🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

You know what we are trying to do here: namely, within these difficulties and these dead ends, within these contradictions that are the fabric of your practice—it is the least presupposition of our work that you notice it—to try to bring you back, again and again, to the point where these impasses and these difficulties can at once appear to you in their true scope, and where in fact you evade them by referring yourself to those partial theories, indeed to those sleights of hand, those slippages of meaning in the very terms you use, which are also the site of all alibis.

Last time we spoke of desire and jouissance, I would like to show you today, by moving forward within the very text of what FREUD contributes at one point through his observation, the difficulties this poses for those who follow, and the way in which, in trying to get a closer grip on things, moreover starting from certain preconceived requirements, something emerges that goes further in the direction of difficulty, and how perhaps we can take a third step. It concerns FREUD, namely, with respect to the phallic position in the woman, or more exactly what he calls the phallic phase.

I recall what we have reached, what we have emphasized, what is meant by what in our last three or four sessions we have begun to articulate, this desire which as such and explicitly is placed at the heart of the mediation of the analytic experience; we have formulated it here as to gather up, to concentrate, what we have called a ‘signified demand’.

Here are two terms that make but one, equally:
– ‘I demand’
– and ‘I signify to you my demand,’ as one says: ‘I signify to you an order,’ ‘I signify to you a ruling.’
This ‘demand’ therefore implies:
– the other, the one of whom it is required,
– but also the one for whom this demand has a meaning, an Other who—among other dimensions—has that of being the place where this signifier has its scope.

This we already know. The second term of ‘signified demand,’ in the sense in which I signify something to you, I signify to you my will, that is where the important point lies to which we have especially directed our thought. Now this ‘signified’ implies in the subject the structuring action of constituted signifiers, in relation to need, in relation to this desire, in an essential alteration: with respect to need, this alteration is constituted by the entry of desire into demand.

I pause for a moment to make a parenthesis. Up to now, and for a reason of time and economy, we have left aside this year—when nonetheless we are speaking of the formations of the unconscious—the dream. You know the essential point of FREUD’s assertion concerning the dream: the dream expresses a desire. But ultimately, we have not even begun to ask ourselves what this desire of the dream is, whether this desire of which we speak—and there is more than one in the dream—are the desires of the day that provide the occasion for it, the material; and everyone knows that what matters to us is unconscious desire.

This unconscious desire—why, in sum, did FREUD recognize it in the dream? In the name of what? In what is it recognized? There is apparently, manifestly, nothing in the dream that corresponds to that by which a desire manifests itself grammatically. There is no dream text, except apparently—that is to say, requiring to be translated—into a deeper articulation. But at the level of this articulation which is masked, which is latent, what distinguishes, what highlights what the dream articulates? Of course, nothing, apparently.

Observe that ultimately, in the dream, what FREUD recognizes as desire:
– it is indeed by what I am telling you, namely by the alteration of need that this makes itself known,
– it is insofar as what is, at bottom, masked is articulated in something that transforms it.
What transforms it into what? Into this: that it passes through a certain number of modes, of images that are there as signifiers.

This therefore necessitates the entry into play of a whole structure which is doubtless the structure of the subject, insofar as a certain number of agencies must operate there. But we recognize this structure of the subject only through the fact that what passes in the dream is subject to the modes and transformations of the signifier, to the structures of metaphor and metonymy, of condensation and displacement.

Here, what gives the law of the expression of desire in the dream is indeed the law of the signifier: it is through an exegesis of what is particularly articulated in a dream that we detect that something which is what, in the end? Something that we suppose wants to make itself recognized, something that participates in a primordial adventure, which is inscribed there and which is articulated if we always refer it to something original that happened in childhood and that has been repressed. It is to that that we ultimately give primacy of meaning in what is articulated in the dream: it is that something there presents itself that is utterly ultimate with respect to the structuration of the subject’s desire.

We can articulate it right away: it is desire, the primordial adventure of what took place around a desire which is the infantile desire, its essential desire which is the desire of the desire of the Other, or the desire to be desired. It is what has been marked, inscribed in the subject around this adventure, which remains there, permanent, underlying, and which gives the last word to what in the dream interests us as an unconscious desire, which expresses itself through what? Through the mask of what will have occasionally provided the dream with its material, with something that here is signified to us through the particular conditions that the law of the signifier always imposes upon desire.

What I am trying to teach you here is to substitute for everything in theory that is more or less confused because always partial—namely for the mechanics, the economy of gratifications, cares, fixations, aggressions—this fundamental notion of the primordial dependence of the subject with respect to the desire of the Other, of what has always been structured by the intermediary of that mechanism which makes the subject’s desire already as such modeled by the conditions of demand, inscribed, as the subject’s history unfolds, into his structure: the vicissitudes, the avatars of the constitution of this desire, insofar as it is subjected to the law of the desire of the Other, make, so to speak, of the subject’s most profound desire, of that which remains suspended in the unconscious, the sum, the integral, we would say, of that capital D, of that desire of the Other.

