🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

June 18 is also the anniversary of the founding of the French Society of Psychoanalysis.
We too said NO, at one point.

Last time I began to comment on the observation of an obsessional woman being treated by one of our colleagues, and I began to outline some of the principles that can be deduced from the way we try to articulate things concerning the well-directed or ill-directed, correct or incorrect character of the conduct of a treatment centered on something that obviously presents itself as existing in the content of what analysis brings, namely the becoming-aware of penis envy.

I think that, overall, you see the interest of the use we make of it. Naturally there are always small delays or schemas at which you stopped, oppositions that seemed easy to retain and are then somewhat shaken or called into question by the continuation of our progress and unsettle you.

One only has to ask us, for example, whether one should not see a contradiction between what I brought last time and a principle at which one had thought one wanted to stop. I said that, in sum, for the woman, her sexual development obligatorily passed through something that could be called:

‘she must be the phallus against the background that she is not’.

For the man it is the castration complex that can be formulated by this:

‘that he has the phallus against the background of the fact that he does not have it (or is threatened with not having it)’.

Obviously these are schemas which, from a certain angle, and when one speaks, and when one opposes sexual development to this or that phase, can show fairly well a certain opposition. It is quite insufficient to stop there, since this dialectic of being and having also holds for both. The man too must realize that he is not it. It is even there, indeed, in that direction, that we can see situated a part of the problems applied by the solution of the castration complex and of penisneid.

We shall see it in more detail, and I hope that little by little you will put back in their place things that are not false in themselves, but that are partial views. For that, let us start again today from our schema. It is extremely important to articulate properly the different lines within which analysis is situated.

There is an article whose reading I will advise you, it is GLOVER’s article called ‘The Therapeutic effects of inexact interpretation’. It is one of the most remarkable and most intelligent articles that can be written on such a subject. It really clarifies the starting base from which the question of interpretation can be approached.

In sum, the core of this article and of the problem it poses is something that can roughly be situated as follows: at the point and at the moment when GLOVER wrote, we are still at a time when FREUD is alive, but when the great turn of analytic technique around the analysis of resistances and aggressivity has occurred. GLOVER articulates that this analysis of resistances and of transference is something which, with experience and the development of notions acquired in analysis, is something that implies the traversal, the covering, so to speak in the sense that a terrain must be covered by analytic progress, of the sum of the fantasmatic systems — let us translate it like this ‘fantasmSystems’, the systems of fantasies — that we have learned to recognize in analysis.

It is clear that at that moment one has learned more of them, one knows more of them than at the very beginning of analysis, and that the question that arises is: what were our therapeutics at the moment when we did not know, in all their breadth, in all their range, these ‘systems of fantasies’?

Does that mean that what we did at that time were incomplete therapeutic cures, less valid than those we do at present? It is obviously a very interesting question, and with respect to which he is brought, in a way, to make a kind of general situation of all the articulated positions taken by the one who finds himself in the position of consultant with respect to some trouble whatsoever.

In a certain way he generalizes, he extends, the notion of ‘interpretation’ to every articulated position taken by the one who is consulted, and he makes the scale of the different positions of the physician with respect to the patient. There is an anticipation of the physician–patient relation, as one says today, but really articulated in a way that I regret was not developed in this direction that lays down a kind of general path.

It is very precisely insofar as we fail to recognize the truth included in the symptom that we thereby find ourselves collaborating with this symptomatic act. He took this starting from the general practitioner who says to the patient: ‘Shake yourself up, go to the countryside, change your occupation!’, in short who puts himself in a position of misrecognition.

Immediately he occupies a certain place, which is not something ineffective since it is something that is situated, that is very well located, at the very place where certain symptoms are formed. He immediately occupies a certain function with respect to the patient that can be situated in the very terms of analytic topology. I will not insist on that.

He notes at a certain point that the whole tendency of the modern therapeutic analytic of his time is the direction of interpreting what he calls the ‘sadistic systems’ and guilt reactions. He points out that until a recent time all this had not been brought to light. Without any doubt one relieved the patient of anxiety, but one certainly left unresolved, unrepressed, and by the same token repressed, that famous ‘sadistic system’.

