🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

Ernest JONES:

– ‘The phallic phase’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XIV, 1933, in Papers on Psychoanalysis, Baillière-Tindall and Cox 1950, pp.452-484.

– ‘Die phallische Phase’ Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse XIX 1933, trans.: ‘La phase phallique’, in La Psychanalyse, No.7, 1964, p.271-312, or ‘Le stade phallique’ in ‘Théorie et pratique de la psychanalyse’, Payot, Paris, 1969.

Hanns SACHS:

– ‘Zur Genese der Perversionen’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1923, IX.

Otto RANK:

– ‘Perversion und Neurose’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1922, VIII, Heft 4, pp.397-420. English trans., ‘Perversion and Neurosis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1923, IV.

This is related to FREUD’s initial article on the theoretical development of analytic thought on neuroses in what followed ‘A Child is Being Beaten’. This article is the signal given by FREUD for a reversal or a step forward in his own thought, and at the same time for everything that followed concerning the study of perversion. You will see that, if one looks closely at what is happening at that moment, the best formulation one can give of it is that which allows only the register of which I am trying here to show you the essential instance in the formation of symptoms, that is, the intervention of the notion of the signifier.

It appears clearly, as soon as FREUD showed it, that in perversion instinct, the drive has absolutely no right to be promoted or declared as more bare, so to speak, in perversion than in neurosis. The whole article by Hanns SACHS, which is so remarkable on the genesis of perversions, is meant to show that in all the so-called perverse formations, whatever they may be, there is exactly the same structure of compromise, elision, dialectic of the repressed and the return of the repressed, as there is in neurosis.

This is the essential point of the article, in which he gives absolutely convincing examples. There is always in perversion something that the subject does not want to acknowledge, with everything that this ‘does not want’ involves in our language: something that is conceived as being articulated there, and yet, not only fundamentally misrecognized by the subject, but repressed for reasons that are essentially reasons of articulation. This is the spring of the analytic mechanism, which would mean that if the subject recognized it, he would at the same time be forced to recognize a series of other things, which are properly intolerable to him.

This is the resource of repression, repression being conceivable only insofar as it is linked to an articulated chain of signifiers. Each time you have repression in neurosis, it is because the subject does not want to recognize something which would necessitate… and this term ‘necessitate’ always involves an element of signifying articulation that is absolutely inconceivable except in a coherence of discourse […]

For perversion, it is exactly the same thing. This is what, in 1923, following FREUD’s article, all psychoanalysts realize: that perversion essentially, if one looks closely at it, involves exactly the same mechanisms of elision of something that is fundamental to it, that is part of the subject’s relations with a certain number of essential terms which are indeed the fundamental terms we find in the analysis of neuroses, which are the Oedipal terms. If there is nonetheless a difference in something, this difference deserves to be examined extremely closely. It could in no case be satisfied with so summary an opposition as the one that would say that:

– in neurosis the drive is avoided,
– and that in perversion it is admitted naked.

The drive appears, but it only ever appears partially. It appears in something which, in relation to instinct, is quite striking – it appears as a detached element, a sign, strictly speaking, and let us go so far as to say, a signifier of the instinct. This is why last time, on leaving you, I insisted for example on the instrumental element found in a whole series of so-called perverse fantasies, to limit ourselves for the moment to those, because it is appropriate to start from the concrete and not from a certain general idea that we may have of what is called ‘instinctual economy’ of an aggressive tension or not, of its reflections, returns, refractions.

It is not always this that will account for the prevalence of certain elements whose character is really, not only emergent, but strictly speaking isolated in the prevalent, insistent, predominant form that these perversions take in the form of fantasies, that is to say, in the form by which they involve an imaginary satisfaction.

Why these elements which have this privileged place – I spoke last time of the shoe, I also spoke of the whip – can we not link them purely and simply to something that would arise from a kind of pure and simple biological economy of instinct? The prevailing character of these isolated elements, of these instrumental elements which there take an all-too-evidently symbolic form for them to be an unrecognized instinct, as soon as one approaches the lived reality of perversion, and this constancy through the transformations over the course of the subject’s life, shows the evolution of perversion.

This constancy of a term which is always found – a point on which Hanns SACHS also insists – is indeed something that should further underline for us the necessity of admitting as a final, irreducible element, one whose place in the subjective economy we must see, but an element which must be retained as primary, as essential, namely, this signifying element in perversion.

