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(All parts in English)

VALABREGA

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LACAN

I would like to make a few remarks about last night’s meeting. LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS’s observation, noting that we need to discipline ourselves regarding “the mirror stage,” which is addressed to all of you, indeed has my agreement in that it should not be overused. The “mirror stage” is not a magic word; moreover, it begins to provoke that craving for novelty, which is not always conducive to progress.

We must learn to revisit concepts. It is not the repetition itself that is tiresome; it is the improper usage of it that is.

That being said, we can give LANG a good grade. He did not misuse it at all. However, he used less effectively what is essentially a completely new way of understanding an articulation: the concave mirror. The mirror stage already dates back a bit; it is around twenty years old [1936]. There is a fair chance that, in its strict form, it no longer fully corresponds to what it seems desirable to understand today.

[Addressing Lefèvre-Pontalis] Ah, here comes the rebel!

I assure you that, regarding this question of psychoses, and especially child psychoses, in the way the problems are framed, there is something you, LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS, might not have the slightest idea about: the extent to which this diagnosis is debated and debatable. And, in fact, there is even a sense in which we don’t know if it is appropriate to use the same term for psychoses in children and psychoses in adults.

We have come to use the same term, but for decades, it was resisted to even think that genuine psychoses could exist in children. It was considered something else, often linked to some organic conditions. Psychosis, as such, in its structured form in adults, is not found to be structured in the same way in children at all.

If we legitimately speak of psychoses, it is as analysts, as those who can take one step further than others in conceptualizing psychosis. I must say that, on this point, we do not yet have any established doctrine—certainly not within our group, although this might be of significant interest.

ANDRIEUX has one, but it is definitely not ours. LANG was in a difficult position because, in the end, do not believe we have any kind of established doctrine or rulebook for analyzing psychosis. Already with adult psychosis, and even more so with child psychosis, the greatest confusion still reigns.

This is why LANG’s work seemed well-positioned to me. He is trying to do something entirely indispensable in the domain of analytic understanding, especially as we venture into the frontiers: to take a certain step back, to gain a certain distance.

For there are two dangers in everything related to grasping our clinical domain. The first is obviously conditioned by all education: what children are taught is that curiosity is a bad thing, which opposes a certain kind of training.

Overall, we are not naturally curious. It is not easy to provoke this feeling automatically. It is easier to guard against another tendency: understanding. We always understand too much, especially in analysis, where we always believe we understand. In some cases, this belief is justified, but most of the time, we are mistaken.

In other words, what am I saying? That one can conduct good analytic therapy if one is intuitive, gifted, and has communication skills, contact, and that sort of diffuse sum, a key, all those things that serve us—or, more accurately, cover up the genius each person may deploy in interpersonal relations, particularly with children.

The recourse to an approximate approach… indeed, from the moment one does not demand extreme conceptual rigor from oneself, one just changes instruments and always finds a way to understand. The danger is that this leaves us completely without a compass, not knowing where we are starting from or where we are trying to go. It is merely in its initial stammerings toward orientation.

What are we dealing with in psychosis? Child psychosis is very interesting. It can even shed light on what we should think of adult psychosis and, in any case, provide a significant element. That is what LANG attempted to do, and he did it very well.

He tactfully pointed out the inconsistencies, discrepancies, or gaps in the systems of Melanie KLEIN and Anna FREUD, ultimately favoring Melanie KLEIN. For, in truth, Anna FREUD’s system is, strictly speaking, at an impasse from an analytic perspective.

He made extremely accurate remarks. What he said about regression, I liked very much. He pointed out that it was a symbol. That using the term regression as if it were a mechanism, something that happens in reality, is truly an illusion. For once, a term that you know I don’t like to misuse is “magical thinking,” but here we have something that resembles, not magical thinking, but something of a magician. Because do we ever really see someone, an adult, truly regress, return to the state of a small child, and start wailing?

One might believe that regression is something that actually exists. As LANG pointed out, it is a symptom that must be interpreted as such. There is regression on the level of meaning, and nothing else! In children, this is sufficiently demonstrated by the simple observation that a child does not have much perspective to regress. Therefore, we must interpret it as something other than on the plane of reality.

There is one remark I would like to highlight, from a note I was rereading in The Interpretation of Dreams, which we are going to deal with these days, regarding the processes and mechanisms of dream psychology. There is a note, a quotation from JACKSON, important for the study of psychoses specifically. This remark belongs to the same imprecision that I am currently targeting in my comments:

“Find the nature of the dream, and you will have found everything that can be known about insanity, about dementia, and about madness.”

Well, that is false! It has nothing to do with it. Get that into your heads first!

