If ‘the things of man’, with which we are in principle concerned, are marked by his relation to the signifier, one cannot use the signifier to speak of these ‘things’ as one speaks of the things that the signifier helps him to posit.
In other words, there must be a difference in the way we speak of ‘the things of man’
and in the way we speak of other things.

We know well that things are not insensitive to the approach of the signifier, that their relation to the order of the λόγος must be studied, and that we are able, more than our predecessors, to notice that the way in which
ultimately language penetrates things, furrows them, lifts them, upsets them somewhat,
raises many questions.

But in the end we have now reached the point where we know—or where we suppose at least—barring error,
that things, for their part, are not developed in language. That is at least where one started
for the work of science as it is currently constituted for us, of the science of the ϕύσις[phusis].

To think first of chastising language, that is to say reducing it to the minimum necessary so that this grip on things can take place, is what one calls the transcendental analytic. Finally, one managed to reduce language,
for things, to its function of interrogation. In sum one has as much as possible—and naturally not totally—freed it from things with which it was deeply engaged up to a certain epoch that corresponds roughly to the beginning of modern science. Now, of course, everything becomes complicated. Do we not observe at once:
– singular convulsions in things, which are certainly not without relation to the way we interrogate them,
– and, on the other hand, curious impasses in language, which, at the moment when we speak of things, becomes strictly incomprehensible to us?

But that is not our concern. We, we are at Man. And there, all I am making you notice
is that language is not, up to now, freed. The language with which to interrogate him is not detachable as we believe it to be detached when we deliver, on ‘the things of man’, the discourse of the academy or of psychiatric psychology. Up to further notice, it is the same. We ourselves can quite sufficiently notice
the poverty of the constructions in which we engage, and moreover their immutability because, in truth,
for a century, since one has been speaking of hallucination in psychiatry, one has hardly taken a step, one still does not know, one still cannot define in any way other than derisory what hallucination is in psychiatry.

All the language, moreover, of psychiatric psychology bears this same handicap of making us feel, in sum, its profound treading in place, and of making us feel this, which we express as follows: we say that one reifies such and such a function, and we sense the arbitrariness of these reifications when one speaks, even in a Bleulerian language, of discordance in schizophrenia. We have the impression that we are in something
when we say reify. What does that mean? It is not at all that we reproach this psychology for making of man ‘a thing’—would to heaven it made of him ‘a thing’—that is indeed the aim of a science of man.
But precisely, it makes of him a thing that is nothing other than language that freezes prematurely, that hastily substitutes its own form of language for something that is already woven in language.

What we call, in sum, formations of the unconscious, what FREUD presented to us as formations of the unconscious, is nothing other than this ‘grip’ of a certain primary—moreover it is indeed for that reason
that he called it the primary process—this ‘grip’ of a certain primary in language. Language marks this primary,
and that is why FREUD’s discovery, the discovery of the unconscious, can be said to have been ‘prepared’ by the interrogation of this primary, insofar as its language structure is first detected. When I say ‘prepared’, it could allow one to prepare the interrogation of this primary, to introduce a correct interrogation of primary tendencies.

But we are not there as long as we have not taken stock of what it is first a matter of recognizing, namely that this primary is first and foremost woven like language. That is why I bring you back to it, and that is also why those who up to now promise you, hold out to you ‘the synthesis of psychoanalysis and biology’
show you manifestly—by the fact that absolutely nothing has been initiated in this direction—demonstrate to you that it is a lure. And even, we will go further by affirming that, up to further notice, to promise it is a swindle.

We are therefore trying to situate, to project, to present before you what I call the texture of language. That does not mean that we exclude this primary. It is indeed in its search, insofar as it is something other
than language, that we advance there. In the preceding lessons we were touching what I called to you
‘the dialectic of desire and demand’. I told you that in demand identification is made with the object—let us say roughly—of feeling. Why, ultimately, is it so?

Precisely insofar as, for anything intersubjective to be established, the Other, with a capital A, must speak. Or again: because it is of the nature of speech to be the speech of the Other. Or again, because:
– it is necessary that everything that is of the manifestation of primary desire at some moment be installed on what FREUD after FECHNER calls ‘the Other scene’,
– that this is necessary to man’s satisfaction, precisely insofar as, being a speaking being, a quite major part of his satisfactions must pass through the intermediary of speech.

It is immediately to be noted that from this sole fact, a wholly initial ambiguity is introduced: if desire is obliged
to this medium of speech and if—as is wholly manifest—this speech has its status, is installed, and by its nature develops only in the Other as the place of speech, then it is wholly clear that from this, there is no reason
for the subject to notice.

