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(All parts in English)

We reached last time the point where we tried to begin concentrically to designate the constellation of the obsessive’s desire, and I announced to you for today, within what I began to approach by speaking to you about the position of demand in the obsessive, this demand so precociously felt by the Other as endowed with that special accent of insistence that makes it so difficult to tolerate. On the other hand, this need for destruction of the Other’s desire in the obsessive is also something that already was setting our topic for today in motion, namely the function of certain fantasies.

It is obviously not in vain that, in the work of the author whom I chose to take as a basis…
it is less a critique in the polemical sense of the word than a critique in the sense of ‘systematic analysis’
…it is not in vain that this phallic fantasy—namely then in the 1950 article, Revue française de psychanalyse, 1950, n°2, April-June—comes in the form of the special examination of the importance that penis envy takes on in the woman in the course of an analysis of an obsessive neurosis.

It is obviously not everything that I teach you—the importance of the phallus signifier, naturally—that will here prove that one gives to this element an exaggerated importance. What is at stake is seeing how one uses it, and it is not, of course, a matter either of indulging in the easy little game of criticizing the outcome of a treatment that is, moreover, presented as unfinished, and of judging from outside something into which one has not entered.

Simply, in this observation, what I give you as a salient element, in a way, let us say, the hesitations of the direction, indeed a direction frankly opposed to the one that could seem logical to us. If we do so, it is never from the observation itself, considered as a sequence and an account of facts, but from the articulations of the author himself. I mean, from the questions he asks himself, which you will be able to find always expressed in the right place because, of course, the properties of the human mind, common sense in particular, are indeed—as has been said rightly, and not without irony—‘the most widely shared thing in the world’.[Descartes]

And there is no doubt that what obstructs us here already obstructed the authors’ minds, and that, in addition, it is a fact that in this observation these obstacles are fully articulated. There are questions, I would say more, there are remarks concerning the paradoxical outcome, the non-outcome of what was being sought. Finally there are contradictions to which perhaps the author himself does not give all the importance they can have, but which certainly can be qualified as such since they are written in black and white in his text.

So, to come to what we are going to try to formulate today concerning what constitutes the general direction of this treatment, the way it is articulated, we are first going to try to get to the heart of what is at stake, that is, to posit the difference there is between something that presents itself as articulated and not as articulable, and between what is aimed at and what is effectively done. Let us take as a starting point our schema, and begin by making it the place of a certain number of positions that complete it and that allow us equally to find our bearings in what we know most familiarly and that is represented there in a certain order and a certain topology.

What is it—posing the question once again—that this signifying line is, the top line of our schema?
– It is a signifying line, we said, insofar as it is structured like a language.
– On the other hand, to be structured like a language, it is precisely that sort of sentence that the subject cannot articulate and that we must help him to articulate.
How is it situated on this schema? How can we understand it?

What it structures is, in sum, we shall say, the whole of the neurosis, the neurosis being here identical, not to an object, to a sort of parasite, to something that would be foreign to the subject’s personality, but being precisely the whole analytic structure that is in his acts, his conduct. In sum, as the progress of our conception concerning neurosis has advanced, we realized that it is not only made, in its signifying elements, of symptoms decomposable into the effects of signified of this signifier—since it is thus that I taught myself to retranslate what FREUD articulates—but that the whole personality in a certain way bears the mark of these structural relations.

It is something that goes well beyond what the word personality, with what it has involved of static, entails in a kind of first acceptation, that is, in what one calls character. It is not that; it is personality in the sense that it traces in behaviors, in relations to the Other and to others:
– a certain movement that is always found the same,
– a scansion,
– a certain mode of passage from the Other to the other, and again to another, that is always found again and again, that forms the background, the modulation if you like, of obsessive action.

This means that it is the whole of obsessive behavior, and even hysterical as well. If we say that it is structured like a language, it is not to say that beyond articulated language that is called discourse, there is something that, taking all the subject’s acts, would have that sort of equivalence to language that there is in what is called a gesture, for a gesture is not simply a well-defined movement; the gesture is signifying; that would not suffice to say what it covers.

