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We will continue our examination of what we have called the paternal metaphor.

We have now reached the point where I stated that it is within this structure, which we have here promoted as being the structure of metaphor, that lies every possibility of clearly articulating the Oedipus complex and its driving force, namely the castration complex.

To those who might be surprised that we arrive so late at articulating such a central question in theory and in analytic practice, we shall respond that it was impossible to do so without having first proved to you, on various grounds both theoretical and practical, the insufficiency of the formulas commonly used in analysis, and above all without having shown you in what way one can provide more satisfactory formulas, so to speak, to begin articulating the problems—first by accustoming you to think in terms, for example, of subject.

What is a subject? Is it something that simply and purely coincides with the reality before you when you say: the subject? Or is it that from the moment you make it speak, this necessarily implies something else? I mean:
– Is speech, yes or no, something that floats above it like an emanation,
– Or does it develop by itself, does it impose by itself a structure such as the one I have commented on at length, to which I have accustomed you, and which says that as soon as there is a speaking subject, there can no longer be any question, for it, of simply reducing the matter of its relations, in so far as it speaks to another, to something straightforward?

There is always a third term, the great Other of which we speak and which is constitutive of the subject’s position as it speaks, that is to say equally of the subject as you analyze it. This is not simply an extra theoretical necessity: it brings all sorts of conveniences when it comes to understanding where the effects you are dealing with are situated—I mean what happens when you encounter in the patient, in the subject, a demand, desires, a fantasy (which is not the same thing), and equally something which seems to be, all in all, the most uncertain, the most difficult to grasp, to define: a reality.

We shall have the opportunity to see this at the point where we now advance, to explain how the term paternal metaphor means that, within what has been constituted as a primordial symbolization between the child and the mother, it is precisely the substitution of the father as symbol, as signifier, in the place of the mother. And we shall see what this ‘in the place’ means, which constitutes the pivot point, the motor nerve, so to speak, the essential of the progress brought about by the Oedipus complex. Let us recall that this is what it is about.

Let us recall the terms I put before you last year concerning the relations between the child and the mother.

But let us recall also, and first of all, in the face of this imaginary triangle—which I taught you last year to handle regarding the relations between the child and the mother—let us recall in the face of this that to admit as fundamental the triangle: child, father, mother, is to introduce something that is indeed real, but which already posits in the real—I mean as instituted—a symbolic relation: the child–father–mother relation, and, so to speak, objectively—to make you understand: in so far as we can make it an object, look at it.

The first relations of reality take shape between the mother and the child. It is there that the child will experience the first realities of its contact with the living environment: the triangle, in so far as it has this reality from the sole fact that we bring in—for the purpose of beginning to outline objectively the situation—that we bring in the father. The father has not yet entered into it for the child. The father, on the other hand, for us, is—he is real.

But let us not forget that for us he is real only in so far as institutions confer upon him, I will not even say his role and function as father—this is not a sociological question—but confer upon him his Name-of-the-Father. I mean we must admit this: that the father, for example, is the true agent of procreation, which is in no way a truth of experience, for in the time when analysts still discussed serious matters, it once happened that someone remarked that in such and such a primitive tribe procreation was attributed to I know not what—a fountain, a stone, or the encounter with a spirit in a remote place.

To which Mr. Jones, with much pertinence indeed, replied with this observation: that it is utterly unthinkable that intelligent beings—and to every human being we attribute a minimum of this intelligence—should ignore this truth of experience. It is quite clear that, save for an exceptional exception, a woman does not give birth if she has not had coitus, and moreover within a very precise time frame. But in making this observation—which, I repeat to you, is particularly pertinent—Mr. Ernest Jones was simply leaving aside everything important in the question. For what is important in the question is not that people know perfectly well that a woman can give birth only when she has had coitus; it is that they sanction in a signifier that the one with whom she had coitus is ‘the father’.

For otherwise, given the way the order of the symbol, the signifier, is by its nature constituted, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the something responsible for procreation from nevertheless continuing to be maintained in the symbolic system as identical with anything whatsoever—what we said earlier, namely: a stone, a fountain, or the encounter with a spirit in a remote place.

