🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I will complete my remarks from last night: the formation of the analyst, of what would constitute their specific realms, along with the transmission of this science that I have precisely named and whose general characteristic is to be ordered by linguistics. Naturally, in this sense, I did not have much more to say, given that we are not quite there yet…

The essence of what I said, namely in the conference, was indeed that the formation of the analyst begins with deeply internalizing what is articulated in the most vigorous manner possible for people, a portion of whom are extremely far removed from our studies. You will see, on the contrary, that through a kind of refraction—if you will—of this flawed symbolism, of this confused notion of symbolism that intertwines within symbolism itself, properly speaking:
– both the one in which we understand ourselves here, symbolism as structured in language,
– and what can be called natural symbolism, which I referred to last night under a formula framing my discussion: reading coffee grounds is not the same as reading hieroglyphs.

That was, therefore, where the crux lay. If there is something that, in what I said last night, could have been partial, left something to be desired, but also, of course, the concomitant part of what I initially intended to fully elaborate. I believe, however, for such an audience as it was, it was necessary to bring to life, to some extent, the difference between the signifier and the signified. I even provided examples, some humorous, I gave the schema, and I moved on to the analytical applications.

I do not believe there is even a sufficient chance that people fully grasped all the care I tried to take, to give a kind of concrete dimension, to build a framework that allows for an understanding of what we emphasize, by recalling that Freudian practice tends, in a certain way, to promote to the forefront, to somehow captivate the attention of analysts in what it shows us as enticing in:
– imaginary forms,
– the relationships of meaning from subject to subject,
– the meaningful value of their world on the imaginary and intuitive planes.

And above all, I recalled that:
– everything FREUD tells us,
– everything he emphasizes,
– everything that, ultimately, allows for organization, progress, that defines this field as something we can shift but into which we can, properly speaking, enter,
…we can properly set it into motion.

In contrast, the dynamics of phenomena are tied to this character of ambiguity, of fundamental duplicity resulting from the distinction between the signifier and the signified in all phenomena of the analytical field. You could see how much this revolves around the problematic of the word, how it is no accident that it was a Jungian who introduced this term.

At the core of the Jungian myth, there is indeed this: that the symbol is conceived as what I called “a kind of flower that rises from the depths”; it is a blossoming of what lies within each person, of man as typical. The distinction lies in knowing whether the symbol is that, or whether it is, on the contrary, something that envelops, contains, intervenes, and forms what my interlocutor rather nicely called creation.

The second part concerned this shift in analysis or what arises in analysis from this forgetting of the fundamental truth of the structuring of signifier-signified, and there, naturally, I only indicated—as I hope I articulated strongly enough overall—I could only indicate where the theory of analysis that reflects upon the ego, the way it designates itself, expresses itself in this doctrine, the theory currently promoted in New York circles, …highlighting that there is something here that completely changes the perspective in which analytical phenomena are approached, I tried to indicate how this participates in the same degradation, the same obliteration of the essential distinction.

This leads to placing at the forefront, indeed, one of the dynamically very effective mechanisms in the imaginary order, which is the relationship from self to self.

And I could only sketch what might result from this on occasion. I mean, I emphasized that if there is, somewhere, what is called “ego reinforcement,” that is, an emphasis on the phantasmatic relationship insofar as it is always connected, correlated to the ego relationship, it is precisely and more specifically among neurotics—not all subjects are neurotics—characterized by a typical structure.

There are indeed many other ways, modes of intervention: the extension of neuroses toward character neuroses, other significant manifestations of the unconscious. There are others, but especially in neurosis, this mode of intervention moves in a direction exactly opposed to that of dissolution, not only of the symptoms, …which are, properly speaking, significant but which can, on occasion, nonetheless be mobilized …but also of the structure of neurosis.

I indicated here that what we must call in obsessive neurosis the “structure of neurosis” is precisely the meaning of what FREUD introduced:
– when he developed his new topography,
– when he emphasized the function of the ego as an imaginary function.

And I also indicated, for those who were there, that it does not seem that a mere cursory inspection immediately reveals by its general disposition that the ego is absolutely nothing like what it is commonly made out to be, especially in its analytic usage.