Of course, they handle the same elements, and symbols can be found in both, as well as analogies in relation to the level of consciousness. But this is precisely not the perspective in which we situate ourselves. Because the question, in its entirety, is this: “Why is a dream not madness?” And conversely, if there is something important to define in madness, it is precisely because the entire primary, determining mechanism of madness is absolutely not the same as what happens every night in dreams.

We must not believe that this idea should be entirely credited to FREUD. The French edition is incomplete; it does not indicate that this was a sort of embellishment added by Mr. Ernest JONES, who thought it useful one day to draw this parallel, likely believing it suitable for linking the analytic tradition to something that was already well-regarded in England.

Let us give to JONES what belongs to JONES, and to FREUD what belongs to FREUD. And start with the idea that this is not at all the direction in which things should be viewed, and that the problem of dreams leaves entirely open all the economic problems of psychosis. I cannot tell you more about it today. But it seems very important to me to emphasize this. It is an opening towards the future, towards what we might begin to address this year regarding psychosis. Next year, we will have to deal with it in more detail.

We will resume our discussion from last time, namely the reference to FREUD’s text, which we began to examine with ANZIEU. I have asked Mr. VALABREGA to pick up where you left off, to introduce us to the economic schema that FREUD provides for the psyche, for the psychic apparatus as such.

It is a matter of seeing, throughout his work—in other words, in the subsequent stages—the outlines of a general psychology, as we have it following the Letters to FLIESS, which ANZIEU began to clarify last time.

I am going to draw a diagram on the board so that you retain something essential, something you can refer to, to grasp the movement of what is being explored here. In this case, it is legitimate because you will see what this will allow me to provide for you. You will see a schema that I will try to reproduce each time—comparable, meaning similar in structure, yet different in what marks its progress.

So, I will be led to present four schemas of FREUD’s psychic apparatus:

• The first relates to what is outlined in his first General Psychology, which remains unpublished, a reference to himself, full of fertile insights.
• The second, at the level of what is presented in The Interpretation of Dreams, that is, the theory of the psychic apparatus he gives to explain dreams. Take note of this: after providing all the elements of dream interpretation, he still had to situate the dream as a psychic function. This is the second stage in his Interpretation of Dreams.
• The third, at the level of the emergence of the theory of libido, much later. One cannot imagine how much this theory is not even contemporary with the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but rather correlated with the advent of the function of narcissism. This was what I had reserved for PERRIER for today; he will address it next time, or the following one.
• And finally—the fourth— Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

In these four schemas, you will see what it is about: always an attempt to present a schema of the analytic field. In the end, that is how it develops. At first, he calls it the psychic apparatus, and you will see the progress he makes. You will see that there is something in the form of this schema that will always remain similar, even though it addresses completely different functions.

And from this progress, I believe we can draw firm conclusions about what is also the progress of FREUD’s thought regarding what we might call the human being. Because, ultimately, that is what it is about—the theoretical claims you can all make.

There is still this idea:

• that it is an object that you have before you, something individual, if not unique,
• that all of this is concentrated around this form that you have in front of you,
• that the unity of the object in psychoanalysis, if not in psychology, is precisely this individual aspect, this something that is projected, about which you believe you can know both the laws and the limits.

In LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS’s “appeal” last night, there is something at the heart of what you all believe—that we are always in the domain of a psychology, in the sense that the psyche would be a kind of property or double of this something you see. It is very peculiar that you do not see that every scientific advance in this field of human relations can plausibly proceed—and it is even more appropriate—in the direction I will now tell you: it is always about making the object as such vanish.

In physics, the further you go, the less you grasp, the less importance—frankly, everything fades into the distant background—this something that is perceptible has. This glass, for instance, does not interest the physicist at all. What interests him is the exchange of energy, atoms, molecules—that is, something of which this appearance is only a transient, contingent realization and which, from the perspective of physics, has no importance whatsoever.

Tell yourself that it is the same thing here. However, that does not mean that the human being vanishes for us. But precisely, you must know, as philosophers, that being and object are absolutely not the same thing at all. Now, if there is precisely something—an experience—that shows us, in perspective, the direction where this being can be situated, which, of course, from the scientific point of view, we cannot grasp, which does not belong to the order of science, it is nonetheless an experience that designates, so to speak, the vanishing point, the direction in which it is encountered, and which emphasizes that man is not at all an object but a being in the process of becoming, something profoundly metaphysical. This does not mean that this is our object as a scientific object, but our object is certainly not the individual who apparently embodies it.

