🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I finished last time with a formula, and I had the opportunity to realize that it was well received, which I can only attribute to the promises it contains, since, as well, in its aphoristic form, it had not yet been developed.

I said that… taking a step, even a leap, after the preparation,
the path I had begun to sketch in order to grasp the concept of transference…
I said: “We are going to rely on the following formula: transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious.”

Perhaps this resonated, perhaps it was— as I just said— well received, insofar as what underlies it, what is announced in such a formula, is precisely what you are all more or less sufficiently informed to see that it is precisely what one strives most to avoid in the definition of transference.

I myself find myself, in advancing this formula, in a problematic position, because what has my teaching advanced, promoted, regarding the unconscious?
– The unconscious is the effects of speech on the subject.
– The unconscious is the dimension in which the subject is determined by the fact and in the development of the effects of speech, after which: the unconscious is structured like a language.

What here, apparently, if not a direction quite suited to tearing any grasp of the unconscious, in appearance, away from any aim of reality other than that of the constitution of the subject?

And yet, if I emphasize that this teaching had in its aim an end—which, to go straight to the point, I have qualified as transferential— that is to say, to recentralize those among my listeners to whom I was most attached—namely the psychoanalysts—within a perspective that conforms to analytic experience, it is quite clear that here, the very handling of the concept must, depending on the level from which the speech of the teacher originates, take into account the effects of conceptual formulation on the listener.

It remains, therefore, that regarding the reality of the unconscious, we all—every single one of us, including the one who teaches about the unconscious—stand in relation to its reality, a reality of the unconscious that my intervention, in some measure, I would say, not only brings to light but to a certain extent, engenders.

Let’s get to the point! The reality of the unconscious is at once what everyone knows…
what is true and what is its unbearable truth…
It is sexual reality. FREUD articulated it, re-articulated it, articulated it, so to speak, mordicus, on every occasion.

Why—shall I say—is it an unbearable reality? Well, precisely because sexual reality, sexuality—well, the least one can say is that we do not know everything about it. While FREUD was articulating his discovery of the unconscious, we, in that same time, let us not forget— that is to say, since approximately, let’s say the 1900s or the years immediately preceding—have made some progress, which, though integrated into our mental imagery, we must not for that reason consider that the knowledge we have gained from it in this time has always been there.

We know a little more about sex than what is fundamentally to be apprehended at first. Sexual division, as it reigns over the vast majority of living beings, is what ensures—what?—the persistence of the being of a species. Whether we emphasize, with PLATO, this “being of a species” to the rank of an eternal Idea, or whether we say with ARISTOTLE that it exists nowhere else than in the individuals who bear it, this is not what we have to weigh here. The species, let’s say, “subsists” in the form of its individuals. It remains nonetheless that if the survival of the horse—as a species—has meaning, it remains that each horse is transient and dies. And the link between sex and death, the death of the individual, is fundamental, essential.

And that this suspension, this existence in this form, endures thanks to sexual division, rests on copulation, a copulation accentuated in two poles, which secular tradition has endeavored to characterize as the male pole and the female pole, and therein lies the driving force of reproduction.

Since always, around this fundamental reality, a whole sequence and consequence— which very sensitively accompanies it in what is most accessible to us—have grouped, harmonized, other characteristics more or less linked to the purpose of this reproduction, to the support, to the first step in the growth of what is thus engendered. In short, I can only indicate here what in the biological register is associated with sexual differentiation, in the form of what is called “sexual characteristics” and “secondary sexual functions.”

Further still, we know, we can specify, articulate, better than ever, how this terrain, on which a whole distribution of functions in a game of alternation has been founded in society. This is precisely what modern structuralism has been best able to specify, by showing how much it is at the level of alliance, as opposed to natural generation, to biological lineage, that these fundamental exchanges are exercised—at the level of the signifier—which will allow us to rediscover the most elementary structures of this social functioning, to inscribe them in terms—finally, the word comes—of a combinatory.

The integration, so to speak, of this combinatory, from top to bottom, into sexual reality—this is what, for us and for every human, raises the question—let’s say the word—not of the origin of the signifier, but whether it is not precisely through this that the signifier entered the world, the world of man. I would like here only to shed a light, for the moment a lateral one, even if we must not linger too long on this point, yet it is here that I wish to mark it.