Last night, I pointed out the most significant aspects. You see that FREUD connects the ego with the properly phantasmatic character of the object, and that the ego, as a mirage… what he called the “ideal ego,” that is to say, precisely the function of illusion, of unreality, the fundamentally narcissistic function of the ego, as he explicitly states, …has the privilege of performing the reality test.

It is this function that attests to reality for the subject, that is to say—the context is not ambiguous—it is specifically a matter of stating that it is through the function of the ego as ego function that the subject values, accentuates, attributes the emphasis of reality to anything: it is the fundamentally illusory function, expressed as such. From this topography, something—so I pointed out—was expected to occur as a result.

This is about understanding what use is made, in typical neuroses, of the ego precisely as an element of the subject, that is, how, with the help of the ego…
to paraphrase Aristotle’s point: “It is not man who thinks; it is not the soul that thinks; man thinks with his soul,”
…we would say that the neurotic poses their neurotic question, their secret question, their silenced question, their unformulated question; they pose their question through their ego.

In FREUD, this is demonstrated to us:
– how a hysteric uses their ego,
– how an obsessive uses their ego to pose the question, that is to say precisely:
– to avoid posing it,
– to maintain it,
– to sustain it in presence.

The structure of a neurosis being exactly what it is to us, it has, in its nature, what it is for us: it was long considered a pure and simple question; it was a problem because it is inherently a problem. The neurotic is in a symmetrical position: they are the question we ask ourselves. Since these are questions that concern us as much as they concern them, it is precisely for this reason that we have the greatest reluctance to formulate them ever more precisely.

I remind you that this is simply illustrated in the way I have always presented the problem of hysteria to you: it is the problem on which FREUD shed the most eminent light, that of the Dora case. What is Dora? She is indeed someone caught in a well-clarified symptomatic state, except that FREUD, by his own admission, made an error regarding what can be called “the object.”

Very specifically, he made this error about the object insofar as he was overly focused on the question of the object, that is, where he failed to account for the fundamental subjective duplicity involved. He was entirely centered on what could be the object of Dora’s desire. He did not ask, first and foremost, not only what Dora desires, but even who desires in Dora.

And the root of his error, the critique of his technique…
which he himself provides in recognizing that he was mistaken about the object,
that is, something belonging to the general topography of the subjective relation
…it is here that he indicates it to us, as well as in this four-character ballet:
– Dora,
– her father,
– Mr. K,
– and Mrs. K,
FREUD realizes that the object that truly interested Dora was Mrs. K. But what does this mean?
We know it: the configuration of the Dora case thus presents itself as follows: it is in identifying herself with Mr. K, it is insofar as the question of where Dora’s ego lies is resolved by this: Dora’s ego is Mr. K.

The function fulfilled, if you will, in the mirror stage schema by the specular image, where the subject situates their sense of recognition, the type of recognition in the similar, where for the first time the subject situates their ego, this external point of imaginary identification: it is in Mr. K that she situates it. It is from this point, and insofar as she is Mr. K, that all her symptoms take on their definitive meaning, namely that if they required explanatory conversions, sometimes a little far-fetched according to FREUD, everything becomes infinitely simpler: the action of Dora’s aphonia, which occurs during Mr. K’s absences, which FREUD explains in a rather clever way, though not without some doubt, because it seems almost too neat:

“She no longer needs to speak since he is no longer there. All she needs to do is write.”

This still leaves one a little perplexed.

For her voice to dry up in this way, it is because the mode of objectification is not established anywhere else. The aphonia occurs because Dora is left directly in the presence of Mrs. K, concerning which all her experience, it seems, of what she may have perceived in the relations between her father and Mrs. K, is tied to an apprehension of a mode of sexuality’s exercise that undoubtedly emerges, specifically her understanding of her father being fellated by Mrs. K: something that seems infinitely more significant for the emergence of oral symptoms in Dora’s confrontation, face-to-face, with Mrs. K. But this, moreover, is entirely secondary in my exposition.

What matters is that it is by identifying with Mr. K, by having her ego in Mr. K, that the entire fundamental situation—the one in which Dora effectively participates until the moment of neurotic decompensation—this is what makes the entire situation, of which she also complains, possible. And this is part of the situation: it is because Dora identifies with Mr. K.