I mean that the distinction between the Other and himself is one of the distinctions that, at the origin, is the most difficult of distinctions to make. Likewise, I do not need to underscore what FREUD, for example, has well underscored, namely
the symptomatic value of that moment of childhood when the child believes that the parents know all his thoughts. FREUD explains very well, at that very moment, the link of this phenomenon with speech, with the fact that his thoughts, ultimately, were formed in the speech of the Other. And it is entirely natural that at the origin his thoughts belong to that speech.

Between him and this Other, at the outset, there is only a slight border, marked precisely by what happens
in the narcissistic relation, but an ambiguous border, in the sense that it is crossed. I mean that the narcissistic relation is perfectly open to a sort of permanent transitivism.

This is what the child’s experience also shows, but the two modes of ambiguity…
the one that takes place here on the imaginary plane, and the one that belongs to the symbolic order, that is to say the first
that I have just recalled, that by which desire is founded in the speech of the Other
…the two limits, the two modes of crossing that make the subject alienate himself, are not confused.
And it is in their discordance that a first possibility is established—as experience shows—
that the subject distinguishes himself, of course, most particularly on the imaginary plane: he establishes himself with his fellow
in a position of rivalry in relation to a third object.

But there always remains the question of what happens when they are two, namely when it is a matter that he sustain himself
in the presence of the Other. This dialectic, which in sum borders on what is called that of recognition,
you recognize it—at least, you glimpse a little of it thanks to what, at least for some of you, thanks to what here we have communicated—you know that this dialectic of recognition,
a certain HEGEL sought it in the conflict of jouissance and in the path of the so-called ‘struggle to the death’
where he makes felt all his ‘dialectic of master and slave’. All this is very important to know,
but it is of course clear that it does not cover the field of our experience, and for the best reasons.

It is that there is something other than the dialectic of the struggle of master and slave:
– there is the relation of the child to the parents,
– there is precisely what happens at the level of recognition, insofar as what is at stake is not struggle nor conflict, but precisely demand.

It is in sum a matter of seeing that if the subject’s desire is alienated in demand, is profoundly transformed by the fact of having to pass through demand, how desire at some moment can… how it must be reintroduced.
These things are simple: primitively the child, in his powerlessness, finds himself entirely dependent
on demand, that is to say on the speech of the Other which modifies, restructures, profoundly alienates the nature of his desire.

What we are alluding to here corresponds roughly to that dialectic of demand that one calls,
rightly or wrongly, ‘pre-Oedipal’, and assuredly rightly ‘pregenital’, and where here, because of this ambiguity
of the limits of the subject with the Other, we see introduced into demand:
– that oral object which, insofar as it is demanded on the oral plane, is incorporated,
– that anal object which becomes the support of this dialectic of the primitive anal gift, linked essentially in the subject to the fact that he satisfies or does not satisfy the educative demand, that is to say in the end, that he accepts or does not accept letting go of a certain symbolic object.

In short, this profound reworking of the first desires by demand is what we touch perpetually
in connection with what we call this dialectic of the oral and anal object in particular. We see what results from it: namely that this Other as such, with which the subject has to do in the relation of demand, is itself subjected
to a dialectic of assimilation or incorporation, or of rejection. There is something different that can and must be introduced, that by which the originality, the irreducibility, the authenticity of the subject’s desire is reestablished.

I do not believe that the purported progress of the genital stage means anything else, which consists in this:
that installed in the first, pregenital dialectic of demand, the subject at a moment has to do with the other desire, a desire that up to then has not been integrated, that is not integrable without reworkings much more critical
and deeper still than for the first desires, and that this desire, the ordinary path by which it is introduced for him, is as desire of the Other:

– he recognizes a desire beyond demand, a desire insofar as not adulterated by demand,

– he encounters it, he situates it in the beyond of the first Other to whom he addressed his demand, to fix ideas, let us say: the mother.

What I am saying there is only a way of articulating, of expressing what has always been taught: namely that it is through the Oedipus that genital desire is assumed, comes to take its place in the subjective economy. But what I intend to draw your attention to is the function of this desire of the Other in, once and for all, allowing the true distinction of the subject and the Other.

In other words, it is the situation of reciprocity that makes it so that if the subject’s desire depends entirely on demand to the Other, that is to say on the Other, there is a situation of reciprocity: what is expressed in the relations of the child to the mother by the fact that the child also knows very well that he holds something, that he can refuse the mother’s demand,
for example by acceding or not to the requests of anal or excremental discipline.

There is therefore, in this relation between the two subjects around demand, something, an original relation such that a new dimension that completes this first one is introduced, which makes the subject something other than a subject in the relation of dependence, a relation of dependence that makes essential being.

What must be introduced, what is of course there from the beginning, what from the origin is latent, is this:
– that beyond what the subject asks,
– beyond what the Other asks of the subject,
…there must be the presence and the dimension of what the Other desires.

