Through the exploration we are pursuing of neurotic structures insofar as they are conditioned by what we call the formations of the unconscious, we arrived last time at speaking of the obsessional.
We ended our discourse on the obsessional by saying, in sum, that he has to constitute himself somewhere facing his evanescent desire.

We began to indicate, in the formula of desire as being the desire of the Other, why in the obsessional this desire is evanescent: this desire is evanescent because of a fundamental difficulty in his relation to the Other, to the big Other as such, this big Other insofar as it is the place where the signifier orders desire. It is this dimension that we are trying here to articulate because we believe that it is for lack of having this dimension that there are introduced:
and the difficulties in theory, and also the deviations in practice. We want in passing, woven in a way within this discourse, to make you feel—this is the meaning of the whole of FREUD’s work if you look at it after a sufficient course—that this discovery is that of the signifier which orders desire. But of course, within this phenomenon, the subject seeks to express, to manifest in an effect of signifier as such what is happening in his own approach to the signified.

To a certain extent, FREUD’s work itself is inserted into this effort. Much has been said about FREUD’s work in terms of a naturalism: an effort to reduce human reality to nature. It is nothing of the sort. FREUD’s work is an attempt at a pact between this being of man and nature, and a pact which, assuredly, is sought elsewhere than in a relation of innateness. It is from the fact that man has constituted himself, constitutes himself as subject of speech, as ‘I’ of the act of speech, that man is always experienced in FREUD’s work. And how could one deny it, since precisely in analysis he is not experienced otherwise?

He is thus essentially—facing nature—in a posture other than as ‘immanent bearer of life’.
It is therefore within this experience which makes the subject of speech that the bond—his relation to nature—has to find how to be articulated, to be formulated. This relation to life is what is symbolized in this sort of lure that he wrests from the forms of life under the signifier of the phallus. And there lies the central point, the most sensitive point, the most significant of all these signifying crossroads that we explore in the course of the analysis of the subject. The phallus is, as it were, the summit, the point of balance, the signifier par excellence of this relation of man to the signified.

And of course, by this very fact, he is in a position, we shall say, in which the insertion of man into the dialectic of sexual desire is destined for an absolutely special problematic. The first is that it has to find a place within something that preceded it: the dialectic of demand, insofar as demand always demands something that is more and beyond the satisfaction to which it appeals. Hence, so to speak, the ambiguous character of the place where desire must be situated, this place which is always problematic:

– It is beyond this demand, beyond, of course, insofar as demand aims at the satisfaction of need.

– And it is on this side of the demand—yes: on this side!—insofar as demand, by the fact of being articulated in symbolic terms, is a demand that goes beyond all the satisfactions to which it appeals insofar as it is a demand for love, insofar as it is a demand aiming at the being of the other, to obtain from the other this essential presentification which makes the other give that something which is beyond all possible satisfaction, which is his very being, which is precisely what is aimed at in love.

It is in this virtual space, between
– the call for satisfaction,
– and the demand for love,
…that desire has to be organized, has to take its place. And it is in this that we find ourselves, in order to situate desire, in this always double position which is in fact, with respect to demand, something that is at once beyond and on this side, depending on the face or aspect under which we consider demand, namely:

– as demand in relation to a need,

– or demand as structured in terms of signifier and which, as such, always exceeds any kind of response that is at the level of satisfaction and calls within itself for a sort of absolute response which from then on will project its essential character of absolute condition onto everything that is going to be organized in this interval, this interval internal, in sum, to the two planes of demand: at the ‘signified’ plane and at the ‘signifier’ plane where desire has to be articulated, to take its place.

It is precisely because it has to be articulated and to take its place in that place that, from the subject’s approach to this desire, the Other becomes the relay. The Other as place of speech and precisely insofar as demand is addressed to it, will also be the place where desire must be discovered, where the possible formulation of desire must be discovered.

It is there that the contradiction is exercised at every instant, for within this Other, insofar as it is possessed by a desire, by a desire which, in sum, inaugurally and fundamentally, is foreign to the subject, the difficulties of the formulation of this desire will be those in which the subject will stumble all the more significantly as we see him develop the structures which are those that analytic discovery has allowed to be drawn.

We have said it, these structures are different:

– depending on whether the accent is placed on the character of essential dissatisfaction of this desire: this is the mode by which the hysteric approaches the field and the necessity,

– or depending on whether the accent is placed on the character essentially dependent on the Other of access to this desire: and this is the mode under which this approach is proposed to the obsessional.

We said it in ending last time: here something happens that is different from this hysterical identification. This hysterical identification consists essentially in the fact that the hysteric, in order to consider this desire which for her is an enigmatic point, something to which we always bring, if I may say, a kind of forced interpretation, which is that which characterizes all the first approaches FREUD made to the analysis of hysteria.