But the question is, what does this mean and why? It is precisely her way of questioning what her sex is, what her femininity is.

What does Dora say? What does the hysterical woman fundamentally say through her neurosis? This question touches on something essential. It is here that we see the fertility of Freud’s apprehension of phenomena; it is that they show us the structural [symbolic] planes of the symptom, a truth that immediately takes us much further.

If there is something that emerges from all that FREUD has always emphasized…
despite the wave of enthusiasm for the imaginary phenomena stirred up in the analytic experience, the eagerness to immediately find symmetries, analogies:
“The Oedipus complex? How clear it is! How well it has been explained for the boy! Then it must be the same for the girl. After all, as Freud himself indicated, many things work in this way.”
…FREUD has always insisted on the essential asymmetry of the Oedipus complex.

Is this not precisely something that allows us to delve deeper into this dialectic of the imaginary and the symbolic? Is it not here that this paradoxical aspect surely lies?

Why, indeed, not simply admit that in the rivalry of the girl with the mother concerning the father, it is merely a matter of the object of desire? You might say to me: there is the primary love relationship with the mother; that is something, something that introduces an asymmetry. But far from being there at the time when FREUD begins to order the facts he observes in his experience and which compel him to assert that, for the girl…
and there are many other elements of asymmetry
…the anatomical element on which FREUD insists, the fact that for the woman, the two sexes in their anatomical organization are not identical. Is that simply where the reason for the asymmetry lies?

This is what is, in a way, proposed or imposed upon us by the highly detailed studies FREUD conducted on this subject. I only need to name a few of them:
– “Considerations on the anatomical differences between the two sexes” is one of the titles of works done in this domain. There are others:
– the article “On Female Sexuality” from 1931 (the other being from 1925),
– then “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” which is from 1924, I believe.

What we see is that an essential asymmetry appears at the level of the signifier, at the level of the symbolic. And there is, we would say, no proper symbolization of the woman’s sex as such; the symbolization, in any case, is not the same, does not have the same source, does not have the same mode of access as the symbolization of the man’s sex.

And this is due to a reason that does not need to be sought beyond something simple: the imaginary provides only an absence where elsewhere there is a highly prevalent symbol. It is the prevalence of the phallic Gestalt on which something essential depends, forcing the woman, in the realization of the Oedipal complex, to take this detour through identification with the father, something entirely asymmetrical compared to what happens with the boy, compelling her to take the same paths as the boy for a time.

The woman’s access to the Oedipal complex occurs on the side of the father. Her imaginary identification is made through the father, exactly as with the boy, and she does so precisely based on the prevalence of the imaginary form but insofar as it is itself taken as a central symbolic element of the Oedipus.

In other words, if the castration complex becomes a pivotal value in the realization of the Oedipus, and this applies to both subjects—the boy as well as the girl—it is very precisely in relation to the father that the phallus becomes a symbol with no counterpart, no equivalent. It is a matter of asymmetry in the signifier, and this asymmetry in the signifier determines the paths through which the Oedipus complex is realized for the different subjects.

The two paths make them pass along the same route:
– the path of castration for the boy,
– and in exactly the same way for the girl, with what is determined as the pivot of the realization of the Oedipus in female sexuality, namely the penis.

Here, we have a striking and entirely characteristic instrument demonstrating the predominance of the signifier in the paths of access to subjective realization: that of the Oedipal experience. Where the imaginary assumption of the situation is not at all inconceivable, there is indeed a kind of compensation.

There are all the elements for an experience of the feminine position that is, in a sense, direct, symmetrical to the realization of the masculine position, if it were merely something realized within the domain of lived experience, as they say, within the domain of something belonging to the ego’s sympathy or sensations.

On the contrary, the experience shows us something manifesting as a striking, singular difference. This is why one of the sexes, in order to achieve its full realization in the subject, is somehow forced to support itself—or at least to take as its support, as the base of its identification—the formal support, the image of the other sex.

This fact alone is something that can literally only find its place…
I simply want to point out that the mere fact that things are this way raises a question:
– that cannot be ordered,
– that cannot remain a pure and simple peculiarity of nature,
– that can only be interpreted through the fact that it is the symbolic order, as it exists, that regulates everything.

