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(All parts in English)

We are going to try today to say a few things on the subject of identification, insofar as—you have grasped this, I hope—we are brought to it as the final term of the precise question around which we have, this year, made our entire attempt to elucidate transference revolve. I announced to you last time that I would return, under the sign of the famous ejaculation of PINDAR, in the eighth Pythian written for ARISTOMENES, wrestler of Aegina, winner of the games:

Ephemeral beings! What is each of us, what is he not? Man is the dream of a shadow.[Epameroi! Ti dé tis? Ti d’ou tis? Skias onar anthrôpos] [Ô man of a day: what is being, what is nothingness? You are only the dream of a shadow. [trad. Faustin Colin]]

Let us resume here our reference to that relation which is the one I have tried, for you, to have borne by a model between two concrete levels of identification: it is not by chance that I emphasize the necessity of distinguishing them, a distinction that is evident, phenomenologically accessible to anyone. The ideal ego does not coincide with the ego ideal, this is what the psychologist can discover by himself, and which he in fact does not fail to do.

That the matter is equally important in the articulation of the Freudian dialectic is what will be confirmed to us, for example, by the work I alluded to last time, that of Mr. Conrad STEIN on primary identification. This work ends with the recognition of what remains obscure, namely the difference between the two series that FREUD distinguishes, underlines and accentuates as being: identifications of the ego, and identifications of the ego ideal.

So let us take the little diagram with which you are beginning to familiarize yourselves and which you will find again when you calmly work on the forthcoming issue of the journal La Psychanalyse.

The illusion represented here, called “the inverted vase” illusion, can only occur for the eye that is situated somewhere inside the cone thus produced by the junction point of the boundary of the spherical mirror with the focal point where the illusion known as the inverted vase must occur. You know that this illusion—real image—is what we use to metaphorize something I call i(a), and you know that what is at stake is what supports the function of the specular image. In other words, it is the specular image as such, and imbued with its tone, its special accent, its power of fascination, with the specific investment that is its own in the register of that libidinal investment so clearly distinguished by FREUD under the term narcissistic investment. The function i(a) is the central function of narcissistic investment.

These words are not sufficient to define all the relations, all the aspects under which we will see the function of i(a) appear. What we say today will allow you to specify what it is about, it is what I also call the function of the ideal ego as opposed to and distinct from that of the ego ideal.

I outline the functioning of the Other, capital O, the Other as the Other of the speaking subject, the Other inasmuch as, through it, the place of speech, the effect of the signifier, comes into play for every subject, for every subject with whom we, as psychoanalysts, are concerned. Here we can fix the place of what will function as the ego ideal. In the little diagram, as you will see it published in the forthcoming journal:

You will see that this purely virtual S is there only as the representation of a function of the subject that is, if I may say so, a necessity of thought. This very necessity which is at the basis of the theory of knowledge: we could conceive of nothing as an object that the subject supports, which does not have precisely this function, the existence of which, as analysts, we call into question since what we, as analysts, bring to light is that by the fact that the subject we are dealing with is essentially a speaking subject, this subject cannot be confused with “the subject of knowledge.”

It is truly a truth of LA PALICE to have reminded analysts that the subject for us is not the subject of knowledge but the subject of the unconscious. To speculate about him as “the pure transparency of thought to itself” is precisely what we rise up against: it is a pure illusion that thought is transparent. I know the insurrection I can provoke at such a juncture in the mind of a philosopher. Believe me, I have already had discussions deep enough with supporters [here: the word “souteneur” also means “pimp”] of the Cartesian position to say that it is entirely possible to reach an understanding. I therefore leave aside the discussion itself, which is not what interests us today.

This subject, then this S that is there in our diagram, is in a position to use an artifice, can only use an artifice, can only access, by artifice, the apprehension of that image—real image—which occurs at i(a), and this is because he is not there! It is only through the mediation of the mirror of the Other that he comes to position himself there: as he is nothing, he cannot see himself there.

Moreover, it is not himself as subject that he seeks in this mirror. A long time ago, in the discourse on psychic causality, the discourse at Bonneval shortly after the war, I spoke of this “mirror without surface where nothing is reflected.”