FREUD did not say that desire is situated for the hysteric in a position such that telling her ‘Here is the one you desire’ is always a forced interpretation, always an inexact interpretation, always an off-target interpretation.
There is no example where, with regard to a hysteric…
– whether in the first observations that FREUD gave,
– or later, whether in the case of Dora,
– or even if we extend the sense of hysteric to the case of the homosexual woman that we commented on at length here
…FREUD did not, as it were, make an error, did not in any case arrive, without any sort of exception, at the patient’s refusal to accede to the meaning of desire, of her symptoms and of her acts, each time that he proceeded in this way.

In fact the hysteric’s desire is essentially, and as such, not desire for an object, but desire for a desire, an effort to maintain herself facing the point where she calls her desire. And to maintain herself facing this point where she calls her desire, the point where the desire of the Other is, she identifies, on the contrary, with an object:
– Dora identifies with Monsieur K.,
– the woman of whom I spoke to you, Elisabeth von R., likewise identifies with different figures of her family or her surroundings.

It is from the point where she identifies with someone—for whom the terms ego or ego-ideal are equally improper when it is a matter of the hysteric—with someone who becomes for her her other ego: precisely this object whose choice of identification has always been expressly articulated by FREUD in a way in accordance with what I am telling you.
That is to say that it is insofar as she—or he—recognizes in another, or in another woman, the indications, if one may say, of her desire, namely that she, or he, is faced with the same problem of desire as she or as he, that identification occurs and all the forms of contagion, of crises, of epidemics, of symptomatic manifestations, which are so characteristic of hysteria.

The obsessional has other solutions, for the reason that the problem of the desire of the Other presents itself to him in an entirely different way. To articulate it we will try to gain access to it by the steps that experience regarding the obsessional allows us. I will say that in a certain way, it matters little by which end we must take the lived experience of the obsessional: what matters is not to forget its diversity.

The paths traced by analysis, the route by which our experience—groping, it must be said—has incited us to resolve, to find the solution to the problem of the obsessional, these paths are partial or biased. They of course deliver material by themselves. The way this material is used, we can explain it in different ways:
– in relation to the results obtained, first,
– we can also criticize them in themselves. This critique must be, as it were, convergent.

The impression we have, in spelling out this experience as it has been oriented in practice, is incontestably that theory, like practice, tends to center on the use of the subject’s fantasies.
This role of fantasies in the case of obsessional neurosis has something enigmatic, insofar as the term ‘fantasies’ is never defined. We have spoken here much and at length of imaginary relations, of the function of the image as guide, if one may say, of instinct, as channel, as indication on the path of instinctual realizations.
We know on the other hand to what extent this use—inasmuch as one can detect it with certainty—of the function of the image is reduced, thin, impoverished in man, since it seems to be reduced to the narcissistic image, to the specular image, reduced, I will say, to an extremely polyvalent function, I do not say neutralized, since also functioning on the plane of the aggressive relation and of the erotic relation.
How, at the point we have reached, can we articulate the imaginary functions, incontestably essential, prevalent, that everyone speaks of, which are at the heart of analytic experience, those of the fantasy?

I believe that at this point [S◊a] we must see that the schema presented here opens for us the possibility of articulating, of situating the function of fantasy. It is no doubt by a sort of intuitive bias of this topology that I ask you first to begin by representing it to yourselves.

Of course this is not a real space, but it is something where these homologies can be drawn:
– if the relation to the image of the other [i(a)] is indeed made somewhere at the level of an experience that is integrated into the circuit of demand, into the primitive circuit of demand, in that by which the subject first addresses the Other for the satisfaction of his needs,
– and if it is somewhere on this circuit that there is made this sort of transitivist accommodation, of effect of bearing that puts the subject into a certain relation to his fellow as such,
– if therefore the relation of the image is found there, at the level of experiences and of the very time of entry into the game of speech, at the limit of the passage from the infans state to the speaking state,
…we will say this: it is that in this field where we seek the paths of the realization of the subject’s desire by access to the desire of the Other, it is at a homologous point that the function and the situation of fantasy are found.

Fantasy, we will define, if you like, as the imaginary that is caught in a certain use of signifier.
Likewise, this is important and is manifested and observed in a characteristic way, if only in this: when we speak of fantasies, sadistic fantasies for example, which play such an important role in the economy of the obsessional, it is not enough for us to qualify these manifestations as fantasmatic by the fact that they represent something that is a tendency qualified as sadistic…
in relation to a certain literary work which, itself, does not present itself as an investigation of instincts, but as a game that the term imaginary would be far from sufficient to qualify, since it is a literary work, that these are scenes, in short, that these are scenarios
…that it is something deeply articulated in the signifier that is at stake.