There is an example of the direction in which, not that he draws conclusions from remarks, but in which he sets them in motion, and that is indeed what nowadays it would be interesting to take up again. I will make to you, on this subject, precisely a remark: it would be a matter of situating, in sum, what this advent of the analysis of aggressivity means.

For a certain time, analysts were so impressed by the discovery they had made that it had become a kind of ‘tired cliché’. Our aggressivity was analyzed so thoroughly that these were the terms in which analysts in training spoke to each other when they met. It would be a matter of knowing what in fact this discovery represented, and I think that we can situate it somewhere on our fundamental schema. That is what I tried to do a moment ago, for after all we can also ask ourselves questions about it.

I have often pointed out how an ambiguity remained, at the time when I was teaching you, when I was shouting to you about the narcissistic system as such, as fundamental in the formation of aggressive reactions, that aggressivity, the one that is provoked in the imaginary relation to the little other, is not something that can be confused with the sum of aggressive power as a vital function, but simply an imaginary relation.

On the other hand it is clear, to recall these things of first evidence, that violence is indeed what is essential in aggression, at least if we situate ourselves on the human plane. It is not speech; it is even exactly the opposite of it. It is violence or speech that can occur in an inter-human relation.

If violence is something in its essence that is distinguished from speech, the question can be posed of knowing to what extent violence as such — I say violence in order to distinguish it from the use we make of aggressivity — can be repressed since, if we follow what we have set down here as a principle, namely that only what is revealed as staked out to the structure of speech can be repressed, that is to say to a signifying articulation.

It is a question that must indeed be posed. In effect, by way of the imaginary, it is by way of this murder of the similar that is latent in the imaginary relation as such that what is of the order of aggressivity comes to be symbolized and, as such, taken into the mechanism of what is, radically, unconsciousness, of what is analyzable, of what is even, let us say in a general way, interpretable. Let us indeed take things up again properly. If we follow and if we start again, if we spell out again our little schema in its simplest form, namely in this interlacing

– of the tendency, if you like, the drive insofar as it represents an individualized need,

– and of something that is the signifying chain where it must come to be articulated.

What does this mean all by itself? This already gives us some elements and allows us to make some remarks. Let us make an assumption: suppose that for the human being there were only reality, that famous reality that we make use of haphazardly. Suppose that there were only that. It is not unthinkable that something signifying would articulate it, this reality.

To fix ideas, suppose that — as one sometimes wants to say in certain schools — the signifier is simply a conditioning, I will not say of reflexes, but of that something that is reducible to reflexes, as if language were not something of another order than what we artificially create in the laboratory in the animal by teaching it to secrete gastric juice at the sound of a little bell. It is a signifier, the sound of the little bell.

And one can suppose an entire human world organized around a coalescence of each of the needs that have to make themselves heard with a certain number of predetermined signs. If these signs are valid for all, in principle that must make a society that functions in a perfectly ideal way: each drive emission, as needs arise, will be associated with something that we shall call, if you like, the bell sound, variously varied, which will function in the suitable way for the one who hears it so that immediately he satisfies the said need. Thus we arrive at the ideal society. I point out to you that what I am depicting is what has always been dreamed of by utopists: a society functioning perfectly and leading to the satisfaction of: ‘each according to his needs, all participating according to their merits’, it is added. That is where the problem begins.

In sum, this schema, if it remains at that level of the interlacing of the signifier with the push or the tendency of need, results in what? In the identification of the subject with the other, insofar as that other articulates the distribution of what can respond to need, the distribution of resources. This is precisely what already makes it appear to you that it is not so.

Namely that this background of demand, it is absolutely necessary to take it into account, simply in order to account for what happens in this articulation of the subject, in this taking of position of the subject in an order that exists beyond the order of the real and that we call the symbolic order, which complicates it, which is superimposed on it, which does not adhere to it. Already, however, at this level, at this simple state of the schema, we can note that already something happens, something of the natural order, of the organic order, let us say at least in man, something that complicates this schema simply at this stage where it is described here on the board and that consists in this, namely: the subject, this child — mythical, let us say, who serves as background to our psychoanalytic speculations — this child, in the presence of his mother begins to manifest his needs.

