[On the board]

Forderung: demand
Begierde: desire
Bedurfhis: need
Wunsch: dream-desire

We are going to try to continue moving forward along this path in which, as you see, the theme of the phallus plays an entirely essential role, insofar as it leads us to tighten our grip on what is said in analysis, what is uttered, and the way in which one effectively makes use of the notion of object.

You must clearly feel that we must normally both, at the same time, draw nearer, focus our attention on the effective function that this object relation has in current analytic practice, and at the same time, by focusing on the way it is used and the services it renders, attempt a more elaborated articulation of what, all in all, we designate in a simply precise way when speaking of the phallus, an articulation that also allows us to criticize this use of the object relation.

If we take a report that has, over time, taken on its historical value, the one that appeared in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse on ‘The ego in obsessional neurosis’, a wholly inadequate title because in reality it is only a matter of the object relation in the obsessional. That would be something to explore, perhaps. We will get an idea of it by trying to know why the author wanted to speak of the ego in obsessional neurosis’ in his title, for in truth nothing is really said about it in obsessional neurosis, except that it is weak, that it is strong. On that point the author, in the end, forewarned by something he was hearing at the time, remained in an attitude of prudence that one can only find laudable.

But what dominates this report, in which two earlier articles by the same author culminate, namely:

– the first, from December 1948, published in 1950 in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse: ‘The therapeutic incidences of becoming aware of penis envy in female obsessional neurosis’ [p. 215], which was his first clinical report on the function of the penis in obsessional neurosis, is that freshness, at first glance, that gives this article its quite important value insofar as it shows how things, all in all, rather deteriorated afterward. For assuredly, at the level of a still new experience of this penis envy in female obsessional neurosis, there is something that reflects a fresh experience that is quite interesting.

– Then there is another article, published in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse of July-September 1948: ‘Importance of the homosexual aspect of transference in the treatment of four cases of male obsessional neurosis’. [p. 419]

– The third article is a report on ‘The ego in obsessional neurosis’. [R.F.P. 1953, XVII, no. 1-2,, p. 111]

I think those are three things to read since there are not so many articles written in French on this subject. All in all, that gives a fairly good sense of the level at which things have arrived here on these problems. On the other hand, rereading them cannot fail to produce an overall impression that will, in a way, provide a ground for what we can manage here in approaching the exact articulation of what makes it possible to situate, all in all, the value and the scope of a therapeutics that is thus centered.

For in the end, this ‘object relation’ that is articulated in the synoptic tables where we see the progressive constitution of the object in subjects, one perceives very well that there is, there, a share of a false window. I do not believe that it is the ‘genital object’, nor the ‘pre-genital object’, that is there something extremely significant or important, except for the beauty of the said ‘synoptic tables’.

But in the end, what gives value to this object relation is what is its pivot, what, all in all, introduced into analytic dialectic the notion of object: it is indeed and above all what is called the ‘partial object’, a term borrowed from the vocabulary and the terms of ABRAHAM, in a way moreover not entirely exact, because what ABRAHAM spoke of is ‘the partial love of the object’, which is obviously not quite the same thing, and already this slippage itself has something significant.

This ‘partial object’, there is no need for a great effort to recognize it, to identify it purely and simply with this phallus of which we are speaking, of which we must speak all the more easily because we have precisely given it its scope, which at the same time removes from us any kind of embarrassment in using it as a privileged object. We know why it deserves this privilege: it is precisely as a signifier. It is precisely because of this extraordinary embarrassment at giving this privilege to a particular organ that authors have come precisely to no longer speak of it at all, whereas, on the contrary, it is practically omnipresent throughout the whole analysis.

Indeed you will note, if you reread these articles, the absolutely manifest use—this is an enormous fact, a primary fact, that runs through all these pages—made by the psychoanalyst… not only by the psychoanalyst in question, but by all those who heard him… it is made at the level of fantasy, namely that one can say that in the perspective of the author from whom I have just cited these three articles, the cure of obsessional neurosis turns entirely around an ‘incorporation’—these are the terms the author uses—or an ‘imaginary introjection’ of this phallus that appears in the analytic dialogue in the form of the phallus attributed to the analyst.

There would be, all in all, two phases there:

– a first in which the fantasies of incorporation, of devouring this phallic fantasy would have a clearly aggressive, sadistic character, as one says, while at the same time being felt as horrible and dangerous.

– But this fantasy would thus have a quite revealing value of something that would pertain to the very position of the subject with respect to what is called, in the perspective of the object relation, ‘the corresponding object’, the object constitutive of his stage, namely on the occasion of a certain second phase of the sadistic-anal stage, in which one would pass from fundamental tendencies toward the destruction of the object, to something that would begin to respect the autonomy of this object, at least in this partial form.