Where there is no symbolic material, there is an obstacle, a deficiency in the realization of essential identification, of the essential path for the realization of the subject’s sexuality.

And this deficiency stems from the fact that the symbolic, at a certain point, lacks material—because it requires some—and that there is something that is, properly speaking, less desirable than the male sex in its provocativeness; it is the female sex that has this character of absence, this void, this gap that creates an essential asymmetry in something where it seems that if everything were to be grasped within the domain of a dialectic of drives, there would be no reason for such a detour, such an anomaly to be required.

This remark is far from sufficient to address the question at stake, namely the function of the ego in male and female hysterics. Here, we must realize something that, if we may say so, lies at the heart of the questions that are to be raised—that is, questions not only related to the material, to the accessory repository of the signifier, but to the relationship of the subject with the signifier as a whole, that is, with what the signifier can respond to.

Because, of course, I spoke last night of beings of language; it was to make an impression on my audience. Beings of language are not organized beings:
– That they are beings is beyond doubt.
– That they are beings that imprint their forms onto man, and that my comparison with fossils is, to a certain extent, entirely apt.
– That there are within man beings that are, strictly speaking, beings of the signifier, this is certain.
…But they do not, for all that, have a substantial existence in themselves. If there is a problem, it is indeed about this.

To return to our discussion of the function of the ego in neurosis, we must begin with this: we have two planes—the symbolic plane and the imaginary plane. Let us consider the paradox resulting from what I might call certain intersections, a kind of functional crossing that immediately becomes quite striking. What does the symbolic evoke in its function in man? It seems that the symbolic is what delivers to us the entire system of the world.

It is because man has words that he knows things, and the number of things he knows corresponds to the number of things he can name. This is indisputable. On the other hand, what we call the imaginary,
– and whether the imaginary relation is tied to the entire field of ethology, to animal psychology, to the functions of sexual relations, to the capture by the image of the other,
– whether it is one of the essential mechanisms of this specificity of choice within the same species of sexual partner, who happens to be simultaneously the fertile partner,
…this too seems self-evident. In other words:
– that one of the domains is open to the complete neutrality of the order of human knowledge,
– and that the other is precisely the very domain of the eroticization of the object,
…this is what initially seems evident to us.

Now, if things are such, what we see is that the realization of the sexual position in the human being is linked—FREUD tells us, and experience confirms it—to the test, to the traversal of a fundamentally symbolized relation, that of the Oedipus:
– that it is only through the mediation of an intermediate position alienating the subject, that is, making them desire the object of another and possess it by proxy of another,
– that it is insofar as we find ourselves in a position structured in the very duplicity of the signifier and the signified,
– that it is insofar as the function of man and woman is, properly speaking, symbolized,
– that it is insofar as this function is literally torn from the domain of the imaginary to be situated in the domain of the symbolic,
…that any normal, completed sexual position is realized. It is in the domain of the symbolic; it is a passage into the symbolic domain. It is to the symbolic that the realization of the genital function is subjected as an essential requirement, that man becomes virilized, and that woman truly accepts her feminine function.

Conversely—and this is no less singular and paradoxical—it is in the order of the imaginary that this relation of identification is situated, from which the object is realized as an object of rivalry. The domain of knowledge has this fundamentally ingrained character within the primitive paranoiac dialectic of identification with the similar. It is from there that the first possibilities, the first opening of identification with the other, begin, that is, an object.

An object isolates itself and neutralizes itself as such, becoming particularly eroticized. This is what introduces into the field of human desire infinitely more elementary, material objects than enter into animal experience.

It is in this intersection, which is of course not without profound reasons, that lies the source of what we must consider as the essential function played by the ego in the structuring of neurosis. What happens, indeed, when Dora finds herself asking her question, wondering, “What is a woman?” This has the meaning—and no other—of a question, an attempt to symbolize the female organ as such.

We might say that, on this occasion, her identification with the man is literally a means of knowing: if she identifies with the man precisely as the bearer of the penis, it is because this penis serves her literally as an imaginary instrument to apprehend what she cannot manage to symbolize.

