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(All parts in English)

As I believe that for most of you the matter is still fresh in your memory, we have thus reached the end of the commentary on the Symposium, in other words, on PLATO’s dialogue which—as I have at least indicated to you several times, if not fully explained—happens, in historical terms, to be at the origin of what can be called—more than an explanation, in our cultural era, of love—at the origin of what can be called a development of this function, ultimately the deepest, the most radical, the most mysterious, in the relations between subjects.

On the horizon of what I have pursued before you as commentary, there was the entire development of ancient philosophy, and ancient philosophy, as you know, is not simply a speculative position: entire zones of society were oriented in their practical action by the speculation of SOCRATES; it is important to see that it was not at all in an artificial, fictitious way, in some sense, that a HEGEL made positions such as the Stoic and Epicurean positions the antecedents of Christianity. In fact, these positions were lived by a very broad range of subjects as something that guided their lives, in a manner that can indeed be said to have been equivalent, preceding, preparing in relation to what the Christian position later brought them.

To realize that the very text of the Symposium continued to profoundly mark something which, even in the position of Christianity, also surpasses speculation, since one cannot say that the fundamental theological positions taught by Christianity were without resonance, without deeply influencing the problematic of each person. And especially of those who, in this historical development, found themselves “in the forefront” by the exemplary position they assumed for various reasons—either by their words or by their directive action—of what is called “sanctity.”

This, of course, could only be indicated on the horizon, and, to say it plainly, that is sufficient for us. That is sufficient for us, because if it were from this starting point that we ourselves had wanted to activate what we have to say, we would have taken it up at a later level. It is precisely insofar as this initial point, which is the Symposium, may conceal within it something absolutely radical in this spring of love whose title it bears, whose subject it claims to be, that we have undertaken this commentary on the Symposium.

We concluded it last time by showing that something—I believe I am not exaggerating in saying this—has been neglected up to now by all commentators of the Symposium, and that in this respect our commentary constitutes—in the course of the history of the development of the indications, the virtualities present in this dialogue—a milestone.

If, insofar as we believed we saw in the very scenario of what takes place between ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES, the final word of what PLATO wants to tell us concerning the nature of love, it is certain that this presupposes that PLATO has deliberately, in the presentation of what one may call “his thought,” left room for the enigma—in other words, that his thought is not entirely apparent, delivered, developed in this dialogue.

Now, I believe there is nothing excessive in asking you to admit this for the simple reason that, in the opinion of all commentators, both ancient and especially modern, of PLATO—and the case is not unique—a careful examination of the “dialogues” shows very clearly that in this dialogue there is an esoteric element, a closed element, and that the most singular modes of this closure reach—including the most characteristic traps, bordering even on the decoy—to the difficulty produced as such, so that those who are not meant to understand do not understand.[sic] And this is truly structuring, fundamental in everything that has come down to us from the presentations of PLATO.

Obviously, to admit such a thing is also to admit what there can always be for us that is tricky in advancing, in going further, in trying to penetrate, to guess in its ultimate spring what PLATO indicates to us. It seems that on this theme of love to which we have limited ourselves, as it is developed in the Symposium, it is difficult for us—for us analysts—not to recognize the bridge, the hand that is extended to us in this articulation of the final scenario of the scene of the Symposium, namely, what happens between ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES. This I have articulated and made you feel in two stages: – by showing you the importance of ALCIBIADES’ declaration, – by showing you what we can only recognize in what ALCIBIADES articulates around the theme of the ἄγαλμα [agalma, a wordplay with the Greek term meaning ‘statue’ or ‘treasure’], the theme of the hidden object inside the subject SOCRATES.

And I have shown that it is very difficult for us not to take seriously that in the form, in the articulation, in which this is presented to us, these are not metaphorical statements, pretty images meant to say, roughly, that he expects a lot from SOCRATES, but that a structure is revealed here in which we can find what we ourselves are capable of articulating as absolutely fundamental in what I will call “the position of desire.”

Here of course—and I apologize to those who are newcomers here—I can presume to be known by my audience, in its general characteristics, the elaborations I have already given regarding this position of the subject, those which are indicated in this topological summary constituted by what we conventionally call here “the graph”…

…insofar as its general form is given by splitting, by the fundamental doubling of the two signifying chains in which the subject is constituted, insofar as we already admit as demonstrated that this doubling—of itself necessitated by the logical, initial, inaugural relation of the subject to the signifier as such, by the existence of an unconscious signifying chain—results solely from the position of the term “subject” as being determined as subject by the fact that it is the support of the signifier. No doubt—let those for whom this is only an assertion, a proposition not yet demonstrated be reassured—we shall have to return to it.

