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(All parts in English)

I would like today to begin to introduce the question of identifications. For those who were not there last time, and also for those who were, I recall the meaning of what was said: I tried to bring attention back to the difficulties posed by the notion of the phallic phase, and to show that if one experiences some trouble in bringing the phallus into a biological rationality, what FREUD brought out from experience immediately becomes clearer if we posit that the phallus is caught up in a certain subjective function that must fulfill a certain role, which I call a role of signifier.

And of course, it does not fall from the sky, this phallus as signifier. On the other hand, it must have at its origin, which is an imaginary origin, some property, some aptitude to fulfill this signifying function which is not just any function, which is a signifier-function more specifically adapted than another to what happens, in sum, in the hooking-on of the human subject into the whole signifying mechanism.

It is, in a sense, a crossroads signifier, a signifier toward which there converges, more or less, what happens in the bringing of the human subject into play in the signifying system insofar as his desire must pass through this system in order to have itself recognized and is thereby profoundly modified. This is an experimental datum.

It follows from this that this phallus, we literally encounter it at every turn of our experience, of our experience of conflict, of the Oedipal drama. We encounter it at the entry into the Oedipal drama and at the outcomes of the Oedipal drama, and even, in a certain problematic way, overflowing that Oedipal drama, since one cannot fail to be struck by the problem posed by the presence of this phallus, and of the paternal phallus by name, in primitive Kleinian phantasies, inasmuch precisely as it is its presence that poses the question of knowing into which register we are going to insert these Kleinian phantasies:

– in the register that Melanie KLEIN herself proposed, that is to say, in the hypothesis of a sort of ultra-early Oedipus?

– Or on the contrary, by admitting the primitive imaginary functioning that we are going to classify as pre-Oedipal?

The question can be left in abeyance, at least provisionally. To shed light on this function which presents itself here in a quite general way, precisely because it presents itself essentially as a signifying function, as a symbolic function, we must—before even pushing our formulas to their last term—see in what signifying economy this phallus is implicated, in other words, examine that something which FREUD’s exploration articulated in this form: at the exit from the Oedipus, after the repression of the desire of the Oedipus, the subject comes out new.

And endowed with what? The answer is: with an ego ideal. In the normal Oedipus, the repression that results from the crossing, the passing, beyond the Oedipus, from the exit from the Oedipus, has as its effect that in the subject there has been constituted something which stands in relation to him in a relation strictly speaking ambiguous.

On that point, it is fitting that we proceed still step by step, because one always goes too fast. There is one thing, in any case, that emerges in a univocal way—I mean: with a single voice—from what FREUD addresses, and on this point all authors cannot but lay down as a minimal formula that it is an identification distinct from the identification of the ego, inasmuch as here it is in a certain relation of the subject to the image of the fellow-being that we can see emerging the structure that is called the ego. That of the ego ideal poses a problem that is proper to it: it does not present itself—it is almost a truism to say it—as an ideal ego.

I have often emphasized that the two terms are distinct in FREUD, in his very article on narcissism, and on this point, let us look closely with a magnifying glass: we shall notice that in the text it is very difficult to distinguish. It is not accurate to begin with, but even if it were, that we ought by convention to note that there is no synonymy between what is attributed in FREUD’s texts taken from experience to the function of the ego ideal and the sense we can give to the image of the ego, however exalted we suppose it when we make of it an ideal image, that to which the subject identifies himself as being:

– composition of his own success,

– model, so to speak, of himself, that in which the subject confounds himself, reassures himself of his wholeness.

For example, what is threatened, what is affected when we allude to the necessities of narcissistic reassurance, to the fears of narcissistic injuries to the own body—this something we can place under the heading of this ideal ego.

The ego ideal, we know it—since it intervenes in functions that are often depressive functions, indeed aggressive toward the subject—FREUD brings it into play in diverse forms of depression. You know that he tends, at the end of the chapter which in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ is called: ‘A stage in the ego’s development: the ego ideal’—it is precisely the first time he introduces in a decisive and articulated way this notion of ego ideal—that he tends therefore to place all depressions under the heading and in the register not of the ego ideal, but of some wavering relation, of some conflictual relation between the ego and the ego ideal.

Let us admit that one can take everything that will occur under this depressive register, or on the contrary under that of relations of exaltation, from the angle, so to speak, of an open hostility between the two instances—whichever instance the declaration of hostilities starts from, whether it is the ego that rises up or the ego ideal that becomes too severe—with all that any imbalance of this excessive relation entails by way of consequences and repercussions.