This, which at first is profoundly veiled to the subject but which nevertheless is there, immanent to the situation and which little by little
will develop in the experience of the Oedipus, this is essential in the structure, more originally, more fundamentally:

– than the perception of the relations of the father and the mother on which I have dwelt in what I called the paternal metaphor,

– than even the perception, from whatever point it may be, of what leads to the castration complex, that is to say what will be a development of this beyond demand.

All by itself, the fact that the subject’s desire is first found, first located in existence as such of the desire of the Other,
as desire distinct from demand, that is what I want today, by an example, to illustrate for you,
and by the first example that can be required, namely that if this is in some way introductory to everything that is
of this structuring of the subject’s unconscious by his relation to the signifier, we must find it right away.

And first I have already alluded to what we can point to in the first observations that FREUD
made of hysteria. Let us move to the time when FREUD for the first time speaks to us of desire. He speaks to us of it in connection with dreams. I commented for you on what FREUD draws from the inaugural dream of Irma, the dream of the injection.

I will not return to it. Let us take the second dream—because FREUD in the Traumdeutung also analyzes some of his dreams—
it is ‘the dream of Uncle Joseph’. I will analyze it another day because it is wholly demonstrative, in particular to illustrate the schema of the two interlaced loops, because there is nothing that truly shows more the two levels on which a dream develops: the properly signifying level which is speech, and the imaginary level where—in a sense—the metonymic object is embodied. Let us not stray into that.

I take the third dream that FREUD analyzed in the third chapter: ‘The transposition of the dream’.
It is the one we will call ‘The dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife’. Here is the dream:

‘I want to give a dinner, but I have for all provisions only a little smoked salmon.
I would like to go shopping, but I remember that it is Sunday afternoon and that all the shops are closed.
I want to telephone a few suppliers, but the telephone is out of order. I must therefore renounce the desire to give a dinner.’
[‘I want to give a supper, but I have nothing in stock except a little smoked salmon. I think of going shopping, but I remember that it is Sunday afternoon, when all shops are locked. I now want to telephone a few suppliers, but the telephone is disturbed. Thus I must give up the wish to give a supper.’]
There is the text of the dream. FREUD scrupulously notes the way in which the text of a dream is articulated, verbalized,
and it is from this verbalization of a kind of dream rebus that analysis of a dream always and only seems conceivable to him.

‘I naturally answer’—says FREUD—‘that only analysis can decide the meaning of this dream…’
[‘I naturally answer that only the analysis can decide on the meaning of this dream…’]

Indeed, the patient proposed it to him by saying:

‘You will remark that you have told me that a dream is always something in which a desire is realized.
Here, I have the greatest difficulty realizing it.’
[‘You always say the dream is a fulfilled wish,’ begins a witty patient. ‘Now I want to tell you a dream whose content goes quite to the contrary, namely that a wish is not fulfilled for me. How do you reconcile that with your theory?’]
‘I nevertheless grant’—continues FREUD—‘that at first sight it seems reasonable and coherent and appears quite the contrary
of a wish’s fulfillment.’ [‘although I admit that at first sight it appears reasonable and coherent and resembles the opposite of a wish-fulfillment.’]
‘What are the elements of this dream? You know that the motives of a dream are always found in the facts of the preceding days’—he says to his
patient. [‘But from what material has this dream arisen? You know that the stimulus for a dream each time lies in the experiences of the last day.’]
‘The husband of my patient is a wholesale butcher. He is a good man, very active. He told her a few days before that he was putting on too much weight. He would like to undertake a slimming cure: he will get up early, he will no longer accept invitations to dinner. She recounts, laughing, that her husband usually went to the res-taurant and that he had made the acquaintance of a painter who wanted to paint his portrait, because he had not yet found a head so expressive. But her husband had replied with
his ordinary roughness that he thanked him very warmly but that he was convinced that the painter would prefer to his entire face, a piece of the backside of the beautiful young girl. My patient is at present very enamored of her husband and teases him constantly.
She also asked him not to give her caviar. What does that mean? In reality she has wished
for a long time to have every morning a sandwich with caviar, but she refuses herself that expense—translates Mr. MEYERSON, but it is not quite that: ‘she does not allow herself that license’, the expense is not made present there—
Naturally, she would have her caviar at once if she spoke of it to her husband, but she begged him, on the contrary,
not to give it to her, so as to be able to tease him longer with it.’

