🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

What did yesterday evening’s session bring you?
What do you think about it?
What connection does it have with our everyday objects?
What began to clarify morality?
What are your impressions?
What does it give you?

LEFORT

I wonder why these people don’t have a civilization. It seems that so many things come from Egypt, yet they have remained where they are in terms of expression. That’s the question I asked myself. But what Mr. GRIAULE brought us, for me, it opened horizons about these peoples who have an unsuspected metaphysics and a [culture?]. In particular, this vibration of speech that cracks the seed and goes to settle on things in potential.

LACAN

Notice, the civilization of Sudan, he didn’t emphasize it much. There is, nonetheless, a very complex history of sorts of marriage, influences, invasions, empires. We regret, moreover, not seeing all of this more tightly woven, the result of a current investigation, set on a very systematic level.

The things he briefly alluded to, for example, the Islamization of an important part of these populations, the fact that they continue to operate on the symbolic register, while belonging in a non-negligible way to a style of religious creed distinctly discordant with this system—their demand on this level manifests itself very precisely, for example when they ask to be taught Arabic because Arabic is the language of the Quran.

All of this, which persists alongside, correlatively to the things otherwise demonstrated, like a tradition that comes from very far and remains very much alive, which seems to be maintained by all sorts of rhythmic processes, is something that leaves us hungry. But one must not believe that this Sudanese civilization is without a [culture?].
You see the external manifestations…

LEFORT — For example, architecture, the little houses…

LACAN

We saw them at the colonial exhibition, the style from the banks of the Niger. But obviously, it’s quite troubling. It’s made to disrupt our categories regarding scale, which we believe to be too unique, where the quality of a civilization can supposedly be measured.

Who has read the latest article by LÉVI-STRAUSS? What do you think about it?
It’s precisely this that is being referred to—that certain errors in our perspectives stem from the fact that we use a single scale to measure what is called the quality, the exceptional, unique character of a civilization.

It’s obvious that there is something here that gives the feeling of an extraordinarily broad and deep use at the same time, and exemplary inasmuch as it seems capable, almost independently of other material supports in culture, of being a great support for the people who live within it, who know this mode of communication that is nonetheless quite striking. That’s what is exemplary: this sort of isolation of the symbolic function.

When one sees this, it always seems difficult to judge these things through an informant who sees things from a certain angle, who brings, it seems, great satisfactions, which allow these people to live under conditions that, at first glance, can indeed seem quite arduous, quite precarious from the point of view of well-being, of civilization, and yet they seem to find there a very powerful support, in this kind of thing that can remain hidden for a long time.

It’s also striking […] how long it took to be able to communicate with them.
There’s an analogy here with our own position vis-à-vis the human subject.
Don’t you think we can roughly take stock of things this way?

As for what I said last time about the dream of Irma’s injection, does that raise questions for anyone?
I think it would be appropriate to confirm, to know if what I told you was well understood.
In the end, in the way I revisited Irma dream, what did I want to say and show you?

Who wants to speak on this? LECLAIRE?

Serge LECLAIRE — I prefer not to speak on this subject.

LACAN — GRANOFF?

Wladimir GRANOFF — …

LACAN — MANNONI?

Octave MANNONI — I’ve been sick; I missed the last sessions.

LACAN — VALABREGA?

VALABREGA — I have nothing to say.

LACAN

Well, this dream of Irma’s injection, as I revisited it last time, I would like us to go back over it a bit.
I believe two essential elements of what I highlighted for you are the dramatic nature of the discovery of the dream’s meaning in the moment Freud was living through, between 1895 and 1900—that is to say, during the time when he was developing this Traumdeutung. And when I speak of this “dramatic nature,” I would like, in support of this, to give you an excerpt from Letter 138 of the Letters to Fliess, which corresponds to that moment. It’s the letter following the famous Letter 137, in which, half-joking, half-serious, and even terribly serious, regarding this dream, he brings us the imagination of the future:

“There, on July 24, 1895, Doctor Sigmund Freud found the mystery of the dream.”

