🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

To situate what the place of the analyst must be in the transference, in the double sense in which I told you last time that this place must be situated:
– Where does the analysand situate him?
– Where must the analyst be to respond properly to him?
…it is clear that this relation – which is often called a ‘situation’ as if the initial situation were constitutive –
this relation or this ‘situation’ can only be entered into based on misunderstanding [malentendu].

It is clear that there is no coincidence between what the analyst is for the analysand at the outset of the analysis and what, precisely, the analysis of transference will allow us to reveal as to what is really at stake, not immediately but what is truly implicated, by the fact that a subject enters into this adventure, which he does not know, of analysis.

You could hear, in what I articulated last time, that it is this dimension of ‘truly implicated’, through the openness, the possibility, the richness, the whole future development of the analysis, which raises a question on the side of the analyst:
– Is it not at least probable, is it not evident that he must, himself, already place himself at the level of this ‘truly’, to really be in the place where he will have to arrive at that end point of the analysis which is precisely the analysis of transference?
– Can the analyst consider himself, in some way, indifferent to his true position?

This may seem to you, after all, to raise hardly any question at all.
Let us clarify things further: does his knowledge not suffice for it? However he formulates it for himself, the fact that he knows something about the paths and ways of analysis is not sufficient, whether he likes it or not, to put him in that place.

But this is what the divergences in this technical function, once it is theorized, nevertheless bring to light:
there is something here that is not sufficient. The analyst is not uniquely the only analyst; he is part of a group, of a ‘mass’,
in the very sense that this term has in FREUD’s article: Ich-analyse und Massenpsychologie.

It is not by a mere coincidence that this theme is addressed by FREUD at the very moment when there is already a ‘Society of analysts’.
It is in relation to what happens at the level of the analyst’s relationship with his own function that a part of the problems
with which he is confronted – all that is called the second Freudian topography – is articulated.

This is an aspect which, though not self-evident, nevertheless, especially for us analysts, deserves to be looked at.
I have made reference to it several times in my Écrits. In any case, we cannot pass by this historical moment
of the emergence of Freud’s second topography – and whatever internal necessity we may ascribe to it –
without entering into the problems that confront FREUD.

This is attested to; one only needs to open JONES at the right page to see that at the very moment when he brought
this theme to light, and namely what is in that article ‘Ich-analyse und Massenpsychologie’, he was then thinking only
about the organization of the analytic Society. I alluded earlier to my Écrits. There I have highlighted, perhaps in an infinitely sharper way
than I am doing at this moment, all that this problematic raised for him of the dramatic.

One must nevertheless indicate what emerges, in a sufficiently clear way, in certain passages cited by JONES,
from the notion of a kind of Komintern, even a secret committee, which is romantically conceived as such within analysis.
It is something to which, in some of his letters, he quite clearly gave himself over. In fact, it is in this way
that he envisaged the functioning of the group of seven in whom he really placed his trust.

From the moment there is a crowd, or a mass, organized of those who are in this function of analyst, all the problems
that FREUD effectively raises in this article arise, which are – as I also illuminated in my time – the problems of organization
of the mass, in its relation to the existence of a certain discourse. And one should take up this article again, applying it to the evolution
of the analytic function, to the theory that analysts have made of it, have promoted, in order to see what necessity makes converge
– it is almost immediately, intuitively evident and understandable – what gravitation attracts the function of the analyst
towards the image he can make of it, insofar as this image will be situated very precisely at the point that FREUD teaches us
to bring out, whose function FREUD brings to its conclusion at that moment of the second topography, and which is that of the Ich Ideal,
translation: ego ideal.

Ambiguity, right from the start, concerning these terms: Ich Ideal. For example, in an article to which I will refer in a moment, on Transference and Love – which is very important for us – which was read at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1933 by its authors and which was published in Imago in 1934 – as it happens, I have it – it is not easy to obtain the Imago, it is easier to have the Psychoanalytic Quarterly of 1939 where it was translated into English under the title Transference and Love, Ich Ideal is translated into English as ego ideal.