[‘Analysis: The patient’s husband, an honest and capable wholesale butcher, had declared to her the day before that he was becoming too fat and therefore wanted to begin a fat-reduction cure. He would get up early, take exercise, keep a strict diet, and above all accept no more invitations to suppers. Of the husband she further recounts, laughing, that at the regular table he had made the acquaintance of a painter who absolutely wanted to portray him, because he had not yet found such an expressive head. But her husband had replied in his rough manner that he thanked him nicely and was quite convinced that a piece of the backside of a beautiful young girl would please the painter more than his whole face. She was now very much in love with her husband and was teasing with him. She had also asked him not to give her any caviar. What is that supposed to mean? For she has long wished to be able to eat a caviar roll every morning, but does not allow herself the expense. Naturally she would get the caviar immediately from her husband if she asked him for it.
But on the contrary she has asked him not to give her any caviar, so that she can tease him longer with it.’]

Here a parenthesis by FREUD:

(‘That seems far-fetched to me, these sorts of insufficient pieces of information that ordinarily conceal motives that one does not express. Let us think of the way Bernheim’s hypnotized subjects, carrying out a post-hypnotic mission, explain it, when one asks them the reason, by a visibly insufficient motive instead of answering: “I do not know why
I did that.” The caviar will be a motive of this kind. I remark that she is obliged to create for herself an unsatisfied desire in life.
Her dream shows her ‘this dilation’, this postponing of her desire, this setting aside of her desire as really accomplished.
But why did she need an unsatisfied desire?’)
[(‘This grounding seems to me flimsy. Behind such unsatisfying information there usually hide unacknowledged motives. Think of Bernheim’s hypnotized subjects who carry out a posthypnotic assignment and, when asked about their motives, do not answer: I do not know why I did that, but must invent an apparently inadequate grounding.
Something similar will probably be the case with my patient’s caviar. I notice she is compelled to create for herself in life an unfulfilled wish. Her dream also shows her the refusal of the wish as having occurred. But what does she need an unfulfilled wish for?’)]

The remark is by FREUD and in parentheses.
‘What has come to her mind up to now could not serve to interpret the dream. I insist. After a moment, as is appropriate when one must overcome a resistance, she tells me that she visited yesterday one of her friends; she is very jealous of her because her husband always says a great deal of good about her. Fortunately, the friend is slim and thin, and her husband likes full forms. What was this thin person talking about? Naturally about her desire to put on weight. She also asked her:
“When will you invite us again? One always eats so well at your place.” The meaning of the dream is clear now. I can say
to my patient: “it is exactly as if you had replied to her mentally: yes indeed! I am going to invite you so that you eat well, so that you put on weight and so that you please my husband even more! I would rather never give a dinner again in my life!” The dream tells you that you will not be able to give a dinner, it thus accomplishes your wish not to contribute to making your friend more beautiful. The resolution taken to no longer accept invitations to dinner because one has told you that dinners in society make one gain weight. There will be missing only a concordance that will confirm the solution. One still does not know what the smoked salmon corresponds to in the dream. From where does it come that you evoke smoked salmon in the dream? It is—she answers—the favorite dish of my friend. By chance, I also know this lady and I know that she has toward smoked salmon the same conduct as my patient with regard to caviar.’

[‘The ideas so far have not sufficed for the interpretation of the dream. I press for further ones. After a short pause, such as corresponds to the overcoming of resistance, she reports further that yesterday she paid a visit to a friend of whom she is actually jealous, because her husband always praises this woman so much. Luckily this friend is very skinny and thin, and her husband is a lover of full bodily forms. What was this thin friend talking about? Naturally about her wish to become a bit stouter. She also asked her: “When will you invite us again? One always eats so well at your place.” Now the meaning of the dream is clear. I can say to the patient: “It is just as if, at the invitation, you had thought: You I will of course invite so that you gorge yourself at my place, become fat, and please my husband even more. I’d rather give no more suppers. The dream then tells you that you cannot give a supper, thus fulfilling your wish to contribute nothing to the rounding-out of your friend’s bodily forms. That one becomes fat from the things one is served in society is taught you by your husband’s resolve, in the interest of his defattening, to accept no more supper invitations.” What is lacking now is only some coincidence that confirms the solution. The smoked salmon in the dream content has also not yet been derived. “How do you come to the salmon mentioned in the dream?” “Smoked salmon is this friend’s favorite food,” she answers. By chance I also know the lady and can confirm that she allows herself the salmon just as little as my patient allows herself the caviar.’]

It is on this that FREUD introduces this dream which entails another more delicate interpretation and which enters
into the dialectic of identification. It is on this occasion that he makes the following remarks:

‘She identified herself with her friend. It is as a sign of this identification, that is to say insofar as she identifies with the other, that she gave herself in real life an unrealized wish.’ [‘The dream receives a new interpretation if in the dream she does not mean herself but the friend, if she has put herself in the place of the friend or, as we can say, has identified herself with her.
I mean she really did this, and as a sign of this identification she created for herself the denied wish in reality.’]

I think that already you must feel this outline taking shape in this simple text that I could have opened at any other page of the Traumdeutung. We would have found the same dialectic. I believe that by taking the first dream that falls under our hand, the one that will show us in a particularly simple way—because this dialectic is particularly simple in the hysteric—the dialectic of desire and demand.

