🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I resume before you my difficult discourse, increasingly difficult due to the aim of this discourse.

For example, to say that I am bringing you today onto unknown ground would be inappropriate, because if I am beginning today to lead you onto some ground, it is necessarily the case that I have already begun from the start. On the other hand, to speak of “unknown ground” when it is ours, the one called the unconscious, is even more inappropriate because what is at stake, and what makes this discourse difficult, is that I cannot tell you anything about it that does not take all its weight precisely from what I do not say about it.

It is not that everything must not be said; rather, in order to speak accurately we cannot say everything, even of what we could formulate, because there is already something in the formulation that—as you will see, we grasp it at every moment—precipitates into the imaginary what is at stake, which is essentially what happens from the fact that the human subject, as such, is prey to the symbol.

At the point we have reached, this “to the symbol,” be careful, should we put it in the singular or the plural? In the singular, assuredly, insofar as the one I introduced last time is, properly speaking, as such, an unnamable symbol—we will see why and in what way—the symbol Φ[capital phi], precisely this point where I must resume my discourse today to show you in what way it is indispensable for us to understand the incidence of the castration complex in the dynamic of transference.

There is a fundamental ambiguity between: phallus as symbol Φ, and phallus as imaginary ϕ, concretely involved in the psychic economy, where we encounter it, where we first encountered it eminently, where the neurotic experiences it in a way that represents his particular mode of maneuvering, of operating with this radical, fundamental difficulty that I am trying to articulate before you through the use I make of this symbol Φ. This symbol Φ, last time and indeed many times before, I have designated briefly, I mean rapidly, in an abbreviated way, as the symbol that corresponds to the place where the lack of signifier occurs.

If I have again, from the beginning of this session, unveiled this image that served us last time as a support to introduce the paradoxes, the antinomies, linked to those various, so subtle, so difficult to retain shifts in their different moments and yet indispensable to sustain if we wish to understand what is at stake in the castration complex and which are the displacements and absences, and the levels and substitutions where what analytic experience increasingly shows us intervenes.

This phallus in its multiple, quasi-ubiquitous formulas, you see it in experience, if not reappearing, at least—you cannot deny it—in theoretical writings, at every instant being re-invoked in the most diverse forms, right up to the final term of the most primitive investigations, into what happens in the first pulsations of the soul. The phallus which you see, in the final analysis, identified for example with the force of primitive aggressivity insofar as it is the worst object encountered in the end in the mother’s breast and insofar as it is also the most harmful object. Why this ubiquity? It is not I who introduce it here, who suggest it; it is manifest everywhere in the writings of every attempt pursued to formulate, on a level both old and new, renewed, of analytic technique.

Well, let us try to put some order into it and see why it is necessary for me to insist on this ambiguity, or on this polarity if you like, a polarity with two extreme terms: the symbolic and the imaginary, concerning the function of the signifier phallus. I say “signifier” insofar as it is used as such but when I speak of it, when I introduced it earlier, I said the symbol phallus and, as you will see, perhaps indeed it is the only signifier that absolutely deserves, in our register, the title of symbol.

So I have unveiled again this image—which assuredly is not a simple reproduction of the original one by the artist—of the painting from which I started as the properly exemplary image, which seemed to me loaded in its composition with all those kinds of riches that a certain art of painting can produce and whose mannerist dynamic I have examined. I am going to run through it quickly again, if only for those who could not see it. I simply want, as a complement I will say, to clearly mark, for those who perhaps could not hear it precisely, what I mean to emphasize about the importance here of what I will call the mannerist application. You will see that application must be employed both in the literal sense and in the figurative sense.

It is not I, but already existing studies, who have made the connection in this painting with the use that is made of the presence of the bouquet of flowers there in the foreground: it covers what is to be covered, of which I told you that it was less still the phallus threatened by EROS—here surprised and discovered by an initiative of the question of PSYCHE: “what of him?”—than what here the bouquet covers: the precise point of an absent presence, of a presence made absent.