But we must announce this morning that this has already been articulated before: that desire as such appears in a position—in relation to the unconscious signifying chain as constitutive of the speaking subject—in the position of what can only be conceived on the basis of metonymy: determined by the existence of the signifying chain, by that something, that phenomenon which takes place in the support of the subject of the signifying chain which is called metonymy, and which means that, as the subject undergoes the mark of the signifying chain: something is possible, something is fundamentally instituted in him that we call metonymy, which is none other than the possibility of the indefinite sliding of signifiers under the continuity of the signifying chain.

Everything that, once, is associated by the signifying chain—the circumstantial element with the element of activity and with the element of the beyond, of the term upon which this activity leads—can all, in appropriate conditions, be taken as equivalent to one another: a circumstantial element may take the representative value of what is the term of the subjective enunciation of the object towards which it is directed, or just as well of the very action of the subject. It is to the extent that something presents itself as revalorizing the kind of infinite sliding, the dissolutive element brought by the very fragmentation of signifiers in the subject, that something takes on the value of a privileged object and stops this infinite sliding.

It is to this extent that an object (a) takes with respect to the subject this essential value which constitutes the fundamental fantasy: S◊a, where the subject himself recognizes himself as stopped, which we call in analysis—to remind you of these more familiar notions—”fixed in relation to the object” in this privileged function, which we call (a). It is therefore to the extent that the subject identifies with the fundamental fantasy that desire as such takes on consistency and can be designated, that the desire in question for us is rooted by its very position in the unconscious, that is to say also—to return to our terminology—that it is posited in the subject as “desire of the Other.”

A being defined for us as the locus of speech, this locus always evoked as soon as there is speech, this third place that always exists in relations to the other as soon as there is signifying articulation. This capital A is not an absolute other, another who would be the other of what we call in our moral verbiage “the other respected as subject, as he is morally our equal”, no, this Other, as I am teaching you here to articulate it, at once necessity and necessary as locus, but at the same time perpetually subject to the question of what guarantees it itself, is a perpetually vanishing Other, and for that very reason, which places us ourselves in a perpetually vanishing position.

Now, it is to the question put to the Other of “what it can give us,” of what it has to answer us, it is to this question that love as such is linked. Not that love is identical to each of the requests with which we assail it, but that love is situated beyond this request insofar as the Other may or may not answer us as a final presence. And the whole question is to realize the relationship that binds this Other, to whom the demand for love is addressed, with the appearance of this term of desire insofar as it is no longer at all—this Other—our equal, this Other to whom we aspire, this Other of love, but that it is something which, in relation to that, actually represents a fall [décadence, “degradation” as wordplay]—I mean something that is of the nature of the object.

What is at stake in desire is an object, not a subject. It is precisely here that lies what can be called “that dreadful commandment” of the god of love which is precisely to make the object that he designates to us something which, first, is an object, and secondly that before which we collapse, we falter, we disappear as subject. For this fall, this depreciation in question, it is we as subject who bear it.

And what happens to the object is precisely the opposite, that is to say—I am using these terms so as to make myself understood, they are not the most appropriate, but no matter, what is important is that it gets across and that I am understood—that this object itself is overvalued, and it is insofar as it is overvalued that it has this function of saving our dignity as subject, that is: making us something other than this subject subjected to the infinite sliding of the signifier, making us something other than “subjects of speech,” that unique, unappreciable, irreplaceable something in the end, which is the real point where we can designate what I have called “the dignity of the subject.”

The ambiguity, if you will, that exists in the term individuality, is not that we are something unique as a body which is this one and not another, individuality consists entirely in this privileged relation where we reach a peak as subject in desire. After all, I am only reporting once more this merry-go-round of truth in which we have been revolving since the beginning of this seminar. This year, it is about showing, with transference, what its consequences are at the most intimate level of our practice. How is it that we get to this transference so late, you may then ask me?

Of course, it is because the nature of truths is never to show themselves in their entirety; to put it bluntly, truths are solids of a rather treacherous opacity. They do not even, it seems, have that property which we are able to realize in solids, of being transparent, and of showing us at once their anterior and posterior edges: one must go all the way around and even, I would say, a conjuring trick.