It is only this that can give meaning to the evolution of analysis as you know it, which has ended up placing so much emphasis on this primordial relation to the mother to the point of seeming to elude the entire subsequent dialectic, indeed the Oedipal dialectic. There is something that goes at once in a right direction and that formulates it beside the point: it is not only frustration as such—that is to say, a more or less of the real that is given or has not been given to the subject—that is the important point; it is that in which the subject has aimed, has located that desire of the Other which is the desire of the mother. And with respect to that desire, it is to have him recognized or pass, to have offered himself to become, with respect to something that is an x of desire in the mother, to become, or not, the one who answers, to become, or not, the being desired.

This is essential, for to neglect it while approaching it, to penetrate as closely as possible, by avenues of approach as accessible as possible, into what is happening in the child—you know, Melanie KLEIN discovered many things—but to formulate it simply, so to speak, in the confrontation, the face-off of the subject, the child, with the maternal person, leads her to this sort of truly specular, mirror relation which makes the body, so to speak—for this is already very striking, it is in the foreground—the maternal body become in a way the enclosure and the housing of what can be localized there, projected there from the child’s drives, these drives themselves being motivated by the aggression of a fundamental disappointment.

And in the end, in this dialectic nothing can get us out of a mechanism of illusory projection, of a construction of the world starting from a sort of autogenesis of primordial phantasms. The genesis of the outside as the place of the ‘bad’ remains purely artificial and subjects, as it were, every subsequent accession to reality to a pure dialectic of fantasy.

It is necessary to introduce, to complete this Kleinian dialectic, this notion that the outside for the subject is given first:
– not as something that is projected from the inside of the subject, from his drives,
– but as the place, the locus where the desire of the Other is situated, and where the subject has to go to meet it.

This is essential, and it is the only path by which we can find the solution to the aporias engendered by this Kleinian way, which has shown itself so fruitful in many respects, but which ends up making vanish, completely eluding, or reconstructing, in a way that is, as it were, implicit when it itself does not notice it, but equally illicit because unwarranted, that the primordial dialectic of desire as FREUD discovered it, the Freudian dialectic, is in a third relation, brings into play a beyond of the mother, indeed, through her, the presence of the desired or rival personage, but the third personage who is the father.

Ultimately, it is here that the schema I was trying to give you is justified when I told you that it is necessary to posit the fundamental symbolic triad, namely the mother, the child, and the father, insofar as the absence or presence of the mother offers the child—here posited as a symbolic term, it is not the subject simply by the introduction of the signifying dimension—offers the child, by the sole introduction of the signifier, of the symbolic term, the fact that the child will be or not be a wanted child.

And this third term, essential, which is, as it were:
– that which permits all this or forbids it,
– that which is posited beyond this absence or presence of the mother as meaning, signifying presence,
– that which allows it to manifest itself or not,
…it is with respect to this that as soon as the signifying order comes into play, the subject has to situate himself.

The subject, for his part, he extends his concrete and real life, of course in something that already comprises desires in the imaginary sense…
– in the sense of capture,
– in the sense in which images fascinate him,
– in the sense in which, with respect to these images, he has to feel himself as ego, as center, as master or as dominated
…this imaginary relation in which, as you know, in man the image of the self, the image of the body, plays with a primordial accent and comes, as it were, to dominate everything.

Of course this electivity of the image in man is something profoundly linked to the fact that he is open to this dialectic of the signifier of which we were speaking. There, the reduction, so to speak, of the captivating image to this central, fundamental image of the image of the body is not unrelated to this fundamental relation of the subject to the signifying triad. But this relation to the signifying triad introduces this third term for the subject, this third term by which the subject, beyond this dual relation, this relation of captivation to the image, the subject, if I may say so, demands to be signified.

This is why there are also, on the plane of the imaginary, three poles—as in the minimal constitution of the symbolic field—beyond ego and my image. By the fact that I have to enter into the conditions of the signifier, there is a point, something that must mark that my desire must be signified insofar as it necessarily passes through a demand that I signify on the symbolic plane.

There is, in other terms, the requirement of a general symbol of this margin that always separates me from my desire, which makes my desire always marked by this alteration by entry into the signifier. There is a general symbol of this margin, of this fundamental lack necessary to introduce my desire into the signifier, to make of it the desire with which I have to deal in the analytic dialectic. This symbol is that by which the signified is designated insofar as it is always an altered signified, indeed a signified beside the point. That is what we note in the schema I am giving you:

This is in the subject at the level of the imaginary:
– here his image [i],
– here the point [m] where the ego is constituted,
– here I locate for you the letter ϕ, insofar as it is the phallus.

It is impossible to deduce the constitutive function of the phallus, as signifier, in the whole dialectic of the introduction of the subject to his sheer existence and to his sexual position, if we do not make of it this: that it is the fundamental signifier by which the subject’s desire has to have itself recognized as such, whether it be a man or whether it be a woman.