– It is here [A] that he encounters the mother as a speaking subject.

– It is here [s(A)] that his message arrives, that is to say at least insofar as the mother satisfies him.

As I have pointed out to you, it is not at the moment when the mother does not satisfy him, frustrates him, that problems begin. That would be too simple, although of course one strives to return to it always, precisely because it is simple.

I told you, the interesting problem, the one that did not escape someone like WINNICOTT for example, whom we know as someone whose mind and whose practice cover the whole breadth of the current development of psychoanalysis and of its techniques, up to and including an extremely precise consideration of the fantasmatic systems that are on the limit, on the border field with psychosis. WINNICOTT, in his article on transitional objects that I mentioned to you, shows with the greatest precision that the essential problem is to know how the child emerges from satisfaction, and not from frustration, in order to build a world for himself.

It is insofar as, for the human subject, a world is articulated that includes a beyond of demand, when the demand is satisfied and not when it is frustrated, that is what he calls transitional objects, that is to say those small objects that we see very early take on an extreme importance in the relation with the mother, namely a piece of diaper that he pulls on jealously, a scrap of anything at all, a rattle, and the importance of this transitional object in the system of the child’s development is something absolutely essential to see and to situate and to understand in its precocity.

That said, let us stop at this frustration, namely at the fact that here [s(A)] the message does not arrive there, starting from a date that we tried to fix when we were interested, 3 years ago, in the mirror stage. It has not evaporated since. I like those among you who tell us: ‘Every year it is something different, the system changes.’ It does not change; I am simply trying to make you traverse its field.

What we find is that what happens in this relation with the mother, insofar as here the mother imposes what I have called, more than her law, ‘her omnipotence’ or ‘her caprice’, is complicated by the fact that the child, the human child — not any little one, and experience shows it to us — is open to a certain relation of the imaginary order, which is the relation to the image of one’s own body and to the image of the other, namely, insofar as we see it on our schema, in the beyond of what happens on the return line of need satisfied or not satisfied.

That is to say what he experiences, the reactions, for example, of disappointment, of malaise, of dizziness, in his own body, with respect to an ideal image that he has of it and that takes on in him a quite prevailing value because of a trait of his organization that we have linked, more or less rightly, to the prematuration of his birth.

In short, from the origin we see interfering, playing between themselves, two circuits:

– of which the first is the symbolic circuit, to fix ideas for you, to hook things to a coat rack you already know: to the infantile feminine superego,

– and on the other hand the imaginary relation to this ideal image of self which in him is, on the occasion of his frustrations or his disappointments, more or less affected, even damaged.

In other words, the circuit from the origin is found to play on two planes, symbolic plane and imaginary plane:

– relation to the image of the primordial object, the mother, the Other insofar as she is the place where the possibility of articulating need in the signifier is situated,

– and on the other hand the image of the other [i(a)] insofar as it is the point where the subject has this kind of link to himself, to an image that represents what we can call the line of his fulfillment, imaginary fulfillment of course.

What did it consist in, saying everything we have said since the beginning of the year, since we began to take things at the level of wit? In order to have the opportunity to bring you this schema, to show you its pertinence, its inevitable character in wit, I told you that, in sum, nothing could be organized of a mental life that corresponds to what experience gives us, to what experience articulates in analysis, unless there is, beyond this Other — put primordially in the position of omnipotence by its power, not of frustration, for that is insufficient, but of Versagung, with the ambiguity of promise and refusal that this term contains — unless there is, if I may say, the Other of this Other. Namely what allows that this Other, place of speech, that the subject perceives it as itself symbolized, that is to say that there is this Other of the Other in the occasion.

When we take the system of the familial Oedipal triangle, if you like, you feel well that there is something there more radical, more fundamental than everything that social experience gives us, this term family, and it is indeed that which makes the permanence, I mean the constancy, of this Oedipal triangle and of the Freudian discovery.

I indicated to you there the Father — with a capital P — insofar as he is never a father but rather ‘the dead Father’, the Father as bearer:
– of a signifier as such, a signifier of the second degree,
– of a signifier that authorizes and founds the whole system of the signifier, which makes that, in a way, the first Other, that is to say the first subject to whom the speaking individual addresses himself, is itself symbolized.