Ultimately, I believe that every time we speak of fantasies, we must not fail to recognize the ‘scenario’ side, the ‘story’ side, which forms an essential dimension of them:
– it is not, so to speak, a sort of blind image of the instinct of destruction,
– it is not something where the subject, so to speak—I may well make an image myself to explain what I mean—sees red all of a sudden before his prey, that is at stake,
– it is something that the subject not only articulates in a ‘scenario’, but where the subject himself puts himself into play in this ‘scenario’.

The formula S◊a, S with the little bar, that is to say the subject at the most articulated point of his presentification in relation to a,
is indeed something valid in every kind of properly fantasmatic deployment of what we will on this occasion call the sadistic tendency, insofar as it can be implicated in the economy of the obsessional.

You will notice that there is always a scene in which the subject is presented as such, under differently masked forms, in the ‘scenario’ in the form of implications in diversified images of the Other, in which another as fellow, as also reflection of the subject, is presentified. I will say more: one does not insist enough on the character of presence of a certain type of instrument. I have already alluded, after FREUD, to the importance for example of the fantasy of flagellation, this fantasy that FREUD specially articulated insofar as it would seem to play a very particular role. It was one of the faces of his article, of the precise communication he made on this subject, on its role in the female psyche. He did it because he approached it from this angle and from a certain angle of his experiences. Of course, this fantasy is far from being limited to the field and to the cases of which FREUD spoke on that occasion.

But if one looks at it closely, it is its field…
quite legitimately limited insofar as this fantasy plays a particular role at a certain turning point of development and at a particular point of the development of female sexuality and very precisely insofar as the intervention of the function of the signifier of the phallus
…which plays its particular role within obsessional neurosis and all the cases where we see the emergence of the so-called ‘sadistic’ fantasies.

The presence, the predominance of this element, ultimately enigmatic, which gives its prevalence to this instrument whose biological function cannot be said in any way to explain it well. One could imagine it or find there I do not know what relation with superficial excitations, stimulations of the skin. You sense to what extent this would have an incomplete character, an almost artificial character and that to the function, so often appeared within fantasies, of this element, to this function there attaches a signifying plurivalence which puts all the weight of the balance much more on the side of the signified than anything that could be attached to a deduction
– of the biological order,
– of the order of needs,
– of whatever order it may be.

Thus this notion of fantasy as something which without doubt participates in the imaginary order
but which takes its function as fantasy in the economy, and at whatever point it is articulated, only by virtue of its signifying function, is something that seems to us—this has not been formulated up to now like this—seems to us essential for speaking of fantasy.

I will say more: I do not believe there is any other way to make what are called unconscious fantasies conceivable.
What are unconscious fantasies, if not the latency of something which, we know by everything we have learned of the organization of the structure of the unconscious, is entirely possible as signifying chain?
That there are in the unconscious signifying chains that subsist as such and which, from there, structure, act upon the organism, influence what appears outside as symptom, this is the whole background of analytic experience.
It is much more difficult to conceive the unconscious instance and incidence of anything imaginary
than to place fantasy itself at the level of what, in common measure, is what presents itself for us at the level of the unconscious, namely at the level of the signifier.

Fantasy is essentially an imaginary taken in a certain function of signifier. I cannot for the moment articulate this approach further. It is simply a certain way of proposing to you what later will be articulated in a more precise way, namely the situation:
– of the point Sbar in relation to a,
– of the fantasmatic fact: S◊a.

The fantasmatic fact, in short, being itself an articulated and always complex relation, a ‘scenario’.
That is its characteristic; it is something that can therefore take place and remain latent for a long time at a certain point of the unconscious, which nevertheless is already organized like a dream for example, which is conceivable only if the function of the signifier alone gives it its structure and its consistency, and at the same time its insistence.

These ‘sadistic fantasies’ for example, of which it is a fact of common experience and of first approach, in the analytic investigation of obsessionals, to have noticed the place this holds in the obsessional, but which does not necessarily hold it in a patent and attested way, but as what in the metabolism of obsessional transformation, the attempts that the subject as such makes toward a rebalancing of what is the object of his balancing search, namely of something which is to recognize himself in relation to his desire.

Of course, when we see a raw obsessional, in the state of nature, as it happens to us or as he is supposed to happen to us through published observations, what we find is someone who speaks to us above all of all sorts of impediments, inhibitions, blockages, fears, doubts, prohibitions.