This play of position in languages, of the determiner in relation to the determined, of the order, to say everything, of determination, is something that plays its role which is by no means accidental. Someone who does not know German might believe that Ich Ideal means ideal self. I have pointed out that in the inaugural article – where one speaks of Ich Ideal, of the ego ideal – Einführung zur Narzissmus, there is from time to time Ideal Ich. And God knows for all of us this is a topic of debate: myself saying that one cannot, even for a moment, neglect under Freud’s pen – so precise regarding the signifier – such a variation, and others saying that it is impossible, when examining the context, to stop there in any way.

There is one thing, however, that is certain, it is firstly that even those who are in this second position will be the first – as you will see in the next issue of Psychoanalysis that is about to appear – to actually distinguish, on the psychological level, the ego ideal from the ideal ego. I have named my friend LAGACHE, whose article on the Structure of Personality you will see, he makes a distinction which I can say, without at all diminishing it, is descriptive, extremely fine, elegant, and clear.

In the phenomenon, it absolutely does not have the same function. Simply, you will see that in a response that I gave especially for this issue, developed concerning what he gives us as a theme on the structure of personality, I pointed out a certain number of points, the first of which is that one might object that there is here an abandonment of the method that he himself announced he proposed to follow in matters of metapsychology, in matters of elaborating the structure: namely, of a formulation which is, as he puts it, “distant from experience,” that is to say, which is strictly speaking metapsychological. And the clinical and descriptive difference between the two terms “ego ideal” and “ideal ego” is here insufficiently in the register of the method he himself proposed. You will soon see all this in its place.

Perhaps today I am already anticipating the very concrete metapsychological way in which one can situate, within this great economy, this economic thematic introduced by Freud around the notion of narcissism and specify very precisely the function of one and the other. But I am not there yet. Simply, what I am indicating to you is that it is the term “Ich Ideal” or ego ideal – insofar even as it comes to be translated in English as ego ideal – in English, this place of the determinative, of the determiner, is much more ambiguous in a pair of two terms like ego ideal – that it is already here, we find the trace, if one may say, semantic, of what has happened as a shift, as an evolution, in the function given to this term, when one wanted to use it to mark what the analyst was becoming for the analysand.

It has been said, and very early on: “The analyst takes for the analysand the place of his ego ideal.” This is true and it is false. It is true in the sense that it happens, it happens easily, I would even say more, I will give you in a moment an example, to what extent it is common, to what extent, to say everything, a subject can install positions at once strong and comfortable and very much of the nature of what we call “resistances.” It is perhaps even truer than is marked by an occasional and apparent position of the sticking point of certain analyses. That does not at all mean that this exhausts the question, nor, of course, to say everything, that the analyst in any way could be satisfied with it, I mean satisfied within the analysis of the subject, that he could in other words push the analysis to its term without driving the subject out from this position that the subject takes in so far as he gives him the position of ego ideal.

In the same way, then, it raises the question of what this truth is revealed to be in becoming. Namely, at the end and after the analysis of transference: where must the analyst be? Elsewhere, but where? This has never been said. For, in the end, what the article I spoke about earlier takes on is something which, at the moment when it appears, is not so much a position of research: in 1933 – compared to the 1920s when the “turn in analytic technique,” as everyone puts it, takes place – they had time all the same to think it over and see it clearly.

There is in this article – which I cannot go through in all its details with you, but to which I ask you to refer, moreover this is something we will return to, we are not going to stop at that, all the more so since what I want to tell you is this which refers to the English text, and that is why it is this one that I have here with me, whereas the German text is more vivid, but we are not yet at the sharp edges of the German text, we are at the level of the semantic shift that expresses what has indeed taken place at the level of a critical internal point of the analyst: in so far as he is the analyst, himself alone and master at his helm and faced with his action, namely for him the deepening of exorcism, of the extraction of himself, necessary for him to have a just perception of his own relation to this function of the ego ideal, in so far as for him, as analyst, and therefore in a particularly necessary way, it is sustained within what I have called the analytic mass.

For if he does not do so, what happens is what indeed has happened: namely, a slippage, a slippage of meaning which at this level is not a slippage that could in any way be conceived as in some sense external to the subject, as an error, to put it simply, but a slippage which deeply, subjectively involves him, as is shown by what happens in theory.

