🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I woke up this morning with a dreadful headache. That never happens to me, I have no idea where it could be coming from. While having breakfast, I read an excellent work by Conrad STEIN on primary identification. I don’t have the same thing every day from my students… What I will say today will show him that his work was well directed. But I no longer know where we left off last time and, as they say, I haven’t properly prepared my seminar.

We will try to move forward. I intended to read Sappho to find things that might enlighten you. This will lead us to the heart of the function of identification. Since it always concerns pinpointing the position of the analyst, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go over things again.

FREUD wrote Hemmung, Symptom und Angst in 1926. This is the third phase of the gathering of his thought, the first two being comprised by the stage of the Traumdeutung and the second topography. We will immediately get to the heart of the problem he raised, which is that of the meaning of anxiety. We will go even further, since, right away, we are going to start from the economic point of view. The problem is to know: “where does the energy of the signal of anxiety come from,” he tells us.

In the Gesammelte Werke, Band XIV, page 120, I read the following sentence:

“Das Ich zieht die (vorbewußte) Besetzung von der zu verdrängenden Triebrepräsentanz ab und verwendet sie für die Unlust-(Angst)-Entbindung.”

Translation:

“The ego withdraws the (preconscious) investment from the Triebrepräsentanz, that which in the drive is representative, which representative is zu verdrängen to be repressed and transforms it for the unbinding of displeasure, Unlust (Angst).”

It is obvious that one cannot simply come upon a sentence by FREUD and then start theorizing. If I bring you right into it, it is after careful consideration. It is a deliberately chosen step, made to prompt you to reread this article as soon as possible.

As for our subject, let’s apply it, let’s bring it immediately to the core of our problems. I have said enough for you to suspect that the structuring formula of fantasy: S◊a, must play some part in the orientation moment where we are. The fantasy is not only formulated but evoked, even approached, even pursued from every direction. To show the necessity of this formula, it must be understood that in this support of desire there are two elements whose respective functions and functional relationship cannot in any way be verbalized by any attribute that is exhaustive, and that is precisely why I must give them as a support these two algebraic elements and accumulate around these two elements the characteristics in question.

You know enough to know that S has something to do with what is called the fading of the subject, and that the little a—which is the little other—has something to do with what is called the object of desire. This symbolization already has the importance and effect of showing you that desire does not involve a simple subjective relation to the object and that this S is meant to express it. It is not enough to say, concerning this relation of the subject to the object, that desire implies some kind of mediation or reflexive intermediary, the subject then thinking of himself as he thinks of himself in the relation of knowledge to the object. An entire theory of knowledge has been built on that.

That is, moreover, what we do, for the theory of desire is meant to call that theory of knowledge into question, which ought to make us tremble, if others had not already, before us, called into question the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” Let us take our sentence from earlier and try to apply it. This does not mean that I bring you immediately to the last point of my results, but that, through this questioning, I bring you halfway.

It is a problematic question meant to orient you, to give you the illusion that you are the one searching. This is an illusion that will be quickly realized because I am not giving you the last word. It is not just my question that is heuristic but my method. What does the disinvestment of the Triebrepräsentanz mean, as applied to our own formulation? It means that, for anxiety to be produced, the investment of the little a is shifted onto the S.

Only, as we have just said, the S is not something graspable. It can only be conceived as a place, since it is not even that point of reflexivity of the subject that would grasp itself, for example, as desiring. The subject does not grasp himself as desiring, but in the fantasy the place where he could—if I may say so—grasp himself as such, as desiring, is always reserved.

It is even so reserved that it is ordinarily occupied by what occurs homologically at the lower level of the graph, i(a), the image of the specular other, namely, it is not necessarily but ordinarily occupied by that.

This is what is expressed, in the small diagram you saw earlier and which we erased, by the function of the real image of the vase, the illusion of the inverted vase: this vase that comes to appear as if to surround the base of the flower stems—which elegantly symbolize the little a—that is what is at issue here.

