🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

I would like to bring you back to some primitive apprehension concerning the object of our experience, that is to say the unconscious, my aim being, in sum
– to show you what paths and possibilities the discovery of the unconscious opens up for us,
– but also not to let you forget what this discovery represents as limits to our power.
In other words, to show you in what perspective, in what avenue, the possibility of a normativization can be glimpsed: therapeutic normativization.

But do not forget, because the entire analytic experience is there to remind us of it, that this normativization runs up against the contradictions, the antinomies internal to any normativization in the human condition. It even allows us to deepen the nature of these limits.

One cannot fail to be struck that one of FREUD’s last articles, the one that has been improperly translated as Analysis terminable or interminable, in reality concerns the finite or the infinite. It is a matter of analysis insofar as it ends or insofar as it must be situated within a kind of infinite scope. That is what is at issue. And the projection to infinity of its aim, FREUD indicates it to us in the clearest way, entirely at the level of ‘concrete experience’ as he says, namely that there is, in the end, irreducibility:
– for the man, in the castration complex,
– for the woman, in penisneid, that is to say in a certain fundamental relation with the phallus.

What did analysis, the Freudian discovery at its outset, place the emphasis on? On desire. What FREUD essentially discovers, what FREUD apprehended in symptoms of whatever kind, whether they are pathological symptoms or what he interpreted in what had presented itself up to then as more or less reducible in normal life, namely the dream for example, is always essentially a desire.

Even more, in the dream for example, he does not speak to us simply of desire, but of wish-fulfillment, and this must not fail to strike us. That is, it is precisely in the dream that he speaks of satisfaction of desire. He indicates, on the other hand, that in the symptom itself there is indeed something that resembles this satisfaction, but this satisfaction, it seems to me, is enough to mark its problematic character since, after all, it is a kind of satisfaction in reverse. Thus, already, it appears in experience:
– that desire is linked there to something that is its appearance and, to say the word, its mask,
– that the close link that desire, as it presents itself to us in analytic experience, has with something that clothes it in a problematic way, is indeed what—at the very least—urges us to stop there as at an essential problem.

I have emphasized several times in recent sessions the way in which desire, insofar as it appears to consciousness, manifests itself in a paradoxical form in analytic experience, or more exactly how much analytic experience has promoted this character inherent in desire as perverse desire, which is to be a kind of desire of the second degree, a jouissance of desire as desire.

In a general way, taken as a whole, everything that analysis allows us to perceive of the function of desire is not something it discovers. But it shows us to what degree of depth is carried the fact that human desire is not involved in a direct way in a pure and simple relation with the object that satisfies it, but that it is linked:
– to a position the subject takes in the presence of this object,
– to a position the subject takes outside its relation with the object, and which means that nothing is ever exhausted purely and simply in this relation to the object.

On the other hand, analysis is also made to remind us of this, which has always been known, namely the in some way wandering, elusive, ungraspable character of desire, escaping precisely the synthesis of the ego, leaving to this synthesis of the ego that it brings only the outcome of being—at every instant in some way—an illusory affirmation of synthesis.

I recall that it is always I who desires and who, in me, cannot grasp me except in the diversity of these desires. Through this phenomenological diversity, if one can say so, through this contradiction, this anomaly, this aporia of desire, it is certain that there is manifested a deeper relation, a relation of the subject to life, a relation of the subject—as one says—to ‘instincts’, and which, by having been situated also in this path of analysis, had made us make progress in the situation of the subject with respect to its position as a living being.

But precisely, analysis teaches us, makes us experience through what stratagems of realizing goals, ends of life, and perhaps also what is beyond life, I do not know what theology of the first vital ends, what FREUD envisaged as a beyond the pleasure principle, namely the ultimate ends at which life would aim, which is the return of death. All that, this analysis has allowed us, I do not say to define it, but to glimpse it, insofar as it has also allowed us to follow, in its pathways, the fulfillment of these desires.