Following passage, next letter:

“On the great problems, there are still many things to decide; everything is pulsating… It’s a double image of waves, of oscillations, as if the whole world were animated by an unsettling imaginary pulsation and at the same time an image of fire, of glow…”

The continuation clearly indicates the thought and image pursued by FREUD:

“An intellectual hell, one layer after another, at the level of the darkest core… umriss Von Luzifer…”

The features, the drawing, the silhouette of LUCIFER, which begin to become visible, this extraordinarily unsettling side, which seems to reflect an utterly impressive, even distressing experience during that moment in FREUD’s life, is something of a dimension we must not forget. It represents what, around these years—the forties—was lived by FREUD during the essential, decisive moments marked by the discovery of the notion of the function of the unconscious.

It is indeed in this register, with this perspective, that I tried to show you what a unique and exceptional value among others was represented […] as, at that time, they began to reveal to FREUD—in this atmosphere of a lived questioning of the very foundations of the world, of human apprehension—it is within this that the entire experience of discovering the unconscious was lived.

We don’t need more indication of what properly constitutes his self-analysis, insofar as he alludes to it much more than he reveals it in the Letters to Fliess. It is in an atmosphere of dangerous, distressing discovery that everything revealed during this period takes place.

It is in this way that I wanted to emphasize this dream of Irma’s injection, showing that the very meaning of the dream relates to the very depth of the experience lived by FREUD at that time. The dream itself is included there, and it is, in a way, a moment, a stage. While it questions the dream, the dream responds on a double point—not simply on the question posed to the dream.
The dream itself, which is a dream dreamt by FREUD, is a dream that, as a dream, is integrated into the progress of his discovery. This is how this dream takes on a dual meaning. On a second level, it is not merely an object deciphered by FREUD, but the dream itself—that is to say, since the dream is a kind of act that is the act of speech—it is a speech of FREUD, who, at that moment, lives from his research. This is what gives this dream its exemplary value, which otherwise would remain, compared to other perhaps more demonstrative dreams, rather enigmatic.

The value attributed to it by FREUD, as an inaugural dream deciphered, would remain quite enigmatic if we could not precisely read this meaning, which makes it a dream that specifically answered FREUD’s question—and, in sum, far beyond what FREUD himself, at that moment, is capable of dialectically analyzing for us in his writing.
What FREUD weighs in this dream and the assessment he makes of its meaning is something far surpassed, in reality, by this historical value that the dream takes on, and that FREUD takes into account by presenting it in this place in his Traumdeutung, acknowledging it in this way by giving it this function and this place in his work.

This is essential to the understanding of this dream. And this, I believe, has allowed us… I would like confirmation from your response, but I also do not know what interpretation to give to this absence of response from some of you [cf. supra: Leclaire, Granoff, Mannoni, Valabrega…].
…I believe that what we were able to see last time seems to have a sufficiently convincing value that I have no reason to return to it. But I will return to it on another level.

Indeed, what I want to emphasize in the way I revisited things last time, by considering not only the dream itself—that is, by taking up FREUD’s interpretation of it—but by considering the entirety of this dream and the interpretation FREUD gives of it, and even more, the particular function of the interpretation of this dream within what is, in sum, FREUD’s dialogue with us. Because that is the essential point:
We cannot separate from the interpretation of the dream the fact that FREUD gives it to us as the first step in the key to the dream. FREUD addresses us by making this interpretation.

One of the questions that careful examination of the dream can help clarify, the one we paused on during the penultimate seminar, is precisely this delicate, thorny question of regression, insofar as we use it in an increasingly routine manner, not without it becoming apparent to us at any moment that we are superimposing extremely different functions onto this notion of regression.
For not everything in regression is necessarily of the same register, as has already become apparent in this original chapter, concerning the distinction—which is certainly valid—of the topical distinction between temporal regression and formal regressions.

So what is there in this dream, for example, that makes the new understanding we have gained, which relates to this question of regression, as it was raised, for example, by FREUD, at the level of topical regression, when speaking to us about the hallucinatory character of the dream, which seemed to lead him, according to his schema, to this requirement of a notion of a regredient process instead of a progredient one?