So, regarding transference, as we are approaching it this year, you have seen that, whatever charm I may have managed to hold you with for a time by making you, with me, occupy yourselves with love, you must nonetheless have noticed that I was approaching it by an angle, a slope which is not only not the classical angle or slope, but in addition is not even the one by which, up to now, I myself have approached this question of transference before you. I mean that, until now, I have always reserved what I have put forward on this theme by telling you that one must be terribly wary of what is the appearance, the phenomenon most commonly connoted under the terms for example of positive or negative transference, of the order of the collection of terms in which not only a more or less informed public, but even ourselves, in this everyday discourse, connote transference.

I have always reminded you that one must start from the fact that transference, in the final analysis, is “the automatism of repetition.” Now it is clear that if since the beginning of the year I have been making you follow the details, the movement, of Plato’s Symposium, On Love, which deals only with love, it is clearly to introduce you to transference from another end. Therefore, it is about joining these two approaches first. This distinction is so legitimate that one reads some very peculiar things from the authors, and precisely for lack of having the lines, the guides which I am providing you here, one ends up with quite astonishing things.

I would not be displeased if someone a bit lively would give us here a brief report, so that we can really discuss it, and in fact I wish it for reasons that are quite local, precise to this turning point in our seminar this year, on which I do not wish to dwell and to which I will return; it is certainly necessary that some can mediate between this rather heterogeneous assembly you make up and what I am trying to articulate before you, can mediate insofar as it is obviously very difficult for me to advance very far without this mediation, in a discourse that aims at nothing less than to put, at the very point of what we are articulating this year, the function as such of desire, not only in the analysand, but essentially in the analyst.

One wonders for whom this entails the greater risks:
– for those who, for some reason, know something about it,
– or for those who can as yet know nothing about it.

In any case, there must nevertheless be a way to approach this subject before an audience sufficiently prepared, even if they do not have the experience of analysis. That being said, in 1951 an article by Herman NUNBERG called Transference of reality, which is quite exemplary, like all that has been written on transference, on the difficulties, the evasions, that occur for lack of an approach sufficiently enlightened, sufficiently situated, sufficiently methodical, regarding the phenomenon of transference.

For it is not very difficult to find, in this short article which is exactly nine pages long, that the author goes so far as to distinguish as essentially different transference and the automatism of repetition. They are, he says, two different things. That is really going far. And it is certainly not what I am telling you. I would therefore ask someone for next time to make a ten-minute report on what seems to them to stand out from the structure of the statement of this article and how it can be corrected. For the moment, let us mark clearly what is at stake.

At its origin, transference is discovered by FREUD as a process—I emphasize this—spontaneous. A spontaneous process certainly rather troubling, as we are, in history, at the beginning of the appearance of this phenomenon, enough to drive away from the first analytic investigation one of the most eminent pioneers: BREUER. And very quickly it is identified, linked to the most essential aspect of this “presence of the past” as it is discovered by analysis. All these terms are carefully weighed. I ask you to note what I retain here in order to fix the main points of the dialectic at stake.

Very quickly as well, it is admitted—initially as a hypothesis, then confirmed by experience—that this phenomenon, insofar as it is linked to the most essential aspect of the “presence of the past” discovered by analysis, is manageable by interpretation. Interpretation already exists at this moment, insofar as it has manifested itself as one of the necessary mechanisms for the realization, the accomplishment, of recollection in the subject. It is realized that there is something other than this tendency to recollection, it is not yet well known what, in any case, it is the same thing. And this transference is immediately admitted as manageable by interpretation, then, if you will, permeable to the action of speech, which immediately introduces the question that will remain, that still remains open for us, which is this: this phenomenon of transference is itself placed in the position of support for this action of speech.

At the same time as transference is discovered, it is discovered that if speech has effect as it has had up to that point, before it was noticed, it is because transference is there. So that up to now, ultimately… and the subject has been extensively addressed and readdressed by the most qualified authors in analysis, I especially note the article by JONES, in his Papers on psychoanalysis: “The function of suggestion”, but there are countless others… the question has remained on the agenda: that of the ambiguity that always remains, that in the current state nothing can reduce.

This:
– that transference, no matter how much it is interpreted, retains within itself a kind of irreducible limit, that under the central normal conditions of analysis, in neuroses, it will be interpreted [one will interpret] on the basis and with the instrument of transference itself, which can only be done with a certain emphasis,
– that it is from the position given to it by transference that the analyst analyzes, interprets, and intervenes on transference itself.