This human desire, in its deep relations, internal to the desire of the Other, has been glimpsed from always, and it is only necessary to refer to the first chapter of HEGEL’s Phenomenology of Spirit to find again the paths in which already a fairly deep reflection could allow us to undertake this research.

The novelty brought by FREUD, this originality, the new phenomenon that allows us to cast such an essential light on the nature of desire, is insofar as…
contrary to the path followed by HEGEL in his first approach to desire, a path which of course is far from being only deductive as one believes from the outside, but which is a grasp of desire by way of the relations of self-consciousness with the constitution of self-consciousness in the other
…the interrogation, the question that arises is to know how, through this intermediary, the dialectic of life itself can be introduced?

Which in HEGEL certainly can be translated only by a kind of leap, which he calls synthesis when the occasion arises.
Freudian experience shows us another pathway of it, very curiously and very remarkably as well, by the way in which desire presents itself as being very deeply linked to this relation to the Other as such, and nevertheless presenting itself as ‘an unconscious desire’.

It is in this that it is fitting to return to the level of what this approach to ‘unconscious desire’ was in FREUD’s own experience. Assuredly, this is something we must represent to ourselves from the earliest times in which FREUD encountered this experience, that we must represent to ourselves in its character of surprising novelty, I will not say of intuition, but rather of divination of something that already presents itself in a human experience—FREUD’s—as something, as the apprehension of something that is beyond a mask.

We can, now that psychoanalysis is constituted, that it has developed into so ample and so mobile a discourse, represent to ourselves—but we represent it rather poorly—what the scope was of what FREUD was bringing when he began to read in the symptoms of his patients and in his own dreams, and when he began to bring us this notion of ‘unconscious desire’. That is moreover what we lack in order to measure at their proper value what presents itself in FREUD as interpretation.

We are always very astonished by the character that appears to us very often, with regard to what we ourselves allow ourselves as interpretations, and I will say with regard to what we can and can no longer allow ourselves, as the extraordinarily interventionist character of FREUD’s interpretations.

One can even add, up to a certain point, as the ‘off to the side’ character of his interpretations.

Have I not pointed out to you a thousand times, concerning the case of Dora for example, concerning his intervention or his interventions in the analysis of a homosexual woman of whom we have spoken at length here, how much FREUD’s interpretations—and FREUD himself recognizes it—were as though linked precisely to his incomplete knowledge of psychology, for example of homosexuals in general, how much this ‘off to the side’ interpretation, how much this interpretation linked to an insufficient knowledge that FREUD had at that time of psychology, especially of homosexuals but also of hysterics, is therefore something that makes, for us, in more than one case, FREUD’s interpretations present themselves with a character at once too directive and almost forced, with a hurried character that gives, indeed, to this term ‘off to the side’ interpretation its full value.

Nevertheless, it is certain that these interpretations, at that moment, were what assuredly presented itself as the interpretation that had to be made, up to a certain point the effective interpretation for the resolution of the symptom.

What does that mean? This obviously poses for us a problem which, to begin clearing it, requires us to represent to ourselves that when FREUD made interpretations of that order, he found himself before a situation that is entirely different from the present situation.

One must literally realize that everything which, in an interpretation-verdict that comes out of the analyst’s mouth insofar as there is, properly speaking, interpretation—this verdict, what is said and proposed, given as true—takes on, on the occasion, its value from what is not said. I mean, against what background of the unsaid the interpretation is proposed.

At the time when FREUD made his interpretations to Dora, when he told her for example that she loved Mr. K. and that, in sum, he indicated to her without ambiguity that it was with him that normally she should remake her life, there was there something that surprises us, all the more because, of course, it cannot be a question of it for the best reasons: namely that in the end Dora absolutely wants to know nothing about it.

Nevertheless an interpretation of that order, at the moment when FREUD made it, presents itself against the background of something which, on the part of the subject, of the patient, of Dora, contains no sort of presumption that FREUD is there to rectify, if one can say so, her apprehension of the world, to make something in her be brought to maturity in her object relation.

