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Symbolization concerns the world. An article appeared in May–June 1956, under the title ‘Symbolism and Its Relationship to the Primary and Secondary Processes’, by Charles RYCROFT, in which he attempts to give a current meaning to the point we have reached in the analysis of symbolism.

Those among you who read English would obviously benefit from reading such an article, since it will show you the difficulties that have always arisen concerning the meaning to be given in analysis to the word symbolism, and I mean, not simply the word itself but the use made of it, the idea one has of the process of symbolism.

It is true that since 1911, when Mr JONES did the first important comprehensive work on the subject, the question has gone through various phases and has encountered, and still encounters, very great difficulties in what currently constitutes the most articulated position on the subject, namely that which comes from Mrs Melanie KLEIN’s considerations on ‘The role of the symbol in ego formation’. This is most closely related to what I am in the process of explaining to you, and I would like to try to make you feel the importance of the viewpoint I am attempting to convey to bring a little clarity into obscure directions.

I do not know from which end I will take it today. I have no plan as to how I will present things to you. I would like—since this is a sort of antepenultimate session, as I announced to you, with the next seminar very precisely focused on the phallus and comedy—today simply to mark a sort of stopping point by showing you some important directions in which what I presented to you at the beginning of this term concerning the castration complex allows us to place question marks. I will then begin by taking the theses as they come. Today, on this subject, one cannot always impose a strict order on something that must above all be considered today as a sort of crossroads.

In this title of Charles RYCROFT, you have just seen appear the primary and secondary process. It is something I have never spoken about before you and indeed, some time ago, certain people were surprised by this. They came across this primary and secondary process in connection with a vocabulary definition, and found themselves a little taken aback.

The primary and secondary process dates from the time of the Traumdeutung, and it is something not completely identical, but which covers the opposed notions of the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Pleasure principle and reality principle, I have more than once alluded to them before you, always to point out that the use made of them is incomplete if they are not brought into relation with one another, that is to say, if one does not feel their connection, their opposition, as constitutive of the position of each of these terms.

I would like right away to get to the heart of what I have just pointed out: the notion of the pleasure principle as a principal element of the primary process, when taken in isolation, leads to this, and it is from here that Charles RYCROFT believes he must start in order to define the primary process.

He believes he must set aside all its structural characteristics, put in the background the fact that one of the constructive elements—namely condensation, displacement, etc.—indeed predominates there, all that FREUD began to address when he defined the unconscious, and he characterizes it fundamentally by what FREUD brings in the final elaboration of this theory concerning the Traumdeutung, namely that the pleasure principle is essentially constituted by this: that there is a mechanism and that originally and principally—whether you understand it from the historical stage point of view or from that of an underlying basis, a foundation on which something else had to develop, a sort of base, of psychic depth, or even whether you understand it in a kind of logical relationship—it is from there that one must start.

There would be, let us say, in the human subject—it obviously seems it could not be a matter of anything else, but the point is not too precisely defined—there would be, in response to instinctual excitation, always the virtual possibility, and in some way as constitutive of the principle of the subject’s position with regard to the world, a tendency to the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire.

I think this will not surprise you: abundantly expressed by all authors, this reference to the fact that, due to a primitive experience and on a model which is that of reflection, every internal excitation of the subject corresponds… before anything corresponds to it in the instinctual cycle, the movement—be it uncoordinated—of appetite, then of search, then of locating in reality what satisfies the need by means of the memory traces of what has already responded to the desire and brought satisfaction… the satisfaction, purely and simply, which tends to reproduce itself at the hallucinatory level.

This, which has become almost consubstantial with our analytic conceptions, we use when needed, I would say almost implicitly, every time we speak of the pleasure principle. Does it not seem to you, to a certain extent, that this is something rather exorbitant that deserves clarification, because after all, if it is in the nature of the cycle of psychic processes to create for itself its own satisfaction, I could ask: why do people not satisfy themselves? Of course, it is because the need continues to insist, because phantasmatic satisfaction could not fill all needs. But we know all too well that in the sexual order, in all cases certainly, it is eminently capable of meeting the need, if it is a matter of instinctual need.

For hunger, it is another matter, and after all it appears on the horizon that it is indeed about this—it is about the possibly illusory character of the sexual object that, in the final analysis, is at issue here. This conception exists and, in a certain way, is indeed motivated by the possibility of maintaining oneself, at least at a certain level, at the level of sexual satisfaction.

