🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The purpose of my teaching has been, and remains, to train analysts. The training of analysts is a subject that is on the agenda of analytical research. Nevertheless, it is clear—and I have already provided you with testimonies of this, at least indicated where in the analytical literature you can find them—that its principles are elusive.

It is evident, in the experience of all those who have undergone this training, that in the absence of sufficient criteria, something of the order of ceremony is substituted at many stages of this training, which, in this context, can only be translated in one way: simulation. For the psychoanalyst, there is no beyond, no substantial beyond to which he might relate that which he feels entitled to exercise as his function.

What he obtains, however, is of inexpressible value, what he obtains, namely—I will articulate this for you today—the trust of a subject as such, and the results that this, through the pathways of a certain technique, entails. This is what should give us pause because the psychoanalyst does not present himself as a God; he is not God to his patient. What does this trust mean—this trust whose articulations we are about to demonstrate—what does this trust mean, around what does it revolve?

No doubt, for the one who relies on it, who receives the reward of it, the question may be elided. It cannot be elided for the psychoanalyst. The training of the psychoanalyst requires that he knows, in this process where he leads his patient, around what the movement turns. He must know, it must be transmitted to him—and in an experience—what it is that he is revolving around.

This point, this pivotal point, is what I designate in a way that, I believe, already appears sufficiently motivated to you but which, I hope, as we progress, will appear increasingly clear, increasingly necessary—it is what I designate under this name: the desire of the psychoanalyst.

Last time, I showed you this place where the Cartesian approach is situated, this place from which a certain approach once disengaged itself—an approach which, in its origin and in its end, does not essentially move toward science but toward its own certainty, and which is at the principle of what is not science, in the sense that, since PLATO and before, it has been the object of philosophers’ meditation, but rather The Science, with the emphasis placed on this “The” and not on the word “science.”

The conditions of science were already known, but the one in which we are caught, which forms the context of all our actions, in the time in which we live, and which the psychoanalyst himself cannot escape, because it, too, is part of his conditions—this science is The Science, that one.

It is in relation to that one that we must situate psychoanalysis. We can only do this through the articulation of this initial approach, the Cartesian approach as it founds the subject. And it is in place of the Cartesian subject that we encounter this discovered phenomenon, the unconscious, which can only be articulated through the revision we have made of the foundation of the Cartesian subject and what it entails in terms of fecundity.

Today, I will first address the phenomenology of transference. Transference is a phenomenon in which both the subject and the psychoanalyst are included together. To divide it into the terms of “transference” and “counter-transference,” no matter the boldness, no matter the casualness of the remarks one allows oneself on this theme, is never anything but a way of eluding what is at stake.

Transference is an essential phenomenon, linked to desire as a nodal phenomenon of human existence, which was discovered before FREUD.

It was perfectly articulated—I devoted a large part of a year dedicated to transference to demonstrating this in a text, namely The Symposium by PLATO—it was articulated with the utmost rigor in this text, where love is debated.

This text could be made, given its relation to the character of SOCRATES, who nevertheless appears particularly discreet in it.

And around this text, it is designated that another essential, initial moment is the one to which the question we must pose regarding the action of the analyst must refer, namely that SOCRATES—and already, I indicate the aim of the path I want to take you on today by saying—that SOCRATES never claimed to know anything, except to know what is at stake in ἔρως [erôs], which means desire.

By this very fact, and because of what SOCRATES is, and because in The Symposium, PLATO, in a way, goes further than in any of his other dialogues to indicate to us the fundamental significance of comedy—and pushes the matter as far as mime—which these dialogues constitute, because of this, he could only indicate to us, in The Symposium, in the most precise way, the place of transference.

As soon as there is somewhere the supposed subject of knowledge—which I wrote for you today at the top of the board as “S.s.S.”, this is an abbreviation—there is transference.

What does the order, the organization of psychoanalysts signify—with what it confers in terms of certificates of competence—if not indicating to whom one can turn to represent this subject?