Indeed, it is starting from a fantasy isolated by FREUD in a group of eight patients… six girls and two boys with fairly nuanced neurotic forms, not all of them neuroses, but a statistically quite significant proportion …it is from the systematic and extremely careful study, followed step by step, with a scruple which is precisely what distinguishes above all these investigations by FREUD himself when it is he who carries them out, it is through these subjects, as diverse as they may be, by means of the search for transformations of the economy through the stages – which are the stages of the Oedipus complex – of a certain fantasy: this fantasy ‘A child is being beaten’, that FREUD begins fully to articulate what will later develop as the proper moment of investigation of perversions in his thought, and I insist on this, which will always show us more and more the importance in this economy of something which is, strictly speaking and as such, the play of the signifier.

I can only, in passing, point out one thing: I do not know if you have noticed that FREUD’s last writings, one of his last articles: ‘Constructions in Analysis’ shows the central importance of the notion of the subject’s relation to the signifier as being absolutely fundamental for conceiving everything we can bring together – and it is one of the last articles FREUD ever wrote – of what the mechanism of remembering as such represents in analysis, which is essentially bound as such to the chain of signifiers.

This is fully established in this article, and the last article by FREUD that we have, the one that, in Collected Papers, was translated under the title of ‘Splitting of the Ego’, which I translate as ‘Division or Splitting of the Ego in the Mechanism of the Analytic Symptom’, the one about which it can be said that FREUD remained working on it until the pen fell from his hand, this unfinished article, the last work he bequeaths to us, closely binds everything of the economy of the ego with this dialectic of perverse recognition, so to speak – of a certain theme to which the subject is confronted – closely binds, in an indissoluble knot, the function of the ego and the imaginary relation as such in the subject’s relations to reality, and insofar as this imaginary relation is used and integrated into the mechanism of the signifier.

Let us now take the fantasy ‘A child is being beaten’. FREUD dwells on the subject of what this fantasy means in which seems absorbed, if not the entirety, at least an important part of the subject’s libidinal satisfactions. He insists: he saw it in the vast majority among female subjects, less among male subjects, and it is not just any sadistic or perverse fantasy, it is those that culminate and fix themselves under this form, the theme of which the subject first gives very reluctantly.

It seems that a fairly strong charge of guilt is linked for the subject to the very communication of this theme which, once he has revealed it, given it, cannot be articulated by him differently or otherwise than by ‘A child is being beaten’. ‘Is being beaten’ means that for the subject, it is not he who beats, he is there as spectator.

FREUD begins by analyzing the thing as it occurs in the imagination of girls, in female subjects who have had to reveal this to him. It is a character who, when considered in his overall characteristics, can be regarded as belonging to the series, the lineage, of the ‘figure of authority’. It is not the father. It is, on occasion, a schoolteacher, an all-powerful figure, a king, a tyrant. Sometimes, it is highly romanticized: one recognizes, not the father, but something which is in some way equivalent to him for us.

We will very easily be able to situate it, and this really allows us to situate it straightaway in the completed form of the fantasy, to avoid contenting ourselves with this kind of homology with the father, to avoid assimilating it to the father, to place it at a certain point which is this beyond-the-father, to situate it somewhere in this category of the Name-of-the-Father which we take care to distinguish from the incidences of the real father.

It is about several children, a kind of group, a crowd, and they are always boys. This raises problems! And indeed enough of them that I cannot even think of covering them today. I simply ask you to refer to FREUD’s article […] itself, published in the old Revue Française de Psychanalyse, vol. 6, no. 3-4.

That it should always ultimately be boys who are beaten, that is, subjects of a sex opposite to that of the subject of the fantasy, is something on which one can speculate indefinitely, trying to relate it at once to themes such as sexual rivalry, for example. This is what FREUD ends his article on, to show the apparent justifications for the profound incompatibility of theories, such as that of ADLER, to explain such a result.

It is certainly not on that point that we will enter here, FREUD’s argument being amply sufficient, and that is not what constitutes our essential interest. What constitutes our interest is the way in which FREUD proceeds to tackle the problem. He gives us the result of his analyses, and he begins by speaking of what happens in the girl for the necessities of exposition, in order not to have constantly to make double openings, alternatives: this in the girl, this in the boy.

Then afterwards he takes – for which, moreover, he has less material – what happens in the boy. What does he tell us? He notes consistencies. He reports these consistencies to us. What seems essential to him is the avatar of this fantasy… I mean the transformations that analytic investigation, the antecedents too that analytic investigation allows to be given to this fantasy – in short, the history of this fantasy, the underlying elements of this fantasy …and there he recognizes in it a certain number of states in which something changes, something remains constant.

It is a matter of drawing a lesson from this, of seeing what, for us, this kind of result of this meticulous investigation – which bears the same mark of precision and insistence, of return, of working through his material until he has really detached what appear to him to be the irreducible articulations, which constitutes the originality of almost everything FREUD wrote – can represent.