Thus, this ego ideal, in any case, is something that presents us with its problem. We are told: the ego ideal issues from an identification, a late identification linked to the in any case third relation that is that of the Oedipus, a relation in which there is intermingled, in a complex way, relations of desire with relations of rivalry, aggression, hostility.

Something is at play, and the outcome of the conflict is a matter for the scales. If it is uncertain, the outlet of the conflict presents itself in any case as having entailed a subjective transformation. And the introduction, introjection as it is said, within a certain structure, of this something which, in relation to the subject, henceforth turns out to be a part of himself while nevertheless having preserved a certain relation with an external object—both things are present there.

And here we touch with our finger what analysis teaches us: that intra-subjectivity and inter-subjectivity cannot be separated. That is to say, within the subject, in functions that he carries everywhere with himself, and whatever modifications may occur in his surroundings and milieu, what is acquired as ego ideal is indeed something that is in the subject in the way the exile carries his homeland on the soles of his shoes: his ego ideal indeed belongs to him, it is something acquired.

It is not an object; it is something that is in addition within the subject. I mean that when one insists on the notion that intra-subjectivity and inter-subjectivity must remain linked in any correct analytic progression and that one speaks of the relations between the instances in question, it is proven by current usages, by the least necessities of language, that when we speak of the relations between ego and ego ideal, one quite ordinarily says in analysis that they can be good or bad, conflictual or attuned, but one leaves in parentheses or one does not finish formulating what must be formulated: namely that these relations are structured, articulated as intersubjective relations.

Within the subject there is reproduced—and of course, as you can well see, can only be reproduced on the basis of a signifying organization—the same mode of relations that exists between subjects. We cannot think, even though we say it, that it might pass for being said, that the superego is effectively something severe that lies in wait for the ego at the corner in order to inflict atrocious miseries upon it.

It is not a person. It functions within the subject like a subject who behaves in relation to another subject, and precisely in this, that there is a relation between subjects that does not thereby imply the existence of the person. It suffices that there be the conditions introduced by the existence, by the functioning as such of the signifier, for intersubjective relations to be able to be established.

It is with this intersubjectivity, within the living person, that we are dealing in analysis; it is within this intersubjectivity that we must form an idea of what this function of the ego ideal is. You know it, you will not find this function in a dictionary, and no one will give you a univocal answer to it. You will encounter the greatest embarrassments there. This function is assuredly not to be confused with that of the superego. It came almost together, to be sure, in the terminology, but by that very fact it distinguished itself from it.

And it is likewise in part confounded; it can have the same instances; nevertheless it is more oriented toward something which, in the subject’s desire, plays a typifying function which perhaps appears indeed linked to the assumption of the sexual type, neither more nor less, insofar as it is implicated in a whole economy, let us even say on occasion social, in the assumption of masculine and feminine functions, not simply insofar as they culminate in the act necessary for reproduction to ensue, but also for a whole mode of relations between man and woman. What is the interest of analysis’s acquisitions on this subject? It is to have been able to penetrate into something which shows itself, as it were, only on the surface and, by these results, to have penetrated it by way of the cases where the outcome is missed. And this is precisely the well-known method, called psychopathological, which consists in decomposing for us, in disarticulating for us a function by grasping it at the point where it has found itself imperceptibly shifted, deviated, where, by that very fact, what usually inserts itself more or less normally into a complement of surroundings appears to us with its roots and its edges.

I would like… with the experience we have gained of the partly missed incidence, or that we provisionally suppose to be missed, of the identification of a certain type of subject with what one can call their regular type, their satisfying type: we are going to see there how we choose, because one must indeed choose …I would like to take a particular case. Let us take the case of women, of what has been called the masculinity complex, the complex of masculinity, of the way in which it is articulated with the existence of the phallic phase.

We can do so because, concerning the existence of this phallic phase, I first showed you the problematic side. Is there here something instinctual? A sort of flaw in instinctual development, the one that makes it so that, one would say to us, the existence of the clitoris would by itself be responsible, the cause of what would translate at the end of the chain into the existence of the masculinity complex?

