🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We will resume the discussion from last time. We will take up again the wall of language, and what happens in front of it, and on either side. This schema assumes one thing in order to be constituted as a schema: that, like light, speech propagates in a straight line. This is to say, of course, that it is a metaphorical, analogical schema. And for it to be established as a spatial schema, this single hypothesis is necessary.

There is also something implied in the schema I attempted to represent to you last time. It is this: something that interferes with the wall of language. For it is equally the specular reaction, the reaction through which the self and the other are in a specular relationship, through which what belongs to the self is always perceived essentially and always appropriated through the intermediary of a specular other, who always retains for the human subject the fundamental supporting properties of the Urbild, the fundamental image of the self. It is thanks to this that confusion, errors, and fundamental misrecognitions can occur, through which both fundamental misunderstandings and the common communication that relies on said misunderstandings are established.

Last time, I initiated this schema, which has more than one property, as I have already shown you by teaching you how to transform it and to see what the analyst’s attitude introduces anew into it. I also indicated to you that the analyst’s attitude could differ greatly, meaning that, at the same time, it can lead to diverse—and even opposite—consequences within the analysis itself. In other words, we have come to the foot of the wall, that is to say, to what happens in analysis depending on whether it is oriented:

– According to a conception that posits as foundational, as indispensable—not only for orienting oneself in meaning but also in the practice of analytic technique—the relationship of speech as such,

– Or according to one that, in some way, however slightly, objectifies the analytic situation and attempts—something I have long indicated to you as a certain way of approaching the analysis of resistances—to reconstruct this objectification, this attempt at objectification. And I would say that every objectification, every attempt to objectify this situation, arrives—under forms and with intensity varying according to authors, theorists, practitioners—at making analysis a process of molding, remolding the self, which ultimately, and even beyond the authors who operate in this register, necessarily results in the molding or remolding of the self after the model of the analyst and the analyst’s own self.

Of course, for the critique brought forth in such a matter to have its full scope, it is necessary to study this theory of the self as deeply as we have attempted to do, to support it by showing the fundamentally alienated, fundamentally specular character of the self, and how this is equally true for any kind of self. Every self that presents itself as a self is always a presentation of an imaginary function as such, even if it is the self of the analyst, for a self is always a self, however perfected, purified, or elaborated it may be.

Certainly, it is not without foundation that analysis has ventured down these paths, for the self has a much more precise, essential, fundamental impact in analytic speech. The question is to know… because FREUD at one point reintegrated it, because FREUD demonstrated, from more than one angle, the essential, economic, and dynamic importance—first and foremost—to which he added a certain topology, which we constantly refer to and which is at the heart of the problem at hand.

…that here, when FREUD reintegrated the self, whether it was to give it this value as an object, or more precisely to recenter the entire analysis on the object and object relations, as indeed the movement that followed within analysis itself suggests.

In other words, what is on the agenda today is this term object relation, which I have told you is at the heart of all the ambiguities that now make it so difficult both to understand the latter parts of FREUD’s work and to resituate technical investigations, which remain in themselves always fruitful.

But the resituation of these technical investigations within the general fundamental situation, within meaning, is often overlooked in analysis as such. I have told you that it is in a way that differs greatly depending on the authors that this term object relation is understood and that this instrument is handled. You will frequently find it used by an author too close to our milieu for me to have done more last time than to cite him through one of his recent works. I did not name him, but I think almost everyone recognized him—someone who wrote about obsessional neurosis and who placed object relation at the heart of his entire theory of obsessional neurosis [Bouvier].

Of course, under his pen, the object relation is not quite what it is under the pen of another. We must try to find a common factor to orient ourselves. It is certain that what I am teaching you here are notions—as I have often said and continue to repeat—truly fundamental, alphabetic, if I may say so, which are much more a compass rose, an orientation table, than a genuine cartography of the problems currently posed in analysis. This implies that, armed with this said orientation table, you must also attempt to navigate, by your own means, through the map. In other words, this question, about which certain critiques have reached me: one hears this or that person say, for example, that I am proposing here a theory that does not coincide with what can be read in a given text by FREUD.

I could easily reply that, in truth, before arriving at any separate text, one must understand the whole, for the ego appears in several places throughout FREUD’s work. Someone who has not seen the theory of the ego in Introduction to Narcissism cannot follow what FREUD says about the ego in Das Ich und das Es, which defines the perception-consciousness system. It is difficult to grasp what even, in this single text, the reference of the ego to the perception-consciousness system means if you have no idea of the general economy of FREUD’s work, which nonetheless implies that you test what I am teaching you here against an extensive reading of FREUD’s work.

But in any case, even within the topographical elaboration as FREUD develops it in Das Ich und das Es, to properly understand a definition—such as the one that equates the ego with the perception-consciousness system—you must not stick to that sole equality, to that sole equation, which in this order cannot even pass for a definition. If we isolated it on this level, it would simply be a convention, or a tautology, if you will. This is why FREUD, at that moment, in that famous schema that played such a hypnotic role throughout analysis—the famous egg schema, where one sees the need, and somewhere appears the kind of lens, the germinal point symbolizing the ego—the ego as that differentiated, organized part of the mass of need, through which the relationship with reality is established.