But for us especially, what we see in the Five Great Psychoanalyses, in that admirable Wolf Man where he constantly returns to this same theme which is to seek strictly the part of what can be called the symbolic origin and the real origin of what is the primitive chain in the subject’s history, is exactly that. There too, he detaches three stages, three times: a first stage, he tells us, which is always found on this occasion among girls, which is this: the child who is beaten, at a certain point in the analysis, always reveals, he tells us, its existence and its true face: it is a sibling, that is, a brother or a sister. So it is a little brother or a little sister that the father beats. The meaning of this, FREUD tells us, is placed very clearly on two planes.

What is the meaning, he tells us, of this fantasy? It is quite striking to see under FREUD’s pen at this moment this assertion that there is something there of which we cannot say whether it is something sexual, something sadistic. It is, he tells us – evoking here, as he does, a literary reference: that of an answer by one of the witches in Macbeth to BANQUO – it is something made of the same stuff from which both – the sexual and the sadistic – come. We are indeed here in what… in an article which will appear shortly afterwards: ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ …FREUD defines for us as truly linked to this first stage where we must conceive that there is somewhere… this is absolutely necessitated by the point we have reached, we are in 1923, that is, after Beyond the Pleasure Principle …as this point where we must think that there is primitively, at least for an important part, fusion of the instincts, binding of the libidinal instincts, the life instincts with the death instincts and that this fusion is something whose primitive state we must admit, so that we are led to conceive instinctual evolution as involving a more or less early parting of this instinct. That it is to the precocity of the separation of this instinct, of the isolation for example of the death instinct, that we must attribute certain prevalences or certain arrests in the subject’s evolution.

But at the same time FREUD emphasizes that it is at the archaic level that the meaning of this primitive fantasy is situated. It is insofar as on the part of the father… there is no higher stage of the fantasy, I mean an earlier archaic stage …it is insofar as on the part of the father it is refused, denied to this child… to the little brother or the little sister who, in the fantasy, suffers the father’s abuse …it is insofar as there is denunciation of the love relationship, humiliation, that this subject is targeted, in this fantasy, in his existence as subject, that he is the object of abuse and that this abuse consists in denying him as a subject, in reducing to nothing his existence as desiring, in reducing him to something which, as subject, tends to abolish him.

That is the meaning of the primitive fantasy: My father does not love him, and that is what pleases the subject, the fact that the other is not loved, that is to say, is not established in the relationship which is properly symbolic. It is through this nerve, through this angle, that the father’s intervention here takes on its value for the subject, the first, essential one, on which everything else will depend.

The second stage, FREUD tells us… and this is no less important to consider than the articulation of the first stage, this first stage being found in analysis, the other, he tells us, is never found there …must be reconstructed.

What I emphasize and what I ask you to dwell on is the enormity of FREUD’s deduction, FREUD’s assertion, because this is what is important. It is not simply a matter of letting ourselves be led, of following him with our eyes more or less closed, it is of realizing the scope of what he says: this second stage must be reconstructed. Let us not stop for the moment to know whether it is legitimate or not.

It is very important for us to realize what FREUD does, and what he tells us to do, thanks to which all his construction can continue. This second stage is this: the fantasy which is thus born in this triangular relationship, which, I repeat to you, must be considered archaic, primitive and yet is not between the subject and the mother and the child, but between the subject–child, little brother or little sister – and the father. We are before the Oedipus, and yet the father is there.

The second stage is linked to the relation of the Oedipus as such – I say for the little girl – and to this meaning of a privileged relation of the little girl with her father. It is she who is beaten, and around this: the convergence of the analytic material which necessitates reconstructing this state of the fantasy, but this fantasy never emerged, FREUD tells us, in memory. On the other hand, the moment, in the little girl, of the desire to be the object of her father’s desire, with what this involves in guilt, FREUD admits that it may be the guilty return of this Oedipal desire which necessitates that she make herself, in this fantasy reconstructed only, the object of punishment.

FREUD also speaks here of regression, that is to say, that insofar as this message cannot be found in the subject’s memory, insofar as it is repressed, a correlative mechanism which he calls here regression, may make it so that it is to this earlier relationship that the subject resorts to express, in a fantasy which is never brought to light, this relationship that the subject has at that moment with the father, a frankly libidinal relationship, already structured in the Oedipal mode.

In a third stage, and after the exit from the Oedipus, nothing will remain other than this general schema in which a new transformation will have been introduced, which is twofold: the figure of the father is surpassed, transposed, referred to the general form of the character who can beat, who is in a position to beat, an omnipotent and despotic character, and the subject himself will there be presented in the form of these multiplied children who are no longer even of his own sex, who are a kind of neutral series of children.