We also know that already it is not at that moment that he will speak to us of this fantasmatic life. We also know that it is in obsessionals in whom either therapeutic interventions, or autonomous attempts at solution, at exit, at elaboration of their own properly obsessional difficulty, that we will see appear in a more or less predominant way the invasion of their earlier life, of their psychic life,
by these fantasies, which we qualify on the occasion with a simple label of ‘sadistic’, namely these fantasies
which already present to us, so to speak, their enigma insofar as we cannot content ourselves with articulating them as manifestations of a tendency but as the signifying organization itself of the relations of the subject to the Other as such. You know on the other hand how much these fantasies can take in certain subjects a truly invasive, absorbing, captivating form, which can engulf, so to speak, pieces, whole stretches of their psychic life,
of their lived experience, of their mental occupations.

It is indeed the economic role of these fantasies insofar as here articulated and subsisting that it is a matter on this occasion of trying to give ourselves a formula. These fantasies, which have the character of being fantasies which, in subjects, remain in the state of fantasies, which are realized only in an entirely exceptional way and moreover, for the subject,
in a way always disappointing insofar precisely as we observe on this occasion the mechanics
of this relation of the subject to desire, namely insofar as he can try, in the paths offered to him,
to approach it, it is precisely in this measure that the approach of his desires comes to extinction, to damping, and to disappearance. The obsessional is a TANTALUS, I would say, if TANTALUS were not an image
presented to us by ancient infernal iconography as an image above all oral.

But it is nonetheless not for nothing that I present him to you as such, because we will see that
this oral underlyingness to what constitutes the point of balance, the level, the situation of the obsessional fantasy as such, it still must exist, since ultimately it is this plane which, on the fantasmatic plane, is reached by the therapist, by the analyst himself, insofar as, as you have seen, as I alluded to with regard to the therapeutic line that is traced in the series of the three articles: it is in a kind of fantasmatic absorption that certain therapists and a large part of analytic practice have engaged in order to find the way in which a new mode of balancing, a certain ‘temperament’, if one may say,
is given to the obsessional’s access on this path of the realization of his desire.

Let us observe nevertheless that in taking things by this end, we see only one face of the problem. From the other face,
we must indeed unfold this fan successively. And of course, we do not fail to recognize:
– what presents itself in the most apparent way in the symptoms of the obsessional,
– what is usually presented in the form of what are called the demands of the super-ego.

It is the way we must conceive in the obsessional these demands, it is the root of these demands
in the obsessional, that it will now be a matter of. What happens in the obsessional, I believe we can indicate it and read it at the level of this schema in a way which, I believe, will later prove to be no less fruitful.

One could say that the obsessional is always in the process of asking for a permission.

I believe that you will find this at the level of the concrete, at the level of what the obsessional tells you in his symptoms. Even, this is inscribed and very often articulated: he is always in the process of asking for a permission, and we will see what the next step is, but in fact, if we rely on this schema, what happens at this level is important.

Asking for a permission is precisely to have, as subject, a certain relation to his demand. A permission,
for the obsessional, is ultimately to restore this Other with a capital A, which is precisely what we said, in order to enter into this dialectic which for him was called into question, questioned, even put in danger: to put himself in the most extreme dependence with respect to the Other with a capital A, that is to say to the Other insofar as it speaks.

This is already something that indicates to us to what extent this place is essential to maintain for the obsessional.
I will even say that it is indeed there that we see the pertinence in FREUD of what he always calls Versagung, refusal.
Refusal—and permission, moreover, implied in the background: the pact of something that is refused, so to speak,
against a background of promise—instead of speaking of ‘frustration’. It is not at the level of pure and simple demand that the problem of relations to the Other arises insofar as it is a matter of a complete subject. It arises thus when we make an attempt to have recourse to development, when we imagine a small child more or less helpless before his mother, that is to say when we ourselves make an object of someone who is at the mercy of someone else.

But as soon as the subject is in this relation we have defined with the Other by speech, there is beyond any response of the Other, and very precisely insofar as speech creates this beyond of its response, there is a point somewhere, virtual. No doubt, not only is it virtual, but in truth if there were not analysis, we could only answer that no one gains access to it, except by that sort of masterful and spontaneous analysis that we always suppose possible in someone who would perfectly realize the ‘Know thyself’. But it is certain for us that we have every reason to think that this point has never been drawn up to the present, in a strict way, except in analysis.

What the notion of Versagung draws is, properly speaking, in itself this situation of the subject with respect to demand.
And here, what I want to accentuate, is this—and I will say, it is a small step that I ask you to take on the same advancing front as the one I asked you with regard to fantasy—what we speak of when we speak
of stage, of fundamental relation to the object, what we qualify as oral, anal, even genital, what is it?
There is here a kind of mirage that is established by the fact that, projecting all this back into development, we take the notion,
but which is never anything but a notion reconstructed after the fact, that a certain type of relation structuring the Umwelt
of the subject around a central function is something that defines in development his relation
to the world by giving to everything that happens to him from his environment a special meaning.