What FREUD means, if it is merely to adhere to a schema that can have a thousand interpretations, is that, in truth, the immense detour of FREUD’s work was not necessary to arrive there. What is important in this schema is precisely the entirely dependent nature of the organization of the ego concerning something that, from the perspective of organization, is completely heterogeneous to it. This is perhaps what is interesting to highlight. And I would say that the danger of any schema, especially any schema that tends too much to reify things, is that the mind immediately rushes into it to see the most routine and rudimentary images.

As a point of reference…
I had to choose one, and since I chose one very close to us last time—and it is never so easy to speak about authors who are also geographically close to us—I have taken another from the analytic literature, an Englishman named FAIRBAIRN, or rather a Scotsman, who tried, not without rigor and not without having precisely the exemplary character required by our presentation, to reformulate the entire analytic theory in terms of object relations.

It is a reading that cannot be inaccessible to you, in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952) and in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. XXV, 1944, pp.70-93 (Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships, 1944). It concerns, writes our author, the endopsychic structure in terms of object relations. What does this yield? This is more than just the particular theory of an author. It is something simply laid out where you will recognize the familiar traces of how problems are posed, how we now report cases, how we evoke the incidences and forces of psychic reality, and even how sometimes one summarizes a treatment and discusses it publicly.

You will see roughly how the schema I am about to reproduce—the one he develops after an article that motivates, justifies it, and shows its echoes—ultimately gives the idea of something, an imagery, properly speaking, which is not unrelated to something that is indeed what we also have to handle under the name of “imaginary economy.” You will also see, at the same time, the implications, the danger, and in any case, what they can indicate to you: that by remaining at the level of such conceptualization, analysis runs great risks—and which ones.

Quite curiously, I will get straight to the point because one would really need to read the entire article, to show the process of its progression: it is a task you must each undertake privately. What we are doing here must guide your research, provoke you to confirm, not assert, and verify what is produced here.

Here is the schema the author arrives at, following the clinical example of a dream where the characters, the roles—those who have already heard something here that will be repeated tonight about psychodrama—will immediately see the connection, which is very peculiar, curious, and indeed a kind of degradation that tends to establish itself between a certain fraction of analytic theory and practices like psychodrama. One cannot speak of it without taking a stance: one cannot in any case say that it constitutes something that shares common ground with analytic practice as such. So here is where our author ends up:

He tells us, ultimately:

“Everything must be redone. There are singular heterogeneities, asymmetries in Freudian theory. I,” says FAIRBAIRN, “no longer understand anything. Would it not be simpler, rather than talking about a libido we no longer know how to handle, which poses too many problems for us, and which ultimately results in identifying it with drives that are essentially a certain way of grasping it in an objectified form—my God, why not simply speak of an object?”

And instead of starting, as FREUD did with so much caution and theoretical rigor, with a libido as primarily an energy—that is to say, a theoretical concept that has subsequently given rise to all kinds of confusion, for indeed it has also been identified with the capacity to love—our author, moreover, follows this path very well, and does not refrain from doing so, heavens no! For, since his goal is to make us notice that to understand things, one must step out of the Freudian perspective, which tells us that:

“Libido”—to express it as he puts it in his language and wording—“is pleasure-seeking,” he says, “in FREUD,” that is to say, it seeks pleasure. “We have changed all that, and we have realized that libido is object-seeking.” And Mr. FREUD had some idea of it: did he not write, “love for object,” love is in search of its object? Between the two, there simply occurred this kind of confusion: “love,” that is to say, “amour,” was substituted for “libido.”*

This is absolutely astonishing because, I assure you, you can encounter this in the first pages of this author. Like many people, he did not notice that there was a substitution, namely that in bringing forth an argument for the theory that would make libido object-seeking, he failed to notice that FREUD speaks of love at the moment when he still believes he is critiquing libido theory, as…
you see the connection with what I brought up in the last session…
as something that at least raises the problem of its adaptation to objects.

The notion of object-seeking libido is of predominant prevalence in the entire economy where it will operate, in the psychic reality of the object as such. This will lead to this kind of simplification, very difficult to avoid, which is the one into which the entire analytic theory has ventured. And for this, the theory I am presenting to you here—the definition of the domain of the imaginary as such—seems to me particularly well-suited to allow us to find our way, that is to say, to introduce every conceptualization to its essentially operational value.

If there is something that justifies what I am attempting here—it is a driving force, one of the keys to the doctrine I am developing for you—it is this way of distinguishing for you the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, of breaking you into it, of familiarizing you with it. I believe that one of the advantages of this conceptualization, one of the most fruitful springs of this exercise, of this conceptual mental gymnastics, is to enable you to find your bearings when you hear talk of the transformation of analysis, now oriented towards objects, to see what secret confusion lies beneath this notion of the object.