This translates into the fact that, whatever the desire, it must have in the subject this reference that it is the subject’s desire, no doubt, but insofar as
– the subject himself has received his signification,
– the subject, in his power as subject, must hold this power from a sign, and that this sign he obtains only by mutilating himself of something by the lack of which everything will have its value.

This is not something deduced; it is given by analytic experience; this is the essential of FREUD’s discovery. This is what makes FREUD, writing in 1931 ‘Über die weibliche Sexualität,’ assert to us this something…
– which, doubtless at first blush, is problematic,
– which, doubtless, is insufficient,
– which, doubtless, calls for an elaboration
…which calls forth the responses of all the psychoanalysts, first the women: Helene DEUTSCH, Karen HORNEY and many others, and Melanie KLEIN, and Josine MÜLLER; and thereupon, summarizing all that and articulating it in a way that seems more or less compatible with FREUD’s articulation, JONES responds.

That is what we are going to examine today. Let us take the question at the point where it is most paradoxical. The paradox presents itself first, so to speak, on the plane of a sort of natural observation. It is as a naturalist that FREUD tells us:

‘What my experience shows me is that in the woman too, and not only in the man, this phallus is at the center of libidinal development.’

As regards the man, he has shown us, in conformity with the general formula I was trying to give you a moment ago:

– that entry into the dialectic is going to allow him to take his place, to take rank in this transmission of human types which will allow him in turn to become the father,

– that nothing will be realized without what I just called this ‘fundamental mutilation’ whereby the phallus will become the signifier of power, the signifier, the scepter, but also that something thanks to which this virility can be assumed.

Of course, up to that point we have understood FREUD. But he goes further and shows us how at the center of the feminine dialectic the same phallus appears. Here something seems to gape open, insofar as up to now it has been in terms of struggle, of biological rivalry, that we have been able, at a pinch, to understand the introduction of the man by the castration complex into his accession to the quality of man.

In the woman, this assuredly presents a paradox, and FREUD first tells it to us purely and simply as a fact of observation: which there too appears to coincide with something that would thus present itself as everything that is observed, as forming part of nature, as natural. It is indeed thus that he seems to present things to us when he tells us that the girl, like the boy, first desires the mother.

Let us state things as they are written: there is only one way to desire; the girl first believes herself provided with a phallus, as she also believes her mother provided with a phallus. And this is what it means that the natural evolution of the drives:
– makes it so that, from transfer to transfer through the instinctual phases, it is toward something that has the form of the breast by the intermediary of a certain number of other forms,
– ends up in this phallic fantasy whereby, in the final analysis, it is in a masculine position that the girl presents herself with respect to the mother, and something complex, more complex for her than for the boy, must intervene for her to recognize her feminine position.

She is supposed—though by nothing that is in principle—she is supposed, in FREUD’s articulation, to lack at the outset this recognition of the feminine position. It is no small paradox to propose to us something that goes so much against nature, which after all would suggest to us a sort of symmetry with respect to the boy’s position; and someone has spoken of the vagina as a vaginal mouth.

We have observations that allow us even to affirm—and I would say against the Freudian data—that there are primitive lived experiences of which we can find the primordial trace in the young subject, and which show, contrary to the assertion of this primitive misrecognition, that something can be set in motion by aftereffect in the subject—at least it seems so—at the moment of the operation of nursing.

I mean in the little girl still at the breast who shows some emotion, doubtless vague, but of which it is not absolutely unmotivated to relate it to a deep bodily emotion that, doubtless, through memories, it is difficult for us to localize but which would in sum allow the equation, by a series of transmissions, of the mouth of feeding to the vaginal mouth, just as, moreover, in the completed, developed state of femininity, this function of an absorbing or even sucking organ is something identifiable in experience, which would in a certain way provide the continuity whereby, if it were only a migration, so to speak, of the erogenous drive, we would see traced the royal road of the evolution of femininity at the biological level.

And it is indeed this something of which JONES makes himself the advocate and the theoretician when he thinks that it is impossible, for all sorts of reasons of principle, to admit that the evolution of sexuality in the woman would be something destined to that detour and that artificialism which FREUD hypothesizes. He therefore proposes to us a theory that opposes, as it were point by point, what FREUD, for his part, articulates to us as a datum of observation, proposing to us the phallic phase of the little girl as resting on a drive whose natural supports he explains to us and demonstrates to us in two elements:

– the first being that—admitted—of primordial biological bisexuality, but it must be said, purely theoretical, remote, and of which one can very well say with JONES that, after all, it lies quite far from our reach.

– But there is something else: the presence of a rudiment of the phallic organ, the clitoridian organ of the first pleasures, linked in the little girl to clitoridian masturbation and which can, in a certain way, give the rudiment of the phallic fantasy that plays the decisive role FREUD tells us of.

And that is indeed what FREUD does: the phallic phase is a clitoridian phallic phase, the phantasmatic penis is an exaggeration of the little penis that feminine anatomy effectively provides. It is in disappointment, and as it is—the exit engendered by this disappointment—yet, for FREUD, founded in a natural mechanism, that he gives us the mainspring of the little girl’s entry into her feminine position.