Yet it is, of course, known to all that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent—even in the slightest way—an absolute knowledge. This is why, in a sense, one might say that the one to whom one can turn, there could not be—if there is one—more than one, only one.

That “one alone” was even at one time alive, and that was FREUD. And the fact that FREUD, concerning what is at stake in the unconscious, was legitimately the subject whom one could suppose to know, specifies and sets apart everything concerning the analytical relationship when it was engaged by his patients with him.

Except that he was not only the subject supposed to know, and he gave us, in terms that can be called indestructible, insofar as since they were formulated, they support an inquiry that to this day has never been exhausted.
No progress, however small that progress might have been, in the work of the so-called scientific societies in analysis, could have occurred without deviating every time one of the terms around which FREUD organized the paths he traced and the ways of the unconscious was neglected. This sufficiently shows us what the function of the subject supposed to know is.
The function and, if I may say, simultaneously its consequence—the prestige of FREUD—are on the horizon of every analyst’s position; they even constitute the drama of what is called the communal organization of psychoanalysts.

Of this subject supposed to know—whether it is FREUD or reduced to this term, to this function—few can feel fully invested. But that is not the question. And the question, first of all, for each subject, is where he positions himself to address the subject supposed to know.
It is clear that every time this function can, for him, be embodied in anyone, analyst or not, it follows from the definition I have just given you that the transference is, from the outset, established. If matters go so far that this is already— for anyone nameable, for a figure accessible to him— sufficiently determined in the patient, it will result for whoever undertakes his analysis in a very particular difficulty concerning the questioning of the transference within the analysis.

And it happens that even the most limited views, at the level of analysts, even the dumbest analyst… I don’t know if such an extreme term exists, it’s a function I refer to here only in the way one designates, in mathematics, that sort of mythical number, for example, the largest number that can be expressed in so many words… even the dumbest analyst notices this, recognizes it, and directs the analysand toward what remains for him the subject supposed to know.

This is just a detail and almost an anecdote. Let us now enter into the examination of what is at stake. The analyst, as I have told you, holds this position insofar as he is the object of transference. And this position, experience proves to us, the subject, when he enters analysis, is far from granting it to him. Let us leave aside for now, just for a moment, the hypothesis—the Cartesian hypothesis—that the psychoanalyst is deceptive. It is not to be absolutely excluded from the context—I say: phenomenological—of certain entries into analysis. This is not, for the moment, the most important point to retain.

Psychoanalysis shows us that what most limits—especially in the initial phase—the confidence, the surrender to the analytical rule by the patient, is the threat, let us say, to avoid overemphasizing things in a subjective sense, in the sense of the fear that the psychoanalyst might be deceived by him, the patient.

How often in our experience does it happen that we learn only very late a biographical detail as big as this! And to make myself understood, I will say, for example, the subject’s confession that at a certain point in his life, he contracted syphilis, a simple example, not very frequently encountered nor particularly illustrative.

“And why didn’t you tell me sooner?” one might ask if one is still naïve enough to pose the question.

“Quite precisely,” the analysand will say, “so as not to deceive you, because if I had told you earlier, you might have attributed at least part, if not the root, of my troubles to it. But if I am here, it is not for you to give my troubles an organic cause.”

This is an illustration, an example with undoubtedly limitless implications, and there are many ways to approach it, from the angle of social prejudices, scientific debate, or the confusion that remains around the very principle of analysis.

I offer it here only as an illustration of the fact that the patient may think the analyst can be deceived if given certain elements; there are elements he withholds so that the analyst does not move too quickly. Certainly—this is not the best example; I could embody it in other examples—in a part of his narrative, in a part, as they say, “of his problems,” the patient gives himself, let’s say at least, the pretext of withholding the theme for a certain time so that the analyst does not rush to judgment. How much more should the one who can be deceived be able to be suspected of simply being capable of making a mistake!

