We are going to take up our argument again, still with the help of our little diagram.
Some of you have questions about the little diamond sign as it is used, for example when I write S in front of the little a, the little other [S◊a]. This does not strike me as extremely complicated.

But since some are asking about it, I will recall that the diamond in question is the same thing as the square of a much older and fundamental schema in which the relation of the subject to the Other is inscribed as object of speech and as message of the Other, in this first approximation we have made of what comes from the Other, and which encounters the barrier of the a’→a relation, which is the imaginary relation.

What does that mean? It means that it expresses the relation of the barred subject—or not barred depending on the case—that is to say as marked by the effect of the signifier, or simply as we consider it as a subject quite simply still undetermined, still not yet split by the Spaltung that results from the action of the signifier, the relation then of this subject to something that is determined by this quadratic relation and which, when I inscribe it like this: S◊a, is not otherwise determined as to the vertices of the quadrant in question in this frame, for example the little other, that is to say the similar one, the imaginary other. If I write S in relation to demand or S◊D, it is the same thing. It does not prejudge the corner of this little square on which demand as such intervenes, that is to say the articulation, in the form of the signifier, of a need.

– Here[²] we thus have a line that is a signifying line, and certainly as such, articulated since it is produced on the horizon of every signifying articulation: it is the fundamental background of every articulation of a demand.

– Here[¹] it is articulated in general. As badly as it may be, we have a precise articulation, a succession of signifiers, phonemes.

Behind[²], that is to say in the beyond of every signifying articulation, this represents or corresponds to the effect of the signifying line, of signifying articulation, taken as a whole, by the fact that by its mere presence it makes the symbolic appear in the real.

It is in its totality and insofar as it is articulated that it makes appear this horizon or this possibility of demand, this power of demand which is that it is essentially and by its nature a demand for love, a demand for presence, this with all the ambiguity, naturally. It is to fix something that I say ‘for love’—hatred on this occasion has the same place—it is only within this horizon that the ambivalence of hatred and love can be conceived.
It is also within this horizon that we can see—at the same point—this third term arrive, frankly homologous to love and hatred with respect to the subject, and which precisely I found in a text and elsewhere: ignorance.

It is therefore here that the signifier of A is located insofar as marked by the action of the signifier, that is to say A barred [A], that is to say that at this precise point which is the homologue of the point where on the line of demand[¹] there appears in the fundamental schema of every demand this return of the passage of demand through the Other which is called the message [s(A)].
If you like, in a homologous way, what has to be produced at the message point on the second line[²] is precisely this message of a signifier [S(A)], a signifier that the Other is marked by the signifier [message about the message]. That does not mean that this message is produced; it is there at a homologous point as ‘a possibility of being produced’.

And on the other hand, at a point homologous to that point where the demand arrives at the Other, that is to say where it is subjected to the existence of the code in the Other, in the place of the Other, in the place of speech, you have on this horizon, likewise ‘what can be produced’ which is called this reference, what one calls this ‘becoming aware’—but it is not simply ‘becoming aware’—this articulation by the subject as speaking, of something that is its demand as such, and with respect to which it situates itself [S◊D].

That this must be able to be produced is the fundamental presupposition of analysis itself; it is what is produced in the foreground in analysis. It is not, not essentially and as a first step, the renewal by the subject of its demands. Of course in a certain way it is a renewal, but it is an articulated renewal: it is in its discourse that the subject, in a certain way, makes its demand appear, either directly or in filigree of its discourse, which certainly is always much more important for us when it is in filigree than when it is renewed directly by the form and nature of its demand, that is to say by the signifiers under which this demand is formulated, and it is insofar as this demand is formulated in archaic signifiers that we speak of anal regression, oral regression, for example.

I remind you that last time, what I articulated, what I wanted to introduce, is that everything that is produced that is of the nature properly speaking of transference is suspended from the existence of this back-line [Φ→Δ], of this line that starts from a point whose departure we can designate by Φ and that ends at a Δ, whose meaning we will specify later in relation to this line Φ→Δ of which it is the origin, the foundation, the foundation of this effect of the signifier as such in the subjective economy: it is insofar as something is situated in relation to this line [Φ→Δ] that one can speak of transference, that is to say that everything that is of the order of transference, according to the analyst’s action or non-action, according to his abstention or his non-abstention, always tends to play in this intermediate zone and can always in a certain way be brought back to the articulation of demand.

In a certain way, of course, at every instant, it is, I would say, normal, it is in the nature of verbal articulation in analysis that something comes to be articulated on the plane of demand. But if precisely the analytic law is that ‘no demand of the subject will be satisfied’, it is precisely for nothing other than because we speculate on the fact that in analysis something will be produced that will tend to make this line of demand[¹] function, not on the plane of a precise demand, formulated, satisfied or not satisfied. Everyone agrees: it is not because we frustrate the subject of what it can ask of us on the occasion—be it, at the extreme, to kiss our hands or be it simply to answer it—it is not that which plays; it is a deeper frustration, of the nature, of the very essence of speech insofar as it itself makes this ‘horizon of demand’ [²] arise.

