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(All parts in English)

Otto Fenichel: The Neurotic acting-out, yearbook of psychoanalysis.
F.R. Alexander: The Neurotic character.
Heinz Hartmann: Psychoanalysis study of the child X; note on sublimation.

We proceed, by recalling where we started from: alienation. Let us summarize, for those who have already heard us and especially for the others: alienation…
insofar as we have taken it as the starting point of this logical path we are attempting to trace this year… it is the elimination—in the literal sense: rejection beyond the threshold—the ordinary elimination of the Other.

Beyond what threshold? The threshold in question is that which is determined by the cut that constitutes the essence of language.
Linguistics serves us here, in that it has provided the model of this cut, and this is its essential contribution.
This is why we find ourselves placed on the side that is roughly qualified as structuralist, within linguistics.

All the development of linguistics, namely—curiously—what one could call semiology…
that which bears this name, that which is designated, that which presents itself as such recently…
does not interest us to the same degree. Which may, at first glance, seem surprising.

Elimination, then, of the Other…
Of the Other: what does that mean, the Other with a capital O, insofar as it is eliminated here?
…It is eliminated as a closed and unified field. This means that we affirm—with the best reasons for doing so—that there is no universe of discourse, that there is nothing assumable under this term.

Language is nonetheless in solidarity, in its radical practice which is psychoanalysis…
note that I could also say: its medical practice. Someone whose absence today in his usual place surprises me, had asked me about the sign I left as a riddle for the term I might have given in Latin, a stricter term, for “I think”. If no one has found it, I will give it today. I had indicated that it could only be conceived from a verb in the middle voice—it is: medeor, from which comes both the medicine I just now evoked and meditation…
language, in its radical practice, is in solidarity with something we will now have to reintegrate, to conceive in some way as an emanation of this field of the Other, from the moment we had to consider it as disjointed.

And this something is not difficult to name. It is that which precariously authorizes this field of the Other, and this is called
“proper dimension of language”, truth. To situate psychoanalysis, one could say that it comes to be constituted wherever truth
is recognized solely in this: that it surprises us and imposes itself. Example, to illustrate what I just said:

“It is neither given to me, nor giveable, any other jouissance than that of my body.”

This does not impose itself immediately, but it is suspected, and one establishes around this jouissance—which is indeed from that moment on my only possession—
this protective grid of a so-called universal law which is called “The Rights of Man”. No one should be able to prevent me
from disposing of my body at my will! The result, ultimately we touch it with our fingers, with our toes, we psychoanalysts:
jouissance has dried up for everyone!

This is the reverse side of a short article I produced under the title Kant with Sade. Obviously, it is not said there in the straightforward manner—
it is in reverse. It was not, for that reason, any less dangerous to say it the way SADE said it. SADE is indeed the proof of it.
But since I was only explaining SADE, it is less dangerous for me!

Truth manifests itself enigmatically in the symptom. Which is what? A subjective opacity. Let us leave aside what is clear…
which is that the enigma already has this resolved aspect, that it is only a rebus
…and let us lean for a moment on this point, which by going too quickly one might overlook:
– the subject can thus be non-transparent,
– it is also that evidence can be hollow, and it is probably better from now on to connect the word to the past participle: hollowed-out.

The subject is perfectly thing-like, and of the worst kind of thing: the Freudian thing, precisely.

As for evidence, we know that it is a bubble and that it can be burst. We have already experienced this on several occasions. Such is the level to which modern thought is progressing, as initially set by MARX, and later by FREUD. If the status of what FREUD brought is less obviously triumphant, it may be precisely because he went further. That comes with a cost.

That cost is paid, for example, in the thematic which you will find developed in the two articles I propose to your attention, to your study, if you have enough leisure for it, because they are to form here the background on which what I have to put forward will find its place, to resume things from the point where I left them last time, to complete, in this quadrangle which I began to trace and to fundamentally articulate around repetition.