All in all, the whole dialectic of the moment—subjective moment as we would say here—where the obsessional-neurosis patient is situated would, as we are told, hang on the maintenance of a certain form of this partial object around which a world could be instituted that would not be entirely devoted to a fundamental destruction, because of the stage immediately underlying this precarious balance at which the obsessional would have arrived. The obsessional is really represented to us as always ready to tip into a destruction of the world, since in any case these things can only be thought in terms of the subject’s relation to his environment, in the perspective in which the author expresses himself. And it is by the maintenance of this partial object, a maintenance that of course requires a whole edifice, a whole scaffolding that is precisely what constitutes obsessional neurosis, that the obsessional would avoid tipping into an always-threatening psychosis. This is most certainly considered by the author as the very basis of the problem.

All the same, one cannot fail to object there that whatever the para-psychotic symptoms may be, the symptoms for example of depersonalization, of ego disturbances, of a feeling of strangeness, of a darkening of the world, feelings obviously touching the tenor, even perhaps the structure, of the ego, that despite all that, we cannot help noticing

– that cases of transition between obsession and psychosis have always existed, but have always been very rare. Authors long ago realized that on the contrary there was indeed a kind of false hope of compatibility between the two affections,

– and on the other hand, when it is a matter of a true obsessional neurosis, it is indeed the thing one risks least in a psychoanalysis: one risks not curing the obsessional, but risking seeing him tip into psychosis is truly a risk that seems to us itself extraordinarily fantasmatic, for it is extremely rare.

That the obsessional, whether in the course of an analysis for some reason whatsoever, or even during an unfortunate, even wild therapeutic intervention, has tipped into psychosis, is very, very, very rare. Personally, I have never seen it in my practice. Thank God! I have never had the impression either that it was a risk that I ran with those patients. There must be something, in an appraisal like that, that betrays a bit more than simply clinical experience: this necessity for coherence of theory that carries the author further than he wants, or even very probably, something that goes further, a certain position of himself in the face of the obsessional that then inevitably opens problems about what one can call, not of course ‘problems of a particular person’: of course, it is not a matter here of speaking of countertransference in the personal sense of things, but of countertransference in the more general sense in which one can consider it as constituted by what I often call ‘the analyst’s prejudices’, in other words, the background of things said or not said on which his discourse is articulated.

Let us begin then by situating what a practice can represent that is led to place its entire pivot, in the therapeutics of obsessional neurosis, around this ‘fantasy of imaginary incorporation of the phallus’, and of the analyst’s phallus, by showing, in truth a bit mysteriously, for one does not see well at what moment, nor why the reversal operates, except by what one can suppose to be a kind of effect of wear, of acceptance of something by the subject.

For there is a moment, we are told, when by reason of a working through, of a persistence of treatment, of the presence of the analyst in the treatment, the incorporation of this phallic fantasy is something that appears to the subject to have a phallic value, a wholly different value, namely the introduction into him of something that is all at once of another nature, that appears to have been the incorporation of a dangerous object and in some way repulsed in fantasies, and that becomes the welcomed object, an object source of power. ‘Source’, it must indeed be said, the word is there, it is not I who made the comparisons and metaphors.

This kind of introjection which, for its part, becomes ‘conservative’:

‘…does it not have traits in common with religious communion, at least in obsessional neurosis—we are told p. 172—where one swallows without chewing—one adds, since in any case, to comment on these—‘feelings of happiness in this fantasy that entailed no destruction, similar in that to ABRAHAM’s melancholics’ sucking fantasies. This kind of introjection that one could perhaps qualify as passive, seems to me much better to deserve the name conservative. Does it not have traits in common with religious communion, where one swallows without chewing?’

Those are not traits chosen, I would say, in a tendentious way in ABRAHAM’s ‘Melancholia’. It is indeed around this something that we feel taking place around a sort of practice or asceticism playing mainly on fantasies that, no doubt with a dosage, with barriers, with a braking, with stages, with all the precautions that the technique entails, we see realized this something that will allow the obsessional-neurosis subject to take up relations whose, in the end, we see poorly what one desires of them, but which assuredly concern what is called ‘the distance taken from the object’.