It is nothing less than the pure and simple confusion of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Under the notion of the object, you can no longer find the essential distinctions, thanks to which it is even conceivable that we intervene via analytic technique. In the end—since there are objects—the objects will always be represented by the way the subject approaches them. It is this that you take literally.

And when you grasp them objectively, as it is said—that is, without the subject’s knowledge—you will also represent them as objects homogeneous with the first ones, that is to say, with the world of objects brought forth by the subject. And amidst all of this, you will attempt to orient yourselves, God knows how!

The notion to which FAIRBAIRN, the author in question, arrives is this:
that we must have the notion that there is a central ego.

This central ego is the ego as it has more or less always been imagined from the moment when the individual organic unity became reified on the psychic plane in the notion of its unity—that is, to take as a given the psychic synthesis of the individual and to see in it something consistent and tied to the existence and functioning of apparatuses, something that ultimately makes the ego a psychic object and as such closed to any dialectic. This is the classical, academic conception—the empirical ego, taken as such and studied as an object of psychology. This is the central ego.

And this central ego—we will also notice, as you can see, how little functional value the initial references to consciousness and the preconscious now retain:
– One part of this central ego emerges into consciousness and the preconscious, conceived of as nothing more than domains of manifestation.
– Another part—something which has never been denied, contested, even in the most outdated psychology—of this ego is, of course, unconscious.

It is from the relationship of this ego with:
– not the repressed,
– not repressed meanings,
– not everything that immediately introduces us to a subjective dimension in FREUD,
but other structures, conceived as such, as repressed.

That is to say, the ego that can be seen, which is within our reach, of which the subject is if not fully conscious, then at least almost entirely conscious—that is to say, that it is composed with it, identical with it—and then there will be something that is repressed, which is another ego. Because, from the moment we admit the organization of the ego, we can just as well admit it as a real organization.

In short, the ambiguity surrounding the term object here rests on a complete lack of any kind of critique of objectification as such. There will be another ego, which is the libidinal ego. The libidinal ego is that part of the ego insofar as it desires, and insofar as it is desirable, thus oriented towards objects—objects that are there, somewhere. And we will soon see—it is very instructive—how they will be designated.

This libidinal ego, due to the extreme difficulty of its relationship with the said object, has undergone—we are not yet explained by what mechanism—this kind of dissociation, this schism, which means that its organization, which indeed belongs to an ego, has been, by the fact of the central ego, rejected, pushed back into autonomous functioning, but a functioning that can no longer be reconnected to the functioning of the central ego.

You recognize something that takes shape quite well in everyone’s mind during a first grasp of analytic doctrine—a return to a kind of vulgar doctrine. Simply, an emphasis on the postulates—when I say vulgar, I mean popularized—implied by such a conception is an adoption, this time systematic and without any precise critical recourse to what might cast doubt on the validity of such a schema. This is indeed how some analysts currently arrive at conceiving what essentially signifies the process of repression.

We know that the situation has not been so simple for some time because we have also discovered the existence in the unconscious of something else, which is far from being libidinal, and which is what? It is everything that provoked the great reshuffling of analytic theory following the introduction of the theory of aggressiveness, from the moment when the problem of the relationship of aggressiveness, as immediate and present in the unconscious, could raise the problem of its relations with the function of the superego. The entire problematic is there, posed by FREUD.

He did not confuse internal aggressiveness with the superego. Here, we will encounter a notion that is particularly striking because it seems that he could not find in the English language a term that truly seemed able to represent the disruptive, even demonic function—for that is ultimately what it is—and in this form appears the instance he called the internal saboteur. I do not know how this is distorted with English pronunciation.

X– It’s almost the same: internal saboteur.

LACAN:

And it makes itself heard. It is an internal saboteur, of course also by another process of repression of the apparatus and organization of the ego. And this is also linked to the fact that it is in relation to an object—a corresponding object—which has, in some way, motivated this differentiation.

In other words, it is because there were, in the life of the individual, two instances of the object, singularly inconvenient at the origin of development, that the ego—whose property is to be something that is in relation to the object—was led to have these very peculiar relations, characterized by what is called the economy of repression, with what could be called, and which he does not hesitate to call, the pseudopods through which it communicated with these two problematic objects.

The two problematic objects must also be referred to by the name given to them by the author. These two problematic objects have a peculiar property: they are fundamentally and initially one and the same object in their real origin. I will not surprise you by saying that, in the final analysis, it is ultimately the mother in question. At this level of theorizing the psyche, it is about the original frustration or non-frustration, and everything comes down to that.