It is something that has so deeply permeated all analytic thought that, insofar as this relation of need to its satisfaction—that is to say, the primitive, primordial gratifications or satisfactions, or also frustrations, which are considered decisive at the origin of the subject’s life, namely in the subject’s relations with the mother—has come to the forefront… namely that it is, as a whole, in a dialectic of need and satisfaction that psychoanalysis has more and more entered as it has become more and more interested in the primitive stages of the subject’s development, namely the child’s relation with the mother… one has come to something whose significant nature I would like to point out to you, and at the same time, moreover, its necessary nature.

It is this, in the Kleinian perspective, which is the one I am designating for the moment, namely where all the subject’s learning of reality is in some way primordially prepared and underpinned by the essentially hallucinatory and phantasmatic constitution of the first objects, classified into good and bad objects insofar as they fix in some way a first wholly primordial relation which will give, for the rest of the subject’s life, the main types of modes of the subject’s relation to reality. One arrives at a sort of composition of the subject’s world which is made of a kind of fundamentally unreal relation of the subject with objects that are only the reflection of his fundamental drives. It is around the subject’s fundamental aggressiveness, for example, that everything will be organized into a series of projections of the subject’s needs.

This world of phantasy, as it is used in the Kleinian school, is fundamental, and it is on the surface of this that, through a series of more or less fortunate experiences—it is desirable that they be fortunate enough for this—the world of experience will allow a certain reasonable identification of what in these objects is, as we say, objectively definable as corresponding to a certain reality, the framework of unreality remaining in some way absolutely fundamental. It is, so to speak, this sort of construction, which one can truly call the psychotic construction of the subject, that makes, in short, a normal subject in this perspective a psychosis that has turned out well, a psychosis somehow happily harmonized with experience. And this is not a reconstruction.

The author I am now going to speak about, Mr WINNICOTT, expresses it strictly thus in one of the texts he wrote on the use of regression in analytic therapy. The fundamental homogeneity of psychosis with the normal relation to the world is there absolutely affirmed as such. This does not prevent very great difficulties from arising from this perspective, if only that of conceiving what is—since phantasy is in some way only the underlying framework of the world of reality—the function of phantasy as recognized as such by the subject in adulthood and completed and successful in the constitution of his real world.

It is also the problem that presents itself to every self-respecting Kleinian, that is, to every avowed Kleinian, and also one can say today to almost every analyst, insofar as the register in which he inscribes the subject’s relation to the world becomes more and more exclusively that of a series of learnings of the world, made on the basis of a series of more or less successful experiences of frustration.

I ask you to refer to the text by Mr WINNICOTT, which is found in volume 26 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and which is called Primitive Emotional Development, in order to be able to motivate the emergence, to conceive this world of phantasy insofar as it is consciously lived by the subject and balances his reality, as experience proves.

And it must be noted in his text itself—for those whom this interests—that he relies on a remark whose necessity is clearly felt, so much so that it leads to a quite curious paradox. The emergence of the reality principle, in other words of the recognition of reality from the child’s primordial relations with the maternal object, object of his satisfaction and also of his dissatisfaction, in no way allows us to glimpse how from there could emerge the world of phantasy in its, so to speak, adult form, unless by a device which Mr WINNICOTT perceives, which certainly allows for a fairly coherent development of the theory, but whose paradox I simply want you to glimpse.

It is this: he points out that if fundamentally the satisfaction of hallucinatory need is in the discordance between this satisfaction and what the mother brings to the child, it is in this discordance that there will open the gap in which the child can in some way constitute a first recognition of the object, the object which—despite appearances, so to speak—disappoints.

Then to explain how there can be born, in short, this something to which for the modern psychoanalyst is reduced everything that belongs to the world of phantasy and imagination, namely what in English is called playing, he points out this: suppose that the maternal object arrives to fulfill just in the nick of time: scarcely has the child begun to react to have the breast than the mother brings it to him.

Here Mr WINNICOTT rightly stops and poses the following problem: what allows the child, under these conditions, to distinguish the hallucination, the hallucinatory satisfaction of his desire, from reality? In other words, with this starting point we arrive strictly at expressing the following equation: that originally hallucination is absolutely impossible to distinguish from complete desire. Does it not seem to you that the paradox of this confusion cannot fail to be striking?

In a perspective which rigorously characterizes the primary process as naturally to be satisfied in a hallucinatory manner, we arrive at this:

– the more satisfying reality is, so to speak, the less it constitutes a test of reality,
– and that the origin of the child’s thought of omnipotence is essentially founded on all that may have succeeded in reality.

This can hold in a certain way, but admit that in itself it presents some paradoxical aspect, and that the very necessity of having to resort to something so paradoxical to explain, in short, a pivotal point of the subject’s development is something that calls for reflection, even for questioning. I will right away go to the opposite of what can be presented in the face of this conception, whose consequences you are not unaware of, I think, and which, already as paradoxical as it is—and frankly paradoxical—must also have some consequences.