Repetition: the temporal locus where that comes into play which I first left suspended, around the purely logical terms of alienation, at the four poles which I punctuated:

– of the alienating choice on the one hand [I],
– of the institution on the other hand, at two of these poles: of the Id, the it [II], of the unconscious on the other hand [III]
– to place at the fourth of these poles castration [IV].

These four terms, which may have left you in suspense, have their correspondences in what I began, last time, to articulate by showing you the fundamental structure:
– of repetition on the one hand. To situate it: on the right of the quadrangle,
– of the function on the other hand – at the right pole – of that privileged and exemplary mode of institution of the subject which is the passage to the act.

What are the other poles I must now treat? Already one – last time – was indicated to you: acting-out, which I will have to articulate insofar as it is situated in that place – elided – where something manifests from the field of the eliminated Other, which I have just recalled in its form as a truthful manifestation. That is fundamentally the meaning of acting-out.

I ask you here, simply, to have the patience to follow me since I can only bring these terms – what they refer to, the structure, so to speak – “head-on.”

If we were to proceed by progression, even critical, from what has already been sketched out in such a formulation within theories already expressed in analysis, we could literally only get lost in the same labyrinth that this theory constitutes.
This is not to say, of course, that we reject either the data or the experience, but that we submit what we bring in new formulations to the test of seeing whether it is not precisely our formulations that will allow what has already been initiated to be defined not only in its justification but in its meaning.

Acting-out, then, which I bring forward, you probably already sense the relevance of bringing it forward in this situation of the field of the Other, which it is our task to restructure, if I may put it that way. If only in this: that history, like experience as it continues, indicates to us at the very least a certain overall correspondence of this term with what analytic experience institutes.
I am not saying that acting-out occurs only in the course of analysis, I am saying that it is from analyses and from what takes place within them that the problem has emerged, that the fundamental distinction has emerged that has led to isolating from the act and from the passage to the act…
such as it may – as psychiatrists – pose problems for us and become established as an autonomous category… to distinguish acting-out. I have thus only brought forward a correlate, the one that aligns it with the symptom as a manifestation of truth. It is certainly not the only one and other conditions are required.

I therefore hope that at least some of you will be able…
in parallel with these statements that I will be led to put at your disposal…
to at least peruse what, at a certain date – which is roughly 1947 or 1948 – the Yearbook of Psychoanalysis began to publish after the last war – and the formulation given by Otto FENICHEL: The neurotic acting out.

I continue… What is the term that you will see being inscribed at the 4th point of convergence of these operative functions which determine what we articulate on the basis of repetition? The thing may surprise you…
and I believe I can support it as fully as possible before your judgment…
it is something which – quite singularly – has remained, in analytic theory, in a certain suspension, and is assuredly the conceptual point around which the most clouds and the most false appearances have accumulated.

To name it…
and indeed it is already written on this board, since it is to this note by Heinz HARTMANN that I ask you to refer in order to grasp a typical fruit of the analytic situation as such… it is sublimation.

Passage à l'acte — Repetition
       |               |
   Sublimation   — Acting-out

Sublimation is the term…
which I will not call a mediator, for it is not one… it is the term that allows us to inscribe the foundation and the conjunction of what constitutes the subjective base, insofar as repetition
is its fundamental structure and includes this essential dimension upon which, in everything that has so far been formulated in analysis, the greatest obscurity remains and which is called satisfaction, “Befriedigung” says FREUD.

Feel in it the presence of the term Friede, whose common meaning is peace. I think we live in an era where this word, at least, will not seem to you to carry any self-evidence. What is the satisfaction that FREUD conjugates for us
as essential to repetition in its most radical form?

Since indeed, it is under this mode that he presents to us the function of the Wiederholungszwang [repetition compulsion], insofar as it encompasses not only such a function—one quite localizable—of life under the term of the pleasure principle, but sustains that life itself of which we can now admit everything, even this, which has become real, tangible: that there is nothing of the material it stirs which is not in the end dead—I say: by its nature, inanimate—but of which it is nonetheless clear that this material
which it gathers, it will return to its domain of the inanimate “only in its own way,” FREUD tells us.