Nothing yet has reached what one could call on the occasion a kind of cultural ambience, that something which makes the subject expect from the analyst’s mouth something quite different. In truth, Dora does not know what she expects. She is led by the hand and FREUD tells her: ‘Speak!’, and nothing else in some way stands out on the horizon of an experience thus directed, except implicitly, by the mere fact that one tells her to speak, that indeed there must be something at stake that is of the order of truth.

The situation is far from similar for us, where the subject comes to analysis already with the notion that the maturity of personality, of instincts, of the object relation, is something that is already organized, normative, and of which the analyst in some way represents the measure. He is the holder of the paths and the secrets of something that already presents itself as a network of relations, if not all known to the subject, at least whose broad outlines reach him, at least in this notion he has, in broad outline:
– that a progress must be accomplished,
– that halts in his development are something conceivable,
…in short, that a whole background, a whole implication concerning ‘the normativization of his person’, of his instincts, put there whatever brace you like, implies that the analyst, when he intervenes, intervenes in the position, one says, of judgment, of sanction. There is an even more precise word, which we will indicate later.

Assuredly, this gives a wholly different scope to his interpretation. But to grasp well what is at issue when I speak to you of unconscious desire, of the Freudian discovery, one must return to those fresh times when nothing was implied of the analyst’s interpretation except this detection in the immediate, behind something that presents itself paradoxically as absolutely closed, of something that is beyond.

And everyone here gargles with the term ‘meaning’. I do not believe that the term ‘meaning’ is there anything other than a kind of weakening of what is at issue at the origin. The term desire, in what it has, on the occasion, to knot, to gather as identical to the subject, gives its full scope to what is encountered there in this first apprehension of analytic experience, and it is to that that it is fitting to return if we must try to gather together, at once, the point where we are and what essentially signifies not only our experience but its possibilities.

I mean that what makes it possible is also what must keep us, if one can say so, from falling into this slope, into this inclination, I would almost say into this trap in which we ourselves are implicated with the patient, that we introduce him into an experience of suppositions, of inducing him into a path that would rest in some way on a certain number of petitions of principle. I mean on the idea that in the end a final solution could be given to his condition that would allow him, in the end, to become, let us say the word, entirely identical to any object whatsoever.

Let us return then to this problematic character of desire as it presents itself in analytic experience, that is to say in the symptom, whatever the symptom may be. I call symptom here in its most general sense, as much the morbid symptom, as the dream, as anything at all that is analyzable. What I call symptom is what is analyzable. The symptom presents itself, let us say, under a mask, presents itself under a paradoxical form: the pain of the first hysterics whom FREUD analyzes, there is something that presents itself at first in a completely closed way in appearance. Something that FREUD, little by little and thanks to a sort of patience that can truly, there, be inspired by a kind of bloodhound instinct, relates as something that is the long presence this patient had had beside her sick father.

And the incidence, while she was caring for her father, of something else that he at first glimpses in a kind of mist: namely the desire that could bind her, at that moment, to one of her childhood friends whom she hoped, let us say, to make her husband. Then afterward, of something that also presents itself under a poorly unveiled form, namely her relations with her two brothers-in-law, that is to say with two characters who married respectively two of her sisters and of whom the analysis allows us to glimpse that, under diverse forms, they represented for her something important there:
– one was hated for I do not know what indignity, what coarseness, what masculine clumsiness,
– the other, on the contrary, seems to have, let us say, infinitely seduced her.

It seems indeed that the symptom precipitated itself upon a certain number of encounters of a sort of oblique meditation around the very happy relations of this brother-in-law with one of her sisters. I take that up again to fix ideas in a kind of example.

It is clear that at that moment we are in a kind of primitive epoch of analytic experience, and we now feel…
after all the experiences that were made afterward, that the fact of saying—as FREUD did not fail to say to his patient—that she was, for example in the last of these cases, purely and simply in love with her brother-in-law and that it is around this repressed desire that the symptom crystallized, namely on the occasion, the pain in the leg
…we feel well, we know that in a hysteric, this has something just as forced as having told Dora that she was in love with Mr. K.