It certainly has all sorts of consequences. I pointed them out to you last year when I alluded to this same article by Mr WINNICOTT, namely that there is no other effect, in the continuation of his anthropology, than to have him classify in the same order as the phantasmatic aspects of thought almost everything that can be called free speculation. I already told you last year: there is here a complete assimilation of phantasmatic life with everything that belongs, however extraordinarily elaborated speculatively, to what one can call convictions, almost whatever they may be: political, religious, or other.

This is indeed a sort of viewpoint one sees inserted into a sort of Anglo-Saxon humor, in a certain perspective of mutual respect, of tolerance, and also of withdrawal. There are a number of things one speaks of only in quotation marks or which one does not speak of among well-bred people, and yet they are things that matter somewhat since they are part of the inner discourse, which one is far from being able to reduce to […].

But let us leave aside the outcomes of the matter. I simply want to show you what, in the face of this, another conception can pose. First, is it so clear that one can purely and simply call satisfaction what takes place at the hallucinatory level, that is to say, in the different registers where we can in some way incarnate this fundamental thesis of the hallucinatory satisfaction of the subject’s primordial need at the level of the primary process?

On this point, I have several times introduced the problem. One says: ‘Look at the dream’, and one always refers to the child’s dream. It is FREUD himself who points the way here, in the perspective he had explored, namely in showing us the fundamental nature of desire in the dream. He was led to give us purely and simply the example of the child’s dream as the type of hallucinatory satisfaction.

From there, everyone knows that the door is quickly opened. Psychiatrists had long sought to form an idea of the disturbed relations of the subject with reality in desire, for example by relating it to structures analogous to those of the dream. The perspective we introduce here does not allow us to bring any essential modification to this.

I believe it is very important, at the point we have reached and even in the presence of the dead ends and difficulties raised by this conception of a purely imaginary relation of the subject with the world as being at the very principle of the development of his relation to reality, to oppose to it this, whose place I showed you in the little diagram I will not stop using and which is this. I take it again in its simplest form, reminding you—at the risk of seeming to drum it in a little—what it is about: namely here something one can call need, but which I already call desire because there is no original, pure state of need and from the beginning, need is motivated at the level of desire, that is to say, of something which in man is destined to have a certain relation with the signifier.

And that it is in the passage of this desiring intention [discourse] through what is posed for the subject as the signifying chain—whether the signifying chain has already imposed its necessities on his subjectivity, or whether at the very origin he encounters it only in the form of this: that it is already constituted in the mother, that it already imposes on him through the mother its necessity and its barrier.

And you know that here he encounters it first in the form of the Other, and that it results in this barrier in the form of the message where, in this diagram, naturally, it is only a matter of seeing its projection, and where in this diagram the pleasure principle is located. Namely this something which, in certain cases, under certain incidences, gives a primitive trait in the form of the dream—let us say the most primitive, even the most confused one, the one we can see in the dog: one sees that a dog from time to time, when it is asleep, moves its paws, so it must be dreaming, and it may perhaps have a hallucinatory satisfaction of its desire.

How can we conceive them? Likewise, how can we situate them, and precisely in man? I propose this to you, so that at least it exists as a possible term in your mind and that on occasion you realize that it applies in a more satisfactory way: what is a hallucinatory response to need is not the emergence of a phantasmatic reality at the end of the circuit inaugurated by the requirement of need:

– it is the appearance, at the end of this requirement, of this movement which begins to be aroused in the subject towards something which must indeed designate for him some lineament,
– it is the appearance at the end of this of something which, of course, is not without relation to this need, which has a relation with what is called the object, but which fundamentally from, I would say, the origin, has this character of being something which has such a relation with this object that it deserves to be called a signifier. I mean something which essentially has a fundamental relation with the absence of this object, which already has the character of a discrete element of sign.

And FREUD himself can do no other when he articulates this mechanism, this birth of unconscious structures—consult the letter already cited by me: letter 52 to Fliess, at the moment when there begins to take shape for him a model of the psychic apparatus allowing precisely to account for the primary process—he must admit at the origin that this type of mnemonic inscription which will respond hallucinatorily to the manifestation of need is nothing other than this: a sign.

That is to say, something which is characterized not only by a certain relation to the image in the theory of instincts and to that sort of lure which may suffice to awaken the need but not to fulfil it, but something which, as an image, is already situated in a certain relation to other signifiers:
– with the signifier, for example, which is directly opposed to it, which signifies its absence,
– with something already organized as a signifier, already structured in that properly fundamental relation which is the symbolic relation insofar as it appears in this conjunction of a play of presence with absence, of absence with presence, a play itself ordinarily linked to a vocal articulation which already constitutes the appearance of discrete elements of signifiers.