That is to say: everything is in this satisfaction which involves retracing and rewalking the same paths that it has—how?—built and that certainly it shows us that its essence is to travel them again. There is—let us be very modest!—a world between this theoretical flash and its verification. FREUD is not a biologist and one of the most striking things, which might be disappointing if we believed that giving the dominant place in his thought to the powers of life were enough to build anything resembling a science that would be called biology.

We analysts have contributed nothing to anything that resembles biology. That is nonetheless quite striking!
Why, then, do we hold so firmly to the assurance that behind satisfaction—which we deal with when it comes to repetition—is something that we designate with all the clumsiness, with all the recklessness that the current state of biological research may entail…
this term we designate…
this is the meaning, the anchor point, which I would go so far as to call the fideistic point of FREUD…
which we call sexual satisfaction.

And this, for the reason FREUD put forward before a dumbfounded JUNG: to avert “the river of mud,” as FREUD evaluates it in relation to the thought he designates, the term one inevitably comes to if one does not hold firm right there, which he designates as the recourse to “occultism.”

Does that mean everything is that simple? I mean that such affirmations are enough to make for an acceptable articulation?
That is the question I am trying to bring forward before you today, and which drives me to advance sublimation as the place which, though until now left fallow or covered in vulgar scribblings, is nevertheless the one that will allow us to understand what is at stake in that fundamental satisfaction, which is the one FREUD articulates as a subjective opacity, as the satisfaction of repetition, that conjunction so foundational for all logic.

For what we carry with us into this marginal place of thought, which is that…
a place of penumbra, a place of veiling, a place of twilight…
where analytic action unfolds, if we bring along with us the requirements of logic, what we are led
to do deserves at last that we pin it down with what I believe must be its best name: sub-logic, as we are trying to inaugurate it here this very year.

I pronounce the term at the very moment we must orient ourselves on what sublimation is.
FREUD, although he never developed it…
for the same reasons that make the developments I am adding necessary…
FREUD affirmed, in the procedural mode of his thinking, which consists…
as another said: BOSSUET, named Jacques-Bénigne [Laughter]
…which consists in holding firmly both ends of the chain:

Firstly, sublimation is zielgehemmt [goal-inhibited], and naturally, he does not explain what that means!
I have already tried, for you, to indicate the distinction already inherent in this term zielgehemmt. I drew my references in English, as being more accessible: the difference between aim [target] and goal [objective].

Say it in French: it’s less clear, because we are forced to use words already in use in philosophy.
We could nonetheless try to say: la fin [the end], that is the weakest word, because it requires reintegrating the entire process that is what is at stake in aim, the target. Such is the same distance there is between aim and goal, and in German between Zweck and Ziel.

Zweckmäßigkeit, sexual finality, we are not told that it is in any way gehemmt, inhibited, in sublimation.

Zielgehemmt—that is precisely where the word is truly meant to arrest us… That with which we fill our mouths, the so-called “object of the holy genital drive,” is exactly that which can, with no inconvenience, be extracted, totally inhibited, absent from what nevertheless is sexual drive, without it losing in any way its capacity for Befriedigung, for satisfaction.

Such is, from the very appearance of the term Sublimierung, how FREUD defines it in unequivocal terms of Zielgehemmt on the one hand, but on the other hand, satisfaction encountered with no transformation, displacement, alibi, repression, reaction, or defense. Such is—how FREUD introduces it, sets it before us—the function of sublimation.

You will see, in the second of these articles…
there are three written up there [on the board at the beginning of the session], but what I call the second is the second I named earlier, the one by Heinz HARTMANN, the first I named being that of FENICHEL, and the ALEXANDER being only a reference by FENICHEL—I mean the point designated by FENICHEL as the major point of introduction
of the term acting out in psychoanalytic articulation… so you will refer to the article by Heinz HARTMANN on sublimation—it is exemplary.

It is exemplary of what is, in our view, by no means obsolete in the analyst’s position: it is that the approach to what he deals with—as the responsibility of thought—always drives him, from some angle, toward one of these two terms that I will designate in the most tempered way: flatness.

