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(All parts in English)

I am speaking to you about the paternal metaphor. I hope you have noticed that I am speaking to you about the castration complex. This is important, because it is not because I am speaking to you about the paternal metaphor that I am speaking to you about the Oedipus. If it were centered on the Oedipus, it would involve an enormous number of questions. I cannot say everything at once.

The schema that I brought to you, particularly last time, as constituting what I tried to make you understand under the title of the three phases of the Oedipus complex, is something I emphasize to you at every moment as being constituted elsewhere than in the subject’s adventure: in the way in which the subject must introduce himself into this something which is constituted elsewhere, and which may interest psychologists in various capacities, that is to say, those who project individual relations into what is called the inter-human, or inter-psychological, or social field, or into group tensions. They can try to register this on their schema, if they can.

Similarly, sociologists — I have indicated enough to say that even for them, they will have to take into account something else, and in particular structural relations which, on this point, give us a common measure, for the simple reason that it is the ultimate root of existence, even social existence — for it is socially unjustifiable, I mean unfounded on any social finality — of the existence, even social, of the Oedipus complex.

But for us, we find ourselves in the position of seeing how a subject must introduce himself into this relation which is that of the Oedipus complex. It is not I who noticed, invented, nor began to theorize, that he [the subject] does not introduce himself into it without the male sexual organ playing a role of the very first order, the center, the pivot, the object of all that relates to this order of events — it must be said — very confused, very poorly discerned, which is called the castration complex. No less does one continue in observations or elsewhere to mention it, it must be said, in such terms that one is surprised at only one thing — that they do not lead, in those who hear or read them, to more dissatisfaction. I am trying, in this kind of psychoanalytic fulmination, to give you a formulation that is not clouded, I mean to distinguish through concepts the different levels of what is at issue in the castration complex.

This castration complex is also brought into play at the level of a perversion that I will call primary, on the imaginary plane, or a perversion of which we may perhaps speak a little more today, but which is also intimately linked to the completion of the Oedipus complex — namely homosexuality. To try to clarify it, I will nevertheless resume, since it is rather new, the way in which I articulated the Oedipus complex for you last time, with at its center this phenomenon linked to the particular function of object played there by the male sexual organ.

I believe it is necessary to go over these steps again, in order to clarify them well, and also on this occasion I will try to show you, as I announced, how this brings at least some light to certain well-known but poorly situated phenomena, such as homosexuality, for example. One must start from these schemata directly drawn from the sap of experience. From the moment you try to make phases, they are not necessarily chronological phases, but still they must resort to them, because chronological phases too can only unfold in a certain succession. So, I told you, in a first phase you have the relation of the child, not as one says ‘to the mother,’ but to the desire of the mother.

Desire of desire — I have had the occasion to realize that this is not such a usual formula, and that some have a certain difficulty accommodating themselves to this notion: that it is different
– from desiring something,
– or from desiring the desire of the subject.

What must be understood, of course, is that this desire of this desire necessarily implies that one is dealing with something: with the first primordial object, which is indeed the mother. I mean that she has been constituted in such a way that her desire is something that can indeed be another desire, in the desire of the child, namely. Where the dialectic of this first phase is placed is where you see that the child is particularly isolated, deprived of anything other than the desire of this other he has already constituted as being the Other, who may be present or absent.

Let us try today to get to grips very closely with what is the relation to what is at stake here, namely the object of the mother’s desire. What is to be crossed here is this: it is something we shall call ‘D’, namely the desire of the mother. And to see how this desire, which is desired by the child — let us call it D provisionally — will be able to meet this something which is constituted at the level of the mother in an infinitely more elaborate way.

The mother is a little further advanced in existence than the child who is the object of her desire. This object, we have posited that insofar as it is the pivot of all the subjective dialectic, it is the phallus, the phallus insofar as it is desired by the mother. This supposes, moreover, different states from the point of view of the structure of this relation of the mother to the phallus since, behind this phallus, insofar as for the mother it is an object bound to a primordial role in her subjective structuring, it may be — indeed this is what will make the whole complication of what follows — in different states as an object.