In fact, what we have as experience, what is even produced at the level of the child’s simplest games, is not a satisfaction. In a certain sense, when it is a matter of simple hunger, the need for food, it is something which already presents itself with a character of excess, if I may say so, of exorbitance.

This is precisely what the child has already been denied, such as in the dream of little Anna FREUD: ‘cherries, strawberries, raspberries, custard…’ Everything which has already entered into a properly signifying characteristic since it is already what has been forbidden… and not simply what meets a need, the need for any satisfaction of hunger… which consists in presenting itself in the mode of a feast of things that go precisely beyond the limits of what is the natural object of the satisfaction of the need. This entirely essential trait is found absolutely at all levels, at whatever level you take what presents itself as hallucinatory satisfaction.

And then, conversely, if you take things at the other end: when you are dealing with a delusion where you may be tempted, for want of anything better, for a time, before FREUD, I would say, to seek also for something which would be the correspondence of a kind of desire of the subject, you arrive at it through some glimpses, some oblique flashes, like the one where something may seem to represent the satisfaction of desire. But is it not obvious that the major phenomenon, the most striking, the most massive, the most invasive of all the phenomena of delusion is not just any phenomenon, is not just anything that relates to a kind of reverie of satisfaction of desire?

It is something as definite as verbal hallucination, and before anything else…
– before knowing whether this verbal hallucination takes place at such and such a level,
– whether there is in the subject something like a kind of internal reflection in the form of a psychomotor hallucination, which is exceedingly important to note,
– whether there is projection or something else
…does it not appear from the outset that in the structuring of what presents itself as hallucination, what dominates first, and what should even serve as the first element of classification, is:
– its structure at the level of the signifier,
– that these are phenomena structured at the level of the signifier,
– that the very organization of these hallucinations cannot for even an instant be thought without seeing that the first thing to be brought forward in this phenomenon is that it is a phenomenon of the signifier.

Here then is something which must always remind us that if it is true that one may approach from this angle the characterization of what may be called the pleasure principle, namely the fundamentally unreal satisfaction of desire, the differentiation, the characteristic that the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire exists, is that it is absolutely original, that it presents itself in the domain of the signifier, and that it as such implies a certain locus of the Other, which is not necessarily another person but a certain locus of the Other insofar as it is necessitated by the position of this instance of the signifier. You will notice that in such a perspective, that of this little diagram here:

It is there that we see come into play in this kind of external part, in the end, of the circuit which is constituted by the right-hand part of the diagram, namely, the need, which here is something that manifests itself in the form of a kind of end or tail of the signifying chain, something which of course exists only at the limit, and where nonetheless you will always recognize, each time something reaches that level of the diagram, the characteristic of pleasure as attached to it. If it is to a pleasure that the witticism leads, it is very precisely insofar as the witticism requires that something be realized at the level of the Other, which has this sort of virtual ending toward a sort of beyond of meaning and which nonetheless is something that in itself carries a certain satisfaction. If therefore it is in this external part of the circuit that the pleasure principle in some way finds itself schematized, here likewise it is in this part that the reality principle is.

It is not conceivable otherwise, for the human subject as far as we deal with him in our experience. There is no other apprehension or possible definition of the reality principle for the human subject, insofar as he has to enter it at the level of the secondary process, insofar as the signifier at the origin of his chain indeed comes into play in the human real as an original reality.

There is language, it speaks in the world, and because of this there is a whole series of things, of objects, which are signified, which absolutely would not be so otherwise, I mean if there were not at play, if there were not in the world, the signifier. And the introduction of the subject to whatever reality it may be is absolutely unthinkable through a pure and simple experience of anything whatsoever—be it frustration, discordance, a blow, a burn, whatever you like. There is not a spelling-out step by step of an Umwelt by man, which would thus be explored in as immediate and, so to speak, groping a way, except that for the animal instinct comes to its aid—thank God! Because if the animal had to reconstruct the world, it would not have enough of its whole life to do it.

So why want man, who has instincts far less adapted, to have this experience of the world, so to speak with his hands? The fact that there is the signifier is absolutely essential, and the principal medium of his experience of reality becomes almost reduced to a banality, to a silliness, to say so at this level.