One could almost use the expression in French, which fits perfectly, of ‘une geste’ [In French, ‘geste’ can mean an epic cycle or heroic tale, as in ‘chanson de geste’, not only a physical ‘gesture’.] in the sense in which it is used in ‘la chanson de geste’: The geste of Roland, that is, the sum of his history. In the end it is a speech, if you like, and in a certain way the sum of the neurotic’s behavior presents itself as a speech, and even as a full speech, I would say, in the sense in which we saw the primitive sense of this full speech that commits, under the form of a discourse, of a full speech also, a speech in the entirely cryptographic sense unknown to the subject as to its meaning, although in sum he pronounces it
– by his whole being,
– by everything he manifests,
– by everything he evokes and has realized ineluctably along a certain path of completion, and of non-completion if nothing intervenes there that is of that order of oscillation that is called analysis
…thus a speech pronounced by this barred subject, this subject barred to himself whom we call the unconscious.

That is how we represent it in the form of a sign, S. Here, it is indeed a matter of that. In sum what you see being discerned in this distinction we are making is that we defined the Other, with the capital A, as the place of speech: the Other is instituted and takes shape by the sole fact that the subject speaks, by the fact that he makes use of speech, this big Other is born as place of speech.

That does not mean that it is therefore realized as subject in its alterity: the Other is invoked each time there is speech. I think I do not need to return to this; I insisted on it enough. But then this beyond, which you see here, which is precisely what is articulated in the upper line of our schema, is in sum the Other of the Other. It is this speech that is articulated on the horizon of the Other as such; it is this Other of the Other that is at stake, and of which we shall say that this Other of the Other, namely the place where the Other’s speech takes shape as such, there would be no reason for it to be closed to us.

It is even the principle of the intersubjective relation as such: that this Other as place of speech is immediately and effectively given to us as subject, that is, as a subject who thinks us ourselves as his Other. That is the principle of all strategy: when you play chess with someone, you attribute to him as many calculations as you make.

Why, since we thus dare to say that this Other of the Other, which should be for us the most transparent element, is given in a way with the dimension of the Other, that this Other of the Other is precisely where the discourse of the unconscious is articulated, this something articulated that is not articulable by us, why must we do it? What makes it that we are entitled to do it?

It is quite simple: this Other to whom, in experience and by the conditions of human life—which makes human life precisely be engaged in the condition of speech—this Other to whom we are subjected by the condition of demand, we do not know what our demand is for him.

And why do we not know it? What gives it that opacity?

These are evident things, but still evident things whose givens are not precisely what is least useful to articulate. We always content ourselves with obscuring them in the form of a kind of premature objectivations. Why then is it this Other of whom we do not know how he welcomes our demand? In other terms, why, in our strategy, is he going to become unbewußt and realize this paradoxical position of his discourse?

That is what I mean when I tell you that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. It is what happens virtually on this horizon of the Other of the Other insofar as it is there that the Other’s speech is produced, this Other’s speech insofar as it becomes our unconscious, that is, something that comes to presentify within us an Other capable of answering us by the sole fact that, in that place of speech, we make an Other live, capable of answering us. That is indeed why it is opaque to us: it is because there is something we do not know in him, and which separates us from his response to our demand, and that is nothing other than what is called his desire.

This suffices to make us perceive at once something: that the essential point of this remark, which is an evidence only in appearance, takes its value as a function of this: that this desire precisely is situated there[d]:
– between the Other as the pure and simple place of speech
– and the Other insofar as he is a being of flesh at whose mercy we are for the satisfaction of our demand.

But that this desire is situated there is precisely what conditions its relation with something that is precisely of the order of speech, which is:
– this symbolization of the action of the signifier on the subject as such,
– this thing that in sum makes what we call a subject, which we symbolize with this S.
It is something other than purely and simply a self, I mean what one calls, according to an elegant word in English—the fact of saying it in English, of isolating it, makes it possible to distinguish well what it means—the ‘self’, that is, what is irreducible in this presence of the individual in the world.