But for the moment let us be content to take it as such. We think we can introduce order, that is to say a correct and normal perspective into everything that is an analytic phenomenon, only by starting from the structure and the circulation of the signifier. We always have stable and reliable reference points, because these are structural points, linked to what one could call the paths of signifying construction. This is what guides us, and this is why here we need not trouble ourselves with what this phallus is for the mother — the actual mother in a determined case: perhaps there are things there and we shall come to them — but to rely simply on our usual little schema, this phallus is situated here [β’], it is a metonymic object.

In the signifier, we can be content to situate it like that. It is a metonymic object essentially in that it is in any case what, because of the existence of the signifying chain, will circulate, like the ferret, everywhere in the signified. It is in the signified what results from the existence of the signifier. It happens — experience shows us — that this signified takes on a major role and, in a sense, the role of a universal object for the subject.

This is what is surprising, this is what scandalizes those who would like the situation concerning the sexual object to be symmetrical: just as the man must discover, and then adapt to a series of adventures, the use of his instrument, [they would like] it to be the same for the woman, namely that penis envy be at the center of the whole dialectic. It is not so, and this is precisely what analysis has discovered. Likewise, we can say that this is indeed the best confirmation: that there is a field of Man which is the field of analysis and which is not simply that of the discovery of a more or less rigorous instinctual development but on the whole superimposed upon anatomy, that is to say upon the real existence of individuals.

How can one conceive that what is at issue — namely the child who desires to be the object of his mother’s desire — achieves satisfaction? There is obviously no other way than to come to occupy the place of this object of her desire [β’]. What does that mean? Here is the child [E] whom we have had to represent many times in the form of this schema: the relation of his demand to this something which is not only in him, but which is first and foremost an encounter essentially in its primary role, namely the existence of signifying articulation [A] as such.

Here [β] there is still nothing, at least in principle. I mean that if the constitution of the subject as ‘I’ — I am speaking of discourse — is not yet necessarily differentiated, it is already implicated from the very first signifying modulation. The ‘I’ is not obliged to designate itself as such in discourse in order to be the support of this discourse; in an interjection, in a command: ‘Come!’, in a call: ‘You!’, there is an ‘I’, but latent. That it is latent is what we shall express here [β→β’] simply by putting a dotted line, just as the metonymic object is not yet constituted for the child.

Here [D] is the expected desire of the mother, and there [M] is what will be the result of this encounter between the child’s call and the existence of the mother as Other, namely a message.

It is clear that for the child to achieve this, which is to coincide with the object of the mother’s desire — that is to say something that we can already at this stage represent as what is immediately within his reach to attain [β’], with — let us also put it in dotted lines, but for different reasons: because it is completely inaccessible to him — what is beyond the mother, it is necessary and sufficient:
– that this ‘I’ which is there in the child’s discourse comes here to constitute itself at the level of this Other which is the mother,
– that this ‘I’ of the mother becomes the Other of the child, and that what circulates here at the level of the mother insofar as she articulates the object of her desire herself, comes here to fulfill its function as a message for the child.

That is to say ultimately:
– that the child momentarily renounces anything — it is no trouble — that might be his own speech, because his own speech is still at that moment rather in formation,
– that the child — to put it plainly — receives, in the form of a message which is produced here [M], which is the raw message of the mother’s desire, receives here [E→β’], at the metonymic level with respect to what the mother says, receives absolutely — at the metonymic level — his identification with the object of the mother. [You are my…]

This is extremely theoretical, but if this is not grasped at the outset, it is absolutely impossible to conceive what must happen thereafter, namely precisely the coming into play, the introduction of what is beyond the mother, which is constituted by her relation to another discourse which must on this occasion be that of the father.

So it is insofar as the child assumes — and he must assume, but he only assumes it in another way that is in some sense raw in the reality of this discourse — assumes first the desire of the mother, that he is open to this: to be able to come himself to take the place of the mother’s metonymy, that is to say to become what I called for you the other day her ‘subjected one.’