Something which is in a certain way maintained, fixed, memorized, one could say, in this final form of the fantasy, is that something which will thereafter remain for the subject invested with the property of constituting the privileged image upon which what the subject can properly experience as genital satisfactions will find its base, its support. This, it seems, is something which nonetheless deserves our pause and our reflection. What, in the schema, can the terms whose first usage I have tried to teach you here come to represent?

I return to my imaginary triangle and my symbolic triangle. The entire first dialectic of the symbolization of the child’s relation to the mother is essentially made for what is signifiable, that is to say for what interests us. There are other things beyond: there is indeed the object which the mother may present as being the bearer of the breast, and the one who can bring certain immediate satisfactions to the child.

But if there were only that, there would be no kind of development nor dialectic of relation of the subject to the mother, nor any opening in the structure. Thereafter, the subject’s relation to the mother is not simply made up of a relation of satisfaction or frustration:
– it is made of this discovery of what is the object of the mother’s desire, it is essential to all understanding, and all that I will tell you afterwards will be made to demonstrate it.
– it is made first of a recognition of what is the mother’s desire.

It is insofar as… in a way which, for the entire analytic history, for theory as for practice …there is a problem of knowing why, at this privileged point of what constitutes the object of the mother’s desire… that is to say the world of the signified as it presents itself from the subject, from the one who has to constitute himself in his human adventure, from that little child of whom we spoke, from the discovery he has to make …it is of the privileged function, in what for the mother signifies her desire, of the privileged function of the phallus.

When you read JONES’s article on the Phallic Phase, you will see the unfathomable difficulties which arise from this assertion of FREUD, that for both sexes there is an absolutely original, essential stage which is closely linked to their sexual development, this stage where, for one as for the other sex, the theme of the other as desiring other is absolutely linked to the possession of the phallus. This is what cannot literally be understood within a certain register by almost all the people around FREUD, even though they contort themselves to make it fit nonetheless, because the facts impose it upon them in their articulation of something of the history of what happens in the subject.

It is for lack of understanding that what FREUD posits there is a pivotal signifier around which revolves the whole dialectic of what the subject must conquer of himself, of his own being, whereby, for lack of understanding that this is a signifier and nothing else, the commentators exhaust themselves in finding again… in the form of a thousand traces which, of course, correspond to their various experiences …something which is its equivalent, namely the reality against which somewhere the subject defends himself in the form of this belief in the phallus, and of course, in this connection, they gather a host of extremely valid facts, but never make of them more than a case or a particular path which still does not explain why this privileged, special element is taken as the center and pivot of the defense.

If you read particularly what JONES gives as the function of this belief in the phallus in the development of the boy, you will see that what he does in this regard is very specifically what happens at the level of the development of the homosexual: that is to say, far from being the general development. It is here a matter of the most general form indeed, and this most general form is conceivable only insofar as one gives to this phallus the function… Allow me a formula which will seem to you quite audacious, but we will never have to return to it if you will agree to admit it for the moment, in its compact form, for its operational use: I have told you that in a certain way within the signifying system, the Name-of-the-Father has the function of the whole signifying system, that which signifies, which authorizes the signifying system to exist, which makes it the law.

I will tell you that frequently in the signifying system, we must consider that the phallus comes into play from the moment when the subject has to symbolize as such—in this opposition of signifier to signified—the signified, that is to say the meaning. What matters to the subject, what he desires, desire as desired, the desired of the subject, when the neurotic or the pervert has to symbolize it, in the final analysis, it is literally with the help of the phallus. The signifier of the signified in general is the phallus.

This is essential:
– if you start from there, you will understand many things,
– if you do not start from there you will understand many fewer, and you will be forced to make considerable detours to understand exceedingly simple things.

This phallus is already that which comes into play as such from the subject’s first approach to the mother’s desire. This phallus is veiled and will remain veiled until the end of time for a simple reason: it is a final signifier in the relation of the signifier to the signified. There is in fact little chance that in the end it will be unveiled otherwise than under its nature as a signifier, that is to say that it will never really reveal itself, itself, except as signifier, it signifies.

Nevertheless we arrive at this: think of what happens in this case, which is precisely that envisaged by FREUD and which we have not considered until now, if at this place there intervenes something much less easy to articulate, to symbolize than anything imaginary, that is to say at this first phase which is indeed the one designated for us by FREUD: a real subject.