The position of the father as symbolic is something that does not depend on whether people have more or less recognized the necessity of a certain sequence of events as different as coitus and childbirth. The position of the Name-of-the-Father as such—the qualification of the father as procreator—is a matter that is situated at the symbolic level, and which can be linked according to cultural forms, for this does not depend on cultural form: it is a necessity of the signifying chain as such.

From the fact that you institute a symbolic order, something either does or does not answer to this function defined by the Name-of-the-Father, and within this function you place significations that may be different depending on the case, but which in no case depend on any other necessity than the necessity of the function of the father which the Name-of-the-Father occupies in the signifying chain. I believe I have already insisted enough on this point.

Here then is what we can call the symbolic triangle in so far as it is instituted in the real from the moment there is a signifying chain, where there is articulation of speech. I say that there is a relation between this symbolic triad and the triad we introduced here last year in the form of the imaginary triad, which is, that of the relation of the child to the mother in so far as the child finds itself dependent on the desire of the mother, on the first symbolization of the mother as such, and nothing other than this:
– namely, that it detaches its actual dependence from her desire, from the pure and simple lived experience of this dependence,
– namely, that through this symbolization something is instituted, which is subjectivized at a primary, primitive level. This subjectivation consists simply in positing her as this primordial being who may be there or may not be there.

Thus desire, her desire for him, for this being, is essential. Which means that what the subject desires is not simply the appetite for her care, for her contact, even for her presence, but the appetite for her desire.

In this first symbolization, the child’s desire asserts itself, initiating all later complications of symbolization, in that it is desire for the desire of the mother, and that by this fact something opens by which, virtually, what the mother herself objectively desires as a being who lives in the world of the symbol, in a world where the symbol is present, in a speaking world, and even if she lives there only quite partially, if she herself, as happens, is a being ill-adapted to this world of the symbol or who has refused certain elements of it, she nonetheless opens up to the child, from this primordial symbolization, this dimension: what, even on the imaginary plane, the mother can, as they say, desire other than, on the imaginary plane.

It is thus that there enters, in a still confused and entirely virtual way, this desire for something else of which I spoke the other day—but not in some sort of substantial way such that we could recognize it, as we did in the last seminar, in all its generality—but in a concrete way, there is in her the desire for something other than to satisfy—me, who am beginning to throb with life—my desire. And in this path, there is at once access and no access.

How can we conceive that, somehow, in this mirage-like relation whereby the primary being reads or anticipates the satisfaction of its desires in the sketched movements of the other, in this dual adaptation of image to image which occurs in all inter-animal relations, how can we conceive that there could be read—as in a mirror, as Scripture puts it—what the subject desires otherwise?

Assuredly, it is at once difficult to think and too difficult to accomplish, for this is indeed the whole drama of what happens at a certain switching point of the primitive level which is called perversions. It is difficultly accomplished, in the sense that it is accomplished in a faulty way, yet it is accomplished nonetheless. It is accomplished certainly not without the intervention of something more than the primordial symbolization of this mother who ‘comes and goes,’ who is called when she is not there, and who—as such—when she is there, is pushed away in order to be called back… there must be something more.

This something more is precisely the existence behind her of all that symbolic order on which she depends, and which, as it is always more or less there, allows a certain access to that object—her desire—which is already an object so specialized, so marked by the necessity established by the symbolic system that it is absolutely unthinkable otherwise, in its prevalence, and which is called the phallus, this phallus around which I made revolve all our dialectic of the object relation last year.

Why? Why this privileged object, if not for something which necessitates it there, in its place, inasmuch as it is privileged in the symbolic order? This is what we now want to enter into in more detail, and where we shall see how, not simply through a mere relation of symmetry, the one that is explained in this diagram and which makes:
– here [ϕ] the phallus be at the summit point of the imaginary triad,
– just as here ‘Father’ is at the summit point of the symbolic triad,

…how it happens that there is between the two this link, and how it happens that I can already put forward to you that this link is of a metaphorical order. Well then, this is precisely what leads us into the dialectic of the Oedipus complex. It is in the Oedipus complex that we can become aware of it, I mean try to articulate it step by step. And this is what FREUD does and what others have done after him, and this is what, in that, is not always entirely clear nor entirely clearly symbolized: to try to push it further for you, not simply for the satisfaction of our minds, but because:
– if we articulate step by step this genesis by which the position of the signifier of the father in the symbolic is foundational to the position of the phallus in the imaginary plane,
– if this requires one, two, three stages, in times—if one can say logical—of the constitution of this phallus in the imaginary plane as privileged prevalent object,
– if these times are clearly distinguished and if from their distinction it results that we can orient ourselves better, question better, both the patient in examination and the meaning of the clinic, and the conduct of the cure,
…then this will justify our efforts.