Namely, that if in 1933 an article on ‘Transference and Love’ is pivoted entirely around a thematic which is strictly that of the ego ideal and without any ambiguity whatsoever, 20 or 25 years later what is at stake – in a way, I say, theorized in articles which state it clearly, concerning the relations of analysand and analyst – is the relations of the analysand and the analyst, insofar as the analyst has an ‘ego’ that can be called ideal. But in a sense very different, both from that of the ego ideal, and from the concrete sense to which I was alluding just now and which you can give – I will come back to this and illustrate all of it – to the function of the ideal ego.

It is an ideal ego, if I may say ‘realized’, the ‘ego’ of the analyst, an ideal ego in the same sense as when one says that a car is an ideal car: it is not an ideal of the car nor the dream of the car when it is all alone in the garage, it is a truly good and solid car. Such is the sense that it ends up taking.

If that were all, of course, a literary matter, a certain way of articulating that the analyst is to intervene as someone who knows a bit more than the analysand, all that would simply belong to the order of platitude, perhaps would not be so meaningful. But it is that this translates something entirely different: it translates a real subjective implication of the analyst in this very slippage of the meaning of this couple of signifiers ‘ego’ and ‘ideal’.

We should not be surprised by an effect of this order, it is only a patching over, it is only the final term of something whose motive force is much more constitutive of this adventure than simply that local, almost caricatural point that you know we constantly face: we are here only for that.

Where did all this come from? From the ‘turn’ of 1920! What is the ‘turn’ of 1920 about? Around the fact that, as people of the time say, the heroes of the first analytic generation: “interpretation, it does not work as it used to work,” the mood is no longer that it works, that it succeeds. And why? That did not surprise FREUD, he had said so for a long time. One can point to one of his texts where he says very early, in the Technical Papers: “Let us take advantage of the opening of the unconscious because soon it will have found another trick.” What does that mean for us, who, with this experience behind us – and we ourselves slipping along with it – can nevertheless find some points of reference?

I say that the effect of a discourse, I am speaking of that of the first analytic generation, which, concerning the effect of a discourse: the unconscious, does not know that this is what it is about – even though, since the Traumdeutung [first occurrence: wordplay on dream interpretation and meaning construction], where I am teaching you to recognize it, to spell it out – namely that under the term of the mechanisms of the unconscious it is constantly only the effect of discourse. It is truly this: the effect of a discourse which, concerning the effect of a discourse: the unconscious, which does not know it, necessarily leads to a new crystallization of these effects of the unconscious which obscure this discourse. “New crystallization” – what does that mean? It means the effects that we observe, namely that it no longer has the same effect on patients when certain insights, certain keys are given to them, when certain signifiers are handled in front of them.

But observe closely, the subjective structures corresponding to this new crystallization do not themselves need to be new. Namely, these registers, these degrees of alienation, if I may say so, which we can specify, qualify in the subject, under the terms, for example, of ego, superego, ego ideal. It is like ‘standing waves’, whatever happens, these effects which set back, immunize, mithridatize the subject with respect to a certain discourse, which prevent that from being the one that can continue to function when it is a matter of leading the subject to where we must lead him, that is, to his desire.

It changes nothing at the nodal points where he, as subject, is going to recognize himself, to establish himself. And this is what at that turn FREUD observes. If FREUD tries to define what these stable points are, these ‘standing waves’ in subjective constitution, it is because this is what appears to him, very strikingly, as a constant. But it is not to consecrate them that he deals with and articulates them, it is with the idea of removing them as obstacles. It is not in order to establish as a kind of irreducible inertia the so-called ‘synthetic’ function of the ego, even when he speaks of it, that he puts it at the forefront – yet it is in this way that it was interpreted subsequently.

It is precisely for this reason that we must reconsider these as artifacts of the subject’s self-institution in his relation to the signifier on the one hand, to reality on the other. It is to open a new chapter of analytic action. It is as an organized mass by the analytic ego ideal as it has in fact developed in the form of a certain number of mirages, foremost among which is this one, for example, which is set forth in the term ‘strong ego’, so often wrongly implicated in the places where one believes to recognize it, that I am attempting here to do something which one could – with all the reservations that this implies – call an effort of analysis in the strict sense of the term, so that in overturning the coupling of terms which make the title of the FREUD article to which I referred earlier, one aspect of my seminar could be called: ‘Ich-Psychologie und Massen-analyse’.