The mother’s desire here is no longer simply the object of an enigmatic search where the subject, in the course of his development, has to trace this sign, the phallus, so that afterwards of course this phallus enters into the dance of the symbolic, that is to say is afterwards the precise object of castration, then is returned to him in another form, that is to say does what at first it is a question of it being. It is, but we are here at the very origin, we are at the moment when he is confronted with the imaginary place where the mother’s desire is situated, and this place is occupied.

We cannot speak of everything at once, and besides it was very fortunate that we did not think immediately of that. If we had thought immediately of that, of this role which we all know is of decisive importance in the triggering of neuroses… it suffices to have the slightest experience in analysis to know how much the appearance of a little brother or a little sister has a truly pivotal role in the evolution of whatever neurosis …only, if we stop first there, it has for us exactly the same effect in our thought as it has for the subject in his neurosis, that is to say that if we stop immediately in this relation of reality, it completely masks for us the function of this relation.

Namely that it is insofar as this relation comes to the place of what requires a completely different development, a development of symbolization, and that this complicates it and necessitates a completely different solution. This is why this relation to the brother or to the little sister, to any rival, takes on its decisive value. Now here, what do we see in the case of the phantasmatic solution linked to the fantasy, in this so-called masochistic occasion? We see something whose nature FREUD has articulated for us: this subject is abolished on the symbolic plane.

It is insofar as he is a nothing at all, as he is something to which one refuses all consideration as subject, that the child finds in this particular case the fantasy of flogging. It is in this respect, and insofar as the child will succeed in this solution of the problem at this level.

We need only limit ourselves to the case where it is like this, but to understand what happens in the case where it is like this. It is indeed a symbolic act that is involved, and FREUD emphasizes it well: what happens in this child happens to the subject himself, who believes himself someone in the family. A single slap, FREUD tells us, often suffices to precipitate him from the summit of his omnipotence.

It is indeed a symbolic act, and I will say that the very form which comes into play in the fantasy, namely the whip, the rod, has something which carries within itself the character and the nature of I know not what thing which, on the symbolic plane, is expressed by a line, by something which bars the subject.

It is before being anything else, a […], any […], something which can be attributed to a sort of physical relation of the subject with the one who suffers, it is above all something which strikes him out, which bars him, which abolishes him, that something signifying intervenes.

This is so true that when the child later – all this is in FREUD’s article, I am following it line by line – actually encounters the act of beating, namely when at school he sees before him a child beaten, FREUD says, and this simply from the text of his experience of the same subjects from whom he extracted the history of this fantasy, he does not find it funny at all. I mean that it inspires in him something of the order of imagination – it is badly translated into French – that is to say an aversion, a turning away of the head.

[Da die Phantasievorstellung, ein Kind wird geschlagen, regelmäßig mit hoher Lust besetzt war und in einen Akt lustvoller autœrotischer Befriedigung auslief, könnte man erwarten, daß auch das Zuschauen, wie ein anderes Kind in der Schule geschlagen wurde, eine Quelle ähnlichen Genusses gewesen sei. Allein dies war nie der Fall. Das Miterleben realer Schlageszenen in der Schule rief beim zuschauenden Kinde ein eigentümlich aufgeregtes, wahrscheinlich gemischtes Gefühl hervor, an dem die Ablehnung einen großen Anteil hatte.]

[Since the fantasy of a child being beaten was regularly filled with great pleasure and resulted in an act of pleasurable auto-enhancement, one might expect that watching another child being beaten at school would also have been a source of similar pleasure. However, this was never the case. Witnessing real scenes of beating at school evoked in the watching child a peculiarly excited, probably mixed, feeling, in which rejection played a large part.]

The subject is forced to endure it, but he has nothing to do with it, he keeps his distance. The subject is far from participating in what really happens when he is confronted with an actual scene of flogging. And equally in fantasies – FREUD also comes to this and indicates it very precisely – the pleasure of this fantasy is manifestly linked to its unserious, inoperative character: that it does not infringe upon the subject’s integrity, so to speak, real, nor physical. It is indeed its symbolic character as such which is eroticized, and this from the origin.

The second time… and this has its importance for the valorization of this schema which I introduced to you last time …is this: this fantasy, in the second time, will take on a completely different value, and this is indeed the enigma, which is the whole enigma. It is the essence of masochism. It is in the change of meaning of this fantasy as such, namely how this something which served to deny love, is this very something which will serve to signify it.

When it is the subject, there is no way out of this impasse, and I am not telling you that this is something easy to grasp as explained, as unfolded. We must first hold ourselves to the fact, namely that it is so, and afterwards try to understand why it can be so.

In other words, why the introduction of this radical signifier which divides into two things:
– a message: ‘the beaten child’, the subject receives the news, the little rival is a beaten child, that is to say a nothing at all, something on which one can sit
– and then, from that, a signifier which must be isolated as such, namely: with what one does that.