What we see when we approach an observation like that, what we touch with the finger, and FREUD expresses it, this view, from higher up than what I am proposing to you, there is no need at all to overturn FREUD’s observation to arrive at it because, without FREUD formulating it thus, diagnosing it, discerning it, he gives all the elements of it in the clearest way. I will say that up to a certain point the composition of his observation lets it appear, beyond the words he articulates in his paragraphs, in a way even infinitely more convincing than everything he says.

For what is he going to bring out? He is going precisely to bring out, concerning this experience of Elisabeth von R., what, according to his account and his experience, links in many cases the appearance of hysterical symptoms to this experience—so harsh in itself—of being wholly devoted to the service of a sick person, of playing the role of nurse, and even more to the scope this function takes when the role of nurse is assumed by a subject with respect to one of its close relations, that is to say where, even more, by all the laws of affection, of passion that bind the caregiver to the cared-for, the subject finds itself in the posture of having to satisfy more than ever, in no other occasion, what one can, there, with the maximum of emphasis, designate as the demand.

The entire submission, indeed the self-abnegation, of the subject with respect to the demand that is proposed to it is truly given by FREUD as one of the essential conditions of the situation insofar as on the occasion it proves hysterogenic. This is all the more important because in this hysteric, contrary to others he also gives us as examples, the antecedents, as much personal as familial, in this sense are extraordinarily vague, little accentuated, and that consequently the term here takes its full scope. Besides, FREUD gives all the indication of it.

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

On the other hand, the thing that we can see correlatively with this condition, the term that I isolate here in the middle of these three formulas as function of demand, we will say that it is as a function of this background position that the something at issue…
and that FREUD here, carried along in a way by the necessities of language, has only one fault, if one can say so, which is to orient prematurely, to set the subject, to implicate the subject in a way that is too definite in this situation of desire
…what is at issue is first and foremost essentially the interest that is taken by the subject in a situation of desire.

It is an interest that is taken, but we cannot say ‘given that she is a hysteric’, and now that we know what a hysteric is, we cannot say completely: ‘whichever side she takes it from’. If, moreover, it is already—to say from which side she takes it—it is already to implicate in a relation, if one can say so as third, that she is interested in her brother-in-law from her sister’s point of view or in her sister from her brother-in-law’s point of view.

It is precisely that now we know that what can persist correlatively with hysterical identification is here double: let us say that she is interested, that she is implicated in the situation of desire, and that is indeed what is essentially represented here by a symptom, which the notion of mask brings back.

The notion of mask, that is to say this desire under this ambiguous form that does not allow us precisely to orient the subject with respect to this or that object of the situation. It is this interest of the subject in the situation as such, that is to say in the relation of desire, that is expressed by this something that appears, that is to say what I call the mask element of the symptom. It is indicated in FREUD, FREUD who says on this subject that ‘the symptom speaks in the session’. The ‘it speaks’ that I speak to you about all the time is there, from FREUD’s first articulations, expressed in the text.

Later he said that the borborygmi of his patients came to be heard and to speak in the session and had a meaning of words. But here what he tells us is:
– that in the session itself, the pains—insofar as they reappear, insofar as they intensify, insofar as they become more or less intolerable during the session itself—are part of the subject’s discourse,
– that he measures, by the tone, by the modulation of his subjects, the degree of burning, of scope, of revelatory value of what the subject is in the process of confessing, of letting go, in the session.

The trace and the direction of this trace, the centripetal direction, the progress, to say everything, of the analysis is measured by FREUD by the very modulation, by the very intensity of the way in which the subject registers, during the session, a more or less great intensification of his symptom. I took this example, but I could just as well take others, I could just as well take the example of a dream, or something:
– that would allow us to center where the problem of the symptom and of unconscious desire is, of the link of desire itself, insofar as desire itself remains a question mark, an x, an enigma, with the symptom with which it clothes itself, that is to say the mask,
– that would allow us, in sum, to formulate this: we are told that the symptom is something that speaks in itself up to a certain point, of which one can say with FREUD—and with FREUD from the origin—that it is articulated. The symptom is therefore something that goes in the direction of the recognition of desire.