Already we are prepared to understand that it must not be so simple and that likewise, if one looks closely, in FREUD it is not so simple. And in any case, the debate that followed is made to show us that it is not so simple, even if this debate was ill-inspired, namely if it was starting, as it were, from petitions of principle, namely that it could not be like that. It remains nonetheless unquestionable that it saw:

– that it was not like that,

– that it is not purely and simply a question of a detour required in female development by a natural anomaly or simply by the famous bisexuality in question,

– that it is assuredly more complex,

– that we are not for all that capable straightaway and simply of formulating what it is, but that assuredly what we see is that in the vicissitude of what presents itself as a masculinity complex in the woman there is something that already shows us a connection of this phallic element, a play, a usage of this phallic element which, in any case, deserves to be retained, since likewise that for which an element can be put to use is nonetheless of a nature to shed light for us on what it is, this element, at its core.

What then do the analysts—especially the female analysts—who have addressed the subject tell us? We shall not say today everything they tell us. I refer especially to two of these analysts who are in the background of the Jonesian discussion of the problem, Hélène DEUTSCH and Karen HORNEY. Those of you who read English will be able to refer, on the one hand, to an article by Hélène DEUTSCH called The significance of masochism in the mental life of women [I.J.P. 1930, XI] and on the other hand to an article by Karen HORNEY.

Let us take Karen HORNEY. What does she tell us? Karen HORNEY, whatever one may think of the formulations of the ultimate terms at which she arrived in theory as in technique, was on the clinical plane, from the beginning and up to the middle of her career, incontestably a creator who saw things that retain all their value. Whatever she may have deduced from it as more or less weakened concerning the anthropological situation of psychoanalysis, it remains nonetheless that her discoveries retain all their value.

What does she bring out in this article on the castration complex? What she brings out can be summed up as follows: she notes the connection, the clinical analogy, in women, of the formation of everything that is ordered around the idea of castration with all that this entails of resonances, of clinical traces in what the subject in analysis articulates, strictly speaking, as claims to the organ as to something that she lacks. She shows by a series of clinical examples—and it is fitting that you refer to this text—that there is no difference in kind: the cases are in the imperceptible continuity of those that present themselves as certain types of female homosexuality in which that to which the subject identifies, in a certain position with respect to her partner, is the paternal image.

The times are composed in the same way; the fantasies, the dreams, the inhibitions, the symptoms are the same. It seems that it is a form; one cannot even say an attenuated one of the other; simply it has or has not crossed a certain boundary, which itself remains uncertain. The point on which, in this connection, Karen HORNEY comes to place the emphasis is this: what happens for those cases urges us to concentrate our attention on a certain moment of the Oedipus complex, which is not the first, which is not even in the middle, which is very far toward the end since it already presupposes that moment attained where not only the relation to the father is constituted, but where it is so well constituted that it is formed in the subject, the little girl, under the aspect of an express desire for the paternal penis, of something, we are told and it is underlined for us with very good reason, which therefore implies a recognition of this reality of the penis:

– not even phantasmatic,

– not even in general,

– not in that ambiguous half-light which makes us at every moment ask ourselves what the phallus is on that plane, on the plane of the question: is it imaginary or is it not?

And of course, in its central function it implies this imaginary existence, this phallus which, at various phases of the development of this relation, the female subject may, against all odds, maintain that she possesses, while knowing full well that she does not possess it. She possesses it simply as an image:

– either that she has had it in what she articulates,

– or that she must have it, as is frequent.

We are told that this is indeed something else: it is a penis realized as real, as being, as such, expected.

I could not even put this forward if I had not already, in modulating the Oedipus complex in three times, pointed out to you that it arrives in diverse modes in each of these three times, and that the father as possessing the real penis is something that intervenes at the third time, as I told you, especially in the boy. Thus things are perfectly situated, then, in the little girl. What happens, according to what we are told?

We are told that in the cases in question, it is from the privation of what is there expected that this phenomenon will result, which is not invented by Karen HORNEY, which is in FREUD’s text put into operation all the time, which is this transformation, this turn, this mutation that makes what was love be transformed into identification:

– that it is insofar as the father disappoints an expectation thus oriented in a certain way, which already involves an advanced maturation of the situation,

– that it is insofar as, in relation to this demand of the subject arrived, in sum—one could say ‘at the acme of the Oedipal situation,’ if precisely its function did not consist in this, that it must be surpassed, that is to say that it is in its surpassing that the subject must find this satisfying identification, that to her own sex,

…that it is to that extent, then, that there occurs this something which remains and which is articulated as such, as a problem, as posing a mystery.

