FREUD, in ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, devotes a chapter to identification.
We are going to, in these last few seminars that remain to us this year, advance into this field,
opened up by FREUD after the First World War, toward the years 1920, of the second topography.

Because what we have gone through this year in trying to give a dimension of the formations of the unconscious and of what that represents, is that alone which will allow us, on the fact of topography, not to lose our way in
its other customary senses. We will therefore be led to indicate at least what this topography means, and quite especially why it has come to the forefront of the function of the ego in a quite other sense, manifestly different and how much more complex, from the use that has been made of it since. This, to show you the direction.

For the moment, I retain from this chapter on identification. Of course, it has to be read, you have to see
in what sense this applies to the reports that I am going to give you of the three types of identification distinguished by FREUD on the diagram that is here and, in sum, that must have for you, at the point we are at, precisely the value of a mediation, of an articulation diagram, indeed of an interpretation:
– on the one hand, of what concerns the structure of the unconscious insofar as this structure of the unconscious is fundamentally structured like speech, like a language,
– and on the other hand, of what is drawn from it as topography.

Precisely, you are going to see right away that FREUD distinguishes three types of identifications. This is clearly articulated and, in a certain paragraph, it is clearly summarized. The first type of identification is the most original form
of the bond of feeling to an object.

The second form is the one on which he particularly dwelt in this chapter, the one that moreover is the concrete basis of all of FREUD’s reflection around identification, fundamentally linked to everything that belongs to topography.
Let us nonetheless not forget as a primary fact, before assessing the different organs, if one can say so,
of Freudian topography insofar as they derive from that famous egg-shaped diagram that would have an eye,

the diagram from which you imagine, you ‘intuit’ the relations of the id, the ego, the superego, an eye somewhere,
a sort of pipette that would enter into the substance supposed to represent the superego, that it is an obviously
very convenient diagram. That is precisely the disadvantage of this, that to represent topological things one uses spatial diagrams.
It is a necessity from which I myself do not escape since I too represent my topography by a spatial diagram.
I try to do so with the least possible disadvantages because what distinguishes topography from a spatial diagram is that this diagram – that one for example, my little network – represents for you this, for example that you take it and that you crumple it, that you make a little ball of it and that you put it in your pocket,
in principle the relations always remain the same: they are relations of linkage, of order.

It is more difficult to do for this egg diagram since it is entirely turned toward this spatial projection.
So you imagine that FREUD wants to designate by the id something that is somewhere, that is an organ on which there is this kind of protuberance represented by the ego which indeed comes there like an eye.
But read the text, it makes no allusion whatsoever to anything that can be represented with this substantial character,
to something that would allow representing that as a sort of organized differentiation. The development
of bodily organs is something altogether different. The term identification means something completely different.
It is upon these identifications that differentiations are supported which are of another kind,
in a wholly other order than organ differentiations.

It is nonetheless very important to be reminded of it, if only because it can go very far. In the end, there really are people who imagine that when they perform a lobotomy, they remove a slice of superego.
And not only do they believe it, but they write it, and they do it in that thought.
This second type of identification, let us see how FREUD articulates it: it occurs along the path of a regression, as replacement of a tie to an object, a libidinal tie that is equivalent to an introjection of the object into the ego.
I repeat it to you, this second form of identification is the one that, throughout FREUD’s discourse in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego, but also in The Ego and the Id, poses him the most problems because of its ambiguous relation with the object.
It is there also where all the problems of analysis are gathered, the problem of the inverted Oedipus complex
in particular: why at a moment, in certain cases, and in the form of the inverted Oedipus complex,
does the object that is an object of libidinal attachment become an object of identification?

In certain cases it is more important to sustain the problem posed than to resolve it in any way.
There is absolutely nothing obligatory about our making a representation of any possible solution
to this question, which is perhaps, after all, the central question, the question on this side of which we are always condemned to remain, the one that forms the pivot point. There has to be one somewhere, because,
wherever we place ourselves in order to consider that all the questions are resolved, there will always remain this question: why are we there? And how did we get there to be at the point where everything is clear?