This something becomes subject properly speaking, and barred subject in the sense in which we symbolize it insofar as it is marked by that condition that subordinates it not only to the Other as place of speech…
it is the subject defined as moment, not of a certain relation to the world, of a relation of the eye to the world, of the subject-object relation that is that of knowledge in the subject insofar as he is born at the moment of the emergence of the human individual in the conditions of speech
…insofar then as it is marked, I told you, by the Other, not simply as place of speech, but insofar as this Other himself is conditioned and marked by these conditions of speech.

What then do we see on this horizon thus made opaque by the obstacle of the Other’s desire? It is this something that refers the subject [S] thus marked back to his own demand, that puts him in a certain relation [S◊D], the relation here designated by the symbol of the small lozenge that I explained to you last time…to his demand, insofar very precisely that the Other, so to speak, no longer answers, as one says. Here, big A no longer answers, which is very famous under other initials.

At the level of the subject, what tends to be produced on the horizon is this confrontation, this referral of the subject to his own demand under the forms of signifiers, so to speak ‘encompassing’ with respect to the subject, these signifiers of which the subject himself becomes the sign. It is on the horizon of this non-response of the Other that we see taking shape in analysis, and insofar precisely that at the outset the analyst, insofar as he first comes to be nothing other than the place of speech, than an ear that listens and does not answer, is going to push the subject in sum to detach himself, to oppose something of which experience shows you that it shows itself in filigree in his discourse, namely precisely these forms of demand that appear to us in the form of what we call ‘anal phase’, ‘oral phase’, phases… in whatever ways you want, but that are characterized in a way by what?

What do we want to say when we speak of these phases? Let us not forget all the same that our subject does not return before us progressively to the state of an infant! We are not engaging in a fakir-like operation. I think one would have to see the subject go back up the course of time and reduce himself in the end to the seed that engendered him! What is at stake is signifiers. What we call ‘oral phase’, ‘anal phase’, is the way the subject articulates his demand by the appearance in his discourse—here in the broadest sense, in the whole way his neurosis is presentified before us—of signifiers that were formed at this or that stage of his development, that were the signifiers that served him in the phases, either more recent or more ancient, to articulate his demand.

What is called in other terms fixation, for example, is the prevalence preserved by this or that form of signifier, oral or other, with all the nuances that you learned to articulate. That is what it means. It is the special importance that certain systems of signifiers have preserved, and that is called regression. It is what happens insofar as these signifiers are reached by the opening to the subject’s discourse, precisely in this: of being simply, as speech, without having anything special to ask, it is outlined in the dimension of demand, and that is why the whole perspective is retroactively opened onto what the subject has lived since his earliest and most tender childhood, namely precisely the condition of demand. This regression is about knowing what we make of it. The whole question is there. We are here to answer it, or to say what happens when we do not answer it, and what else we can do. Such is the aim that deserves to be attained.

Here I point out to you in passing that, in sum, the signifiers that are here implicated in this regression of discourse are therefore something that we must consider as being in the structure of discourse itself, and moreover it is always there that we discover them, in these two lines:
– the signifying sequence,
– the significations always produced according to the law of the signifying chain.

If you like, these two things are equivalent by an anticipation of the signifying sequence, every signifying chain opening before it the horizon of its own completion, and at the same time, by a retroaction, once the signifying term has naturally come that, so to speak, doubles the sentence, that makes what is produced at the level of the signified always have that function, so to speak, retroactive.

Here S2 already takes shape at the moment when S1 begins, and is completed only at the moment when S2 retroacts on S1. A certain shift always exists from the signifier to the signification. It is even that which gives to every signification, insofar as it is not a natural signification, insofar as it is not linked to that wholly momentary sketch of the instance of need in the subject, that which makes it something essentially metonymic, that is, always linked to what links within itself the signifying chain to what constitutes it as such: these links, these knots…which we can call precisely thus, momentarily and to distinguish them, a certain Σ[sigma] if you like, that is, that beyond of the signifying chain into which we try to reduce it

…these signifiers precisely that we find in this confrontation of the subject with demand, in this sort of reduction of his discourse to these elementary signifiers, which is what we discern in filigree in everything that evokes for us, and which is precisely what makes the background of our experience, that by which we find the same structural laws in the whole conduct of the subject, in the mode in which he expresses it to us.