The technical history of painting of the era calls out to us, not through my own path but through the path of critics who started from premises entirely different from those that might, on occasion, guide me here. They have emphasized the kinship that exists, precisely due to the probable collaborator who was the one who specifically made the flowers. Certain things indicate to us that it is probably not the same artist who worked on the two parts of the painting and that, brother or cousin of the artist, it is another, Francesco instead of Jacopo, who, because of his technical skill, was asked to be the one to execute this tour de force of the flowers in their vase in the appropriate place.

This is connected by the critics to something I hope a certain number of you are familiar with, namely the technique of ARCIMBOLDO, which was brought, a few months ago, to the attention of those who keep themselves informed about various returns to the present, about facets sometimes elided, veiled, or forgotten in the history of art. This ARCIMBOLDO stands out for this singular technique that produced its last offshoot in the work, for example, of my old friend Salvador DALI, which consists of what DALI called “paranoiac drawing” [paranoiac here is a wordplay in DALI’s sense].

In the case of ARCIMBOLDO, it is about representing the figure, for example, of the librarian—he worked to a large extent at the court of the famous RUDOLPH II of Bohemia, who also left many other traces in the tradition of the rare object—of RUDOLPH II by a clever scaffolding of the basic utensils of the librarian’s function, namely a certain way of arranging books so that the image of a face, of a visage, is here much more than suggested, truly imposed.

Likewise, the symbolic theme of a season embodied in the form of a human face will be materialized by all the fruits of that season, whose assembly itself will be realized in such a way that the suggestion of a face will also be imposed in the realized form.

In short, this realization of what in its essential figure appears as the human image, the image of another, will by the mannerist procedure be achieved by the coalescence, the combination, the accumulation of a heap of objects whose total will be charged with representing what from then on manifests itself at once as substance and as illusion, since at the same time as the appearance of the human image is maintained, something is suggested which is imagined in the disassembly of the objects which, in some way presenting the function of the mask, at the same time show the problematic of this mask.

What we are always dealing with, each time we see this so essential function of the person come into play, insofar as we see it constantly in the foreground in the economy of human presence, is this: if there is a need for a “persona”, it is that behind, perhaps, every form slips away and vanishes.

And certainly, if it is from a complex gathering that the persona results, it is indeed there that both the lure and the fragility of its subsistence lie, and that behind, we know nothing of what can be sustained, for a doubled appearance is imposed on us or is essentially suggested as a doubling of appearance, that is, something that leaves an emptiness at its questioning: the question of knowing what is behind at the ultimate point.

It is therefore in this register that, in the composition of the painting, the mode by which the question is maintained is affirmed, because this is what we must maintain, support before our mind essentially, namely: what is at stake in the act of PSYCHE?

PSYCHE, fulfilled, wonders about what she is dealing with and it is this moment, this precise, privileged instant, that ZUCCHI has captured… perhaps far beyond what he himself could, or could have articulated in a discourse: there is a discourse on the ancient gods of this character, I have taken care to refer to it, without great illusion, there is not much to draw from this discourse, but the work speaks for itself enough …that the artist in this image has seized that instantaneous something I called last time this moment of appearance, of birth of PSYCHE, this sort of exchange of powers which makes her take form, and with all this procession of misfortunes that will be hers so that she can close a circle, so that she can rediscover in this instant that something which, for her, will disappear the instant after, precisely what she wanted to seize, what she wanted to unveil: the figure of desire.

The introduction of the symbol Φ[capital phi] as such, what justifies it, since I present it as what comes in the place of the missing signifier? What does it mean for a signifier to be missing? How many times have I told you that once the battery of signifiers is given, beyond a certain minimum that remains to be determined, of which I have told you that at the limit 4 should be enough for all meanings as JAKOBSON teaches us[See α, β, γ, δ, in “the seminar on The Purloined Letter”: Écrits, p. 11], there is no language, however primitive it may be, where in the end everything cannot be expressed, except of course that, as they say in the Vaud proverb: “Everything is possible for man, what he cannot do, he leaves,” that what cannot be expressed in the said language, well simply, this will not be felt. This will not be felt, subjectivized, if to subjectivize is to take place in a subject, valid for another subject—that is, to go beyond that most radical point where the very idea of communication is not possible.