And it is always, in sum, at the level of this ‘horizon’, which I have simply called, to fix ideas, ‘a demand for love’ and which, you see, can also be a demand for something else, can be a certain demand concerning the recognition of its being, with everything that this brings forth of conflicts insofar as the analyst, by his presence as similar one, denies it. The Hegelian negation of the relation of consciousnesses appears there also on the occasion: demand to know. There is that naturally on the horizon of the analytic relation.

What is why this interests us, what is why this is implicated in symptoms, what is why this serves the resolution of neuroses, is that it is in this topological relation with these two lines…
insofar as they are formed by every articulation of speech in analysis
…that the four vertices of this other place of reference of the subject to the Other are situated, which is the place of imaginary reference, insofar as here this is only a false vertex. They are realized by the narcissistic or specular relation of the ego to the image of the other [i(a)] insofar as it is already on this side, prior, entirely implied in the first relation of demand.

And beyond, it is in the intermediate zone between articulated demand[¹] and its essential horizon[²], articulated as well of course since it is the zone of all the articulations in question, articulated also as such since it is supported by what is articulated, but which does not mean articulable, of course, because here what is on the horizon and properly speaking this last term [Φ], insofar as nothing suffices to formulate it in a completely satisfactory way, except by the indefinite continuation of the development of speech.

It is in this intermediate zone that this something called desire is situated: desire insofar as it interests us, desire insofar as it is desire that is properly called into question in the whole economy of the subject, and that it can be implicated in what is revealed in analysis, namely in everything that in speech begins to move in this play of oscillation between the signifiers, if I may say, ‘down-to-earth’ signifiers of need, and everything that results beyond the articulation of this signifier from the constant presence of the signifier as present in the subject’s unconscious, that is to say as it has already kneaded, formed, structured the subject.

It is here, in this intermediate zone—and I have told you why—that desire is situated, man’s desire insofar as it is the desire of the Other, that is to say that it is beyond the passage of the articulation of man’s need into this necessity of making it count for the Other. This desire, in its form of absolute condition, of something that is beyond any satisfaction of need, and which is produced in the margin that exists between the demand for satisfaction of need[¹] and the demand for love[²], is situated there.

This is the problematic of this desire:

– insofar as man’s desire is always for him to be sought in the place of the Other, and what makes desire a desire structured in this place of the Other as such,

– and insofar as the place of the Other is the place of speech, that is what makes the whole problematic of desire, of human desire, and what makes it subject to the formations of the unconscious, to the dialectic of the unconscious, which makes it so that we have to do with it, that we can influence it by the fact that it is or is not articulated in speech in analysis. There would be no analysis if there were not this fundamental situation.

That being said, we have what is—if one can say—its counterpart, its support [S◊a], the point where it is fixed on its object which, far from being an object in some kind of natural way, is an object always constituted by a certain position taken by the subject with respect to the Other. It is with the help of this fantasmatic relation in its essence, in its nature, that man finds himself again and situates his desire; hence the importance of his fantasies, hence the fact that in FREUD you will see with what rarity the term ‘instinct’ is employed.

It is always a matter of drives, in other words of something that is a technical term given to this desire, insofar as speech isolates it, fragments it, and puts it in this problematic and disarticulated relation with its own aim, that is to say what one calls the direction of the tendency, with its object. On the other hand you know that it is essentially made of substitution, of displacement, even of all forms of transformations and equivalences essentially subject to speech.

We had arrived last time at trying to center more closely the problems around something that must indeed have a relation with what is said here, since in the end certain elements show through in the studies, especially of the nature of obsessional neurosis of which I have several times put you in a position to take cognizance yourselves, and it is certain that certain elements, terms: ‘distance to the object’, ‘the phallic object’, ‘relation to the object’, which are implicated there cannot—at least in the later relation of these studies—fail to provoke us to see how we can judge them, appraise them, in the light of what this brings.

I had therefore taken last time, in their relation, two treatments, two cases of obsessional neurosis, in the article ‘Importance of the homosexual aspect of transference…’. I pointed out to you how, in a certain way, the result of such and such a suggestion, let us say a direction, or even let us say properly speaking: an interpretation, given of this fantasy presents itself as problematic. I pointed out to you, apropos of a dream for example, how by certain presuppositions one finds oneself simplifying in the system, one comes to elide certain salient elements and thus the dream itself.