Sometimes even down to the scansion, in the motor way in which he articulates it, insofar as a stutter, a babbling, or any stumbling of speech, as I expressed myself elsewhere, can be for us significant of something that, fundamentally, is of the order of a signifier of demand as lack, oral or anal insofar.

What does that already allow us, in passing, to conceive?

It is that it is indeed of that that it is a matter, and that makes…
as a little study group led by ‘the most friendly of my colleagues’, namely LAGACHE, discovered it with an astonishment that must indeed be motivated by a kind of permanent misunderstanding
…that everywhere where in French we see the word ‘instinct’…
it is in the references made to the German text, and that was a surprise for this group
…one never finds anything other than the term Trieb, Trieb or pulsion, as we translate.

And in truth, pulsion rather obscures the thing. The English term is drive, and if we wanted to find something in French, we have hardly anything that would allow, given the true sense of Trieb, translating it.

I would say that one would have to choose a scientific word, the word tropism, which is specially made to designate irresistible elements, considered as irreducible to the physico-chemical attraction of certain attractions, such as they would be exercised in animal behavior, which would allow us precisely to exorcise the side always more or less finalist that there is in the term instinct. I will say that it is something in the end that is indeed also of that order that we encounter here in our Freudian notion of Trieb.

Let us translate it, if you like, by the French word ‘attraction’, which I used a moment ago to speak of tropisms, except that what would be at stake there is this something that situates the human subject in a certain necessary dependence on something. I cannot say that the human being is not the obscure subject, under the gregarious forms of organic attraction toward the element of climate for example, or of another nature; it is obviously not there that our interest develops, we others, in the field that we are called to explore in analysis, which of course is something that makes us speak of these various phases, ‘oral’, ‘anal’, ‘genital’ and others.

And what do we see? It is that in analytic theory it is indeed a certain necessity, a certain relation that puts him in a relation of subordination, of dependence, of organization and of attraction with respect to what? To signifiers. Borrowed from what? From the register, from the battery of a certain number of his own organs. To say nothing other than to say that an ‘oral’ or ‘anal’ fixation survives in an adult subject is precisely to make him depend on what? On a certain imaginary relation.

But without any doubt, what we articulate more here is that this is carried to the function of signifier. If it were not isolated as such, mortified as such, it could not have the economic action that it has in the subject, for a very simple reason: images as such are never linked precisely except to the arousal or to the satisfaction of need, this, even…
I do not fail to say it on occasion
…when it is a matter of need purely and simply.

If the subject remains in a way attached to these images outside their text, images: ‘oral’ where it is not a matter of food, ‘anal’ where it is not a matter of excrement, it is still indeed that these images have taken another function. It is the signifying function that is at stake. The drive, as such, is precisely the manageable expression of concepts that count for us, that express to us this dependence of the subject with respect to a certain signifier.

What is important is this: it is that this desire of the subject encountered as the beyond of demand is what makes it opaque to our demand and what also installs his own discourse as something that is absolutely necessary to our structure, but that is, in certain respects, impenetrable to us, which makes it an unconscious discourse.

This desire then, which is its condition, is itself subject to the existence of a certain effect of signifier, what I explained to you at the beginning of this year—I mean from January—under the name of the paternal metaphor. This means that it is insofar as on the horizon appears the Name of the Father, insofar as itself being the support of the signifying chain, of the order established by the signifying chain. It is only insofar as this metaphor is established, metaphor:

– of primitive desire,
– of opaque desire,
– of obscure desire that the mother’s desire represents,
– of this something that at first is completely closed for the subject, and that can remain closed only by reason of the formula of the metaphor. Namely the one that I already symbolized for you by the relation of two signifiers, one being in two different positions:

The Name of the Father over the mother’s desire [S/S’], and the mother’s desire over its symbolization [S’/x].

Its determination as signified is something that is produced by a metaphorical effect and—as I told you—where the Name of the Father is lacking it is precisely there that this metaphorical effect is not produced: I cannot manage to bring to light this, which has x designated, namely the mother’s desire, as being properly the phallus signifier [S(S/phallus))]. That is indeed what occurs in psychosis, insofar as the Name of the Father is rejected, I mean is the object of a primitive Verwerfung that does not enter the cycle of signifiers.