It is only at the level of this Other, of the Law properly speaking, and of a law — I will insist on it — incarnated, that the articulated human world as we see it exercised by experience and as experience shows it to us can take its proper dimension, as absolutely indispensable this background of an Other with respect to the Other, without which the universe of language… as it shows itself effective in the structuring not only of needs, but of that something new whose original dimension I am trying to demonstrate to you, to make you understand this year, and which is called desire… cannot be articulated.

It is at this level that the Other is perceived as place of speech, this Other that could purely and simply be the place of the bell sound I was speaking to you of a moment ago, which would therefore not be, properly speaking, an Other, but simply the organized place of this system of signifiers, introducing its order and its regularity into vital exchanges within a certain species.

One sees poorly who could have organized it, and after all one can envisage that in a certain society ‘men full of benevolence’ apply themselves to organizing it and making it function. One can even say that it is one of the ideals of modern politics. Only the Other is not that. Precisely it is not purely and simply the place that is something perfectly organized, fixed, frozen. It is an Other itself symbolized.

That is what gives it its appearance of freedom. It is a fact that it is symbolized, and that what happens at this level of the Other of the Other, that is to say of the Father in the occasion, of the place where the Law is articulated, of the point of aim where it depends on an Other, is that this Other itself is subject to signifying articulation. More than subject, marked by something that is the denaturing effect — let us underscore our thought well:

– of this presence of the signifier which is far from having yet reached that state of perfect articulation that we take here as a kind of starting hypothesis solely to illustrate our thought,

– of this effect of the signifier on the Other as such, of this mark that it underwent at this level.
It is this mark that castration as such represents.

If we formerly, in the triad ‘castration, frustration, privation’, clearly marked in castration:
– that the action is symbolic,
– that the agent is real,
– that it is a real father that one needs,
– that castration exists,
– that castration is a symbolic action and that it bears on something imaginary,
…we find again there its necessity.

It is insofar as something real passes to the level of the Law… a more or less failing father — what does it matter! — or something that replaces him, but something that holds his place… that this occurs: that there is reflected in the system of demand where the subject is instituted this something that is its background, namely that marks in this system of demand — far from being articulated, far from being perfect, far from being at full output or full employment — this something that is called:
– effect of the signifier on the subject,
– mark of the subject by the signifier,
– lack, dimension of lack introduced into the subject by this signifier.

This introduced lack is symbolized as such in the system of signifiers as being the effect of the signifier on the subject, the signified properly speaking, the signified that comes not so much from the depths, as if life blossomed into meanings, but that comes from elsewhere, from language and from the signifier as such, to imprint there this kind of effect that is called signified.

This is primitively symbolized, as what we have brought on castration indicates. The fact that what serves as support to the proper symbolic action that is called castration is an image, an image chosen, if one may say, in the imaginary system. This something where the symbolic action of castration chooses its sign is borrowed from the imaginary domain: something in the image of the other is chosen to bear the mark of a lack that is that very lack by which the living being realizes, because it is human, that is to say because it is in relation with language,
– as excluded from the omnitude of desires,
– as something limited, local,
– as a creature, on the occasion as a link in the vital lineage, as being only one of those through whom life passes.

Unlike the animal, which is effectively only one of those who realize the type which, as such, can be considered by us with respect to the type — like each individual — already dead. We too already are for them. We are already dead with respect to the movement itself, this very movement of life that, because of language, we are capable of projecting in its totality, and even more, in its totality as having reached its end.

It is exactly what FREUD articulates in the notion of the death instinct. He means that for man, life already projects itself as having reached its term, that is to say at the point where it returns to death. This articulation by FREUD of the death instinct is the articulation of a position essential to an animal being that is taken and articulated in a signifying system that allows it to dominate its immanence as living and to perceive itself as already dead.

It is very precisely what it does only in an imaginary way, I mean here as virtual, as at the limit, as in a speculative way. There is no experience of death, of course, that could respond to it, and that is precisely why it is symbolized in another way. It is symbolized on this point and this precise organ where what is the push of life appears in the most sensitive way.