People spoke of a dream of homosexual transference, as if even this could have a meaning where the dream itself gives the image of what is at issue, namely of a relation that is far from dual, insofar as I showed you, in the quite piquant presence here in the form of an object, of an object that is on the occasion there, the famous bidet that is spoken of in this dream. The subject therefore, who was in the dream transported into the analyst’s bed, the subject who is there, at once at ease—an attitude that one can indeed qualify, according to the manifest content of the dream, as waiting—but with the quite articulated and essential presence of this bed.

One can be all the more astonished that the analyst does not stop there, that another text by the same analyst shows that he is far from ignoring the properly phallic significance of what certain analysts have called ‘the hollow penis’, or ‘the cup’, insofar as it is one of the forms under which can be presented at the level of the assumption of the phallic image by the female subject, precisely the signifier phallus.

In sum, this sort of Grail that is presented to us here in the dream is indeed something that is at least of a nature to hold attention, even to arouse, in the one who interprets this dream in terms of a two-person relation, some prudence. I will say more: this ‘observation No. 2’ I reread once more. I also read the one that precedes it. It really seems to me that it is not the most interesting one on which one can bring criticism to bear, because really brought to this truly evident level. I simply ask you to reread this observation.

Let us nonetheless take at random for example this sentence:

‘We therefore alluded to a time already second in the analysis, whereas an intervention of this nature had preceded earlier, but we return to it because in some way already the subject who has been truly drawn to the fact of deepening the transference[…]The transference situation became more and more precise[…]It was necessary to insist a great deal to overcome certain silences[…]The transference therefore became frankly homosexual [p.424][…]We therefore alluded to the fact that if there exists—since it is a matter of facilitating—between men affectionate relations that are designated by the name of friendship and by which no one feels humiliated, these relations always take on a certain character of passivity for one of the partners, when the one who finds himself in the necessity of receiving from the other […] directives[…]At that difficult moment we had the idea of using an analogy that could be felt “de plano” by this former officer.’ Why do men in combat let themselves be killed for a leader whom they love, if not precisely because they accept with an absolute absence of resistance[…]his instructions and his orders?
Thus, they so fully espouse the leader’s feelings and thoughts that they identify with him and make the sacrifice of their life as he himself would do if he found himself in their place.’ [R.F.P. 1948, pp.424-425]

You see that an intervention of this kind must require a fairly serious sector of silence.

‘They can act thus only because they love their leader passively. This remark did not immediately make all reserve disappear in J., but it allowed him to continue to show himself objective, whereas he was going to relive with us other homosexual situations, more precise, those!’ [R.F.P. 1948, pp.425-426]

Indeed, this is not lacking. In truth it is quite clear that the fact of orienting, of facilitating, of opening the slope of a whole imaginary elaboration in what is called ‘the two-person relation’ between analysand and analyst in a way of which the observation itself testifies how far it is not simply systematic, it is truly insistent, and on the two terms, on the two planes, it chooses everything that, in the material, goes in the simplifying direction of elaborating the two-person relation insofar as it is provided with a meaning by the analyst.

Here it is not even a matter of that element on which I will insist later, which is the share of the mark that the introduction of a signifier gives to interpretation. Here interpretation, that is to say what requires that interpretation be something of a brief nature, is precisely this: that it is essentially and that it must be essentially centered on the handling of the signifier. Here what do we have?

We manifestly have an intervention in the very paragraph in question: it shows the significant, comprehension-based, persuasive character, which consists in inducing the subject to live precisely this relation which, as such, is articulated and considered at this level of the author’s work as a two-person relation, and to articulate in him exactly this notion of the analytic situation as a relation as simple as he expresses elsewhere, a two-person relation.

Here we find ourselves in the most manifest way, anyone can put their finger on it, one does not even need to be an analyst to notice it, before something that by its nature is akin to suggestion, which in any case, by the sole fact that it [the interpretation] chooses a meaning to which it returns three times just within this observation which is about six pages, shows us the essential stages of this relation of the analysand to the analyst, and presents itself in the form of a facilitation of understanding of the two-person situation in terms of homosexual relations insofar as they are presented to us classically in Freudian doctrine as being that libidinal something that underlies all relations considered from the social angle.

That is to say in that eminently ambiguous form which does not allow one to distinguish what is properly speaking ‘the homosexual drive’ insofar as it is distinguished in the choice of an erotic object, that of the opposite sex from that which the norm may wish. There is something of another nature than the use of the term ‘homosexual’ apropos of this libidinal underlying. This certainly raises all sorts of problems, but its use in the form of indoctrination within therapeutics, I do not say that it is in itself illegitimate, I say that certainly, the fact that it is systematic raises the problem of the whole orientation, of the whole direction of the treatment.