This enigmatic statement could at that time have lent itself to confusion with I don’t know what exercise of more or less mystical asceticism. Recognize today what I wanted to say, or more exactly, begin to sense the point on which the question of the function of the analyst as mirror can focus—it is not about the mirror of specular assumption—I mean for the place he, the analyst, has to occupy, even if it is in this mirror that the virtual specular image must occur.

This virtual image which is here at i’(a), here it is:

And indeed, this is what the subject sees in the Other, but he sees it in the Other only insofar as he is in a place that does not coincide with the place of what is reflected. No condition binds him to be in the place of i(a) to see himself in i’(a), but certain conditions still bind him to be in a certain field: it is the one outlined by the lines delimiting a certain conical volume.

Why then—in this original diagram—have I placed S at the point where I have placed it, where you will find it in the figure I published? Nothing implies that it is there rather than elsewhere. In principle it is there because, in relation to the orientation of the figure, you see it appear in a way behind i(a), and this position—behind—is not without having a phenomenological correlate that is well enough expressed by the expression that is not there by chance: “an idea at the back of one’s mind.” Why then are ideas, which are generally the ideas that sustain us, qualified as “an idea at the back of one’s mind”? One must also know that it is not for nothing that the analyst sits behind the patient. This whole theme of what is in front and what is behind, we will come back to it shortly.

In any case, it is appropriate to identify to what extent the fact that the position of S is identifiable only somewhere in the field of the Other—in the virtual field that the Other develops by its presence as a field of reflection—as this position of S finds itself at a point capital I and as it is distinct from the place where i’(a) is projected.

It is only insofar as this distinction is not only possible but ordinary that the subject can apprehend how fundamentally illusory his identification is insofar as it is narcissistic. There is skias [Greek: “shadow”; here as in Pindar], the shadow, der Schatten FREUD says somewhere, and precisely about what: das verlorene Objekt, the lost object in the work of mourning. Der Schatten, the shadow. This opacity, this essential shadow, brings into the relation to the object the narcissistic structure of the world. If it can be overcome, it is insofar as the subject through the Other can identify elsewhere. Indeed, if that is where I am in my relation to the Other, as we have pictured it here in the form where it is legitimate for us to imagine it: in the form of a mirror, in the form in which existentialist philosophy seizes it—and seizes it to the exclusion of anything else, and that is what constitutes its limitation—by saying that the other is the one who returns our image to us.

Indeed, if the Other is nothing other than the one who returns my image to me, I truly am, indeed, nothing other than what I see myself to be. Literally, I am capital Other as other, insofar as he himself, if he exists, sees the same thing as me, he too sees himself in my place. How can one know if what I see myself as being over there is not all there is to it?

Since, in short, if the Other, this mirror, it is enough for us—which is truly the simplest of hypotheses since it is the Other—to suppose it, this living mirror, in order to conceive that he sees just as much as I do and, to put it plainly, when I look at him, it is he in me who looks at himself and who sees himself in my place, in the place I occupy in him: it is he who founds the truth of this gaze if it is nothing other than his own gaze.

It is enough—it must be, and it happens every day—to dissipate this mirage, for something I showed you the other day as that gesture of the little child’s head turning back towards the one carrying him. Not even that is needed: a trifle, a flash, that’s saying too much… for a flash has always been considered to be something, even the very sign of the “Father of the gods,” nothing less, and that is, moreover, why I emphasize it…but a fly that passes by is enough—if it crosses this field and goes “bzzz…”—to make me locate myself elsewhere, to draw me outside the conical field of visibility of i(a).

Do not think I am joking if I bring in here the fly or the wasp that goes “bzzz…,” or anything at all that makes a noise, that surprises us. You know well that it is the chosen object, sufficient in its minimal character, to constitute what I call “the signifier of a phobia.” It is precisely in this that this kind of object can have the operational, instrumental function, entirely sufficient to call into question the reality and consistency of the ego’s illusion as such.

It is enough for anything whatsoever to move in the field of the Other, to play the role of the subject’s point of support, for the consistency of the Other, of what is there as a field of narcissistic investment, to be, on such occasions, dissipated, to waver, to be called into question. For, if we rigorously follow FREUD’s teaching, this field is central, essential, this field is what the entire fate of human desire revolves around. But it is not the only field, and the proof is that already in FREUD, from the very beginning of the introduction of this field, in Zur Einführung des Narzissmus, it is distinguished from another [field]: from the relation to the archaic object, from the relation to the nurturing field of the maternal object, it acquires in the Freudian dialectic its value by being first distinguished as belonging to another order.