The relationship…
and I am not forcing anything, I urge everyone to refer to this article, which is exemplary of what underlies many more moderate, more nuanced, more camouflaged positions, but which is one of the manifest trends to anyone who lives within contemporary analytic dialogue…
in the end, it is about the division or the primitive schism between the two faces—good and bad—of the primitive object, that is to say, the mother as a nurturer, to which the essential structurations are ultimately reduced, and everything else will only be elaboration, ambiguous play, homonymy, of the primitive situation. This is absolutely not avoided.

This is pushed to its ultimate consequences in the article I am discussing, where it is said that the Oedipus complex merely superimposes itself upon this primitive structuration, giving it motifs. Very precisely, these are motifs in the ornamental sense of the term. At a more elaborated stage, it will then be a matter of the father and the mother distributing, in a way that can itself be extraordinarily nuanced and divided, the fundamental roles that are inscribed in this primitive division:
– Of the object, here described as exciting, that is, the object insofar as it excites desire, with libido here being conflated with the entirely concrete, objectified property of desire as such, in its conditioning,
– And of the other, which is described as rejecting.

I do not want to take you too far. But this is rich with implications that would allow us to critique these ideas, if only for this reason: that exciting and rejecting are not on the same level. Rejecting already implies, in a latent way, a subjectivization of the object, because on the purely objective plane, an object is either frustrating or it is not. From the moment we introduce the notion of rejecting, we secretly introduce the intersubjective relationship as such, the non-recognition.

This shows you the extent of the confusion to which one is perpetually subject, even in elaborations like this. But I do not even want to dwell on what could be done as internal critiques of the schema in its own terms. I am not here to correct Mr. FAIRBAIRN regarding his own intentions; I am progressively trying to reveal his intentions to you and what all of this ultimately leads to.

Here now are the elements that will function. This tendency towards repulsion, ultimately, to which the entire notion of repression will be reduced—the libidinal ego and the internal saboteur—is justified for the best reasons. Precisely because if they were created and differentiated as such, it is due to the extreme difficulties in managing the two primitive objects, all of this represented by arrows.

These two primitive objects are one and the same object in reality, linked to the division into its two faces, good and bad, linked to the fact that, for the object as rejecting to be somehow mastered, it is absolutely indispensable that it must, in some way, be internalized by the subject, conceived as alive by the individual subject, by the ego.

Moreover, the principle of the internalization of the bad object is not even something that can, in fact, be contested in the economy, in the general schema that we can give of development. This is not to be contested, indeed. And, in truth, the remark made—that this something must urgently be internalized in order to be somehow mastered, regardless of any inconvenience that might follow—is indeed rather about the bad object than the good one, which it is better left outside, where it can exert its beneficial influence.

But assuredly, it is because this object is far from being univocal—that is to say, it is one and the same object that causes, in the subject, both the distress of rejection and the ever-renewing libidinal incitement, thanks to which this distress is reactivated—that it is, in a sense, within the movement, within the wake of the internalization of the bad object, the rejecting object, that the process will also occur whereby the libidinal ego is considered too dangerous, as it too acutely reactivates the drama that led to the original internalization.

It, too, will then secondarily be rejected, subjected henceforth, on the part of the central ego, to the action of repulsion, of schism, of repression, which is expressed by the arrow we place here. And we must not forget this, which happens within the unconscious—that is to say, on the part of the term thus designated as internal saboteur—a double additional repulsion, manifested this time in the form of aggression, which comes from the instance itself repressed, under the name internal saboteur, that is to say, something closely related to the primitive bad objects.

This is roughly the schema we arrive at, and you can see that it indeed reflects something which, from the perspective of the general structure, unmistakably reminds us of more than one phenomenon that we actually observe in clinical evolution, in manifestations, and in what seems to reflect the behavior of subjects in the field characterized as that of neurosis.

The importance of such a schema is, for example, directly illustrated by the image of a dream, where events occur that are indeed entirely expressive and exemplary. The subject dreams that she herself is the object of an aggression by a character who turns out to be an actress, with the function of the actress having a particular connection to her history.

In the continuation of the dream, a transformation allows the clarification of both the relationships of the aggressor character with the subject’s mother, and on the other hand, the splitting of the aggressed character in the first part of the dream into two other characters, respectively male and female, and who shift in the manner in which the iridescence of color momentarily renders ambiguous the appearance of a given object.

In the dream, we successively see the aggressed character pass, through a sort of pulsation, from a feminine form to a masculine form—a masculine form in which the author has no difficulty recognizing her exciting object, buried far behind the two others, a kind of inert element found deep within the unconscious psyche. The associations of the subject with this dream allow it to be identified with her husband, with whom she undoubtedly has the most difficult relationship, represented at that moment by his imminent return home.

Illustrating it with a dream like this has little significance. A thousand other things could illustrate it. It is simply a matter of knowing what role such a schema can play in the economy that will be deduced from it concerning the action, the intervention of the analyst. One of the modifications that seems theoretical on the part of its author is precisely this: it seems to him that only such a way of theorizing the fundamental structure of the subject allows one to arrive, first of all, at its absolutely radical elements—namely, being able to probe, identify, almost quantify in each case, according to predominance, the least emphasized instance in the functioning of the subject’s behavior, what qualifies it, and what gives it its particular situation.