I am, for example, referring to what FREUD designates, that there is always, in a dream, an absolutely ungraspable point and—he writes—belonging to the domain of the unknown: he calls this “the navel of the dream.” These things are not emphasized in his text because they are probably considered poetic. But no! This means that there is a point somewhere that is not accessible, that is not graspable in the phenomenon, which is the point of emergence of this relationship with the symbolic that exists in this particular object, which is our partner in analysis. Yes! We have here the reference to this point of FREUD that I call being, this final word which, in the scientific position, is absolutely not accessible to us. But the important thing is that in the phenomena, we already see the direction indicated.

So, what is always important for us is to see, in some way, the extent to which we must situate ourselves in relation to what we call our partner. Now, if there is also something that is clearly highlighted, as I think you are beginning to see, it is that there are two distinct dimensions—although they are constantly intertwined in a single phenomenon, that of the interhuman relationship—two distinct dimensions in which we must situate ourselves:

• one is that of the imaginary,
• the other is that of the symbolic.

They intersect in a way, and we must always know what function we occupy within them—that is, in which dimension, in which direction we oppose the subject, either in a way that precisely realizes a true opposition, or in one that realizes a mediation.

This, of course, is a rough outline. It can be, in a way, distinguished, and if one believes that the two overlap because they merge in the phenomenon, one is mistaken. This means arriving at this kind of magical communication, this universal plane of analogy, on which many theorize their experience, which, in particular and concrete terms, is often very fertile, very rich, very communicative, but which, from that point on, is not only absolutely inarticulable but also subject to all kinds of technical errors.

You may see this illustrated more precisely in the fourth schema I mentioned, which corresponds to the final stage of FREUD’s thought: Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

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Jean-Paul VALABREGA

I will resume the text of the Drafts approximately where ANZIEU left it the other day. It concerns the study of primary processes in the Ψ system, in sleep, and in dreams. But I think we must first summarize what FREUD says about primary and secondary processes in the Ψ system—that is, I will revisit this text on page 386 and the following pages.

FREUD says that there are two situations in which the ego experiences displeasure and finds itself exposed to trauma. He does not use the word “trauma,” by the way, but the word damage, at least in the English translation. I still called it trauma because, in the following passage, a little further along, he speaks of biology, he speaks of biological damage.

So, there are two situations in which the ego may be exposed to trauma:

• In the first, the state of desire cannot be followed by satisfaction because the object is not actually present; it is only imagined. At an early stage, he tells us, the Ψ system is incapable of making this distinction, and therefore, we must look elsewhere—that is, somewhere other than in the Ψ system—for a distinctive criterion that allows us to separate perception from the idea.
• In the second situation, the Ψ system needs an indication, not for satisfaction, but to avoid displeasure, and it does so, as ANZIEU mentioned the other day, by means of lateral investment. If the Ψ system is capable of performing this inhibition, the avoidance of displeasure and defense are possible. If not, there is a kind of overflow, an intense, immense displeasure, and a primary defense.

In these two situations—impossible satisfaction and avoidance of displeasure—pleasure can still be seen emerging in the first, and displeasure in the second. In both cases, there can be trauma. And here, FREUD uses the term “biological damage.” Therefore, in both cases, it is necessary to be able to distinguish, to have an indication that allows us to differentiate between perception and memory or idea, or, one might say—although this is not in the text—between reality and image.

I will not use the words real and imaginary here, because we must clearly understand that perception is not reality; it is an indication of reality. It is better to remain faithful to the words used by FREUD: reality and image.

This distinctive criterion that must be found, FREUD identifies in two essential elements:

• on one hand, information,
• on the other, inhibition.

This is what must now be explained.

LACAN:
If you are afraid of anticipating by speaking of reality, you are anticipating even more by speaking of information, even though it is part of the subject. But then, have no scruples!

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:
“Report” is what I translate as information.
It is a report in the sense that FREUD uses it, not a connection report, but an information report.

LACAN:
You are right. But precisely, the notion of information is not at all yet developed, not even in FREUD’s mind.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:
It exists in the context of “report” that he consistently employs. So, we are searching for this. FREUD will later find it in information on one hand, and inhibition on the other. I will quote the passage in italics, with the word report, because it is clear. He will then cite these two criteria—“criterion” is also his word. We will need to return to the ω system.

LACAN:
I have drawn this small diagram on the board so that you can follow things clearly.

This, in essence, is what he calls the ϕ system. It corresponds to the reflex arc, because that is where he starts, from the reflex arc schema, which brought so much hope to the understanding of living beings and their relationship with the environment, in its simplest form.

These two lines do not represent a boundary but rather a break in the schema, both distant from everything you will observe in the environment and yet still relatable, in the sense that there may indeed be a direct path from this plate to that plate. And here you have the response: it is the reflex short-circuit, on which the first fundamental schema of the relational system of a living being is based.