It is clear that there must indeed be a point that precisely makes us remain plunged into the question. I am not telling you that this point is the point in question, but in any case it is clear that FREUD, he, in any case turns around it
and does not claim – anywhere – to have resolved it. What is important, on the other hand, is to see how the coordinates,
if one can say so, of this zero point vary. I repeat it to you, this is the essential question,
that of the relation between love for an object and the identification fundamentally given by experience to follow from it.

Here, FREUD introduces in the clearest way the distinction and the opposition that is the one that at the end of one of our last seminars in which I had alluded to the problem of the relation to the phallus: the opposition, in sum,
of being and of having. This is how he articulates the difference there is between:
– erotic, libidinal attachment to the loved object,
– and identification with the same.

But FREUD tells us clearly: in any case what his experience gives him is that this identification is always
of a regressive nature. The coordinates, the correlations of this transformation of a libidinal attachment
into identification are coordinates that show that there is regression. I think you nevertheless know enough for me not to need to dot the i’s. In any case, I have already articulated in the previous sessions what attests a regression. Of course, you know it, but what is at issue is knowing how one articulates it here. We articulate it as follows, it is the choice of signifiers that clearly gives the indication: what we call regressing to the anal stage with all its nuances and varieties, indeed to the oral stage, is what we always see in the present, in the subject’s discourse: regressive signifiers. There is no other regression in analysis.

That the subject lies on your couch moaning like an infant, even imitating its behaviors, that happens sometimes, but we are not accustomed to seeing there the true regression that you see in analysis. This occurs, this sort of act on the patient’s part, but it is generally not in cases
of very good omen, and it is not that that you are ordinarily accustomed to calling ‘regression’.
At the point we are at with these two forms of identification, we are going to try to apply them to our diagram and to see what they mean.

If the two lines which, when we place ourselves here, that is to say at the level of the subject’s need, Bedürfnis, the term is used in FREUD. I point out to you in passing that FREUD, and precisely with regard to the same reflection concerning the advent of identification and its relations with the cathexis of the object, tells us in a certain sentence:

‘Later one must admit that the cathexis of the object…’

I remark to you in passing that Jankélévitch’s translation of these chapters renders them properly unintelligible
and sometimes makes them say exactly the opposite of FREUD’s text, this term ‘cathexis of the object’
is translated as concentration on the object, which is of an incredible obscurity.

‘…that the cathexis of the object originates from the Es (from the id) which perceives erotic incitations as need.’

You see that the Es is something that proposes itself here as very ambiguous: it perceives erotic incitations,
erotic pressures, erotic tensions, as ‘need’. Whatever the perspective of need may be,
these lines¹et² thus give the two horizons of demand:
– that is to say of demand here¹ insofar as articulated, demand for satisfaction of a need insofar as every demand for satisfaction of a need must pass through the defiles of articulation as language makes them obligatory.
– On the other hand, from the sole fact of passing onto the plane of the signifier in its existence and no longer in its articulation, what results from it at the level of the one to whom the demand is addressed², that is to say the Other: unconditional demand for love insofar as it is linked to the fact that the one to whom one thus addresses oneself is himself symbolized, that is to say that he appears as presence against a background of absence, that he can be made present as absent, that is to say this other horizon.

Before an object is loved in the erotic sense of the term, in the sense in which the Eros of the loved object can be perceived as need,
the institution, the positioning of demand creates the horizon of the demand for love. They are separated on this diagram,
these two lines, the one of demand as demand for satisfaction of a need and the one of the demand for love,
they are separated for a reason of topological necessity, but the remarks from earlier apply:
that does not mean that they are not one and the same line, namely what the child articulates before the mother.

In other words, the ambiguity, the simultaneity…
if one can say so, of the unfolding of what happens on these two lines insofar as these are
lines where what belongs to the subject’s need is articulated as signifier
…this superposition, this simultaneity, this ambiguity is something that is always offered to us as a permanent state. You are going to see an immediate application of it, this ambiguity is very precisely the ambiguity
that maintains – throughout the work – FREUD, and in a permanent way:
– the notion of transference as such, I mean the action of transference in analysis,
– with that of suggestion.