The regredient process, insofar as the dream would bring back everything that belongs to a certain moment of the psychic chain, everything that must express itself, in sum, at the level of certain psychic requirements, to their most primitive mode of expression, which would be located at the level of perception—of what is perceived. This would, in part, be interpreted as follows: that the mode of expression of the dream would be found…
through mechanisms that are questioned here, in a way that is far from consistent—FREUD himself points this out in the theory he provides about the dream…
…in part subjected to the requirements of passing through figurative elements, whose increasing purity, the fact that they approach more and more the level of perception, would pose this original question, namely:
why a process, if we follow it along the progredient line where it usually unfolds, must lead to those mnemonic boundaries that are those of images.

But images insofar as they are increasingly distant from the qualitative plane:

• where perception occurs,
• where they are, in a sense, increasingly bare, stripped,
• and where they would precisely take on an increasingly associative character with what FREUD told us, the different systems that VALABREGA presented to us on the board the other day, namely increasingly at the symbolic node of resemblance, identity, difference—in short, something that goes far beyond what properly belongs to the associationist level.

What is figurative in this “dream of Irma” is something, according to the analysis we made of it last time, that imposes such an interpretation on us. That is to say, something that essentially forces us to consider that there is a kind of convergence at the level of the different associative systems S1, S2, S3… that occurs at the level of the Ψ system, the recording of memory, which returns as close as possible to this primitive entryway of what comes through the senses, at the level of perception. Is it something that compels us to support this schema, with what it paradoxically entails, as VALABREGA remarked?

The fact of realizing that when we want to speak of the outcome of unconscious processes towards consciousness, we are forced to place consciousness [C] at the exit, while perception [P], with which it is inherently linked, would be found at the entrance.

What did we observe in this phenomenology of the dream of Irma’s injection, which we took as an example?
We spoke of two parts: the first culminates in the revelation of the terrifying, distressing image of what I called “the head of Medusa”, the abyssal revelation of something quite literally unnameable, which is at the bottom of that throat, with this complex, unplaceable form that makes it equally the primitive object par excellence, under whatever register we consider it:
– the abyss of the female organ, from which all life emerges,
– equally the chasm and the gaping mouth, where everything is swallowed,
– equally the image of death, where everything comes to an end,
…since the connection with the illness that could have been fatal, which threatened his daughter, is the link with the patient he lost, at a time contiguous with his daughter’s illness, and which he considered as if the threat posed to his daughter had been some kind of retaliation of fate against a professional negligence:
“One Mathilde for another,” he wrote.

So, at the level of this particularly distressing appearance of something that summarizes in itself what we can in some way call the revelation of the real, in what is least penetrable, absolutely without any possible mediation, of this ultimate real, of this essential object which is no longer an object, which is something before which all words stop, all categories fail, and which is, strictly speaking, the object of anxiety par excellence.

At that moment, what happens? Can we speak of the process—at this peak moment where the dream arrives—can we speak of a process of regression to explain the profound destructuring that occurs at this level in the dreamer’s experience, namely the transition from the first register, which seizes FREUD in his research, his pursuit at Irma’s location, and even in his active pursuit:
– he reproaches Irma for not hearing what he wants her to understand,
– he strictly continues the style of real-life relationships.

It is in this passionate, overly passionate pursuit, we might say—and this is indeed one of the meanings of the dream to say it formally, since, in the end, that is what it’s about:
– the syringe was dirty,
– the passion of the analyst, the ambition to succeed, was too pressing,
– the countertransference—as we say—of the analyst was itself the obstacle.

At the moment when this dream reaches its first peak, something happens that is a complete change in the subject’s relationships. The subject becomes something entirely different:
– there is no longer a FREUD,
– there is no longer anyone who can say “I”.

In truth, the observation is made by the author I indicated to you last time, who had conducted research for a deeper understanding of “Irma’s injection dream”, namely Erik ERIKSON, where he speaks of a […].

I am trying to show you that it is perhaps something else, and that this sort of subject, which appears at that moment, what I have called “the entrance of the jester”—since that is roughly the role played by the figures FREUD appeals to…
It’s in the text: “appell”—the Latin root of the word reveals the legal sense on this occasion.
…this appeal he makes to this consensus of his peers, his equals, his colleagues, his superiors, is the decisive point.

Is this something that could allow us, without further ado, to speak of regression, or even regression of the ego, which is a notion entirely distinct, and completely different from the notion of instinctual regression? The notion of ego regression was introduced by FREUD at the level of the “Lectures” classified in French under the title “Introduction to Psychoanalysis”.