Of which everyone knows that I have long designated as its most eminent representative: FENICHEL. Peace be upon his memory!
His writings have for us the very great value of being the collection, undoubtedly very scrupulous, of everything that may arise as holes in the experience. What is simply missing, in place of these holes, is the necessary question mark.

As for Heinz HARTMANN and the way he supports…
for some fourteen or fifteen pages, if I recall correctly, with tones of questioning therein…
the problem of sublimation, I think it cannot escape anyone who approaches it with a fresh mind, that such a discourse…
the very one I ask you to refer to in person, indicating where it is, where you can very easily find it…
is, properly speaking, a discourse of falsehood.

The whole apparatus of a so-called “energeticism,” around which we are offered something that consists precisely in reversing the approach to the problem…
to interrogate sublimation, insofar as it is first presented to us as being identical and undistorted in relation
to something which is properly—with the quotation marks imposed by usage at this level, for the term “drive”—
nonetheless: the “sexual drive”…
to reverse this and to question, in the most deliberate and emphasized manner, what sublimation is, as related to what is proposed to us: namely, that the functions of the ego…
which in the most undue way have been posited as autonomous, as even being of a different source than what is called, in this confused language, an “instinctual” source—as if this had ever been the issue in FREUD!
…to ask then how these purely ego functions…
related to the measure of reality and providing it as such in an essential way, thereby reinstating, at the heart of analytic thought, what all analytic thought rejects—that there is this isolated, direct, autonomous, identifiable relation of pure thought to a world that it would be capable of approaching without itself being entirely traversed by the function of desire…
how it is that there could come from what is thus—elsewhere—the instinctual core, I don’t know what reflection, I don’t know what image, I don’t know what coloring, that is literally called: “sexualization of the functions of the ego”! Once introduced in this way, the question becomes literally unsolvable, in any case forever excluded from everything proposed to the praxis of analysis.

To approach what is at stake in sublimation, it is necessary for us to introduce this primary term, by means of which it becomes possible to orient ourselves within the problem, which is the one from which I started last time by defining the act. The act is signifying:
– It is a signifier that repeats, although it occurs in a single gesture, for topological reasons that make possible the existence of the double loop created by a single cut.
– It is the institution of the subject as such.
– That is to say, from a true act the subject emerges different: due to the cut, its structure is modified.
– And fourthly, its correlate of misrecognition, or more exactly the limit imposed on its recognition within the subject, or if you prefer: its Repräsentanz in the Vorstellung of this act, is Verleugnung. That is, the subject never recognizes it in its true inaugural import, even when the subject is, so to speak, capable of having committed this act.

Well, it is here that we must realize something that is essential to any understanding of the role that FREUD assigns to sexuality in the unconscious, that we must remember what language already lets us know: that we speak of the sexual act.
The sexual act—this at least might suggest to us…
which is, moreover, obvious, because as soon as one thinks about it, well, it becomes immediately tangible…
is that it is clearly not pure and simple copulation.

The act has all the characteristics of the act, as I have just recalled them, as we handle it, as it presents itself to us, with its symptomatic sediments and everything that makes it more or less sticky and stumbling.
The sexual act presents itself precisely as a signifier, firstly, and as a signifier that repeats something. Because that is the first thing psychoanalysis introduced into it. What does it repeat?

But the Oedipal scene! It is curious that one must recall these things that are the very soul of what I have proposed you perceive in the analytic experience. That it may be the institution of something that is without return for the subject, is what certain privileged sexual acts, which are precisely those called incestuous, let us literally touch with our hands.

I have enough analytic experience to affirm to you that a boy who has slept with his mother is not at all, in analysis, a subject like the others! And even if he himself knows nothing of it, it changes nothing of the fact that this is analytically as touchable as that table right there! [Lacan strikes the table with his hand] His personal Verleugnung, the denial he may bring to the fact that this has the value of a decisive crossing, changes nothing about it.