What I am introducing anew by telling you that this other field, which, if I understand correctly what Mr. STEIN identified in his work under the term “primary identification,” is structured for us in an original, radical way by the presence of the signifier as such. It is not merely for the pleasure of bringing a new articulation to what is, after all, always the same field, but rather to point out this function of the signifier as decisive, as that by which what comes from this field is only what opens up for us the possibility of escaping pure and simple capture in the narcissistic field.

It is only by pointing it out in this way, by indicating as essential the function of the signifying element, that we can introduce clarifications, possibilities of distinctions, which are those demanded—as you will see, I am going to show you, I hope—imperatively demanded by clinical questions as concrete as possible. Without this introduction I am speaking of, the articulation of the signifier as such in the structuring of this field of the Other, of the big Other—there is no salvation.

It is only in this way that clinical questions, hitherto unresolved, can be resolved and, because they have remained unresolved, lend themselves to equally irreducible confusions. In other words… this skias onar anthrôpos [Greek: “man, a dream of a shadow”; as in Pindar]—dream of a shadow: man, …it is from my dream, it is from moving about in the field of the dream, insofar as it is the field of the signifier’s wandering, that I can glimpse: – that I might dissipate the effects of the shadow, – that I might know it is only a shadow.

Of course, there is something that I may long remain unaware of, that is, that I am dreaming. But it is already at the level and within the field of the dream—if I know how to question it well, if I know how to articulate it well—that not only do I triumph over the shadow, but that I have my first access to the idea that there is something more real than the shadow, that there is first of all and at least the reality of desire from which this shadow separates me. You will tell me that, precisely, the world of the real is not the world of my desires. But it is also the Freudian dialectic which teaches us that I proceed in the world of objects only by way of the obstacles put in the way of my desire: the object is ob, the object is found through objections.

The first step toward reality is made at the level of and within the dream, and of course, for me to reach this reality presupposes that I awaken. Awakening cannot simply be defined topologically by saying that in my dream there is a little too much reality, that this is what wakes me up. Awakening actually occurs when something comes into the dream that is the satisfaction of the demand, this is not common but it does happen.

On a level that is that of the analytic unfolding of the truth about man brought by analysis, we know what awakening is, we glimpse where the demand goes. The analyst articulates what man demands. Man, with analysis, awakens. He realizes that for a million years that the species has existed, he has not ceased to be necrophagous.

This is the last word of what, under the name of primary identification—the first kind of identification—FREUD articulates. Man has not ceased to “eat his dead,” even if, for a short period of time, he dreamed that he was irreducibly repudiating cannibalism; this is what the following will show us.

It was important at this point to indicate that it is precisely by this path, where we are shown – that desire is “a desire of dream,” – that desire has the same structure as the dream, – that the first correct step is made toward what is the path toward reality, – that it is because of the dream and in the field of the dream that, first of all, we prove ourselves stronger than the shadow.

Now that I have thus indicated, articulated, in a way for which I apologize again that you cannot, at this very moment, see the clinical connections, the relations of i(a) with the capital I, we are going to show—and it is already implied in my previous discourse—all that is sufficient to guide us in the relations with i(a), for what matters to us is the relations of this play coupled with small (a), the object of desire. I will return later to what, outside of this massive experience of the dream, justifies the emphasis I placed on the function of the signifier in the field of the Other.

Identifications to the ego ideal as such, whenever they are invoked, and notably, for example, in the introjection that is that of mourning around which FREUD has organized an essential aspect of his conception of identification, you will always see that, by looking closely at the case, the clinical articulation in question, it is never a massive identification, so to speak, an identification that, in relation to the narcissistic identification it counters, would be enveloping, being to being.

And to illustrate what I have just said—since the image comes to me right now—in the relation where, in Christian icons, the mother is in relation to the child whom she holds in front of her on her knees—a depiction that is not at all accidental, believe me—she envelops him, she is larger than he is. The two relations of narcissistic identification and anaclitic identification, if it were this opposition that was at stake between identifications, then the latter [anaclitic identification] would be like a vast container in relation to an inner world, more limited, which reduces the first by its scope.