An irreducible margin of suggestion, to put it plainly, remains from outside as an always suspect element, not of what happens—you cannot know that from outside—but of what the theory is capable of producing. In fact, as the saying goes, “these difficulties do not prevent us from moving forward.” Nonetheless, it is necessary to set their limits, “theoretical aporia,” and perhaps this introduces us to a certain possibility of going beyond later. Still, let us carefully observe what is at stake—I mean concerning what happens—and perhaps we can already see by which paths one might go beyond.

The “presence of the past” then, such is the reality of transference. Is there not already something that imposes itself, that allows us to formulate it in a more complete way? It is “a presence”—a little more than a presence—it is “an active presence” and, as the German and French terms indicate, a reproduction. I mean that what is not clearly articulated enough, not sufficiently brought to light in what is usually said, is how this reproduction is distinguished from a simple passivation of the subject.

If it is a reproduction, if it is something active, there is, in the manifestation of transference, something creative. This element seems to me absolutely essential to articulate, and as always, if I highlight it, it is not that its identification is not already detectable, in a more or less obscure way, in what authors have already articulated.

For if you refer to the report that marks an era by Daniel LAGACHE, you will see that this is what constitutes the nerve, the focus of the distinction he introduced, but which in my view remains a bit wavering and unclear for failing to see this final point, of the distinction he introduced, the opposition around which he wanted to make his distinction of transference turn, between “repetition of need” and “need for repetition.” For as didactic as this opposition may be, in reality it is not included, not even for a single moment truly in question, in what we experience of transference.

There is no doubt, when it is a question of the “need for repetition,” we cannot formulate the phenomena of transference otherwise than in this enigmatic form: why must the subject perpetually repeat this meaning, in the positive sense of the term, what he signifies to us by his conduct?

To call this “need” is already to bend it in a certain direction, to influence what is at stake.

And in this regard, one can indeed understand that the reference to an opaque psychological datum, such as that simply and purely connoted by Daniel LAGACHE in his report: “the Zeigarnik effect”, after all, better respects what must be preserved in what constitutes the strict originality of what is at stake in transference.

For it is clear that everything, on the other hand, indicates to us that if what we do, we do insofar as transference is the repetition of a need—a need which may manifest there as transference and there as need—we reach an impasse, since otherwise we spend our time saying that it is a shadow of a need, a need long since surpassed, and that it is for this reason that its repetition is possible. And likewise, here we arrive at the point where transference appears as, strictly speaking, a source of fiction.

The subject in transference feigns, fabricates, constructs something, and then it seems that it is not possible not to immediately integrate into the function of transference this term, which is first of all: what is the nature of this fiction, what is its source on one hand, its object on the other? And if it is a question of fiction: what is being feigned? And since it is a matter of feigning: for whom? It is quite clear that if one does not immediately answer: “For the person to whom one is speaking,” it is because one cannot add: “the knowing one.” It is because already, through this phenomenon, one is very far from any hypothesis, even in a massive sense, of what can simply be called by its name: simulation.

So, it is not for the person one addresses as one who knows. But it is not because it is the opposite, namely, because it is as one does not know, that one should believe that, for all that, the person to whom one addresses is suddenly volatilized, vanished. For everything we know about the unconscious, from the outset, from the dream, tells us—and experience shows us—that there are psychic phenomena which occur, develop, are constructed to be heard, precisely for that other who is there. Even if one does not know it, even if one does not know that they are there to be heard: they are there to be heard, and to be heard by another. In other words, it seems to me impossible to eliminate from the phenomenon of transference the fact that it manifests itself in relation to someone to whom one speaks.

This is constitutive, constitutes a boundary, and at the same time indicates to us not to drown its phenomenon in the general possibility of repetition constituted by the existence of the unconscious. Outside of analysis, there are repetitions linked, of course, to the constancy of the unconscious signifying chain in the subject. These repetitions, even if in certain cases they may have similar effects, are strictly to be distinguished from what we call “transference,” and in this sense, justify the distinction in which, as you will see, the quite remarkable figure of Herman NUNBERG lets himself slide in by a completely different end—but by an end of error.