What for us can accentuate the urgency of this question, the one that would legitimize saying that it is through sexual reality that the signifier entered the world, which means that man learned to think, is that, in this recent field of discoveries, the one that begins with a proper study of mitosis and, above all, with the emergence of the modes, the revelation of the modes under which the maturation of sexual cells operates, namely the double process of reduction that, I believe, you all have at least heard of.

Following which, in a general type—to which many exceptions must be added—what is at stake in this reduction is the loss of a certain number of elements— that one can see— that are called chromosomes. And everyone knows that all this has led us to a genetics.

But what emerges from this genetics if not the dominant function, in the determination of certain elements of the living organism, of a combinatory?

I will go further, along the path I am advancing: a combinatory that operates by leaving, at certain of these times—essential times, major times for anyone who knows even a little of this study, which, I think, is the general case here—times of alienation of certain remnants, of expelled elements (cf. supra caput mortuum). I say here nothing more.

I do not rush, under the pretext of the function of (a), into an analogical speculation; I merely indicate what constitutes an affinity, a kinship, that has always existed between the enigmas of sexuality and the play of the signifier, with the combinatory.

In other words, I am here only bringing to light and granting legitimacy to a certain vision, namely that, effectively, in history, a “science,” primitive science, has indeed been rooted in a mode of thought that, by playing on this combinatory, on oppositions—those of Yin and Yang, of water and fire, of hot and cold, of whatever you like—made them, if I may say so, dance—the word is chosen for its more-than-metaphorical reach—made them dance, basing itself on ritual dances fundamentally motivated by the actual sexual distributions that took place in society.

I cannot begin to give you here a lecture, even a brief one, on Chinese astronomy, but amuse yourselves by opening the book of Léopold de SAUSSURE—there are, from time to time, brilliant people in that family—you will see that Chinese astronomy is at once founded as profoundly as possible on this play of signifiers, which resonate from top to bottom: from politics, from social structure, from ethics, from the regulation of the smallest acts, and yet it remains a very good astronomical science. It is true that up to a certain point in time, the entire reality of the sky could be inscribed in nothing other than—a fact which, incidentally, was not overlooked—a vast constellation of signifiers.

The limit here of science, and of what one can call primitive science, insofar as it would be fundamentally—let us say, let us go to the extreme—a kind of sexual technique, is not possible to establish because it is a science. What the Chinese have effectively compiled, enriched with perfectly valid observations, shows us that they had a system—relative movement of the earth and the stars—perfectly effective for predicting diurnal and nocturnal variations, for example, at a very early period. So early that, due to their signifying markings, we can date this period because it is distant enough that the precision of the equinoxes is marked in the celestial configuration, and the North Star, at the time of the foundation of this astronomy, was not in the same place as it is today.

There is no dividing line here, no boundary between the most perfectly admissible science, what we call science—experimental compilation, which remains valid for all—and the principles that guided it. No more than, as Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS emphasizes, can one say that everything in primitive magic is fantasy and smoke: an enormous compilation of perfectly usable experiences is inscribed and stored within it.

Except that there is nevertheless something, a moment that arrives—sooner or later—where, after all, the tether is broken with the sexual initiation of the mechanism. And precisely, paradoxical as it may seem, the rupture occurs all the later when the function of the signifier is more implicit there, less recognized.

I illustrate what I mean: well after the Cartesian revolution and the Newtonian revolution, we still see, at the heart of the positivist doctrine founded on astronomy, a religious theory of the earth as a great fetish, which is perfectly coherent with this statement found in COMTE, as you know: that never, with regard to the stars, will we be able to know anything about their chemical composition. In other words, the stars will continue to be fixed in their place, and—if we can take another perspective—purely as functions of signifiers.

Bad luck, as they say, in almost the same years, the analysis of light allowed us to see in the stars a thousand things at once, including precisely their chemical composition. That is to say, the rupture is consummated, from astronomy to astrology, at that precise moment—and you see it— which does not, of course, mean that astrology does not still survive for a great number of people.