In FREUD himself, it is emphasized that this play which we admit as being the possibility par excellence of the transformation of love into identification is something that does not go by itself. Yet we admit it in this case for the first reason we note: that it is at this moment that it is a matter of articulating it, of giving a formula that allows us to conceive what this identification is as linked to a moment of privation.

That is why I would like to try to give you a few formulas, because I consider them useful for distinguishing what is that from what is not that. In other words, to try to introduce this essential element of dialectic, of signifying articulation, which I am not giving you here for pleasure, so to speak, and from a taste for finding ourselves in words, but on the contrary so that the use we habitually make of words and signifiers not be a use akin to what is called ‘to take bladders for lanterns,’ that is to say, things insufficiently articulated for things sufficiently illuminating.

It is by articulating them well that we shall be able effectively to measure what is happening and distinguish what happens in one case from what happens in another. What happens when the subject in question, the female subject, has taken a certain position of identification with the father? The situation, if you will, is the following: here is the father; something here at the level of the child has been awaited; finally the paradoxical, singular result is that, from a certain angle and in a certain way, we are told that the child becomes, as ego ideal, this father.

She does not, of course, actually become the father. And invariably, there, a woman in this case can truly speak of her relations with her father: it suffices to listen to her in the most open way say ‘I cough like him,’ for example. It is indeed something that is an identification that is at issue. So let us try to see what is happening, let us try to see step by step the economy of the transformation: the little girl is not thereby transformed into a man. What we find as signs, as stigmata of this identification, are things that are expressed in part, that can come out like those, that can even be noticed by the subject, of which the subject can boast to a certain extent. What are these?

Now there it is not in doubt: these are signifying elements. If a woman says: ‘I cough like my father’ or ‘I push out my belly or my body like him,’ these are all the same signifying elements at issue, we shall say provisionally. More exactly, to bring out what is at issue, provisionally we shall designate them by a special term, because they are not signifiers brought into play in a signifying chain; we shall call them ‘the insignia of the father.’ The psychological attitude shows at the surface here this: that the subject, in sum, to call things by their name, presents herself under the mask that she sets upon that something which is the partially undifferentiated side there is in every subject as such: she sets upon herself the insignia of masculinity.

It is perhaps fitting to ask oneself, with the slowness which is always what must here guard us from error, the question of what becomes, in the process, of the desire from which all this set out? The desire, after all, was not a virile desire. What becomes of desire, insofar as the subject has here, at this level, taken on the insignia of the father?

These insignia are going to be employed vis-à-vis whom? Vis-à-vis something third, vis-à-vis something of which we will be told that it takes—because experience shows it—the place of what, in the primitive evolution of the Oedipus complex, was in that third place: that is to say the mother.

The very analysis of a case like that will show us that from the moment of identification, that is to say from the moment when the subject clothes herself in the insignia of that with which she is identified, there is a transformation of the subject in a certain sense which is of the order of a passage to the state of signifier of something which is that, the insignia. But the desire that comes into play is no longer the same as if it were what was expected in this relation to the father, if it were this something that we could suppose at the point things had reached, at that point where we are at that moment in the Oedipus complex, namely something extremely close to a passive genital position, to a passionate desire, to a properly feminine appeal. Now it is quite clear that it is no longer the same that is there after the transformation. For the moment we leave aside the question of what has happened to this desire.

A moment ago we said privation. It is worth returning to it, for one could just as well say frustration. Why privation rather than frustration? I indicate here that the thread remains hanging. Be that as it may, what is going to be established, insofar as the subject who here [E] has also come there [P], insofar as she has an ego ideal, that something may have occurred within herself which is structured as in intersubjectivity, is that this subject is going to exercise a certain desire. Which is what?

On this schema, what appears are the relations of the father to the mother. It is quite clear that what we find in an analysis, in the analysis of a subject like this at the moment when we analyze her, is not the double, the reproduction of what was happening between the father and the mother, and this for all sorts of reasons, if only because the subject has only accessed it in a quite imperfect way.

Experience shows, on the contrary, that what is going to come into the relation is the whole past, the whole vicissitude of the extremely complex relations which up to that point have modulated the child’s relations with the mother. That is to say everything that has happened from the origin, from the frustrations, the disappointments linked to what must of necessity exist of mishaps, of starts and stops in the child’s relations to the mother, with all that they entail of an extraordinarily complicated relation, bringing into play, expressly and with a very particular emphasis, aggressive relations—the aggressive relations in their most original form—as well as relations of rivalry.