I tell you straight away that among the most demonstrative readings in this respect, it is that of Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido that should be read, it is the history of the development of the libido (Karl ABRAHAM, 1924) where it is only a matter of this: the consequences to be drawn from what FREUD had just contributed regarding the mechanism of mourning, and the identification that it fundamentally represents. There is not a single example, among the many clinical illustrations given by ABRAHAM of the reality of this mechanism, where you do not touch, without ambiguity, that it is always about introjection, not about the reality of another—insofar as it involves envelopment, breadth, even sometimes confusion, massiveness—but always about ein einziger Zug, a single trait.

The illustrations he gives go very far, since, in reality, under the title Versuch… of the essay on the development of the libido, [Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Grund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen], it is only a question of this, of the function of the “partial” in identification, and concurrently, one could say: under the cover of this research, unless this research is its excuse or a subdivision, it is in this work that Karl ABRAHAM introduced the notion which has since circulated throughout analysis and has been the cornerstone of a considerable edifice concerning neuroses and perversions and which is mistakenly called the conception of the “partial object.”

You will see what it is even before being able to return to the striking illustrations given of it. It is enough for me to indicate the place and for you to go look for things where they are to realize that there is nothing to refute in what I am formulating here. Namely that this article has meaning and scope only insofar as it is the illustration on every page of that trait of identification in question as identification with the ego ideal, that it is an identification: – by isolated traits, – by traits, each unique, – by traits having the structure of the signifier.

This is what also obliges us to look a bit more closely at a relation and at what must be distinguished in it if we want to see clearly.

In the same context and not without reason, ABRAHAM comes to introduce what I mentioned earlier and designate as the function of the partial object, for it is precisely this that will be at stake concerning the relations of i(a) with small (a). If you read ABRAHAM, you will read this: first, that he never wrote in any way that it was a “partial object,” he writes Die Objekt-Partialliebe, which means “partial love of the object,” you will see that what he emphasizes, when he speaks of what is the more than exemplary object, the only true object, though others may fall into the same structure, is the phallus. How does he conceive—and I intend to relate it to you in his text—this rupture, this disjunction, which gives the phallus its value as privileged object? On every page, he brings to us what is at stake in the following way: “partial love of the object”—what does that mean for him?

It means—not the love of that something which comes to fall from the operation under the name of phallus—it means the love approaching access to this normal object of the genital relation, that of the other sex insofar as there is precisely a stage—which is this capital, structuring, structural stage, which we call the phallic stage—in which there is indeed love of the other, as complete as possible, minus the genitals. This is what “partial love of the object” means.

But the important part is in a note—I give the reference immediately: page 89 of the original edition, and in Selected Papers page 495—all the clinical examples lead there, namely: the example of the two hysterical women insofar as they had certain relations with the father entirely founded on variations of the relation that first manifest, for example, in the fact that the father is apprehended by the patient, following a traumatic relation, only for his phallic value. Later, in dreams, the father appears in his complete image but censored at the level of the genitals in the form of the disappearance of pubic hair. All the examples point in this direction: “partial love of the object” being: love of the object minus the genitals.

And that to find in this the basis for the imaginary separation of the phallus—as now intervening as exemplary central function, as pivot function, I would say—can allow us to locate what is different, namely: (a), inasmuch as small (a) designates the general function as such of the object of desire. At the heart of the function small (a), enabling the grouping and situating of the different possible modes of objects, insofar as they intervene in fantasy, there is the phallus.

Understand well that I said that it is the object which enables us to locate the series, it is, if you like, for us, a point of origin behind and ahead of a certain idea. I read what ABRAHAM writes in the little note below:

“The love of the object with exclusion of the genitals seems to us like the psychosexual developmental stage whose time coincides with what FREUD calls the phallic stage of development. It is connected to it, not only by this coincidence in time, but it is connected by much closer internal links—he adds—the hysterical symptoms can be understood as the negative of this defined organization, structured as the exclusion of the genital.”