But let us continue, so as to have pursued to its end what this very important text articulates to us, since in sum it is one of the first very clear articulations by FREUD of what hysterical identification signifies.
He specifies what its sense is. I pass over a few lines so as not to be too long. It is a matter of discussing
what one calls in this connection imitation, sympathy, and he criticizes with much energy the simple reduction
of hysterical contagion to what would be a pure and simple imitation.

‘This process,’ he says, ‘is a little more complicated than hysterical imitation as it has been represented. As an example will prove, it corresponds to unconscious inferences. If a doctor has put, with other patients, in a hospital room, a subject who presents a kind of trembling, he will not be astonished to learn that this accident has been imitated.[…] But this contagion occurs roughly in the following way: patients generally know—one would have to see the weight such a remark carries, I am not speaking merely at the time when it was made, but for us—patients generally know more things about one another than the doctor can know about each of them, and they still concern themselves with one another after the doctor’s visit. Essential remark.
In other words, the human object continues to live its little particular relation to the signifier, even after the observer, behaviorist or not, takes an interest in its photograph. Has one of them had her crisis today, the others will soon know that a letter from home, a reminder of her love sorrow, or other similar things, have been the cause of it. Their compassion is stirred and they unconsciously carry out the following examination: if these sorts of motives entail these sorts of crises, I too can have this sort of crisis—Articulation of the symptom as elementary, to an identification of discourse, to a situation articulated in discourse—because I have the same motives. If those were conscious conclusions, they would lead to the anxiety of seeing this same crisis occur. But things take place on another psychic plane and lead to the realization of the dreaded symptom. Identification is therefore not a simple imitation, but appropriation on the basis of an identical etiology; it expresses an ‘just as if’ and bears on a commonality that persists in the unconscious,

• The term ‘appropriation’ is not quite well translated. It is rather ‘taken as one’s own’—the hysteric identifies by preference with persons with whom she has had sexual relations or who have sexual relations with the same persons as she does. Language is moreover responsible for this conception, it accounts for the fact that two lovers are one.’ says FREUD.
  [‘The latter is a little more complicated than one likes to imagine the imitation of hysterics; it corresponds to an unconscious process of inference, as an example will make clear. The doctor who has a patient with a certain kind of twitching among other patients in the same room in the hospital is not astonished if one morning he learns that this particular hysterical attack has found imitation.[…] Yes, but the psychic infection proceeds roughly in the following way. The patients usually know more about one another than the doctor does about each of them, and they take care of one another when the medical round is over. One has her attack today; it soon becomes known to the others that a letter from home, a freshening of love sorrow, and the like, is the cause of it. Their sympathy becomes active; the following inference is carried out in them, one that does not reach consciousness: If one can have such attacks from such a cause, then I too can get such attacks, for I have the same occasions. If this were an inference capable of consciousness, it would perhaps end in the anxiety of getting the same attack; but it is carried out on another psychic terrain and therefore ends in the realization of the feared symptom. Identification is thus not simple imitation, but appropriation on the basis of the same etiological claim; it expresses an “just as if” and refers to a commonality that remains in the unconscious. Identification is most often used in hysteria to express a sexual commonality. In her symptoms the hysteric identifies most readily—though not exclusively—with such persons with whom she has stood in sexual intercourse, or who have sexual intercourse with the same persons as she herself does. Language likewise takes account of such a view. Two lovers are “One”.’]

Of course the relation of identification to the jealous friend is here the problem that FREUD raises.
I want to draw your attention to this: FREUD in this text underscores as the primary problem that the desire we first encounter, from the first step of the analysis, the one from which the solution of the enigma will unfold, is that the patient was preoccupied, at the moment of this dream, with creating for herself an unsatisfied desire.

What is the function of this unsatisfied desire? For if we read in the dream the satisfaction of a wish, what we dis-cover about the satisfaction of this wish is the underlying presence of a situation that is very properly
the fundamental situation of man between demand and desire, the one into which I am trying to introduce you,
and the one into which I do in fact introduce you by way of the hysteric because, let us put things
roughly like this: one can say that the hysteric is suspended at this first stage, at this necessary split whose necessity I tried to show you a moment ago between demand and desire. Here nothing is clearer:

– What does she demand? I am speaking before her dream, in life. This patient, very enamored of her husband, what does she demand? It is love. And hysterics like everyone else—except that in them it is more cumbersome—demand love.
– What does she desire? She desires caviar. One simply has to read.
– And what does she want? She wants that one not give her caviar.