For we see well indeed to what extent this can be a bearer of effect, but do you not see at the same time also that there is there a choice in the mode of intervention apropos of obsessional neurosis, and that everything you know elsewhere about obsessional neurosis well recalls that this relation of the subject to himself, to his ‘existence in the world’, which is called an obsessional neurosis, is something infinitely more complex, in any case, than a relation of libidinal attachment of the subject to his own sex, at whatever level it manages to be articulated? Everyone knows, since FREUD’s first observations, the role played by the destructive drive directed against the similar one and thereby turned against the subject himself. Everyone knows well:

– that other elements are implicated there, those elements of regression, of fixation in libidinal evolution, which are far from being so simple, and I will even say embarrassing,

– that the famous linkage of ‘the sadistic’ and ‘the anal’ is not something that, of itself, can be held to be simple, or even simply elucidated at any moment whatsoever.

In short, everything makes it appear that if such an orientation or direction of the treatment followed is provided with effect, it is precisely something from a much broader perspective of what is at issue, something that comes to be articulated. I do not say that it is entirely sufficient, but already that allows us to better order the different planes and registers in which things can effectively be ordered.

At the level of this plane, we can see, we can indeed locate that something which is a detail in sum of the economy of the obsessional, namely the role played, at one point of this economy, by identification with another, which is a little a, an imaginary other, and that it is one of the modes by which he balances more or less, as best he can, his obsessional economy.

To go along in this direction, to give him that sort of satisfaction which is the ratification of this relation…
since there appears in the subject’s history the frequency, the constancy in the history of the obsessional, of an other insofar as he is the one to whom he refers, whose approval and criticisms he asks for, with whom he identifies as with someone—the author in question articulates it—as someone stronger than he is and on whom literally he leans, a kind of dream, that is something well known
…the fact of sanctioning, if one can say, this mechanism, which certainly is a mechanism of defense properly speaking on the occasion, the way in which the subject balances the problematic of his relation to the desire of the other, is something that can have some therapeutic effect, but far from having it by itself alone…
and likewise moreover, the subsequent development of the author’s works will only show things pushed in a direction that increasingly places the accent on what he calls on this occasion ‘distance to the object’, this being embodied in something that is produced, centered quite especially around the fantasy of fellation, the fellation of a phallus, not just any phallus, but very precisely the phallus that is a part of the imagined body of the analyst
…this leads to the elaboration, as it were, of a fantasy in which this sort of imaginary support taken in the similar one and in the homosexual other is embodied, materialized in this imaginary experience that is given to us as such, as comparable to Catholic communion, to the absorption of a host.

We see here that…
still in the same line, in a certain line of elaboration of the fantasy, this time pushed even further
…something is produced that we then certainly see, that we can materialize on the diagram:
it is a matter of the production of what takes place at the level of original fantasmatic productions.

I will show you that it is exactly from the subject himself, from the passage of this…
namely of the relation S◊a insofar as it is at the level of fantasy, that is to say of the fantasmatic production that allowed the subject to situate himself, to manage with his desire
…from the passage of this to the level of the message properly speaking, of the message that is that of the response to demand, of the message insofar as it is situated here…
it is not for nothing that in the observation, you will see it, it is articulated in such a way that we then see the image of the good mother appear, of the benevolent mother, and we are spoken to of the softening of the infantile feminine superego
…at the level of the meaning of the signified and of the Other with a capital A.

To ratify this fantasmatic production of the subject is what we can quite literally express only as a reduction of the complexity of the formations in the subject—which is desire—as a reduction of this to the relation of demand, of demand articulated in the direct relation of the subject to the analyst. But—you will say—but if this succeeds? Indeed, why not? Is this not even a certain idea one might have of analysis?

I answer:

– not only is this not sufficient, but we have in these observations, moreover in the most perceptible way in what is given to us, we also have elsewhere documents that allow us by experience to see about it what the result is: certainly this is not without entailing certain effects.

– But on the other hand, what is produced is something that from very far represents the fact of cure that we could expect or the purported genital maturation that would be realized. How can one not see the paradox represented by speaking of genital maturation when, in sum, one frankly articulates here that genital maturation is on this occasion represented by the fact that the subject lets himself be loved by his analyst?

There is nevertheless here something extraordinary: far from genital maturation being realized as in a process, we see there very evidently on the contrary the fact of a subjective reduction of symptoms by means of a process which, by its nature, has something regressive about it. Not regressive in the only temporal sense, but regressive from the topical point of view, insofar as there is reduction, on the plane of demand, of everything that is of the order of the production, the organization, the maintenance of desire.