And that is why also the Other’s desire, and namely the mother’s desire, is not symbolized there.

It is very precisely what on this schema, if we had to represent the position of psychosis, would make us say that this desire, as such, I do not mean insofar as existing—everyone knows well that even the mothers of a psychotic have a desire, although that is not always sure—but certainly it is not symbolized in the subject’s system and, not being symbolized, that is what allows us to see what we see, namely that for the psychotic the Other’s speech does not pass at all into his unconscious.

The Other speaks to him incessantly, the Other insofar as place of speech. That does not necessarily mean you or me; it means roughly the sum of what is offered to him as a field of perception. And this field speaks to him of us, naturally, and likewise to take an example, the first that comes to mind, the well-known one recited last evening by […]. He told us that in delusions, the red color of a car can mean that he is immortal. Everything speaks to him, because nothing of the symbolic organization destined to refer the Other back where he must be, that is, into his unconscious, nothing is realized of that order.

And that is why, so to speak, the Other speaks in a way entirely homogeneous to that first and primitive speech which is that of demand. That is why everything becomes sonorized, that the ‘it speaks’ that is in the unconscious for the neurotic subject is outside for the psychotic subject. That ‘it speaks’ and that ‘it speaks out loud’ in the most natural way, there is no reason to be astonished by it. If the Other is the place of speech, it is there that ‘it speaks’, and that it resounds from all sides.

Naturally, we find the extreme case of it at the point of unleashing of psychosis, there where, as I have always formulated it for you, what is Verwerfung, or rejected from the symbolic, reappears in the real. This real that is at stake is precisely there, the hallucination, that is, the Other insofar as he speaks. It is always in the Other, of course, that it speaks, but there it takes the form of the real. The psychotic subject does not doubt it: it is the Other who speaks to him, and who speaks to him through all the signifiers.

And it suffices to bend down to scoop them up with a shovel in the human world. The poster, etc., everything that surrounds us has a marked character of signifier. The character of letting go, of dissolution will be more or less great according to the state of the psychosis. Everything that we see, and what FREUD articulates for us as being that in which psychosis organizes itself, articulates itself, is precisely made to supplement this absence at its organized point, I mean descending from the signifying structure of the Other’s desire.

For what do the most benign forms of psychosis present to us if not—of course, fundamentally, and entirely in the extreme state of dissolution—a pure and simple discourse of the Other. Namely that it comes to scan here in the form of a signification, that is, as I showed you two years ago, these very curious sorts of decomposition of speech that, by the very structure of what is presented to us here—I could not show it to you then—prove necessarily to be code of the message on the code: what is returned from A is then everything the subject has at his disposal to make the discourse of the Other live.

You remember SCHREBER, the fundamental language: each word that is given to him contains within itself that kind of definition whose advent occurs with the outcome of the word itself. It is a code of message on the code, and inversely these phrases:
– ‘How it is…’
– ‘You only have to…’
– ‘Perhaps he will want to…’ and again: the ‘will he want’ is too much in the sentence.

But there is only that, that is, a series of messages that aim only at what in the code relates to the messenger, what in the code—these particles, these personal pronouns, these auxiliary verbs—designates the messenger’s place. This maps strictly onto this graph. I do not want to dwell too much on it; you will see it in my article on the psychoses that is going to appear, where I made a bit of the synthesis of my course from two years ago with what I am doing for you this year.

I do not want to insist on it now; what I want to tell you about it is that it is quite evident that something like the delusion of jealousy, as FREUD himself articulates it as negation of the subject, the ‘I love him’ being less the homosexual subject than the similar subject, that is of course, as such, homosexual. FREUD says: ‘It is not me whom he loves, it is her.’

What does that mean, if not precisely that the delusion of jealousy, insofar as it obstructs this pure and simple unleashing of speech, of interpretation, is precisely this something it tries to restore, to reestablish: the Other’s desire.

The structure of the delusion of jealousy is precisely to attribute to the Other a desire that is that sort of desire, sketched, outlined in the imaginary, that is the subject’s. It is attributed to the Other: ‘It is not me whom he loves—the subject, the rival…
—it is my spouse.’ I try, as a psychotic, to institute in the Other this desire that is very precisely this function, this essential relation that is not given to me,
– because I am psychotic,
– because nowhere has this essential metaphor been produced that gives to the Other’s desire that primordial signifier, that signifier that is called the phallus signifier, and of which we are now going to see, with regard to what is done for this patient, the use.