The question is precisely to know why it is necessary, for a hys-teric to maintain a commerce of love that satisfies her:
– firstly, that she desire something else: the caviar has here no other role than to be something else.
– and secondly, that for this ‘something else’ to fulfill well the function it has the mission to fulfill: precisely that one not give it to her!

For her husband would ask nothing better than to give her caviar. But probably he would be more tran-quil, he imagines. But what FREUD formally tells us is that she wants him not to give her caviar
so that one can continue to love one another madly, that is to say to tease one another, to make one another miserable without end.

These structural elements that have nothing—apart from the fact that we dwell on them—so original,
still are something that is beginning to take on its meaning here. You see that what is expressed there
is a structure that, far beyond its comic side, must represent a necessity: if the hysteric is pre-cisely, as we know, the subject for whom the constitution of the other as big Other, as bearer of the spoken sign, is that with which it is difficult to establish the relation that allows him, hysterical subject—and that is indeed the very definition that can be given of it—to keep his place as subject.

And the hysteric, to say everything, is so open, or so open, to the suggestion of speech, that there must be something there.
Somewhere FREUD—in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’—raises the ques-tion of the manner in which this hypnosis comes to light. Its relation to sleep is far from transparent, and the enigmatic electivity
that appropriates it—I mean satisfies it, or that on the contrary, for other persons opposes it, distances itself from it radically—shows that there is a certain unknown moment that must be realized in hypnosis and that perhaps
makes possible by itself in the subject, originally, the purity of ‘libidinal situations’.

I would rather say ‘libidinal attitudes’, for it is precisely a matter of the places, the positions that we are trying to clarify, and this unknown element of which FREUD speaks turns around this articulation of demand and desire.
This is what we are going to try to show further on. Thus, this preoccupation, this necessity for the subject
to create for himself an unsatisfied desire in relation to what is required for a real Other to be constituted for the subject,
that is to say an other that is not entirely immanent to the reciprocal satisfaction of demand,
that is to say to the entire capture of the subject’s desire by the speech of the Other.

That this desire at issue is by its nature the desire of the Other, that is very pre-cisely what the dialectic of the dream introduces us to, since this desire for caviar, the patient does not want it to be satisfied in reality: where is it represented in
this dream, which indeed indub-itably tends to satisfy the patient as to the solution of the problem she is pursuing?

This desire for caviar, by what is it going to be represented in this dream? By the fact that the person at stake in the dream, the one to which FREUD points, designates that she identifies with her, she is there too, she is hysterical or she is not, what does it matter! Everything is pure-pure and everything is hysterico-hysterical for the patient. Hysterical, of course the Other is too, and this all the more easily because, as I have just told you, the hysterical subject is constituted almost entirely from
the desire of the Other. The desire that the subject asserts here is also the preferred desire of the Other, and indeed she has only that left at the moment when she is not going to be able to give a dinner.

She has only smoked salmon left, that is to say what indicates at once the desire of the Other and what indicates it as capable of being satisfied, but only for the Other: besides, do not fear anything, there is smoked salmon! The dream does not
for all that say that things go as far as her giving it to her friend, but the intention is there. The intention is there…

On the other hand, of course, her friend’s demand, which is the genetic element of the dream, namely that she asked her to come to dinner at her place, where one eats so well and where moreover one can meet the handsome butcher: the amiable husband who always speaks so well of this friend, he too must have his little desire behind his head: the backside of the young girl evoked
so promptly in connection with the painter’s amiable proposal, who proposes to sketch him, to draw his so expressive and so interesting face, is certainly there to demonstrate it.

Everyone, to say everything, has his little desire beyond, simply more or less intensified. What is important in
the case of the hysteric is that she shows us that for her this desire as beyond any demand, that is to say as having to occupy a function as refused desire, plays for her a role of the very first order.

And these things are entirely usable. You will never understand anything about a hysteric, male or female, if you do not start from this recogni-tion of this first structural element. As on the other hand hysteria in the relation of man to the signifier is a wholly primordial structure: if you do not know at what point of the struc-ture,
provided you have pushed the dialectic of demand far enough, you must always at a given moment encounter this Spaltung of demand and desire, at the risk of making great errors, that is to say of making
the patient hys-terical, for of course everything we are analyzing there is unconscious for the subject.

In other words, the hysteric does not know that he cannot be satisfied in demand, but it is on the other hand
very essential that you, you know it. This, at the point where we are, will therefore allow us to begin
to point out what the little diagram means that I drew for you last time and of which I could not even
—of course, because it was a little premature to do it—bring for you the pointing-out and the interpretation,
but we are now going to come to it. Here it is.

We told you, it is around something like this, that is to say around a relation of what
manifests itself as a need that must pass through demand, that is to say address itself to the Other, that we see here…
by way of an encounter, which takes place or does not take place, but which occupies roughly
what we can call the place of the message, that is to say s(A): what is signified of the Other
…that this remainder of demand is produced, which consists in the alteration of what manifests itself in the
still unformed state of the subject’s desire and which, in principle, mani-fests itself in the form of the subject’s identification.