It receives something. Is it information? Certainly not! And yet, it responds to this excitation. Do not forget that this response always implies, in the background, something adapted. Also, do not forget that the reflex arc schema emerged from the first experiments on frogs, for example, at the same time as electricity, which, you will see, will teach us so much—not at all by itself, but as a model.

Electricity was beginning to make its appearance in the world. The frog reacts to stimulation, and it was not only electric stimulation. A drop of acid was placed on its leg, and it scratched that leg with the other. This is considered a response. And here you see its ubiquity! There are two elements: the afferent-efferent pair and something implied in the fact that it must still serve some purpose if the living being is an adapted being. The whole task is to remove the implications contained in the term response and attempt to neutralize this circuit as much as possible.

This was taken up by FREUD at the starting point of his construction, and it seems he already introduced the notion of balance—in other words, a principle of inertia. But you will see that this is not at all legitimate. From the energetic point of view, there is no relationship between something we might call stimulus, or what he already calls information, but, in my opinion, prematurely. Let us call it input, something inserted into the system.

And let us say that when we start from there, we start from a kind of pre-scientific state in approaching the problem—that is, just before the energetic notion was introduced as such. As I have told you, this goes back well before CONDILLAC’s statue. From the perspective of the evolution of ideas, there was no consideration of energy—it was a kind of starting point, a basic schema. The place where we must locate the energetic element is, in fact, entirely elsewhere.

This is what FREUD’s construction highlights. He must establish that it is effective in the other system; he must insert it into the circuit, specifically into the Ψ system. It is at this point that an energy input occurs, and it is only here that it begins to come into play, that this system deals with internal indications—in other words, needs. And what are needs? They indeed refer to the organism. That is where we can indeed have the notion of need, distinct from the notion of desire.

Last night, LANG lamented that the two are still always confused. They are not the same thing at all. Need expresses the way in which this system, which is a particular system within the organism, will come into play in the total homeostasis of the organism—that is, in something that indeed introduces a notion of energetic constancy.

In other words, the notion of energy, as it already appears in FREUD’s work, emerges transversally. Here, it dominates everything that happens between Ψ as it perceives something from within the organism and Ψ as it produces something that will have a certain relationship with its needs. From there, it may indeed be considered that there is an energetic equivalence.

But in this sense, we are left with something that becomes entirely enigmatic because we have absolutely no idea what the equivalence of a certain internal pressure related to the organism’s equilibrium and its outcome could mean in relation to the notion of energy. At this point, we do not at all see how this is necessary, nor even what purpose it serves.

It is an x that is precisely characterized by the fact that, after serving as a first approximation, as a starting point for thought, when it comes to understanding, it is in fact entirely abandoned afterward because, as you will see, it no longer appears to be anything but something entirely unusable.

Even what might be considered input—that is, things brought in from the external world—not only cannot suffice, but it must improvise, it must introduce this additional apparatus, which is the ω apparatus, which was already mentioned to you last time as a play of notation; it most probably refers to the perceptual system.

After having built such beautiful constructions to explain the relational system, based on energetic notions—that is, on the idea that we must put something into it—I have told you what this first approximation boils down to: in order to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you must first put it in. There is nothing else implied in the stimulus-response pair: something must arrive for something to emerge. From there, we will build everything.

After such a promising beginning, it is curious that FREUD ends up situating the perceptual system—let us not call it consciousness too prematurely; you will see that later he will confuse it with the system of consciousness—he must introduce it as an additional hypothesis. Why? Because it must not only have stimuli from the external world but also reflect an internal world, or more precisely, an internal apparatus that somehow reflects not only external stimuli but also their structure, if you will. He is not a Gestaltist—we cannot attribute all the credit to him—but he is nonetheless forced to feel the needs that led to Gestaltist construction.

Indeed, for this living being not to perish at every turn, it must have some adequate reflection of the external world. This shows you, at the same time, the demands implied by this schema, the theoretical requirements that all respond to what was later isolated under the term homeostasis, which is already present in FREUD’s schema through the notion of a balance to be maintained, a buffer zone. Because, ultimately, this always serves to keep all excitations, all stimulations, at the same level. Consequently, it serves just as much to not record as it does to poorly record. It must record, but in a filtered manner. It is a filter or a buffer. The notion of homeostasis is present here and simultaneously implies, at both input and output, something called energy.

However, this schema proves insufficient precisely because it is the schema of a nervous system—something designed to function in the order of filtration, in such a way that its purpose, its usefulness, lies in organized filtering, in progressive filtering, which involves pathways. And nothing in this schema allows us to think that these pathways will ever follow a usable, functional direction unless you acknowledge what is, for a first attempt, a dismal failure.