You have seen, in a sense, on what displacement this is founded: precisely in that something which on this occasion will be called primitive identification, and which consists precisely in this kind of exchange which makes
– the subject’s ‘I’ come to the place of the mother as Other,
– while the mother’s ‘I’ has become his Other.

This is exactly what happened in this kind of ‘stepping up a notch in the little ladder’ of our schema, which has just been carried out in this second phase:

The central point, the pivot point, the mediating point, or more exactly the moment when the father appears as mediated by the mother in the Oedipus complex, is very precisely that where now he makes himself felt as forbidding. I have said that here, he is ‘mediated’: he is mediated because it is as forbidding that he will appear. Where? In the discourse of the mother.

I point out to you here, just as earlier the discourse of the mother was grasped in its raw state in this first phase of the Oedipus complex, here, to say that it is mediated does not mean that we are already bringing in what the subject that is the mother does with the father’s speech.

It means that the father’s speech actually intervenes in what results in the form of the mother’s discourse. He thus appears at this moment less veiled than in the first phase, but he is not completely revealed: that is what this use of the term ‘mediated’ means on this occasion. In other words, at this stage he intervenes here [M] as a message for the mother. ‘He’ has the speech here, and what he says is a prohibition, it is a ‘do not…’ which is transmitted here [message], at the level where the child receives the message expected from the mother.

It is a message about a message, and this particular form of message about a message — which I will tell you, to my great surprise, linguists do not distinguish as such, showing how useful it would be for us to make our junction with linguists — message about a message, it is the message of prohibition. It is not simply for the child, and already at this stage ‘You shall not sleep with your mother,’ it is also for the mother ‘You shall not reintegrate — and here all the well-known forms of what is called the maternal instinct encounter an obstacle — “You shall not reintegrate your product.”’

Everyone knows that the primitive form of the maternal instinct manifests itself in certain animals, perhaps even more in humans, by reintegrating, as we elegantly say, orally what has exited by another way. It is very precisely this that is at issue.

This prohibition arrives here [M] as such, just as we can say here [A] that something manifests itself, which is precisely the father as Other. And in principle, it is from there that there exists the potentiality, the virtuality, ultimately salutary, which comes from the fact that, as a result, the child is profoundly called into question, shaken in his position as subjected one.

In other words, it is insofar:
– as the object of the mother’s desire is called into question by paternal prohibition,
– as the paternal prohibition prevents the circle from closing completely upon him, that is to say that he would become purely and simply the object of the mother’s desire,
…that the whole process which should normally stop there — namely the symbolic relation to the Other — already has this implicit triplicity that exists in the child’s relation to the mother, since it is not her that he desires, but her desire. There is already this ternarity: it is already a symbolic relation.

Nevertheless, everything is called into question, from the desire for this desire, from the moment its first closure, its first success, namely the finding of the object of the mother’s desire, completely escapes through the paternal prohibition, and leaves the desire for the mother’s desire in the child high and dry.

This second stage, a little less made up of potentiality than the first — the first being completely perceptible and tangible but essentially instantaneous, so to speak, transitory — is nonetheless crucial, because in the end it is the very heart of what one can call the privative moment of the Oedipus complex. It is insofar as the child is flushed out himself, and for his own good, from that ideal position in which he and the mother could have been satisfied, from this function of his metonymic object, it is insofar as he is flushed out from there, that the third relation, the next stage, can be established: the fruitful one, where he becomes something else. He becomes that other thing of which I spoke to you last time, the one that involves identification with the father and the virtual title to have what the father has.

If I gave you last time a kind of rapid sketch of the three phases of the Oedipus, it was so as not to have to start it again today, or more exactly so as to have the whole time today to take it up again step by step. Let us stop here for a moment, and then we will get to homosexuality. It is almost a parenthesis, nevertheless it is important. The way the father intervenes at that moment in the dialectic of the Oedipus is extremely important to consider, because it is there… and you will be able to see it more clearly in the last article I gave for the next issue of La Psychanalyse, which gives a summary of what I said the year we spoke about Freud’s Structures of Psychosis. The level of publication that this represents did not allow me to include this schema, which would have required far too many explanations in that article. But when you have read this article — I hope not too long from now — you can take up in your notes what I am going to show you now, and which consists in this… that insofar as the Name-of-the-Father — the father as symbolic function, the father at the level of what happens here between message and code, and code and message — is precisely Verworfen [foreclosed], there is not even here what I have represented in dotted lines, namely that through which the father intervenes as Law, but purely and simply, crudely, as message of ‘do not…’ over the mother’s message to the child, also as something raw, source of a code that is beyond the mother.