All in all, if I understand correctly, at the fantasmatic level it is a matter of allowing the subject to approach as closely as possible, to pass through a phase in which this distance is annulled in order to be no doubt—at the very least one must hope so—reconquered afterward with respect to an object that has successively concentrated on itself all the powers of fear, of danger, in order then to become the symbol by which a libidinal relation is established that is considered more normal, and that is qualified as ‘genital’. In truth we perhaps remain, when we are in a certain perspective, a bit more severe than the author in applauding ourselves for reaching the goal when, concerning a female patient, he prides himself on having obtained from her, after a certain number of months of treatment, the following declaration:

‘I had an extraordinary experience, that of being able to enjoy my husband’s happiness. I was extremely moved in noting his joy, and his pleasure made mine.’ [p. 164]

I ask you to weigh these terms. They certainly are not without value, they describe very well a sort of experience that implies absolutely, I must say, no lifting of the said patient’s prior frigidity. The extraordinary experience of being able to enjoy her husband’s happiness is something frequently observed, but that does not mean for all that that the patient in any way reached orgasm. In truth, we are told, the patient remains, so it is said, half-frigid […she nevertheless remained half-frigid… p. 164]. That is why one is perhaps a bit surprised that one immediately adds afterward:

‘Is that not best characterizing adult genital relations?’ [p. 164]

This notion of ‘adult genital relations’ is obviously what gives this whole perspective what I call the construction of ‘false windows’ in adult genital relation. One does not see very well what that truly means when one looks closely at it.

We have seen that as soon as authors try to explain it, it does not seem that they find in it the simplicity or the unity that all this seems to imply.

‘…as for the affirmation of the coherence of the ego, it emerges not only from the disappearance of obsessive symptomatology and depersonalization phenomena, but is also expressed by access to a feeling of freedom and unity that is a new experience for these subjects.’ [p. 164]

These approximations, perhaps optimistic, are not entirely either something that, at least for us, corresponds to our experience of what progress and a cure in obsessional neurosis really represent. That said, we can see well how much, what kind of mountain, of wall, of ready-made conception we are dealing with when it is a matter of situating somewhere, of appraising what an obsessional constitution, a structure, is, the way it is lived and the way it evolves.

Here we try to articulate things in an entirely different register, because we believe—for not being more complicated than others: I do not believe that if you manage to familiarize yourselves with counting the number of measures we bring into play here, you will find that in the end it makes many more things—that simply, it is perhaps articulated differently, in a less multilinear way.

And of course, although the desire to have thus a synoptic table corresponding to or opposing that of Mme Ruth MACK BRUNSWICK lies at the bottom of the heart of many listeners, we may perhaps arrive at it one day. But obviously, before arriving at it, it would perhaps be fitting to go step by step and to see what we mean when we think that this notion of the partial object—of the phallus—must be criticized and, to be put into use and perhaps also to see the dangers of a certain use, which is the present use, must be put in its place.

It is this place that we try to articulate by this small schema. One could cover all that with signs and equations, but I do not want to give you the impression of artifice, although these things are indeed the things I have tried most to reduce to their essential necessity.

We have already placed here the big A of the big Other where the code is found and which receives the demand, and seen that it is in the passage from A to the point where the message is [s(A) ← A] that the signified of the Other is produced. And need, here initiated and found there in a heap of transformations, at the different levels is qualified differently. And if we take this line¹ to be the line of realization of the subject:

Δ ⇒ $ ◊ D ⇔ S(Ⱥ) ⇐ Φ

This is expressed by something here that always more or less pertains to an identification [I → s(A)], that is to say to the passage, to the remolding in the end, of the subject in the defiles³ of his demand [D → A]:

D ⇒ A ◊ d ⇔ s(A) ⇐ I

We know that this is not enough to constitute a satisfactory subject, a subject that stands on the number of points of support it needs, let us say 4, and who knows? It is precisely in this beyond of demand that a Begehren is articulated—we already tried to define it last time by qualifying it as Begierde, as desire [A◊d]—in its topological place, where there is in a way a necessity linked to this topology, to the fact that it is in this field of the beyond of demand that sexual desire comes to be situated, and at the same time to be articulated, necessarily to undergo this articulation peculiar to this beyond.

There is, all in all, a coincidence between the place where the sexual drive can find a place, the tendency as such, and the structural necessity that binds it to being in this place in the beyond of demand. It is, all in all, insofar as this something intervenes in the set of signifiers over which it comes to superimpose itself to make a signified of it, that we usually put it below the bar of our articulation S/s.

The signified, which is first an ‘to be signified’, is thus indeed this particular signifier, the phallus:

– which is in the body of signifiers,

– which is specialized to designate as such the set of the effects of the signifier on the signified as such, that is to say insofar as they are the effects of the signifier on the signified.