Of course, all this would deserve support. My assurance here is that I have listeners who have analytic experience and who, if I were saying something too outrageous, I believe, would know how to raise a protest. But believe me, they will not say the contrary, because they know it just as well as I do, quite simply. That does not mean that one knows how to draw the consequences, for lack of knowing how to articulate them. Be that as it may, this leads us to try, perhaps, to introduce a bit of logical rigor into it.

The act is founded on repetition. What, at first glance, could be more welcoming [Lacan smiles] than the sexual act! Let us recall the teachings of our Holy Mother the Church, eh! In principle, we don’t do that just like that, we don’t have our little fling, unless—eh!—to bring into the world… a new little soul! [Laughter]

There must be people who think about that while doing it! [Laughter] That’s a supposition! It is not established. It may be that, conforming as this thought is to dogma—Catholic, I mean—it is, where it occurs, only a symptom.
This, obviously, is meant to suggest to us that it may be worth trying to get a little closer, to see by which side the function of reproduction, which is there behind the sexual act, reveals itself. Because, when we deal with the subject of repetition, we are dealing with signifiers, insofar as they are the pre-condition of a thought.

Given the direction in which biology is going, which we leave so nicely to its own resources, it is curious to see that the signifier shows its nose there, right at the root: at the level of the chromosomes. For the time being, it’s swarming with signifiers, carriers of highly specified traits. We are told that the chains—whether DNA or RNA—are made up like little well-ordered messages, which come, of course, after having been shuffled in a certain way, right, in the great urn [Laughter], to bring out who knows what… the new kind of nutcase that everyone in the family awaits to form a circle of acclamation. Is it at that level that the problem arises?

Well then, it is here that I would like to introduce something, of course, that I didn’t invent for you today. There is somewhere, in a volume called my Écrits, an article entitled The Signification of the Phallus. On page 693, on the tenth line—I had a little trouble finding it this morning—I write:

“The phallus as signifier gives the reason of desire, in the sense in which the term is employed—
I say: ‘reason’ as in ‘mean and extreme reason’ of the harmonic division.”

This is to indicate to you that what I’m going to say to you today, uh… obviously, time had to pass before I could introduce it; I simply marked there the “little white pebble” meant to let you know that: The Signification of the Phallus—that’s already it, it had already been located.

Indeed, let us try to bring some order, some measure, into what is at stake in the sexual act insofar as it relates to the function of repetition. Well, it becomes immediately obvious—not that it is misrecognized, since the Oedipus complex has been known from the beginning—but that we do not know how to recognize what it means, namely, that the product of repetition, in the sexual act as an act…
that is, insofar as we participate in it as subjected to what it has of the signifier…
has consequences that manifest in the fact that the subject we are is opaque, that he has an unconscious.

Well then, it is worth noting that the fruit of biological repetition, of reproduction—it is already there!
It is already there in that well-defined space for the accomplishment of the act, which is called “the bed.”

The agent of the sexual act knows very well that he is a son. And that’s why, when it comes to the sexual act as it concerns us psychoanalysts, it has been linked to Oedipus. So let us try to see, in these signifying terms defined by what I just now called the “mean and extreme reason,” what results from it.

Let us suppose that we will have this signifying relation borne by the simplest support, the one we have already given to the double loop of repetition: a simple line. And to make it even easier, let us lay it out, quite simply, like this:

A line to which we can give two ends—we can cut this double loop anywhere, and once we have cut it, we will try to make use of it. Let us place the four points (points of origin) of the two other cuts that define the “mean and extreme reason”:

– petit (a): the charming product of a previous copulation, which, since it happened to be a sexual act, created the subject who is now in the process of representing it—the sexual act.

– capital A. What is capital A? If the sexual act is what we are taught it is, as signifier: it is the mother.

We will assign to her…
because we find everywhere in analytic thought the trace of it—all that this signifying term “the mother” entails of thoughts of fusion, of falsification of unity, insofar as it concerns us only in one way: namely, in terms of accounting unity, of the passage from this accounting unity to unifying unity…
we will assign her the value One.