You can, on this schema of conduction of signifiers, see — tangible and perfectly identifiable — this that happens, when, having been solicited at an essential vital detour, to have the Name-of-the-Father respond in his place, that is, there where it cannot respond because it has never been there, President Schreber sees in its place arise very precisely this structure produced by the massive, real intervention of the father beyond the mother, but not absolutely supported by him as the author of the Law, which makes it so that President Schreber hears, at the major fertile point of his psychosis — what? — very exactly two fundamental kinds of hallucinations which are never — of course — isolated as such in the classical manuals.

To understand something about hallucination, it is better to read the work, remarkable indeed and exceptional, of a psychotic such as President Schreber, than to read all the best psychiatric authors who have approached the problem of hallucination with, all ready in their pocket, the famous school scale learned in philosophy class: sensation, perception, perception without object, and other nonsense.

Whereas President Schreber himself distinguishes very well two orders of things:
– the voices that speak in the ‘fundamental language’ and whose distinctive feature, in speaking this ‘fundamental language’, is to teach the subject the code through that very speech. That is to say, everything concerning, everything that belongs to the messages he receives in fundamental language is at the same time made of words which, neologistic or not — they are so in their own way — consist in teaching the subject what they are in a new code, the one that literally repeats to him a new world, a signifying universe. In other words, there is a series of hallucinations that are messages about a neo-code, therefore something that presents itself as coming from the Other — this is what is most terrifyingly hallucinatory — and in the form of a message about the code, constituted as such in this Other.
– And on the other hand, another form of messages that present themselves essentially as interrupted messages; you recall those little bits of phrases: ‘He must namely…’, ‘Now I want…’, etc.

That is to say, beginnings of orders, and very precisely, in certain cases, even real principles: ‘Finish a thing when you have started it…’ and so on. In short, these messages which present themselves essentially as pure messages, orders, or interrupted orders, as pure forces of induction in the subject, also perfectly localizable on both dissociated sides — message [M] and code [A] — where the intervention of the father’s discourse resolves itself when this something is abolished from the outset and has never in any way been integrated into the subject’s life, which is very precisely what makes the coherence, the self-sanction of the father’s discourse, namely that in which, having finished his discourse, he returns upon it, he sanctions it as Law.

For the next stage, which presupposes under normal conditions that the father can come into play, we said last time what it was: namely that it is insofar as the father is going to intervene to give — insofar as he has it — what is at issue in phallic privation and which has intervened as the central term in the evolution of the Oedipus, in the three phases of the Oedipus, it is insofar as he will appear effectively as act of gift, no longer in the acts of the mother, and thus still half-veiled, but in discourse.

The mother herself — insofar as the father’s message becomes the mother’s message — becomes the message that allows and authorizes, that will produce this something of which you can clearly see that my schema from last time means nothing other than this: that insofar as this message of the father is embodied as such, it can produce something that is the stepping up a notch in the schema, namely that the subject can receive from the father’s message what he attempted [to receive] from the mother’s message.

But here, by means of, by way of the gift or the permission given to the mother, that is to say that what he has in the end — and this is indeed realized by the phase of the decline of the Oedipus — he has this: that he is allowed to have a penis for later. It is really, as we said last time, ‘the title in his pocket.’ It is also, to evoke a historical and amusing anecdote: a woman whose husband wanted to be sure she was faithful to him had given her a certificate in writing that she was faithful to him. Whereupon she went about the world saying: ‘Ah, the fine note that La Châtre has!’ Well, this LA CHÂTRE and our little castrated ones are of the same order: they too, at the end of the Oedipus, have this fine note, which is not nothing, since it is on this fine note that will rest thereafter the fact that they can calmly assume, that is to say, in the happiest case, having a penis, in other words being someone identical to their father.