That is why it is the phallus, insofar as it simply represents the rise of vital potency, that takes its place in the order of signifiers to represent for the human individual in his existence what is marked by the signifier, what by the signifier is struck with this essential caducity where, in the signifier itself, that lack-to-be can be articulated whose dimension the signifier introduces into the life of the subject.

That is what allows us to understand in what order things presented themselves for analysis, from the moment when simply someone did not set out from the School to go to the phenomenon, but simply set out from the phenomena as he saw them manifest in neurotics, the chosen ground for manifesting this articulation in its essence, simply because it manifests in its disorder. And experience proved that it was always in disorder that we learned to find fairly easily the cogs and articulations of order.

We can say that what was first given, by FREUD, to an experience, an experience that immediately brought to the foreground, promoted the underlyingness of the castration complex as such, is something which, as everyone knows, started from the apprehension and perception of the subject’s symptoms. What does the symptom mean? Where, in this schema, is it situated?

It is situated somewhere in s(A), it is produced at the level of signification. It is essentially everything that FREUD brought:
– a symptom is a signification,
– a symptom is a signified,
…it is a signified that is far from concerning only the subject. His history, his whole anamnesis is involved. That is why one can legitimately symbolize it at this place by an s(A). Understand: signified of the Other coming as such from the place of speech.

But what FREUD also taught us is that
– the symptom is never simple:
– the symptom is always overdetermined.
There is no symptom whose signifier is not brought from an earlier experience, precisely from an experience situated at the level where what is repressed is at stake and what is the core of everything that is repressed in the subject, namely that castration complex, that S(A) which is something that, without any doubt, is articulated in the castration complex but is not necessarily nor always totally articulated there.

The famous trauma from which one started, the famous primal scene, what is it, if not precisely something that enters into the subject’s economy and that plays, at the core, at the horizon of the discovery of the unconscious, always as a signifier: a signifier insofar as it is defined in its incidence such as I began to articulate it earlier.

That is to say that life, I mean the living being grasped as living, insofar as living, but with this gap, this distance which is precisely what constitutes this autonomy of the signifying dimension, the trauma or the primal scene, what then is it if not this life that grasps itself in a horrible apperception of itself, in its total strangeness, in its opaque brutality as a pure signifier of an existence intolerable to life itself, as soon as it departs from itself to see the trauma and the primal scene?

It is what appears of life to itself as signifier in the pure state, that is to say as something that cannot yet in any way be resolved, articulated. This necessity, this background of the signifier with respect to the signified, is that something which from the start, from the moment FREUD begins to articulate what a symptom is, is by him implied in the formation of every symptom, and what have we seen in recent times in the hysteric, if not this which allows us to situate where the neurotic’s problem lies?

It is a problem of the relation of the signifier with its position as subject dependent on demand. It is in this that the hysteric has to articulate something that we will provisionally call her desire and the object of that desire, insofar precisely as it is not the object of need. That is why I insisted somewhat on the dream called ‘of the beautiful butcher’s wife’.

What is at stake, what is it? It appears there in an entirely clear way, and FREUD says it from the start, from the very threshold of psychoanalysis, that it is a matter for the hysteric of making the object of desire hold, of making it subsist as distinct and independent from the object of any need. This relation to desire, to the constitution, to the maintenance in its enigmatic form of desire as such in its background with respect to any demand, that is the hysteric’s problem, and everyone knows that this, namely, if you like, something we have called the x, is the unsayable desire.

What is the desire of my hysteric? It is what opens for her, I will not say the universe, but an entire world that is already quite vast enough, namely the dimension that one can call the dimension of hysteria latent in every kind of human being in the world, namely everything that can present itself as a question about one’s own desire.

This is what the hysteric finds herself communicating with on an equal footing, first of course with everything that can happen of this order in all her hysteric brothers or sisters, namely that it is on this— as FREUD articulates it for us— that hysterical identification rests. Every hysteric echoes everything that, in the present, is posed in some others, whether as questions about one’s own desire, especially and insofar as that other is hysteric, but equally insofar as it is only a hysteric mode of posing a question, even in someone who may be only occasionally and even in a latent way, hysteric.