It nonetheless intervenes through the voice. This is quite manifest, naturally, from the teaching he receives, from what the adult’s speech teaches him, but the important margin that FREUD conquers over this experiential element is this: that already, even before the learning of language is elaborated on the motor level, on the auditory level, and on the level of understanding what is told to him, there is already… from the origin, from his first relations with the object, from his first relation with the maternal object insofar as it is that primordial, primitive object on which depends his first survival, subsistence in the world… this object is already introduced as such into the process of symbolization, already plays a role which introduces into the world the existence of the signifier, this at an ultra-early stage. Make no mistake: as soon as the child simply begins to be able to oppose two phonemes, these are already two words, and with two—the one who pronounces them and the one to whom they are addressed, that is, the object, that is, his mother—there are already enough of the four elements to contain virtually in themselves the whole combinatory from which will arise the organization of the signifier.

I will now move to a new and different little diagram, which has moreover already been sketched here, and which will show you what the consequences will be, while you recall what, in the last lesson, I tried to make you feel.

We have said that primordially we had the relation of the child with the mother, and it is true that it is in this axis [I → M] that the first relation of reality is constituted; I mean this reality is non-deducible, and in experience can only be reconstructed with the help of perpetual sleight-of-hand, if one makes its constitution depend solely on the relations of the child’s desire with the object insofar as it satisfies or does not satisfy his desire.

If one can, at the outer limit, find something which answers to this in a certain number of cases of early psychoses, it is always in the end to the so-called depressive phase of the child’s development that one refers whenever one brings in this dialectic. In reality, insofar as this dialectic involves an infinitely more complex further development, it is something quite different, namely that the relation is not simply at the origin: of the child’s desire to the object which satisfies or does not satisfy it, but—thanks to something which is a minimum of thickness, of unreality, given by the first symbolization—a locating, if you like, already triangular, of the child: not in relation to what will bring satisfaction to his need, but in relation to the desire of the maternal subject he faces.

It is this, and only insofar as something is already inaugurated in this dimension here represented along the axis called “the ordinate axis” in mathematical analysis: we have the dimension of the symbol. And because of this it can be conceived that the child, to the extent that he has to locate himself at the place of these two poles… and indeed it is around this that Madame Melanie KLEIN gropes, without being able to give the formula: that it is indeed around a double pole of the mother, she calls her the good and the bad mother… that the child begins to take his position.

It is not the object he situates, it is himself first that he situates, and then he will situate himself at all sorts of points that are there in order to try to reach what is the object of the mother’s desire, to try, himself, to respond to the mother’s desire. This is the essential element, and this could last for an extremely long time. There is, in truth, from that moment on, no kind of dialectic possible. It is here that we must necessarily bring in that it is absolutely impossible to consider the relation of the child to the mother, first because it is impossible to think it and deduce nothing from it.

But it is equally impossible, according to experience, to conceive that the child is in that ambiguous world which the Kleinian analysts, for example, present to us, in which there is no reality other than that of the mother, and which allows them to say that the child’s primitive world is at once suspended from this object and entirely auto-erotic, insofar as the child wants to make no difference there between an inside and an outside for an object to which he is so closely bound that he literally forms with it a closed circle.

In fact, everyone knows—one need only watch a small child live—that the small child is not at all auto-erotic, namely that he normally takes an interest, like any small animal, and a small animal after all rather more intelligent than others, in all sorts of other things in reality. Obviously, not in just anything, but there is nonetheless one to which we attach a certain importance and which—since here the abscissa axis is the axis of reality—presents itself right at the limit of this reality. It is not a phantasy, it is a perception.

I will leave aside this, which is enormous in Kleinian theory. I mean that with her—for she is a woman of genius—one can forgive everything, but with the disciples, especially those well-versed in psychology, with someone like Susan ISAACS, who was a psychologist, it is unforgivable: following Mrs Melanie Klein, she nonetheless arrived at articulating a theory of perception such that there is no way to distinguish perception from introjection in the analytic sense of the term!

I cannot, in passing, point out to you all the dead ends of the Kleinian system; I am trying to give you a model that allows you to articulate more clearly what happens. What happens at the level of the mirror stage? It is that the mirror stage, namely the encounter of the subject with something which is properly a reality and at the same time is not, namely a virtual image playing a quite decisive role in a certain crystallization of the subject which I call Urbild, and which occurs—I put it in parallel with the relation which occurs between the child and the mother. Roughly, this is indeed what it is: the child there conquers the point of support of this thing at the limit of reality which presents itself, so to speak, for him in a perceptive way.