Independently of this notion, which alone is not enough to justify the creation of such a schema, there is this:
the author tells us that a schema like this is inherently open, predetermined for all the subject’s readaptations, because ultimately, what is it about? It is about this libido, about this energy, hitherto apprehended theoretically in the extraordinarily fluid relations of its internal economy—that is to say, none of its parts can change without all the others changing at the same time.

On the contrary, here it is about a perfectly defined and stable world, of the individual living with objects destined for them, in which they can find their strict adaptation. And at every stage, it is essentially about helping them rediscover the path to a normal relationship with objects that are there, waiting for them.

The difficulty, of course, since things do not happen on their own, lies in the existence—and the hidden, secret existence—of these objects, which are henceforth called internal objects, and which are fundamentally, in their origin, of an adaptive nature. These are already objects that, as such, have had, so to speak, a sort of full-fledged reality.

If they have transitioned to this function—a function henceforth characterized by obstacles, heaviness, and paralysis for the subject—it is because the subject failed to cope with the primitive encounter with an object that did not measure up to its task. This—I am not forcing anything—is stated in the text. It is because, after all, the mother, we are told, did not fulfill her natural function.

For it is assumed:
– that in her natural function, the mother is in no case a rejecting object,
– that the mother can only be good in the state of nature,
– and that it is due to the particular conditions of how we live that such an original accident can occur: that the subject is forced to separate, to cut off a certain part of themselves.

And quite rightly, insofar as this part is the one they have, in some way, had to abandon—the cloak of Joseph, so to speak—they had to amputate themselves, rather than endure the essentially ambivalent incitements as such, from which the entire drama arises out of this ambivalence, that is to say, this ambiguity. This is what the word ambiguity means: being at once a good and a bad object.

But this schema, as you see it commented on step by step, is not without its merits. It contains all kinds of things that can be highlighted. In particular, that any notion of the ego that is efficient and valid must indeed correlate the ego, in some way, with the objects.

Whether this object is called internalized, you can feel that, ultimately, this is where the trick lies. This internalized object—what is it? That is precisely the question. This is what we are trying to resolve here by speaking of the imaginary and, at the same time, by seeing all the implications involved in referring to the imaginary order, provided we understand the function played by the imaginary within the overall biological order.

This is something I will return to shortly, although I have already given you enough indications about it. It is precisely the fact that the function of the imaginary within the biological order is far from being identical to the real that will be at stake.

But here, there is no critique of this order: the object is an object, taken in its entirety. The position we choose to objectify it—that is to say, at the beginning of the subject’s life—indeed lends itself entirely to this confusion because we have every reason to think that the imaginary value of the mother, as such, can indeed be very significant. It is also all too evident that the value of her real character is something that also has an entirely predominant impact.

The drama, if I may say so, is the risk of confusion, of ambiguity born from the moment when, however predominant these two registers may be, one is led here to confuse them. Indeed, what is at stake?

It is about ensuring that this libidinal ego can be reintegrated—that is to say, that it finds the objects destined for it, and that these objects destined for it participate in this dual nature of real objects and imaginary objects. I mean that it is to the extent that they are covered with this imaginary prestige, which makes them objects of desire—if there is something that analysis has always placed at the forefront, it is precisely this: the fertility of libido in the creation of objects as such, which correspond to a certain phase, a certain stage of its development—and, on the other hand, these objects will be real objects.

These real objects, of course, cannot be given to the individual by us; this is beyond our capacity. What is at stake is to enable them to stop having, in relation to the object as exciting—that is, provoking the imaginary reaction—an attitude, a behavior that allows them to fully manifest, in its quantifiable extent, that libido which has until now been repressed, and whose repression as such constitutes the core of their neurosis. Well, I believe that, at this level, it is clear that if we adhere to such a schema, there is indeed only one path for the analyst.

To know what path the analyst can take, it is necessary to know where they are, where they can be situated in this schema. When Mr. FAIRBAIRN deduces from a phenomenon—and not from an abstract construction, specifically from the dream—the differentiation of this multiplicity of egos, as he puts it, the central ego is nowhere to be seen at that moment. He assumes it because we started with the idea that now it is the ego that interests us and, consequently, we can bring it into play.

The ego in question, which he calls central, has only one function in the dream. He represents it, in the dream he discusses, for example, as the origin of the coordinate system he defines. It is an ego; it is the ego he observes, the one in which the entire scene unfolds. If, from an objectified schema of the individual, we move to an indispensable effort to objectify the analytic situation, we will see that the analyst can, in fact, occupy only one position: precisely the position of the ego they observe.

This second interpretation has an obvious merit and value as soon as it is made: it is truly the justification of the first. Because, up until now, in such a theory, in such a schematization, the ego of the subject, insofar as it observes, has precisely no active character of an ego. If someone is observing, however, it is indeed the analyst. Moreover, what we know is that, in the economy of such a schema, this central ego has the precise function of being something that the analyst assumes exists in their subject—namely, the central ego.