The world is opened by this ‘question about her desire’ to the hysteric, a world of identification that puts her, if one may say, properly speaking in a certain relation with the mask. I mean with everything that can in any way fix, symbolize according to a certain type, this ‘question about desire’ that made her akin to the hysteric— let us say here to the appeal to hysterics as such— that made her essentially identified with a kind of general mask under which all the possible modes of mask stir about.

We are now with the obsessional. The structure of the obsessional, as I try to advance into it, I told you, is also designated by a certain relation with desire that is not this relation: d/x, but that is another relation that I indicated to you as being essential in him, which we will call, if you like, today: d/0

The obsessional’s relation to his desire is subject to this that we have known for a long time thanks to FREUD, namely the early role played by what is called Entbindung ‘defusion of the drives’ [Entbindung: unbinding], isolation of something that is called ‘destruction’.

It is insofar as the first approach to the desire of the obsessional subject was, as for every subject, the bringing of the desire of the Other, and that this desire of the Other was first and as such destroyed, annulled, that the whole structure of the obsessional is engaged, and that it is as such and only thereby— I am not saying something so new by saying this, I am simply articulating it in a new way— that it is as such and from there, determined.

When you have an obsessional in hand, and those who already have one in hand can know that it is an essential trait of his condition, of his structure, that not only, as I have already announced and said to you, his own desire, for him, diminishes, blinks, wavers and vanishes as he approaches it, bearing here the mark of this: that desire was first approached as something that destroys itself because first the reaction of desire of the Other presented itself to him as something that was his rival, as something that immediately bore the mark to which he reacts with the style of the reaction of destruction that is the underlying reaction in the subject’s relation to the image of the other as such, to this image of the other insofar as it dispossesses and ruins him. There is thus this mark that remains in the obsessional’s approach to his desire and that makes every approach make it vanish.

This is what the author I am speaking to you of [Bouvet], and let us say, whom I criticize in passing in what I have been unfolding before you for a few lessons, this is what the author perceives in the form he calls ‘distance from the object’, and that he confuses with something he calls ‘destruction of the object’. I mean that the idea he forms of the psychology of the obsessional is that of someone who has perpetually to defend himself against madness, madness defined as ‘destruction of the object’.

There is there— and I will explain to you why— only a projection in the said author of something, given the perspective in which he himself operates and wants to arrive, at the resolution of this problem of desire in the obsessional by the route he takes, where he conceives it not only as a function of his insufficiencies on the theoretical plane, but also because of personal factors, for this is only a fantasy, a fantasy in a way necessitated.

I will show you in what, by the imaginary perspective through which he engages the solution of this problem of desire in the obsessional; but it is a patent, common experience, that there is in typical obsessionals not the slightest danger of psychosis, wherever you take him, and I will tell you— when the time comes— why. I will be able to tell you why insofar as things are articulated in a way that can show you to what extent an obsessional, in his structure, differs from a psychotic. By contrast, what is perceived there— although badly translated— is indeed this: that the obsessional maintains himself in a possible relation with his desire only at a distance.

What must be maintained for the obsessional is the distance from his desire and not the distance from the object. The object, we shall see, has on the occasion a quite other function, and what experience shows us in the clearest way is that precisely he must keep at a certain distance from his desire for that desire to subsist.

But there is to this another face, which is this: it is that insofar as the obsessional— observe this in the clinic and in the concrete— establishes with the other a relation that in some way is fully articulated at the level of demand, whether it is his mother first, but also in the whole sequel of things, and namely with regard to his spouse. For what does analysis mean for us, what can this term spouse mean, if not indeed something that takes its full articulation at the level of the things where we try to situate it?

That is to say the one with whom one must indeed in some way, willingly or unwillingly, return to being all the time in a certain relation of demand, someone with whom one is all the time in this relation, even if on a whole series of things ‘one shuts up’, it is never without pain: demand demands to be pushed to the end.