But it is precisely in this stage, in sum ambiguous, whose two sides you can clearly see are in some way always liable to be reversed one into the other, that there is something in a way abstract, yet dialectical, in the relation between the two times of which I have just spoken to you: the one where the father intervenes as interdictive and privative, and the one, on the other hand, where he intervenes as permissive and donor, but donor at the level of the mother.

Other things can happen. To see what can happen, we must now place ourselves at the level of the mother. At the level of the mother, we must ask ourselves again the question of the paradox represented by this central character of the phallic object, of the imaginary object as such. The mother is a woman whom we suppose has reached the fullness of her capacities for feminine voracity, and it is very clear that the objection made — and quite rightly — to this imaginary function of the phallus is the mother, and this: ‘But the phallus is not purely and simply that; this fine imaginary object she swallowed up some time ago.’

In other words, that the phallus at the level of the mother is not solely a phallic object. It is also, very much so, something that has fulfilled its function then, at the instinctual level, at the level of its function as the normal instrument of instinct. It is, in other words, considered by the mother as the injet, if I may express myself thus with a word that does not simply mean that she introduces it to herself, but that it is introduced to her, and that this ‘in’ also signals this relation of this object to its function at the instinctual level.

It is an object that has its instinctual function. It is because man must traverse the whole forest of the signifier to rejoin these instinctively valid and primitive objects, that we have to deal with this whole dialectic of the Oedipus complex. All the same — still! — he reaches it from time to time, thank God! Otherwise for a long time now things would have died out, for lack of combatants, given the too great difficulty of rejoining the real object. That is one of the possibilities on the side of the mother.

The others, one would have to try — in order to be able to distinguish from there — to see what it means for her, this something that consists then in her relation to the phallus insofar as, as for any human subject, it is dearest to her heart. We can very easily distinguish alongside this injet function the adjet function, that is to say the imaginary belonging of something that is or is not conferred on her as having the permission to desire it as such at the level we have reached. That is to say, as something that, at the imaginary level, is given to her or not given to her, that is lacking to her, and then, intervening
– as lack,
– as something of which she has been deprived,
– as the object of that penisneid, of that always felt privation whose incidence in feminine psychology we know, or on the contrary as that something that is nevertheless given to her from where it is. And you can see that it is another function, that it is something else… even though it can be confused with that of the primitive injet in question, and which can enter on its own into the reckoning in a way, so to speak, very symbolic… and insofar as the woman as such:
– if she has all the difficulties involved in having to introduce herself into the dialectic of the symbol in order to succeed in integrating herself into the human family,
– has on the other hand all the accesses — this is absolutely certain — to that something primitive and instinctual which establishes her in a direct relation to what is the object, no longer there of her desire, but of her need.

Now, let us speak of homosexuals, this being well elucidated. Homosexuals, one speaks of them. Homosexuals, one treats them. Homosexuals, one does not cure them. And the most formidable thing is that one does not cure them, despite the fact that they are absolutely curable. For there is something that emerges in the clearest way from observations, it is that what is called male homosexuality is very properly an inversion as to the object, which is motivated, which is structured at the level of a full and completed Oedipus.

Namely at the level of an Oedipus having reached that third stage we have just spoken about, or more exactly something which, in this third stage, while realizing it, modifies it quite noticeably so that one can say that the male homosexual — the other too, but today we will limit ourselves to the male for reasons of clarity — the male homosexual has fully realized his Oedipus. And you will say to me: ‘We know that well: he has realized it in an inverted form.’

If it is enough for you to say it in that form, you can always stay there, I do not force you to follow me, but I consider that we have the right to have greater requirements than those which consist in saying: ‘Your daughter is mute, it is because the Oedipus is inverted.’ We must seek in the very structure of what the clinic shows us about homosexuals whether we cannot much better understand at what precise point this completion of the Oedipus is situated:
– its position with all its characteristics,
– the fact that he is extremely attached to this position, in the sense that the homosexual, if given the slightest opportunity and ease, is extremely attached to his position as homosexual, that his relations with the female object are far from abolished, but on the contrary very deeply structured.