Any battery of signifiers can always “say everything” since what it cannot say will mean nothing at the place of the Other, and everything that means something for us always occurs at the place of the Other. For something to signify, it must be translatable at the place of the Other. Suppose a language—I have already pointed this out to you—which does not have such a figure, well, here it is: it will not express it, but it will still signify it, for example through the process of “must” or “to have.” And that is indeed what happens in fact—since I do not need to go over it again, I have pointed it out to you—that is how, in French and in English, the future is expressed:
– cantare habeo, je chanter-ai, tu chanter-as, it is the verb “to have” that is conjugated, I mean originally, in the most attested way.
– I shall sing, it is also, in a roundabout way, expressing what English does not have, that is, the future.

There is no signifier that is missing. At what point does the lack of signifier possibly begin to appear? At that proper dimension which is subjective and which is called the question. I remind you that I have sufficiently pointed out, at the time, the fundamental, essential character of the appearance in the child—already well known, noted of course by the most customary observation—of the question as such. This moment so particularly embarrassing, because of the nature of these questions, which is not just any nature. The one where the child who knows how to be busy, to manage, with the signifier, introduces himself to this dimension which makes him ask his parents the most inconvenient questions, those that everyone knows provoke the greatest disarray and, in truth, almost necessarily impotent answers:
– What is it to run?
– What is it to stamp one’s foot?
– What is an imbecile?

What makes us so unfit to satisfy these questions, which forces us to answer them in such a particularly inept way, as if we did not know ourselves:
– that “to run is to walk very fast” is really spoiling the work,
– that “to stamp one’s foot is to be angry” is really uttering an absurdity.
– I will not insist on the definition we can give for “imbecile.”

It is quite clear that what is at stake at this moment is the subject’s stepping back from the use of the signifier itself. And that the passion for words, for what it means that there are words: that one speaks and designates a thing so close to what is at stake by this enigmatic something called a word, a term, a phoneme, this is indeed what it is about.

The incapacity felt at this moment by the child is—formulated in the question—to attack the signifier as such at the moment when its action is already marked on everything, indelible. Everything that will be as a question, in the historical sequence of his pseudo-philosophical meditation, will in the end only decline, for when he gets to “what am I?” he will be much less far, except of course if he is an analyst. But if he is not—it is not in his power to have been one for so long—when he comes to ask himself the question “what am I?”, he cannot see that by precisely putting himself in question in this way, he is veiling himself, he does not realize that to cross the stage of doubt about being is to ask oneself what one is, for, simply by formulating his question in this way, he falls straight into—except that he does not realize it—the metaphor. And this is indeed the very least of the things we—analysts—must remember in order to prevent him from repeating this ancient error, always threatening his innocence in all its forms, and to prevent him from answering himself, even with our authority: “I am a child,” for example. For of course that is the new answer that will be given to him by the indoctrination of form, renewed by psychologizing repression, and with it—in the same package, and without his realizing it—the myth of the adult who, supposedly, would no longer be a child. Thus once again proliferating this kind of morality of a so-called reality in which, in fact, he allows himself to be led by the nose by all sorts of social scams.

Likewise, the “I am a child,” we did not have to wait for analysis, nor for Freudianism, for the formula to be introduced as a corset intended to make upright what, for some reason, finds itself in a somewhat twisted position. As soon as under the artist there is a child, and it is the rights of the child that he represents before people, naturally considered as serious, who are not children: I told you last year in the lessons on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, this tradition dates from the beginning of the Romantic period, it begins roughly at the time of COLERIDGE in England—to situate it within a tradition—and I do not see why we should take it upon ourselves to take up its legacy.

What I want you to grasp here is what happens at the lower level of the graph. What I alluded to during the “provincial days” when I wanted to draw your attention to this: that as the double intersection of these two bundles, of these two arrows, is constructed, it is designed to draw our attention to this: that simultaneity, I said, is not synchrony. That is, assuming the two tensors, the two vectors, develop correlatively, simultaneously, which are in question: that of intention [II], and that of the signifying chain [I].