What may, moreover, be called an image, in the sense that this word has, insofar as the image has this property in reality of being that captivating signal which isolates itself in reality, which draws from the subject this capture of a certain libido, of a certain instinct, thanks to which there are indeed a certain number of reference points, of perceptible points in the world, around which the living being more or less organizes its behaviour. For the human being, it seems in the end that this is the only reference point which remains. It plays its role there, and it plays its role precisely insofar as it is, strictly speaking, deceptive and illusory. It is in this that it comes to the aid of an activity which, already, is for the subject—insofar as he has to satisfy the desire of the other—an activity which already presents itself in the aim of deceiving the desire of the other himself.

The child, insofar as he will now constitute himself… As all the jubilant activity of the child before his mirror is at that moment both to conquer himself as something which both exists and does not exist, and in relation to which he locates at once his own movements and also the image of those who accompany him before this mirror, it is around this possibility which is opened to him by a certain privileged experience in reality, which has precisely this privilege of a virtual reality, unrealized and grasped as such, that the child will be able to conquer that something around which will literally be constructed the whole possibility of human reality.

It is not yet that the phallus, insofar as it is that imaginary object with which the child has to identify to satisfy the desire of the mother, can already be situated in its place, but the possibility of such a situation is greatly enriched by this crystallization of the ego in a certain locating, which opens the whole possibility of the imaginary. And what, in sum, are we witnessing?

We are witnessing something which is a double movement through which the experience of reality has introduced, under the form of the image of the body [i], an illusory and deceptive element as the essential foundation of the subject’s locating in relation to reality. And to the full extent of this space, of this margin offered to the child by this experience—the possibility, in a contrary direction, for his first ego identifications to enter into another field which is defined as homologous and inverse to that which is constituted by the triangle miM:

which is this one, the one between mi E, which is the subject insofar as he has to identify himself, to define himself, to conquer himself, to subjectivize himself:

and also the pole of the mother M E m:

And what is that triangle?

And what is that field? And how can this trajectory, which from the Urbild of the ego will allow the child to conquer himself, to identify himself, to progress—how can we define it? What is it made of? It is strictly speaking constituted in this: that this Urbild of the ego, this first conquest or mastery of the self that the child achieves in his experience from the moment he has doubled the real pole in relation to which he has to situate himself, makes him enter into this trapezoid E miM:

insofar as he identifies himself with multiplied elements of signifiers in reality, I mean: where, through all these successive identifications, he himself is, he himself takes on the function, the role of a series of signifiers—understand, of hieroglyphs, of types, of forms and presentations which will punctuate his reality with a certain number of reference points which already make it a reality studded with signifiers.

In other words, what will constitute here the limit is this formation called the ego ideal—you will see why it is important that I situate it to you thus—that is to say, that to which the subject identifies himself in going in the direction of the symbolic, starting from the imaginary locating and, in some way, preformed instinctually from himself to his own body, and insofar as he will engage in a series of signifying identifications in the direction thus defined, as opposed to the imaginary, namely as using the imaginary as signifier.

And the identification called the ego ideal takes place at the paternal level. Why? Precisely in that, at the paternal level, the detachment from the imaginary relation is greater than at the level of the relation to the mother.

This little construction of diagrams one atop the other, these little acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders, that is exactly what it is about: it is insofar as the third figure in this little scaffold, namely the father insofar as he intervenes to forbid, that is, to elevate what is precisely the object of the mother’s desire to the properly symbolic rank—meaning that it is not only an imaginary object but is, in addition, destroyed, forbidden.

It is insofar as he intervenes as a real person, as an ‘I’, to play this function, that this ‘I’ will become something eminently signifying and will serve as the core of the identification which is, in the end, the final, supreme result of the Oedipus complex, the result that makes the formation called the ego ideal relate to the father. And these oppositions of the ego ideal in relation to the object of the mother’s desire are expressed in this diagram in the following way: if the virtual and ideal identification of the subject with the phallus, insofar as it is the object of the mother’s desire, is situated there at the summit of the first triangle of the relation with the mother, it is situated there only virtually—always possible and always threatened.

So threatened that it must indeed be destroyed at a certain moment by the intervention of the pure symbolic principle, represented by the Name-of-the-Father, which is there in a state of veiled presence, but a presence that unveils itself—not gradually, but through a decisive intervention first of all, insofar as it is the forbidding element, and in that precisely this sort of groping search of the subject, which should end, and which in some cases does end, in this exclusive relation of the subject with the mother, not as a pure and simple dependence but as something that manifests itself in all sorts of perversions by a certain essential relation to the phallus, whether the subject assumes it in various forms:
– whether he makes it his fetish,
– or whether we are here at the level of what can be called the primitive root of the perverse relation to the mother.