Now, where does all this discourse lead? To questioning whether what FREUD designates as the unconscious should be considered as a remnant of this “archaic” junction of thought with sexual reality. If the unconscious is what survives in us from it, unbeknownst to us and in isolation, if it is in this sense that we must understand that “sexuality is the reality of the unconscious.”

Understand well what must be decided here, the matter is so veiled, so difficult to access that it is only through: – a historical support for the manifestation of directions that solutions take form,
– the way in which history oscillates and shifts between them that we can illuminate it.

I say that it is striking that this conception of a level where human thought follows the slopes of sexual experience, as if representing the field, reduced by the invasion of a science and a technique that are regulated otherwise, is the solution, the perspective, that in history took form and incarnation in JUNG’s thought. This includes, this implies, given what is inevitable for modern thought, a theory of the subject where what is called psychologism leads him to situate this level, to embody under the name of archetype this relationship of the subject’s psyche to reality.

Now, it is remarkable that Jungianism, insofar as it makes these primitive modes of articulating the world into something that subsists, something like the core—he says it—of the psyche itself, is accompanied by a necessity that is not of word, that is not of form, that is not contingent, that cannot be obsolete—the repudiation of the term libido, as FREUD emphasized it, the neutralization of this function designated by FREUD in the term libido, by resorting to a notion of psychic energy, of interest, a much more generalized function.

This is not merely a difference in school perspective, a “minor difference”—here something absolutely essential is being designated. For what FREUD seeks to presentify in the function of the libido is not an “archaic” relationship, a primitive mode of access to thoughts, a world that would be there as the lingering shadow of an ancient world through our own; it is the effective presence, as such, of desire, and this is what now remains to be pinpointed. Desire, not as a substance, not as something we will seek at the level of the primary process, but desire insofar as it is there, insofar as it commands the very mode of our approach.

In other words, I shed further light on my point: I was recently reading, rereading, for an intervention I made for a congress that took place a few years ago in 1960, I was rereading what someone from outside— not, of course, someone uninformed, but someone trying to advance as far as possible from the position he occupies in order to conceptualize this domain— M. RICŒUR, specifically, had contributed regarding the unconscious. He had undoubtedly gone as far as to access what is the most difficult to access for a philosopher, namely the realism of the unconscious, the fact that the unconscious is not the ambiguity of behaviors, a “future knowledge that already knows it does not know itself,” but a gap, a cut, a rupture that is inscribed in a certain lack.

And here, he introduces something that appears to be what I am telling you, which is that what is at stake can only be fully experienced: – in relation to the analytic adventure, in relation to the unconscious,
– in this adventure, through its contours, its reliefs, its recesses, its gaps, its traps, and its closures.

Of course, as the philosopher he is, he acknowledges that there is something of this dimension to be preserved. He simply appropriates it, he calls it hermeneutics. Much is made nowadays of what is called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics does not only object to what I have called our analytic adventure; it has also, in fact, proven to be opposed to structuralism as it is formulated in the works of LÉVI-STRAUSS.

What is hermeneutics, if not also something that sees in the succession of its transformations, its historical mutations, what one might call “progress for man”—a man whom I will not qualify as abstract, the man of a history, a history that can just as well, on its margins, extend into more indefinite times, the progress of the signs by which he organizes, constitutes his destiny? And of course, M. RICŒUR relegates to pure contingency that which analysts, on occasion, have to deal with in each case.

It must be said that, from the outside, the analyst community does not give him the impression of such a fundamental agreement that it could truly impress him. However, this is not a reason to leave the conquered ground to him. For indeed, I maintain that it is at the level of the analyst—if any step forward can be accomplished—that it is at the level of the analyst that what constitutes this nodal point, through which the pulsation of the unconscious is linked to sexual reality, can and must be revealed.

This nodal point is called desire, and all the theoretical elaboration I have pursued in recent years has aimed to show you, step by step in clinical practice, how desire is situated in dependence on demand, insofar as demand is articulated to the signifier. What sustains it leaves behind this metonymic remainder, what runs beneath demand:
– this element that is not an indeterminate element but an absolute and elusive condition,
– this element that is necessarily in deadlock, unsatisfied, impossible, unrecognized,
– this element that is called desire,
…this is what creates the junction with the field defined by FREUD as that of the sexual instance at the level of the primary process.