[Die Objekliebe mit Genitalausschluß scheint als psychosexuelles Entwicklungsstadium zeitlich mit Freud’s “phallischer Entwicklungsstufe” zusammenzufallen, mit ihr aber auch durch innere Verbindungen eng verknüpft zu sein. Die hysterischen Symptome hätten wir als das Negativ der libidinösen Regungen aufzufassen, die der Objektliebe mit Genitalausschluß und der phallischen Organisation entsprechen (p. 89)]

I must say that it had been a long time since I reread this text, having left the task to two of you. Perhaps it is not a bad thing for you to know that the algebraic formula I give of the hysterical fantasy is manifest there:

But the next step I want you to take is something else that is also found in the text, but I believe no one has stopped there yet. I quote:

“Wir müssen außerdem in Betracht ziehen, daß bei jedem Menschen das eigene Genitale stärker als irgendein anderer Körperteil mit narzißtischer Liebe besetzt ist.” (p. 89 of the original edition)

“This is what we must”—he says—“take into consideration…

And at what moment, at the moment when he has just asked in the previous lines: why is it like this? – Why this reluctance? why this rage, to put it plainly, that already emerges at the imaginary level to castrate the other at the sensitive point? That is what he answers: Grauen, horror. The preceding lines must justify the term “rage” that I introduced

…we must therefore take into consideration that in every man, what properly belongs to the genitals is invested more strongly than any other part of the body in the narcissistic field.”

So that there may be no ambiguity about his thought, he specifies:

“It is precisely in correspondence with this that, at the level of the object, anything else, whatever it may be, must be invested rather than the genitals.”

I do not know if you fully realize what such a statement—which is not isolated as if it were a slip of the pen, but which everything shows to be the underlying basis of his thought—implies. I do not feel able to pass over this with a light step as if it were an everyday truth, that is to say, despite the obviousness and necessity of such an articulation, I am not aware that it has ever been pointed out by anyone until now.

Let us try to represent things a bit more for ourselves. It is well understood that the only interest in having introduced narcissism is to show us that it is the vicissitudes of narcissism upon which the process of the progress of investment depends. Let us try to understand. Here is the field of the body proper, the narcissistic field. Let us try to represent, for example, something that answers to what we are told: that nowhere is investment stronger than at the level of the genitals. This supposes that if we take the body from one side or another we will arrive at a graph of the following kind:

What ABRAHAM’s sentence implies—if we are to give it its value as reason—as consequence, is that if this represents for us the profile of narcissistic investment, contrary to what one might first think: it is not from above that the energies will be subtracted to be transferred to the object, it is not the most invested regions that will discharge themselves in order to begin to give a small investment to the object—I say: if we are speaking of ABRAHAM’s thought as it is necessitated by his whole book, otherwise this book has no meaning at all—on the contrary, it is at the level of the lowest investments that the taking of energy will be made: facing it—in the world of the object—a certain investment, objectal investment, the object existing as object.

That is to say that it is to the extent that in the subject—as is explained to us in the clearest manner—the genitals remain invested, that in the object they are not; there is absolutely no way to understand this otherwise.

Reflect for a moment whether all this does not lead us to something much broader and more important than one might think, for there is something that seems to go unnoticed concerning the function which, in the mirror stage, is that of the specular image, it is that if it is in this mirror relation that something essential occurs which regulates communication, reversal, or pouring out, or inter-pouring, of what happens between the narcissistic object and the other object, should we not show a little imagination and give importance to what results from it: that if indeed the relation to the other as sexual or as not sexual, in man is governed, organized, the organizing center of this relation in the imaginary occurs at the moment and in the specular stage.

Is it not worth pausing at this: that this has a much more intimate connection, which is never remarked upon, with what we call the face, the “face-to-face relation.” We often use this term with a certain emphasis but it seems that no one has ever quite focused on what is original about it.

The genital sexual relation is called a tergo: more ferarum relation. This should not be for cats, if I may put it this way, it is indeed the case. It is enough for you to think of these “cat-women” to tell yourself that perhaps there is something decisive in the imaginary structuring which makes the relation with the object of desire essentially structured, for the great majority of species, as having to come from behind, as a relation to the world which consists in covering or being covered.