Here, this analyst who observes is also the analyst who will somehow have to intervene: whether we call this interpretation, analysis of resistances, or something else, it is they who will intervene. Let us set aside how they will intervene. What is certain is that it is they, from this position, from this posture, who will somehow have to intervene in the revelation of the function of this hidden object, this repressed object, insofar as it is correlative to the libidinal ego, which must be allowed to reveal itself and to evolve. In other words, what is this about?

The subject—that is now the function of analysis—will reveal what the images of their desire are, and the analyst is there to show them the right direction for these images, the one where they can find satisfaction, and the mode by which these images, which constitute the objects, can once again be confronted.

The intervention of the analyst is, therefore, something…
and you will recognize, I believe, what for some of you, I suppose, constitutes merely the development of what we do in analysis…
which allows the subject to rediscover suitable images, images with which they can align themselves.

These images, from the moment we are dealing here with a reality—a reality that constitutes a world of reality—the only difference between psychic reality and true reality, as it is said, is precisely that psychic reality is subject to this mode called identificatory, which is this relationship with images. There is no measure of the normality or direction of images other than that given by the imaginary world—to some degree, you will always find it again—in the analyst themselves.

This is not contested, and every kind of theorization of analysis that is based upon and organized around the object relation consists in saying that, ultimately, the reorganization, redistribution, and recomposition of the subject’s imaginary world will occur according to the standard and world of what constitutes…
the thing is stated and emphasized, and wherever you go, as soon as you enter such a framework for organizing experience, you will find it asserted…
the order, the world of images that constitute the ego of the analyst.

The original faulty introjection of the rejecting object, which has, in some way, poisoned the exciting function of said object, is something that is corrected by the proper introjection of a correct ego, of the ego of the analyst, of the imaginary world of the analyst as such.

Having explained this, I have done so at length, almost much more slowly than anything I have explained to you until now. This was intentional so that you may recognize the function effectively attributed to the object relation in practice. For, having heard from me how the schema of analytic progress is organized, you cannot help but recognize it implied in countless practices and theorizations you encounter daily, based on principles that, though implicit, still require explicit clarification.

Is this analysis? In presenting it to you, I have the impression that many of you have not been introduced, through the work we do here, to another question: the radical, basic, endopsychic schema, situation, or structure, as the author of this schema puts it. I think it is worth pointing out that here the entire experience will therefore occur not through speech, but through the instrument of speech, yet at the limit of this function which then, in analysis, assumes merely a kind of role of distraction, of keeping up appearances.

One does not know why one speaks. What is at stake is to observe how, at the limit, in what escapes the field of speech, the field of affirmation, the field of verification in speech, one perceives what captivates the subject, what stops them, rears them back, inhibits them, frightens them, and in some way, objectifies this in order to correct it—to correct it, I repeat, on an imaginary plane that can only be that of the dual relationship with the model constituted by the analyst, for lack of any other system of reference.

The question I am trying to present to you here, through one of FREUD’s most challenging works, is this:
– FREUD never settled for such a schema.
– If he had wanted to create such a schema, he would have done so.
– If he had wanted to conceptualize the theory of analysis in this way, half of his work would be different.
– If this schema were conceptualizable in this way,
– there would have been no need for Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle—I have emphasized this throughout our teaching this year—consists precisely in the fact that this imaginary economy is not given to us at the limit of our experience as a sort of ineffable lived experience constituted by search, discovery, or something that would be a better economy of mirages.

On the contrary, the entire imaginary economy only makes sense, we only have a grasp on it, and it only has significance in analysis to the extent that it is embedded within a symbolic order—a symbolic order which, as such, imposes a relationship that is fundamentally not dual but ternary. And from the moment it is ternary, it opens onto the full complexity of the symbolic order as universal.

No matter how well this schema aligns with the dream referred to, which illustrates it particularly clearly and evidently in its very images, no matter how objectifiable such a schema may be, there is one thing more essential than all, and it is the dominant fact:
– it is the subject who tells it to you,
– it is the subject who dreams, and experience proves that this dream is not made randomly, haphazardly, or addressed to no one.

The dream, even in analysis, retains all the value and function of what could be the direct declaration by the subject of everything they can recount about themselves. And it is in this communication—in the fact that they can recount it to you, tell it to you, judge themselves as having such and such inhibited attitude, difficulty, or, on the contrary, ease in other cases, whether feminine or masculine—that the very lever of analysis lies. And this can be so because it is not something superfluous, superstructural, that they can articulate it in speech.

It is already organized from the outset within a symbolic order, within a legal order into which the subject is introduced almost from the very beginning, and which already gives meaning to their imaginary relations through a discourse that I call the unconscious discourse of the subject. Through all that takes place, the subject wants to say something, and they want to say it in a language that, as such, is adapted—or at least virtually offered—to become speech, that is, to be communicated.