The dual aspect of the function of desire, insofar as it is the ultimate residue in the subject of the effect of the signifier, a radical subject for FREUD—”desidero” is the Freudian “cogito”—and it is from there, necessarily, that the essential of what FREUD designates as the primary process is instituted. Observe well what he says about it, this field where the drive finds satisfaction—by structure—finds fundamental and essential satisfaction in hallucination.

No schematic mechanism will ever be able to account for what is simply given as a regression on the reflex arc:
– what enters through the sensorium must exit through the motorium,
– and if the motorium does not function, it returns backward.

But for heaven’s sake, if it returns backward, how can we conceive that this produces a perception? If not through the image of something that, from a blocked current, causes energy to reflux in the form of a lamp lighting up—but a lamp that lights up for whom? The dimension of the third is essential, in whatever form you wish to represent what is at stake in this so-called regression.

It can only be conceived in a form strictly analogous to what I drew for you the other day on the board, in the form of the duplicity of the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.

Only the presence of the subject who desires, and who desires sexually, brings us this dimension of metaphor, of natural metaphor, from which the so-called identity of perception is decided.

For FREUD, and precisely insofar as he maintains libido as the essential element of the primary process, this means—contrary to, or if you prefer, contradicting the appearance of the texts where he attempts to illustrate his theory—that hallucination, the simplest hallucination of the simplest need, even alimentary hallucination itself, as it occurs in little Anna’s dream, when she says I no longer know what: “Pie, strawberry, eggs,” and other small treats… this implies not merely that there is, purely and simply, a presentification of the objects of a need, but that it is within the dimension of the sexualization of this object, already, that the hallucination of the dream is possible, for you can notice, little Anna hallucinates only the forbidden objects.

The matter, of course, must be debated in each case and at each level, but the dimension of meaning in every hallucination that clinical practice presents to us must absolutely be identified, to allow us to grasp what is at stake in the principle of pleasure. The matter is clearly formulated: it is from the point where the subject desires that the connotation of reality—and this is what gives it weight—is given in hallucination. And that FREUD sets up an opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is precisely insofar as reality is defined there as desexualized reality.

In analytic theory—and in the most recent theories—one often speaks of desexualized functions: that the ego ideal is based on the investment of a desexualized libido, and many other functions as well. I must say that it seems very difficult to me to speak of a desexualized libido.

But that the approach to reality involves a desexualization—this is indeed what lies at the very principle of FREUD’s definition of the Zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens, the two principles in which psychic events are distributed. What does this mean? That in transference, it is there that we must see inscribed the weight of this sexual reality.

For the most part unknown and to a certain extent veiled, it runs—doubly—beneath what takes place at the level of analytic discourse, which, as it takes form, is indeed what can be called demand. And it is not without reason that all experience has led us to shift it so much toward the terms of “frustration” and “gratification.”

But if there were not this form, this topology of the subject that I have attempted here to inscribe on the board, according to a symbol, an algorithm, which I once called the “inner eight”:

Certainly something that reminds you of logical diagrams, such as the famous Euler circles, except that, as you can see, I think both diagrams are quite expressive—you can see clearly that this concerns a surface, something you can cut out, construct.

Its edge is continuous, except that here—you can see—it is not without being occluded by the surface that previously unfolded, but you have no objection to make against this structure nor against the purity of this edge. Something is being drawn here which, seen from a certain perspective, may appear to us as representing two intersecting fields.

Libido, here, I have inscribed it at the point where this lobe, as it is described as the field of the development of the unconscious, comes to cover, to obscure the other lobe, that of sexual reality, as it is implicated here. Libido would be what belongs to both, the point of intersection, as one says in pure logic. Well, that is precisely what it does not mean. Because it is exactly at this point where the fields appear to overlap that—if you see the true profile of the surface—there is a void.

If you wish to connect this surface to something fundamental in topology, rather than making it an accidental construction, like a small patch strangely assembled, it belongs to a surface whose topology I once described to my students, and which is called the cross-cap, in other words, the mitre.