And it is at this moment, he tells us, that the Oedipus complex plays the normative role that it must essentially play, but it plays it in the little girl the reverse of the way it does in the boy: the Oedipus complex gives her access to that penis which she lacks by means of the apprehension of the male’s penis:
– either that she discovers it in some companion,
– or that she situates it or likewise discovers it in the father.

It is through the intermediary of the disappointment, the disillusionment of something in her, with respect to this phantasmatic stage of the phallic phase, that the little girl is introduced into the Oedipus complex, as was theorized by one of the first analysts to follow FREUD on this terrain, Mme LAMPL DE GROOT. She very rightly noted it: the little girl enters the complex via the inverted phase of the Oedipus complex; she first presents herself in the Oedipus complex in a relation to the mother, and it is in the failure of this relation to the mother that she finds the relation to the father, with what subsequently will thus be normalized by the equivalence of that penis which she will never possess, with the child that she can indeed have, that she can give in its place.

Let us observe here a certain number of markers with respect to what I have taught you to distinguish: this penisneid which here turns out to be the essential articulation of the woman’s entry into the Oedipal dialectic, this penisneid as such and thus, like castration in the man, is found at the heart of this dialectic which, no doubt, through the criticisms that I will formulate for you subsequently—those brought by JONES—is going to be called into question. And of course, it appears from the outside, when one begins to approach analytic theory, that it presents itself as something artificial. Let us stop for a moment first to underline—as is fitting—what ambiguity there is in the term as it is employed across the various moments of this Oedipal evolution in the girl!

JONES’s discussion points it out, moreover: Penisneid, what is it? There are three modes, through this entry into and exit from the Oedipus complex, that are shown to us by FREUD around the phallic phase:

– There is penisneid in the sense of fantasy, namely this wish, this desire long preserved, sometimes preserved for a lifetime—and FREUD insists quite a bit on the irreducible character of this fantasy when it is the one that remains in the foreground—this fantasy that the clitoris be a penis. This is a first meaning of penisneid.

– There is another meaning: that of penisneid as it intervenes when what is desired is the father’s penis, that is to say this moment when the subject sees in the reality of the penis—where it is, the point where to go and seek its possession—not only that the Oedipus is the forbidden situation, but [also] the physiological impossibility of which the situation, the development of the situation, has frustrated her. Then there is the function of this evolution insofar as it causes to arise in the little girl the fantasy of having a child by the father, that is to say of having this penis under a symbolic form.

It is through the intermediary of disappointment, the disillusionment of something in her, with respect to this phantasmatic stage of the phallic phase, that the little girl is introduced into the Oedipus complex, as was theorized by one of the first analysts to follow FREUD on this terrain, Mme LAMPL DE GROOT. She very rightly noted it: the little girl enters the complex by the inverted phase of the Oedipus complex; she first presents herself in the Oedipus complex in a relation to the mother, and it is in the failure of this relation to the mother that she finds the relation to the father, with what subsequently will thus be normalized by the equivalence of that penis which she will never possess, with the child that she can indeed have, that she can give in its place.

Let us observe here a certain number of markers with respect to what I have taught you to distinguish: this penisneid which here turns out to be the essential articulation of the woman’s entry into the Oedipal dialectic, this penisneid as such and thus, like castration in the man, is found at the heart of this dialectic which, no doubt, through the criticisms that I will formulate for you subsequently—those brought by JONES—is going to be called into question. And of course, it appears from the outside, when one begins to approach analytic theory, that it presents itself as something artificial. Let us pause for a moment first to emphasize, as it is fitting to do: what ambiguity there is in the term as it is employed across the various times of this Oedipal evolution in the girl!

JONES’s discussion points it out, moreover: Penisneid, what is it? There are three modes throughout this entry into and exit from the Oedipus complex that are shown to us by FREUD around the phallic phase:

– There is penisneid in the sense of fantasy, namely this wish, this desire long preserved, sometimes preserved for a lifetime—and FREUD insists quite strongly on the irreducible character of this fantasy when it is the one that remains in the foreground—this fantasy that the clitoris be a penis. This is a first meaning of penisneid.

– There is another meaning: that of penisneid as it intervenes when what is desired is the father’s penis, that is to say this moment when the subject sees in the reality of the penis—where it is, the point where to go and seek possession of it—not only that the Oedipus is the forbidden situation, but [also] the physiological impossibility of which the situation, the development of the situation, has frustrated her. Then there is the function of this evolution insofar as it causes to arise in the little girl the fantasy of having a child by the father, that is to say of having this penis under a symbolic form.