And it seems to us that, given the difficulties we encounter precisely in the clinic, in questioning, in examination, and in therapeutic maneuvering, these efforts are already, and in advance, justified. Let us observe this desire of the Other which is the desire of the mother, which carries this beyond. We say that to reach this beyond, and already just to reach this beyond of the mother, the desire of the mother as such, a mediation is necessary, and that this mediation is precisely given by the position of the father in the symbolic order.

Rather than proceeding dogmatically ourselves, let us question the way in which, for us, the question arises in concrete terms. We see that there are states, cases, stages also in very different states, where the child identifies with the phallus. This was the entire object of the path we traveled last year: we showed in fetishism an exemplary perversion in the sense that there, the child has a certain relation with that object beyond the mother’s desire by having noticed the prevalence and the value of excellence, so to speak, attached to it, by way, all in all, of an imaginary identification with the mother.

We also saw, indicated, that in other forms of perversion, and notably transvestism, it is in the opposite position that the child will assume the difficulty of the imaginary relation to the mother, namely that he identifies himself, it is said, with the phallic mother. I believe that, more correctly, it must be said that it is precisely with the phallus that he identifies, inasmuch as this phallus is hidden under the mother’s clothing. I remind you of this to show you that this relation of the child to the phallus is essential as long as the phallus is the object of the mother’s desire. Experience also proves to us that this element plays an essential active role in the relations the child has with the parental couple.

Already last time we recalled this on the theoretical plane in the presentation of the decline of the Oedipus complex in relation to what is called the inverted Oedipus. FREUD points out to us cases where, in order to identify with the mother—I mean insofar as he identifies with the mother—the child, having adopted this position both significant and promising, fears the consequence, hence the deprivation that will result for him—if it is a boy—of his virile organ. This is a line of indication, but it goes much further. Experience proves to us that the father, considered as one who deprives the mother of this object—namely the phallic object—of her desire, plays a quite essential role not only in perversions, but in every neurosis, and I would say in the entire course, be it the easiest, the most normal, of the Oedipus complex.

You will find, in experience, in analysis, that the subject has taken a position in a certain way at a moment of his childhood on this point, on this point of the father’s role in the fact that the mother does not have the phallus. This moment is never elided. This moment is the one which, in our recall of last time, left open the question of the favorable or unfavorable outcome of the Oedipus, suspended around the three planes—of castration, of frustration, and of deprivation exercised by the father.

It was at the third level, the one that at once posed the question for us, because it is the one in which it is the most difficult to understand anything, and the one in which, nevertheless, we are told lies the whole key of the Oedipus, namely its outcome, namely finally the child’s identification with the father.

This level is that of the father who deprives someone of what he does not have, in the end—that is to say, deprives him of something which exists only insofar as you bring it forth into existence as a symbol. It is quite clear that the father does not castrate the mother of something she does not have. For it to be posited that she does not have it, it is necessary that already that of which it is a question be projected onto the symbolic plane as symbol.

But it is nonetheless a deprivation, and every real deprivation is something which requires the symbolization of what is both evident and deprived. It is thus on the plane of the mother’s deprivation that a question, at a given moment of the evolution of the Oedipus, arises for the subject: to accept, to register, to symbolize himself, to make significant this real deprivation of which the mother turns out to be the object. This deprivation, the child-subject assumes or does not assume, accepts or refuses. This point is essential: you will find it at every crossroads whenever your experience leads you to a certain point which we are now trying to define as nodal in the Oedipus. Let us call it nodal point, since it has just come to me. I do not hold to it essentially, I mean by that that it does not coincide, far from it, with the moment whose key we are seeking, which is the decline of the Oedipus, its result, its fruit, in the subject.

But there is a moment when the father comes into function as depriver of the mother, that is to say appears behind this relation of the mother to the object of her desire as something, if you will, that ‘castrates’—but I put it only in quotation marks—because what is castrated, in this case, is not the subject, it is the mother. This point is not very new. What is new is to point to it precisely, to turn your gaze to this point inasmuch as it allows us to understand from there what precedes—which we already have some light on—and what will follow.