All the incidences, for example, of the arrival of elements foreign to the trio, namely of all the brothers or sisters who may have intervened more or less inopportunely in the subject’s development and in her relations with her mother. All that will bear its trace and its reflection to temper or to reinforce what will then present itself as a claiming of the insignia of masculinity. It is that which will project itself into the young subject’s relations with her object, which will from then on be commanded from this point of identification where the subject puts on the insignia of that with which she is identified inasmuch as there has become, or there is played out in her, the role and the function of ego ideal. Of course, it is a way of imagining the places of which I speak, but it obviously supposes, if you wish to understand it, a sort of comings and goings. These insignia, the subject brings them back with her after the oscillatory movement in question. She finds herself constituted in a certain way and with a new desire. This formula, this mechanism of transformation, thus comprises three times, namely:

– the intervention at the outset of an element that must first be libidinal [the mother].

– Secondly, the existence—alongside—of a third term with which the subject is in a relation that allows the distinction of this third term, which in any case requires that in the past of the relation with this third term [the father] there has intervened that radically differentiating element called competition.

– And thirdly a sort of exchange takes place: what had been the object of the libidinal relation becomes something else, is transformed for the subject into a signifying function, and her desire then passes onto another plane, onto the plane of the desire previously established with the third term.

In the operation, the other desire, the one that comes to substitute for the repressed desire, comes out the same in its core and nonetheless transformed: it is that which constitutes the process of identification. There must first be the libidinal element pointing to a certain object as object. This object becomes, within the subject, a signifier in order to occupy the place which will from then on be called ego ideal. Desire, on the other hand, undergoes this something which involves an ersatz: it is another desire that comes in the place of the first.

This other desire is not a desire that comes from nothing, it is not nothingness: it existed before, it concerned the third term, and it comes out of there transformed. Here is the schema that I beg you to retain in your mind, because it is, in a way, the minimal schema of every process of identification in the proper sense, of identification at the secondary level, of identification insofar as it founds the ego ideal.

None of these three terms is ever missing. And the crisscrossing, so to speak, which results from the transformation, on the one hand of an object into a trans-signifier, and on the other hand of the taking of place that this signifier effects at that moment in the subject, and which constitutes, strictly speaking, identification, is that something that we find at the base of what constitutes an ego ideal. And this is always accompanied as well by what we can call a transfer of desire, namely that another desire arises from elsewhere, which is in relation with a third term that had nothing to do with the first libidinal relation at issue, and that this desire which comes to substitute for the first is, in this substitution and through this substitution, transformed.

This is quite essential. We can explain it again, but otherwise. Let us say, to take up our schema in the form in which we usually present it, that the child, in an initial relation with the primordial object—this is the general formula—finds herself taking the position symmetrical to that of the father. She enters into rivalry. She situates herself opposite, with respect to the primitive relation to the object, at a point X.

It is insofar as there she becomes something that can be clothed in the insignia of that with which she enters into rivalry, that she then finds her place where she necessarily is, that is to say opposite this point x where things took place and there where she comes to constitute herself under this new form which is called ego ideal. She retains something of this passage in the most general form. This concerns something where you can clearly see that it is no longer a matter of either father or mother: it is a matter of relation to the object. And the mother is the primordial object, the object par excellence.

What she retains in this case, in this back-and-forth which has made her—with respect to the object—enter into rivalry with a third term is something characterized by what one can call the common factor which results from the existence of signifiers, from the fact that in the human psyche, insofar as human beings have to do with the world of the signifier and that it is they, the signifiers, that are the necessary condition, the defile through which their desire must pass. In this back-and-forth, there is always something that will imply this common factor

– in the incidence of the signifier upon desire,

– in what signifies it,

– in what necessarily makes it a signified desire.

This common factor is precisely the phallus. It is because it always forms part of it, because it is the least common denominator of this common factor, that we always find it there, in all cases, whether it is a matter of man or of woman. In other words, it is for that reason that we place here at point x the phallus, the small ϕ.

What results from this is that it always places itself in relation to the ego… that is to say as third in relation to what has been established there of a subject with herself, and always more or less fragilely constituted with respect, in sum, to the primitive identification—indeed always more or less ideal—that the subject has made of herself with an image always more or less contested … which [the ego] has nothing to do with this fundamental relation it has with that to which it has addressed its demands, that is to say the object. The ego ideal constitutes itself in this back-and-forth always opposite, so to speak, this virtual point where the putting into competition, the contest of the third term, takes place. It is opposite it that there is always a certain relation with this metonymic common factor which is the phallus, which turns up everywhere.