It is inasmuch as Ich-Psychologie has come, has been promoted to the forefront of analytic theory – which acts as a plug, as a barrier, as inertia, for more than a decade to any new beginning of analytic efficacy – it is insofar as things are thus, that it is fitting to call upon the analytic community as such by allowing each person to cast a glance at what comes to alter the analytic purity of his position with regard to the one for whom he is the respondent: his analysand, insofar as he himself inscribes himself, determines himself through the effects resulting from the analytic mass, I mean from the mass of analysts, in the current state of their constitution and their discourse.

Let there be no mistake about what I am saying, this is something that does not belong to the order of a “historical accident,” with the emphasis on accident. We are faced with a difficulty, a dead end, which is linked to what you heard me emphasize earlier: analytic action. If there is a place where the term “action” – for some time now in our modern era questioned by philosophers – can be re-examined in a way that may be decisive, it is – as paradoxical as this statement may seem – at the level of the one whom we might think abstains the most on this point, namely the analyst.

Many times in recent years in my seminar – recall in connection with the obsessive and his style of performances, even exploits, and you will find it in the text I provided of my Royaumont report, in its definitive form – I have stressed what our very particular experience of “action” as acting-out, in treatment, must allow us to introduce as a new, original relief to any thematic reflection on action. If there is something the analyst can rise to say, it is that action as such, human action if you will, is always implicated in the attempt, in the temptation to respond to the unconscious.

And I propose to anyone concerned, in any capacity whatsoever, with what deserves the name of “action,” to the historian in particular – insofar as he does not give up that which many ways of formulating cause to waver in our minds, namely the meaning of history – I propose that he take up again, in light of such a formulation, the question of what we cannot in any case eliminate from the text of history, namely that its meaning does not simply carry us along like the famous “dead dog,” but that in history, actions do occur. But the action with which we are concerned is analytic action. And for it, it is nonetheless incontestable that it is an attempt to respond to the unconscious. And it is also incontestable that this is – with our subject – what happens, what our experience has accustomed us to.

That something which makes an analyst is what allows us to know what we are saying – even if we do not know very well how to say it – when we say: “That is an acting-out in the subject in analysis…” It is the most general formula one can give of it, and it is important to give the most general formula, because, here, if one gives particular formulas the sense of things becomes obscure. If one says: “It is a relapse of the subject,” for example, or if one says: “It is an effect of our nonsense,” one conceals what it is about. Of course it can be that, obviously. These are particular cases of the definitions I propose to you regarding acting-out.

It is that, since analytic action is an attempt – temptation too, in its way – to respond to the unconscious, acting-out is that type of action by which at a certain moment of the treatment – no doubt inasmuch as it is especially solicited, perhaps through our stupidity, perhaps through his, but this is secondary, what does it matter – the subject demands a more just response. Every action – acting-out or not, analytic action or not – has a certain relation to the opacity of the repressed, and the most original action to the most original repressed, to the Urverdrängt. And then we must also… this is the importance of the notion of Urverdrängt, which is in FREUD, and which can appear there as opaque, this is why I try to give you a sense of it: it consists in this, which is the same thing as what, in a certain way, I tried last time to articulate for you when I told you that we cannot do other than engage ourselves in the most original Versagung.

It is the same thing that is expressed on the theoretical level in the following formula, that, despite all appearances, “There is no metalanguage.” There may be a metalanguage on the blackboard, when I write little signs, a, b, x, kappa, it runs, it goes and it works, that is mathematics. But concerning what is called “speech,” namely that a subject engages in language, one can no doubt speak about speech, and you see that I am doing so, but in so doing all the effects of speech are engaged, and this is why it is said that at the level of speech “There is no metalanguage,” or if you like that there is no metadiscourse. There is no action – to conclude – that definitively transcends the effects of the repressed. Perhaps, if there is one in the final term, at most it is that where the subject as such dissolves, eclipses and disappears. It is an action about which nothing can be said.