What happens on the plane of the obsessional’s relations with his spouse? It is very exactly this which is the most subtle to see, as you will note, as you will observe, when you take the trouble: it is that the obsessional sets about destroying the desire of the Other. Any approach within, so to speak, the ‘area of the obsessional’ ends, in the normal case, insofar as one lets oneself be caught in it, in a muffled attack, a permanent wearing-down that tends, in the other, and because of the obsessional, to end in the abolition, the devaluation, the depreciation of what is the other’s own desire. These are nuances, terms assuredly whose handling demands a certain exercise, but outside these terms, nothing else will even allow us to perceive the true nature of what happens.

I have already said, I have already marked moreover in the past of the obsessional, in the childhood of the obsessional, this quite particular and accentuated character that precisely the articulation of demand takes on in him.

On this schema you are beginning to be able to understand and situate it, for what I had already marked for you, by representing to you this little child who is always asking for something and who— surprising thing— has this property, among all the children who indeed spend their time asking for something, of being the one whose demand is always felt, and by the best-intentioned among those around him, as being properly speaking unbearable. The ‘pestering’ child, as one says.

It is not that he asks for more extraordinary things than the others; it is in his way of asking for it, it is in the subject’s relation to demand that this specific or early character of the articulation of demand lies in the one who already at the moment when this manifests itself, in the period for example just of the decline of the Oedipus, in the so-called latency period, it is of this that it is a matter.

As for our hysteric, we have seen that, to sustain her enigmatic desire, something in her is employed as artifice [a], which we can represent, if you like, by the formation of two parallel and identical tensions at this level of idealizing formation, of identification with a little other [→S◊a,→i(a)]

Think of Mr. K’s feeling for Dora. Every hysteric moreover, in one of the phases of her history, has a similar support that comes to play here the same role of support as little a. The obsessional does not take the same route, the same path. He too is oriented to manage with this problem of his desire, but he must start with other elements, he must start elsewhere.

What I am beginning to show you is that it is in a certain early and essential relation to his demand [S◊D] that he can, in his relation to the Other, manifest the specificity and the place, maintain, if one may say, the distance necessary for what is possible somewhere, but from afar, the position of this desire annulled in its essence, of this sort of blind desire, if one may say, whose position it is a matter of maintaining.

We are going to go around, to circumscribe this relation of the obsessional to his desire. This is a first trait of the subject’s specific relation to his demand. There are others. Let us observe this: what is obsession?

You know the importance the verbal formula has there. To the point that one can say that obsession is always something verbalized. FREUD has no doubt about that: even when he is dealing with an obsessive conduct, so to speak latent, he considers that it only reveals its own structure, so much does it take the form of a verbal obsession.

He even goes so far as to say that, in sum, one has indeed done well to articulate the first steps, even in the treatment of an obsessional neurosis: when one has had the subject give to his symptoms what one calls all their development, what can present itself clinically as a worsening of what is at stake is a kind of destruction of all the obsessive forms into something properly articulated.

Besides, is there any need to insist on the character of verbal annulment, the verbal character that will stem from the structure of obsession itself? And everyone knows that what makes its essence and its phenomenologically anxiety-provoking power for the subject is this: that it is a verbal destruction by the verb and by the signifier. The subject finds himself prey to what one calls this destruction that one calls ‘magical’— I do not know why: why not say verbal quite simply— of the Other, which is given in the very structure of the symptom.

This also introduces us to a phenomenology that it is essential to traverse in order to understand its necessity. I will say that just as you have seen here, in sum, the circuit of the hysteric that ends on the two planes, that is to say in an idealization [S◊a] or identification in the schema at this higher level, which is the parallel of the symbolization that passes here on the imaginary plane [i(a)].

If I allowed myself to use this schema all the way through, I would say that for the obsessional, the circuit is roughly something like this, just as we find it again here.

I will explain myself. The schema of the verbal obsession:

– this destructive schema of the relation with the Other,

– this fear of hurting the Other by thoughts, that is to say by words since they are spoken thoughts,

– this obsession of blasphemy also is something that introduces us to an entire phenomenology at which it would be fitting to stop a bit at length.

Blasphemy itself, I do not know whether you have ever taken an interest in it, in itself it is a very good introduction to verbal obsession, this theme of blasphemy. What is it to blaspheme?