And indeed, what is produced in these stages…
far from being interpretable as it sometimes is in the sense of an improvement, in the sense of a normalization of relations with the other
…presents itself as sudden explosions:

– either of acting-out: I showed you one last year apropos of an observation that was the observation of relations with a subject strongly marked by perverse tendencies, and whose things had this outcome of a true acting-out of the subject going to observe through a door of women’s toilets women urinating, that is to say literally going to find the woman precisely insofar as phallus, that is to say by a sort of sudden explosion of something that, under the influence of demand, is excluded and that here makes its return in the form of something that properly speaking, in this act quite isolated in the subject’s life, has all the compulsive forms of acting-out and the presentification of a signifier as such,

– or—and many other testimonies moreover show us under other forms, sometimes for example in the form of an infatuation that has this paradoxical aspect in subjects whom there is no place to consider in themselves as being dissident homosexuals: what is homosexual in them, they have it, and they have exactly no more of it than what one can see—of a sudden infatuation with a similar one, a problematic infatuation, I will say a true artificial product of these sorts of interventions, an infatuation that indeed takes on the aspect of a homosexual infatuation, and that is in sum only the forced production, if one can say, of this relation of S in relation to a [S◊a] which, in such a way of orienting, of directing analysis, is properly speaking what has been forced by the reduction to demand.

I will therefore say that at the level of this practice which, really, at that moment lacks all critique, all finesse, there is something that discourages commentary.

And that is also why I would like to take something that is still earlier and that—as I told you once—in the work of the author in question has always seemed to me much more interesting and more apt to show what development his elaboration of these subjects could have taken, on condition of being oriented differently, which concerns ‘The therapeutic incidences of becoming aware—this is the very title—of penis envy in female obsessional neurosis’.

This observation is of great interest because we do not have so many analyses of obsessional neurosis in women, and also for those who might sketch the problem of the sexual specificity of neurosis, namely of thinking that it is for reasons that pertain to their sex that subjects choose this or that slope of neurosis.

We will nonetheless see, on the occasion of female obsessional neurosis, how much everything that is of the order of structure in neurosis is something that leaves very little room for what the position of sex, in the sense of natural sex, biological sex, can have as determining. Here indeed, this famous prevalence of the phallic object as such, which we have seen at work in the observations concerning male obsessional neuroses, is found again, and in a quite interesting way.

Here is how the author, on this occasion, conceives, discovers, develops the progress of the analysis. He articulates it himself in the following way:

‘…like the male obsessive, the woman needs to identify, in a regressive mode, with the man, in order to be able to free herself from the anxieties of early childhood, but whereas the former will rely on this identification to transform the infantile love object into a genital love object…’

This corresponds strictly to what I pointed out to you a moment ago about the paradox of the male subject’s identification with the analyst on this occasion, since by itself alone it constitutes this passage from the infantile love object to the genital love object.

There is surely something there that at least raises a problem:

‘…she, the woman, first grounding herself on this same identification, tends to abandon this first object, and to orient herself toward a heterosexual fixation, as if she could proceed to a new feminine identification, this time on the person of the analyst.’ [R.F.P.1950, pp.215-216]

It is therefore said, with an ambiguity that is certainly striking but necessary, that it is identification with the analyst that is here articulated and specified as such. It is stated that he is of male sex, and that it is this identification, which in the first case is supposed to be realized of itself quite simply and as self-evident, that ensures access to genitality.

From which it results, if one has this presupposition, this hypothesis, that in the case of the woman, if we obtain what is given as being the case, not without prudence moreover, because in this observation one does not make mention of an extraordinary improvement, one notes that as this very identification with the analyst proceeds, one notes, not without a certain embarrassment, not without even a certain surprise, that this identification will in sum be made successively under two modes:
– under a first mode that will at first be conflictual, that is to say of claims directed toward the man, even of hostility toward the man,
– then, insofar as this relation, we are going to be told, softens, a singular problematic. It is always by the necessity of conceiving in a certain way this progress of a feminine identification that one admits possible, by reason, we are told, of the fundamental ambiguity of the person of the analyst.

Certainly we are not for all that satisfied with this explanation.

‘A new identification, this time feminine, this time on the person of the analyst. It goes without saying that the interpretation of transference phenomena is here particularly delicate. If the personality of the male analyst is first apprehended as that of a man, with all the prohibitions, the fears and the aggressiveness that this entails, shortly after the desire of phallic possession—and that is what we are going to have to speak about and that we are going to have to appraise—and correlatively of castration of the analyst is brought to light, and that thereby the aforementioned effects of relaxation have been obtained, this personality of the male analyst is assimilated to that of a benevolent mother.’ [R.F.P.1950, pp.215-216]

And he adds further:

‘Does this assimilation not demonstrate that the essential source of anti-masculine aggressiveness is found in the initial destructive drive of which the mother was the object?’

Here a Kleinian horizon can always give some support.