It is, if you will, the horizon of this action that gives its structure to my notation of fantasy. And my little notation is for this reason algebraic, that it can only be written with chalk on the blackboard, that the notation of the fantasy is S◊a, which can be read, S desire for little (a), the object of desire. You will see that all of this will perhaps lead us, nevertheless, to glimpse in a more precise way the essential necessity that we do not forget that precisely unspeakable place inasmuch as the subject dissolves there, which the algebraic notation alone can preserve in the formula I give you for fantasy.

There is in this article Transference and Love by the so-called JEKELS and BERGLER, in 1933, when they were still at the Vienna Society, a brilliant clinical intuition which gives – as is customary – its weight, its value, to this article, this relief, this tone, which makes it an article of what is called “the first generation.” Even now, what pleases us in an article is when it brings something like that. This intuition is that there is a relationship – a close relationship – between the term from the common berquinade [wordplay: sentimental, idyllic love story], love, and guilt.

JEKELS and BERGLER tell us, contrary to the pastoral scene where love bathes in bliss:

“just observe a little what you see, it’s not simply that love is often guilty, it’s that one loves to escape guilt.”

That, of course, is not something one can say every day. Still, it’s a bit of sweet talk for people who don’t like CLAUDEL. For me it’s of the same order as being told things like that. If one loves, after all, it is because somewhere there is still the shadow of that one whom a hilarious woman with whom we were traveling in Italy called “il vecchio con la barba,” the old man with the beard, the one we see everywhere among the primitives [in painting].

Well, it is very nicely supported, this thesis, that at its core love is the need to be loved by the one who could make you guilty. And precisely, if one is loved by that one or by her, things go much better. These are the kinds of analytic insights that I would qualify as precisely the sort of respectable truths that are also, naturally, bad, because it is an alloy – in other words, a mixture – and it is not truly distinguished as a clinical truth. But as such, if I may say, it is a hybrid truth, there is here a kind of flattening of a certain articulation.

It is not the taste for the berquinade that makes me want us to separate these two metals again – love and guilt in this case – it is that the interest of our discoveries rests entirely on these effects of compaction of the symbolic in the real, in reality as it is called, which we are constantly dealing with. And it is with this that we progress, that we show effective springs, those which we are dealing with. And it is absolutely clear, certain, that if guilt is not always and immediately involved in the triggering, in the origins of a love – in the flash, if I may say, of infatuation, of the lightning strike – it nonetheless remains certain that even in unions inaugurated under such poetic auspices, with time it happens that all the effects of active censorship come to be applied, to center themselves on the loved object.

It is not simply that all the system of prohibitions gathers around him, but also that it is to him that one comes, in that function so constitutive of human conduct which is called “asking for permission.” The role, I do not say of the ego ideal, but of the superego as such and in its most opaque and most disconcerting form, the incidence of the superego in very authentic forms, in the best quality forms of what is called the love relationship, is something that certainly must not at all be neglected.

And so, there is on one side this intuition in the article of our friends JEKELS and BERGLER, and then on the other side there is the partial and truly, just as brutal as a rhinoceros, use of what FREUD brought in terms of economic insights under the register of narcissism. The idea that every purpose of the libidinal equation ultimately aims at the restoration of a primitive integrity, at the reintegration of all that is, if my memory serves, abtrennung [separation], all that at a certain moment experience has led the subject to consider as separated from himself.

This theoretical notion, for its part, is among the most precarious to be applied in all registers and at all levels. The question of the function it plays at the moment of the Introduction to Narcissism, in FREUD’s thought, is a question. It is a matter of knowing whether we can trust it, of knowing if – as the authors say in clear terms, for all the surrounding aporias of a position were known, at that generation where people were not trained in series – one can formulate this under the term of the “miracle of the investment of objects.”

And indeed, from such a perspective, it is a miracle. If the subject is really, on the libidinal level, constituted in such a way that his end and his aim are to satisfy himself with an entirely narcissistic position, well then, why does he not manage – in broad terms and on the whole – to remain there? To say everything: that if something can make this monad react even the slightest bit, one can very well theoretically conceive that all its aim is nevertheless to return to this starting position.