It is precisely this difficulty of shaking his position but even more so the reason why analysis generally fails then, [this position] being flushed out, not because of an internal impossibility in his position, but precisely because all sorts of conditions are required, of journeying through the detours by which his position has become essentially precious and paramount to him. I believe that only this conception and this way of schematizing the problem allow them to be pinpointed. There are a certain number of traits one can see in the homosexual.

It has been said first: a deep and perpetual relation to the mother. The mother, according to the average of cases, is described to us as someone who, in the parental couple, has a directing function, an eminent function, who took more care of the child than the father — that is already something else — who, we are told, took care of the child in a very castrating way, who took a very, very great, meticulous, overly prolonged care of his upbringing.

There does not seem to be an awareness that in all that, not everything goes in the same direction. One must add a few small additional links to think that the effect of such a castrating intervention, for example, would be in the child this overvaluation of the object — especially in this general form in which it presents itself in the homosexual — that no partner capable of interesting him could be without it.

I do not want to keep you waiting, nor to seem to be posing riddles to you. I believe that the key to the problem concerning the homosexual is this: the homosexual as homosexual, that is to say in all his nuances, accords this prevailing value to the penis object, makes it an absolutely required characteristic of the sexual partner, insofar as in some form it is the mother who — in the sense I have taught you to distinguish — lays down the law to the father.

I told you that the father intervenes in this dialectic of desire — in the Oedipus — insofar as the father lays down the law to the mother. Here, something that can take various forms always comes down to this: that it is the mother who at a decisive moment has laid down the law to the father. What does that mean? You will see, it means very precisely this: that at the moment when, by the intervention of the father, the phase of dissolution concerning the subject’s relation to the object of the mother’s desire should have taken place, that is to say, the fact that the possibility for him to identify with the phallus was completely past, cut at the root by the fact of the father’s interdictive intervention — at that moment, it is in the structure of the mother that he finds the reinforcement, the support, the something that makes it so that this crisis does not take place.

Namely, if you like, that at the ideal moment, at the dialectical time when the mother should be taken as deprived of this adjet as such, that is to say, when the subject literally no longer knows in that respect to which saint to devote himself, at that moment he finds his security.

It holds perfectly, from the fact that he feels that in fact it is the mother who is the key to the situation, that she does not let herself be either deprived or dispossessed. In other words, that the father can always say whatever he wants, that for some reason or other it will not matter to them in the least. This does not mean that the father did not enter into play.

Freud, for a very long time — I ask you to refer to the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ — has said: ‘It is not rare…’ and when he says ‘it is not rare’, he does not express himself by chance: it is not because he is soft that he says ‘it is not rare’, it is because he has frequently seen it. Let us then take it up again: ‘It is frequent — it is one of the possibilities — that an inversion is determined by the fall of a too interdictive father.’

There are in that the two moments: the interdiction, but also that this interdiction has failed. In other words, that it is the mother who, in the end, has laid down the Law. This also explains that in quite different cases, where the mark of this interdictive father is broken, the result is exactly the same, and in particular that in cases where the father loves the mother too much, where he appears by his love as too dependent on the mother, the result is exactly the same.

I am not telling you that the result is always the same, but that in certain cases it is the same. What it is about is not differentiating what happens when, because the father loves the mother too much, it produces another result than homosexuality. I simply note in passing that I am not at all taking refuge in constitution for this occasion, because there are differences to be established, for example on an effect of the obsessive neurosis type, and we will see it on another occasion, but for now I simply want to group different causes that can have a common effect, namely that in cases where the father is too much in love with the mother, he is in fact in the same position of being the one to whom the mother lays down the law.

There are still cases… and this is the interest of taking this perspective, it is to see how it can bring together different cases… cases where the father — the subject testifies to it — has always remained like a kind of very distant figure, whose messages only came through the mother. This is what the subject testifies to.