But what was this symptom—insofar as it is there to have desire recognized—before FREUD arrived, and thus behind him the whole rising of his disciples, the analysts? It is a recognition that tends to come to light, that seeks its way but that, precisely because it is not—it does not manifest itself—except by the creation of what we have called the mask, that is to say something closed. This recognition of desire is a recognition by no one, that aims at no one since no one, up to that moment when one begins to learn its key, can read it. It is essentially a recognition that presents itself under a form closed to the Other, recognition of desire then, but recognition by no one.

On the other hand, if it is a desire for recognition, as desire for recognition it is something other than desire. Besides, we are told it clearly: this desire is a repressed desire. That is why our intervention adds something more to simple reading. This desire is a desire that the subject excludes, insofar as the subject wants to have it recognized as a desire for recognition. It is perhaps a desire, but in the end a desire for nothing:
– it is a desire that is not there,
– it is a desire that is rejected,
– it is a desire that is excluded.

It is this double character of unconscious desire which, by identifying it with its mask, makes it something other than anything whatsoever directed toward an object. This is what we must never forget. And this is what allows us literally to read the sense of what is presented to us as being the analytic dimension of the locating of the most essential discoveries when FREUD speaks to us of this lowering, of this Erniedrigung of love life that arises from the ground of the Oedipus complex, or when he speaks to us of the desire of the mother as being at the principle of this for certain subjects: precisely those about whom we are told that they have not abandoned the incestuous object, that is to say the mother. Finally, that they have not abandoned her enough, for in the end what we learn is that the subject never abandons her entirely.

Of course, there must be something that corresponds to this more or less of abandonment, and that we call and diagnose ‘fixation on the mother’: it is the case where FREUD presents to us the dissociation of love and desire. These are subjects who cannot, FREUD tells us, envisage approaching the woman insofar as she enjoys for them her full status of being lovable, of being human, of being—in the full sense—accomplished, which this being has, one says, and can give, and give itself. Here, there is no desire insofar as the object is there, we are told. Which of course means that it is there under a mask, for it is not to the mother that this desire is addressed, it is to the woman, one says, who succeeds her, who takes her place. Well precisely: there is no longer any desire.

On the other hand, FREUD tells us, this subject will find desire with prostitutes. What does that mean? Of course, here when we are in this kind of first exploration of the darkness concerning the mysteries of desire, we say: ‘it is insofar precisely as it is the very opposite of the mother’. Does that fully suffice, because ‘it is the very opposite of the mother’, that precisely he can subordinate it? We have since made enough progress in the knowledge of the images, the fantasies of the unconscious and of their character to know that what the subject goes to seek in prostitutes on this occasion is nothing other than what Roman Antiquity showed us quite plainly sculpted and represented at the door of brothels, namely the phallus, the phallus insofar as it is precisely what inhabits the prostitute.

We now know that what the subject goes to seek in the prostitute:
– is the phallus of all the other men,
– is the phallus as such,
– is the anonymous phallus.

That is to say, also something that is under an enigmatic form, a mask, something problematic, something that binds desire with a privileged object, with something that is here in a certain relation to meaning—of which we have only too much learned to see all the importance of the phallic phase—of these defiles through which subjective experience must pass for the subject to be able to rejoin his natural desire.

In short, we find, concerning what we call on this occasion ‘desire of the mother’…
which is here a sort of label, a symbolic designation of something that we observe in the facts, namely the correlatively promoted and split raising of the object of desire into two irreconcilable halves
…what, on the occasion and in our interpretation itself, can be proposed as being its object, namely the substitutive object: the woman, insofar as she is the heiress of the mother’s function, finding herself dispossessed, frustrated of the element of desire, this element of desire itself being linked to something extraordinarily problematic and which also presents itself with a character of mask and of mark.