You see that what happens here [II] as the initiation of this intersection, of this succession which will consist in the succession of the different phonematic elements, for example, of the signifier, this develops very far before meeting the line on which what is called to be—the intention of meaning or even the need itself, if you like, which is concealed there—takes its place. Which means this: that when this double crossing will ultimately take place again simultaneously, because if the nachträglich signifies something, it is that it is at the same instant—when the sentence is finished—that the meaning emerges.

Along the way, no doubt the choice has already been made, but meaning is only grasped when, in the successive stacking, the signifiers have come to take their place one after the other [III], and they unfold here, if you will, in the reversed form, “I am a child” appearing on the signifying line in the order in which these elements have been articulated [IV]. What happens? What happens is that, when meaning is completed, when what is always metaphorical in any attribution: “I am nothing other than myself who speaks,” and currently “I am a child.” To say it, to affirm it, realizes this grasp, this qualification of meaning by which I conceive myself in a certain relation with objects that are the childish objects. I make myself other than I could have in any way grasped myself at first: I incarnate myself, I crystallize myself, I idealize myself, I make myself my ideal ego. And this, in the end, very directly: in the sequence, in the process of the simple signifying initiation as such, in the fact of having produced signs capable of having referred to the actuality of my speech. The departure is in the “I” and the end is in the child. What remains here [V] as a sequel is something that I may see or may not see: it is the enigma of the question itself, it is the “what?” that here demands to be taken up again at the level of the capital A, afterwards.

To see that the sequence, the sequel “what I am” appears in the form in which it remains as a question: where it is for me the target point, the correlative point where I ground myself as ego ideal, that is, as the point

– where the question has importance for me,
– where the question summons me in the ethical dimension,
– where it gives that form which is precisely what FREUD combines with the superego,
– and from where the name that qualifies it in a diversely legitimate way as being that something which branches directly, as far as I know, onto my signifying initiation, namely: a child.

But what does it mean that this precipitated, premature answer, this something that in short elides the whole operation that took place, central. This something that makes the word child precipitate, it is the avoidance of the true answer, which must begin much earlier than any term in the sentence. The answer to “what am I?” is nothing else articulable, in the same way that I told you that no demand is sustained.

To “what am I?” there is no other answer at the level of the Other than “let yourself be.” And any haste given to this answer, whatever it may be in the order of dignity: child or adult, is nothing but that something by which I flee the meaning of this “let yourself be.” It is therefore clear that it is at the level of the Other and of what this adventure means at the degraded point where we apprehend it, it is at the level of this “what?,” which is not “what am I?” but which analytic experience allows us to reveal at the level of the Other,

– in the form of the Other,
– in the form of “what do you want?”,
– in the form of that which alone can stop us at the precise point of what is at stake in any formulated question, namely what we desire in asking the question
…it is there that it must be understood and it is there that the lack of signifier intervenes, the one at stake in the Φ of the phallus.

We know it, what analysis has shown us, has discovered, is that what the subject is confronted with is the object of the fantasy insofar as it presents itself as the only thing capable of fixing a privileged point: what must be called, along with the pleasure principle, an economy regulated by the level of jouissance. What analysis teaches us is that, in shifting the question to the level of “what does he want, what does it want in there?”, what we encounter is a world of hallucinated signs, that the reality test is presented to us as this kind of way of tasting the reality of those signs that have arisen in us according to a necessary sequence, in which precisely consists the dominance of the pleasure principle over the unconscious. What is at stake, then, let us observe it well, is indeed in the reality test to control a real presence, but a presence of signs.

FREUD underlines this with the utmost force. The reality test is not about controlling whether our representations correspond to a real—we have known for a long time that we do not succeed at that any better than the philosophers—but about controlling that our representations are indeed represented, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. It is a question of knowing whether the signs are really there, but as signs—since they are signs—of this relation to something else.