Recall now that with regard to the castration complex I taught you to distinguish among castration, frustration, and privation. Of these three forms, which ones correspond respectively to each of these three terms? I told you:

– A frustration is something imaginary bearing upon a very real object. It is indeed in this that the fact that the little girl does not receive the father’s penis is a frustration.
– A privation is something entirely real, and which bears only upon a symbolic object, namely that when the little girl has no child by the father, in the final analysis it has never been a question that she should have one. She is indeed incapable of having one. The child, moreover, is there only as a symbol, and precisely as the symbol of that of which she is really frustrated, and it is indeed as a privation that this desire for the child by the father intervenes at a moment in the evolution.
– There remains then what corresponds to castration, namely that which symbolically amputates the subject of something imaginary and, on this occasion, a fantasy fits well.

Agent	Lack	Object
Real Father	Symbolic Castration	Imaginary Phallus
Symbolic Mother	Imaginary Frustration	Real Breast
Imaginary Father	Real Privation	Symbolic Phallus

And FREUD is on the right line here when he tells us that the position of the little girl with respect to her clitoris is that at a given moment she must renounce this clitoris that she kept as a matter of hope, namely that sooner or later it would become something as important as a penis.

It is indeed at this level that, structurally, the correspondent of castration is found, if you recall what I thought I ought to articulate when I spoke to you of castration, at the elective point where it manifests itself, that is to say in the boy. One can argue whether in fact everything in the girl turns around the clitoridian drive; one can probe the detours of the Oedipal adventure, as you will now see through JONES’s critique, but we cannot at the outset fail to note the rigor, from the structural point of view, of the point that FREUD designates for us as corresponding to castration: it is indeed something that must be found at the level of what happens, of what can happen as a relation to a fantasy, and insofar as this relation to a fantasy takes signifying value. It is at that point that the symmetric point must be found.

It is now a matter of understanding how this comes about. It is not, of course, because that point is used that it is that point which gives us the whole key to the affair. JONES’s critique apparently gives it to us in FREUD, insofar as FREUD seems to show us there a story of a drive anomaly, and this is indeed what is going to revolt, to cause a certain number of subjects to rise up, precisely in the name of biological preconceptions.

But you will see what, in the very articulation of their objections, they will manage to say. They are forced by the nature of things to articulate a certain number of points, of features which are precisely those that are going to allow us to take the step forward: to understand well what is at issue, to go beyond the theory of the natural drive, to see in effect that the phallus does indeed intervene in what I first told you here, in what I can call the premises of today’s lesson and which is nothing other than the reminder of what we have just circumscribed by other routes, namely that the phallus intervenes here as signifier.

But let us now come to the response, to JONES’s articulation. There are 3 articles by JONES on this:

– one called Early female sexuality, written in 1935, and which we are going to discuss today,
– which had been preceded by the article on The phallic phase, read before the 12th International Congress at Wiesbaden in 1932,
– and finally Early development of female sexuality, read before the 10th Congress in September 1927.

It is to that one that FREUD, in his 1931 article, alludes when he refutes in a few lines—and I must say very disdainfully—the positions taken by JONES. The latter, in ‘The Phallic Phase’, tries to respond and to articulate his position, in sum against FREUD, while striving to remain as close as possible to his letter.

The article on which I am going to rely today, ‘Early female sexuality’, is extremely significant for what we want to demonstrate. It is also the most advanced point of JONES’s articulation. It dates from 1935, four years after FREUD’s article on female sexuality. It was delivered at the request of FEDERN, who at that moment was vice-president or president of the Viennese Society, and it was brought to Vienna to propose to the Viennese circle what JONES straightforwardly formulated as the Londoners’ point of view, that is to say what was already centered around the Kleinian experience.

JONES tells us that one should proceed by the experience that alone stands in opposition, that of the Londoners. And he sets out his oppositions in a way so much sharper that the exposition gains in purity, in clarity, in support for discussion. He makes a certain number of remarks, and there is every interest in dwelling on them while referring back as much as possible to the text. He first points out that experience shows us that it is difficult, when one approaches the child, to grasp this supposed masculine position that would be that of the little girl in the phallic phase with respect to her mother. The further one goes back toward the origin, the more we find ourselves confronted with something that, there, is critical.

I apologize if, in following this text, we are going to find ourselves before a certain number of objects which, with respect to the line that I am trying to draw for you here, appear in positions sometimes a little lateral but which are worth noting for what they reveal.

JONES’s suppositions, I tell you right away, are essentially directed toward something he states clearly at the end of the article: is a woman a being ‘born’—that is to say ‘born’ as such, as a woman—or is she a being ‘made’, ‘manufactured’ as a woman? And it is there that he situates his questioning; it is there that he rises up against the Freudian position. There are two terms that are going to be, as it were, the point toward which his path advances:

– something that issues from a sort of summary of the facts which, in the concrete experience with the child, allows either objection or sometimes also confirmation, but in all cases correction of the Freudian conception.

– But what animates his whole demonstration is this which he poses at the end as a question, a sort of ‘yes or no’ which for him would exclude in an absolutely preclusive way even a possible choice: there cannot be, in his perspective, a position such that half of humanity should be made up of beings who, in a way, would be made, that is to say manufactured in the Oedipal procession.