It’s something that raises all kinds of problems—namely, whether we can, regarding the ego, introduce the notion of typical stages, constituting a development, phases, a normative progression in the subject’s development.
You know that at this point, without the question being resolvable today—on the contrary, a work on this level can be considered fundamental—that of Anna FREUD, “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense”.

It must be acknowledged that, in the current state of things, we absolutely cannot introduce, concerning the notion of ego development, the idea of a typical, stylized development, which would be expressed in this way: that a defense mechanism, by its very nature, would indicate to us, if a symptom is attached to it, at what stage we must link the psychic development of the ego. There is nothing here that can be doctrinally set out, tabulated, as you know has been done, and perhaps overly done, in the order of the development of instinctual relationships. Far from it, we are entirely incapable today, concerning these different defense mechanisms enumerated by Anna FREUD, of offering in any way a genetic schema that could be paralleled, or even simply give us the beginnings of an equivalence of the development of instinctual relationships. This is precisely what many authors tend to compensate for.

And the author I spoke of last time, ERIKSON, did not fail to address this. This is what he refers to when he provides, regarding the stages of ego development, this kind of spectrum, to which I alluded last time.
It is certainly not to attach great value to it. I do not believe at all that this is what we need to resort to, as I told you, to understand what happens at this turning point in the dream.

It is not a previous state of the ego that is at stake, but literally a “spectral decomposition,” if one might put it this way, of the ego’s function, which is involved at this stage of the dream. And the appearance of the series of “I’s” and identifications, of which FREUD, at a later stage in his work, strictly told us that the ego is made, from the series of identifications that, throughout the subject’s life, have represented, at each historical moment, and in a manner dependent on historical circumstances, the subject’s life.

It is these successive identifications that are at issue. And it is these that must be understood if we want to understand what the subject’s ego is. This is found in Das Ich und das Es, which follows Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the pivotal point we are now reaching after having taken this long detour, which we are currently making through the initial stages of FREUD’s thought.

This “spectral decomposition,” as I call it, is obviously an imaginary decomposition.

It is precisely on this point that I now want to try to draw your attention, namely whether the subsequent stage, relative to the Traumdeutung, in FREUD’s thought—the one we referred to several times last year, when we were studying the Technical Writings, that is, those grouped between the years 1907 and 1913—is the period during which, correlatively, the theory of narcissism was elaborated. This theory represents a fundamental stage in the development of FREUD’s thought, which is why last year we could not provide even a comprehensible analysis of everything that unfolds during that era in the context of the Technical Writings, without referring, on the other hand, to this theory of narcissism, centered on the article Introduction to Narcissism.

If FREUD’s theory…
as it was presented to us at that moment, showing us the entirely fundamental function of narcissism in structuring all of man’s relationships with the external world…
If this theory has any meaning, if we must logically draw consequences from it, it is in a way that certainly aligns with everything the elaboration of the apprehension of the world by living beings in general has offered us in recent years, along the lines of what is called Gestalt thought. This refers to the dominance, in the structuring of the animal world, for example, of a certain number of fundamental images that provide this world with its main lines of force, giving it a form that, in a certain way, spreads the need for memory.

That it is something entirely different in humans, extraordinarily untethered, seemingly, from their needs for objectification of the world—this is where the central problem lies. This is where the Freudian notion of narcissism provides us with a category that allows us to understand how there is nonetheless a connection between:
– this structuring, seemingly very neutralized, of the human world,
– and the insights that animal psychology gives us regarding the relationship between this structuring of the animal world and the world of human needs.

If something is brought to us by the notion of narcissism, it is quite evidently this.

This is what I tried to highlight, to express, to make understandable in the notion of the mirror stage:
a certain relationship that dominates the entire world of human perceptions, insofar as it precisely contains something untethered, fragmented—let us express our thought directly: anarchic—which establishes man’s relationship with his world on the plane of an entirely original tension. Namely, that it is first and always external, and in a way that reflects in an anticipatory manner the unity he will place there, insofar as:
– he will bring to it the distinctly human mark, his own reflection,
– he will bring to it the image of his body as the principle of all perceived unity in objects.