And this is exactly what the Freudian articulation means, that the gravitation of our unconscious refers to a lost object which is never anything but found again, that is to say, never truly re-found. It is never more than signified and this is precisely because of the chain of the pleasure principle. The real, authentic object at stake when we speak of object is in no way seized, transmissible, exchangeable. It is at the horizon of that around which our fantasies revolve, and yet it is with this that we must make objects that, themselves, are exchangeable.

But the matter is very far from being resolved. I mean that I stressed enough for you last year what is at stake in what is called utilitarian morality. It is certainly something absolutely fundamental in the recognition of objects that can be called constituted by “the market of objects.” These are objects that can serve everyone, and in this sense, so-called utilitarian morality is more than justified: there is no other. And it is precisely because there is no other, that the difficulties it would supposedly present are in fact perfectly resolved.

It is quite clear that the “utilitarians” are absolutely right in saying that every time we are dealing with something that can be exchanged with our fellow beings, the rule is utility, not ours but the possibility of use, utility for all and for the greatest number. That is indeed what creates the gap of what is at stake, in the constitution of that privileged object which arises in fantasy, along with all sorts of objects called from the socialized world, from the world of conformity.

The world of conformity is already coherent from a universal organization of discourse. There is no utilitarianism without a “theory of fictions.” To claim in any way that recourse is possible to a natural object, to claim even to reduce the distances at which the objects of common agreement are sustained, is to introduce a confusion, one more myth into the problematic of reality.

The object at stake in the analytic object relation is an object that we must locate, make emerge, situate, at the most radical point where the question of the subject arises regarding his relation to the signifier. The relation to the signifier is in fact such that if, at the level of the unconscious chain, we are only dealing with signs, and if it is a chain of signs in question, the consequence is that there is no halt in the referral of each of these signs to the one that follows it. For the very nature of communication by signs is to make of this same other to whom I address myself—to induce him to aim at the object to which this sign refers in the same way as I do—a sign.

The imposition of the signifier on the subject freezes him in the very position of the signifier. What is at stake is indeed to find the guarantor of this chain, which, by transfer of meaning from sign to sign, must stop somewhere, which gives us the sign that we are entitled to operate with signs. It is here that the privilege of Φ emerges among all the signifiers. And perhaps it may seem too simple to you, almost childish to underline what is at stake with this signifier.

This signifier always hidden, always veiled, to the point—my God—that one is astonished, one notes as a peculiarity, almost as an exorbitant undertaking to have, in some corner of representation, or of art, depicted the form. It is more than rare—though of course it exists—to see it deployed in a hieroglyphic chain, or in a prehistoric cave painting.

This phallus, which we cannot say does not play some role in the human imagination even before any analytic exploration, it is therefore, among our fabricated representations, those made signifying, most often elided. What does this mean? It means that after all, of all possible signs, is it not the one that gathers in itself the sign, namely both the sign and the means of action and the very presence of desire as such. That is to say, in letting it come to light in this real presence, is it not precisely that which is by nature, not only to halt all this referral in the chain of signs, but even to make them enter into I don’t know what shadow of nothingness.

Of desire, there is no surer sign, provided that there is nothing left but desire. Between this signifier of desire and the entire signifying chain, a relation of “either… or” is established. PSYCHE was blissful in that particular relation with what was not a signifier, which was the reality of her love with EROS. But there it is! It is PSYCHE and she wants to know.

She asks herself the question because language already exists and one does not spend one’s life only making love but also gossiping with her sisters. In gossiping with her sisters, she wants to possess her happiness. It is not such a simple thing. Once one has entered into the order of language, to possess her happiness is to be able to show it, to be able to account for it, to arrange her flowers, to be equal to her sisters by showing that she has better than they do and not just something different.