It is in the spoken elucidation relationship that the driving force of progress lies. It is to the extent that the images will gain their meaning within a broader discourse, within something into which the subject’s entire history is integrated, and, as such, the subject is a fully historicized subject. This is where analysis takes place: at the boundary between the symbolic and the imaginary.

The subject does not have a dual relationship with an object that is merely in front of them; instead, it is in relation to another subject that their relations with this object take on meaning and, consequently, their value. Conversely, if they have relations with this object, it is because another subject also has relations with this object. Both subjects can name it, situate it in a certain way, within a certain order—an order that is different from the real. From the moment it can be named, from the moment its presence can be evoked as an original dimension, that is to say, as something distinct from its reality, a new meaning emerges.

Presence, as such, presupposes absence, and the naming and evocation of presence, and the possibility of maintaining this presence in absence. In other words, the schema that places the object relation at the heart of analytic theorization is something that always leaves us with a veiled, eluded, external perspective. This schema always keeps hidden what must be taken as the central focus of analytic experience—namely, what the subject tells you.

It is the fact that they tell it to you, it is in the act of narrating themselves, that the dynamic driving force of analysis lies. And the breaks that appear, which allow you to go beyond what they tell you, are not found in the margins of discourse; they are precisely breaks within the text of the discourse. It is because something appears within the discourse—something that seems, if you will…
I will let the word appear—it is indeed the first time, and you will see in what sense…
something irrational. It is at this level that you can introduce images in their symbolic value.

This is the first time I grant that there is something irrational. But rest assured, there is no contradiction here when we use this term in the strict sense it can have in arithmetic. There are numbers called irrational. The first one that, I believe, comes to mind, regardless of your familiarity with such things, is the observation made since the Greeks. It is the observation that brings us back to the Meno, which constituted the kind of gateway through which we entered this dialectic this year—it is the realization that there is no common measure between the diagonal of a square and its side. It took a very long time to admit this. For a long time, people stubbornly believed that they would eventually find it—no matter how small you choose it, you will not find it. That is what is called irrational.

I will tell you that everything we call Euclidean geometry is precisely based on this: that one can use two symbolic realities equivalently. They are both symbolic. We can suppose one to be reality and the other to be a symbol—or two symbols, if you like—two symbolized realities that have no common measure. And it is precisely because they have no common measure that we can use them equivalently—that is to say, do what Socrates does in his dialogue with the slave in the Meno.

He says, “You have a length. You make a square. You want to make a square twice as large—what must you do?” The slave responds, “I will make a length twice as long.” The only thing that matters is that Socrates immediately makes him understand that he is mistaken—that if he makes a length twice as long, he will end up with a square four times as large. And we would remain stuck there and never find another way. Because there is no way, no matter how you arrange real squares, to find a trick that makes one square twice as large.

But it is precisely because it is dealt with in a symbolic way that the present reality can be managed—that is to say, these are not actual squares or tiles being manipulated but lines being drawn, which are then introduced into reality. Of course, this is the thing Socrates does not tell the slave because that is where the mystery lies. They say the slave knows everything and merely needs to recognize it—but only on the condition that the groundwork has been laid for him.

And this groundwork is precisely this: having drawn this line and immediately using it as something that can be treated equivalently to the one originally supposed—assumed to be real.

That is to say, one can, regarding both, speak of something that constitutes a square. At this point, it will no longer be a great feat to make the slave recognize that there is also a square here, and to make him realize that this square must be twice as large as the other because it is equal to four times its half.

You can already see how many things are introduced! The entire numbering of whole numbers is introduced into matters that were not originally given, where it was simply a question of bigger and smaller and real tiles. In other words, you can see here—since I take this example to clarify—a set of imaginary evidence camouflaged, or more precisely, giving an evident appearance to what is essentially symbolic manipulation.

Because if the solution to the problem was found—that is, the square that is twice as large as the first square—it is because the first square was effectively destroyed as such. That is to say, something was taken from it that is no longer a square, since it is a triangle, and, with this triangle, a second square was recomposed.

This presupposes an entire world of symbolic assumptions that are, in some sense, more hidden than revealed behind the false evidence to which the slave is made to adhere. In other words, the point is to demonstrate what is falsely evident, what appears apparently natural—a space that would supposedly contain within itself its own intuitions, though nothing is less evident than this.

It took a world of surveyors, a world of practical exercises, of trigonometry, practiced by people long before those who discoursed so learnedly in the Agora of Athens, for space, for example, not to be, for everyone, what it might have been for someone living by a great river in a wild and natural state—a space of waves and loops of sand, on a perpetually shifting beach, where no fixed point can ever be grasped.

A space can also be pseudopodic. To borrow my example, it took a very long time to learn how to fold things onto others, to align imprints, with all sorts of adjustments, to begin to conceive of a space that subsequently appeared secondarily as homogeneously structured in three dimensions, even though it was you who brought these dimensions with your symbolic world.