All the time FREUD tells us that after all, transference is a suggestion, that we use it as such.
But he adds: ‘…except that we make something quite other of it, since we interpret this suggestion.’
But what does that mean, if not that if we can interpret the suggestion, it is because a background offers itself
to it as such, because, if I may say so, transference in potency is there. We know very well that it exists and I will immediately give you an example of it.

Transference in potency is already analysis of suggestion, it is itself the possibility of this analysis of suggestion,
it is secondary articulation of what, in suggestion, imposes itself purely and simply on the subject.
In other words, the horizon line on which suggestion is based is there¹, it is very essentially at the level of demand, of the demand that the subject makes by the sole fact that he is there. What are these demands?

How can we situate them? It is indeed very interesting to establish the point at the start because it varies extremely:
– There really are people for whom the demand to be cured is there at every instant, ever present. The others, more informed, know that it is put off until tomorrow.
– There are others who are there for something other than the demand for cure, they are there to see.
– There are some who are there to become analysts.
What importance does it have to know the place of demand since the way in which the analyst,
even in not responding to it, instituted as such, responds to it: that is constitutive of all the effects of suggestion.
But do not tell me that it is enough to say that transference is, there, that something thanks to which suggestion operates.
That is the idea one ordinarily has of it. Not only is it the idea one ordinarily has of it, but I will say that, up to a certain moment in his text, FREUD writes that if it is appropriate to let transference become established it is because
it is legitimate to make use of the power of what? Of suggestion that transference gives, transference here conceived as the hold
and the power of the analyst over the subject, as the affective bond that makes the subject depend on him,
that it is legitimate that we use it so that an interpretation gets through.

What is this if not, at this level, to state in the clearest way that we use suggestion?
It is because the patient, to call things by their name, has come to love us well,
that our interpretations are ingested: we are on the plane of suggestion.

Now, of course FREUD does not intend to limit himself to that. But when one says ‘yes, we are going to analyze transference’, observe carefully the bifurcation that presents itself at this level: it is a bifurcation that makes transference
entirely vanish as…
let us say that I underline the terms because they are not mine, but those that are implicit
in every discussion on this subject of transference
…as affective hold over the subject because if we consider that at that moment we distinguish ourselves from the one who relies on his power over the patient to get through the interpretation that he suggests, in that we are going to analyze this effect of his power, what do we do other than refer the question to infinity?

So it is again starting from transference that we will analyze what has just happened in the fact that the subject has accepted the interpretation for example. There is no kind of reason to get out by this route from the infernal circle of suggestion.
Now, we suppose precisely that something else is possible. It is therefore that transference is something other than the use
of a power: transference is already an open field, the possibility of another and different signifying articulation
from the one that encloses the subject in demand.

That is why it is legitimate, whatever its content must be, to put on the horizon this which is called here,
not the line of suggestion, but the line of transference, that is to say this something articulated that is in potency
beyond what is articulated on the plane of demand.

Now, what is there on the horizon is what produces demand as such, namely the symbolization of the Other, namely the unconditional demand for love, it is there that the object later comes to lodge itself, but as an erotic object, it is there that it is aimed at by the subject.

And to say that identification, by succeeding it to this aiming at the object as loved, that identification, by replacing it is a regression, that means precisely that what is at issue is the ambiguity of this line of transference, if I may say so, with the line of suggestion because we know – and there I have articulated it for a long time and right at the beginning, and FREUD articulates it there for us – that on this line of suggestion identification is made in its primary form, this identification that we know well, this identification with the insignia that make the other, as subject of demand,
the one who has the power to satisfy it or not to satisfy it, mark at every instant this satisfaction by something
which of course is in the foreground: his language, his speech.

Spoken relations of the child with the mother, I have underlined their importance, they are essential and they make it such that all the other signs, the whole pantomime of the mother, as one said yesterday evening, is something that is articulated in terms of signifiers that crystallize in the conventional character of these mimicries, supposedly emotional, which are what the mother communicates with the child with and which give to every kind of expression of emotions in man, this conventional character that makes the alleged expressive spontaneity of emotions reveal itself, upon examination

• and this without one being forced to be Freudian for that – not only quite problematic, but completely floating, namely that what in a certain area of signifying articulation of emotions signifies a certain emotion,
  can in another area – this is a reference – be of a wholly other value from the point of view of expression of emotions.