He does not seem to notice that the Oedipal procession, ultimately, manufactures no fewer—if that is what it is a matter of—men. Nevertheless, the very fact that women enter into it there with a baggage, in sum, that is not their own, seems to him to constitute a sufficient difference from the boy for him to claim something which, in its substance, will consist in saying: it is true that we observe in the woman, in the little girl at a certain moment of her evolution, something that represents this bringing to the foreground, this exigency, this desire which manifests itself under the ambiguous form of penisneid and which for us is so problematic.

But what is it? It is in this that everything he is going to tell us will consist:

– it is a defensive formation,
– it is a detour,
– it is something, he explains, comparable to a phobia.

And the exit from the phallic phase is essentially something that must be conceived as the cure of a phobia which would be, in sum, a very widely spread phobia, a normal phobia, but essentially of the same order and of the same mechanism.

There is something there… you see it, since in sum I am taking the course of leaping to the heart of his demonstration …there is something there which for us is all the same extraordinarily propitious to our reflection, insofar as you perhaps still remember the way in which I tried to articulate for you the function of phobia.

If this is indeed how the little girl’s relationship to the phallus must be conceived, we are certainly getting closer to the concept I am trying to convey to you, namely that it is as a privileged signifying element that the little girl’s relationship to the phallus intervenes in the Oedipus complex.

Does that mean that we are going to rally to JONES’s position on this? Certainly not! If you remember the distinction I made between phobia and fetish, we will say that here the phallus plays rather the role of a fetish than that of a phobic object, but as for this, we will return to it later.

Let us take up JONES’s entry into his critique, its articulation, and say where he starts from, where this phobia is going to be constituted. This phobia for him is a defensive construction against something, against a danger engendered by the child’s primitive drives. Of the child, whom he follows here at the level of the little girl, but who at this level finds herself in the same position and has the same fate as the little boy. But here it concerns the little girl, and he therefore notes that originally the child’s relation—and it was on this that I paused a moment ago in telling you that we would encounter quite singular things—to the mother is a primitive masculine position. He says:

‘Her mother she regards not as a man regards a woman, as a creature whose wishes to receive something it is a pleasure to fulfil.’

She is far from being, as a man is with regard to a woman, ‘as a man regards a woman,’ that is to say, as a creature whose desires one accepts or receives, as a being to whose desires one accedes and for whom it is a pleasure to fulfill them.

It must be acknowledged that bringing to this level so elaborate a position of the relations between man and woman is, to say the least, paradoxical. It is quite certain that when FREUD speaks of the little girl’s masculine position, he in no way refers to this most consummate effect—if indeed it is ever truly attained—of civilization, where the man is there to satisfy all the woman’s desires.

But under the pen of someone who advances in this domain with such naturalistic pretensions at the outset, we cannot fail to note this as bearing witness to one of the difficulties of the terrain, that he should come to stumble at this point in his demonstration—and this is right at the beginning of his demonstration—namely, to oppose to it rather the position of the child and, without any doubt rightly so, not therefore as a man here, but it is a matter of the mother as the child considers her:

‘A person who has been successful in filling herself with just the things the child wants so badly…’

You have recognized there the mother’s pot of milk, as [seen by] the child as described by Melanie KLEIN, namely—I translate JONES:

– ‘as a person who has succeeded…’, [a person who has been successful].

This successful has its full import because it implies in the maternal subject this something—and JONES does not notice it—it implies that, in modeling things on the text of what one finds in the child, it is indeed a desiring being that is at issue: the mother, since she has been fortunate enough to:

– ‘succeed in filling herself, with just the things the child wants so badly…’ [successful in filling herself with just the things the child wants so badly…]

Namely this delightful material of the two kinds of things, solid and liquid.

One cannot fail to recognize what Melanie KLEIN shows us concerning what she calls in her Contributions ‘the ultra-early Oedipus of the child,’ merely in presenting to us the child’s primitive experience. This primitive experience, no doubt one reaches it through a spyglass, but she does so by approaching as close as possible to the place and by analyzing children of three or four years. And we already discover in them a relation to the object that is structured in this form that I have called ‘the empire of the maternal body.’

This field of the ‘maternal empire’, with what it contains inside it… which I have called, by reference to Chinese history, the warring kingdoms …the child produces drawings of it that she shows us.

For then he is capable of drawing by including inside it everything that she identifies as signifiers: the brothers, the sisters, the excrements, everything that cohabits in this maternal body, but with, in addition, what she enables us to distinguish and what indeed the dialectic of the treatment allows one to articulate as being the paternal phallus, namely that something which would already be introduced there as an element at once particularly harmful and particularly rival with respect to this child’s demands of possession regarding the content of this body.

It also seems to us very difficult to see there anything other than data which underscore, which for us deepen, the problematic character of these so-called natural relations: do we not, on the contrary, see them already structured by what I called last time a whole battery of signifiers, showing a relation already established with them and articulated in a way that no natural biological relation could really motivate?