Perpetually, these pathways constitute, through the sum of all the events and incidents occurring in the individual’s development, a model, a term of comparison that gives us the measure of the structure of the real. In other words—as Mr. VALABREGA aptly suggested earlier, though he restrained himself from saying it—if we cannot at all say that this is the imaginary, you all understand why: the imaginary must indeed be there, but it is absolutely not indicated here. The imaginary involves a certain intervention of Gestalten, of something that already predisposes the living subject to a certain relationship with a typical form, with something that specifically responds to it—but in a biological coupling—with an image of its own species or an image of what may be fundamentally useful to it biologically in a determined environment. There is no trace of that here; there is merely a zone of experience and a zone of pathways.

This is a preliminary conception of memory as a sequence of series, of engrams—in other words, a sum of series of pathways that are established. This proves entirely insufficient because we precisely introduce the notion of image. That is to say, when a series of pathways, conceived as generating a certain image, is reactivated by a new stimulus, this image, in this first schema, tends to reproduce itself.

In other words, the foundation, the principle of the functioning of the Ψ apparatus is always hallucination. This is indeed the conclusion if one thinks that what is at stake here is a sensitive plate provoking images that would somehow simply and purely result from the sequence of experiences. If the image is there, it is because the recording of experiences has left its mark.

If this image is assumed to recur every time excitations, pressures, needs, energetic inputs, and stimuli are renewed—if it reproduces itself—it becomes clear that, indeed, the process that FREUD would later call primary (he already calls it that at this level, although I am not entirely sure) will always more or less produce hallucination in response to any excitation.

And so, the problem immediately shifts to the relationship between this hallucination and reality. That is to say, we must assume that there is another mode of information, as Mr. VALABREGA put it. In other words, we are led to reintroduce the system of consciousness in the form of a paradoxical autonomy with respect to the energetic perspective accepted as dominant. That is to say, we must have something that consumes the least possible energy.

Because it is not clear how a correct structure of the world can establish itself in a way that allows for correction of what happens through the sequence of experiences, when these are conceived as having hallucinatory effects. We must always have an instance, a corrective apparatus—a reality test. This reality test can only occur through a comparison, at this stage of FREUD’s theory, with something received in experience and preserved in the memory of the psychic apparatus.

And this something, since he initially wanted to eliminate the system of consciousness entirely, he is ultimately forced to reestablish consciousness in a sort of reinforced autonomy. That is where it leads.

I am not here to offer criticism, nor to say whether this is legitimate or illegitimate. You will simply see where it takes him. Are you following closely?

So, by what detour will he pass to conceive of this system, this comparison of reference, if you will? Between what is given by experience in the Ψ system, as a buffer system, a system of homeostasis, of moderation of stimuli, and the recording of these stimuli, to what hypothesis is he led as an additional assumption?

Because it is through these additional hypotheses that we measure the difficulties he faces and the validity of the solution.

What are the correlated hypotheses he is led to make?

They group under the two categories you just mentioned: inhibition on the one hand and information on the other. What will the characteristics of this information be? What is this information?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

The central problem is indeed, as LACAN just stated, the indication of reality. Well, FREUD says that this indication of reality is provided by the perceptual neurons in external perception. Indeed, a qualitative excitation occurs in the ω system, or W system. But this excitation cannot reach the Ψ system. Consequently—LACAN already mentioned this—this qualitative excitation that occurs in the ω system is of no use.

LACAN
It’s not that it cannot be—it must not be…

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

He says cannot be, stating it as a fact. According to all likelihood, it is the perceptual neurons that provide this indication of reality. In all cases of external perception, a qualitative excitation occurs in the W system, but this, as such, is of no utility for the Ψ system.

In short, the qualitative excitation originating from the ω system cannot be transmitted. This is the problem of the transmission of the indication of reality, and we will see how this is organized through three different processes. Since this qualitative excitation cannot be transmitted to the Ψ system, it must be assumed that the perceptual excitation is followed by a perceptual discharge, and this perceptual discharge is only an intermediate stage.

Because it is not the perceptual discharge itself that will reach the Ψ system, but rather a report of this discharge. That is why I used the word information. It is not the perceptual excitation nor the subsequent perceptual discharge resulting from the excitation that reaches the Ψ system, but information about this discharge—a report of this discharge.

Thus:

1. perceptual excitation,
2. perceptual discharge, which FREUD assumes based on all the facts,
3. information, or a report of this discharge, transmitted to the Ψ system.

Therefore, it is the discharge from the ω system that constitutes the indication of reality transmitted to the Ψ system.

What about in the case of hallucination?

The indication transmitted is the report of the discharge, the same as in the case of perception. That is why, in the case of hallucination, there is no distinctive criterion between perception and idea or memory.