It is the image, the narcissistic phantom that comes to fill in the fantasy the function of attaching itself to desire, the illusion of holding its object, so to speak. From then on, if S is that place which from time to time may be found empty, namely that nothing satisfactory comes to be produced there regarding the emergence of the narcissistic image, we can conceive that perhaps it is precisely to this, to its call, that the production of the signal of anxiety responds.

I am going to try to show this point, so important, about which one can say that FREUD’s last article on this subject really gives us almost all the elements to resolve it, without—to speak properly—giving it the final quarter-turn. For now, the nut is not yet tightened. Let us say with FREUD, that the signal of anxiety is indeed something produced at the level of the ego.

However, we see here, thanks to our formalisms, that we may perhaps say a bit more about this “at the level of the ego.” Our notations will allow us to break down this question, to articulate it in a more precise way, and this will allow us to cross certain points where, for FREUD, the question leads to an impasse. Here, I immediately make a leap.

FREUD says—at the moment when he speaks of the economy, of the transformation necessary for the production of a signal of anxiety—that it should not require a very great amount of energy to produce a signal.

FREUD already indicates to us that there is here a relation between the production of this signal and something that is of the order of Verzicht, of renunciation, close to Versagung—the fact that the subject is barred. In the Verdrängung of the Triebrepräsentanz, there is this correlation of the withdrawal of the subject which confirms very well the correctness of our notation of S.

The leap consists in pointing out to you here what I have long announced to you as the place where the analyst really stands, that does not mean he occupies it all the time. But the place where he waits—and the word wait here takes on its full meaning, what we will find again of the function of waiting, of Erwartung, to constitute, to structure this signal—this place is precisely the place of S in the fantasy. I said that I was making a leap, meaning that I do not immediately prove where I am leading you. Now, let us take the steps that will allow us to understand what is at stake.

One thing is thus given to us, which is that the signal of anxiety is produced somewhere, this “somewhere” that can be occupied by i(a), the ego as image of the other, the ego as fundamentally a function of misrecognition. It occupies it, this place, not as that image occupies it, but as a place, that is, as at times this image can be dissolved there.

Note well that I am not saying that it is the lack of the image that causes the emergence of anxiety. Note well what I have always said: it is that the specular relation, the original relation of the subject to the specular image, is established in the reaction called aggressiveness. In my article on The Mirror Stage, I have already indicated this; this same specular relation, I have defined it, grounded it, because the mirror stage is not unrelated to anxiety.

I even indicated that the way to grasp—as in cross-section, transversally—aggressiveness, was to see that one had to orient oneself in the direction of the temporal relation. Indeed, there is not only the spatial relation that refers to the specular image as such, namely when it begins to animate, when it becomes the embodied other, there is a temporal relation:

“I can’t wait to see myself like him, otherwise, where will I be?”

But if you refer to my texts, you will also see that I am more cautious there and that if I do not push the formula to its end, it is for a certain reason. The function of haste in logic—those who are very attentive to my works know that I have dealt with it somewhere in a sort of little sophism which is that of the problem of the three disks—this function of haste, that is to say, this way in which man rushes into his likeness to man, is not anxiety. For anxiety to be constituted, there must be a relation at the level of desire. This is precisely why it is at the level of fantasy that I am leading you today by the hand to approach this problem of anxiety.

I will show you far ahead where we are going, and we will go back to make some little detours like a hare. So here is where the analyst would be: in the relation of the subject to desire, to an object of desire, which we suppose on occasion to be that object which carries with it the threat in question, and which determines the Zurückgedrängt, the repressed. None of this is definitive.

If this is how we approach the problem, let us ask ourselves the following question: what would the subject expect from an ordinary companion who would dare under ordinary conditions to occupy that same place? If this object is dangerous—since that is what is at stake—the subject would expect this from him: that he give him the signal “DANGER,” the one that, in the case of real danger, makes the subject take off running. I mean that what I introduce at this level is what people regret that FREUD did not introduce into his dialectic, because it really should have been done. I say that internal danger is entirely comparable to external danger, and that the subject strives to avoid it in the same way that one avoids an external danger.