Now, this is precisely the limit, around this “deceiving,” this “being deceived,” where the pivot, the balance of this subtle point, this infinitesimal point that I intend to highlight, lies. How is it… On what point can we articulate what we see most manifestly in analysis? It is that, even assuming that the analyst can be deceived, and I would say, even assuming that the analysis itself, in some subjects, is questioned from the very start, I mean assuming that, after all, it might only be a kind of illusion, to further emphasize what I want to convey and what patients tell us, around this “being deceived,” something halts.

Even for the psychoanalyst who is questioned, there is granted a certain credit of infallibility somewhere, which—even for the analyst who is questioned!—will sometimes lead to attributing intentions to a random gesture: “You did that to test me.”
Here I want to try to focus your attention, and I repeat, to bring it onto the terrain of phenomena concerning what is at stake. Since Socratic discussion, this theme has been introduced: that the recognition of the conditions of the good for man would inherently have something compelling, something irresistible.

It is the paradox of teaching, if not of SOCRATES—what do we know of him, except through the Platonic comedy?—but I would not even say “of PLATO,” for PLATO unfolds in the terrain of dialogue, and of comic dialogue, leaving all questions open, but in a certain exploitation of Platonism that one could say persists amid general derision.
For the truth is, who does not know that the most perfect recognition of the conditions of the good will not prevent anyone from rushing headlong into its opposite!

What, then, is at stake in this trust placed in the analyst? What credit can we give him, this good, of wanting it, of wanting it for another, moreover? And yet we do not doubt that where our point of encounter lies, it can only be a matter of assuming what is at stake. Let me explain:

– Who does not know, from experience, that one can not want to enjoy?
– Who does not know from experience this recoil imposed on each person, in what it involves of atrocious promises, the approach to enjoyment as such?
– Who does not know that one can “not want to think”? For this, we have the universal college of professors to testify.

But what could it mean: “not wanting to desire”? All analytical experience, which here merely gives form to what lies at the very root of each person’s experience, testifies to us:
– that “not wanting to desire” and desiring are the same thing,
– that desire itself contains within it this phase of defense that makes it identical because it is the same as “not wanting to desire” and “wanting not to desire.”

This is the discipline to which people have applied themselves, precisely as a solution to the impasses of Socratic questioning—people who were not merely philosophers but, in their own way, kinds of religious figures, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, for example. The subject knows that this “not wanting to desire” is something as irrefutable in itself as that Möbius strip that has no reverse side, meaning that when traversed, one mathematically returns to the surface presumed to double it.

It is because the analyst is awaited at this meeting point that we can say that, on the subject of desire, it is insofar as the analyst is supposed to know that he is also, equally necessarily, supposed to encounter the unconscious desire—whether he knows it or not, whether he can formulate it or not.

That is why I say—and I will illustrate this for you with a small topological drawing that has already been on the board, which I will reproduce next time—that desire is the axis, the pivot, the handle, the hammer, so to speak, through which this force-element, this inertia behind it, applies itself, what will first, in the patient’s discourse, be formulated as demand, and what gives it its true weight, namely—which is not the same—the transference. The axis, the common point of this double-headed axe, is the desire of the analyst, which I designate here as a position, as a function, as an essential articulation. Do not tell me that I do not name this desire, that I do not articulate it, because it is precisely first this point that can only be articulated through the relation of desire to desire. Now, this relation is internal:

“The desire of man is the desire of the Other.”

Is there not, reproduced here, this element of alienation that I have pointed out to you as essential in the foundation of the subject as such, namely that certainly: it is only at the level of the “desire of the Other” that man can recognize his desire, and that certainly: as “the desire of the Other”? Is there not something here that must appear to him as, in some sense, the obstacle to that point of vanishing where his desire can never be recognized?