But in reality, analysis shows that he is far from absent, namely in particular that behind the tension-filled relationship, very often marked by all sorts of accusations, complaints, aggressive manifestations as they are called, concerning the mother, which constitute the text of the analysis of a homosexual, one realizes that the presence of the father as rival, that is to say, in the sense not at all of the inverted Oedipus, but of the normal Oedipus, is discovered, and in the clearest way, and in that case one is content to say that the aggressiveness against the father has been transferred to the mother.

One does not have something completely clear, but one still has the advantage of saying something which at least fits the facts.

What it is a matter of knowing is why it is so. It is so because in a critical position where the father has indeed been a threat to the child, the child has found his solution.

But note that on this schema, it appears to be the same as that which consists in the identification represented by the homology, the similarity of these two triangles. He considered that the way to hold out — because it was the right one, because the mother did not let herself be shaken — was to identify with the mother.

Thus it is very precisely as being in the position of the mother, but thus defined, that he will find himself:
– on the one hand, insofar as he addresses himself to a partner who is then the substitute for the paternal figure, namely, as very frequently appears in the fantasies, the dreams, of homosexuals, that the relation with him will consist in disarming him, in subduing him, even in a very clear way in certain homosexuals, in rendering him incapable, he, the figure substituting for the father, of making himself valued with a woman or with women,
– and on the other hand, that phase which is the homosexual’s requirement to find in his partner the penile organ corresponds very precisely to this, that in the primitive position, that occupied by the mother who lays down the law to the father, what is precisely brought into question — not resolved, but brought into question — is namely whether really the father has it or does not have it.

And it is very precisely that which is demanded by the homosexual from his partner — well before anything else, and in a way prevailing over anything else — it is above all — after that we will see what is to be done with it — but above all: to show that he has it.

I will go even further, I will even point out to you here that the value of dependency represented for the child by the father’s excessive love for the mother consists precisely in this… of which you can remember, and which I hope you do remember… chosen for your benefit, namely: that ‘to love is always to give what one does not have, and not to give what one has.’ I will not go back over the reasons why I gave you this formula, but be certain of it, and take it as a key formula, as a little railing which, by touching it with your hand, will lead you — even if you understand nothing of it, and it is much better that you understand nothing of it — it will lead you to the right floor. To love is to give to someone — who, himself, has or does not have what is in question, but assuredly — it is to give what one does not have. Giving, on the other hand — it is also giving — but it is giving what one has. That is the difference. In any case, it is insofar as the father shows himself to be truly loving toward the mother that he is suspected of being suspected of not having it. And it is from this angle that the mechanism comes into play. That is indeed why this remark I make to you: truths are never completely obscure nor unknown; when they are not articulated, they are at the very least sensed. I do not know to what extent you have noticed that this burning theme is never addressed by analysts, although it is at least as interesting to know if the father loved the mother as if the mother loved the father. The question is always posed in this sense: the child had a phallic, castrating mother, and whatever else you want, and she had toward the father an authoritarian attitude: lack of love, of respect, etc. But it is very curious to see that we never emphasize the father’s relation to the mother. It is precisely to the extent that we do not quite know what to think of it and where, all things considered, it does not appear to us that we can say anything truly normative concerning this subject. And so we carefully leave aside, at least until today, this aspect of the problem. I will very probably return to it.

Another consequence: there is also something that appears very frequently, and which is not one of the least paradoxes in the analysis of homosexuals; it is something that, at first glance, seems quite paradoxical with respect to this requirement for the penis in the partner. It appears in the clearest way that there is one thing of which they have a mortal fear, and we are told that it is of seeing the woman’s organ because it suggests to them ideas of castration. That may be true, but not in the way one thinks, because what stops them before the woman’s organ is precisely that it is supposed — in many cases one encounters this — to have ingested the father’s phallus, that what is dreaded and feared in penetration is precisely the encounter with this phallus.