But then, see what an effective articulation this offers us to think about what really happens in animal psychology. In social animals, in herd animals, everyone knows the role played by the signal: faced with the enemy of the herd, the cleverest or the lookout among the animals is there to sense it, to sniff it out, to spot it. The gazelle, the antelope, lift their noses, give a little cry, and without delay, everyone runs off in the same direction. The notion of signal in a social complex, reaction to a danger, that is where we grasp at the biological level what exists in an observable society. If it allows itself to be seen, this signal of anxiety, it is indeed from the alter ego, from the other who constitutes his “ego,” that the subject can receive it.

There is something here that I would like to point out. You have heard me for a long time warn you of the dangers of altruism. Beware, I have implicitly and explicitly told you, of the traps of Mitleid, pity, of what holds us back from doing harm to the other, to “the poor girl,” whereby one marries her and both are annoyed for a long time. I am schematizing: these are the dangers of altruism. Only, if these are dangers, against which it is simple humanity to warn you, that does not mean that this is the ultimate recourse.

Moreover, that is why I am not—in regard to the X to whom I am speaking on this occasion—“the devil’s advocate” who would recall him to the principle of a healthy egoism and who would divert him from this rather sympathetic inclination not to be mean. In fact, the precious Mitleid, this altruism—for the subject who misrecognizes himself—is nothing but the cover for something else, and you will always observe this provided you are in the plane of analysis. Work a little on the Mitleid of an obsessive, and here the first step is to realize—with what I am pointing out to you, with what moreover all moralist tradition allows in this case to assert—that what he respects, what he does not want to touch in the image of the other, is his own image. And that is why, if the intactness, the untouchability of that own image were not carefully preserved, what would arise from all this would indeed be anxiety.

Anxiety before what?

Not before the other in whom he sees himself—that one I called earlier “the poor girl,” who is only that in his imagination, for she is always much tougher than you can believe—it is not before “the poor girl” that he feels anxiety, before i(a), not the image of himself, but before the other: (a), as the object of his desire.

I say this to clearly illustrate what is very important, which is that anxiety is produced—topically—at the place defined by i(a), that is to say—as FREUD’s latest formulation articulates it for us—at the place of the ego, but there is only a signal of anxiety insofar as it relates to an object of desire, and to that object of desire insofar as it disturbs the ideal ego i(a), the one that originates in the specular image.

What does this mean, this absolutely necessary link to understand the signal of anxiety? It means that the function of this signal is not exhausted in its Warnung, its warning to take off. It is that even while fulfilling its function, this signal maintains the relation with the object of desire. This is the key and the spring of what FREUD—in this article and elsewhere repeatedly, and with that emphasis, that choice of terms, that incisiveness that is illuminating in him—accentuates for us, characterizes for us, in distinguishing the situation of “anxiety” from that of “danger”: “Gefahr,” and from that of “Hilflosigkeit” [distress].

In Hilflosigkeit, distress, helplessness, the subject is purely and simply capsized, overwhelmed by an eruptive situation to which he cannot respond in any way. Between that and taking flight—a solution that, while not heroic, is the one that even Napoleon himself thought was the truly courageous solution when it came to love—between that and flight, there is something else, and it is what FREUD points out to us by emphasizing in anxiety this character of Erwartung [expectation, hope]. That is the central feature. That we can, secondarily, make it the reason for taking off, is one thing, but that is not its essential character. Its essential character is Erwartung and it is this that I am designating in telling you that anxiety is the radical mode under which the relation to desire is maintained.

When—for reasons of resistance, of defense, etc., everything you can put in the order of mechanisms of cancellation of the object—when there is nothing left but that and the object disappears, vanishes, but not what can remain of it, namely the Erwartung, the orientation toward its place, the place where it is from then on lacking, where it is now only an unbestimmtes Objekt, or again as FREUD says, we are in the relation of Löslichkeit, when we are at that point, anxiety is the final mode, the radical mode, under which the relation to desire continues to be sustained—even if it is in an unsustainable way.