The fundamental character in this actual existence of the masochistic fantasy in the existing subject is not I know what kind of reconstruction, ideal model of instinctual evolution. The fundamental character is the existence of the whip, it is something which in itself deserves to hold our attention so that we make of it something which is a signifier, which is something which in the series of our hieroglyphs, deserves to have a privileged place for a simple reason: first, if you look at the hieroglyphs, you will see that it has a privileged place: he who holds the whip has always been the director, the governator, the master.

And it is about this, it is about not losing sight of this, that this exists, and that we are dealing with this. This, in the second time, thus manifests in its duplicity also the message, but a message ‘My father beats me’ which does not reach the subject. This is how we must understand what FREUD says at this moment, the message which at one moment wanted to say: ‘The rival does not exist, he is nothing at all’ is the same which wants to say: ‘You, you exist, and moreover you are loved’.

This is what serves at that moment, in the regressive or repressed form, but no matter, it is still what serves as a message, but a message which does not reach. It is appropriate to dwell on this enigmatic time, because, as FREUD tells us: it is the whole essence of masochism.

And from the moment when FREUD tackled, fundamentally attacked the problem of masochism as such, that is to say Beyond the Pleasure Principle, from the moment when he sought what was the radical value of masochism, of this masochism which he encounters as an opposition and a radical enemy, he was forced to posit it in various terms, and we find here something where it is certainly not for nothing that three years after having done Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he says that there lies the whole essence of masochism.

It is worth our stopping there. Even if we went about it step by step, we must begin by seeing the paradox, and by seeing where it is. We thus have here the message, the one which does not reach the place of the subject, and the only thing which remains as a sign on the other hand is the material of the signifier, this object, the whip, itself, remains.

It remains as a sign until the end and to the point – remaining as a sign – of becoming the pivot, I would almost say the model of the relation with the desire of the other, since afterwards the final fantasy, the one which remains – whose character of generality is indicated to us well enough by the indefinite multiplication at that moment of the subjects – means this, namely: my relation with the other, the others, the little others, with the little a, my relation with those, insofar as this relation is a libidinal relation, is linked to this, that human beings are as such all under the whip, that for the human being, to enter into the world of desire is indeed and first of all to undergo from that something which exists beyond – whether we call it the father here no longer matters, it does not matter – it is the Law. This is what, in a given subject, doubtless entering into the matter by particular paths, defines how a certain line of evolution is defined, and what is the function of the terminal fantasy: to manifest an essential relation of the subject to the signifier.

And now let us go a little further and recall what FREUD brings us concerning masochism. Let us recall what constitutes what Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduces as new in the evolution of Freudian thought. It rests essentially on this observation: that if we consider the mode of resistance or inertia of the subject to a certain curative, normative, normalizing intervention, we are led to articulate in an absolute way the pleasure principle as this tendency of all that is life to return to the inanimate. The ultimate spring of libidinal evolution is to return to the rest of stones.

This is what FREUD – to the greatest scandal moreover of all those for whom the notion of libido had until then made the law of their thought – brings, and which presents itself at once as paradoxically new, even scandalous when it is expressed as I have just done, presenting itself moreover only as a sort of extension of what had been given as the very law of the pleasure principle, namely pleasure being characterized by the return to zero of tension. There is indeed no more radical return to zero than death. Simply you can notice at the same time that here it is this formulation that we give to the ultimate principle of pleasure.

We are nonetheless forced to call it a Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to distinguish it. This is one of the most singular problems of his life and of his person: FREUD had a relation to women, on which perhaps one day we will have the opportunity to return, a rather deplorable tendency to receive [opinions, advice, suggestions?] from the feminine constellation which he had around him in sum, in the continuators or the helpers of his thought, a constellation which moreover is quite in conformity with his own existence, therefore very deprived of women or depriving himself of them.

We know hardly more than two women for FREUD: his wife and then this sister-in-law [Minna Bernays] who lived in the shadow of the couple. We really have no trace of anything else which is a properly amorous relation. On the other hand it suffices that a person like Barbara LOW propose a term – I dare say – as poorly adapted as the term ‘Nirvana principle’, for FREUD to give it his sanction.

The relation there is between Nirvana and this notion of return to inanimate nature is somewhat approximate, and FREUD was content with it. Let us be content with it also… If the Nirvana principle is thus the rule and the very law of vital evolution as such, FREUD recognizes it, there must then be somewhere a trick so that, at least from time to time, it is not the fall of pleasure which gives pleasure, but on the contrary its rise.