With a character, let us say the word, of signifier, as if precisely we found ourselves—once it is a matter of the relations of unconscious desire—in the presence of a necessary mechanism, of a necessary Spaltung that makes desire, which we had long known, which we presumed to be alienated in a quite special relation to the Other, present itself here as marked, not only with the necessity of this intermediary to the Other as such, but in this intermediary to the Other, marked with a special signifier, with an elected signifier which turns out to be the necessary path on which must ‘adhere’, if one can say so, the course of the vital force, on the occasion: of desire, and the problematic character of this particular signifier on the occasion: the phallus.

That is what the question is. That is what we stop at. That is what is proposed to us by all the difficulties that the very fact introduces for us of being able to conceive how it happens that we encounter, on the paths of maturation as one says ‘genital’, this obstacle, which is not simply an obstacle but which is an essential defile, which makes it so that it is by way of a certain position taken with respect to the phallus…
– for the woman as lack,
– for the man as threatened
…that what presents itself as having to be the, let us say, happiest outcome is necessarily realized.

So here what we see is:
– that by intervening, by naming something, we always do more, whatever we do, than what we believe we do,
– that by interpreting—the word that I wanted to tell you just now, the precise word that I called just now to authorize, to sanction, to permit, is ‘to homologate’—we identify the same with the same, we say: ‘it is that’.

We substitute ourselves for this ‘no one’ to whom the symptom is addressed insofar as it is there, in the path of the recognition of desire, but we always also misrecognize, up to a certain degree, the desire that wants to have itself recognized, insofar as always to a certain degree we assign it its object whereas it is not an object, that it is desire but desire of this lack, which in the Other designates another desire.

This introduces us to the second chapter, if you like, to the second line of what I am proposing to you here in these three formulas, namely to the chapter of demand [D].

d ⇒ $ ◊ a ⇔ i(a) ⇐ m
D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I
Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

I think that the way in which I approach these things and take them up again, namely the way in which I try to articulate for you the originality of the desire that is at issue at every instant in analysis, is not in the supervision that we can make of it in the name of a more or less theoretical idea of the maturation of each. I think you must begin to hear that if I speak of the instance of speech or of the letter, in the unconscious, it is certainly not to eliminate this something irreducible, unformulable, that is desire.

I am simply making to you this remark of which up to now philosophers do not seem to have become aware. I say it in relation to a remark that someone, badly inspired on the occasion, believed he had to make recently about the fact that certain psychoanalysts—as if there were many of them on the occasion—gave too much importance to language with regard to this famous unformulated of which I do not know why certain philosophers have made one of the cases of their personal property.

We will say that contrary to this formula, which consisted—in the person whom I qualify on the occasion as ‘badly inspired’, which is the minimum of my thought—in making the remark that the unformulated was perhaps not unformulable, I will answer him this, to which he would do better to pay attention than to seek to implicate everyone in his shop quarrels, it is—in an inverse perspective—that it is not a reason because something is not articulable—namely desire—for it not to be articulated.

I mean, in itself desire is articulated insofar as it is linked to the presence of the signifier in man, and this does not mean for all that, precisely because it is essentially a matter of this link with the signifier, it is not a reason, far from it: it is even precisely the reason why, in a particular case, it is never fully articulable.

Let us now return to this second chapter which is that of demand [D]. There, we are in the articulable articulated, in the actually articulated. It is indeed this link between desire and demand that is in question for the moment and we will not reach the end of this discourse today. But next time, I want, between these two terms of desire and demand, and the paradoxes that just now we have designated in this desire as being essentially masked desire, to show you how this is articulated.

Assuredly, it is because we can approach it only by way of some demand, that from the moment the patient approaches us and comes to us, it is to ask us for something. And we already go enormously far in the engagement, in the precision of the situation, by saying to him simply: ‘we are listening to you’. Then it is fitting, there, to start again from what one can call the premises of demand…
– on what makes demand upon demand,
– on what makes the situation of demand,
– and on the way it is engaged within an individual life.