It is this dual relationship with himself that makes it so that, in sum, it is always around a kind of wandering shadow of his own ego that all objects will be structured. All the objects of his world will have this fundamentally anthropomorphic, let us even say egomorphic, character, which means that it is in this very perception that, at every moment, for man, there arises and is evoked this unity—which is both his own, ideal, and at the same time a unity never fully attained, which at every moment escapes him, insofar as this object is, in effect, never definitively and ultimately the final object for him.

Except when, indeed, in certain exceptional experiences, it presents itself, but then as:
– an object from which he is irrevocably separated,
– which reveals to him the very image of his fissure within the world,
– an object that, by essence, is one that destroys him, that distresses him, that can never be attained, where he can never truly find his reconciliation, his adherence to the world, his perfect complementarity on the plane of desire.

This radically torn character of human desire and the fundamental relational world where the very image of man introduces:
– an always imaginary mediation,
– therefore always a problematic mediation,
– thus never fully accomplished,
– which is sustained in a succession of instantaneous experiences, in something that always either alienates man from himself or results in the destruction or negation of the object.

The perceived unity outside has its own unity:
– as a “desire” that man sees in the world,
– something that, as soon as it is perceived, places him in a state of tension,
– whereby he perceives himself at that moment essentially as desire and as unsatisfied desire.

Conversely, when he grasps his unity, it is the world that, on the contrary, decomposes before him, loses its meaning, and presents itself to him in a profoundly alienated, discordant manner. It is in this imaginary oscillation that we find the underlying drama in which every human perception, insofar as it truly concerns a human being, is experienced.

We therefore do not need to seek in a regression the reason for the imaginary eruptions that characterize the dream. It is insofar as something is experienced, which represents this approach to the ultimate real, insofar as a dream goes as far as it can go in the order of anxiety, that we witness precisely this imaginary decomposition, which is nothing other than the revelation of the most normal components of perception, insofar as it is entirely related to a given tableau:
– where man always recognizes himself somewhere,
– always sees himself, sometimes even in several points,
– where the points of attachment, or if you prefer, the points of stability and the points of inertia of the tableau of the relationship with the world, make it so that this is not something experienced in an unrealized and derealized manner, and that this tableau is always loaded with a certain number of diverse representations of the subject’s ego.

This is indeed how we are accustomed to interpreting a dream. In every dream—it is always thus that I teach you, in supervision sessions at least for certain dreams—it is essential to learn to recognize where the subject’s ego is. This is already what we find in the Traumdeutung, where FREUD repeatedly knows how to show and recognize that it is he, FREUD, who is represented by this or that figure. For example, in the dream of the castle, in the chapter we began to study, the dream of the castle in Spain, or more precisely the castle of the Spanish-American War, where he is with the commander of the castle, who dies at one point. And FREUD says:

“I am not in the dream where one might think. The character who just died—that is me, and here is why.”

The second part of the dream is precisely this: the highlighting, precisely at the moment when something of the real, in its most abyssal form, is reached, of these fundamental components of the perceptual world as such, which constitute this narcissistic relationship. This means that the object is always more or less structured as something that is the image of the subject’s body, the reflection of the subject: the specular image is found, more or less, somewhere in every kind of perceptual tableau.
It is this image that gives the tableau a special inertia, a special weight, a special quality.

It is masked, sometimes very masked, but in the dream—precisely because of a certain lightness that relationships take on in the imaginary plane of the dream—it reveals itself easily at every moment, all the more so because the point of anxiety has been reached once, which is something where the subject encounters:
– the experience of his rupture,
– the experience of his isolation from the world,
– the experience of what makes the human relationship with his world something deeply, initially, inaugurally damaged as such.

This is what emerges from the entire theory that FREUD gives us of narcissism, insofar as its framework introduces this ineffable “no way out” quality that marks all its relationships, and especially its libidinal relationships—the fundamentally narcissistic character of Verliebtheit, of object love, the fact that it is never grasped and apprehended on the libidinal plane except through and by means of the grid of the narcissistic relationship, with everything that is initially present in a fully real relationship. This is something we must always remember if we want to understand one of the most essential dimensions that the doctrine of experience, of Freudian discovery, allows us to consider as establishing and structuring the imaginary human relationship.