And of course, what happens at the level of the ego ideal consists essentially in its having at a minimum this common factor, and of course composed in a way that does not let it be seen, or that only lets it be seen as something that always slips through our fingers, this something that runs at the base of every kind of signifying assumption.

There is this: it is that this signifier, in all cases, bites into the signified. The ego ideal constitutes itself in this relation with the father; it always implies the phallus. Here, the father is the third term. It always implies the phallus. It implies it always and solely insofar as this phallus is the common factor, the pivotal factor of this instance of the signifier.

What does Hélène DEUTSCH, for example, tell us further? Karen HORNEY showed us the continuity of the castration complex with female homosexuality. Hélène DEUTSCH will speak to us of something else. She too will tell us that the phallic phase indeed plays the role FREUD tells us it does, with this proviso: that what matters to her is also to perceive its subsequent vicissitude.

She sees this vicissitude in the following: that the adoption, she says, of the masochistic position—essential, constitutive, she says, of the feminine position—is based on this plane, namely that it is insofar as clitoral enjoyment is found to be forbidden to the little girl that she will draw her satisfaction from a position which will therefore no longer be solely and uniquely a passive position, but a position of enjoyment, assured—in this very privation that is imposed on her—of clitoral enjoyment.

There is here a certain paradox, but a paradox that Hélène DEUTSCH upholds, something that in her goes as far as technical precepts, findings of experience that go very far in their paradox. I mean that I am reporting to you here the data of an analyst’s experience, submitted as such without any doubt to a certain selection of material, but which are worth pausing over.

For Hélène DEUTSCH, the question of feminine satisfaction is something that presents itself in a way complex enough for her to consider that a woman, in her nature as a woman, and feminine, can find a satisfaction sufficiently accomplished, at any rate, for nothing to appear that presents itself as neurotic or atypical in her behavior, in her adaptation to her functions as a woman, without there presenting itself for her, under any clearly marked form, properly genital satisfaction.

I repeat, this is the position of Mrs DEUTSCH. Namely that, in sum, the accomplishment of the satisfaction of the feminine position can be found in its entirety on the plane of her maternal relation, in everything that pertains, at all its stages, to the accomplishment of the function of reproduction, namely in the proper satisfactions of the state of pregnancy, of nursing and of the maintaining of the maternal position.

The maturation of the satisfaction linked to the genital act itself, of orgasm itself, to call it by its name, being something sufficiently bound up with this dialectic of phallic privation for Hélène DEUTSCH to formulate that in certain subjects she encountered, in a more or less advanced, a more or less developed way, this implication in the phallic dialectic.

Namely that it is in relation to the man, in relation to a certain degree of masculine identification, that there has been constituted an equilibrium necessarily conflictual, hence precarious, of the personality. A reduction too far pushed of this complex relation, an advancement to a degree too far pushed of the analysis, is of a nature to frustrate the subject of what she has, up to that point, more or less successfully achieved of enjoyment on the genital plane.

This consideration goes so far as to entail, for Hélène DEUTSCH, the indication of leaving, as it were, to the subject [the benefit] of her more or less successful identifications on this plane and in any case acquired, and not—by too advanced an analysis—to reduce, so to speak, to decompose, to analyze these identifications, except at the price of putting her in a posture of loss with respect to what these analyses reveal to be the ground, the structure of the enjoyment achieved:

– insofar as that acquisition would be linked, on the plane of genital enjoyment, to something which is precisely the subject’s past with respect to her identifications,

– insofar as enjoyment can consist in the masochistic frustration of a certain position that for a time was conquered and which, in order for the frustration to be maintained, requires at the same time the maintaining of the positions from which that frustration can be exercised.

In other words, in certain conditions, the reduction of identifications that are strictly masculine identifications can constitute a danger for what has been conquered by the subject on the plane of enjoyment in the very dialectic of that identification. It is worth what it is worth. The question here is simply that it could be advanced, that it was assuredly advanced by someone who is not without experience and who, if only by her reflections, manifests herself assuredly as someone who reflects on her craft and on the consequences of what she does.