So identification as such, if it is regressive, is precisely insofar as the ambiguity remains permanent between the line of transference and the line of suggestion. In other words, we have no reason to be surprised that, in what follows, in the development, in the detour of analysis, we see regressions be punctuated by a series of identifications that are correlative to them, that mark their time, their rhythm. Moreover they are different. There cannot be at once regression and identification. The ones are the stops, the stoppages of the others.

But it remains that if there is transference, it is very precisely so that this is maintained on another plane than that
of suggestion, namely that this is aimed at not as something to which no satisfaction of the demand responds, but as such, as a signifying articulation, and that is what distinguishes the one from the other.

You will tell me ‘what is the operation that makes us keep them distinct?’ Precisely, our operation here is the abstinent or abstentionist one, which consists in never, as such, gratifying the demand. We know this, but this abstention, although it is essential, is not by itself sufficient. This is obvious.
It is indeed because it is in the nature of things that these two lines remain distinct, that they can remain so.

In other words it is because for the subject they are distinct, and that precisely between the two there is all this field
which is, thank God, not thin to grasp, which is never abolished, and which is called the field of desire, that they can remain distinct. In other words, all that is asked of us is, by our presence there as Other,
not to favor this confusion. For of course:
– it is enough that we enter there as Other, and especially in the way we enter there, with this character that we call permissive of analysis, but permissive on the verbal plane, but that is enough,
– it is enough that things be permissive on the verbal plane – Why? – Not of course so that the patient is satisfied, because he is even satisfied by that, but he is not satisfied in the elements of the real,
– it is enough that he be satisfied on the plane of demand for the confusion to become established irremediably between these two planes: the one that I call the line of transference², and the one that I call the line of suggestion¹.

We are therefore, by our presence and insofar as we listen to the patient, what tends to make the line of transference merge
with the line of demand. We are therefore, in principle, harmful and that is what that means.
Regression is our path, but it is a downward path, it is a path that, with respect to the end of our action, does not designate its goal but its detour. And that is what we must keep constantly in mind.
Thank God, there is something that prevents this irremediable confusion from being established…

Although there is a whole technique of analysis that has no other aim and no other end than to establish it, this confusion, and that is why it leads to ‘the transference neurosis’, and that you then see written in a journal called the Revue Française de Psychanalyse, that as for resolving what is called the question of transference, there is only one thing left to do:

– make the sick person sit down,
– show him nice things,
– show him that it is pretty outside,
– and tell him to go there by crossing the door in small steps so as not to make the flies rise.

And this by a great technician!

Fortunately there is between the two lines something that opposes this confusion of the line of transference
and the line of suggestion, there is between the two desire precisely, and all that is so obvious that hypnotists, let us simply say those who have been interested in hypnosis, know it well:
that no suggestion, however successful it may be, takes hold of the subject totally. What is it that resists?

Very precisely this – I will not even say this or that desire of the subject, it is obvious – but very essentially this: the desire to have one’s desire, it is even more obvious, but that is not a reason not to say it. These are these forms, for the subject, of the necessary maintenance of desire, thanks to which there remains what is of the very nature of the human subject as such: a divided subject. If he is no longer a divided subject, he is mad. He remains a divided subject because there is there a desire whose field, after all, must not be so convenient to maintain either since, what I explain to you,
is that what a neurosis is constructed for as it is constructed, a hysterical neurosis, an obsessional neurosis, is to maintain something articulated that is called ‘desire’ and this is well defined.

Neurosis is not the more or less great strength or the more or less great weakness, or fixation, understood in this sort of also intuitive sense that consists in imagining fixation as something that has happened
at a point where the subject has put his foot in a pot of glue, fixation is obviously something else. If it resembles
anything, it is rather like stakes intended to maintain something that otherwise would run away. It is very variable, what is called ‘the quantitative element’, the force of desire among neurotics, and I will say that it is one of the most convincing things to ensure the autonomy of what is called structural modification in neurosis.