There are other ways of sustaining the relation to desire that concern the unsustainability of the object, and that is precisely why I explain to you that hysteria and obsession can be characterized by those statuses of desire which I have called for you:
– the unsatisfied desire, and sustained as such,
– the impossible desire, instituted in its impossibility.
But it is enough for you to look at the most radical form of neurosis, phobia—which is what all of FREUD’s discourse in this article revolves around—the phobia which cannot be defined otherwise than as follows: that it is made to sustain the relation of the subject to desire in the form of anxiety.

The only thing that remains to be added to fully define it is that, just as the completed definition of hysteria or obsession, with regard to fantasy, is:

…the metaphor of the other at the point where the subject sees himself as castrated, confronted with the big Other: DORA, in that it is through Mr. K. that she desires, but it is not him whom she loves, it is through the one she desires that she orients herself toward the one she loves, namely Mrs. K, in the same way, we must also complete the formula for phobia.
So phobia is indeed this: the support, the maintenance, of the relation to desire in anxiety, but with something extra, something more precise. It is not the relation of anxiety alone.

It is that the place of this object, as it is targeted by anxiety, is held by what I have explained to you—at length, regarding little Hans—to be the function of the phobic object, namely Ф, capital phi, the symbolic phallus in so far as it is the joker in the cards, that is to say, it is indeed a question, in the phobic object, of the phallus, but it is a phallus that will take on the value of all the signifiers, that of the father on occasion.

What is remarkable in this observation is both its lack and its presence:

– lack in the form of the real father (Hans’s father),

– presence in the form of the overwhelming symbolic father (FREUD).

If all of this can play the same place on the same plane, it is of course because already in the object of the phobia there is this infinite possibility of fulfilling a certain missing, deficient function, which is precisely what the subject would succumb to if anxiety did not arise at this place.

With this little circuit made, I think you can understand that if the signaling function of anxiety warns us of something, and of something very important in the clinic, in analytic practice, it is that the anxiety to which the subject is open is not at all only—as is believed, as you are always searching for—an anxiety whose only source would be, so to speak, internal to him. What is proper to the neurotic is to be in this respect, as Mr. André BRETON calls it, a “communicating vessel.” The anxiety your neurotic deals with, anxiety as energy, is an anxiety which he is quite accustomed to going and ladling up right and left from this or that of the big Others he deals with. It is just as valid, just as usable for him as the one of his own making.

If you do not take this into account in the economy of an analysis, you will make a great mistake. In many cases, you will rack your brains trying to understand where, on a given occasion, this little resurgence of anxiety comes from just when you least expected it. It is not necessarily his own, the one you are already familiar with from the practice of previous months of analysis, there is also that of the neighbors that counts, and then yours!

You may think that, of course, you will find your way through this. You know well that you have already been given warnings about this. I fear this will not warn you of much, because precisely, a question introduced from this consideration is to know what this warning implies:
– that your own anxiety must not come into play,
– that the analysis must be aseptic concerning your anxiety.

What can this mean, on the level where I have tried to sustain you all year, on the synchronic level, the one that does not allow for the invasion of diachrony: namely, that you have already largely surpassed your anxiety in your earlier analysis solves nothing, because what needs to be known is what your current status must be, you, with respect to your desire, so that not only the signal but also the energy of anxiety does not arise from you in the analysis, insofar as it is there—if it emerges—it is entirely made to pour itself into the economy of your subject, and this as he advances further in the analysis, that is to say, it is at the level of that big Other that you are for him that he will seek the path of his desire. Such is the status of the analyst in synchrony concerning anxiety.

In any case, to close this first loop, it is necessary to bring in the function of the Other, big A, concerning the possibility of the emergence of anxiety as a signal.

You see at the same time that if the reference to the herd—as long as this signal is exercised within a function of imaginary communication—is necessary, because it is through this that I want you to feel that if anxiety is a signal, this means it can come from another, it remains no less true—as far as it is a question of a relation to desire—that the signal is not exhausted in the metaphor of the danger of the enemy of the herd, and precisely in this, which distinguishes the human herd from the animal herd, that for each subject, as everyone knows, except the entrepreneurs in collective psychology, the enemy of the herd is himself.