It is insofar as, in this identification starting from the ego, the subject, who can in a certain phase indeed make a movement of approach, of identification of his ego with the phallus, is essentially carried in the other direction, that is, constitutes a certain relation which is marked by the terminal points expressed there in a certain relation to the image of his own body—that is, to the pure and simple imaginary, namely the mother.

On the other hand, as a real term, his ego, insofar as it is capable, not simply of recognizing itself but, having recognized itself, of making itself into a signifying element and no longer simply an imaginary element in its relation to the mother, these successive identifications of which FREUD, in his theory of the ego, articulates for us in the firmest way, can then occur. This is the object of his theory of the ego: to show us that the ego is made up of a series of identifications—refer to the diagram—of a series of identifications to an object which is beyond the immediate object, which is the father insofar as he is beyond the mother.

This diagram is essential to keep in mind because it also shows that for this to occur properly, completely, and in the right direction, there must be a certain relation between its direction, its straightness, its accidents, and the ever-growing development of the father’s presence in the dialectic of the child’s relation with the mother. This diagram, with its double rocking movement—namely that reality is conquered by the human subject insofar as it reaches certain of these limits in the virtual form of the image of the body, and correspondingly, that it is insofar as the subject introduces into his field of experience the unreal elements of the signifier that he is able to enlarge, to the extent that it is for the human subject, the field of this experience.

This is of constant use, and without referring to it you will find yourself perpetually sliding into a series of confusions which consist in taking bladders for lanterns, an idealization for an identification, an illusion for an image— all sorts of things that are far from equivalent and to which we shall have to return later, with reference to this diagram.

It is quite clear, for example, that the conception we may have of the phenomenon of delusion is something that should be easily indicated by the structure established, promoted, manifested in this diagram, insofar as we always see in delusion something which certainly deserves the term regressive, but not in the sense of a kind of reproduction of an earlier state, which would really be quite an abuse.

To confuse with this phenomenon the notion that the child lives in a world of delusion, for example, which seems to be implied by the Kleinian conception, is one of the most difficult things to accept, for the good reason that this psychotic phase, if it is necessitated by the premises of Kleinian articulation, finds no kind of experiential counterpart in the child of anything that would represent a transient psychotic state.

On the other hand, it is quite conceivable, at the level of a regression that is structural and not genetic, and which the diagram allows us to illustrate precisely by an inverse movement to that described here by the two arrows, to see the invasion into the world of objects of the body image which is so manifest—I am speaking of delusions of the Schreberian type—and inversely here, that something which gathers around the ego all the phenomena of the signifier, to the point that the subject is no longer, in a way, supported as an ego except by this continuous fabric of signifying verbal hallucinations which at that moment constitutes a sort of retreat to an initial position in the genesis of his world, of reality.

Let us see, in sum, what our aim has been today. Our aim is to situate definitively the meaning of the question we pose concerning the object. The question of the object, for us analysts, is fundamentally this—because we have constant experience of it, we have nothing else to do but deal with it—what is the source and genesis of the illusory object? The question is whether we can form for ourselves an adequate conception of this object as illusory, simply by referring to the categories of the imaginary. I answer no, this is impossible.

Because the illusory object—and this because it has been known for an exceedingly long time, since there have been people who think and philosophers who try to express what is in everyone’s experience—everyone knows that the illusory object has long been spoken of: it is the veil of Maya.

This is why it appears that a need such as what is called the sexual need manifestly realizes aims that are beyond, so to speak, anything that is within the subject. One did not wait for FREUD: already Mr SCHOPENHAUER and many others before him saw in it this ruse of nature that makes the subject think he embraces such and such a woman, while he is purely and simply subject to the necessities of the species.

This side of the fundamentally imaginary character of the object, especially insofar as it is the object of the sexual need, had long been recognized and did not make us take one step in the direction of this problem, which is nevertheless the essential problem. Why does this same need, which would supposedly be made up of what, crudely, apparently seems indeed to be in nature realized by the character of the lure, by the fact that the subject is sensitive only to the image of the female of his species—this roughly speaking—why does that not make us take one step toward understanding that, for man, a little woman’s shoe can quite precisely be what provokes in him this upsurge of energy supposedly destined for the reproduction of the species? The problem lies there.

The problem lies there, and the problem is soluble only insofar as you realize that the object in question, insofar as it is an illusory object, plays its function in the human subject not as an image—however deceptive, however well organized naturally as a lure you suppose it to be—but as a signifying element in a signifying chain. I shall return to this.

We have come today to the end of a lesson perhaps especially abstract. I ask your pardon for that, but if we do not establish these terms, we will never be able to understand:
– what is here and what is there,
– what I say and what I do not say,
– what I say to contradict others and what others say quite innocently without realizing their contradictions.