What does the value One mean, as unifying unity? We are within the realm of the signifier and its consequences on thought.
The mother as subject is the thought of the One of the couple. “The two shall become one flesh”—that is a thought belonging to the order of the maternal capital A.

Such is the “mean and extreme reason” of what connects the agent to that which is patient and receptacle in the sexual act.
I mean: insofar as it is an act, in other words, insofar as it bears a relation to the existence of the subject.

The One of the unity of the couple is a thought determined at the level of one of the terms of the real couple.

What does that mean? It means that something must subjectively emerge from this repetition that reestablishes the ratio,
the mean reason as I just defined it for you, at the level of this real couple.

In other words, that something must appear which…
as in that fundamental signifying manipulation which is the harmonic relation…
manifests itself as follows: this magnitude (let’s call it c), in relation to the sum of the two others, has the same value
as the smallest in relation to the largest.

But that is not all! It has this scope, insofar as this value—of the smallest in relation to the largest—is the same value as that which the largest has in relation to the sum of the two first. In other words, that a over A equals A over a plus A, equals what?

…this other value that I caused to emerge there and which has a name, which is called nothing other than minus phi, where castration is designated, -ϕ, insofar as it designates the fundamental value. I rewrite it a little further: equals minus phi over a plus A minus phi:

That is to say, the signifying relation of the phallic function insofar as it is the essential lack in the junction of the sexual relation with its subjective realization, the designation in the signifiers—those most fundamental of the sexual act—of this: that…
although everywhere invoked, yet always eluding…
the shadow of unity hovers over the couple, and yet there necessarily appears the mark…
this by reason of its very introduction into the subjective function, –ϕ…
the mark of something which must represent therein a fundamental lack.

This is called the function of castration insofar as it is signifying. Insofar as man enters into the function of the couple only by way of a relation that is not immediately inscribed within the sexual conjunction and which is represented there only in that same exterior where you see taking shape what is called, for that very reason, “extreme reason.”

The relation assured by the predominance of the phallic symbol, in relation to sexual conjunction—as act—is the one that gives simultaneously:
– the measure of the relation of the agent to the patient,
– and the measure—which is the same—of the thought of the couple, as it is in the patient, to what the real couple is.

It is precisely by being able to reproduce exactly the same type of repetition that everything belonging to the order of sublimation…
and I would prefer not to be forced here to evoke it specifically
under the form of what is called “the creation of Art,” but since it must be done, I bring it in…
it is precisely insofar as something, some object, can come to take the place that –ϕ takes in the sexual act as such, that sublimation can subsist, by giving exactly the same order of Befriedigung that is given in the sexual act, and of which you see this: that it is very precisely suspended upon the fact that what is purely and simply internal to the couple is not satisfying.

This is so true that this sort of crude homily that has been introduced into the theory under the name of “genital maturation”
only presents itself—as what?—very evidently, in its very text, I mean in anyone who tries to articulate it,
as a sort of catch-all, a dumping ground, where nothing truly indicates what might suffice to conjoin the fact:

– firstly of a copulation—“successful,” it is added, but what does that even mean?

– and of those elements termed tenderness, recognition of the object—of which object, I ask you?

Is it so clear that the object is there, when we’ve already been told that behind whatever object there is, looms the Other,
who is the object that sheltered those nine months of interval between the conjunction of chromosomes and the arrival into the world?

I am well aware that it is here that all obscurantism takes refuge, which clings desperately around the analytic demonstration,
but that is not a reason for us not to denounce it, if the act of denouncing it allows us to advance more strictly in a logic,
which you will see, next time, how it concentrates at the level of the analytic act itself.

If there is anything interesting in this quadrangular representation:

it is that it also allows us to establish certain proportions: if the passage to the act fulfills a certain function in relation to repetition,
it is at least suggested to us by this arrangement that it must be the same one that separates sublimation from acting-out. And in the other direction: that sublimation, in relation to the passage to the act, must have something in common with what separates repetition from acting-out.

Certainly, there is here a much greater gap, the one that surely makes of the analytic act…
as we will try to grasp it in what we say next time…
something that also deserves to be defined as act.