This is not even usually articulated in so elaborated a way. Precisely the fact that all these actions,
for example, of the environment would undergo, so to speak, the refraction through the typical oral, anal, and genital object: this is very often elided. One speaks purely and simply of object, then one speaks alongside it, of environment.
One does not think for a single instant to see the difference there is between the typical object of a certain relation defined by
a certain stage of rejection in the subject, and the concrete environment, with its multiple incidences, namely the plurality of this object to which the subject, whoever he may be, is always subjected, and this whatever one may say, from his earliest childhood.

The supposed absence of objects, the supposed […] of the infant, is something about which until further notice we must here cast the greatest doubt. I must tell you that for me, already, if you want to believe me, you will hold this notion to be purely illusory, since it is a matter, thanks to recourse to direct observation
in very small children, of knowing that it is nothing of the sort, that the subjects of the world are for him as multiple as they are interesting and stimulating.

What is it a matter of, then? The discoveries we have made, we can define and articulate them as being in fact a certain style of the subject’s demand. Where did we discover them, these manifestations that made us speak of relations successively oral, anal, even genital, to the world? We discovered them in analyses, in analyses carried out with people who had long since passed beyond the stages in question, insofar as they are stages of infantile development, and we say that the subject regresses to these stages. What do we mean when we say that he regresses to these stages?

I believe that to say that there is anything whatsoever that resembles a return to these same imaginary steps, supposing even that they are conceivable, but let us suppose them admissible, which are those of childhood, is something that misleads us and does not deliver to us the true nature of the phenomenon. When we speak of fixation, for example, at a certain stage in the neurotic subject, what could we try to articulate that would be more satisfactory than what is usually given to us, if in fact what is at stake—what is our aim, what is in all cases our path [sic]—is in sum what we see in analysis, namely that the subject articulates in the course of regression, and we will see better later what this term regression then means, the subject articulates his present demand in analysis in terms that allow us to recognize a certain respectively oral, anal, genital relation, with a certain object.

Do you not see that this means that at a certain stage: it is insofar as they have passed into the function of signifier that the subject’s relations were able to exercise over the whole rest of his development a decisive influence? It is insofar as at a certain level, the level of the unconscious, the subject articulates his demand in oral terms, that the subject S is in a certain relation here at the level of a virtual signifying articulation which is that of the unconscious.

It is insofar as it is in terms of absorption that the subject articulates his desire, that we can speak at once
– of something that will present itself at a moment of the exploration with a particular value, called ‘fixation at a certain stage’,
– and that, on the other hand, there will be interest in making the subject regress to this stage so that something essential can be elucidated of the mode under which his subjective organization presents itself.
But it is only as that that what interests us is not to give to what was, with more or less justification, at a given moment, the subject’s dissatisfaction on the plane of an oral, anal, or other demand, the satisfaction at which the subject would stop, that we have to give compensation, gravitation, return, even symbolic.

It is insofar as it was at that moment of his demand that there were posed for him, in a certain way, the problems of his relations to the Other, insofar as they are going to be, for what follows, entirely determining for the putting into position, the putting into place of his desire, it is only in that that this interests us. In other words, everything that is of demand in what was effectively lived by the subject, this is once and for all and henceforth past. The satisfactions or compensations that we can give him will in the end never be anything but symbolic, and giving them can even be considered an error. It is an error insofar, of course, as that is not entirely impossible. We will see why it is not entirely impossible, precisely thanks to the intervention of fantasies, of that something more or less substantial, if one may say, that is supported by fantasy.
But I believe that it is an error of orientation of analysis, for it leaves, in the end, at the end of analysis the question of relations to the Other unpurified.

The obsessional, we say, like the hysteric, needs an unsatisfied desire, that is to say a desire beyond a demand.
The obsessional resolves the question of the evanescence of his desire by making of it a forbidden desire. He has it borne by the Other, and precisely by the Other’s prohibition. Nevertheless this way of having his desire borne, supported by the Other, is ambiguous. It is ambiguous because a forbidden desire does not thereby mean a stifled desire.
Prohibition is there to sustain desire, but for it to be sustained, it must present itself.