This phallus signifier: it still remains that there would be something rather obscure in admitting it as essential and in a way preferential with respect to all sorts of other objects that moreover we see on occasion play a homologous role. The equivalences that have been made between the phallus signifier and the excremental signifier for example, the breast signifier more exactly the extremity of the breast, object of all feeding, are indeed there. That is, it is open to all sorts of equivalences. What makes its privilege, it can be very difficult for us to perceive what it is. That it is, quite obviously, this something that puts it in a certain place with respect to something that has the highest functions in the relation of the individual to the species, namely what is called ‘the genital phase’.

Of course, but it is precisely for that reason that it is more especially dependent than another on a function of signifying: the other objects, the maternal teat, or that part of the body that under the scybala form presents itself on occasion as being able to be the occasion for the subject of an essential loss, all that, it is something that up to a certain degree is given outside, as object.

It is a currency, so to speak, in amorous exchange, which of course needs to pass into the state of signifier in order to serve as a means, but still in the manner of cowries, those shells that serve in certain remote tribes precisely as objects of exchange. It is still something that is already in the natural order.

Observe well that for the phallus all the same, the thing is not quite the same, because, after all, the phallus under its real organic form, the penis, or that something that corresponds to it in the woman, after all it takes much more than for predetermined objects, for the subject to make of it an object and, phantasmatically or otherwise, a detachable object.

We will never insist enough on the articulation of the enigma that the castration complex or the penisneid contains, that is to say that something which is all the same indeed something that pertains to the body, and which after all nothing threatens more than any limb is threatened—arm or leg, indeed nose or ear—this element which after all is on the proper body only a point of voluptuous pleasure.

That is how, first, the subject discovers it. Masturbatory autoerotism, which indeed plays such a great role in the subject’s history, is not at all, in itself, of a nature to trigger such catastrophes, as we know by experience, as long as—and insofar as—the organ as such is not precisely taken up in the signifying game, in paternal retention, in maternal or paternal prohibition.

In other terms, it is precisely because this organ is nothing other in origin, for the subject, insofar as he has relation only to himself, than a point of voluptuous pleasure of his own body, that it is certainly much less subject to caducity than any other of the elements that have taken on the import of signifier in his prior demand.

This element, this point of his body, of his organic relation to himself, it is more than any other, in the taking hold of a metaphoric chain, in the paternal metaphor namely as such, that it must play its role in order to make of it a signifier: – which at the same time becomes a quite privileged signifier of this relation to the Other of the Other, – which makes it a quite central signifier of the unconscious.

Likewise, we grasp that the whole dimension that analysis opened up for us on this subject was precisely that something new, completely unexpected with respect to everything that had been formulated up to then. Which shows us well, if I may really articulate what I want to say here, that it is insofar as this something is only an organ with which the subject maintains relations other than innocent. Let us not forget that in our fraternal species, that of the apes, it suffices that you have gone around those little ditches that surround a certain platform at the Vincennes zoo to notice with what tranquility, into which we would be wrong to project our own anxieties, this good and bold tribe of baboons and others spend their day attending to a glittering sex without worrying in the least about what the neighbors are going to think, except to help them on occasion in their collective rejoicings.

You can still feel the world there is between this relation of a certain animal species more or less upright in its stature, with what hangs at the bottom of its belly, and what in man nonetheless makes essentially of the phallus—and primitively of the phallus, and signaletically of the phallus—the object of a cult. What makes it akin for us from the origin of ages to this something that makes erection as such a signifier and that makes us all feel that it is not for nothing that in our very ancient cultures the standing stone has all its import, all its incidence of signifier in the grouping of the human collectivity.