But precisely, this is what is neither raised nor to be raised, because analytical experience shows us that it is by seeing an entire chain at play at the level of the “desire of the Other” that the desire of the subject is constituted. Something is thus preserved here of alienation, but not with the same elements, not with this S1 and this S2 of the first pair of signifiers from which I deduced the entire formula of the subject’s alienation in my penultimate course, but elsewhere, between:
– something constituted from primal repression, from what I called the fall, the Unterdrückung of the second S2 of the pair, the primary binary of signifiers,
– and this place of lack, this place that first appears as lack, in what is signified by the pair in the interval that links them and that is called the “desire of the Other.”

Must I—for those for whom words are not enough—indicate that there is a difference between “what happens from there to there,” or “what happens from here to there”? I have, moreover, it seems to me, already sufficiently indicated this in what I have previously presented.

This should, in passing, give me the opportunity to re-point, to re-articulate, a certain number of absolutely essential formulas for you to retain, as, in some sense, terminal points, anchor points, without which our thinking can only slip across all these terms.

The initiating, inaugural function concerning the constitution of this division of the subject where I emphasize the essence of alienation is not linked by chance—by a mere need for illustration—to the function of the pair of signifiers; it is not a simpler way of presenting things to you, but it is essentially different whether there are two or whether there are three. If we want to grasp where the function of the subject lies in this signifying articulation, we must operate with two, because it is only with two that he can be, if I may say so, trapped in alienation. As soon as there are three, the slippage becomes circular: from the second to the third, it returns to the first, but not to the second.

The effect of aphanisis that occurs under one of the two signifiers is linked to this: that what defines, let us say using the language of modern mathematics, a set of signifiers is that it is a set such that if we reduce it to two—there “exists,” as they say in the theory, with a reversed capital E for notation, there exists only two—the phenomenon of alienation occurs, meaning that the signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier. Hence it results that at the level of the other signifier—if the other signifier is at the level of another—the subject vanishes.

That is also why I felt today… and this is due to the rereading I did of the work of one of my students, to whom I alluded the last time… I pointed out to you the error in a certain translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, which is the signifier S2 of the pair. Here, it is necessary to articulate what is at stake, and what in this text I am referring to was sensed but expressed incorrectly, in a way that lends itself to error, precisely by omitting the fundamental character of the subject’s function in this articulation.

There is constant mention of the relationship between the signifier and the signified: – which remains at what I would call the “A B C” of the question,
– which, indeed, I had to put on the blackboard one day to show where I was starting from, what foundation I was relying on in something that had been formulated at the root of Saussurean development,
– but of which I immediately showed that it was only effective and manageable when the function of the subject at the original stage was included.

It is not simply a matter of saying—and this is really within the reach of the slightest experience—that reducing the function of the signifier to the signified, to nomination, that is, a label stuck on a thing, is to let slip the entire essence of language. I must say that this text, which I said last time showed conceit, also shows gross ignorance, by suggesting that this is what it’s about at the level of Pavlovian experience!

Not even for an instant, in PAVLOV’s ideas, is what PAVLOV “desires”—to use the term whose function we have just designated here—simply a matter of associating a sign with a thing. Even if he himself knew it or not, certainly, if there is anything that can be situated at the level of the conditioned reflex experience, it is assuredly not associating a sign with a thing.

As I told you last time, it is precisely—whether PAVLOV recognized it or not—the association of a signifier, which is characteristic of any experimental condition, insofar as it is an instituted experience, with indeed something that I have called the cut one can make in the organic organization of a need. This something is designated by a manifestation at the level of an interrupted need cycle and is indicated, at the level of Pavlovian experience, by what we find here as being the cut of desire. And—as the saying goes, “That’s why your daughter is mute!”—this is why the animal will never learn to speak, at least not through this path, because obviously, it is out of time, behind. This may provoke all sorts of disorders, all sorts of troubles in it, but it is not predestined, it is not called—not being up to now a speaking being—to question the desire of the experimenter, who also, if he were questioned himself, would be quite embarrassed to answer.