Likewise, this is what the obsessional does and it is a matter of knowing how. The way he does it is, as you know, very complex. He shows it at once and he does not show it: he camouflages himself, in short, and it is easy to understand why.
His intentions, if one may say, are not pure. This had already been noticed; it is what has been designated precisely by the aggressiveness of the obsessional: fundamentally any emergence of his desire would be for him the occasion of this projection or of this fear of retaliation which would inhibit precisely all the manifestations of his desire.

I believe that this is a first approach to the question, but that it is not everything, and that it is to fail entirely to recognize what is at stake at bottom to say simply that the obsessional rocks on a sort of little swing that goes
from the manifestation of a desire which, by going too far, becomes an aggressive desire and which from there comes back down or tips back
into a disappearance, so to speak, that will be linked to the fear of effective retaliation on the part of the Other,
of this aggressiveness: namely of undergoing on his part a destruction equivalent to that of the desire he manifests.

I believe there is reason to take in a global apprehension what is at stake on the occasion, and to do so,
one must almost pass through the illusions that this relation to the Other develops within ourselves, I would say
within us analysts, within analytic theory itself. In the end, this notion of the relation to the Other
is always solicited by a sliding that tends to reduce desire to the problem of demand.
If desire is in fact what I have articulated here, that is to say that something which is produced in the gap
that speech opens in demand, and thus as such beyond any concrete demand, it is clear that any attempt to reduce desire to something whose satisfaction is demanded runs up against an internal contradiction.

I will say up to a certain point that the term of oblativity…
namely the recognition of the desire of the Other as such, of that in which analysts almost in their community at present place the summit and the summum of a happy realization of the subject: of what they call genital maturity, and of which I was reading you an example the other day in a passage by the author I called into question, namely of this deep taking of satisfaction in the satisfaction given to the demand of the Other, in short of what is commonly called ‘altruism’
…is precisely that something which lets escape what there is in fact to resolve in the problem of desire.

In short, I believe that the term ‘oblativity’, as it is presented to us in this moralizing perspective
—one can say so without forcing the terms—is an obsessional fantasy. It is quite certain that in analysis,
as things present themselves, the temperaments—I am speaking of those that practice theorizes for reasons
that are very easy to understand—hysterical temperaments are much rarer than obsessional natures.

A part of the ‘indoctrination’ of analysis is done along the line, along the pathways of obsessional wishes:
the illusion, the very fantasy that is within the obsessional’s reach, is in the end that the Other as such
be consenting to his desire. This carries within itself extreme difficulties, since it must be consenting,
but in an entirely different way from a response to any satisfaction whatsoever, from a response to demand.
But this is entirely elided: the problem is to give ourselves the solution by short-circuit. That is more desirable
than thinking that in the end it suffices to come to an agreement and that, ‘to find happiness in life,
it suffices not to inflict on others the frustrations of which one has oneself been the object’.

A part of the unhappy and perfectly confusionary outcomes of analysis derives from the fact of treating demand…
from a certain moment when the subject is exalted by the perspective of good intentions which are quickly established in a certain number of presuppositions toward the happy termination of analytic treatment
…by giving oneself over to something that is one of the most common inclinations of the obsessional, namely that something that is expressed roughly as: ‘Do not do to others what you would not want to have done to you.’ This imperative, assuredly categorical, is entirely essential and structuring in morality, but is not always of practical use in existence. It is assuredly completely beside the point when it is a matter of a realization such as sexual conjunction.

The order of relation to the Other that consists in putting oneself in his place is something that assuredly is a tempting slide, all the more tempting because the analyst, being precisely vis-à-vis that other who is the little other, his fellow, in an aggressive relation, is quite naturally tempted to be in this position of sparing him, so to speak.
To spare the other is indeed what is at the bottom of a whole series of ceremonials, precautions, detours,
in short of all the maneuverings of the obsessional.

If it is in order to arrive at ‘indoctrinating’, at making a kind of generalization of what was no doubt manifested not without reason in a much more complicated way in his symptoms, to make of it a kind of moralizing extrapolation,
and to propose to him as end and outcome of his problems what is called the ‘oblative outcome’, that is to say submission to the demands of the Other, I believe it was really not worth making this detour.

In short, it is really only substituting, as experience shows, a symptom, and a very serious symptom because it does not fail, of course, to engender what is going to occur, namely the resurgence, under other more or less problematic forms, of the desire that has never been, and that cannot be by these paths in any way resolved.
It is quite clear that in this perspective one can say that the paths that the obsessional finds by himself and in which he seeks the solution to the problem of his desire, are otherwise adequate, if they are not adapted, because the problem is at least read there in a clear way.