And that is why PSYCHE emerges in the night, with her light and also her little knife. She will have absolutely nothing to cut—I told you, because it is already done. She will have nothing to sever, so to speak, except—what she would do well to do as soon as possible—the current, namely that she sees nothing but a great dazzling of light and that what is going to happen, much against her will, is a swift return to darkness, of which she would do better to regain the initiative before her object is lost forever, that EROS is left sick because of it for a long time, and can only be found again after a long chain of ordeals. The important thing in this painting, what matters for us:

is that it is PSYCHE who is illuminated and, as I have taught you for a long time regarding the slender form of femininity at the limit of the pubescent and the prepubescent, it is she who, for us in representation, appears as the phallic image. And at the same time it is embodied that it is neither woman nor man who, in the last analysis, are the support of the castrating action, it is this [phallic] image itself, insofar as it is reflected, insofar as it is reflected on the narcissistic form of the body.

It is insofar as the relation—unnamed because unnamable, because unspeakable—of the subject with the pure signifier of desire will be projected onto the organ, localizable, precise, situatable somewhere in the whole structure of the body, will enter into the properly imaginary conflict of seeing oneself as deprived or not deprived of this appendage, it is in this second imaginary moment that everything will reside around which the symptomatic effects of the castration complex will be elaborated. I can only begin to sketch it here and indicate it, I mean: recall, summarize what I have already addressed for you in a much more developed way when I spoke to you—many times, of course—about what constitutes our object, that is to say, neuroses.

What does the hysteric do? What does DORA do in the end? I have taught you to follow the paths and detours in the complex identifications, in the labyrinth where she finds herself confronted—with what?—with what FREUD himself stumbles on and gets lost in. For what he calls the object of her desire, you know that he is mistaken precisely because he seeks the reference of DORA as a hysteric first and foremost in the choice of her object, no doubt an object petit(a) [the “a” is the first time: here is a Lacanian notion, see objet petit a]. And it is true that in a certain way Mr. K. is the object petit(a), and after him: FREUD himself, and that in truth that is indeed the fantasy, insofar as the fantasy is the support of desire. But DORA would not be a hysteric if she were content with this fantasy. She aims at something else, she aims at something better, she aims at capital A. She aims at the absolute Other: Mrs. K. I have explained to you for a long time that Mrs. K. is for her the incarnation of that question: “What is a woman?”

And because of this, at the level of the fantasy, it is not S◊a, the relation of fading, of vacillation, which characterizes the subject’s relation to this (a) that is produced, but something else, because she is hysteric, it is a capital A as such, capital A in which she believes, unlike a paranoiac. “What am I?” for her has a meaning that is not that of a moment ago, of moral or philosophical wanderings, it has a full and absolute meaning.

And she cannot help but encounter there, without knowing it, the perfectly closed, always veiled sign Φ that responds to it. And this is why she resorts to all the forms she can give to the closest substitute, note it well, for this sign Φ. That is to say, if you follow the operations of DORA or any other hysteric, you will see that it is never for her anything but a kind of complicated game whereby she can, so to speak, finesse the situation by slipping in, where needed, the ϕ [small phi] of the imaginary phallus.

That is to say: her father is impotent with Mrs. K.: well, what does it matter! It is she who will make the coupling, she will pay with her person, it is she who will sustain that relationship. And since that is still not enough, she will bring in the image substituted for herself—as I have long shown and demonstrated to you—of Mr. K., whom she will cast into the abyss, whom she will cast into outer darkness, at the moment when that animal says to her exactly the one thing he should not have said: “My wife means nothing to me,” that is to say, she does not arouse me. If she does not arouse you, then what are you good for?

For all that matters for DORA, as for any hysteric, is to be the supplier of that sign in its imaginary form. The devotion of the hysteric, her passion for identifying with all sentimental dramas, to be there, to support in the wings everything that might happen that is passionate and which is nevertheless not her business, that is where the spring is, where the resource is around which all her behavior vegetates, proliferates. If she always exchanges her desire for that sign—do not look elsewhere for the reason for what is called her “mythomania”—it is that there is something else she prefers to her desire: she prefers that her desire remain unsatisfied so that the Other keeps the key to her mystery.

It is the only thing that matters to her, and that is why, identifying herself with the drama of love, she strives, this Other, to reanimate it, to reassure it, to re-complete it, to repair it. In the end, it is precisely this that we must beware of: of any restorative ideology, of our initiative as therapists, of our analytic vocation. Certainly, it is not the hysteric’s path that is the most easily offered to us, so that it is not there, either, that the warning can take on the greatest importance.