It is that it jumps out to experience that neurotics who have the same form of neurosis are people who are very diversely endowed on the side of what one of the authors who are involved concerning obsessive neurosis calls somewhere ‘exuberant and early sexuality’ of one of his patients.

I must say that ‘exuberant and early sexuality’, the one of whom it is said somewhere

that ‘He masturbated by lightly pinching the peripheral part of the foreskin, convinced, at the time, that irreparable lesions would occur if the sheath retracted. He did not dare to wash the […] because he feared injuring himself and losing something. The advice of a doctor […] they had to consult a doctor in view of the repeated failures of their attempts at coitus.’

We know well that all that, those are symptoms! The subject will reveal himself, at least in the milieu where the author conducts his analysis, very capable of satisfying his wife and of fulfilling his duties as a husband. But still! But still!
We are not going to talk all the same about an ‘exuberant sexuality’ that is the one which, by whatever force we suppose to support the symptoms, nonetheless lets itself languish, be fooled to the point that one can give such a description of a subject who has already reached an advanced age.

Which does not mean that on the other hand, another obsessive neurotic will not show you a different picture, for example of a sexuality that one can indeed qualify as exuberant, even as early. It is precisely this difference, quite palpable in clinical cases – and which moreover does not prevent us from recognizing that it is in all cases one and the same obsessive neurosis – that shows us that what it is for which it is an obsessive neurosis, that is situated quite elsewhere than in this quantitative element of desire. If it intervenes, it is only and insofar as it will precisely have to pass into what one calls ‘the defiles of structure’.

But what characterizes neurosis in the occasion is structure, that is to say that something, for example in
the case of the obsessional, that makes his desire be weak: whether he is in full puberty or whether he comes to us when he is forty or fifty years old, that is to say at the moment when his desire nonetheless declines and when he desires to get a little idea of what has happened, that is to say of what he has understood nothing of up to then in his existence, it is what in all these cases will present itself, not at all as the weakness or the strength of desire, but in the fact that, on the contrary, weak or strong, the obsessional during the whole time of his existence is occupied with putting his desire in a strong position, with constituting a ‘stronghold’ of desire, and this on the plane of relations that are essentially signifying relations.

In this ‘stronghold’ there dwells a weak desire or a strong desire, the question is not there. There is one certain thing,
it is that in all cases the ‘strongholds’ are double-edged, the ‘strongholds’ that are built on the outside are still much more annoying for those who are inside, and that is where the problem is.

You see therefore that the first form of identification is defined for us by the first tie to the object, that is to say at the level of what happens of identification – if you want, to schematize – of identification with the mother.

The other form of identification²ᵉ, it is identification with the loved object, insofar as regressive, that is to say insofar as it should occur quite elsewhere, at a horizon point which of course is not quite easy to reach,
since precisely being unconditional, or more exactly subject to the sole condition of the existence of the signifier.

For, outside the existence of the signifier, there is no possible opening of the dimension of love as such.
It is entirely dependent, being the sole condition, on the existence of the signifier, but within this existence, on no particular articulation except this: that there is the existence of articulation. And that is why it is not quite easy to formulate since in sum nothing could complete it, fill it, not even the totality
of my discourse in my whole existence, since it is the horizon of my discourses, in addition.

Which poses precisely the question of knowing what this S means, but at this level. In other words, which subject is at issue?
There is no reason to be surprised that this constitutes never anything but a horizon, namely that the whole problem is to know
what is going to be constructed, articulated in this direction, in this interval.

If this direction, in which what is articulated, for the neurotic in sum, is the right one, the neurotic who lives what?