There are dreams, of which I will cite some to you, which are well recorded in the literature, and also in my practice, where it appears in the clearest way that, at the point where one can articulate what is involved in the relation with the woman, it is this: that what emerges on occasion in the possible encounter with a female vagina is very precisely a phallus which develops there as such, and which represents that something insurmountable before which the subject must not only stop but meet all his fears, and which gives the danger of the vagina a completely different meaning than that which has been thought fit to be placed under the heading of the toothed vagina, which also exists but which, in comparison to the vagina insofar as it contains the hostile phallus, the paternal phallus, the phallus both phantasmatic, present and absorbed by the mother, of which the mother herself holds the real power, is there precisely in the female organ — this articulating sufficiently all the complexity of the homosexual’s relations with the different terms which in a way […].

And it is precisely because this is, so to speak, a stable situation, not at all dual, a situation full of security, a three-legged situation, and that it is never envisaged other than sustained, so to speak, under the aspect of a dual relation, that never in the labyrinth of the homosexual’s positions — and consequently through the fault of the analyst — does the situation ever come to be entirely elucidated.

In other words, it is to misunderstand that the situation… which of course, while having the closest relations with the mother… has its importance only in relation to the father, in the manner of what should be the message of the Law, is exactly the opposite, that is to say, that something which, ingested or not, is ultimately in the hands of the mother, of which the mother has the key, but in a way, as you can see, much more complex than simply by this global and massive notion that she is the mother endowed with a phallus and that the homosexual is found to be identified with the mother. Not at all insofar as she is purely and simply this something that has or does not have an adjet, but as someone who holds the keys to this particular situation which is the one that is at the outlet of the Oedipus. Namely, this point where it is judged which of the two, in the end, holds the power, not just any power, but very precisely the power of love, and insofar as the complex links of the construction of the Oedipus, such as they are presented to you here, allow you to understand how this relation to the power of the Law corresponds, resounds metaphorically with the relation to the phantasmatic object that is the phallus as object to which the identification of the subject as such must at some point be made.

Next time I will continue with something which here imposes itself as a small annex, namely the commentary on what has been called ‘the states of passivity of the phallus’ — the term is Loewenstein’s — to account for certain troubles of sexual potency. This fits here too naturally for me not to do it.

Then I will take up again, in a general way, how we can, through these different avatars of the same object — from the beginning, namely its function as imaginary object of the mother, up to the moment when it is assumed by the subject — how we can sketch out the definitive classification of the different forms in which it intervenes. That is what we will do next time, that is to say on the 5th of the following month.

And the following time, the 12th, after which I will leave you for 15 days, we will conclude with this, which will then concern, in a way that may perhaps interest you less directly but to which I attach great importance, the relation of the subject to the phallus. I ended my last term on what I brought you concerning comedy. This was not very well digested, when I told you that the essential of comedy was when the subject took the whole dialectical affair in hand and said: ‘After all, this whole dramatic affair, tragedy, the conflicts between the father and the mother, all that is not worth love, and now let us enjoy ourselves, let us enter into the orgy, let us put an end to all these conflicts.’

All the same, all that is made for man, for the subject. I was very surprised to have caught some people who were scandalized. I will confide something to you: it is in Hegel. On the other hand, what I will be able to bring that is new, and which seems to me much more demonstrative than anything that could have been elaborated by the various phenomenologies of the spirit, is that in taking this path, one finds a surprising confirmation of what we are advancing, namely the crucial character for the subject and for his development of the imaginary identification with the phallus.

And it is therefore there, on that last day of this period, that I give you an appointment to show you:
– to what extent this applies,
– to what extent it is demonstrative,
– to what extent it is sensational,
…to give a key, a single term, a univocal explanation to the function of comedy.

Precisely, this phallus as a fundamental function with which the subject identifies himself imaginarily is completely evaded in order to be reduced to the notion of partial object, which is absolutely not, in Freud’s economy, its original function. This phallus will bring us back at the same time to something that has not been quite understood, at least to what I thought I heard, at the end of my discourse last time, namely comedy.

I will leave you today on this theme. I simply wanted, to conclude, to show you in what direction and in what path this complex discourse, by which I try to bring together all the things we have said, connects and holds together.