Here, one must return to what institutes it at the beginning. I am not going to redo the dialectic of the ‘Fort!-Da!’. Demand is linked first and foremost to this something that is in the premises of language itself, namely in the existence of a call that is at once the principle of presence, and the term that makes it possible to push it away, play of presence and absence, and it makes of the first articulation by which the object is called this something by which already it is more than a symbol object: it becomes what the desire for presence makes of it, and not, as one says, an object.

The first dialectic is not the partial object of the mother-breast or of the mother-food or of the mother-total object, as if it were a kind of conquest made step by step. The infant notices that the breast continues into the armpit, into the neck and into the hair.

The object at issue is the symbolic parenthesis of this presence inside which there is the sum of all the objects that it can bring and which makes this symbolic parenthesis already more precious than any good, and that one of the goods it contains cannot in itself and by itself alone satisfy what is the call of presence, that, as I have already expressed to you several times, none of these goods in particular can serve, and serves on the occasion, except to crush, if one can say so, the principle of this call, namely that the child perhaps feeds and begins to sleep. At that moment, obviously, there is no longer any question of call, all the relations to any object whatsoever, partial as one says, within maternal presence, are here only substitutes, crushing of desire, not satisfaction as such.

And this, namely the principal character of this symbolization here of the object insofar as it is the object of the call, is already marked by the fact that we too have read, but as always we do not know how to draw to the end the consequences of what we read, that already in the object, in the object at issue, in the object of presence, the dimension of the mask appears.

What is it that our good friend Mr. SPITZ brings us, if not that? It is that first is recognized this kind of direct frontal, of framework, this mask, and the character of beyond that characterizes this presence insofar as symbolized, namely of search beyond this presence insofar as it is masked, insofar as it is symptomatized, symbolized. And this search beyond, the child indicates to us in his behavior that he has its dimension. For it suffices—I have already spoken elsewhere of the very particular character of the child’s reaction before the mask—to play with a child—I have already told you—to see the blossoming that the fact of removing the mask gives him, and this particularly anxious character of what happens under the mask, when under the mask another mask appears. For then, he no longer laughs.

But there is not even any need to give oneself over to these sorts of small little exercises, it suffices to observe a child to realize that before speech, communication, the first communication. One must never have simply observed a child in his development in the first months to not realize that the first communication, insofar as truly communication, that is to say with the beyond of what you are before him as symbolized presence, is laughter. Before any speech, the child laughs. He laughs when laughter of course is linked to smiling and to relaxation, and the whole physiological mechanism of laughter is always linked to a certain satisfaction.

People have spoken of this aim of the smile of the sated child, but the child, insofar as he laughs at you, he laughs at you precisely in a certain relation of course with his satisfaction of desire, but after and beyond this satisfaction, insofar as, still present and awake, it is to this beyond of this presence, insofar as it is capable of satisfying him and that it contains within it the accord to his desire, that laughter occurs and that the familiar presence, the presence of which he has the habit and the knowledge, insofar as it can satisfy his desires in their diversity, is there called, apprehended, recognized in this so specific, so special mode that are, in children, before speech, these first laughs in the presence of certain of the presences that care for him, that feed him, that respond to him.

Laughter also responds just as well moreover to all these maternal games that are the first exercises in which modulation, articulation as such, is brought to him. Laughter, insofar as precisely it is linked to what I have called for you throughout these first articulations of this year’s lectures the witticism, is the beyond, the beyond of the immediate, the beyond of any demand. Desire, insofar as it is properly speaking linked to a signifier, on the occasion the signifier of presence, is to the beyond of this presence, to the subject there behind, that the first laughs are addressed.

And we find there, from that moment, from the origin if one can say so, the root of identification. For identification, insofar as it will be made successively over the course of the child’s development with this or that, with the mother first, with the father afterward, and I am not telling you that this exhausts the question, but that we find there a root of it. Identification is very exactly the correlative of this laughter, for the opposite of laughter, of course, is not crying. Crying expresses colic, expresses need, crying is not a communication, crying is an expression. But laughter, insofar as I am forced to articulate why, is a communication.