In this sense, one can say that the hysterical woman… if there are far more hysterical women than hysterical men—it is a fact of clinical experience—it is because the path to the symbolic realization of the woman as such is much more complicated. Conversely, when it comes to posing the problem, that is, in a sense, stopping halfway, because:
– becoming a woman,
– and wondering what a woman is,
…are two essentially different things. I would even say more: it is because one does not become it that one wonders about it, and to a certain extent, wondering is the opposite of becoming.

The metaphysics of her position is the detour imposed on subjective realization in the woman. It is because her position is essentially problematic and, to a certain extent, unassimilable, that she is more likely to develop hysteria than a subject of the opposite sex.

But on the other hand, hysteria will also be a more adequate solution when the question takes form under this aspect of hysteria. It takes this form by the shortest path, meaning that it is very easy for her to pose the question simply by identifying with the father. This is what makes the position of the woman within hysteria particularly clear.

In this sense, and in this respect, it is a position that presents a kind of particular stability in relation to itself, due to its structural simplicity. The simpler a structure, the fewer opportunities it has to reveal points of rupture.

As for the question of what happens in male hysteria, the situation becomes much more complex: precisely because the Oedipal realization in men is more structured, the question that arises in female hysteria has less chance of emerging for him. But this question, precisely—what is it?

For to say that something is lacking, so to speak, in the material of the signifier that aids in the realization of the masculine position, there is nothing corresponding to the phallus. This point shows us that it is absolutely not sufficient to exhaust the question of the asymmetry between the boy and the girl in the Oedipal position: the same asymmetry appears in the case of the realization of hysteria. This is manifested in the fact that the hysteric, whether male or female, poses the same question. That is to say, the central concern of the male hysteric—the observation I made last time—concerns the feminine position.

As I have already told you, this revolves around the fantasy of pregnancy in this observation. But does this suffice to exhaust the question? It is not something exclusively feminine either. It concerns the question of procreation. As we have seen, it also revolves around the themes of fragmentation, the fantasies of fragmented bodies, and, strictly speaking, functional fragmentation or even anatomical and phantasmatic fragmentation, which we have long recognized as yielding points of rupture—phenomena characteristic of hysteria as such.

This phantasmatic anatomy, whose structural character in the phenomenon of hysteria has long been emphasized by authors, shows that paralysis or anesthesia does not follow the paths or topography of nerve branches. Nothing in nerve anatomy corresponds to anything observed in hysterical symptoms. It is always a question of an imaginary anatomy. All this forms the constellation of hysterical phenomena. Can we nonetheless specify what, beyond the [imaginary] signified, provides meaning to what, for the hysteric, undoubtedly resides on the level of the symbolic, the level of the signifier, but nonetheless remains, to a certain extent, […]

There is something that is a common factor between the feminine and the masculine position. For both, without a doubt, though through different paths and terms, the question of procreation arises. This already seems to provide an entry point where it is difficult to disregard the problematic nature of the essence of both paternity and maternity.

This is not something that resides purely and simply at the level of experience. That there is indeed a feminine experience of maternity, and that it is essentially different from paternity, brings to light, through analysis, a whole array of phenomena, manifestations, and simultaneously problems—those on which analysis has, for the first time, shed some light.

Recently, I was discussing with one of my students the long-debated problems of “couvade.” He reminded me of elements ethnographers have recently contributed on this subject, which has remained problematic. It is clear that facts derived from experience and investigations—strictly speaking, in the symbolic domain—allow us to clarify certain ambiguities. For instance, the observation of specific practices, manifesting clearly only in certain Central American tribes, enables us, at certain moments, to resolve questions about the meaning of “couvade,” which has remained highly ambiguous and enigmatic.

Until recently, there was hesitation about its connections to various elements of belief concerning the mechanism of paternity, the element of guilt and repercussions in relationships reflected through the intermediary of the woman. A precise element of questioning can be introduced here: the function of the father as such in procreation, that is, the role the father contributes to the creation of a new individual.

I do not need to elaborate on the facts underlying this assertion, which provide an essential precision in the material of the signifier that allows us to situate “couvade” at the level of the question concerning male procreation and its participation in it.

Through this approach, it may not seem far-fetched to say that, ultimately, this question about neuroses leads us here: let us reflect on what the signifier, the symbolic, is, in so far as it provides a form in which what we may rightly call the subject, in the strict sense, can be situated at the level of being—what allows the subject to recognize themselves as this or that.