Nevertheless, articulated in this way, this experiment indeed has the essential interest of allowing us to situate, as I did last time in response to questions that were posed to me, what is properly to be conceived as the psychosomatic effect. This can go infinitely further, in a way of thus formulating the four-term formula represented below, I think you recognize it, despite today’s complications, which are justified by what I am going to tell you now.

It is precisely to the extent that there is no interval between S1 and S2—where the first pair of signifiers solidifies, “holophrases” if I may express it this way—that we have the model for a whole series of cases that can illustrate it, even though in each, the subject will not occupy the same place.

It is insofar, for example, that the child—the mentally disabled child, on whom our colleague Maud MANNONI has just published a book that I recommend to all of you—takes the place below, and to the right of this S, in relation to something to which the mother reduces him, making him no more than the support of her desire in the most obscure term, that this psychotic dimension is introduced precisely into the handling of the education of the disabled child, which Maud MANNONI’s book tries to indicate to those who, in one way or another, may be tasked with lifting the burden.

Similarly, it is assuredly something of the same order that is at stake in psychosis: this solidity, this mass formation of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids this dialectical opening that manifests itself in the phenomenon of belief. At the heart of paranoia—even paranoia itself, which nevertheless appears to us fully animated by belief—there reigns this phenomenon of Unglauben [disbelief], which is not “not believing,” but the absence of one of the terms of belief, of that place where the division of the subject is designated.

If there is, indeed, no belief that is, so to speak, full and complete, it is because there is no belief that does not suppose, at its core, that the final dimension it has to reveal is strictly correlative to the moment when its meaning will vanish. All sorts of experiences testify to this, one of which was humorously given to me one day concerning a misadventure of CASANOVA, by MANNONI, here present, who makes observations on this, both the most amusing and the most demonstrative.

For it is at the end of a mystification, which succeeds to the point of moving the celestial forces, of unleashing around him a storm that, in truth, terrifies him, that the character, who until then has pursued the most cynical adventure with a little goose who gives him the motive for everything around which he entangles a whole circle of fools—and having seen, so to speak, his mystification take on meaning, incarnate itself, realize itself—that the character himself enters into this kind of collapse—comic to witness in a CASANOVA who defies earth and sky at the level of his desire—falling into impotence as if he had truly encountered the figure of God to stop him.

Let us be clear here that, for example, when I am presented with something as overused—as in this text I mentioned earlier, where the person almost apologizes for bringing up once again the fort-da, on which everyone has wiped their feet. You know what it refers to: fort-da, the phonemic opposition where FREUD identifies the initial game in the child’s establishment of the relationship to presence and absence. The text in question revisits it as an example of primordial symbolization, and, as I said, while apologizing for mentioning something that has now entered the public domain, nonetheless makes a mistake—a gross mistake—because it is not from their opposition, the fort and the da, a pure and simple going and returning, that it draws its inaugural strength, nor does its repetitive essence find explanation there.

And to say that it simply concerns the subject instituting itself in a function of mastery is foolishness. It is insofar as, here, in the two phonemes, the mechanisms of alienation are incarnated, which are expressed—paradoxical as it may seem to you—at the level of fort. No fort without da and—if we can say so—without Dasein. But precisely, contrary to what Dasein-analysis, a certain phenomenology, tries to grasp as the radical foundation of existence, there is no Dasein with the fort.

That is to say, there is no choice, and if the little subject can engage in this fort-da game, it is precisely because he does not engage in it at all, for no subject can grasp this radical articulation: he plays it with a little spool, that is, with the object (a). And the weight, the function of this exercise with this object refers to an alienation and not to any supposed “mastery,” whose enhancement through indefinite repetition seems unclear, whereas the indefinite repetition in question expresses, manifests, and brings to light the subject’s radical vacillation.

As usual, I must interrupt things at a certain point. However, I want to indicate, if only briefly, what will now be the subject of our next discussion. I have marked it on the board, in the form of two diagrams, the essential difference.