However, if inhibition intervenes, which is possible when the ego is invested, there is a quantitative reduction in the investment of desire. There is then an indication of quality or reality. Only at this moment does the distinctive criterion become valid.

Finally, FREUD adds that inhibition originating from the ego—since we have seen that this inhibition is only possible after an investment of the ego—is the distinctive criterion between perception and memory.

Before summarizing this, which will allow us to follow it further, it is worth adding that in the second situation, avoidance of displeasure, the ω process serves as a biological signal whose function is to protect the Ψ system by producing attention, which is a Ψ process. I am elaborating slightly on what is stated briefly at the end of FREUD’s summary before he moves on to other considerations.

For this protective function, the Ψ system finds its attention attracted, and the ω process then serves as protection. What is the Ψ system’s attention drawn to? To the presence or absence of perception. Thus, the distinctive criterion can function in this case. Is that clear enough?

LACAN

There may be an imbalance in your exposition that arises from the following: I mentioned earlier that the energetic notion operates at the level of the Ψ system—that is, within our transversal schema. FREUD introduces the notion of quantity there.

This term cannot be associated with the caloric quantity used primitively in the history of thermodynamics. In this sense, all energy investments—considerable and significant—are tied to the very existence and sustenance of the living being. These are needs. This is introduced as determining all its initiatives. It provides the true energy for its search, its actions.

Here, we have the notion of these energy shifts of an important and quantitative order. In FREUD’s theory, the two are conflated. What matters to him is the problem posed: how does the qualitative—this kind of zone of perceptions of the external world, most of which have no biological significance, do not directly move any need, do not respond to any needs of the living being—considered as the source of Qη, neural quantity, come into play?

He does so through a trick that you may have overlooked, which is this: The ω system, in relation to the external world, is composed of differentiated organs, such that it does not record massive energies coming from the external world. We can conceive of massive energies—changes in temperature or considerable pressures—reaching levels that seriously endanger the persistent subsistence of the living being. In such cases, the living being has little choice but to escape, if it cannot buffer them. But this is entirely outside our area of interest.

The focus is on the relational functions of the psyche in connection with the fine determinations of the external world. These specialized apparatuses are designed such that the energy involved in an external phenomenon—for example, solar energy—captures only a period of the phenomenon. For instance, the period of solar energy as it reaches us as light energy. It will select from solar radiation the light energy, a certain range of frequencies, and within those, it will align not even with the energy zone as such in light energy—because, as transformers or photoelectric cells, what would we be?—but with the period.

It is therefore led to identify quality as such within a specialized apparatus, which implies almost complete elimination of any form of energy input. If you like, this means that an eye, when receiving light, retains far less energy than a green leaf, because with the same light, the green leaf accomplishes all sorts of things, like chlorophyll transformation. This is what FREUD emphasizes.

In other words, what is at stake, and which indeed justifies the notions of perception as a received thing, sensation, and perceptual excitation and discharge, is that you can sense that the notion of purely perceptual discharge—at the level of this apparatus itself—is merely a need for symmetry.

It must indeed be admitted that here, too, there is a certain constancy of energy—namely, that what is brought in must indeed reappear somewhere. But what is emphasized is that between this excitation and this discharge, the minimum amount of energy is displaced. And why? Precisely because of its very property, this system must be as independent as possible from what is properly referred to as energy displacement.

It must detach from it, distinguish the pure quality from it, namely the external world taken as a simple reflection. Are you following?

The proof is that, in order for there to be a comparison between what happens at the internal level—where the image only has memorial dependencies, where it is essentially and by nature hallucinatory—the ego, conceived as accentuating at a secondary level the regulatory function of this buffer, must inhibit the energy passages in this system as much as possible, bringing it down to a level as low as possible. Only then can there be a comparison, a possible balance, a common scale, between what happens at this level and at that level.

Only under this condition can what comes as an excitation or a report—but you can sense that this report implies an additional hypothesis—be filtered, so that this system, which is supposed to have already considerably filtered the external world, is filtered once again in order to be compared to the special excitations that arise as a function of a need: the image of a good meal when one is hungry. It is a question of knowing at what level the pressure of the need is, to determine:

• whether it will impose itself against all evidence and persist for a long time, since there will be nothing else,
• or whether the quantity of displaced energy can be buffered, sifted by the ego to a sufficient degree so that one can realize that the image is not realized.

Ultimately, that is what it comes down to.

In other words, after this initial elaboration, and simply insofar as FREUD thought that, already knowing the reflex, one would gradually be able to deduce and construct from it the entire hierarchy—perceptions, memory, thought, ideas (a traditional position).