Thus does Melanie KLEIN introduce into the child’s dialectic—namely into what brings the phallus onto the scene at the level of this primitive experience—this reference which is truly given by her as, in a way, read in what the child offers. The proposal remains nonetheless rather astonishing: the introduction of the penis as being a more accessible, more convenient and, in a way, more perfect breast—that is what would have to be admitted as a datum of experience.

Of course, if that is given, it is valid. But it nonetheless remains that it is by no means something, so to speak, that goes without saying, that it is something which precisely in itself allows us to pose the question of what can make this penis effectively more accessible, more convenient, more pleasurable than the primordial breast. That is indeed the question of what this penis signifies, namely of the implication already—by the intermediary of what, that, of course, is what will be put into question—of the already accomplished introduction of the child into a signifying dialectic.

Likewise, moreover, the entire remainder of JONES’s demonstration will only pose this question in an ever more pressing manner, insofar as he explains to us that the little girl, after therefore having had it, possibly… he does not settle the matter, but this is required by the very data of his starting point, and he nonetheless settles it within this simply to tell us that the phallus can intervene only as means and alibi of a kind of defense …he therefore supposes that originally it is in relation to a certain primitive apprehension of her own organ, of her feminine organ, that the little girl finds herself libidinally interested.

But he is going to try to explain to us why it is necessary that this apprehension of her vagina she should repress. He tells us, of course, that it is of a nature to evoke, in the feminine child’s relation to her own sex, a greater anxiety than the relation to his sex evokes in the little boy, because the organ is more internal, more diffuse, more profoundly the proper source of her first movements. The clitoris will therefore not play, he articulates—I am sure he articulates it to show you the necessities implied in what he formulates in a relatively naive way, namely that the clitoris, insofar as it is external, serves only for anxieties to be projected onto it. Moreover, it is more easily an object for reassurance on the part of the subject, who will be able to experience, by her own manipulations, indeed at a pinch by sight, the fact that it is still there. That is what JONES means.

And he will show that subsequently it will always be toward more external objects, namely toward her appearance, toward her clothing, that the woman, in the course of her subsequent evolution, will carry what he calls the need for reassurance. In other words, something in the anxiety is displaced, which makes it possible to temper it by having its object borne upon something that is not the point—precisely for that very reason misrecognized—of its origin.

You see it well, what is at issue is that we find there once again the necessity implied that it should indeed be, says JONES, as something externalizable, representable, that the phallus comes to the foreground as element, as limit-term, as point where the anxiety stops; and of course, that is his dialectic.

We are going to see whether it is sufficient. It is by this dialectic that he admits that the phallic phase must be presented as a phobic position, as something which, for the child, allows, as it were, by centering them on something accessible, to keep at a distance the fears and anxieties of retaliation that her own oral or sadistic desires will have directed toward the inside of the mother’s body and which will immediately appear to her as a danger capable of threatening her herself inside her own body.

Such is the genesis that JONES gives of what he calls ‘the phallic position as phobia’.

It is assuredly as a fantasized, but accessible, externalized organ:
– that the phallus comes into play,
– that subsequently, moreover, it is capable of disappearing again from the scene because the fears linked to hostility can be tempered, likewise displaced elsewhere, onto other objects than the mother, for example,
– that erogeneity and anxiety, insofar as they are linked to the deep organs, can, by the very process of a certain number of masturbatory exercises, likewise be displaced, and that in the final analysis, he says, the relation to the feminine object will become less partial, that it will be able to shift onto other objects,
– that subsequently the, in sum, unnameable anxiety, the original anxiety linked to the feminine organ—which is, in the child, ultimately in the girl child, the counterpart of castration anxieties in the boy—can thereafter turn into the fear of being abandoned which, according to JONES, will become more characteristic of feminine psychology.

What, then, we find ourselves before is this. To resolve it, look at FREUD’s position, the position of an observer which thus presents itself as natural observation: the connection to the phallic phase is of a drive nature, the entry into femininity occurs from a libido which by its nature—let us say, to put things at their exact point and not in the somewhat caricatural critique that JONES makes of it—is active and which will lead to the feminine position insofar as this disappointed position will, by a series of transformations and equivalences, come to make the subject request and accept, from many others besides the paternal figure, this something that will come to fill her desire.

Ultimately, the presupposition—moreover fully articulated by FREUD—is that the primordial childish exigency is, as he says, ‘aimless’. What it demands is everything, and it is through the development of this exigency, moreover impossible to satisfy, that the child gradually enters into a more normative position. There is assuredly there something which, problematic as it may be, contains that opening which will allow us to articulate the problem in the terms of desire and demand, which are those on which I am trying here, myself, to place the emphasis.

To this, JONES replies: here is a natural history, an observation by a naturalist that is not so natural as all that, and I am going to render it more natural for you. He says so formally. The story of the phallic phobia is only a detour in the passage from a position already primordially determined. The woman is born, she is born as such, in a position which already is that of the mouth position, of an absorbing mouth, a sucking mouth, which she will find again after the reduction of her phobia, which is only a simple detour with respect to her primitive position.