He lives the paradox of desire exactly like everyone, because there is no human inserted into the human condition who escapes it. The only difference between what one calls a normal relation of desire and the neurotic is not simply this paradox, for this paradox of desire is fundamental, it is that the neurotic is open to the existence
of this paradox as such.
Which of course does not simplify existence for him, but nonetheless does not put him in such a bad position from a certain point of view, that we can flatly on this occasion articulate the philosopher’s point of view.
The philosopher’s point of view either is not clear, in other words, one can very well put it in question in the same way as the neurotic’s point of view, one does not even know if he has the occasion to do it.
Whether this is valid or not, it is certain that it is in the nature of things that it be so, because it is nonetheless on something, on a path, on a line, on an opening, that has some kinship with what the philosopher articulates, or at least what he should articulate, for, in truth: this problem of desire, you have already seen it well and truly, and carefully, and correctly, and powerfully, articulated in the philosopher’s path? Up to now what seems to me one of the most characteristic things about philosophy is that it is there what in philosophy is most carefully avoided.

This would push me to open another parenthesis on the philosophy of action, and which would lead to the same conclusions, namely that the action that one talks about right and left…
namely that one sees in it I do not know what instrument of spontaneity, of originality of man insofar as
he comes there to transform the data of the problem, transform the world as one says
…it is very singular that one never brings out what nonetheless for us is this truth of experience, namely this profoundly paradoxical and quite patent character of the paradox of desire in action, its features and its reliefs that I began to introduce to you last time by alluding to the character of exploit, of performance,
of demonstration, of action, even of desperate outcome.

These terms that I use are not mine because the term Wirkung [action] is used by FREUD
to designate action that is quite paradoxical, action that is quite generalized, human action. Human action
is quite especially there where one claims to designate it in accord with history, as ‘the crossing of the Rubicon’.
My friend KOJÈVE speaks of that as of something that is there the point of concurrence, the harmonious solution
between the present, the past and the future of CÉSAR…
although the last time I passed on that side, I never saw it except dry. It was immense,
and at the time when I was there, it was dry, it was not in the same season when CÉSAR crossed it
…and even in the fact that CÉSAR ‘crossed the Rubicon’, with the genius of CÉSAR, in the fact of
‘crossing the Rubicon’ there is always something that entails that ‘one throws oneself into the water’ since it is a river.

In other words, human action is not something so harmonious as that.
And for us, analysts, it is indeed the most astonishing thing in the world that no one,
in analysis, has proposed or set about trying to articulate what concerns action, precisely
in this paradoxical perspective where we see it incessantly, where we never see any other.
Which moreover gives us enough trouble to define well what is called properly acting-out.
Acting-out, in a certain sense, in this respect, being an action like another, but taking precisely its relief from being provoked by the fact that we use transference, that is to say that we do something extremely dangerous, and all the more dangerous because, as you see from what I suggest to you, we do not have a very, very precise idea of what it is.

Perhaps this is an indication in passing that will clarify for you what I mean, if I tell you that ‘resistance’

• and ‘resistance’ in a quite sensible and material way, namely ‘resistance’ insofar as the subject in certain cases does not accept interpretations such as we present them to him on the plane precisely of regression –
  .is something that seems to stick so well at first glance, namely that for him it does not seem to stick at all like that. And if the subject ‘resists’, he will end up letting go if we insist, given that we are always ready to play on the string of suggestion. This ‘resistance’, insofar as it expresses the necessity of maintaining the point where it is precisely a matter of articulating desire otherwise, namely on the plane of desire, this ‘resistance’, what value does it have?
  But very precisely, the value that FREUD gives it in certain texts. If he calls it Übertragungswiderstand
  [transference resistance], it is because it is the same thing as transference – transference in the sense in which I am telling you for the moment, where no doubt what it is a matter of maintaining is the other line, the line of transference, where the line of articulation
  has another requirement than the one that we immediately give it, in response to demand.

I would like to tell you, after this reminder which corresponds only to obviousnesses but to obviousnesses that nonetheless, I believe, need to be articulated, tell you:
– that the second identification means the point where what happens is judged insofar as regressive,
– that it is this call of transference that allows this commotion of signifiers that is called regression and that must lead us to something beyond ourselves, which is what we are trying to aim at for the moment,
namely how to operate with transference but which quite naturally tends to degrade into something that we can always satisfy at its regressive level in a certain way, that is to say by making for ourselves a certain conception of analysis, precisely the one that lets itself be fascinated by the notion of frustration
and by different articulations that, on occasion, are expressed in object relation in a thousand ways.
All the ways, if I may say so, of articulating analysis always tend to degrade, which does not prevent analysis from nonetheless being something else.