[…] FREUD will produce a satisfactory schema. And this is what he is led to construct: ultimately, a consciousness-perception entity within a system, which is not completely absurd, because, in the end, it is true that such a differentiated system exists. We have a notion of it; we can even approximately locate it.

It is not exactly the sensory organs, nor the cerebral cortex, or at least the parts of the cortex that play this role. He is led to distinguish within the psychic apparatus two zones: a zone of imagination, memory, or more precisely, memorial hallucination, in relation to a specialized perceptual system as such.

At this point, we can see nothing else but consciousness as a reflection of reality.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

That is how it must be viewed. But it only appears much later, not in the text from 1895. Essentially, since he did not yet have a clear idea of the notion of the psychic apparatus—which he would later formalize with the perception-consciousness system—there are elements here, but they will only appear explicitly later.

LACAN
The elements are ω.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA
It is not yet conceived as what he will later call psychic apparatus.

LACAN
I believe, on the contrary, that the apparatuses as such are already there. Why call them Ψ, ϕ, ω if he did not already distinguish them as apparatuses?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA
Later, he will distinguish two fundamental elements within the Ψ system itself. This is what will give rise to the psychic apparatus.

LACAN
But what I want to show you next time is precisely that the term psychic apparatus is entirely insufficient to designate what is in the Traumdeutung. Because you will see that the dimension introduced by the Traumdeutung is not isolated at all—it is the temporal dimension that begins to emerge.

Another dimension, entirely correlated with it, is already information, in reality individualized not when he used the term report. It is we who deduce the necessity of a report. Continue, Mr. VALABREGA…

Inhibition is the fact that the ego must calm, at a certain level, the neuronal quantities so that they can become usable.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

It concerns the ego and indications of reality. There are three cases to distinguish:

1. If the ego is in a state of desire when the indication of reality appears, there is an energy discharge into what he calls specific action. This first case corresponds simply to the satisfaction of desire. It is the first case: the ego is in a state of desire, an indication of reality appears, and there is a specific indication of the fulfillment of desire.
2. With the indication of reality coincides an increase in displeasure. The Ψ system reacts by producing defense through lateral investment.

LACAN
This means that the quantity of energy passing through several neuronal filters arrives at the synaptic level with much lower intensity. This is the electrical schema. If you pass a current through three or four wires instead of just one, each wire will require proportionally less resistance according to the number of wires—that is to say, the synapses can stop it more easily.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

In the second case, it concerns a normal defense against the increase of displeasure.

3) Finally, if neither of the previous cases occurs, the investment may develop without being impeded, according to the dominant tendency.

These are the three cases of inhibition. Next, FREUD moves on—he discusses this in the passage—to the definition of primary and secondary processes, following these remarks. By primary process, one must understand the investment of desire carried to the hallucinatory point, to the hallucinatory representation. And by secondary process, one must understand a moderation of this primary process. The condition for this moderation is the proper use of the indication of reality.

For this to happen, the inhibition produced by the ego must intervene. At the end, FREUD returns to the primary process, in sleep and in dreams. Before reaching that point, he draws two important consequences from the secondary processes, based on the two characteristics just defined: moderation and inhibition.

First, the secondary process will appear as a diminished repetition of the primary process. This is the case with memory. And the second consequence: inhibition or lateral investment will bind a certain quantity of energy, and this energy is encountered in other processes, such as judgment and attention. Memories—take note—are secondary processes of reproduction, with the primary process being association.

Reproduction is made possible by the persistence of traces of thought and also traces of reality.

---

LACAN

What does that mean? Judgment, thought, are energetic discharges in their inhibited form. This construction will always remain his own when he says that thought is an act maintained at the level of minimal investment. It is, in a way, a simulated act, within the usual circuit it travels.

And reality is always something that must necessarily be admitted—namely, this reflection of the world, which must obviously be accepted by us because we have experimental notions indicating that we must pass through the idea of neutral perception.

By neutral, I mean from the point of view of investments—that is, having minimal investments.

Do not forget what animal psychology reveals. If animal psychology progresses, it is to the extent that it has emphasized, in the animal’s world (Umwelt), these lines of force, these configurations that represent pre-formed points of attraction corresponding to its needs—that is, what is also called its Innenwelt. This refers to a certain structure tied to the preservation of its form.

Because, in truth, it is not enough to speak of homeostasis in terms of energy; one must see that the needs of a crab are not those of a rabbit, and this for multiple reasons. This corresponds to the Innenwelt. And it is also clear that the crab does not take an interest in the same things as the rabbit. This seems self-evident.