I will take this up again, if you like, next time, text in hand. The first time FREUD speaks
in a completely articulated way of identification, you can already refer to it if you feel like it, before I speak to you about it next time, you will see how FREUD articulates it and you will see that
primitive identification is not articulated otherwise than as I mark it for you there.

You know, on the other hand, to what extent, here, on the path where the rela-tion or the narcissistic short-circuit [A→m→i(a)→I] is situated,
a possibility is introduced already, an opening, a kind of sketch of a third in this relation of the subject to the other.
The essential of what I brought you by describing for you the function of the phallus insofar as it is that certain signifier
that marks what the Other desires insofar as marked by the signifier.

The phallus is that certain signifier that marks what the Other desires insofar as, as real Other, as human Other,
it is in its economy. It is this formula that we are precisely in the process of studying,
namely that it [the Other] is marked by the signifier.

It is precisely insofar as the Other is marked by the signifier that the subject must, can only—through that—recognize,
by the intermediary of this Other, that he too, in sum, is marked by the signifier. That is to say that there is always something that remains beyond what can be satis-fied by the intermediary of this signifier, that is to say by demand, and that this split made around the action of the signifier, this irreducible residue linked to the signifier, also has its own sign, but its sign that, here, is going to identify with this mark in the signified and that it is there that he must encounter his desire.

In other words, insofar as the desire of the Other is barred he is going to recognize his barred desire,
his own unsatisfied desire, and it is at the level of this barred desire, by the intermediary of the Other, that his encounter
with his most authentic desire is made, namely genital desire. That is why genital desire is marked by castration, in other words by a cer-tain relation with the signifier phallus. These are two equivalent causes.

It is from a certain relation of what responds to demand at a first stage, namely to the mother’s speech,
it is beyond that, that is to say beyond a relation of this speech to a Law that is beyond,
and that I showed you to be incar-nated by the father, that this is what constitutes the paternal metaphor.

But you rightly have the right—and I think that it is indeed this kind of lack that must have left you wanting too at the moment when I explained it to you—to think that everything is not reduced to this sort of stratification of speech.
Beyond speech, beyond over-speech—however one names it, namely the Law of the father—in the end
there is indeed something else that is required.

And of course, naturally at the same level where this Law is situated, this elective signifier is introduced precisely,
namely the phallus, which makes it so that under normal conditions, what is produced here is encountered at a second degree of the encounter with the Other. That is what, in my little for-mulas, I called S(A), the signifier of A,
that is to say very precisely what I have just defined as being the function of the phallic signifier,
namely this that marks what the Other desires insofar as marked by the signifier, that is to say barred.

In the same way as what was produced here from the moment when the subject is properly speaking constituted, and not ambiguous, and not perpetually involved in the speech of the Other, the finished subject, the subject that remains this side
of the relation to specular time, of the dual relation to the little other of the relation of speech, the subject—what is here
in the Z formula—the finished subject, it is the subject insofar as the bar has been introduced, namely insofar as he himself too is somewhere marked by the relation to the signifier. And that is why it is here that the relation
of the subject to demand as such is produced: S◊D.

This is the necessary stage through which the integration of the Oedipus com-plex and the castration complex is normally realized,
namely the structuring, through their inter-mediary, of the subject’s desire. How does this occur?
This is developed on this diagram: the way in which the necessity was introduced, by the intermediary of the phallic signifier, of this beyond of the relation to the speech of the Other, but of course, as soon as this is constituted it does not remain
in that place, I mean that it is integrated into the speech of the Other, once the phallus is there as desire of the Other.
That is why the phallic signifier, with everything it involves, its whole sequence, comes here to take the primitive place of the rela-tion
of speech to the mother. It is here that it comes to play its function.

In other words, what happens, if we develop it, if we explain it, what happens for us who try to delimit the stages of this integration of a speech that allows desire to find its place for the subject, remains, if I may say so, unconscious. I mean that from now on it is here that the dialectic
of demand will unfold for him, that he will not know that this dialectic of demand is possible only insofar as what is his desire, his true desire, finds its place in a relation—which for him remains unconscious—to the desire of the Other.

In other words, these two lines normally exchange places, and from the sole fact that they must exchange places,
all sorts of accidents occur in the interval. These accidents, we will encounter them in various forms.
What I simply want today is to indicate to you that in the hysteric what simply manifests itself, what comes to fulfill the function of this, is because of certain elements of deficiency that are always present.