The third form of identification, FREUD articulates it for us like this: this form of identification that can arise
from a newly perceived community with a person who is not at all the object of a sexual drive.
Where is it situated, this third identification? FREUD exemplifies it for us in a way that leaves no kind of ambiguity on the way to respond to it on this diagram. He gives as an example the hysteric’s identification.
He articulates it for us exactly. As I was telling you all this time, in FREUD it is always said in the clearest way: for the hysteric the problem is somewhere to fix – in the sense in which an optical instrument allows one to fix
a point – to fix her desire, this desire that for her presents some special difficulties.

Let us try to articulate this more precisely. This desire, it is nonetheless doomed for her to I do not know what impasse, since she can realize this fixation of the point of her desire only on condition of identifying with anything, with a small trait… FREUD writes it:

‘When I tell you an insignia, a trait, a single trait – no matter which – of someone else
in whom she can sense that there is the same problem of desire…’

That is to say that her impasse, for the hysteric, opens wide for her the doors of the other, at least wide on the side of all the others, that is to say of all possible hysterics, even of all hysterical moments of all the others, insofar as she senses in them for an instant the same problem, which is that of this question about desire.
That is how FREUD situates it.

I will show it to you: the question – although it is articulated a little differently – is, from the point of view of the relation of topology, exactly the same for the obsessional, and for good reason! In other words, this identification of which
it is a matter is the one that is here, [S◊a], namely the place where I designated for you last time, in the obsessional, the fantasy.
It is insofar as there is a point where the subject has to establish a certain imaginary relation with the other, not in itself,
if I may say so, but insofar as it is this imaginary relation that brings him a satisfaction.

It is specified to us that it is there a matter of a person or an object that has no relation with any Sexual Trieb whatsoever. It is something else, it is a support, if you want it is a puppet of the fantasy. I have given to this word ‘fantasy’ all the extent that you will want. It is a matter of fantasy, as I articulated it last time
and as I will return to it, insofar as fantasy can be an unconscious fantasy. Here the other is of no use, except

• which is not little – to allow the subject to hold a certain position that avoids this collapse of desire,
  that avoids the neurotic’s problem.

Here is a third form of identification that is quite essential. As I do not know where that would lead us,
because it is always longer than one thinks, the fact of entering into the reading of the observation of the article
by M. BOUVET that appeared in the Revue Française de Psychanalyse where there is my report on Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,
I ask you to read it. I will return to it, but I would like on this subject to articulate today the point where I designate the error of the technique of analysis that brings back into the present homosexual transference in obsessive neurosis.

What occurs, insofar as in fantasies the phallic object appears, and namely the phallic object
insofar as it is fantasmically the phallus of the analyst, is something that occurs there, at the point of proliferation already instituted, but that can always be stimulated, namely there where the subject, as obsessional, maintains by his fantasy the possibility of maintaining himself – position for her, the hysteric, much more precarious and much more dangerous – in the face of his desire. It is here that the fantasmatic phallus appears insofar as in this technique that I designate, it is there that the analyst is going to make himself, by his present interpretations, insisting so that the subject
in some way consents to commune, to swallow, to incorporate fantasmically this partial object.

I say that this is an error of plane:

– that it is very probably making pass onto the plane of suggestive identification, onto the plane of demand, what is at that moment brought into question,

– that it is favoring a certain imaginary identification of the subject by profiting, if I may say so, from the hold that the suggestive position open to analysis gives on the foundation of transference,

– that it is giving a false, deviated, off-to-the-side solution to what is at issue, I do not say in his fantasies, but in the material that the subject effectively brings to the analyst.

And this is read in the observations themselves where one hears constructing on that a whole doctrine, a whole theory ‘of the partial object’, ‘of the distance to the object’, ‘of the introjection of the object’, of everything that follows. And to do no more than introduce what I will pursue next time in detail, I am going to give you an example of it.