That goes far, and there is no way to go less far in order to give its signification to the phallus, namely this something that makes it occupy here this privileged place in what is going to be produced as such of signifier, in this beyond that is called here the beyond of desire, namely the whole field that is there, beyond the field of demand. Insofar as this beyond of desire is symbolized, and insofar as it is thus, it is there that we will see the possibility—it is a simple articulation of the sense of what we are saying—that here [S◊D] there is a relation of the subject to demand as such. For it is quite obvious that for there to be a relation of the subject to demand, it must not be completely included.

Up to the moment when this beyond is constituted, if indeed by hypothesis it is constituted by being articulated thanks to the signifier phallus—it is at that moment that here, beyond the pure and simple Other which up to then makes all the law of the constitution of the subject in the simple existence of his body, by the fact that the mother is a speaking being.

And the fact that she is a speaking being is something absolutely essential. Whatever the analyst—SPITZ—may think, there are not only the little rub-a-dub, the Eau de Cologne care to give to the infant in order to constitute a relation to the mother. The mother must speak to him, everyone knows that. And not only that she speaks to him, but everyone knows that the child has a very particular relation to it and that a mute wet nurse would not fail to entail some quite visible consequences in the infant’s development.

Beyond this Other, if there is here something that is constituted of the signifier that is called the beyond of desire, we have the possibility of this relation S◊D, that is to say the subject as such, a less complete subject, that is to say that he is barred. That means that a complete human subject is never a pure and simple subject as all philosophy constructs it, subject of knowledge indeed corresponding to that percipiens of that perceptum that is the world. We know that there is no human subject who is a pure subject of knowledge, except the human subject insofar as we reduce him to whatever resembles a photoelectric cell or an eye, or again to what is called in philosophy a consciousness.

But since we are analysts, we know that there is always a Spaltung, that is to say that there are always two lines where it is constituted, and that is moreover why all the problems of structure that are ours arise. Here, what is it that must be constituted? It is precisely what I called, no longer the signified of A [s(A)] but the signifier of A, [S(A)], insofar as this Spaltung, it knows it, insofar as it is itself structured by this Spaltung, in other words, insofar as it, A, has already undergone the effects of this Spaltung.

Here, it is reversed, that means: is already marked by this effect of signifier which is signified by the signifier phallus. It is the A, then if you will, insofar as the phallus is barred there, brought to the state of signifier [ϕ → Φ]. It is the Other insofar as castrated which, here, is represented in the place of the message, the message of desire [S(A)]. The message of desire is that.

That is not to say, however, that it is easy to receive because, precisely, the whole problem of this difficulty of articulating desire rests on the fact that there is an unconscious.

In other words, that in fact what presents itself here as being at the ‘upper level’—if one can say—of the schema, is on the contrary ordinarily something that we must imagine to be at the ‘lower level’, not to be so articulated in the subject’s consciousness, although it is indeed articulated in his unconscious.

And even, it is because it is articulated in his unconscious that it is—to a certain point, it is precisely a matter of knowing which, that is the question we are posing here—articulable in the subject’s consciousness. What does the hysteric—of whom we spoke last time—show us? The hysteric, of course, is not psychoanalyzed, otherwise she would no longer be hysteric by hypothesis. The hysteric—as we said—posits this beyond, she situates it in the form of a desire as desire of the Other.

To fix ideas—I will justify this a little more later, but from now on, because one must, if one tries to articulate something, begin by articulating it, by commenting on it—I will tell you that things happen like this:

– just as here, in the first loop, the subject, by the manifestation of need, of his tension, makes this path of the first signifying line of demand [D → A] be traversed, likewise it is here that we can, to topologize things, place the relation that is that of the ego to the image of the other as such [m → i(a)].

– And likewise it is here, that is to say, all in all insofar as what—not in the other as little a, in the imaginary other—but in the Other as such, as big A, allows the subject to approach this beyond to be signified which is precisely the field we are in the process of exploring, that of his desire [A → d →…].

This little d of desire occupies the same place that the little m occupies with respect to the subject, which expresses this: simply that precisely it is in this place [d] where the subject sought to articulate his desire that he will encounter the desire of the Other as such. And what we express is precisely this, which is founded on experience and which I have long articulated for you in other forms but which I have also articulated in this one, that the desire in question, namely desire in its unconscious function, is the desire of the Other. That is indeed what we saw when we spoke last time of the hysteric with respect to the dream. These are not chosen dreams, any more than I give you chosen texts from FREUD.

I assure you, if you set yourselves—as it seems it is beginning to happen—to read FREUD, I cannot advise you too strongly to read him completely; otherwise it is you who risk falling on passages that may not be chosen, but that will nonetheless be the source of all sorts of errors, even of false recognitions. If you do not see in what place this or that text is situated in, I will not say the development of a thought, although that is properly speaking what one must say, but since the time one has been speaking of ‘thought’, it is a term so worn out that one never knows very well what one is talking about. It is not enough to speak of ‘thought’ for one to be able to say that it is a matter of something.

