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In the opening to Seminar XIV: The Logic of Fantasy, Lacan offers what seems like a light, anecdotal comment about a machine at MIT called “Eliza.” Yet, as with much in Lacan, this is not a throwaway reference—it contains a tightly packed knot of meaning that threads together psychoanalysis, language, performance, and subjectivity.

The machine, ELIZA, mimics human conversation. It doesn’t understand or think, but it simulates a response. Lacan links this technological artifact to Eliza Doolittle, the central figure in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, a working-class flower girl who is taught to speak “proper English” in order to pass as a member of the upper class. This parallel is not arbitrary. Rather, it opens up a rich metaphor for the structure of fantasy and the formation of the subject in psychoanalysis.

1. Eliza Doolittle: From Object to Subject—Or Not?

In Pygmalion, Eliza undergoes a transformation, but this transformation is primarily linguistic and performative. She learns to speak differently, and by speaking differently, is treated differently. But her “essence” remains contested—does she truly become someone new, or is she simply a simulation of the Other’s desire?

This question is at the heart of Lacan’s thinking: Is the subject ever more than a response to the desire of the Other?

Eliza Doolittle is not simply learning to speak; she is learning to desire in a certain way—to conform herself to the social codes of an Other (high society) whose desire structures her own self-perception. She is caught in the fantasy of what she believes the Other wants from her. Her subjectivity is formed in relation to this fantasized desire of the Other. This is exactly what Lacan formulates in the fantasy structure:

$ ◊ a — the barred subject in relation to the objet a, the object-cause of desire.

Eliza becomes a speaking being only insofar as she inserts herself into the symbolic order—but crucially, her insertion is based on mimicry, not mastery. She mimics the language of the Other, and thus appears to belong—but this very mimicry reveals the gap between being and semblance. She does not become the Other; she performs it. The question is whether that performance is sufficient for subjectivity—or whether something remains fundamentally lacking.

2. ELIZA the Machine: Simulating the Mirror Stage

Lacan finds in the machine ELIZA a contemporary version of this same logic. ELIZA responds, but only according to pre-programmed rules. It “hears” the user and returns something that appears meaningful—but it has no unconscious, no manque (lack), no desire.

Yet—and this is Lacan’s crucial point—the user experiences ELIZA as if it were responding. Something happens in the one who speaks, even if nothing is happening in the machine. In this way, the machine becomes the screen onto which fantasy is projected.

This parallels the mirror stage: the infant identifies with an image, sees itself as whole and unified—but this image is an illusion. The machine (ELIZA) functions like a mirror for the speaking subject: it reflects their speech, their desire, their questions—but what is reflected is only a surface. It’s the subject’s own fantasy that fills in the illusion of understanding.

3. Performance and the Fantasy of the Other’s Desire

Both Eliza Doolittle and ELIZA the machine raise a central psychoanalytic question: What does the Other want from me? This is the enigmatic question that structures fantasy. The subject is always positioned in relation to what it believes the Other desires.

• Eliza Doolittle performs the role she believes the Other expects.
• The user of ELIZA receives the illusion of understanding from the machine—because they need to believe it.

In both cases, we see a dynamic in which the subject emerges only through a fantasy, a fantasy that stages a scene: “I am being addressed. I am being heard. I am responding to what the Other wants.” But this scene is always a construction.

Lacan suggests that the logic of fantasy is what allows the subject to function within language at all—but it also hides the truth of the lack in the Other. There is no guarantee the Other desires us, or even that the Other exists in any coherent form. Fantasy covers over this void.

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Conclusion: The Machine as Metaphor for the Other

By invoking both Eliza Doolittle and the ELIZA program, Lacan subtly triangulates the illusion of dialogue, the performance of identity, and the fantasy of the Other’s desire. What links them is not technology or literature per se, but the structure of subjectivity as mediated by language and fantasy.

In the end, Lacan’s point is not just that machines can simulate conversation, but that humans, too, often simulate—we simulate desire, simulate roles, simulate responses, in a constant effort to satisfy the imagined demands of the Other. The fantasy that the Other responds—whether through a computer, a lover, or society—structures our very sense of being.

And in both cases—Doolittle and ELIZA—the question is left hanging: If I’m only mimicking desire, am I truly desiring at all?

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If you’d like, I can help format this into a formal paper with footnotes or citations, or extend it into other aspects of Seminar XIV, like the fantasy formula or its connection to clinical practice.

Prompt: explain lacan seminar 14 / extend the paper focusing on linking the doolittle reference

Before giving the floor to Jacques-Alain MILLER, I want to share something very amusing, which was brought to me by a faithful follower: a communication from a specialized journal, which mentions both IBM machines and what is being done with them on an experimental level at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—M.I.T. as it is commonly called—and tells us about the use of one of these high-level machines as it is now being employed, to which has been given—not without reason—the name Elisa, or at least it is called Elisa in the context of the usage I am about to describe. Elisa is, in a well-known play, “Pygmalion”, the person who is taught “proper speech”… while she is a little flower girl selling bouquets in the busiest streets of London… and is being trained to express herself in high society, without it being noticeable that she does not belong to it. Something of that order emerges with this said machine. In truth, that is not exactly the point. That a machine is capable of giving articulated responses, simply when spoken to—I do not say when interrogated—now appears to be a game, which raises the question of what may happen: of obtaining these responses in the one who speaks to it.

(Seminar 14.3: 30 November 1966 Jacques Lacan)