When, at the level of the text Triebe und Triebschicksale (Drives and Their Vicissitudes), FREUD places love simultaneously:
– at the level of the real,
– at the level of narcissism,
– at the level of the pleasure principle in its correlation with the reality principle,
…and deduces the function of ambivalence as absolutely different from what occurs in Verkehrung [reversion], in circular movement—in short, at the point, at the level where love is at stake—we have the diagram, the diagram that FREUD tells us unfolds in two stages.

First, an Ich, an Ich defined objectively by the joint functioning of the central nervous system apparatus with the conditions of homeostasis, at a certain level—the lowest possible level to maintain—of tensions. Around this, he tells us, primitively, we can conceive what is outside of this—if there is indeed an outside—as indifference, and at this level, since it concerns tensions, indifference simply means non-existence. And then what does he tell us he gives us afterward? It is that the rule of this auto-erotism is not the non-existence of objects, but the functioning of objects solely in relation to this rule. In this zone of indifference, what brings Lust and what brings Unlust are differentiated.

And hasn’t everyone always seen the ambiguity of the term Lustprinzip, since some even write Unlustprinzip? That something brings pleasure is already too much for equilibrium, and everyone knows it. How, then, to depict this stage, as I have placed it here on the left?

It will answer certain questions that have been posed to me here, about the specular function in the subject’s relationship to the other. We are not here at the level of the relationship between the subject and the other; we are within this hypothetical Ich where the first construction of an apparatus functioning as a psyche is motivated.

What can we offer as the closest and most accurate representation to make it function? It is this, on the left: with its large letters: ICH, this Ich insofar as it is an apparatus tending toward a certain homeostasis. And everyone knows that it cannot be the lowest since that would be death, and moreover, the matter was considered by FREUD in a subsequent stage. But it is a question of understanding whether it was evoked at this level or another.

Lust is indeed an object, an object that is not within this circle of the Ich, an object that is recognized, that is mirrored in this Ich as being an object of Lust. The purified Lust-Ich FREUD speaks of is the mirror image, it is the point-to-point correspondence, it is the bi-univocal connotation of something that is at the level of the object and something that in the Ich is satisfied with it, as Lust. What is inassimilable, what is irreducible to the pleasure principle, what is fundamental Unlust, FREUD tells us, is that from which the non-self will be constituted.

But the non-self is constituted within the circle of the primitive ego, and what bites in this object is what the functioning of the Ich will never manage to evacuate; this is the origin of what we will later find in the function called the bad object. You can see here, then, what articulates this level of functioning is something that first gives the starting point for a possible articulation of alienation. For, ultimately, what belongs to the field of Lust is—says FREUD—in the zone outside the Ich; it is still something that must be dealt with. There is something where the perfect tranquility of the Ich collapses.

But this does not entail the requirement of the disappearance of the apparatus, quite the contrary. Here, the chipping or notching that I speak of in the dialectic of the subject to the Other occurs in the opposite direction. The formula for this is “no good without evil,” “no good without suffering,” which preserves for this good and this evil their character of alternation, of possible dosage, which is indeed where the articulation I gave earlier of the pair of signifiers will be reduced—and falsely.

For, to take things up again at the level of this primitive good and evil, of hedonism, which everyone knows fails, which slips when explaining the mechanics of desire, it is that, by passing to the other register, to the alienating articulation, this is expressed quite differently. And I almost blush here to wave around these rags with which fools have been playing for so long: “Beyond good and evil,” without knowing exactly what they are talking about.

Nevertheless, it remains necessary to articulate what happens at the level of the alienating articulation as:

“no evil without resulting in some good”
and when the good is there:
“there is no good that holds with evil.”

This is why, by situating itself in the pure and simple register of pleasure, ethics fails, and why, very legitimately, KANT objects that the Sovereign Good cannot in any way be conceived as the infinitization of any small good, because—as he observes—there is no possible law to be given regarding what may be good in objects.