It is even the development of a research, of an effort by someone who, he, has a certain idea of his ‘magnetic field’, so to speak, and who can reach it only by a certain detour, and it is by the whole path traveled that each of these detours must be judged. I therefore did not choose the two dreams from last time just anyhow. I explained to you how I had taken them. I took the first dream because I encountered it after the other dreams whose reasons I explained to you for why I had not taken them first—I will come back to that—it is namely because ‘the dream of the botanical monograph’, which can help us understand what it is a matter of demonstrating, is a dream of FREUD that it will be appropriate to explain later.

I first continue the articulation of the hysteric’s dream. What the hysteric showed us is that she finds, so to speak, her point of support…
these are not terms that are very reserved for me: if you read Monsieur BOUVET concerning obsessional neurosis, you will see that he uses exactly the same term to say that it seems that, when one has removed their obsessions from obsessional neurotics, they lack, for example, a point of support. You see that the use I have made here of the terms is a use that I share with the other authors, that is to say that we try to metaphorize our experience, our little impressions
…the hysteric takes her point of support in a desire that is the desire of the Other, we said.

This is essential, this creation of a desire beyond demand, it is something that we have, I believe, sufficiently articulated. One can mention here a third dream that I did not have time to address last time, but that I can indeed read to you now:

‘She places a candle in a candlestick; the candle is broken, so that it stands badly. The little girls at school say that she is clumsy; but the teacher says that it is not her fault.’

In this case again, here is how FREUD relates this dream to the real facts:

‘She did indeed put a candle in the candlestick yesterday; but that one was not broken. This is symbolic. In truth, one knows what the candle signifies: if it is broken, if it does not stand well, that indicates the man’s impotence…

And FREUD underscores:

‘It is not her fault.’ But how can this young woman, carefully brought up and kept away from anything ugly, know this use of the candle?’
[She sticks a candle into the candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand well. The girls at school say she is clumsy; but the young lady says it is not her fault. A real occasion here too; yesterday she really stuck a candle into the candlestick; but it was not broken. A transparent symbolism has been used here. The candle is an object that excites the female genitals; if it is broken so that it does not stand well, this means the man’s impotence (‘it is not her fault’). Does only the carefully raised young woman, who has remained unfamiliar with everything ugly, know this use of the candle? By chance she can still state through what experience she came to this knowledge. During a boat trip on the Rhine, a boat passes in front of them in which students are sitting, who with great relish sing or bellow a song: ‘When the Queen of Sweden, with the shutters closed, with Apollo candles …’ She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband must give her the desired clarification.]

On that, we learn that during a rowboat outing, she heard a very improper students’ song, concerning the use that the Queen of Sweden, with the shutters closed, made with APOLLO candles. She did not understand the last word; her husband explained it to her. Of course the shutters closed, the APOLLO, all that is found again and frolics appropriately on the occasion. The important thing is that here we see appear then, in a bare state if I may say so, and isolated, in the state of a partial object, if not flying, the signifier phallus, and that the important point is of course that—we do not know at what moment of this analysis of this patient, for it is certainly a patient in analysis, the subject of this dream was extracted—the important point is obviously here in ‘It is not her fault’.

The ‘It is not her fault’ is the fact that it is at the level of the others, it is in front of all the others, it is as a function of the teacher that all the little schoolmates no longer mock. Here the symbol is evoked—and that is indeed where I want to come to—which intersects and confirms, so to speak, what was already in ‘the so-called dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife’, namely that the emphasis is to be put on the fact that for the hysteric—and hysteria, all in all, is a mode of constitution of the subject concerning precisely her sexual desire, it is the mode on which she adopted it—what is to be emphasized in the case of the hysteric:
– it is the dimension of desire, of course, insofar as it is opposed to that of demand,
– but it is first and above all, in the term desire of the Other, the position, the place in the Other that is to be underlined.

I reminded you how Dora lives up to the moment when her hysterical position decompensates. She is quite at ease, apart from a few small symptoms, but they are precisely those that constitute her as hysteric and that are read in the relation of the distinction, the Spaltung of these two lines. We will return to the way in which we can articulate the overdetermination of the symptom. It is linked to the existence of the two signifying lines as such.