It is thus here that he expresses himself. He says this: ‘We are absolutely unable to say why.’ It must be something like a temporary rhythm, a sort of fitness of terms. He lets appear on the horizon the possibilities of resorting to explanations which, if they could be given, would certainly not be vague, but in any case very far from our reach, finally, it is rather in the sense of music, of the harmony of the spheres and of pulsations.

In any case, we must notice that we must nonetheless, from the moment when we have admitted that the pleasure principle is to return to death, that actual pleasure, the one with which we are concretely concerned, therefore necessitates another order of explanations which can only be in some trick of life, namely to make the subjects believe, so to speak, that it is indeed for their pleasure that they are there, that is to say that we return to the most banal philosophical commonplace, namely that the veil of Maya keeps us alive only thanks to the fact that it deceives us.

And then, beyond that, the possibility – to attain either this pleasure, or pleasures – of making all sorts of detours by the reality principle. This is Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and FREUD needs nothing less than that to modify, to justify the existence

of what he calls the negative therapeutic reaction.

But nonetheless here we must stop for a moment, because after all the negative therapeutic reaction does not occur at the level of a kind of atony reaction of the subject, it manifests itself through all sorts of extraordinarily troublesome, burdensome and articulated things, of crises which he causes for us and for his entourage.

In other words, this process still appears to be one of the best outcomes, as far as what has happened to the being is concerned. That on which the Oedipal drama ended is something articulated. I would say that at the moment when OEDIPUS finally articulates it as the term and the conclusion of his tragedy, when he gives us the meaning where the whole tragic adventure ultimately comes to its culmination, it is still something which, far from abolishing him, eternalizes him, for the simple reason that if OEDIPUS had not been able to pronounce it, he would not be the supreme hero that he is, and it is precisely inasmuch as he finally articulates it that he is this hero, that is to say inasmuch as he endures, to put it plainly.

What is at stake in what FREUD reveals to us as the Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that there is perhaps indeed this final term of the aspiration to rest and to eternal death. But I would point out to you—and this was the entire sense of my second year of seminar—that what we are dealing with here is inasmuch as this lets itself be recognized: that it is articulated in the last resistances with which we are confronted in those subjects more or less characterized by the fact of having been unwanted children:
– in this irresistible tendency to suicide,
– in this quite specific character of the negative therapeutic reaction.

This is due to the fact that the more clearly what should bring them closer to their history as subjects is articulated for them, the more they refuse to enter into the game; they literally want to get out of it. They do not accept being what they are; they do not want this chain of signifiers into which they were admitted by their mother only reluctantly.

But this is something which is present for us analysts only inasmuch as it is exactly what it is elsewhere: it is there not merely as a desire for recognition, but as the recognition of a desire—something articulated. The signifier is its essential dimension, and the more the subject affirms himself through the signifier as wanting to get out of it, the more he re-enters and integrates into this chain of signifiers and becomes himself a sign of this chain of signifiers. If he abolishes himself, he is more of a sign than ever, for the simple reason that it is precisely from the moment when the subject is dead that he becomes an eternal sign for others, and suicides more than others. This is exactly why suicide has both
– this “horrific beauty” which makes it so terribly condemned by men,
– and this contagious beauty which causes epidemics of suicide to be among the most evident and real phenomena in experience.

Once again, then, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, what FREUD emphasizes is the desire for recognition as such, as the basis of what constitutes our relation to the subject. And after all, is there even anything else in what FREUD calls Beyond the Pleasure Principle, namely this fundamental relation of the subject to the chain of signifiers? Because if you think about it carefully, at the point we have reached, this idea appeals to a supposed inertia of inanimate nature to give us the model of what life aspired to. I mean that as for a model of what life would aspire to—and this is something that ought to make us smile a little—as for a model of return to nothingness, nothing is less assured.

And FREUD himself, moreover, at one point, in a very small parenthesis that I ask you to find in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” when he recalls his own Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates it to us: insofar as inanimate nature is that something which is indeed conceivable as the return to the lowest level of tension and of rest. Indeed, at the point we have reached, we know a little something about this: this supposed view, which would be the reduction to nothing of that something which arose and which would be life—nothing indicates to us that in this, too, so to speak, nothing stirs, and that the pain of being which is there at the bottom, I am not bringing it up, I am not extrapolating it. It is indicated by FREUD as being that something which must be considered as the ultimate residue of the linking of Θάνατος [Thanatos] with Ἔρως [Eros].