So this role of the phallus is here fundamental, essential in its passage, its emergence—certainly not primordial but dependent on something else—its metaphoric emergence to the rank of signifier, which is what every possible situation of the Other’s desire as such will depend on, insofar as the subject must find there the place of his own desire. It is within the accidents of the encounter of the subject’s desire with this desire of the Other, insofar as it is at the level of the Other’s desire that he must find himself to signify it, his desire, it is quite naturally there that we are going to see the phallus signifier function. It is there, before the four cardinal points posited of the definition of desire… …that we are going to see what… placed in the atypical, abnormal, deficient, pathological conditions that are those of the neurotic, but nonetheless in a complete constellation, and not a decompleted one as in the psychotic …the subject is going to have to develop.

The obsessive, we said, is the one who, in this relation to the Other’s desire, finds primordially, primitively, the defusion of instincts. It is finding it in such a position that the first outcome, the starting outcome, the one that will condition all his later difficulties, will be that it is annulled, this desire of the Other.

What does that mean, if we give its full sense to what we have just said? To annul the Other’s desire is not the same thing as having—by lack, deficiency of the signifying metaphoric act of the father, of the Name-of-the-Father—been incapable of grasping the Other’s desire.

On the other hand, in a more or less delusional real, the Other’s desire is instituted, it is symbolized, it is even symbolized by the phallus, but it is denied as such. The obsessive subject’s primitive relation to his own desire is something that is founded on the denegation of the Other’s desire. The term Verneinung, as such, applies here in the sense in which precisely FREUD shows us its two faces: – that this desire is articulated, symbolized, – but that, secondly, it is endowed with the sign ‘no’.

That is the something before which the obsessive finds himself confronted as the very base of his position and the one to which he must respond by the formulas of supplementation, of compensation. I am saying nothing there that is new, I am simply applying it: the triad of the formation of the obsessive put forward by all authors: – annulment, – isolation, – defensive reaction.

That is what I am rearticulating for you.

Simply observe this: in order to be able to speak of annulment of anything at the level of the subject, it must be a matter of signifier, because one annuls nothing that is not signifying. There is not the slightest trace of annulment, even conceivable, at the animal level, and if we find something that resembles it there, we will say that there is a sketch of symbolic formation.

But the term annulment is not simply what I spoke to you about when it is a matter of the erasure of a trace, but on the contrary the taking of something elementary and signifying under the parentheses of something that says ‘This is not’, but which, saying ‘This is not’, nonetheless posits it as signifier. It is indeed always essentially a matter of signifier: if the obsessive is led to annul so many things, it is because they are things that are formulated.

The things that are formulated, what are they? We know very well: it is a demand, only it is a demand for death. And everyone knows that a demand for death, especially when it is early, having precisely as its result to destroy the Other and in the foreground the Other’s desire, of course destroys with the Other, at the same time, everything in which the subject can himself have to articulate himself. It is all the more necessary to isolate the parts of discourse that can be preserved with respect to these parts of discourse that must absolutely be erased and annulled so that the subject is not, at the same time, destroyed himself.

And it is in this perpetual game of ‘yes or no’, of separation, of sorting of what, in his speech, in his demand itself, destroys him with respect to what can preserve him, of what, of all necessity, is necessary for the preservation of the Other as such, for the Other exists as such only at the level of signifying articulation.

It is in this contradiction that the obsessive subject is constantly caught, and that is indeed what you know he is constantly busy with: precisely maintaining the Other, maintaining the subsistence of the Other with respect to all these linguistic formulations with which he is busied more than anyone, and which are precisely instituted there to support the Other, perpetually in danger of falling, of succumbing under the demand for death, this Other who is nevertheless the essential condition of his own maintenance as subject.

He could not himself subsist as subject if this Other as such were effectively annulled, whereas: – if something presents itself at the signifying level as especially annulled, that is to say if what marks the place of the Other’s desire as such, namely the phallus, – if here the d/(0), which I spoke to you about last time and which situates the obsessive’s desire, is something that is equivalent to the annulment of the phallus, we clearly sense that indeed everything will be played out around something that has the closest relation with this signifier.

What I am explaining to you, the division that presents itself between: – a consistent method that would take account of this function of the phallus as signifier, – and the one which, for lack of having elucidated it, is reduced to groping around something that indeed is played out around the phallus signifier in the subject, …here is what this difference consists in, here is what will be for you the golden rule, if you take the trouble to read this article that I am pointing out to you, at the risk of requesting in a far-fetched way—but perhaps this risk is perhaps not so great—the said issue from the Presses Universitaires.