But what we showed the other day is that what Dora wanted was that, all in all, she subsist as subject insofar as she demands love, no doubt like every good hysteric, but that she supports the desire of the Other as such. It is she who supports it, it is she who is its support. Things go very well insofar as, for things, the encounters between her father and the so-called Mme K., to take place as happily as possible in the world and without anyone having anything to see in it, the term she supports, the desire of the Other, is here the term that suits best the style of her action and her position with respect to her father, to Mme K.

And that is where I indicated something to you: it is insofar as she finds herself identifying with Monsieur K. in a certain relation to the other, then imaginary as such, and insofar as, facing this desire, she supports it in that place, namely in the place corresponding to her, that the whole little construction is possible. You have clearly seen that, all in all, here a little square is outlined whose four vertices are represented by: ego [m], image of the other [i(a)], relation of the subject then constituted to the imaginary other as such [S◊a], and here: desire [d]. We thus find the four feet on which a human subject constituted as such can normally stand, that is to say who is neither more nor less aware of the mechanism and the strings pulling the puppet of another there where he sees, that is to say where he is capable, or almost capable, of finding his bearings in this essential component.

It is here and at that level, facing the desire of the Other, and moreover—I showed it last time—without for all that things going beyond, for in the end one can say that in the hysteric the return line was more faded.

That is indeed why, moreover, the hysteric has all sorts of difficulties with her imaginary, here represented in the image of the other, and liable to see produced there effects of fragmentation, various disintegrations, which are properly speaking what serves her in her symptoms. I simply recall this at the level of the hysteric.

How are we going to be able to articulate what happens at the level of the obsessional, I mean in an obsessional structure? Classical theory tells you—what it articulates in FREUD and what it articulates in FREUD’s last word on obsessional neurosis—tells you that obsessional neurosis is a bit more complicated than hysterical neurosis, but not that much more. If one manages to point things to the essential, one can articulate it, but if one does not point things to the essential—which is surely the case of the author I spoke to you about a moment ago—one literally gets lost in it, namely that one swims between ‘the sadistic’, ‘the anal’, ‘the partial object’, ‘incorporation’, ‘distance from the object’: one literally no longer knows which saints to turn to in order to know where one stands.

Yet it is excessively diverse, clinically, as the author shows in the observations that even seem barely possible to gather under the same clinical rubric under the name of Pierre and Paul, not counting the Monique and the Jeanne who are behind. But I mean that in the author’s clinical material, at the level of the report on the ego, there are only Pierre and Paul. Pierre and Paul are manifestly completely different subjects from the point of view of the texture of a single object. One can barely put them under the same rubric. Which of course is not an objection either since we are not particularly well able, for the moment, to articulate other ones either, of these nosological rubrics.

It is very striking to see how much, after so much time that we have practiced obsessional neurosis, we are incapable of dismembering it as the clinic manifestly would impose on us, given the diversity of aspects it presents to us. One recalls in PLATO what is called the just passage of the cook’s knife, of the good cook, the one who knows how to cut at the joints. In the current state of things, if no one—particularly those who have dealt with obsessional neurosis—is capable of articulating it properly, that is indeed the indication of some theoretical deficiencies.

Let us take things up where we are. What is it that he, the obsessional, does in order to consist as subject? He is also, like the hysteric, and as one can suspect, there is no such deep relation between the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic that already, before any kind of serious elaboration—namely: before FREUD—a M. JANET could do that sort of very curious work of geometric superposition, so to speak, of point-by-point correspondence of images that in geometry are called, I believe, transformations of figures, which makes the obsessional really conceived as something that is the figure of a transformed hysteric, so to speak.

The obsessional is also oriented of course toward desire: if it were not in all this, in all and before all, a matter of desire, there would be no kind of homogeneity in the neuroses. Only, there it is, classical theory, FREUD’s, FREUD’s last articulation, what does it tell us about obsessional neurosis?

FREUD said many things over the course of his career. He first located that what one can call ‘the primitive trauma’ is opposed to the hysteric’s primitive trauma. Whereas in the hysteric it is a undergone seduction, an intrusion, an irruption of the sexual into the subject’s life, he saw very well that, insofar as this psychical trauma withstands the critique of reconstruction, it is on the contrary a matter of something where the obsessional subject had an active role, he said, where he took pleasure.

That was the first approximation. Then there is the whole development in The Rat Man, namely the appearance of the extreme complexity of affective relations in the obsessional, and namely hatred, the pinpointing of the emphasis on affective ambivalence, on the fundamental active-passive, masculine-feminine opposition, and the most important thing, the hate-love antagonism. One must moreover reread The Rat Man like the Bible. The Rat Man is still rich with everything that still remains to be said about obsessional neurosis: it is a work theme.