We will nevertheless try to point it out later but it is already easy today to evoke that what occurs is something roughly like this: this beyond of the other’s desire, it occurs before all and first
in a pure state in Dora. And we immediately touch with the finger why part of the battery of elements is miss-ing.
There is absolutely no talk of the mother. You may have noticed in Dora that she is completely absent:
Dora is confronted with her father. It is entirely clear that it is from her father that she wants love.
She wants her father’s love, and it must be said, before the analysis, Dora’s life is very well balanced.
I mean that up to the moment when, as you know, the drama breaks out, she has found a very happy solution to her problems: it is to her father that demand is addressed, and things go very well because her father has a desire.
And the desire goes even better in this affair because this desire is an unsatisfied desire. Dora—as FREUD
does not conceal from us—knows very well that her father is impotent and that the desire for Mme K. is a barred desire.
But what we also know—we know it with a bit of delay, FREUD learned it a little too late—
is that it is Mme K. who is the object of Dora’s desire. It is the object of Dora’s desire precisely as a function of this:
that it is the father’s desire, and the father’s barred desire.

For the maintenance of this balance there is only one thing that is necessary, it is that Dora be somewhere, it is that Dora realize somewhere this basis, this bal-ance, this identification of self that allows her to know where she is.
And this as a function of this demand that is not satisfied: the demand made for her father’s love, but which would hold up well like that as long as there is a desire, and a desire that, as such, cannot be satisfied, neither for Dora nor for her father.
All this depends on where the identification called the ego ideal is going to be produced. You see it here, at the origin it always passes after a double crossing of the line of the Other here.

It is the same, except that the father’s desire represents the second line, and it is after this double crossing
of the two lines that the hysteric’s identification will be realized here, that is to say no longer the identification with the father as when the father is purely and simply the one to whom demand is addressed. Do not forget it, there is now beyond
—and this suits the hysteric very well for her satisfaction and her balance—the father’s desire.

It is another who is in a position to satisfy desire: Monsieur K., the husband of Mme K., of Mme K. so seductive,
so charm-ing, so dazzling, the true object of Dora’s desire. He is here because she is a hysteric, because in
the case of a hysteric, the process cannot go further. Why? Because desire is the element that
by itself is charged with taking the place of this beyond that is located here by the subject’s own position
in relation to demand. But because she is a hys-teric, she does not know what she demands.

She simply needs there to be, somewhere, this desire beyond. But for this desire, she must be able to lean on it,
to complete herself on it, to find herself her identification, her ideal, it is necessary that, at least there, there be at the level of this beyond
of demand, an encounter that allows her to rest, to locate herself on this line.

And it is where Monsieur K. is that she finds—as is absolutely evident from the whole observation—her other
in the sense of little a, the one in which she recognizes herself. And that is precisely why at once she takes an extremely
strong interest in him, and she deceives at first glance her world, namely FREUD on the occasion, who believes that she loves this Monsieur K.

She does not love him, but he is indispensable to her. And he is even far more indispensable to her insofar as Monsieur K.
is the one who desires Mme K. And as I have already marked for you a hundred times, this is arch-demonstrated by the fact
that the circulation is short-circuited entirely, namely that vis-à-vis the other, the little a, she falls back into the situation of unleashed aggression that manifests itself on the occasion by a for-midable slap, namely the fury against the other:
insofar as he is your fellow, he simply robs you of your existence.

From the moment when Monsieur K. says to her the fatal word, without knowing what he is saying, the poor wretch, namely that he is not at all there to support her identification with her, Dora, for a simple rea-son: it is that his wife is nothing to him. That is precisely what Dora cannot tolerate. She cannot tolerate it, why?
It is quite true that if, as we are told, Dora is also structured, as one expresses it incompletely,
as manifestly in a homosexual way as the hysteric is, she should normally be quite pleased with it.

Not at all! That is precisely what unleashes her fury, precisely because at that moment her fine hysterical construction of identification with the mask, with the insignia of the Other—very specifically on the occasion with the fulfilled masculine insignia that Monsieur K. offers her, and not her father—unfortunately collapses, namely that she returns
at that moment to pure and simple demand, to pure and simple claim to her father’s love, and to the quasi-paranoid state into which she enters when she conceives herself for what she is in fact, much more objectively on the part
of her father: an object of exchange, namely someone who amuses Monsieur K., who occupies him while he, her father,
can occupy himself—however vainly it may be, that suffices him, since precisely on this occasion you sense the very function and the nature of desire—while he occupies himself with Mme K.

But at that moment our hysteric falls hard and returns to the wholly primitive character of demand,
that is to say that at that moment she purely and simply demands that her father occupy himself only with her,
in other words that he give her love, in other words that he give her, according to our definition, everything he does not have.
That is why today this is a little first exercise at the barre that I have just made you do, to try to show you what the meaning is—and precisely as regards the hysteric—of this relation of desire and demand.

This, as you get used to it, will allow us to go much more surely and much further.