It is very difficult to see what could condition this enormous detour which at the very least constitutes a structuring that is nevertheless complex and rich, which is that with which we are confronted in reality. And this is indeed what it is about and what throughout this article the authors will strive to answer.

For this they commit themselves – quite servilely, I must say – to the paths opened up by FREUD, which are these: it is that the driving force of the subject’s complexification, of this structure of the subject – which you see today is what makes the balance, the unique theme of what I am developing for you – this complexification of the subject, namely the coming into play of the ego ideal.

FREUD, in the Introduction to Narcissism, shows us that it is the artifice by which the subject will be able to maintain his ideal – let us say to abbreviate because it is late – of “omnipotence.” In FREUD’s text – inaugural, especially if one reads it… – it comes, it passes, and then it already clarifies enough things at that moment so that we do not ask more of it.

It is quite clear that as FREUD’s thinking moved on from there, our authors find themselves confronted with a rather serious complexification of this first differentiation, that they have to face the distance, the difference there is between an ego ideal which would in the end be made precisely to restore to the subject – you see in what sense – the benefits of love.

The ego ideal is that something which, being originally formed in the first wounds of narcissism, becomes tamed again by being introjected. This is what FREUD explains to us, moreover. For the superego, one will see that it must still be admitted that there must be another mechanism, because even while being introjected, the superego does not thereby become much more beneficial. And I will stop here, I will continue. What the authors are necessarily led to is to resort to a whole dialectic of EROS and THANATOS, which is not a small affair. It goes a bit strong and indeed is rather pretty.

Refer to this article: you will get your money’s worth. But before I leave you, I would still like to suggest something lively and amusing to give you the idea of what a more accurate introduction to the function of narcissism allows, I believe, to articulate better, and in a way confirmed by all analytic practice since these notions were introduced.

Ideal ego, ego ideal, obviously have the greatest connection with certain requirements of narcissistic preservation. But what I have proposed to you subsequently, in the path of my first approach to a necessary modification of analytic theory as it was being engaged in the way where I showed you earlier that the ego was being used, is precisely that approach called, in what I teach or taught you: “the mirror stage.” What are the consequences regarding this economy of the ideal ego, the ego ideal, and their relationship with the preservation of narcissism?

Well, because it is late, I will illustrate it in a way I hope you will find amusing. I spoke earlier of a car, let us try to see what the ideal ego is.

The ideal ego is the family’s son at the wheel of his little sports car. With that, he will show you the world. He will show off. He will exercise his sense of risk, which is not a bad thing, his taste for sport as they say, and everything will consist in knowing what sense he gives to this word “sport,” if “sport” cannot also be the challenge to the rule – I do not mean only the highway code, but also safety. Whatever the case, it is indeed the register where he will have to show himself or not show himself and to know how it is appropriate to show himself stronger than others, even if this consists in saying that he goes a little too far. The ideal ego is that.

I only open a side door – for what I have to say is the relation with the ego ideal – a side door with this: that he does not leave the ideal ego all alone and without object, because after all on such an occasion – not always – if he gives himself to these risky exercises, for what is it? To catch a girl!

Is it so much to catch a girl as for the way of catching the girl? Desire may matter less here than the way of satisfying it. And it is in this, and for this reason, as we know, the girl may be completely incidental, even absent. To say everything, this side, which is where this ideal ego comes to take its place in the fantasy, we see better, more easily than elsewhere, what regulates the pitch of the elements of fantasy, and that there must be something here, between the two terms, which slips so that one of the two can so easily disappear. This term which slips, we know it: there is no need here to elaborate further, it is little phi [ϕ], the imaginary phallus, and what is at stake is indeed something put to the test.

What is the ego ideal? The ego ideal, which has the closest relation with this play and this function of the ideal ego, is indeed constituted by the fact that at the start, I told you: if he has his little sports car, it is because he is the family’s son and that he is “daddy’s boy” and that – to change the register – if “Marie-Chantal” as you know joins the communist party, it is to annoy “Father.” To know whether she does not, in this function, fail to recognize her own identification with what she is trying to obtain by annoying father, that is another side door we will refrain from pushing open.