‘Becoming aware of the one entails the right to the free exercise of the other, and the liberating power of this becoming aware of the desire of phallic possession then becomes “de plano” comprehensible, as does the passage from one identification to the other as a function of a fundamental ambiguity of the person of the analyst whose masculine aspect is at first alone perceptible to the patient.’ [R.F.P.1950, pp.215-216]

Here we find again the phrase said a moment ago. Everything is indeed there. You are going to see it: this rests first on the interpretation of what is at issue, and of a requirement or a desire of phallic possession, and correlatively of castration of the analyst. Looking at things more closely, this is far from representing what effectively presents itself in the observation. I will take the observation in the order in which it is presented to us: it is a woman of fifty years, in good health, mother of two children, exercising a paramedical profession.

She comes for a series of obsessional phenomena that are entirely of common order:
– obsession of having contracted syphilis. This is important, insofar as she sees in it I do not know what prohibition placed on the marriage of her children, which moreover she has not been able, as to her eldest, to oppose,
– obsession of infanticide, of poisoning, in short a whole series of obsessions entirely, I would say, banal, very especially in the type of manifestations of obsessions in women.

Before even giving us the list, it is the author himself who speaks to us in a prevalent way of obsessions with a religious theme. There is there of course, as in all religious-themed obsessions, all sorts of insulting, scatological phrases that impose themselves on the subject, in formal contradiction with her convictions.

Let us begin by looking at what presents itself as one of the elements that the author himself immediately underlines in the subject’s relations to religious reality, especially to the reality that is for her, since she is Catholic, the presence of the body of CHRIST in the host. She moreover represented to herself, imaginatively, male genital organs—without it being hallucinatory phenomena, we are told— in the place of the host.

A few lines further on, we are made to note an important detail concerning this principal religious thematization of this obsessional subject: it is that her mother was solely responsible for her Catholic education, and her conflict with her could be displaced onto the spiritual plane, we are told, which in fact never had anything but a character of obligation and constraint. We do not discuss it. It is here a fact that has all its import.

I would like, before we stop on the mode of the interpretations that will be given thereafter, to have you yourselves pause for a moment on this symptom. This symptom in itself is highly of a nature to incite us to a few remarks.

The genital organs, we are told, present themselves before and in the place of the host. What can that, for us, mean? For us, I mean: for us analysts.

This is nonetheless precisely a case where this place, this superposition, if we are analysts, we must give it its value: what do we call ‘repression’, and above all ‘return of the repressed’, if not something that appears as something that bleeds through from underneath, that comes to arise at the surface—as writing qualifies it—or like a stain that rises or rises again with time to the surface?

Here is a case where, if we are willing to accord things their textual importance as it is our position as analyst to do, we must try to articulate what it is about. CHRIST, we know that according to this woman who received a religious education, that must at least have a religious meaning.

As for all those who are in the Christian religion, and this is not indifferent, CHRIST is the Word, the λόγος[logos], and this is drummed into us in Catholic education, and that he is the incarnate Word is what does not admit the slightest doubt, it is the most abbreviated form of what is called the Creed. We see in sum, if we refer to this λόγος[logos], what it is, that is to say if we are told that it is the Word, it is the Word.

Is that to say the totality of the Word? We see appearing through it, substituting for it, in its place, something that is what, in what in a convergent way with respect to all our exploration, we try to formulate of analytic experience, we have been led to call this unique privileged signifier insofar as it is defined by the fact that it designates the effect, the mark, the imprint of the signifier as such on the signified.

What is produced then in this symptom is the substitution for a relation, which is given to us as that of the relation of the subject to the Word, to the Word in its essence, to the total Word, to the incarnate Word even, the substitution for the totality of this Word of a privileged signifier which is properly speaking the one that serves to designate the effect, the mark, the imprint, the wound of the whole of the signifier that bears upon this human subject insofar as, by the instance of the signifier, there are in him things that come to signify.

We advance in the observation. What are we going to find further on? We are going to find this: that the subject is going, on the occasion, to find herself saying that she dreamed that she was crushing the head of CHRIST with kicks, and this head—she adds—resembled yours: she is speaking of the analyst. And in association, the following observation:

‘I pass every morning, on my way to my work, in front of an undertaker’s shop where 4 “Christs” are displayed. Looking at them, I have the sensation of walking on their verge. I feel a kind of acute pleasure and anxiety.’

Here, once again, what do we find? We manifestly find the identification of that something which is the Other, the big Other certainly, on the occasion the Other insofar as place of speech. On the occasion, what is given to us is that the subject crushes with her heel the figure of CHRIST. Let us not forget that here CHRIST is materialized by an object, namely a crucifix. That this object itself on this occasion should not be, in its totality if one can say, the phallus, that is again something that cannot fail to strike us.

Especially if we continue to pursue the details that the observation gives us, namely this:
it is that something very particular is going to intervene in the relations of the analysand with the analyst:
the reproaches that she is going to make to the analyst about the embarrassment that he brings by his care, in her existence, are going to be materialized in this, that she cannot buy herself shoes.