What you call phallic drive is purely and simply the artificialism of a phobia described, evoked in the child by her hostility and her aggression toward the mother. There is there, in an essentially instinctual cycle, only a pure detour, and the woman will then re-enter by full right into her position, which is a vaginal position.

To respond to that, I am trying to articulate for you that the phallus is absolutely inconceivable in the Kleinian dynamics, mechanics, unless it is already implied as being the signifier of lack, the signifier of that distance between the subject’s demand and the subject’s desire, which makes it the case that, for this desire to be reached, a certain deduction must be made from this necessary entry into the signifying cycle.

And if the woman must pass by way of this signifier, however paradoxical it may be, it is insofar as what is at issue for her is not simply and purely to realize a kind of primitive given, a purely and simply formal position, but to enter into a dialectic—set aside in the man by the fact of the existence of signifiers, by all the prohibitions that constitute the Oedipal relation—which will make her enter into the cycle of exchanges of alliance and kinship, that is to say make her herself become that object of exchange.

The fact is that what is effectively demonstrated to us by every correct analysis of what structures at the base this Oedipal relation is that the woman must offer herself, or, more exactly, accept herself as an element of this cycle of exchanges. This fact is something that has in itself something infinitely more enormous from the natural point of view than anything we have been able to note up to now of anomalies in her instinctual evolution, and which, on that account, indeed justifies that we should find at the imaginary level, at the level of desire, a sort of representative of it in the roundabout paths by which she herself must enter into it.

What punctuates in her this fact of having to—like the man, moreover—inscribe herself in the world of the signifier, is this need toward a desire, toward something which, as signified, will always have to remain at a certain distance, at a certain margin from anything that could relate to a natural need, insofar as, precisely, for it to be introduced into this dialectic, something of this natural relation must be amputated, must be sacrificed. And to what end? So that precisely this becomes the very signifying element of this introduction into demand.

But something is enough—I will not say surprising, but is going to show us the return of this necessity that I have just told you, observed with all the brutality of this sociological remark founded on all that we know and more recently articulated: the necessity for a part—indeed a half—of humanity to become the signifier of exchange. That is indeed how LÉVI-STRAUSS articulates it in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté and by which women enter into this combinatorics: by the variously arranged laws in the elementary structures—assuredly much more simply but with far more complex effects—in the complex structures of kinship[…]

What we observe in the dialectic of the child’s entry into this system of the signifier is, as it were, the reverse side of this passage of the woman as signifying object in what we can call, with quotation marks, ‘the social dialectic’. For, of course, the term social must here be put with all the emphasis that shows it to be dependent precisely on the signifying and combinatory structure. What we see on the reverse side is this result: for the child to enter into this signifying dialectic, what do we observe?

Very precisely this: that there is no other desire on which he depends more closely and more directly than on the desire for what? For the woman. For the desire of the woman insofar as it is precisely signified by what she lacks, and by the phallus. What I showed you is that everything we encounter as stumbling block, as accident, in the child’s evolution—and that up to the most radical of these stumbling blocks and accidents—is linked to this: that the child does not find himself alone facing the mother, but facing the mother and something which is precisely the signifier of this desire, namely the phallus.

We find ourselves here before something that will be the object of my next lesson. It is that, one of two things:

– either the child enters into the dialectic, that is to say he makes himself object in this current of exchanges, that is to say at a given moment renounces his father and his mother, that is to say the primitive objects of his desire,

– or else it is to the extent that he keeps these objects, that is to say that he maintains this something which is for him much more than their value, for value precisely is what can be exchanged and what exists from the moment when he reduces them to pure signifiers, to the extent that he holds on to these objects as objects of his desire.

It is here, always, insofar as the Oedipal attachment is preserved, that is to say where the Oedipus complex, where the infantile relation to the parental objects does not pass—it is to the extent that it does not pass, and strictly to that extent, that we see produced what? In a very general form, let us say these inversions or these perversions of desire which show that within the imaginary relation to the Oedipal objects there is no possible normalization.

There is no possible normalization very precisely in this, that there is always—as a third term, with respect even to the most primitive relation, the relation of the child to the mother—this phallus as object of the mother’s desire, that is to say what places the child before this sort of insurmountable barrier to the satisfaction of his own desire, which is, for its part, to be the exclusive desire of the mother. This is what pushes him, then, toward a series of solutions which will always be of reduction or of identification of this triad. From the fact that the mother has to be phallic:
– either that the phallus is put in the place of the mother herself, and that is fetishism,
– or that he himself unites in himself, as it were in an intimate way, this junction of the phallus and the mother without which nothing for him can be satisfied, and that is transvestism.

In short, it is precisely to the extent that the child—that is to say the being insofar as he enters with natural needs into this dialectic—does not renounce his object, that his desire does not find satisfaction. And this desire finds satisfaction only by renouncing in part. Which is essentially what I first articulated for you in telling you that it must become demand, that is to say signified, signified by the intervention and the existence of the signifier, that is to say in part alienated desire.