Many things become explainable in this framework—as explanatory, causal, or coordinating—this something that, in the end, is nothing other than the chain of signifiers. The very notion of causality is nothing else. Still, one thing escapes this framework. But we need not look far for it. There are two things that escape the framework—at the symbolic level, let us be clear—the explanation of succession, the emergence of beings one from another. This is precisely procreation in its essential root: that one being arises from another.

Here lies something that, within the symbolic order, is covered by the fact that an order of succession between beings is established. But as for their essential individuation—the fact that one arises from the first, that there is creation—this remains unresolved.

Moreover, there is no creation; precisely, all symbolism exists to affirm that the creature does not create the creature, that the creature is inconceivable without a fundamental act of creation. Within the symbolic, nothing explains creation.

In other words, nothing explains—it is the same thing—that beings must die for others to be born. The essential connection between sexual reproduction and the emergence of death, as biologists suggest, shows that they too are circling the same question.

The question of what connects two beings in the emergence of life as such is something that is self-evident only insofar as the being itself is integrated into the symbolic. That is to say, for the being, the question does not arise once they are realized in the symbolic as man or woman, but rather in every instance where this realization is disrupted by an accident preventing them from accessing it.

And this can happen just as much due to the biographical accidents of an individual. What emerges is the fundamental question, the same one FREUD posed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Just as, he says, life reproduces itself, each time it reproduces, it is forced to repeat the same cycle to achieve the shared goal of death, we might say this is, in a way, a reflection of his experience.

Ultimately, what every neurosis reproduces is indeed a certain cycle within the order of the signifier, within the order of certain particular questions—undoubtedly the most fundamental—that arise at the level of the signifier. But underlying these questions lies the relationship of man to the signifier as such. That is to say, there is something radically unassimilable to the signifier, which is simply their singular existence:
– Why are they here?
– Where do they come from?
– What are they doing?

In other words, the question of why they will disappear arises because the signifier is incapable of offering an answer for a simple reason:
– Precisely because, as a signifier, it places them beyond death,
– Because, as a signifier, it already regards them as dead; it immortalizes them by its very essence.

The question of death, then, is essentially another mode of the neurotic creation of a question—it is the question of obsessive neurosis. I mentioned this last night. I will set it aside today because we are not covering obsessive neuroses this year.

The considerations I am presenting to you now are structural ones of a general nature, which serve as preludes to the problems posed to us by the psychotic. I am particularly interested in the question as it arises in hysteria because it is precisely about understanding how the mechanism of psychosis—specifically that of President SCHREBER—is relevant in that we can also see in it the question of female procreation in particular. What does this mean? It is to situate it in relation to how the question presents itself in the hysteric that I take this detour, which is simultaneously an illustration of the points I discussed last night.

I want to point out to you that, illustrating the points I emphasized strongly last night, there are FREUD’s texts. And I believe that for those among you who know German or English, referring to them will show you that these are not conclusions I have drawn myself. FREUD understood neuroses and a number of other phenomena. He did his work. My position can very well be expressed as this: my work is to understand what FREUD did.

Thus, any kind of interpretation, even of what is implicit in FREUD, is absolutely legitimate. So, let me make clear that it is not to evade responsibility that I ask you to refer to what certain texts have powerfully articulated.

It is, nonetheless, striking to see that in 1896, during the years when FREUD himself tells us he was organizing and establishing his doctrine—and that it took him a long time to bring forth what he had to say—he clearly marks the latency period, always three or four years, between when he composed his principal works and when he published them. The Interpretation of Dreams was written three or four years before its publication, as was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and notably, the Dora case.

During this period, it is striking that the double structuring of the signifier and the signified does not appear as an afterthought. In a letter such as letter 46, for instance, FREUD tells us that this is the moment when he begins to see these steps emerging in his experience, when he begins to construct—very early—the stages of the subject’s development as essentially connected to the existence of the unconscious and its mechanisms.

It is striking to see him use the term “Übersetzung” to designate certain stages of the subject’s experiences, insofar as they seem—or do not seem—translated. Translated—what does that mean? It refers to what happens at the level defined by the subject’s developmental stages:
– The first stage he distinguishes: from 1 to 4 years old,
– Then from 4 to 8 years old,
– Then the prepubescent period,
– And finally, the period of maturity.