But it is not at all self-evident, because you will notice that whether you deal with a rabbit, a crab, or a bird, and whether you subject it to experiments to explore its perceptual field—if, for example, you offer a rat or a chicken something eminently desirable, grains that feed it and satisfy it—and if you systematically correlate, using a choice apparatus, this food, or object satisfying a need, with a specific shape (triangular, green, or red),

You will realize, through such experiments, how astonishing—if I may say so—is the number of things a chicken, or even a crab, is capable of perceiving. This can occur either through senses homologous to ours—vision, for example, or hearing—or through apparatuses that resemble sensory organs but to which we cannot assign any anthropomorphic correspondence. For example, in the thighs of grasshoppers.

In any case, you will realize how extremely vast the sensory field available to these animals is, compared to what specifically structures their Umwelt.

In other words, far from simply having the notion of a coaptation between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt, of a pre-formed structuring of the external world according to the animal’s needs, we see that each animal has a zone of consciousness—to use the term as it appears in this perspective.

I am not saying that, because the external world is received in a sensory system in every animal species, this sensory reception is significantly broader than what we can structure as responses more or less pre-formed to its core needs.

In a certain sense, this corresponds to something: the notion of this generalized sensitive layer, explained by this schema, which clarifies that man indeed possesses far more information about reality than he acquires through the simple pulse of his experience.

Here, two things are missing: the pre-formed pathways that I mentioned in animals. Namely, man starts from almost nothing, and he must learn that wood burns and that he must not jump into the void.

It is not true that man must learn all this from scratch, but it is ambiguous to determine what he knows innately. It is more probable that he learns these things through pathways other than those FREUD accounts for in animals.

It is clear that we observe he already possesses a certain reference point, a certain knowledge, in the sense of CLAUDEL: co-naissance of reality (co-birth). This is nothing other than these Gestalten, these pre-formed images, which we must admit not only as a theoretical necessity of Freudian theory but also as something that finds confirmation in animal psychology—namely, that there is a neutral recording apparatus, something that constitutes this reflection of the world, whether we call it conscious or not. Let us say that FREUD calls it conscious.

You have already seen why, in humans, this appears with the specific relief that we call consciousness. This happens precisely because the imaginary function of the ego comes into play—meaning that man:

• perceives this domain of reflection,
• perceives it from the point of view of the other.

He is an other to himself, and this is what creates the illusion that consciousness is something transparent to itself, insofar as, in essence, we are not actually in it.

Instead, we are in the consciousness of the other in order to perceive the phenomenon of reflection.

But all of this is not yet fully developed. What is ungrateful in this discussion today is having to show you the difficulties FREUD speaks of—the first flutter of wings he makes when trying to provide a rational schema of the psychic apparatus.

You can see how all of this is, at once, coarse, ambiguous, and superfluous in certain respects because, when reflection introduces us to the notion of equivalence in its crude form, we no longer know just how hybrid this formula is, nor how it is already fraught with problems, insofar as FREUD introduces into it something that is simply the energetic notion that there is a need, and that this need drives the human being toward a number of reactions intended to satisfy it.

It is, if you will, this introduction of a notion that, at first glance, one might criticize as vitalist and forcibly inserted into a pseudo-mechanistic schema that is, in reality, fruitful because it is an energetic notion. There is the notion of neuronal energy quantity at the foundation. Just by having introduced this, you will see that, with the conjunction of this and his experience of dreams, there will be a striking evolution of the schema.

I apologize that we have insisted for so long today, and that it might seem sterile and archaic to you. But it is important to see what, in this schema, presents these kinds of questions—these openings towards the future. What forces the conception to evolve is not at all—as Mr. KRIS tries to make us believe—that there was an evolution in FREUD’s thought, transitioning from mechanistic thought to psychological thought. These are crude oppositions that mean nothing.

FREUD did not abandon his schema, but he was developing it at the same time as he was constructing the more elaborate schema presented in The Interpretation of Dreams, without highlighting or even sensing the differences. You will see how striking these differences are and how they mark the decisive step that introduces us into the psychoanalytic field as such.

But it is not at all about FREUD’s conversion to a kind of thought that would be organo-physiological thought, a sort of […]. It is always the same thought that continues. If one could say so, his metaphysics does not change. He simply elaborates and refines the schema. He will incorporate something entirely new into it, which is precisely the notion of information towards which we are being led.

I already indicated at the outset that what we are reconstructing here allows us both to clarify this notion of information, insofar as it is extremely current in thought today, and to show that it offers a way of resolving the final questions posed by FREUD in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

To achieve this, we still have a long road ahead.

You must be aware of this and understand that you are not here merely to encounter the things being discussed and feel satisfied because they align with your habits. Instead, you must learn, in a way, to suspend your thought at moments that are ungrateful—moments that are interesting precisely because they represent stages in creative thought, which later demonstrated a development that extends far beyond this initial approach to the question.