The analyst of course cannot fail to be sufficiently un-alert not to recognize here the phallic value of the shoe, in other words that the shoe, and especially the heel of which great use is made, very precisely on this occasion to crush the head of Christ, is something that here has all its import. Let us note in this regard:
– that this comes within an analysis,
– that fetishism, especially shoe fetishism in women, is practically not observed,
– that the appearance of something that relates to the shoe with this phallic signification, by contrast, in the course of an elaboration of the observation as it is carried out in analysis, is something that here takes on all its value.

Let us try to understand it. To understand it it is not necessary to go very far. While the analyst is doing, at that moment, everything to suggest to the subject that it is a matter of a need, of a desire to possess the phallus, which is perhaps, well, in itself not the worst thing he could say, if it were not that for him that represents—and he says it too—the desire in the subject to be a man, to which the subject does not cease to oppose herself, to protest with the greatest energy up to the end: she has never had the desire to be a man.

And the truth indeed is that it is perhaps not the same thing to desire to possess the phallus and to desire to be a man, since analytic theory itself supposes that things can be resolved in a very natural way. Who would not take notice of it?

But let us see what the analysand replies on this occasion. She replies: when I am well dressed, men desire me and I say to myself with a very real joy: ‘there are some more who will be out of pocket’. I am glad to imagine that they might suffer from it. In short, she brings the analyst back onto solid, economic ground, namely: if there is a relation to the phallus in her relations with the man, what is it?

Let us now try to articulate it ourselves. Here is more or less how I propose to articulate it precisely. There are here several elements:

– there is the relation to the mother, of course! Relation to the mother of which we are told that it is profoundly essential, a relation of true coherence between the real subject and this mother of whom we are shown the problematic relations with the father. And we will return later to these relations with the father, and to the patient’s relations with the father.

– there is that this mother in any case manifested herself in several ways, and in particular in this one: that the father had not been able to triumph over his wife’s attachment to a first love, moreover platonic. For something like that to be signaled in the observation, it must have held a certain place.

We are given on the other hand that the subject’s relations to the mother are these:
– she judges her in all favorable ways as more intelligent than her father, etc.,
– she is fascinated by her energy, etc. The rare moments when her mother relaxed filled her with an unspeakable joy. She always considered that her younger sister was preferred to her.

Likewise moreover, any person intruding into this union with her mother was the object of death wishes, as an important material will demonstrate, either dream material or infantile material, relating to the desire for the sister’s death.

Is that not enough to demonstrate that first and foremost what is at issue, on this occasion, in the subject’s relations with her mother, is precisely what I underlined for you as being the relation of the subject to the mother’s desire. The way the problem of desire is introduced into the subject’s life is early and particularly manifest, precisely in the history of the obsessive woman.

This desire, which leads to this, that the subject sees her end taking shape for her, the end not of having this or that, but first of being the object of the mother’s desire, with what this entails, that is to say of destroying what is—but unknown—the object of the mother’s desire, is precisely what suspends everything that will henceforth for the subject link the approach to her own desire to an effect of destruction and what at the same time subordinates, defines if one can say, the approach to this desire as such to the signifier that is precisely by itself the signifier of the effect of desire in a subject’s life, namely the phallus.

I articulate things again: the problem is not for the subject in question to know whether the mother—as in the phobic for example—has or does not have the phallus; it is to know what this effect is in the Other of this something that is desire. And in other terms, what comes to the foreground for the subject is to know what he will be, he, if he is or is not what this desire of the Other is. What we see coming to the foreground…
and very precisely in this respect, it is quite something to see it on this occasion of the incarnate λόγος[logos],
namely of the Other, of the Other insofar as the word precisely marks it
…it is the substitution at this point and at this level of the signifier phallus as such.

In other words, I will articulate my thought even further: FREUD saw and designated the frontiers of analysis as stopping, if I may say, at this point which, in certain cases, he says, proves irreducible, leaving in the subject a sort of wound which is for the man the castration complex and which keeps all its prevalent manifestation, which in sum is summarized in this: that he can have the phallus only on the ground of this, that he does not have it.

Which is exactly the same thing as what presents itself in the woman, namely: that she does not have the phallus except on the ground of this: that she is it! For otherwise, how could she be made enraged by this irreducible penis neid [penis envy; German Neid means it makes me literally enraged]. Do not forget that German Neiden does not simply mean a wish; Neid means that it makes me literally enraged. All the underpinnings of aggression and anger are indeed in this originary Neid, in modern German as well as even more in the older forms of German and even of Anglo-Saxon.

If FREUD in a certain way marked there what he calls on a certain occasion the infinite character, projected to infinity—what has been badly translated as ‘interminable’—of what can happen to analysis, it is that he does not see…
because afterward there are things that he did not have the occasion to do, although many things indicate it, and especially in this last article on the Spaltung of the ego to which I will return
…that the solution to the problem of castration, in the man as well as in the woman, is not around this dilemma of ‘having it or not having it’, for it is only from the moment when the subject realizes that there is one thing that in any case is to be recognized and posited: that he does not have it, it is from this realization in analysis that the subject does not have the phallus that he can normalize this position, I will say ‘natural’, that: either he is it, or he does not have it.