In this reference to the reality of the herd, we find an interesting transposition of what FREUD articulates for us in the form of internal danger. We find here the confirmation of what I always tell you with respect to the universal in man: the individual and the collective are one and the same level, what is true at the level of the individual, this internal danger, is also true at the collective level—it is the same internal danger in the subject, which is the internal danger in the herd.

This comes from the originality of the position of desire as such. Insofar as desire emerges to fill the lack of certainty, the lack of guarantee with which the subject finds himself confronted regarding what matters to him as he is not only a herd animal—he may be—but this elementary relation that certainly exists is seriously disrupted by the fact that it is found included, just as much at the collective level as at the individual level, in the relation to the signifier.

The social animal, at the moment it flees under the signal given to it by the watchful beast or the dear beast, is the herd. The speaking being, for his part, is essentially the lack of being arisen from a certain relation to discourse, from a poetry if you will. This lack of being, he can only fill it—I have already articulated and indicated this to you—by that action which—you feel it better in this context and in this parallel—so easily takes, perhaps radically always takes, this character of a headlong rush.

But precisely, fundamentally that action does not suit the herd at all. It does not play at all at the level of coherence or collective defense. Its action, to put it simply, in principle the herd hardly accommodates, not to say does not want it at all. And not only the herd, but reality itself does not want his action, because reality—I do not say the Real—is precisely the sum of certainties accumulated by the addition of a series of previous actions, so the new one is always unwelcome.

This is what allows us to situate correctly, that is, in a way that matches experience, namely—what is surprising nevertheless and yet always more or less obvious—this little rise of anxiety that occurs every time it is truly a matter of the subject’s desire. We are there at once in the everyday, at the root, at the essential, at the sharp point of all that is our experience.

If analysis has not served to make people understand that their desires:
– first, are not the same thing as their needs,
– and second, that desire in itself carries a dangerous character, is that danger whose threatening nature for the individual is illuminated so particularly by the completely obvious character of what it contains of threats for the herd,
…then I wonder what analysis has ever served for.

It is a matter of climbing something, and since we are engaged on this path taken today, and perhaps more directly than the royal road that I have not prepared today, we will continue in the same way. We will pose an insidious question. I have already prepared the question of what the Versagung of the analyst must be, but here, frankly, I have not told you much more. I ask you the same question: is this not the fruitful Versagung of the analyst, to refuse the subject his anxiety as analyst, to leave bare the place where he is in sum called, by nature as Other, to give the signal of anxiety?

Let us see it take shape, this something I have already—at least last time—indicated to you by saying that the pure place of the analyst, as far as we can define it in and through fantasy, would be the place of the one desiring—ἐραστής [erastès] or ἔρόν [erôn]—pure, which would mean that somewhere where the function of desire always takes place, namely, of coming to the place of the ἐρώμενος [erômenos] or the ἐρώμενον [erômenon], for it is for this reason that I made you, at the beginning of the year, traverse that long deciphering of the Symposium, of the theory of love.

We should come to conceive that some subject could occupy the place of the pure desiring one, could abstract himself, make himself vanish in the relation to the other from any supposition of being desirable. What you have read of the words, the responses of SOCRATES in the Symposium should give you an idea of what I am telling you, because if anything is embodied and signified by the episode with ALCIBIADES, it is precisely that. On the one hand, SOCRATES affirms that he knows nothing except about the matters of love: everything we are told about him is that he is a desiring one through and through, inexhaustible.

But [on the other hand] when it comes to showing himself in the position of the desired, that is, in the face of ALCIBIADES’s public, scandalous, unrestrained, drunken aggression, what is shown to us is that there is literally no one there. This, I am not saying that it settles the matter, but it is at least illustrative of what I am talking to you about. It has a meaning that has at least been embodied somewhere.

For it is not only to me that SOCRATES appears to be a human enigma, a case such as has never been seen and of which one does not know what to make, however carefully one tries to grasp it with tongs, it is to everyone. Every time someone has really—regarding SOCRATES—asked the question: how was that guy made and why did he create such havoc everywhere just by showing up and telling little stories that seem to be everyday affairs?