For example, there are several modes of solution: there are modes of solution precisely at the level of an effective relation with the other. The way the obsessional behaves with his fellow when he is still capable of it,
when he is not submerged by his symptoms—and it is rare that he is completely so—is something which
in itself is sufficiently indicative and no doubt leading into a dead-end path but nonetheless giving an indication that is not so bad for direction. For example I spoke to you of the manifestations of feat in obsessionals. What is this feat? For there to be feat, one must be at least three:
– because one does not do one’s feat alone, one must be at least two for there to be something that resembles it, for there to be performance won, sprint…
– Then there must also be someone who records it and who is the witness.

It is quite clear that what in the feat the obsessional seeks to obtain is very precisely this: he seeks to obtain what we were calling a moment ago ‘the permission of the Other’, in the name of something that is very polyvalent,
one can say in the name of this: that he has well deserved what he seeks to obtain. Now satisfaction is not something that is classified at all on the terrain where he has well deserved it. Observe the structure of our obsessionals.

What is called ‘super-ego effect’ means what? It means that they inflict on themselves all sorts of particularly hard tasks, particularly trying tasks, that they succeed at them moreover, that they succeed at them all the more easily because it is precisely that they desire to do it, but there they succeed very very brilliantly,
and in the name of that they would indeed have a right to a little vacation during which one would do what one would want:
hence the well-known dialectic of work and vacation.

In the obsessional, work is powerful, being done to free the time of the full sail that will be that of vacation,
and the passage of vacation revealing itself usually as a time more or less lost. Why? Because, of course, what was at stake was to obtain the permission of the Other. And as the other—I am speaking of the other in fact, of the other who exists—has absolutely nothing to do with all this dialectic for the simple reason that the real other is far too occupied with his own Other, he has no reason to fulfill this mission of giving to the obsessional’s feat
its little crown, namely that something which would precisely be the realization of his desire insofar as this desire
has nothing to do with the terrain on which he demonstrated all his capacities.

This is a certainly very sensitive phase, and which is well worth being exposed under its humorous aspect. But it does not stop there. This is precisely the interest of these concepts like the big Other and the little other:
it is that they are applicable, that they structure lived relations in much more than one direction.

One can also say, from a certain side, that in the feat the subject dominates—and this has been said by others than me—tames, even domesticates what is called a fundamental anxiety, and there again I believe that one fails to recognize a dimension
of the phenomenon, namely that the essential is not in this expertise, in this risk run which is always
in the obsessional a risk run within very strict limits, I mean in the fact that a learned economy strictly distinguishes everything that the obsessional risks in his feat, from anything whatsoever that resembles
what is called ‘the risk of death’ in the Hegelian dialectic.

There is something in the obsessional’s feat that always remains irremediably fictive, for the reason that death,
I mean where the true danger is, is quite elsewhere than in the adversary whom he seems to defy effectively.
It is precisely at the side of this invisible witness, of this Other who is there as the spectator, the one who counts the blows and who will say of the other: ‘Decidedly—as one expresses oneself somewhere in SCHREBER’s delirium—he is a tough rabbit!’ But one would find this sort of exclamation, this way of taking the blow as implicit, as latent,
as wished for in all this dialectic of feat.

The obsessional here puts into a certain relation the existence of the other as being his fellow, as being the one in whose place he can put himself. And it is precisely because he can put himself in his place that there is in reality no kind
of essential risk in what he demonstrates in his effects of sporting bearing, of risk more or less taken.

This other with whom he plays is never, in the end, anything but another who is himself, another who already in any case, and whichever way he takes things, leaves him the palm. But the Other before whom all this takes place, that is the one who is important, that is also the one who must at all costs be preserved:
– it is the point, the place where the feat is recorded, so to speak,
– it is there where, so to speak, his history is inscribed,
…this point that must at all costs be maintained and which makes him so adherent to everything that is of the verbal order, to everything that is of the order of computation, of recapitulation, of inscription, of falsification also, and which makes it so that what the obsessional wants above all to maintain without seeming to, while seeming to aim at something else, is this Other, with a capital A,
in which things are articulated in terms of signifier.

Here then is a first approach under which we can begin to approach this wish since,
beyond any demand and what he desires, it is a matter of seeing at what the obsessional’s conduct as a whole aims.
It is certain that this maintenance of the Other is for him the essential aim, because it is the first aim, the preliminary aim within which alone can be made this validation so difficult of his desire.

What can be and what will be this validation? That is what we will have to articulate later.
But first the four corners, so to speak, of his conduct must be fixed in such a way that the trees, so to speak, do not hide the forest from us and that, in order to catch such and such of these little mechanisms, we are not
as it were stopped, fascinated by this mechanism giving it a kind, because it has a certain style,
finding there this satisfaction.