What matters is to see that the notion of “Übersetzung,” the fact that the subject has translated, is given prominence. Based on the context, it is curious to refer to what in FREUD places such strong emphasis on the element of the signifier. Bedeutung cannot be translated as merely specifying the signifier, rather than the signified. Similarly, in letter 52, to which I ask you to refer, you will find exactly what I have noted before: FREUD says:

“I work on the assumption that our psychic mechanism was born from stratification through an arrangement where, from time to time, the material at hand undergoes reworking according to new relations and a disruption in the inscription—a reinscription.”

What is essentially new in the theory is the affirmation that memory is not simple but plural, multiple, and recorded in various forms, in various modes. Let me draw your attention to the kinship of what FREUD says here with a work that has been far too neglected: the schema I commented on the other day. He explains it as follows and emphasizes that what characterizes these different stages is precisely the difference established during these stages in completing the plurality of these memory inscriptions.

These memory inscriptions, he characterizes for each stage by the differences in complexity, which are as follows:
– First, Wahrnehmung (perception): this is a primary, primordial position, which remains purely hypothetical since, in a sense, nothing of it emerges in the subject.
– Bewusstsein (consciousness): and memory, in this simple form, exclude each other as such. This is a point on which FREUD never varied. He always maintained that the phenomenon of pure memory, as inscription, as marking the acquisition of a new reactional capacity in the subject, was something that had to remain completely immanent to the mechanism, meaning that it did not involve any grasp by the subject themselves at any point.
– The Wahrnehmung stage, the true primary hypothetical stage, is there to indicate that we must assume something simple at the origin of what is at stake, that is, this conception of memory as being essentially composed of a plurality of registers.

The first is therefore the initial registration of perceptions, entirely inaccessible to consciousness as well, and it is organized by associations of simultaneity. Here, we have established and posited, as the original requirement, a primitive establishment of simultaneity. This is what I demonstrated to you when, last year, we attempted certain demonstrative exercises regarding symbols, showing that things became (++ , +– , ––) interesting as soon as we established their raison d’être within the structure of groups of three.

To group things in threes is, in effect, to establish them within simultaneity. The birth of the signifier is simultaneity, and equally, the existence of the signifier is a synchronic coexistence.

After this, Bewusstsein is the second mode, which is ordered as something involving a relationship of causality. Unconscious inscriptions correspond to something because they indicate the direction in which this primordial birth of a new dimension leads us. It belongs to the realm of what will later become conceptual memories, which, he says, “in the same way, are inaccessible to consciousness.”

The notion of causal relation that emerges here for the first time as such—that is, the moment when the signifier, constituted as a signifier, is ordered in relation to something else—cannot, at that point, be anything other than, and is secondarily, the emergence of the signified. This includes the grasp of meaning, which is something that is impossible to overlook.

It is only after this that the Vorbewusstsein (preconscious) intervenes. This is the third mode of reworking among these elements, linked to the conscious emergence of investments that, by that point, correspond to what he refers to as our “official word.” He says it is from this preconscious that the investments will become conscious, according to certain precise rules.

This second level of thought-consciousness is likely, he tells us, connected to the hallucinatory experience of verbal representations—the production of words. Here lies something whose most radical example is in the experience of verbal hallucination, tied to the paranoiac mechanism through which we audibly experience the representation of words. It is through this that the emergence of consciousness is connected, which would otherwise remain entirely disconnected from memory.

In the sequence that follows, FREUD demonstrates that the phenomenon of Verdrängung (repression) always involves the suppression of something precisely within the realm of significant expression—something suppressed in one of these inscriptions or illustrations during the transition from one developmental stage to another.

This means that the signifier recorded at one stage does not carry over to the next mode of reclassification required by a new phase of signifier-signification organization into which the subject enters. It is in this manner that we must explain the existence of what is repressed.

It remains in a mode of inscription that is anterior. The notion of inscription, the embedding of everything into a signifier that itself dominates all and governs registration, is essential to the theory of memory, insofar as it serves as the foundation for FREUD’s first investigation into the phenomenon of the unconscious.