On that I would very much like some theologian to answer me. Let us say assuredly that it is something that makes an eminent signifier fall, and whose level of signifying authorization, so to speak, it is a matter of seeing, where its relation with this supreme signifier that is called the misrecognized Father is assuredly situated. It absolutely does not coincide, even if it plays a homologous role.

That God has a relation with creation, signifier as such, is not doubtful, and that blasphemy in its essence is something that is situated absolutely only in this dimension, that is to say something that makes this signifier fall to the rank of object, that identifies in a way the λόγος [logos] with its metonymic effect, that makes it fall down a notch, that is something that is no doubt not the good answer, the complete answer to the question of blasphemy.

But it is assuredly an essential approach for what is at stake in obsession, verbal sacrilege, I mean in the phenomenon that is observed in the obsessional. Remember the episode of the Rat Man, this furious anger that seizes him against his father, at the age of four if my memory is correct, where he starts rolling on the ground calling him: ‘you towel, you plate’, etc.

As always, it is again in FREUD that we find the most colossally exemplary things, in a true collision and collusion of the essential ‘you’ of the other with this ‘something inert’. This effect, so to speak fallen, by the introduction of the signifier into the human world, which is called an object and especially an inert object, an object insofar as it is in itself only an object of exchange, of equivalence. The whole string of object names in the child’s rage indicates it well enough: it is not a matter of knowing whether he is lamp, plate, or towel, it is a matter of knowing that the ‘you’ descends, is destroyed to the rank of object.

You will tell me that what is at stake in this destruction of the Other in verbal obsession is something… and you allow me to finish on that since we will be forced to leave it there today… I will say that it is something that happens here and whose whole structure we will see next time, this something that makes it so that it is only in a certain signifying articulation that the obsessional subject manages to preserve the Other, that the effect of destruction toward which he aspires must sustain him thanks to a signifying articulation.

Think it through carefully; you find there the very warp of this world the obsessional lives: the obsessional is a man who lives in the signifier; he is very solidly installed there, there is absolutely nothing to fear. This signifier suffices, for him, to preserve the dimension of the Other. But it is a dimension in a way idolized, and our schema gives us this theme, which I recall to you from the observation of the Rat Man: I will say that French allows us to articulate it in a way that moreover I once began here— it will not be a surprise to you— at the level of the relation to the other, and of the ‘you’ that begins here: what the subject articulates to the other is a: ‘You are the one who…’ [French pun: ‘Tu es’ (‘you are’) sounds like ‘tues’ (‘you kill’).] And for the obsessional it stops there.

Full speech, which is that in which the subject’s commitment in a fundamental relation with the Other is articulated, cannot be completed, except by this kind of repetition from which a humorist made the famous ‘To be or not…’ emerge, and the guy scratches his head to continue: ‘Tobeornot… Tobeornot…’ and it is by repeating that he finds the end of the sentence: ‘You are the one who… You are the one who… Kill the one who kills me.’

The French language gives us here the fundamental schema of this relation with the Other. This relation with the Other is founded on an articulation that, in a way, forms itself on the destruction of the Other, but which, by the fact that it is articulation, and signifying articulation, makes it subsist.

It is within this articulation that we are going to see what this relation is, this place of the signifier phallus as to ‘being’ and as to ‘having’, what we remained with at the end of this last session, which will allow us to see the difference there is between a solution that would allow showing the obsessional what is really the case with his relation to the phallus as signifier of the desire of the Other, or satisfying him in a sort of imaginary mirage of concession of the demand for symbolization by the analysis of the imaginary fantasy, this something whose dimension you know within which this whole observation unfolds, the one that consists in sum in saying to the woman: ‘You envy the penis? Well then…’ As Mr. Casimir PÉRIER said to a guy who had pinned him against a lamppost:
– ‘What do you want?’
and the guy answers him:
– ‘Freedom!’
– ‘Well then, you have it!’
Casimir PÉRIER says to him, and he slips between his legs, and goes off leaving him utterly bewildered.

That is perhaps not exactly what we can expect from an analytic solution! The very ending of this observation, this kind of euphoric identification, intoxicated in the subject, the description that entirely covers a masculine ideal found in the analyst, is perhaps something that brings the subject a change in his balance, but assuredly not the one that is the true answer to the obsessional’s question.