Experience—in any case, do not doubt it, and you will be able to verify and confirm it whenever you have the occasion to see it—experience proves that insofar as the subject does not cross this nodal point, that is to say does not accept this deprivation of the phallus from the mother operated by the father, it is observed that as a rule… I underline this ‘as a rule’ because here it does not simply have the importance of an ordinary correlation, but of a correlation founded in the structure …it is to the extent that the child maintains for himself a certain form of identification…
– with this object of the mother,
– with this object which I have represented to you from the start, to use the word that arises here, as rival object, so to speak,
…that—in some way—always, whether it be a matter of phobia, of neurosis, or of perversion, you will encounter a link. It is a point of reference: there is perhaps no better word around which you can group the elements of observation from this question you will ask yourself in the particular case:
– what is the special configuration of this relation to the mother, to the father, and to the phallus which makes the child not accept that the mother be deprived by the father of something which is the object of her desire?
– And to what extent, in what case, should one point out that in correlation with this relation, he, the child, maintains his identification with the phallus?

There are degrees, of course. This relation is not the same in neurosis or in psychosis as in perversion. But this configuration is nodal, you see it. At this level, the question that arises is:

‘To be or not to be—the phallus?’

On the imaginary plane, it is a matter for the subject of being or not being the phallus, and the phase to be crossed is this: the subject will ‘choose’ at a certain moment. When I say ‘will choose,’ also put this choose in quotation marks, for of course, the subject is as passive here as he is active, for the good reason that it is not he who pulls the strings of the symbolic: the sentence was begun before him, was begun precisely by his parents.

What I am going to bring you to is precisely the relation of each of his parents to this sentence begun and the way in which it is fitting that the sentence be sustained by a certain reciprocal position of his parents in relation to this sentence. But let us say—because one must express oneself—that there is here, if you will in the neutral, an alternative: ‘To be or not to be this phallus.’

You well feel that there is a considerable step to take in order to understand simply what is at stake between this ‘To be or not to be this phallus’ and what is at stake at some moment—you still have to await and find it—which is completely different, which is ‘to have or not to have,’ as one also says, to draw on another literary quotation, in other words: to have or not to have the penis. It is not the same thing, something must have been crossed between the one and the other, and let us not forget: what is at stake in the castration complex is that something which is never articulated, which becomes almost completely mysterious.

For we know that it is on the castration complex that depend these two facts:
– that on one side, the boy becomes a man,
– on the other side, the girl becomes a woman.
But this question of having or not having is resolved—even for the one who, in the end, has the right to have it, that is to say the man—by way of something called the castration complex, consequently which supposes that to have it, there must be a moment when he has not had it. That is to say, one would not call it ‘castration complex’ if in a certain way it did not put in the foreground this: that to have it, it must first have been posited that one might not have it, that this possibility of being castrated is essential in the assumption of the fact of having it, the phallus. This is the step to be crossed. This is where the father must intervene, at some moment, effectively, really, actually.

For you see that until now I have been able—the very thread of my discourse indicated it—I have been able to speak to you of things only starting from the subject: he accepts or he does not accept. Insofar as he does not accept, this leads him, man or woman, to be the phallus [of the mother]. But now for the next step, it is essential to make the father intervene effectively.

I am not saying that he does not already effectively intervene before, but that my discourse until now could leave him in the background, even do without him, whereas from now on, where it is a matter of having or not having, we are forced to take into account ‘Him.’ ‘Him,’ it must first—I emphasize to you—be, outside the subject, constituted as symbol. For if he is not outside the subject constituted as symbol, no one will be able to intervene really as invested with this symbol.

But it is as a real person inasmuch as invested with this symbol that he will now intervene effectively at the next stage. This is where, in the instance of the Real Father, are situated the different phases under which we evoked last time the Real Father, insofar as he can bear a prohibition. We remarked that as far as, for example, forbidding the first manifestations of sexual instinct—which begins to reach its first maturity in the subject the first times the subject makes use of his instrument, even exhibits it, offers to the mother his good offices—for this we have no need of the father.

I will even say more on this point: what usually happens—which is something still very close to imaginary identification, namely that the subject shows himself to the mother, makes her offers—most of the time what happens is something which, as we saw last year in the case of little Hans, takes place on the plane of comparison, of imaginary depreciation.