I have not drawn it here, so as not to burden you with additional effort at the level of my discourse, but I simply ask you to observe its characteristic, which is immediately and absolutely evident: if you make the edges unite, as they present themselves, roughly two by two, through a complementary surface, if you close this surface— a surface that plays the same complementary role, if you will, as a sphere would in relation to a simple circle, a sphere that would enclose what the circle already appears and offers itself as ready to contain—

Look carefully: it is a Möbius surface. I mean that if you follow what happens in a slope that would find itself at the interval of these two surfaces, this slope ends up closing in, looping, sticking together, just as one would do in reality, in such a way that, as you know, in the Möbius strip, its front side continues into its reverse.

But there is a second necessity that emerges from this figure: in order to close its curve, it must, at some point, cross the previous surface, namely at this precise point, along the line I have just reproduced here in the second model.

This designates the place, the image that allows us to figure desire as the junction point between the field of demand—inasmuch as we will see the syncopations of the unconscious, their correlation, being presented there—and that something involved, which is sexual reality. All of this depends—and this is where I must conclude today—on a point, a line, which we call the line of desire, insofar as, on the one hand, it is linked to demand, and on the other hand, it is through its incidence that the sexual incidence is made present in experience.

Now, what is this desire? Do you think that this is where I designate the instance of transference? Yes and no. The question is how I am to understand it, and you will see that the matter is not so simple if I tell you that the desire in question is the desire of the analyst.

I will do nothing else—so as not to leave you in the shock of an assertion that may seem adventurous to you—than remind you of the point of entry of the unconscious in FREUD’s horizon.

Anna O…
Let us leave aside this story of O, let us call her by her name: Bertha PAPPENHEIM. As you know, she later became one of the great names in social work in Germany. Not long ago, one of my students brought me, as proof, a small postage stamp issued in Germany bearing her image. Which is to say, she left a mark in history.

Anna O, as you know, it was in relation to her that transference was discovered. You know what happened: BREUER was absolutely delighted with the process that was unfolding with said person; it was going smoothly, without a hitch—do not forget this. At that moment, the signifier—no one would have contested it, had they simply known how to revive that word from Stoic vocabulary.

The more signifiers Anna produced, the more she babbled, the better things went. It was the chimney cure, the sweeping of the flue. And in all this, not a trace, on the horizon, of the slightest disturbing element—review the observation. No sexuality, neither under the microscope nor through a telescope.

The entry of sexuality, however, was nonetheless through BREUER. At some point, something began to return to him—it may have first come back to him from his own home: “You are getting a bit too involved in this.”

On this, the dear man—alarmed, and a good husband besides—found that, indeed, it was enough. As a result, as you know, the O in question displayed the magnificent and dramatic manifestations of what is called, in scientific language, pseudocyesis, which simply means a small balloon, in other words, what is called a “nervous pregnancy,” displaying there—one may speculate—what?

One should still be careful not to rush toward the language of the body. Let us simply say that the domain of sexuality shows a natural functioning of signs, not of signifiers at this level. Because the false balloon is a symptom made—according to the definition of a sign—to represent something for someone. Whereas the signifier, I remind you, is something entirely different—it represents a subject for another signifier. A significant distinction to articulate on this occasion.

For—and for good reason, as I will tell you shortly—there is a tendency to say that all of this is Bertha’s fault! But I ask you for a moment to suspend your thoughts on this hypothesis: why would we not consider Bertha’s pregnancy, rather—according to my formula that *”Man’s desire is the desire of the Other”—*as the manifestation of BREUER’s desire?

Why not go so far as to think that it was BREUER who had a desire for a child? And I will give you the beginning of proof: BREUER, upon leaving for Italy with his wife, hastens to make her pregnant.

A child who—as JONES kindly reminds his interlocutor—a child who, at the moment when JONES is speaking, having been born under these conditions, says that unshakable Welshman, has—no doubt not without relation to these conditions—just committed suicide in New York.

Let us set aside what we might think about a desire for which even such an outcome is not indifferent, but let us observe what FREUD does in saying to BREUER:

“But what? What’s the matter! Transference is the spontaneity of the unconscious of said Bertha. It is not yours, your desire…”

he tells him. I do not know if they addressed each other informally, but it is likely.

“…it is the desire of the Other.”

In this, I consider that FREUD treats BREUER as a hysteric, for he tells him:

“Your desire is the desire of the Other.”