In fact, what happens at this level…
when we see this polycephalous subject substitute itself for the subject, this crowd I spoke of last time, which is a crowd in the Freudian sense, as discussed in Ego Psychology or Mass Psychology, which is precisely made up of this fundamental imaginary plurality of the subject, of this spreading, of this unfolding of the different identifications of the ego…
What happens, if not, of course, something that appears to us at first as an abolition, a destruction of the subject as such?

Because after all, this subject transformed into this polycephalous image is a subject that comes from the acephalous. And if there is something that represents the notion FREUD gives us of the unconscious, it is indeed in this way that we must represent the unconscious:
– an acephalous subject,
– a subject insofar as there is no longer an ego,
– insofar as it is extreme to the ego,
– that it is decentered from the ego,
– that it is not of the ego.

And yet, it is the subject who speaks. For it is he who makes all the characters in “the dream of Irma’s injection” utter those nonsensical speeches, which precisely gain their meaning through their nonsensical character. In fact, what is this about? What emerges from this moment in the dream where we reach, with the discourse of multiple egos, who enter the scene in the greatest cacophony, is this: in fact, the objection that concerns FREUD is his own guilt, specifically in relation to Irma.

The object is destroyed, so to speak, and the guilt in question is indeed destroyed along with it. I highlighted this to you concerning the comparison FREUD makes with the story of the cracked cauldron:
– firstly, that it was returned intact,
– secondly, that it was never received,
– thirdly, that it was already cracked.

It is something of the same order here. There was no crime because:

– Firstly, the victim was, as the dream says in a thousand ways, already dead; that is to say, she was already sick, or with an illness that FREUD could not have cured, since everything in the dream indicates that she suffered from an organic disease. So, the victim was already dead when the crime took place.

– Secondly, the murderer, that is to say, the criminal FREUD, was innocent of any intention to do harm because…

– Thirdly, the crime in question was, in sum, a curative crime, which is indicated in another part of the dream in this paradoxical form—and this is one of the most absurd parts: the illness—there is a pun between dysentery and diphtheria—dysentery is precisely what will cure the patient, says one of the three eminent characters: all the evil, all the bad humors will leave with dysentery.

In FREUD’s associations, this echoes a burlesque incident he had heard about in the days preceding his dream, one of those things doctors sometimes come across…
with the character of comedy figures they retain over time,
when they are in their role as consultants…
profoundly distracted, while at the same time commenting on a case where it was pointed out to him that the subject nonetheless had albumin in their urine, he immediately replied: “That’s fine, the albumin will be eliminated.”

This is indeed what the dream concludes with—that it is precisely the entry into operation of the symbolic system, if we may say so, in its most radical use, in which this ineffable absolute that it represents comes, in sum, to eliminate, to abolish the individual’s action so completely that it simultaneously eliminates his entire tragic relationship with the world.
It is a kind of paradoxical and absurd equivalent of: “All that is real is rational…”

In the final analysis, he arrives at a strictly philosophical consideration of the world, which can result in placing us in a kind of very particular ataxia, in something where, after all, the action of every individual is justified according to the motives that drive them, these motives being conceived as something that entirely determines them, which can no longer, in any way, be weighed from a perspective in which the subject himself feels, even for a single moment, concerned.

Since every action is a “ruse of reason,” after all, everything is equally valid, and from a certain extreme use of the radically symbolic character of all truth, one can also say that all this relationship with truth loses its edge, and that the subject literally finds himself, amidst the course of things, the functioning of reason, its entry into play, reduced to being no more than a point, something passive playing its role, pushed within this system. He finds himself truly excluded from any participation that is properly dramatic and consequently tragic in the realization of this truth.

It is indeed something so extreme that happens at the limit of the dream, in this kind of total absolution where FREUD, ultimately, in the revelatory experience of this dream, finds himself carried, and which he himself recognizes as being, in reality, the secret animation of the dream, the goal pursued by what he calls the structuring desire that animates this dream and pushes it to its conclusion. In fact, we are indeed confronted here with something that prompts us to ask ourselves about the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic, and to rediscover in another way this third function of the symbolic, this mediating function, which I had already let you glimpse at the moment when, trying to rediscover a kind of mechanistic representation of the interhuman relationship…
from the image I had borrowed from these modern mechanical constructions, from the most recent experiments, the research that cybernetics has provided us with examples of…
to show you that what constituted the model that can be given of interhuman relationships comes through the capture of a certain number of these artificial subjects by the image of their fellow beings.