The mother is quite sufficient to show the child how inadequate is what he offers her; she is also sufficient to forbid the use of the new instrument. The father enters into play, that is certain, as bearer of the Law, as the forbidding agent of the object which is the mother.

This, we know, is fundamental, but it is entirely outside the question as it is effectively engaged with the child. We know that the function of the father—the Name-of-the-Father—is tied to the prohibition of incest, but no one has ever thought to place at the forefront of the castration complex the fact that the father actually promulgates the Law of the prohibition of incest. It is sometimes said, but it is never articulated by the father, so to speak, as legislator ex cathedra: he interposes himself between the child and the mother, he is the bearer of the Law, so to speak in principle, but in fact he intervenes otherwise, and I would say that it is also otherwise that his failures to intervene manifest themselves.

This is what we will examine closely. In other words, the father insofar as he is the culturally constituted bearer of the Law, the father insofar as he is invested with the signifier of the father, intervenes in the Oedipus complex in a more concrete, more graduated way, if I may say so, and it is this that must now be articulated, and this is what we wish to articulate today. And here it turns out that the small diagram I commented to you during the first term, to the greatest weariness, it seems, of some, nevertheless does not seem to be entirely useless.

I remind you of what one must always return to: that it is because, and insofar as, the intention—I mean the desire having passed into the state of demand in the subject—has traversed something that is already constituted; namely, that for that to which it is addressed—specifically its object, its primordial object, the mother—desire is something that is articulated. And in some way, all his progress, his entire entry into this world—this here-below world which is not simply a world in the sense of being a place where his needs may be satisfied, but a world where speech reigns—consists in submitting the desire of each to the law of the desire of the Other, and only for this reason, and insofar as:
– he crosses, more or less successfully, this line of the signifying chain, insofar as it is latent there and already structuring,
– the demand of the young subject, from the first trial he makes of his relation to the first Other, the mother insofar as he has already symbolized her.

It is insofar as he has already symbolized her that he addresses her in a way that may be more or less inarticulate, yet already articulated, for this first symbolization is linked to the first articulations. It is thus insofar as this intention, this demand, has traversed the signifying chain that it can assert itself before the maternal object. In this measure the child, who has constituted his mother as subject through the foundation of the first symbolization itself, finds himself entirely subject to what we may call—but only by anticipation—the Law, but this is only a metaphor: I mean that we must unfold the metaphor contained in this term, the Law, to give its true position to the term at the moment I employ it. The mother’s law is, of course, the fact that the mother is a speaking being, and that suffices to legitimize my saying the mother’s law.

Nevertheless this law is, if I may say so, an uncontrolled law. This law is, in any case for the subject, simply the fact that there is law—that is to say, that something of his desire is completely dependent on something which, without any doubt, is already articulated, namely, as such, is of the order of the Law.

But this law resides entirely within the subject who supports it, namely, in the good or bad will of the mother, the good or bad mother. And this is what leads me to propose to you this new term, which, you will see, is not so new after all; it suffices to press it a little for it to recover something which language did not arrive at by chance.

The principle we advance here is that there is no subject unless there is a signifier which founds it. It is to the extent that there have been those first symbolizations constituted by the signifying couple—the first subject and the mother—that we must know what this means with respect to such terms as: reality or no reality at the beginning of the child’s life, autoerotism or no autoerotism.

You will see things become particularly clear from the moment you pose questions with respect to this subject, the child, the one from whom the demand emanates, the one in whom desire is formed. And the whole of analysis is a dialectic of desire. The child begins to emerge, emerges as a “subjected-being.” He is a “subjected-being” because he experiences and feels himself at first as profoundly subjected to the whim of that on which he depends, even if this whim is an articulated whim.

What I advance to you is necessary in all our experience. For example, I take the first example that comes to mind: you could see last year that little Hans, who finds so atypical an outcome to his Oedipus—that is to say, precisely, who does not find the outcome we will now try to designate, who finds only a substitute, who needs this all-purpose horse to make up for all that will be lacking for him in that moment of crossing which is the very stage of assuming the symbolic as the Oedipus complex, where I am leading you today—who thus substitutes with this horse which is at once the father, the phallus, the little sister, whatever you like, but which is essentially something corresponding precisely to what I will now show you.