I would like us to pause a bit at “the place of the desiring one.” This echoes, it rhymes with something I would call “the place of the supplicant” in prayer, because in prayer, the supplicant sees himself praying. There is no prayer without the supplicant seeing himself praying. This morning I remembered PRIAM. He is the type “supplicant” who demanded from ACHILLES the body of the last of his sons—of whom he does not know the count: he had fifty. It appears that it is about the last one—in any case, this HECTOR, he cares about him.

What does he come to tell ACHILLES? Not too much about HECTOR, and that for several reasons:
– first, because it is not easy to talk about him in the state he is in at that moment,
– second, as it appears, every time the living HECTOR is mentioned, ACHILLES, who is neither easy nor master of his impulses, begins to go into a rage, even though he has received divine instructions, namely that his mother THETIS came to tell him: “The big boss wants you to return HECTOR to his father PRIAM and came to visit me especially for this.” It’s a hair’s breadth from him not returning him. The important thing is that PRIAM does not do much psychology.

By the mere fact that he is in the position of supplicant he will, in his very request, make present the character of the supplicant. I mean that the prayer of PRIAM—that which resonates since the beginning of our era, because even if you have not read The Iliad this episode is circulating among you all as a model, through all the other models it has generated—in order to carry it, he doubles this supplicant character that he is, with another who is described, inserted into his prayer in the form of someone who is not there, namely PELEUS, ACHILLES’s father, whom he represents.

It is he who prays, but in his prayer, it is necessary that this prayer passes through something that is not even the invocation of ACHILLES’s father, he sketches for him the figure of a father who, he says, may at that very moment be greatly troubled because his neighbors are giving him trouble. He knows that he still has a son who is no ordinary one, ACHILLES here present. You will find in every prayer what I call “the place of the supplicant” within the very request of the one who prays.

The desiring one—that is why I am making this detour—is not the same, I mean that the desiring one, as such, can say nothing about himself except by abolishing himself as desiring. For what defines the pure place of the subject as desiring is that at every attempt to articulate himself nothing comes out but a syncopation of language and an inability to speak, because as soon as he speaks he is nothing more than a supplicant, he shifts to the register of the demand and that is something else. This is no less important if we are to formulate in some way what, in this response to the Other that constitutes analysis, constitutes the specific form of the place of the analyst.

To end today with something that may add a little more, a formula at an impasse, to all those that I already seem to be serving you. It is this one which indeed has some interest in that it closes the elements I have just outlined: that, if anxiety is what I have told you, this relation of support to desire where the object is lacking, we find this other thing of which we have experience—that, to invert the formula, and this is constantly seen in practice—desire is a remedy for anxiety.

Even the least little neurotic fellow knows as much or even more about this than you do. The support found in desire, however inconvenient it may be with all its train of guilt, is still something much easier to maintain than the position of anxiety, so that all in all, for someone a little astute and experienced—I say this for the analyst—it would be a matter of always having at hand a small, well-honed desire so as not to be exposed to bringing into play in analysis a quantum of anxiety that would be neither timely nor welcome.

Is this really what I intend to lead you toward? Surely not; in any case, it is not easy to feel the walls of the corridor with one’s hand! The question at stake is not the expedient of desire, it is a certain relation to desire that is not sustained simply “from day to day.”

In our next meeting, we will return to the distinction, inaugurated last time, of the relation of the subject to the ideal ego and to the ego ideal. That will allow us to orient ourselves in the true topography of desire, the function of the einziger Zug, of that which fundamentally differentiates the ego ideal in such a way that only from there can we distinguish, define, the function of the object in its relations with the narcissistic function.

That is what I hope to achieve in our next meeting, by putting it under the title of the formula of PINDAR σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος [skias onar anthrôpos], dream of a shadow: man, he writes in the last lines of the eighth ode.

This relation of dream and shadow, of the symbolic and the imaginary, is what I will make our decisive discussion revolve around.