We must indeed go through this, through the function played by this or that object, fetish or not, but even simply any instrumentation of a perversion. One really has to have one’s head I know not where to be content with terms like masochism or sadism, for example, which naturally provide all sorts of admirable considerations about stages, instincts, about the fact that there is I know not what aggressive motor need necessitated by the fact of being able simply to reach the goal of genital embrace.

But after all, why is it that in this sadism and in this masochism the fact of being beaten—there are other ways of exercising sadism and masochism—the fact of being beaten very precisely with a cane, or anything analogous, plays an essential role? And to minimize the importance in human sexuality of this particular instrument, commonly called the whip, in a more or less elided, symbolic, generalized way, is still something that deserves some consideration.

Mr Aldous HUXLEY depicts for us the future world where everything will be so well organized in regard to the reproductive instinct [“1984”] that they will simply put little fetuses in bottles after having selected those destined to have been provided with the best seeds. Everything is going very well, and the world becomes something so particularly satisfying that Mr Aldous HUXLEY, because of his personal preferences, declares it fundamentally boring.

We take no side, but what is interesting is that an author who indulges in these kinds of anticipations, to which we attach no sort of importance ourselves, makes the world he knows, and we know too, reappear through the intermediary of a girl who manifests her need to be whipped. It seems to him without a doubt that there is here something closely linked to the human character of the world.

It is simply this that I want to point out to you. I want to point out to you that what is accessible to a novelist, and to someone who without a doubt has experience of sexual life, is nonetheless also something which, for us analysts, should give us pause, namely that if the whole turning point, for example, in the history of perversion in analysis, that is, the moment when one moved beyond the notion that perversion is purely and simply the drive that emerges—that is, the contrary of neurosis—one waited for the conductor’s signal, that is, the moment when FREUD wrote ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’.

And that it is around this study of absolute sublimity—because obviously everything said afterwards is only the small change of what is contained there—it is around the analysis of this whipping fantasy that FREUD at that moment truly brought perversion into its proper analytic dialectic: where it appears to be not the manifestation of a pure and simple drive, but to be attached to a dialectical context as subtle, as composite, as rich in compromise, as ambiguous as a neurosis.

It is starting precisely from something which will not classify perversion in a category of the instinct of our tendencies, but in something which articulates it precisely in its detail, in its material and—let us say the word—in its signifier. Whenever, moreover, you are dealing with a perversion, there is something corresponding to a sort of misrecognition of what you have before you if you do not see how fundamentally perversion is bound to a kind of fabric of fabrication which is moreover essentially liable to be transformed, to be modified, to be developed, to be enriched.

This is even the whole history of perversion. The fact that perversion, moreover, is linked in certain cases in the closest way—I mean clinically, in experience—to the appearance, the disappearance, the whole compensatory movement of a phobia, which itself obviously shows the obverse and reverse, but in a very different sense, in the sense that two articulated systems compose and compensate for each other and alternate with each other. This is also something that is well made to have us articulate the drive in a completely different domain than the pure and simple one of tendency. It is on this, on the accent of signifier to which the elements, the material of perversion itself respond, that I particularly draw your attention, since for the moment it is a matter of signifying what is at issue regarding the object.

What does all this mean? It means that we have an object, a primordial object which, without a doubt, continues to dominate the rest of the subject’s life. We also have, without a doubt and certainly, certain imaginary elements which play the crystallizing role, and particularly all that involves the material of the bodily apparatus: the limbs and the subject’s reference to the mastery of his limbs, the total image.

But the fact that the object is taken up in a function which is that of the signifier, and which makes it so that, in this relation constituted by the existence of a signifying chain such as we symbolize it by a series of S, S’, S”…and that beneath it there is this series of significations which makes it so that, just as the upper chain progresses in a certain direction, the something which, in the significations—or beneath them—progresses in the opposite direction, is a signification which always slips, slides away and eludes, which makes it so that, in the end, the basic relation of man to all signification, by the very existence of the signifier, is an object of a special type.

S, S’, S”…
s, s’, s”…

This object I call the metonymic object. I tell you that its principle, insofar as the subject has a relation to it, is that insofar as the subject identifies himself imaginarily in a wholly radical way, not with this or that of its functions as object which would correspond to this or that partial tendency, as they say, but that there is something that necessitates that there be there, somewhere, a pole—namely, in the imaginary, something which represents what always eludes, namely what is induced by a certain current of flight of the object in the imaginary, by the very existence of the signifier. This object has a name; it is the pivot, it is central in the whole dialectic of perversions, neuroses, and even, purely and simply, of all subjective development. It is called the phallus, and this is what I shall illustrate for you next time.