Recall how he gets out of it and how it is symbolized in the final dream. What he calls in place of the father, namely that imaginary and all-powerful being called the plumber. This plumber is there precisely to un-subject something. For little Hans’ anxiety is essentially, as I have told you, the anxiety of this subjection, inasmuch as, literally, from a certain moment on, he realizes that to be thus subjected, one cannot know where it might lead.

You remember this diagram, the diagram of the cart going away, which embodies the center of his fear: it is precisely from that moment that little Hans establishes in his life a certain number of centers of fear, these centers of fear around which the re-establishment of his security will precisely pivot.

Fear—be it something that has its source in the real—fear is an element of the child’s securing himself, inasmuch as it is thanks to these fears that he gives to the Other, to this anxiety-provoking subjection which he realizes at the moment when the lack of that external domain appears, of that other plane where it is necessary that something should appear so that he is not purely and simply a subjected-being. This is where we arrive.

It is thus here that lies the remark that this Other to whom he addresses himself—namely the mother—has a certain relation—this again, everyone says, everyone has said—a certain relation which is a relation to the father. And everyone has perceived that much depends on these relations to the father; experience has proved to us that the father, as they say, does not play his role. I need not remind you that last time I spoke to you of all the forms of paternal deficiency concretely designated in terms of inter-human relations.

Experience does indeed impose that it is so, but nothing articulates sufficiently that what is at stake is not so much the relations of the mother with the father in the vague sense of something that is of the order of a sort of rivalry of prestige between the two, which would converge on the subject of the child. Without any doubt, this schema of convergence is not false; the duplicity of the two instances is more than required, without which there could not be precisely this triad, but it is not sufficient.

And what happens between the one and the other—everyone admits—is indeed essential. And here we come to what is called bonds of love and respect, the position of the mother. And we fall again into the rut of environmental sociological analysis, around which some will revolve their entire analysis of the case of little Hans, namely whether the mother was nice enough, affectionate with the father, etc., without articulating what is essential.

It is not so much about the personal relations between the father and the mother, and whether each measures up or not. It is properly a matter of a moment which must be lived as such and which concerns the relations, not simply of the person of the mother with the person of the father, but of the mother with the speech of the father, with the father insofar as what he says is not absolutely equivalent to nothing. The function in which:

1. the Name-of-the-Father intervenes, sole signifier of the father,
2. the articulated speech of the father,
3. the Law insofar as the father is in a more or less intimate relation with it,

…this is also very important.

In other words, the relation in which the mother grounds the father as mediator of something that is beyond her own law and her own whim, and which is purely and simply the Law as such—the father thus as Name-of-the-Father, that is to say, as the whole development of Freudian doctrine announces and promotes him, namely as closely bound to this enunciation of the Law.

This is what is essential, and it is in this that he is accepted or is not accepted by the child as the one who deprives—or does not deprive—the mother of the object of her desire. In other words, to understand the Oedipus complex we must consider three stages, which I will try to schematize for you with the help of our small diagram from the first term.

First stage.

What the child seeks is to know—desire of desire—whether he can satisfy the desire of his mother, that is to say, “to be or not to be the object of the mother’s desire,” and insofar as he introduces his demand and where here there will be something which is the fruit, the result of it, and on the path of which lies this point which corresponds to what is ego, and which here is his other ego, that to which he identifies, this something else which he will seek to be there, namely the object satisfying to the mother. As soon as he begins to stir something at the bottom of his belly, he will begin to show it to her, to know “whether I am indeed capable of something,” with the disappointments that follow; he seeks it, and he finds it.

Insofar as the mother is questioned by the child’s demand, she is also something herself that is in pursuit of her own desire, and somewhere therein lie the constituents. In the first time and first stage, it is a matter of this: that in some way in mirror the subject identifies with what is the object of the mother’s desire.

And this is the stage, if I may say so, of the primitive phallic, the one where the paternal metaphor acts in itself, insofar as already in the world the primacy of the phallus is established by the existence of the symbol, of discourse, and of the Law. But the child catches only the result of it. To please the mother—if you allow me to go quickly and use figurative terms—it is necessary and sufficient to be the phallus, and at this stage many things stop in a certain sense. It is insofar as the message here is realized in a satisfactory way that a certain number of disorders and disturbances can be founded, among which are those identifications we have called perverse.