To what, finally, did FREUD arrive as his last metapsychological formula? It is that, he says…
there were at that moment the clinical experiences and the metapsychological elaboration that brought aggressive tendencies to light and that had already led FREUD to make this fundamental distinction between ‘life instincts’ and ‘death instincts’, which have not finished giving torment to analysts
…what FREUD tells us is that there was defusion, early deintrication of the life instincts and the death instincts, in other words, that the detachment as such of destructive tendencies took place at too early a stage in the obsessional for it not to have marked the whole continuation of his development, namely his installation in his particular subjectivity, the obsessional’s.

How is this going to be inserted into this dialectic? Much more, it seems to me, immediately, concretely, sensibly. These terms of demand and desire, if they begin to find their logic in your brain, you will find them a daily use—and in any case daily for your analytic practice—quite usable.

I mean that you can make something usual out of it before it is worn out, but you will always find yourselves asking whether it is a matter of desire and demand, or desire or demand. What does it mean, here, what we have just recalled concerning, all in all, the instincts of destruction, that is to say something that manifests itself in experience, in an experience that must first be taken at the vulgar, common level, of what we know of the obsessional, but not even of the obsessionals we analyze, of the obsessionals that, simply as informed psychologists, we are capable of seeing live and whose incidences on their behavior we are capable of measuring?

It is quite certain that the obsessional tends to destroy his object. That is something that is almost an experiential truth. It is simply a matter of being content with that, of seeing what this destructive activity of the obsessional is.

Here is what I propose to you: I propose to you to consider that, unlike the hysteric, who, as experience shows well, lives entirely at the level of the Other: for her, the emphasis is being at the level of the Other. And that is why she needs a desire of the Other, because without that, what would the Other be, if not the law? But it is first at the level of the Other that, so to speak, the center of gravity of the constitutive movement of the hysteric is placed, for reasons that are not at all impossible to articulate and that are all in all identical to what FREUD says when speaking of the early effusion and defusion of the instincts; it is the search and the aiming of desire as such, of the beyond of demand, that is constitutive of the obsessional.

I would like you to have a bit of experience of what a child who is going to become obsessional is. I believe that there are no young subjects in whom what I tried to articulate to you last time is more perceptible, when I represented to you that in this margin of need necessarily of limited scope—as one says a ‘limited liability company’—need is always something of limited scope, in this margin between need and the unconditional character of the demand for love, there is situated this something that I called desire. And I defined this desire as such how? As something that, precisely because it must be situated in this beyond, if I may say so, denies the element of otherness that is included in the demand for love.

But in order to preserve this unconditional character by transforming it into the character of absolute condition of desire, in desire as such in the pure state, the Other is denied. But need, from the fact that the subject had to cross, to know this last character, the limit of the unconditional of the demand for love, there you have this character remaining transferred to need as such.
The young child who will become an obsessional is this young child of whom the parents say—here is a convergence of the usual language with the language of psychologists—‘he has fixed ideas.’

He does not have ideas more extraordinary than any other child. If we stop, on the contrary, at the material of his demand, namely that he will ask for a little box, it really is not much, a little box, and there are many children in whom one will not stop for a single instant at this demand for a little box, except psychoanalysts of course who will see all sorts of fine allusions in it. In truth one will not be wrong, but I find it more important to see that there are certain children, among all the children who ask for little boxes, for whom the parents find that this requirement of the little box is properly speaking an intolerable requirement. And it is intolerable.

One would be quite wrong to believe that it is enough to send the said parents to the parents’ school so that they will resign themselves, because, contrary to what is said, the parents of course have something to do with it. That is to say that it is not for nothing either that one is obsessional. For that one must indeed have somewhere a model, that is understood, but in the welcome itself, the fixed-idea side that the parents accuse is quite discernible, and always immediately discerned, even by people who are not part of the parental couple.

In this very particular requirement that is manifested in the way the child asks for a little box, what is properly intolerable for the other, on the occasion, is precisely this that people approximately call ‘the fixed idea’, that is to say that it is not a demand like the others. In other words, it has a character of absolute condition that is the one I designate to you as being that of desire.

And the obsessional is precisely a child in whom…
for reasons whose correspondence you see with what are called inclinations, drives, on this occasion, strong, which is going to be the element, if I may say so, of the first foundation of this tripod which must then, to stand upright, have 4
…the emphasis is placed on desire, not only on desire, but on desire as such.

That is to say that in his constitution he includes this destruction of the Other; he is unconditional form of need, need passed to the state of absolute condition, and precisely insofar as he is beyond this unconditional requirement of love, of which, on the occasion, he can come to the test, but, as such, he is something that denies the Other as such, and that is indeed what makes him, to anyone, like the desire for the little box in the young child, so intolerable.