By contrast, what is it that corresponds to the opposite of laughter, insofar as laughter notes, communicates, addresses itself to the one who, beyond this signified presence, is the spring, the source of pleasure and of identification? It is the contrary: one no longer laughs, one is serious as a pope or as a dad, one acts as if nothing, because the one who is there gives you a certain wooden face because, no doubt, it is not the time to laugh. It is not the time to laugh because needs do not, at that moment, have to be satisfied. Desire, as one says, is shaped on the one who holds the power to satisfy it, who opposes the resistance of reality as one says, which is perhaps not quite what one says it is, but which, assuredly, presents itself here under a certain form, and, to say everything, already within this dialectic of demand.

We see, according to my old schema, what is at issue occur when demand arrives here at a good port, namely beyond the mask, to meet, not satisfaction but the message [s(A)] of this presence, in the way the subject registers that he indeed has before him the source of all goods: here laughter bursts out. And the process does not need either, there, to go further.

But it may have to go further because the face showed itself wooden, because the demand was refused, and then, as I told you, what is at the origin of this need and desire appears here under a transformed form, the wooden face has been transferred into the circuit to come here, moreover at a place where it is not for nothing that it is there that we meet the image of the other [i(a)] and that this transformation of demand is given which is called the ego ideal [I], while here indeed, in the signifying line, the principle, the place begins of what is called prohibition and superego, of what is articulated as such coming from the Other. Analytic theory has always had much difficulty reconciling the existence, the coexistence, the co-dimensionality of the ego ideal and of the superego, but assuredly they correspond to different formations and productions.

It would suffice to make this essential distinction that there is between need, and the speech that demands it, to understand how these two products can be at once co-dimensional and different:
– it is in the line of signifying articulation, [A → S] namely prohibition, that the superego is formulated, even under its most primitive forms,
– whereas it is in the line of the transformation of desire [d→S◊a], insofar as desire is always linked to a certain mask, that the ego ideal is produced.

In other words, the link in demand of satisfaction with the mask, their opposition which makes the mask constitute itself in dissatisfaction and by way of the demand that is refused, that is the point up to which I wanted to bring you today. But then, what would result from it? It is that there would in sum be as many masks as forms of dissatisfaction? Yes, that is indeed how things present themselves, and you will be able to guide yourself on that with certainty in the psychological dimension that unfolds, that deploys itself from frustration that is so vivid in certain subjects.

You will be able to note in their very declarations this kind of relation between dissatisfaction and the mask, which would make that, up to a certain degree, there would be as many masks as dissatisfactions. This plurality of relations of the subject to the Other, according to the diversity of his dissatisfactions, is indeed something that poses a problem and of which one can say precisely, up to a certain point, that it would make of any personality a kind of moving mosaic of identifications.

And I will say that it is precisely in the intervention of the third dimension, the one that I will leave aside today, that I reserve for next time, the one that is introduced, not, as one says, by genital maturation, nor gift, nor oblativism, nor other moralizing balderdash which are quite secondary characteristics of the question, but in something of which we will say that it intervenes indeed from a certain moment, a desire:
– a desire that is not need but that is Ἔρως [Éros],
– a desire that is not autoerotic but, as one says, alloerotic, for those are exactly ways of saying the same thing.

Only it is not enough to say that, for in truth, it is not enough of this genital maturation to bring subjective reworkings that are going to be decisive reworkings, that are going to allow us to grasp the link between desire and the mask.

We will see next time this characteristic, this essential condition that links this stage to a prevalent, privileged signifier, which we call not by chance, but because concretely it is this signifier, namely the phallus. And we will see paradoxically that it is precisely at this stage that there is realized at once this something that allows the subject to find himself as ‘one’ through the diversity of his masks, but which on the other hand makes him fundamentally divided, fundamentally marked by an essential Spaltung between:
– what is in him desire,
– and what is mask.