Or, in the rare species for which this thing must happen from the front, a species for which a sensitive moment of the apprehension of the object is a decisive moment, if you believe both the experience of the mirror stage and what I have tried to find in it, to define in it as a crucial fact, as that object which is defined by the fact that in the upright animal something essential is linked to the appearance of its ventral face. It seems to me that not all the consequences of this remark have yet been fully brought to light in what I would call the various fundamental positions, the aspects of eroticism. It is not that—here and there—we do not see traces of it and that authors for a long time have not remarked that almost all “primal scenes” evoke, reproduce, revolve around the perception of a “coitus a tergo.”

Why? There are a certain number of remarks that could be arranged in this direction, but what I want to point out to you is that, in this reference, it is quite remarkable that the objects which, in the imaginary composition of the human psyche, have an isolated value and especially as partial objects, are, if I may say so, not only placed in front, but emerge in a way, if we take as a measure a vertical surface, regulating in a certain way the depth of what is at stake in the specular image, that is, a surface parallel to the surface of the mirror, highlighting in relation to this depth what comes forward, as if emerging from libidinal immersion: I am not speaking only of the phallus, but also of that essentially phantasmatic object called the breasts.

A memory came to me in this regard, from a book by the excellent Mme GYP, called Petit Bob, the inimitable buffoon, about Petit Bob, at the seaside, spotting on a lady who is floating on her back, the two little “sugar loaves,” as he puts it, whose appearance he discovers with wonder, and one cannot help but notice a certain indulgence on the author’s part. I do not think it is ever unprofitable to read authors who collect the sayings of children—that one is surely gathered from real life—and after all, the fact that this lady, who was known to be the mother of a late neurosurgeon who was probably himself the prototype of Petit Bob, was—let it be said—a bit foolish, does not prevent the outcome from being all the more instructive for us, on the contrary.

Likewise, perhaps we will see better, in the objectal relation, the true function to be assigned to what we call the nipple, if we also see it in this Gestalt relation of isolation on a background and thereby exclusion from the deep relation with the mother that is that of feeding. If it were not so, perhaps it would not often be so difficult to get the infant to grasp the part in question, the nipple, and perhaps also the phenomena of anorexia nervosa would take a different turn. What must be said, what I wish to say on this occasion, is thus a little diagram you should keep in mind concerning the mechanism of what happens reciprocally between narcissistic investment and investment in the object, because of the connection that justifies its denomination and the isolation of the mechanism. Not every object is as such to be defined as purely and simply a determined object—at the outset, at the foundation—as a partial object, far from it.

But the central characteristic of this relation of the body proper to the phallus must be considered essential for seeing what it conditions afterwards, nachträglich, in the relation to all objects. The characteristic of “separability,” “possibility of being lost,” would be different if there were not at the center the fate of this essential possibility of the phallic object to emerge as a “blank” on the image of the body, like an island, like those islands on nautical charts where the interior is not depicted but only the contour. Namely, it is the same for all objects of desire, the characteristic of isolation as starting Gestalt is essential because one will never draw what is inside the island. One will never sail full sail into the genital object, the fact of characterizing the object as genital does not define the “postambivalent” entry into this genital stage, or else, no one has ever entered it.

What I have said today made me think of the hedgehog. I read The Hedgehog. I would tell you that at the moment I was pausing on this relation between man and animals, it occurred to me to read it. How do they make love? It is clear that a tergo this must present some inconvenience. I will call Jean ROSTAND. I will not dwell on this episode. The reference to the hedgehog is a literary one. ARCHILOCHUS expresses himself somewhere in this way:

“The fox knows many things, he knows many tricks. The hedgehog has only one, but it’s a famous one.”

Now, what is at stake concerns precisely the fox. Remembering—or not remembering—ARCHILOCHUS, GIRAUDOUX, in Bella, reveals in a flash the style of a man who has a trick just as famous which he attributes to the fox and—perhaps the association of ideas played a role—perhaps the hedgehog also knows this trick. In any case, it would be urgent for him to know it because it is a matter of getting rid of his vermin, an operation which is more than problematic for the hedgehog. For GIRAUDOUX’s fox, here is how he proceeds: he enters the water very slowly starting with his tail. He slips in slowly, lets himself be covered until only the tip of his nose remains outside, on which the last fleas dance their final ballet. Then he plunges it into the water so that he is thoroughly cleansed of everything that troubles him. Let this image illustrate for you that the relation of everything narcissistic is conceived as the root of castration.