Curiously, he does not absolutely relieve him of guilt, but he certainly alleviates his anxiety. Those who, here, know the difference I make between these two levels can take note of it. It is not now that we will follow things in this direction.

But this introduces us to the question of what FREUD’s own desire decided in misleading, in diverting the entire aim, the direction to be given to grasping transference as such in its functioning— in this direction, now in the final phase and in the quasi-absurd terms I have given, initially denounced by SZASZ, namely, that which leads to an analyst being able to say that “the entire theory of transference is nothing but a defense of the analyst.”

I overturn this extreme. I show exactly the other side of it, but a side that, perhaps, can lead us somewhere, by telling you: it is the desire of the analyst! You must follow me; all of this is not simply done to turn things upside down—it is to lead you somewhere.

But with this key in hand, read a general review, as you can find—my God—under the pen of just about anyone, someone who could write a Que sais-je? on psychoanalysis could just as well provide you with a general review of transference. Read the general review of transference, which I sufficiently designate here, and orient yourself according to this perspective.

What each person contributes as an insight into the mechanism of transference—is it not, apart from FREUD, something in which his own desire is perfectly legible?

– I could analyze ABRAHAM for you, simply based on his theory of partial objects. It is not only about what the analyst intends to do with his patient; it is also about what the analyst intends for his patient to do with him. ABRAHAM—let us say—wanted to be a complete mother.

– And then, I could also amuse myself by punctuating the margins of FERENCZI’s theory with a famous song by GEORGIUS: Je suis fils-père (I am son-father).

– And that NUNBERG also had his intentions, and that in his truly remarkable article on Love and Transference, he appears as an arbiter of the powers of life and death, where one cannot help but see, in some way, an aspiration to a divine position.

This may, in a certain sense, be nothing more than a kind of amusement. But it is over the course of this history that one can mark, that one can scan, the true, authentic isolation of functions such as those I have sought to reproduce here on the board. Namely, that the reason for these little diagrams I made in response to a psychologizing theory of the psychoanalytic personality was to show—what?—the dynamic that closely links them to what the subject seeks to articulate here within the net, what of his small affair comes into profile, as I have said, as an obturator.

Except that this obturator must be slightly complicated—you must conceive of it as an obturator like that of a camera, except that it would be a mirror. And it is in this small mirror, which comes to obscure what lies on the other side, that he sees the outline of the play by which he can adjust his own image around it, according to the illusion I recall here, of what is obtained in an amusing physics experiment known as the inverted bouquet, that is to say, a real image.
[Lacan modifies Bouasse’s experiment: here it is the vase that is inverted, and a flat mirror is added.]

Here, it is the real image i(a) of the envelope [the vase] that comes to adjust itself around this something that appears, which is the little (a). And the sum of these image adjustments is that something in which the subject must find the opportunity for an essential integration.

What do we know of all this, if not that, according to the oscillations, the fluctuations, the engagement of each analyst’s desire, we have managed to add such and such a small detail, such and such a complementary observation, such and such an addition or refinement of incidence, which allows us to qualify the presence—the presence at the level of desire—of each analyst?

And insofar as, in this matter, it constitutes an admissible work, the incidence of sexual reality—this is where FREUD left behind that band, as he called it, which follows him, that band I evoked earlier—my God—quite ironically… Only to evoke it here in another form: you know that, after all, the people who followed CHRIST were not exactly illustrious.

FREUD was not CHRIST, but after all, he may have been something like Viridiana. Those who are so ironically photographed in that film, with that little camera, sometimes irresistibly evoke for me that group, also repeatedly photographed, of those who were FREUD’s apostles and epigones.

Is this to diminish them? No more than it does the apostles! It is precisely from that level that they could bear the best testimony. It is from a certain naïveté, a certain poverty, a certain innocence, that they have taught us the most.

It is true that around SOCRATES, the assembly was—one must admit—far more illustrious, and that it—I believe I have demonstrated this on occasion—teaches us no less about the subject of the transference relationship, as those who remember my seminar on this subject [seminar 1960-61] can testify.

This is where I will resume my step next time, in an attempt to articulate for you the pregnance of the function of the analyst’s desire.