But let us say clearly that both, Marie-Chantal and the daddy’s boy at the wheel of his little car, would quite simply be included in this world so organized by the father if there were not precisely the signifier “Father,” which allows, if I may say so, to extract oneself from it in order to imagine oneself, and even to manage to annoy him.

This is what is expressed by saying that he or she introjects on the occasion the paternal image.

Is it not also to say that it is the instrument by which the two characters, masculine and feminine, can extricate themselves from the objective situation?

Introjection is, in sum, this: to organize oneself subjectively so that the father, indeed, in the form of the ego ideal that is not so mean after all, becomes a signifier from which the little person, male or female, comes to contemplate themselves without too much disadvantage at the wheel of their little car or brandishing their Communist Party card. In sum, if from this introjected signifier the subject falls under a judgment that disapproves of him or her, he or she thereby takes on the dimension of the “reproved,” which, as everyone knows, is not so disadvantageous narcissistically.

But then, it follows that we cannot so simply speak of the function of the ideal ego as in some way massively realizing the coalescence of benevolent authority and what is narcissistic benefit, as if it were purely and simply inherent in a single effect at the same point.

And to say everything, what I am trying to articulate for you with my little schema from the other day… which I will not remake because I do not have the time, but which is still present, I imagine, in a certain number of memories… which is that of the “illusion of the overturned vase” [first occurrence: wordplay on reversal, mirroring, and illusion], insofar as it is only from one point that one can see appear around the flowers of desire this real-image, let us observe it – of the vase produced through the intermediary of the reflection of a spherical mirror, in other words of the particular structure of the human being in that the hypertrophy of his ego seems to be linked to his premature maturation.

The necessary distinction between the place where narcissistic benefit is produced and the place where the ideal ego functions, forces us to interrogate differently the relation of one and the other with the function of love, this relation with the function of love which must not be introduced – and less than ever at the point we are at in the analysis of transference – in a confused way.

Let me, to conclude, tell you about a case of a patient. Let us say that she takes more than liberty with the rights, if not the duties, of the conjugal bond and that, my God, when she has an affair she knows how to push the consequences to the furthest point of what a certain social limit – that of the respect offered by her husband’s brow – obliges her to respect. Let us say that it is someone, to say everything, who knows admirably how to hold and deploy the positions of her desire. And I had better tell you that over time she managed, within her family – I mean over her husband, and over some pleasant offspring – to maintain absolutely intact the field of force of demands strictly centered on her own libidinal needs.

When FREUD speaks to us somewhere, if my memory is correct, of Knödelmoral – that means the morality of dumplings concerning the woman, that is, of required satisfactions – one must not think that it always fails. There are women who succeed excessively well, except that she, in any case, still needs an analysis. What was I, for a whole period, accomplishing for her? The authors of this article will give us the answer: I was indeed her ego ideal, insofar as I was the ideal point where order is maintained and in a way all the more demanded since it is from there that all disorder is possible.

In short, at that time it was not a matter of her analyst passing for an immoralist. If I had been clumsy enough to approve any of her excesses, one would have had to see what would have resulted. Moreover, what she could glimpse of such or such an atypical aspect of my own family structure, or the principles in which I raised those under my authority, was not without opening up for her all the depths of an abyss quickly closed again. Do not think that it is so necessary for the analyst to actually offer – thank God – all the ideal images one forms about his person. She simply signaled to me at every occasion all that, concerning me, she did not want to know anything about. The only truly important thing is the guarantee – which she certainly had, you may believe me – that concerning her own person I would not budge.

What does all this requirement of moral conformism mean? The moralists of the time – as you may imagine – have the answer: quite naturally, for this person to lead such a fulfilled life she could not have come entirely from a working-class background. And so the political moralist will tell you that what must be preserved above all is a lid on the questions that might arise about the legitimacy of social privilege. And all the more so since, as you might expect, she was somewhat progressive. Well, you see, when considering the real dynamic of forces, this is where the analyst has a little something to say. The opened abysses could be treated as with the perfect conformity of the ideals and reality of the analyst.

But I believe that the real thing, what had to be kept at all costs safe from any theme of contestation, is that she had “the prettiest breasts in town,” which – as you can well imagine – the bra saleswomen never contradict.