ego, contrary to appearances. This discrepancy constitutes the dialectic problem: it is not, as PLATO imagined, the master riding the horse (i.e., the slave). Rather, it is the paralytic who rides the one who knows how to walk, but who is blind.

I would say it is blind; this is a way of speaking: it is blind from the perspective of the one who sees. But what it sees is something else—or, more precisely… since, ultimately, the paralytic is the basis upon which this perspective is constructed… when it identifies with its unity, it can only do so by adopting an attitude of fascination, by entering a fundamental immobility, through which it can correspond in an equivalent way to the gaze, the blind gaze—because it is the gaze of an image—the gaze under which it is caught.

The other image—since all images are valid—that complements that of the blind man and the paralytic is that of the snake and the bird, in which the bird is precisely fascinated by a certain gaze. This fascinating relationship is absolutely essential to the phenomenon of the constitution of the ego in its first experience. This relationship, which is a relationship of reflection, is also a relationship of fascination, a relationship of blockage. It is within this blockage that all the uncoordinated, incoherent diversity of the primitive fragmentation finds its unity, precisely as a fascinated unity. This image of fascination, even of terror, is so essential that I will show it to you again, in FREUD’s own words, at this precise level—that is, at the level of the constitution of the ego as such.

I will give you a third image.

If something—since we have spoken of machines—could embody for us what is at stake in this dialectic, I would propose the following model: one of those little automatons, turtles or foxes, which we have learned to fabricate for some time now and which form the amusement of the scientists of our age. Automatons have always played a significant role, and they play a renewed role in our era. Let us say one of these small machines, which we now know how to equip, thanks to various intermediate devices, with something resembling desires and, perhaps, something almost akin to homeostasis—or even entirely so.

Let us say it is a machine designed such that its final blockage—its structuration within a mechanism—depends on its perceiving, by whatever means (a photoelectric cell with relays), the production of a certain image somewhere, which fixes the mechanism. It would attain its unity only in the perfection of another machine identical to itself, which has simply already undergone this blockage through what might be called a prior experience.

A machine can have experiences. Do you see the result? The movement of each machine is strictly conditioned by the perception of a certain stage reached in what we might call crystallization, the fixation at a certain point.

This corresponds to the fascination element of another machine. But you also see the kind of circle that could form: the direction in which the first machine moves—the one we started with—will depend essentially on the direction taken by the other, because the unity of the first will always depend on the unity of the other. The result will be nothing less than a deadlock—a situation of impasse—which is precisely the constitution of the human object insofar as it is entirely suspended within a dialectic of jealousy-sympathy. This is exactly what is reflected and expressed in traditional psychology by the incompatible nature of consciousnesses.

This does not mean, as is commonly believed, that one consciousness cannot conceive of another. On the contrary, the very nature of a consciousness is to conceive of all others—a consciousness of consciousnesses. But what is strictly incompatible is an ego entirely suspended in the unity of the other, in this other as an ego—that is, in the other as advancing toward an object as such, as desired, as apprehended. “It is either he or I who will have it,” because it must be one or the other. For, in the end, when the other has it, it is because it belongs to me—or, more precisely, if I can, from this schema, apprehend or desire something, it is because the other has begun to move toward it. It is the other who gives me the model and even the form of my unity.

This dialectic of essential rivalry—constitutive of human knowledge, of pure knowledge—is obviously a virtual stage. For, as you can see, there is no such thing as pure knowledge. It is precisely within the strict commonality of the ego and the other in their desire for the object that something entirely different can begin: recognition.

This clearly presupposes a third. For, ultimately, continuing our parable, what would be necessary? For the first little machine, blocked on the image of the second, to reach an agreement—so that it is not forced to destroy itself at the point of convergence of their desire, which is essentially the same desire since, at this level, they are but one and the same being—it would have to be able to, as we say, inform the other, to tell it: “I desire that.”

But clearly, this is not possible. For if we admit there is an “I,” this immediately transforms into: “You desire that.” Because “I desire that” means: You, the other, who are my unity, “you desire that.” This does not surprise us. We recognize in it the essential form of the human message, which ensures that one receives their own message from the other, in an inverted form.

But do not be mistaken. What I am describing is purely mythical. For there is no way the first machine can say “I desire that,” because, precisely in its state before unity, it is essentially immediate desire and lacks speech for a very simple reason: it is no one. The first machine is no more someone than the reflection of the mountain in the lake. The paralytic is voiceless; it has absolutely nothing to say. For something to happen, there must be something somewhere—a third—that enters this machine, perhaps the first one, and can indeed articulate something called an “I.”

But this is entirely unthinkable at this level of experience. Yet it exists, as you will see—precisely because it is what we find in the unconscious. But, of course, it is in the unconscious.

Where we can conceive it, for the dance of all the little machines to be established, it is very evidently above the little machines—that is, in the place where Mr. Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS told you the other day that the system of exchanges was established: within these small groups of machines, one could—because the ballet was regulated from elsewhere—transfer a little machine to another group. This is what we find in The Elementary Structures. The symbolic system must intervene for something to be established within the system conditioned by the image of the ego—something that is not knowledge but recognition.

You can see the deduction to which this operational image I have given you today leads us. You can see from this that the ego can never, under any circumstances, be anything other than an imaginary function, determining at a certain level the structuring of the subject. However, it is as ambiguous as the constitution of the object itself, of which it is, in a way, not only a stage but its identical correlate.

The point where the subject positions itself as an operator, as human, is the moment when the symbolic system appears. It is from this system that the subject can position itself as an “I,” and this moment cannot in any way be deduced from any model that belongs to the order of individual structuring.

In other words—and I will explain this to you in another way—for the world of the human subject to appear, the machine, in the information it provides, must be able to do one thing: the only thing it cannot do, which is to count itself as a unit among others. For it to count itself, it would necessarily need to no longer be precisely the machine that it is; it would have to be something else. Because one can do anything except make a machine add itself to a calculation as an element.

This is the perspective under which I have presented things to you today. You will see, perhaps next time, I will present it to you from a less arid angle. Because, of course, the ego is not merely a function. From the moment the symbolic world is founded, it becomes itself—it can serve as a symbol.

This, moreover, is precisely what we are dealing with. All the effort we have made today was specifically to strip it of this fascinating symbolic function that causes us to believe in it. As people wish for the ego to be the subject, this relation of the unification of the ego as both a function and a symbol brings us back to fundamental positions.

This is what I aim to address next time, to show you the very close relationship this has with all our operational practice—the way we approach the subject in analytic technique, when we approach it, very specifically, at the level of the ego.