Pay close attention, because you must clearly understand that I am not saying the same thing:
– when I say ‘desire is the destruction of the Other’,
– and when I say ‘the hysteric goes to seek her desire in the desire of the Other’.
When I say ‘the hysteric goes to seek her desire in the desire of the Other’, it is the desire that she attributes to the Other as such. When I say ‘the obsessional puts his desire first of all’, that means precisely that he is going to seek it in a beyond, by aiming it as such in its constitution as desire, that is to say insofar as, as such, it destroys the Other.

And that is the secret of this deep contradiction that there is between the obsessional and his desire: it is that, thus aimed, desire bears within itself this internal contradiction that produces the dead end of the obsessional’s desire, and that authors try to translate by speaking of these kinds of perpetual back-and-forth, so to speak instantaneous, between introjection and projection.
I must say that it is something that is extremely difficult to represent to oneself, especially when one has sufficiently indicated, as the author does in certain places, to what extent the mechanism of introjection and the mechanism of projection have no relation. I articulated it to you more forcefully than this author, but one must all the same start from there, namely:
– that the mechanism of projection is imaginary
– and that the mechanism of introjection is a symbolic mechanism.
It has absolutely no relation.

On the other hand it seems to me—you can conceive it, and moreover find it again in experience, if you see your obsessionals well—that the obsessional is inhabited by desires that are precisely all those, provided you put your hand into it a bit, that you see swarming in a kind of extraordinary vermin which, in a kind of culture medium particularly well suited, if you direct indeed—it takes very little, it is enough to have the elements of your transference of which I was speaking a moment ago—if you direct the cure of obsessional neurosis in the culture of fantasy, you will see the said vermin proliferate more or less in whatever one wants.

That is why it does not last long, the culture of obsessional neurosis. But in the end, if you seek to see the essential, namely what happens when the obsessional, from time to time, taking his courage in both hands, starts trying to cross the barrier of demand, that is to say to set off in search of the object of his desire…
First, he does not find it easily, but there are indeed many things nevertheless, since there is already practice; there are indeed many things that can serve him as support for it: the little box, if only that. It is quite clear that it is on this road that the most extraordinary accidents happen to him, namely something that one will try to motivate at various levels by the intervention of the superego and a thousand other things that of course exist.

But much more radically than all that, the obsessional, insofar as his fundamental movement is directed toward desire as such, and above all in its constitution as desire, implies, in every movement toward the attainment of this desire, what we call the destruction of the Other. Yet it is of the nature of desire as such to require this support in the Other.

It is not an access route to the subject’s desire, the desire of the Other; it is the place pure and simple of desire, and every movement, in the obsessional, toward his desire runs up against something that is absolutely tangible in, so to speak, the movement of his libido:
– the more, in the psychology of an obsessional, something plays the role of the object—even if concatenated—of desire,
– the more the law of approach, so to speak, of the obsessional with respect to this object will be conditioned by something that manifests itself literally in what one can call a true lowering of libidinal tension at the moment when he approaches it, and to the point that at the moment when he holds this object of his desire, for him nothing more exists. You will observe this. This is absolutely observable by examples. I will try to articulate it to you, to show it to you by examples.

The problem for the obsessional is therefore entirely to give to this desire, which for him conditions this destruction of the Other where desire itself comes to disappear, the only thing that can give him this semblance of support, this corresponding point that the hysteric, for her part, thanks to her identifications, occupies so easily and which on this occasion, because precisely due to the fact that there is here no Other, no big Other…
I say, insofar—as of course—it is a matter of desire; I am not saying that the big Other does not exist for the obsessional, I am saying that when it is a matter of his desire, there is none
…that is why he is in search of the only thing that can maintain in its place this desire as such outside this point of reference; it is something that is opposite that comes to take this place: the other formula of S in relation to a, identification of the hysteric.

What holds its place, its function in the obsessional, is an object, and this object is always, under a veiled form no doubt, but it is always perfectly equivalent, identifiable, and reducible to the signifier phallus. On that I must end today. You will see in what follows what this entails as to the obsessional’s behavior vis-à-vis this object, and also his behavior vis-à-vis the little other. You will see, I will show you next time, how a certain number of much more common truths are deduced from it.

Namely, for example, that the subject can really show his desires only by opposing what we will call ‘an absolute rivalry’, and that on the other hand, insofar as he must show his desire, for that is for him the essential requirement, he can show it only elsewhere than where he is, and very precisely show it in something where he must overcome the feat. I mean that the performance side of all the obsessional’s activity is something that finds there its reasons and its motives.