Without any doubt, Θάνατος [Thanatos] finds a way to free itself through the subject’s motor aggressivity toward what surrounds him. Nature is there, but there is something which remains well bound to its interior; this pain of being is something which seems to him truly fundamental, as linked to the very existence of the living being. Nothing proves to us that this pain of being is something that stops with the living, given all we know of a nature that is fermenting, stagnant, seething, animated, even explosive, far more than we could have imagined until now. But the relation of the subject to the signifier, insofar as he is asked to constitute himself in the signifier and from time to time refuses it, saying “No, I will not be an element of the chain,” this, on the other hand, is something we can put our finger on, and which is indeed the basis—but the basis, the reverse, here, is exactly the same as the front.

For what is he doing at each instant when he in some way refuses to pay a debt he has not contracted? He does nothing other than perpetuate it! Namely, through his successive refusals to cause the chain of that debt to rebound, he is ever more bound to this chain of signifiers. It is indeed through the eternal necessity of repeating the same refusal that FREUD shows us the ultimate role of all that, in the unconscious, manifests itself in the form of symptomatic reproduction. We see here, then—and nothing less than this is needed to understand—that from the moment when the signifier is introduced, its value is fundamentally double.

I mean how the subject can, inasmuch as himself, feel himself affected as desire, because after all, here it is he, it is not the Other, the Other with the whip, and he is abolished, but “he” in contact with the imaginary and, of course, signifying whip, he feels, as desire, repelled by that which as such consecrates and valorizes him by profaning him. Moreover, there is always in the masochistic fantasy this degrading side, this profanatory side which at the same time indicates the dimension of recognition. And this mode of relation with the forbidden subject, relation with the paternal subject, is precisely what forms the basis of the unrecognized part of the subject’s fantasy.

Let us note that this will have this radically double-sided character of the signifier, from the moment it is introduced, and here again facilitated in the subject’s access by the fact that I have not brought into play until now in the schema—so as to spare your little heads—something which last time caused frightful complications from the moment I introduced the parallel line i→m, namely the existence, at a given moment, of the proper body image with the subject’s ego.

It is nevertheless quite certain that we cannot ignore it, namely that of course this rival here did not intervene purely and simply in a triangular relation: the radical obstacle to the mother, of that something which in the text—the Confessions of Saint AUGUSTINE—provokes in the young infant, on seeing his milk-brother at the mother’s breast, that deadly pallor of which Saint AUGUSTINE speaks.

There is indeed something radical, truly deadly for the subject, which is well expressed in this passage, but there is also the term of identification with the other. In other words, the fundamentally ambiguous character which binds the subject to any image of the other forms here the completely natural introduction for the subject. This introduction to the rival’s place, to the same place where afterwards, to him—insofar as it is he who is there—from that moment on the same message will reach him with a completely opposite meaning, simply because it is the message.

What we will then see is this, which makes us better understand what is at stake: it is that insofar as part of the relation comes to be linked to the subject’s ego as such, the subsequent fantasies can take on their organization and structure. I mean that it is not for nothing that it is here, in this dimension—the one which is the whole range of intermediaries where reality is constituted between the primitive maternal object and the image of the subject—that all these others are situated inasmuch as they are the support of the significant object, that is to say of the whip.

At that moment the fantasy in its meaning, I mean the fantasy as the beaten child, insofar as it from then on becomes the relation to the Other, with the Other from whom it is a question of being loved, while in sum he himself is not recognized as such, is situated somewhere there in the symbolic dimension between the father and the mother, between whom moreover he effectively oscillates.

I have taken you today along a path that was no less difficult than the one I led you along last time. Wait to check its value and validity for what I will be able to tell you about it afterwards. To end with something which can introduce a small suggestive note in the applications of these terms, I will point out to you this: it is as if it were commonplace in analysis that the relation of man to woman, and of woman to man especially, is a relation of which it is said, without more, that it involves on the part of the woman a certain masochism. This represents one of those types of characteristic perspective errors to which we are constantly led by I know not what slippage into a kind of confusion or rut in our experience.

It is not because masochists manifest in their relations to their partner certain signs or fantasies of a typically feminine position that, conversely, the relation of woman to man is a masochistic relation. I mean by this that the notion of the relations of woman to man as those of someone who receives blows is something that may well be a perspective of the male subject, insofar as the feminine position interests him.

But it is not because the male subject, in certain perspectives—whether his own or those of his clinical experience—perceives a certain link between the adoption of the feminine position and something which has more or less relation to the signifier of the subject’s position, that it is in fact a radically and constitutively feminine position.

I make this remark to you in passing: with regard to what is called and what FREUD, in that article on the economic problem of masochism, himself introduces under the term feminine masochism, it is extremely important to make a similar correction. I have not at all had time to approach what I had to tell you concerning the relations between the phallus and comedy. I regret this, but I will put it off until our next meeting.