The Sovereign Good, if this term, which causes confusion, must be maintained, can only be found at the level of the law, and I have demonstrated in my article KANT with SADE: “Kant avec Sade” that this means that at the level of desire: passivity, narcissism, ambivalence—these are the characteristics that govern the dialectic of pleasure at the level of the diagram on the left. Its term is, strictly speaking, what is called identification.

The characteristics of what occurs, of what the activity of the drive introduces… what allows us to construct with the greatest certainty the functioning called “division of the subject” or “alienation” with its consequences, is the recognition of the drive. And how has it been recognized? It has been recognized in that far from being able to limit the dialectic of what happens in the subject’s unconscious to the reference to the field of Lust, to the images of beneficial objects, benevolent objects, favorable objects, we have found the privileged function of a certain type of objects that ultimately serve no purpose.

These are the objects (a): the breast, the feces, the gaze, the voice. It is around this new experience, this introduction of a new term that every dialectic brings, that lies the experimental point, the demonstrative point, which introduces the dialectic of the subject as the subject of the unconscious.

That is where I will continue next time and where I will pick up the continuation of what is to be developed on the subject of transference.

Discussion

Moustafa SAFOUAN

I cannot ask a question because I always find it difficult to grasp the difference between the object in the drive and the object in desire. Now, when it comes to distinguishing between the Id and the object in the drive, I lose the thread.

LACAN

Listen, my dear, this is a matter of terminology. It’s very kind of you to ask a question, even if it reflects some confusion, because it can help everyone.

I am not the first, I think, to take the position, for example, of saying that in the sense of the determined— I mean in the sense of an objective genitive: desire for something— I am not the first to say… take even Mr. SARTRE: desire is a useless passion, it’s not what it appears to desire that it truly desires. We must be clear about this!

Nonetheless, there are many pleasant things that we believe we desire—let’s say, insofar as we are sane—but we cannot say more than this: we believe we desire them. There are things here, it seems to me at least, that are entirely communicable; this is not analytical theory. The objects that lie in the field of Lust and have that fundamentally narcissistic relationship with the subject—so much so that, ultimately, the system of the so-called regression of love into identification has its reason simply in the symmetry of these two fields that I have indicated to you as Lust and Lust-Ich on the other side.

What cannot be kept outside is always mirrored inside. Identification with the love object is as simple as that.

And I don’t see why this caused so many difficulties, even for FREUD himself. That’s the love object, my dear. Moreover, when it comes to objects that do not have this drive-related value, strictly speaking—the one you mention when you speak of the object of the drive—what do you say then, as FREUD points out: “I like this; I like lamb stew.”

It’s exactly the same thing as when you say: “I love Mrs. So-and-So.” With the difference that when you say “I love Mrs. So-and-So,” you say it to her, which changes everything. You say it to her for reasons that I will explain to you next time.

Nevertheless, while you love lamb stew, you are not sure you desire it. Take the case of the beautiful butcher woman: she loves caviar, but she does not want it. That is why she desires it.

So, the object of desire is the cause of desire, and that object that causes desire is the object of the drive.

Which means: it is the object around which the drive revolves.

Here, we are at the level of a dialogue with someone who has worked through my texts sufficiently for me to express myself in tightly condensed algebraic formulas. There is the object of the drive: the object of the drive is what is at stake in its determining character, not at all because desire clings to it. Desire circles around it, insofar as it is enacted within the drive.

Not every desire is necessarily enacted within the drive. There are also empty desires, mad desires, that arise precisely from the fact that something has been forbidden to you. For instance, if something is forbidden to you, you may find yourself unable, for a certain time, to think of anything else. That is still desire.

But, as you can see, as elsewhere, there is the existence of the object at the level of what is determined in desire. Every time you encounter an object of good, you might argue that we refer to it as an object of desire. It is indeed a matter of terminology—but a justified terminology—since you will see next time when I attempt to articulate for you the relationship between love, transference, and desire.

The function of love, where we can see it in action, is exactly where The Symposium, I think, after a year of work, allowed me to show you how it operates.