This is therefore indeed the final term, the signifying relation around which the imaginary impasse engendered by the function that the image of the phallus comes to take at the level of the signifying plane can be resolved. And that is indeed what happens in our subject when, under the effect of the first manifestations of being caught in the mechanism of transference, that is to say of a more elaborated articulation of symptomatic effects, what is produced in her is what is produced in an entirely recognizable way in what I have just cited for you today, namely this: the fantasy, insofar as presentified in analysis, is linked to the possession or to the non-possession of shoes, of women’s shoes, of phallic shoes, shoes that we will call on this occasion ‘fetishistic’.

What function does it take for a male subject insofar as in his perversion what he refuses is that the woman be castrated? This is what fetishistic perversion means for the male subject: it is to affirm that the woman has it on the ground of the fact that she does not have it. Without that there would be no need for an object to represent it, an object, moreover, manifestly independent of the woman’s body.

If the woman comes to foment in the course of the transferential elaboration this, which is apparently the same thing: namely that she has it, since what she underlines is that she can have it in the form of clothes, in the form of those clothes that will excite men’s desire and thanks to which she will be able to disappoint them in their desire, it is she who articulates it thus. She certainly posits in appearance the same thing. But it is altogether something else when it is posited by the subject herself, namely by the woman rather than by the man who is facing her.

Likewise for her, on this occasion, what she demonstrates is that in wanting to present herself as having what she herself knows perfectly well that she does not have, it is a matter of something that has for her a wholly other value. Namely what I called the value of masquerade, and whereby she makes of her femininity precisely a mask.
What is at issue is that this phallus that is for her the signifier of desire, she presents the appearance of it, that she appear to be it.

What is at issue is that she be the object of a desire, and of a desire that she herself knows perfectly well that she can only disappoint. She expresses it formally at the moment when the analyst interprets what is at issue for her as a desire to possess the phallus. This is something that, once again, shows us the divergence that is established and that is essential, between being that something which is the object of the Other’s desire, and the fact of having or not having the organ that bears its mark. We thus arrive at the following formula: the originary desire is:

‘I want to be what she—the mother—desires. To be it, I must destroy what is for the moment the object of her desire.’

The subject wants to be the object of this desire. What one must bring her to see in the treatment is that it is not in himself that the man is it, the object of this desire; it is to show her precisely that the man is not the phallus any more than the woman is.
What makes her aggressiveness—I will show it to you even better next time—toward her husband as man, is insofar as she considers that he is—I do not say that he has—that he is the phallus, and it is in that capacity that he is her rival, it is in that capacity that her relations with him are marked by the sign of obsessional destruction.

If this desire for destruction turns back against her according to the essential form of the obsessional economy, the aim indeed of the treatment is indeed to make her remark that:

‘You yourself are this that you want to destroy, insofar as you too want to be the phallus.’

And what is done in this way of pursuing the treatment? Observe the difference: ‘You are this that you want to destroy’ is replaced by: ‘You want to destroy this’, the phallus of the analyst, which on the occasion is taken up in fantasies quite improbable and fugitive. And the detail of the observation will show you this destruction of the phallus of the analyst.

‘You want to destroy this—says the analyst—and I give it to you.’

In other words, the cure is entirely conceived as the fact that the analyst gives fantasmatically, consents, if one can say, to a desire of phallic possession.

Now, that is not what is at issue. And one of the proofs among others that one can give that it is not that, is that, at the quasi-terminal point where the analysis then seems to have been pursued, where we are told that the patient preserves all her obsessions, apart from this that there is only one left, they have all been ratified, and as a block, by the analysis, of course, but the fact that they still exist nonetheless has some importance, what does the patient do?

This is said in the observation with an entire ignorance: she intervenes with all her force with her eldest son, of whom she has always been terribly afraid because in truth he is the only one whose masculine reactions she has never been able to manage well, by telling him that it is urgently necessary that he go and be analyzed in his turn.

That is to say that this phallus that the analyst believes to be the solution of the situation, insofar as by taking—he says it himself—the position of the benevolent mother, he gives it to her, to the patient, she gives it back to him. Namely that at the only point where she effectively has the phallus, she turns it back on him. What is lent is repaid.

The analyst oriented the analysis entirely toward the term that the analysand wants to be a man. The analysand is to the end not well, nor entirely, convinced. Certainly nonetheless, something that is implicated, namely the possession or non-possession of this phallus, found there its appeasement, but the ground, the essential, the signification of the phallus insofar as it is the signifier of desire, remains unresolved.