Second stage.

I told you that on the imaginary plane, the father indeed intervenes as depriver of the mother, that is to say, what is addressed here to the other as demand is referred to a higher court, if I may put it thus, and relayed as it should be, for always, in certain respects, what we question the other about—insofar as it runs through him entirely—does indeed encounter in the other this Other of the other, namely her own Law.

And it is at this level that something occurs which makes what returns to the child purely and simply the father’s Law insofar as it is imaginarily, by the subject, conceived as depriving the mother. It is the stage, if I may say so, nodal and negative, whereby this something that detaches the subject from his identification at the same time ties him to the first appearance of the Law in the form of this fact: that the mother is in this dependent, dependent on an object, an object which is no longer simply the object of her desire, but an object that the other has or has not.

In the close link between this referring of the mother to a Law which is not her own, with the fact that in reality the object of her desire is sovereignly possessed by this same Other to whose Law she refers, one has the key to the Oedipal relation, and what gives the relation of the mother its essential, decisive character, insofar as I ask you to isolate it as relation not to the father, but to the father’s speech. Recall little Hans last year:
– the father is the most kind,
– he is the most present,
– he is the most intelligent,
– he is the most friendly to Hans.

He does not seem to have been at all a fool; he brought little Hans to FREUD, which at the time was still proof of an enlightened mind. The father is nevertheless totally inoperative, insofar as there is one thing which is entirely clear: whatever the relations between these two parental figures, what the father says is exactly as if he were playing the flute, I mean as far as the mother is concerned.

The mother, note it, in relation to little Hans, is at once the forbidding one, that is to say, she plays the castrating role one might expect attributed to the father—but on the real plane—she says to him: “Don’t use that, it’s disgusting!” This does not prevent her, on the practical plane, from quite fully admitting little Hans into her intimacy, that is to say, she allows him, encourages him to maintain this function of the imaginary object for which indeed little Hans renders her the greatest services. He indeed incarnates for her her phallus, and little Hans as such is maintained in the position of subjected-being. He is subjected, and this is the entire source of his anxiety and his phobia.

It is insofar, and essentially insofar, as already the father’s position is called into question by the fact that it is not his speech which makes the law to the mother, that the problem is introduced. But that is not all: it seems that in the case of little Hans, what is going to happen now, that is to say, the third stage, this third stage is essential and is also lacking. This is why I emphasized to you last year that the outcome of the Oedipus complex in the case of little Hans is a falsified outcome, that little Hans, though he emerged from it thanks to his phobia, will have a love life completely marked by a certain style, the imaginary style whose extensions I indicated to you in connection with the case of Leonardo da Vinci.

This third stage is this, and it is as important as the second because it is on it that the exit from the Oedipus complex depends. That of which the father has testified that he gives, insofar as, and only insofar as, he is the bearer of the Law, is that it is from him that depends the possession by the subject, paternal or not, of this phallus. It is insofar as this stage has been crossed that in the second stage, what the father, so to speak as supporter of the Law, what the father promised, he must keep. He may give or refuse insofar as he has it, but the fact that he has it, the phallus, he must at a given moment give proof of it. It is insofar as he intervenes in the third stage as one who has the phallus—and not who is it—that something can occur which reinstates the instance of the phallus as desired object of the mother and no longer only as object of which the father may deprive.

The all-powerful father is the one who deprives. It is moreover at this stage that the analyses of the Oedipus complex had stopped until a certain moment. At the time when it was thought that all the ravages of the Oedipus complex depended on the omnipotence of the father, one thought only of this stage, except that it was not emphasized that the castration exercised there was the deprivation of the mother, and not of the child.

The third stage is this: it is insofar as the father can give to the mother what she desires, can give it because he has it—and here intervenes precisely the fact of potency in the genital sense of the word; let us say that the father is a potent father—that in this third stage occurs the restitution, if you will, of the relation of the mother to the father on the real plane, the relation as such of the other who is the father with the mother’s ego and the object of her desire, and that to which may be identified, on the lower level where the child is in the position of petitioner, the identification with this paternal instance which has here been realized in these three stages:

1. In the veiled form where, as not yet appearing but father existing in mundane reality—I mean in the world, by the fact that in the world reigns the law of the symbol—already the question of the phallus is posed somewhere else: in the mother, where the child must locate it.
2. From his privative presence, insofar as he is the one who supports the Law, and this occurs no longer in a veiled way but in a way mediated by the mother, who is the one who posits him as the one who lays down the Law to her.
3. The father insofar as he is revealed: he is revealed insofar as he, he has it, and the exit from the Oedipus complex is a favorable exit insofar as the identification with the father occurs at this third stage, the stage where he intervenes as the one who has it.