It is evident that one always has to stop at some detail of an organism; it is a satisfaction that is not completely illegitimate, since a detail always reflects, at least in the domain of natural phenomena, something of the totality. But in a matter that is of an organization as little natural as that of the subject’s relations to the signifier, we cannot entirely trust the reconstitution of the whole obsessional organization from such a defense mechanism, for of course, all that you can set yourself to expressing in the catalogue of defense mechanisms.

I am trying to do something else: I am trying to make you find the four cardinal corners around which
each of the subject’s defenses is oriented and polarized. Here are already two for today, namely this corner that we first approached: the role of fantasy. We now see with regard to the feat that this presence of the Other as such
is something that is entirely fundamental.

There is another point on which I would like at least to introduce you to the chapter: on hearing talk of feat,
you have no doubt thought of all sorts of behaviors of your obsessionals, but there is a feat
that perhaps does not quite deserve to be pinned under the same title, it is what is called in analysis acting out.
There I gave myself— you will give yourselves also I hope, by my example, if only to confirm what I put forward—
to some investigations in the literature. It is very surprising. To such a point that one does not get out of it.

A person has done the best article on this subject, namely Phyllis GREENACRE, under the title ‘General problems of acting out’. It is a quite remarkable article in this that it shows that up to the present nothing of value has been articulated about it. I believe one must limit these problems. I believe it is quite impossible to limit them,
if one sticks for example to the general notion: that acting out is a symptom, that it is a compromise,
that it has a double sense, that it is an act of repetition, …for that is to drown it in all the compulsions of repetition in their most general forms.

I believe that if it has a sense, it is always something that arises in the course of an attempt at solution
of this problem of demand and desire, and that is why these sorts of acts that are called acting out occur
in a more elective way during analysis, because all the same, whatever one effectively does with it in analysis,
they are indeed attempts at solution of this problem of the relation of desire and demand.

Acting out certainly occurs on the path, on the field of this realization in analysis of unconscious desire.
It is extremely instructive, because if we look closely for what characterizes the facts of acting out,
we find there all sorts of absolutely necessary components which will for example make it that it is
that which absolutely distinguishes them from what is called a slip, namely from what I call here in a more
proper way, a successful act, I mean a symptom insofar as it clearly lets appear a […].
Acting out is something which for example always includes a highly signifying element, and precisely
in this that it is enigmatic. We will never call acting out anything but an act that presents itself with this character
especially unmotivated. That does not at all mean that it has no cause, but that it is precisely very unmotivatable psychologically, for it is an act always signified.

The role, on the other hand, of an object in acting out, of an object in the material sense of the term, that is to say what I will be led to return to next time to show you precisely what limited function it is a matter of granting in all this dialectic, to the role of the object, it always exists in acting out.

On the other hand, the function and the relation, almost the equivalence that there is between fantasy and acting out. I mean
that acting out is structured in general in a way that comes very close to that of a ‘scenario’; in its way it is something that is of the same level as fantasy. There is one thing that distinguishes it from fantasy, and that also distinguishes it from feat, it is that if feat is an exercise, a tour de force, a conjuring trick destined in the end to please the Other, the big Other who, I told you, does not care about it, acting out is something else. And it is in that that it is interesting for us to consider: acting out is always a message and it is in that that it interests us.

When it occurs in an analysis, it is always addressed to the analyst, and to the analyst insofar as in sum he is not too badly placed, but that he is also not entirely in his place. It is in general a hint that the subject gives us, which sometimes goes very far, and which is sometimes very serious, but it is a hint if acting out occurs outside the limits of the treatment.
It is evident that it is a hint from which the analyst can hardly profit, but that is precisely what is serious
and grave: it is that every time we will be led to designate in a precise way something that has
the character of this paradoxical act—which we are trying to delimit and which is called acting out—outside the limits
of treatment, assuredly what will in the end be a matter of reaching is something articulated on this line,
namely a clarification of the subject’s relations to demand, insofar as it reveals that any relation to this demand is fundamentally inadequate insofar as it is a matter of the subject’s acceding, in the end, to the effective reality of this effect of the signifier on the subject, namely to put himself at the level of the castration complex as such,
and strictly, that is to say that this will have been missed.

This can be missed—and this is what I will try to show you next time—precisely insofar
as this interval space where all these troubled exercises occur which go from feat to fantasy, and from fantasy
to a quite passionate and partial—this is indeed the word—love of the object, for ABRAHAM never spoke of partial object, but ‘partial love of the object’, it is insofar as moving in this intermediate space of the object that one has obtained illusory solutions. Illusory solution, very precisely the one that is manifested in what is called
‘the homosexual transference’ within obsessional neurosis. That is what I call the illusory solution,
and I hope next time to show you in detail why it is an illusory solution.