Here I will, for a moment, slip back in, to show you its vivifying character, a piece, a segment of our exploration of the Symposium. Recall the extraordinary scene, and try to situate it in our terms, which is constituted by the public confession of ALCIBIADES. You must surely feel the quite remarkable weight that is attached to this action. You must surely feel that there is something here that goes far beyond a simple account of what took place between him and SOCRATES. It is not neutral, and the proof is that, even before beginning, he himself shields himself with I do not know what invocation of secrecy, which is not simply aimed at protecting himself. He says:

“Let those who are neither able nor worthy to hear, the slaves who are there, block their ears!” [218b]

For there are things it is better not to hear when one is not in a position to hear them. In front of whom does he confess? The others, all the others, those who, by their assembly, their body, their council, their plurality, seem to constitute, to give the greatest possible weight to what can be called “the tribunal of the Other.” And what gives value to ALCIBIADES’ confession before this tribunal is a relationship
– where precisely he attempted to make SOCRATES into something completely subordinate, subject to another value than that of the relation from subject to subject,
– where, with regard to SOCRATES, he demonstrated an attempt at seduction,
– where what he wanted to make of SOCRATES, and in the most avowed manner, is someone instrumental, subordinate—to what?—to the object of his desire, to him, ALCIBIADES, which is ἄγαλμα [agalma, wordplay: the good object].

And I will say more, how could we—not we analysts—fail to recognize what is at stake, because it is stated plainly: it is the good object he has inside. SOCRATES is nothing more than the envelope of what is the object of desire. And it is precisely to mark that he is only this envelope, that he wanted to show:

– that SOCRATES is, in relation to him, the servant of desire,

– that SOCRATES is enslaved to him by desire,

– and that the desire of SOCRATES, even though he knew it, he wanted to see it manifest itself in its sign, in order to know that the other object, ἄγαλμα [agalma, wordplay: the good object], was at his mercy.

Now, for ALCIBIADES, it is precisely having failed in this endeavor that covers him with shame, and makes his confession so charged. It is that the demon of Αἰδώς [Aidôs, wordplay: Modesty], which I have already brought up before you on this topic, is what intervenes here, it is what is violated.

It is that in front of everyone is revealed, in its feature, in its secret, the most shocking, the last spring of desire, that something which always more or less compels one, in love, to conceal it, it is that its aim is this fall of the Other (capital A) into other (small a), and that on top of it all, on this occasion, it appears that ALCIBIADES has failed in his endeavor, insofar as that endeavor, specifically, was to make SOCRATES fall from this rung.

What could seem closer, in appearance, to what one could call, to what one might believe to be the final stage of a search for truth, not in its function of refinement, abstraction, neutralization of all elements, but on the contrary in what it brings of value, of resolution, of absolution in what is at stake and which you can clearly see is something quite different from the mere phenomenon of an unfinished task, as one says, Zeigarnik, it is something else.

The public confession, with all the religious charge we attach to it—rightly or wrongly—is really what seems to be at stake here. As it is done right to its final term, does it not also seem that with this striking testimony, rendered about SOCRATES’ superiority, should end the tribute paid to the master, and perhaps what some have described as the apologetic value of the Symposium?

Given the accusations with which SOCRATES, even after his death, remained charged, since the pamphlet of one named POLYCRATES still accuses him at the time—and everyone knows that the Symposium was written partly in relation to this libel, we have some citations from other authors—of having, so to speak, “corrupted” ALCIBIADES and many others, of having shown them that the path was clear for the satisfaction of all their desires, now what do we see? It is that paradoxically, in the face of this unveiling of a truth which seems, in a certain sense, self-sufficient, but about which everyone feels the question remains:

– Why all this?
– To whom is it addressed?
– Who is it meant to teach at the moment the confession takes place (it is certainly not the accusers of SOCRATES)?
– What is the desire that drives ALCIBIADES to strip himself bare in public?

Is there not a paradox here which is worth highlighting and which, as you will see by looking closely, is not so simple? It is that what everyone perceives as an interpretation by SOCRATES indeed is one. SOCRATES replies:

“All that you have just done there, and God knows it is not obvious, is for Agathon. Your desire is more secret than all the unveiling to which you have just submitted yourself and now aims at yet another—small a—and this other, I indicate to you, is Agathon.”