At every instant, in this observation, is palpable, perceptible, the fact that the problem…
which is the solution of the analysis of the obsessional…is that the obsessional discovers castration for what it is, that is to say the law of the Other. It is the Other that is castrated, and for reasons that are those of his false implication in this problem, the subject feels himself threatened by this castration on a plane so acute that he cannot approach his desire without feeling its effects. What I am in the process of saying is that this horizon of the Other,
of the big Other as such and insofar as distinct from the little other, from the fact that that is where the problem is,
is at every instant touchable in this observation.

From the origin in his anamnesis, in this subject who, the first time he has a rapprochement with a little girl, flees, oppressed under anxiety and goes to confide it to his mother and feels completely reassured from the moment when he tells her:
‘I will tell you everything’, one has only to take this material literally: there is only a reference and a maintenance which, of course, is a virtual maintenance, a project, a frantic reference to the Other as place of verbal articulation in which
the subject is going to invest himself entirely from now on. It is the only possible refuge from the panic that he experiences at the approach
of his desire, it is already inscribed, it is a matter of seeing what is underneath.

When, after all sorts of solicitations by the analyst, certain fantasies come to light, we arrive at a dream that the analyst interprets – he says it right away – strictly as the fact that the passive homosexual tendency in the subject becomes patent. Here is this dream:

‘I accompany you to your private residence. In your room there is a big bed. I lie down in it.
I am extremely embarrassed. There is a bidet in a corner of the room. I am happy, although ill at ease.’ [R.F.P.1948, p.435]

We are told that after preparation of this subject by an already prior period of analysis, the subject does not experience much difficulty in admitting the passive homosexual significance of this dream. Is that what in our eyes suffices
to articulate it? Assuredly, by taking up this observation again, one can show all the indices that prove that that
does not suffice, but there is one certain thing, it is that the very text of the dream shows us that the subject comes to put himself, it is indeed the case to say it, in the place of the other. He says it: ‘I am at your private residence – I am lying in your bed.’

Passive homosexual, why? Until further order, nothing manifests itself there that in this occasion makes
of the other an object of desire. On the other hand I see there in a quite clear way, designated also in third position
and in a corner, something that is fully articulated and to which no one seems to pay attention,
which is nonetheless not there for nothing: it is the bidet.

Namely something that at once makes the phallus present and does not show it, since I do not presume that, in the dream, it is indicated that anyone is occupied with using it. The bidet is there indicating that what is at issue,
what is problematic, is indeed something that is present in the question. It is not for nothing that it comes, this famous partial object, it is the phallus, but the phallus is there precisely posed insofar as, if I may say so, question:
– does the other have it or not have it? That is the occasion to show it.
– is the other it or is he not it? That is what is in the background.

In short, it is the question of castration, the question itself, if you want, for this obsessional prey to all sorts of obsessions of cleanliness, which shows well to what point, on occasion, this instrument can be a source of danger.
And these obsessions of cleanliness, it is not for nothing that I evoke them there, for I read to you this little piece
‘of the bidet’ which shows that the bidet, for him, for a long time made the phallus present, at least his own.
It is the question about the phallus, and about the phallus insofar as it is put into play, and at the level of the Other
as being the object of this essentially symbolic operation that makes that in the Other, and at the level of the Other, and at the level of the signifier, the phallus is the signifier of what is struck by the action of the signifier, of what is subject to castration.

That is the essential articulation: insofar as the aim is not to know whether the subject in the end will feel comforted
in himself by the assumption of a superior power starting from assimilation to someone stronger than he, but to know how he will have resolved effectively the question that is on the horizon, implicit in the very line of what indicates
the structure of neurosis, namely acceptance or non-acceptance of the castration complex insofar as, being realized,
castration is, it, realized in its signifying function. It is here that one technique is distinguished from the other,
and I will show you why.

Independently of the legitimacy tied to structure, tied to the very sense of the existence of the obsessional’s desire, independently of that, the therapeutic solution – if you want, the knot, the closing, the scar let us even say –
obtained does not render absolutely doubtful that a certain technique is unfavorable, does not correspond to what one can call a cure, nor even to an orthopedics, even if limping, that only the other technique can give,
not only the correct solution but the effective solution.