For the system to operate, for it not to be reduced to a vast, increasingly paralyzing concentric hallucination, it obviously required the intervention of a regulating third party, of something else, which had to establish between them the distance of a certain ordered arrangement. Well, this is something we rediscover here from another angle and under another aspect: every imaginary relationship, as I indicated to you earlier, occurs and is understood within a kind of “you or me” between the subject and the object. That is to say, if it is you: I am not; if it is me: you are not.

This is precisely where the symbolic element intervenes, in these objects that, on the imaginary plane, never present themselves to man except in the vanishing relationships of that something where he recognizes his unity, but only externally. And insofar as he recognizes his unity, he feels himself, in relation to the object that represents this unity, in the disarray of what is precisely what we call instincts, drives, which precisely in this fundamentally fragmented character represent the fundamental discordance, the essential maladaptation, the essentially anarchic character that the study of the Id as such, and the very experience of analysis, shows us to be something that characterizes the instinctual life of man. That is to say, precisely this possibility of displacement, which amounts to saying fundamental error, which is attached to all properly instinctual relationships.

If this object is never graspable except as a mirage, as a mirage of a unity that can never again be captured on the imaginary plane, it is certain that the entire object relation can only be struck with a fundamental uncertainty, which is indeed what has been found in countless experiences. It is not enough to simply call them psychopathological, since they are contiguous with many other experiences that are themselves qualified as normal.

Well, here the symbolic relationship, the power to name objects, is something that intervenes as absolutely essential for structuring what I would call perception itself. Man’s perceiving itself can only be sustained within a zone of naming:
– insofar as it is through naming that man maintains the subsistence of these objects in a certain consistency,
– insofar as these perceived objects, which are never perceived except instantaneously in this narcissistic relationship with the subject, and which could never be perceived otherwise than instantaneously, it is only through the mediation of the word, and the word that names, and the word that essentially names what, in these objects, is glimpsed for an instant.

This word:
– is the identical, within this dazzling difference, always on the verge of vanishing,
– is something that does not respond to the spatial distinction of the object, always ready to dissolve into an identification with the subject,
– it responds to its temporal dimension, to the fact that these objects, for an instant constituted as semblances of the human subject, as doubles of himself, nonetheless present, through time, a certain permanence of aspect, which is not indefinitely durable, since all objects are perishable, mortal.

It is nonetheless this permanence, this temporal dimension, this fact that, for a certain time, one can apply the same name to them. And the name is essentially this: the time of the object.

The name is an appearance for a certain time, a recognition that endures, but it is strictly recognizable only:
– through the mediation of naming,
– through the mediation of the pact constituted by naming,
– through the mediation of the fact that this naming is a naming where two subjects simultaneously agree to recognize the same object.

If the human subject does not name…
as Genesis says it was done in the Garden of Eden: first the major species…
…if there is no agreement on this recognition, there is no perceptible world of the human subject that can be sustained for more than a moment. This is where the characteristic, the junction, the emergence of the dimension of the symbolic in relation to the imaginary lies.

This also shows us the profound coherence of this entry of discourse as such.

I have taken it simply in its state as discourse, and entirely independently of its meaning, since it is nonsensical discourse that is at issue: the entry into play, in the dream of Irma’s injection, of discourse as such at the moment when the dreamer’s world, on the figurative plane, is plunged into the greatest imaginary chaos, that is to say, into the increasing and total decomposition, into the disappearance of the subject as such.

Well, what I have indicated to you is that in the dream, namely the recognition of the fundamentally acephalous character of the subject, past a certain limit: this point, which seems designated in a way that almost itself seems like a kind of symbolic game, which designates at point N, in the formula of trimethylamine, the place where one must see, conceive, and designate what, at that moment, is the “I” of the subject—something I did not indicate without caution, without humor, nor without hesitation, since it almost has the character of a Witz, a witticism, to ultimately see there the final word of the dream, at the point where one sees all the heads of this hydra on a body that no longer has one, in “a voice that is no longer anyone’s voice,” in the appearance, the emergence of this formula of trimethylamine as being the final word of what is at stake, of what is sought, of what gives the word to everything.