By contrast, it is on that ground, and on that ground alone, that it deserves to be maintained within the question. I repeat to you, and to summarize Mrs DEUTSCH’s position, it is that, in sum, in inter-human relations as they in fact present themselves… I am not saying that it presents itself in the same way in robins and in praying mantises … in the human species, it would seem that the center of gravity, the major element of satisfaction in the feminine position would be found beyond the genital relation as such.

In a way, everything that could be found there by the woman would be tied essentially to a dialectic whose intervention there should not surprise us. What does that mean? It means that this something which is equally manifested in the man’s position with respect to the genital act—namely the extreme importance of what is called fore-pleasure—is there what provides, perhaps simply in a more accentuated way, the libidinal materials to be brought into play.

But that these libidinal materials effectively come into play starting from their capture in the subject’s history within a certain signifying dialectic implying the intrusion of possible identification to the third object, which on this occasion is the father, and that therefore everything which comes—under the heading of phallic claim and identification with the father—to complicate the woman’s relation to her object is simply nothing other than the signifying elaboration of that to which are borrowed the satisfactions that properly occur in the genital act, namely what I have just called fore-pleasure, orgasm itself as such, I mean insofar as it would be identified at the summit of the act itself, thereby indeed posing for experience the problem in the woman of something that indeed deserves to be posed, given all that we know physiologically of the absence of a nervous organization directly made to provoke voluptuousness in the vagina.

This leads us to try to formulate this question of the relation of the ego ideal to a certain vicissitude of desire, and to formulate it as follows: we thus have, as much in the boy as in the girl, at a given moment, a relation to a certain object whatever it may be, to an object already constituted in its reality as object. And this object will become something which is the ego ideal. It will become so by its insignia.

Why has the desire in question in this relation to the object been called in this instance privation? It has been so called because what constitutes its characteristic is not, as one says, that it concerns a real object… it is necessary, of course, that the father, at the moment when he intervenes, in the first example I have given, in the girl’s development, be indeed a being real enough in his physiological constitution for the phallus to have passed to a stage of evolution that goes beyond the purely imaginary function that it can long retain in the Penisneid, that is certain … but that it aims at something that can be asked for.

There can properly speaking be instituted a dialectic of privation only when it is a matter of something that the subject can symbolize. It is insofar as the paternal penis can be symbolized, can be asked for, that there occurs what takes place at the level of the identification in question today. There is here something quite distinct from what intervenes at the level of the prohibition that is constituted insofar, for example, as phallic enjoyment—clitoral enjoyment, to call it by its name—is perhaps, at a given moment of evolution, forbidden.

What is forbidden throws the subject back into something in which she no longer finds anything in which to signify herself. This is what properly speaking makes its painful character, and it is insofar as the ego can, on the part of the ego ideal for example, on occasion find itself in this position of rejection that there is established the state properly speaking melancholic.

We shall return to the nature of this rejection, but understand already here that what I am alluding to can be related to the very term which in our vocabulary I have related to this rejection, namely the term Verwerfung. It is insofar as, on the part of the ego ideal, the subject can find herself, in her living reality, in this position of exclusion from any possible signification, that the depressive state as such is established.

But what is at issue in the formation of the ego ideal is quite the opposite process; it consists in this: that this object which is confronted with something that we have called privation, insofar as it is a negative desire, that it is something that can be asked for, that it is on the plane of the demand that the subject sees this desire refused, this linkage between desire as refused and the object—this is what is at the outset the constitution of this object as a certain signifier that takes a certain place, that substitutes itself for the subject, that becomes a metaphor of the subject.

What occurs in the identification to the object of desire, in the case where the girl identifies herself with her father, is indeed this: this father whom she desired and who refused her the desire of her demand becomes something that is in her place.

The metaphorical character of the formation of the ego ideal is an essential element, and just as in metaphor what results is the modification of something:

– which has nothing to do with the desire,

– which is involved in the constitution of the object, which is a desire that is elsewhere at that moment: the desire that had linked the little girl to her mother, let us call it small d with respect to big D.

The whole preceding adventure of the little girl with her mother here comes to take its place in the question and undergoes the consequences of this metaphor. It becomes bound up.

We find again there the formula of metaphor that I gave you, insofar as it is, as you know:

f(S/S₁) S₂ ~ S(+)s

that is to say something which results from a change of signification. After metaphor, this change of signification is something that occurs in the relations hitherto established by the subject’s history, since in sum we are still on the first example of the little girl with the mother. What will from then on model her relations with her object will be this history, this history modified by the establishment of this new function in her which is called ego ideal.