There is another, that of the obsessive, who, as everyone knows, is much more intelligent in his way of operating. If the formula of the hysteric’s fantasy can be written as follows: a/-ϕ◊A. That is: (a), the substitutive or metaphorical object, over something that is hidden, namely -ϕ, her own imaginary castration in her relation to the Other.

Today I will do no more than introduce and sketch for you the different formula of the obsessive’s fantasy. But before writing it, I need to give you a certain number of touches, of hints, of indications to set you on the path. We know what the difficulty is in handling the symbol Φ in its unveiled form, it is—as I told you earlier—what is unbearable about it, which is none other than this: it is not simply sign and signifier, but the presence of desire, it is the real presence of desire.

I ask you to grasp this thread, this indication that I am giving you, and which—given the time—I can leave here only as an indication, to be resumed next time. It is that at the bottom of the fantasies, the symptoms, those points of emergence where we see the hysterical labyrinth in some way let its mask slip, we encounter something I will call “the insult to real presence.” The obsessive, too, deals with the mystery of the phallic signifier and for him as well it is a matter of making it manageable.

Somewhere an author—whom I will have to discuss next time, who has approached in a way certainly instructive and fruitful for us, if we know how to critique it, the function of the phallus in obsessive neurosis—somewhere an author has for the first time entered into this relationship concerning a feminine obsessional neurosis. He emphasizes certain sacrilegious fantasies: the figure of Christ, even his phallus itself, trampled underfoot, from which, for her, an erotic aura arises, perceived and confessed.

This author immediately rushes into the theme of aggressiveness, of penis envy, and this despite the patient’s protests. Do not a thousand other facts, which I could proliferate for you here, show us that we should stop much more at the phenomenology—which is not just any phenomenology—of this fantasy process that we call, too briefly, “sacrilege.” We will recall the fantasy of “the Rat Man,” imagining that in the middle of the night his dead father resurrected comes knocking at the door, and that he appears to him while he is masturbating: “insult” here too to real presence.

What we call in obsession “aggressiveness” is always present as an aggression specifically against that form of appearance of the Other that I have elsewhere called “phallophany”: the Other precisely as he can present himself as phallus. To strike the phallus in the Other in order to heal symbolic castration, to strike it on the imaginary level, is the path the obsessive chooses to try to abolish the difficulty I designate by the name “parasitism of the signifier in the subject,” to restore—for him—the primacy of desire, but at the cost of a degradation of the Other that essentially makes him the function of something which is the imaginary elision of the phallus.

It is insofar as the obsessive is at this precise point of the Other where he is in a state of doubt, of suspension, of loss, of ambivalence, of fundamental ambiguity, that his correlation to the object, to an always metonymic object—for for him, the other—it’s true—is essentially interchangeable—that his relation to the other object is essentially governed by something that relates to castration and which here takes a directly aggressive form: absence, devaluation, rejection, refusal of the sign of the desire of the Other as such, not abolition nor destruction of the desire of the Other, but rejection of its signs.

And it is from there that this very particular impossibility that strikes the manifestation of his own desire arises and is determined. Certainly, to show him—as the analyst I mentioned earlier did, and insistently—this relation to the imaginary phallus, to, so to speak, familiarize him with his impasse, is something that we cannot say is not on the way to solving the difficulties of the obsessive.

But how can we not also retain in passing this remark, that after such a moment, such a stage of the working through of imaginary castration, the subject—as this author tells us—was by no means rid of his obsessions but only of the guilt that was attached to them.

Of course, we can say to ourselves that, for all that, the question of this therapeutic path is thereby judged. What does this introduce us to? To the function Φ of the phallic signifier as signifier in the transference itself.

If the question of: “how does the analyst himself situate himself in relation to this signifier?” is essential here, it is already illustrated for us by the forms and by the impasses that a certain therapeutics oriented in this way demonstrates to us.

That is what I will try to approach for you next time.