And after all, this word means nothing, except that it is still a word. This is what I told you last time. It is quite certain that this, which has an almost delusional character, is indeed so. If it were the subject alone, if FREUD alone, analyzing his dream, tried to find there, in the manner an occultist mind might proceed, the kind of secret designation of the point where indeed the word is, where the solution to all the mystery, both of the subject and of the world, lies.

But let us not forget this: it is not at all in this way that things present themselves. FREUD is not alone. FREUD communicates to us the secret of this Luciferian mystery, to use the terms I extracted from his letters at the beginning of this talk. FREUD is not alone confronted with this dream on this occasion.

This dream, as I told you, just as in an analysis every dream is addressed to the analyst, we can say that FREUD, in this dream, is already addressing us. It is already for us—that is, for the community of psychologists, anthropologists… all those supposed to represent the world with which he is in dialogue—that he dreams. And when he interprets this dream, it is to us that he speaks. And it is for this reason that this final absurd word of the dream, the act of seeing in it the word, is not to see something that somehow participates in a delirium, since FREUD, through this dream, makes himself understood by us and indeed puts us on the path of what his object is, namely the understanding of the dream.

It is not simply for himself that he finds the Nemo, or the alpha and the omega of the acephalous subject, as representing his unconscious. On the contrary, it is he who speaks, through this dream, who realizes that he tells us, without having intended to, without having first recognized it, and recognizing it only in his analysis of the dream—that is, while he speaks to us—he tells us something that is both him and not him, which spoke in the final parts of the dream, which tells us:

“I am the one who wishes to be forgiven for having dared to begin to heal these patients, who, until now, were not to be understood, and therefore were forbidden to be healed. I am the one who wishes to be forgiven for this. I am the one who wishes not to be guilty of it, because to transgress a limit previously imposed on human activity is always to be guilty. I wish not to be that. In my place, there are all the others. I am only the representative of this vast, rather vague movement that is this search for truth, in the sense where I erase myself. I am nothing anymore. My ambition was greater than myself. The syringe was dirty, undoubtedly. And it is precisely because I desired it too much, because I participated in this action, because I wanted to be myself, the creator. I am not the creator. The creator is someone greater than me. It is my unconscious, it is this speech that speaks within me, beyond me.”

This is the meaning of the dream. I believe that what will now allow us to go further, to understand in the continuation of our lessons the way in which we must conceive the death instinct—which is, let us not forget, in question—the relationship of the death instinct with this world of the symbol, this world of speech, this speech that is within the subject without being the speech of the subject.

This is the question we sustain for as long as it takes for it to take form in our minds before we can, in turn, attempt to provide a symbolization, a schematization of it, which will allow us to understand what the function of the death instinct is.

And, of course, we are beginning to see very naturally why it is necessary, beyond the pleasure principle, for the death instinct to be something that exists, for this dimension to exist, insofar as we see that it is indeed beyond the homeostasis of the egos, beyond the pleasure principle, insofar as their ego always finds itself, insofar as the unconscious intervenes. It is because something else, another current, another necessity, intervenes, which must be distinguished on its own plane. FREUD is led, after introducing the pleasure principle as that which regulates the ego’s measure, which establishes this consciousness in its relationships with the outside world, where it precisely finds itself again—it is due to the insufficiency of this explanation, with regard to this compulsion, which ensures that something that has been excluded from the subject, or that has never entered into it, the Verdrängt, the repressed, expresses itself in this Zwang.

It is a matter of explaining this Zwang, of realizing that we cannot simply and purely integrate it into the pleasure principle, namely because if the ego, as such, finds and recognizes itself, it is because there is an unconscious, a beyond of the ego, a subject who speaks, and yet is unknown to the subject, and we must assume another principle.

Why did FREUD call it the death instinct?

This is precisely what we will attempt to clarify through other avenues. First, by highlighting, from other perspectives, at other moments of both psychopathological and normal experience, as FREUD teaches us to discover it.

This is what we will do in our future encounters.