It is an identification called ‘ego ideal’ which occurs at this level in the symbolic triangle precisely there, at the pole where the child is, and insofar as it is at the maternal pole that everything which will later become reality begins to be constituted, and it is at the level of the father that everything which will later become superego begins to be constituted.

It is insofar as the father intervenes as real and as potent father in a third time—the one which follows the deprivation or the castration that concerns the mother, the mother imagined at the level of the subject in her own imaginary position of dependence—it is insofar as he intervenes at the third time as the one who, himself, has it, that he is internalized as ego ideal in the subject and that, so to speak, let us not forget, at that moment the Oedipus complex declines.

What does that mean? It does not mean that at that moment the child will begin to exercise all his sexual powers—you know well he will not. Quite the contrary, he does not exercise them at all. The exit from the Oedipus complex consists in this: in fact, one may say that apparently he is deposed from the exercise of those functions which had begun to awaken. Nevertheless, if everything that FREUD articulated has meaning, it means that he has in his pocket all the titles to make use of them in the future.

The paternal metaphor plays here a role which is indeed the one we could expect from a metaphor: it is to lead to the institution of something of the order of the signifier, which is there in reserve. The signification of it will be developed later. The child has all the rights to be a man, and what will later be contested in his rights at the moment of puberty will be insofar as there will have been something that did not completely fulfill this metaphorical identification with the image of the father, insofar as it will have been constituted, but through these three times.

I point out to you on this occasion that this means that, insofar as he is virile, a man is always more or less his own metaphor. This is even what casts over the term virility that sort of shadow of ridicule which must nevertheless be acknowledged. I will also point out to you that the outcome of the Oedipus complex is different, as everyone knows, for the woman, for her, this third stage—as FREUD emphasizes: read his article on The Decline of the Oedipus Complex—for her, it is much simpler: she does not have to make this identification nor to retain this title to virility.

She knows where it is, she knows where she must go to take it: it is on the side of the father, toward the one who has it, and this also shows you in what way what is called femininity, true femininity, always has also a little of the dimension of alibi. True women always have something a little lost, this is a suggestion I want to make to you only to support for you the concrete dimension in which this development is situated.

To return and conclude, in justifying my term metaphor, today it is, you feel it well, only a diagram. We will return to each of these stages and we will see what is attached to them. Observe well that what is at stake here is, at the most fundamental level, exactly the same thing as what is called, in the manageable and common terrain of language study, metaphor. For metaphor, with the formula I have given you:

f(S/S1)S2 ~ S(+)s

It means nothing but this:

S, S’, S”…
s, s’, s”…

that of the two chains of S, S′ and S″, which are signifiers, in relation to all that circulates of wandering signifieds s, s′, s″…, because they are always in the process of sliding, the pinning of which I speak, or again the quilting point, is only a mythical affair, for never has anyone been able to pin a signification to a signifier. But on the other hand, what one can do is to pin a signifier to a signifier and see what happens.

But in this case, something new always occurs which is sometimes as unexpected as a chemical reaction: namely, the emergence of a new signification. Insofar as the Father is in the signifier—in the Other—the signifier which simply represents this: the existence of the link of the signifying chain as such in that it places itself, so to speak, above the signifying chain, in a metaphorical position.

S
S, S’, S”…
s, s’, s”…

It is insofar as the mother makes the father the one who sanctions by his presence the existence as such of the place of the Law, it is insofar as she does this, and only in this measure—and this thus leaves an immense latitude to the modes and means in which it can be realized, and it is also why it is compatible—it is in this measure that the third time of the Oedipus complex can be crossed, that is to say, in the stage of identification in which it is a matter:
– for the boy, of identifying with the father as possessor of the penis,
– for the girl, of recognizing the man as the one who possesses it.

We will see the continuation next time.