Paradoxically, in this situation, then, it is not something fantastical, something that comes from the depths of the past and no longer exists, which is here by this interpretation of SOCRATES put in the place of what is manifesting; here, it is in fact reality—as SOCRATES understands it—that would serve as what we would call a transference in the process of the search for truth. In other words, so that you understand me well, it is as if someone were to say during the trial of OEDIPUS:

“OEDIPUS pursues so breathlessly this search for the truth which must lead him to his downfall only because he has but one goal: to leave, to fly away, to escape with ANTIGONE…”

Such is the paradoxical situation in which SOCRATES’ interpretation places us. It is quite clear that all the shimmering of details, the ruse by which it can serve to “dazzle the sparrows” [wordplay: to impress the naïve], to perform such a brilliant act, to show what one is capable of—none of this, in the end, holds up. It truly concerns something that makes one wonder just how much SOCRATES knows what he is doing.

For SOCRATES, responding to ALCIBIADES, seems to fall under the accusations of POLYCRATES, for he, SOCRATES, learned in matters of love, indicates to him where his desire is, and does much more than indicate it since he is, in some way, going to play the game of that desire by proxy. And he, SOCRATES, right afterward prepares to praise AGATHON, who, all of a sudden, by a freeze-frame, is whisked away—we see nothing of it—by a new entry of revelers. Thanks to this, the question remains enigmatic.

The dialogue can return endlessly upon itself, and we will never know what SOCRATES knows about what he is doing, or if it is PLATO who at that moment substitutes himself for him—no doubt, since it is he who wrote the dialogue, he the more knowing one—that is, allowing centuries to go astray on what he, PLATO, designates for us as the true reason for love, which is to lead the subject up—toward what?—the rungs indicated to him by the ascent toward a “Beauty” more and more confused with the “Supreme Beauty.” That is PLATO.

That said, it is not at all what we feel obliged to do if we follow the text. At most, as analysts, we could say that if SOCRATES’ desire, as seems to be indicated in his words, is nothing other than to bring his interlocutors to Γνῶθι σεαυτόν [gnôthi seauton, “know thyself,” wordplay], which in another register translates as “take care of your soul.”

Ultimately, we might think that all of this must be taken seriously, that in some part—and I will explain to you by what mechanism—SOCRATES is one of those to whom we owe having a soul, I mean, for having given consistency to a certain point designated by Socratic questioning with, as you will see, all it generates in terms of transference and qualities.

But if it is true that what SOCRATES thus designates is, without knowing it, “the desire of the subject” as I define it and as indeed it [Socrates’ desire] manifests itself before us without making of it what must be called the accomplice, if it is that and he does it unknowingly, here is SOCRATES in a place we can fully understand, and understand at the same time how, in the end, he set ALCIBIADES on fire.

For…
– if desire in its root, in its essence, is the desire of the Other, it is precisely here that lies the spring of the birth of love,
– if love is what happens with that object toward which we reach out our hand by our own desire, and which, at the moment when its blaze bursts forth, lets us see for an instant this response: that other hand, the one that is extended toward you as its desire,
– if this desire always manifests itself insofar as we do not know: “And Ruth did not know what God wanted from her…”, in order not to know what God wanted from her, it was still necessary that it was a question of God wanting something from her, and if she knows nothing of it, it is not because one does not know “what God wanted from her…” but because, due to this mystery, God is eclipsed but always there.
…it is to the extent that what SOCRATES desires he does not know, and that it is the desire of the Other, it is in this respect that ALCIBIADES is possessed by—what?—by a love of which it can be said that SOCRATES’ only merit is to designate it as transference love, to refer it to its true desire.

These are the points I wanted to fix, to set in place again today, in order to continue next time with what I believe I can clearly show: how much this apologue, this final articulation, this scenario—which borders on myth—of the last moment of the Symposium allows us to structure, to articulate around the position of the two desires, this situation—which we will then truly be able to restore to its real meaning as a situation between two, between two reals—which is the situation of the analysand in the presence of the analyst.

And at the same time, to put exactly in their place the phenomena of love, sometimes ultra-early, so disconcerting for those who approach these phenomena, early then progressively more complex as they become, in analysis, more belated—in short, the whole content of what takes place on the level we call “imaginary,” for which the entire development of modern analytic theories has believed it necessary to construct, and not without reason:
– the whole theory of the object relation,
– the whole theory of projection, since this term is in fact far from being sufficient on its own,
– ultimately the whole theory of what the analyst is, during analysis, for the analysand,
…this imaginary plane cannot be conceived without a correct positioning of the fact that the analyst himself occupies the position he occupies in relation to the desire constitutive of analysis and with which the subject sets out in analysis: “what does he want?”