In other words, the introduction here of the incommensurable aspect of the irrational number lies precisely in the fact that it is not commensurable. It animates all those initial imaginary structures that would otherwise remain inert, still reduced to operations like those we still see lingering in the early books of Euclid:
remember with what caution one lifts the isosceles triangle, verifies that it has not moved, applies it onto itself—this is how you enter geometry.

Geometry bears here the trace of its umbilical cord—that is, nothing is more essential to the entire construction of Euclidean geometry than the fact that something can be turned back upon itself, something that ultimately is nothing more than a trace, and even less than a trace—it is nothing at all. And it is precisely for this reason that one feels so much apprehension, at the moment of grasping it, about performing operations in a space that it is not prepared to confront. And indeed, it is here that one sees to what extent it is the symbolic order that introduces all reality into what is at stake.

Likewise, when it comes to the images of our subject, it is the dialectical order…
the fact that all of this—the function of images—has been inscribed, has taken a certain place, a certain point, that in certain points they have been quilted into the text of the subject’s history…
they are taken as functions within a certain symbolic order into which the human subject is introduced as early as possible, as closely as possible, as coalescent as you can imagine afterward, and contemporaneous with the original relationship, which we are forced to admit as a kind of residue of the real, namely this submission to the real object.

But immediately, as soon as there is something in the human being resembling this rhythm of opposition—which is already scanded by the first wailing and its cessation—something already reveals itself. It reveals itself through all the traces it leaves behind as operative within the symbolic order. All those who have observed a child have seen how precisely the same blow, the same shock, the same slap, is not received in the same way if it is a punitive slap or an accidental blow.

As early as possible, and even before the fixation of the subject’s own image as it will become the first structuring image of the ego, the symbolic relationship as such—that is, as constituting the intersubjective relationship, as introducing the dimension of the subject as such into the world—reveals something capable of creating another reality than what presents itself as raw, massive reality, as the collision of two masses, as the impact of two balls.

It is as early as possible that experience, particularly imaginary experience, is inscribed as such into the dialectic, within the register of this symbolic order. It is because this is so…
because already everything that has occurred in the order of the object relation is structured around something that has been, for the subject, a particular history, something that is not simply reminiscence but rememorable…
it is because of this that analysis is possible.

It is because of this that the phenomenon of transference itself is transference.

Today, I have been led, simply by the necessity of presenting to you this typical schema of what currently tends to be a certain theorization of analysis, to perhaps extend far more during this seminar than I originally intended in my critique. At the same time, not enough time remains to approach things from their other side, from their other angle, from their other perspective—that is, to address positively what the place of the ego-to-ego relationship, the dialectic of the ego, the function of the ego signifies in an analysis correctly centered on the exchange of speech.

This is what I will do next time. If today’s session has seemed too arid, I will take an example and a literary reference, whose connotations will become evident to you.

I wanted to say that the ego can only be conceived as one among others in the world of objects, insofar as it is symbolized. But, on the other hand, it has, of course—like that space that is always there at the limit—its own kind of evidence, and for the best reasons. It is quite certain that there is a very close relationship between ourselves and what we call our ego, and that our identity with this ego is something that we do not see at all in its real insertions. We only see it in the form of an image.

This is the other end of the chain, as they say; it is in a certain time. This is indeed what will be at stake. If there is something that shows us, in the most problematic way, the mirage-like nature of the ego, it is precisely the possibility of evoking the double, and more importantly, the illusion of the double.

In short, the very term imaginary identity of two real objects, although different, is something around which this function of the ego as such can be tested. And as we pose it here as a problem, it is indeed around the double that I intend to open the next seminar. And this, of course, has led me to some literary reflections that are far from recent on the subject of what the character of Sosia represents.

It cannot be distinguished, due to the value we grant to the symbolic register, from the realization that it did not emerge immediately but appeared belatedly in the legend of Amphitryon. It was Plautus who introduced him as a kind of comic double, the quintessential double, of the most magnificent of cuckolds, the one named Amphitryon.

Around this legend, which has been enriched over the ages and reached its final pinnacle—not its last, actually, because there is Giraudoux—with Molière:
– There was a German version in the 18th century, mystical in type, evoking something like a Virgin Mary.
– There was the marvelous Giraudoux, where the pathetic resonances and the deepening of the theme go far beyond mere literary virtuosity.

You can reread all of this by next time. I will focus on Molière’s Amphitryon, in its classical character. And you will see how, since today we have had, concerning a certain conceptualization of analysis, what I do not believe to be the best—a small mechanical schema of considerable effect—it is only natural that, to illustrate something else—the theorization within the symbolic register of analysis itself—I should turn to a dramatic image or model.

I will try to show you, within Molière’s Amphitryon, what I will call, to parody and pastiche the title of a recent book, the adventures—and even the misadventures—of psychoanalysis.