This rule that will allow you to discern what is done in a certain way by this conduct of the treatment from something else, lies in this: what does a completed, complete relation of a subject with his own desire comprise in its bases, in its premises? The subject, I told you, the human subject, insofar as he must assume himself as human subject and not only as animal, in order to assume his genital desire must realize as essential signifier of his desire the function of the phallus signifier.

It is because the phallus signifier is there in the circuit, in the circuit of the subject’s unconscious articulation, that the human subject can be human, even when he fucks. That does not mean that on occasion the human subject cannot fuck like an animal; it is even a kind of ideal that twitches somewhere in the deepest recess of the hopes of all human subjects. I do not know whether the thing is frequently realized; some have boasted of having gotten that far. One does not see why one should not believe them, but never mind. For us, what we know, experience simply showed it to us, is that it is subject to much greater difficulties, and these difficulties are signifying difficulties.

This also explains to you for example the perpetual ambiguities that come to light concerning: – ‘Has one reached the genital or phallic stage at such a moment?’ – ‘Does the child reach the genital stage before the latency period, or is it simply at the phallic stage?’ It revolves around that. Perhaps things would be less obscure if one realized that ‘phallic stage’, on occasion, simply precisely means this: ‘access to the level of the signification of genital desire’.

The two things are different. When, at a first approach, one said that the child could only gain access to the phallic stage, one said something very probably true, although of course one can discuss, regarding autoerotic activity, whether it is or is not properly speaking genital. That is true too, in the end, but the thing that is important, in any case for us, that is of essential incidence, is not its more or less physiologically characterized as genital; autoerotic activity does indeed seem to appear as representing a first push of physiological evolution; it is its structuration on the phallic plane that is at stake, and that is what is decisive for the continuation of the neurosis.

In the end, what is at stake? If it is true, as I told you, that something must be realized at the level of the unconscious that is equivalent, so to speak, to full speech, that is to say there where discourse is articulated at the place of the Other [A] and returns as a signified [s(A)] to the subject by involving the ego [m] of the subject as such, what the subject of himself has concretely located with respect to the image of the other [i(a)], here, any kind of completion of unconscious articulation means nothing other than this: this circuit, which starts from the confrontation of the subject with his demand, is formulated into a desire articulated as such, completed, satisfying for the subject, desire with which the subject is identical and which comes to end at a certain place in this circuit, at the place that is precisely the place of the Other: – as human being marked by language, – as human being marked by the drama proper to the castration complex, – as truly another myself.

He comes there, I would not say to formulate himself into an ‘I am identical to the phallus’, not ‘I am the phallus’, but on the contrary: ‘I am in the very place that it occupies in the chain, in signifying articulation’.

The sense of ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’, is that. It is insofar as the subject taken in this movement of the signifier must come to conceive that what he was precociously confronted with, this signifier of desire that subtracts from him the mother’s total object, this phallus, he is not it, but that he is subject to the necessity, from the fact that this phallus occupies a certain place, that the subject comes to realize that he is not it, and from there, and from there only, he can accept what has everywhere been the process profoundly put in question, namely to know: – whether he has it or does not have it, – and whether he accepts having it when he has it, not having it when he does not have it.

It is there at that place, and in the articulation of the underlying signifying chain, in the elucidation of this relation of the subject to the phallus insofar as he is not it but must come to its place, that an ideal completion, such as the one that FREUD articulates in the ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’, is conceivable.

This, which is the necessary condition for us to orient our interventions and our technique, will be the object of my seminar next year, which I will call properly speaking Desire and its interpretation. How does one get there? What are the directions and the directives that allow us to see the modes of access to this last message which is the one in which the Freudian formula, with its presocratic lapidary turn, is articulated? That will be the object of what we will try to articulate next year.

What happens, everything that happens that is different from that, is very precisely what neurosis, or any other form of anomaly of evolution, spontaneously realizes: – what neurosis, in the case of obsessive neurosis, realizes, – just as in the hysteric, the place of desire, situated in a profound uncertainty in the hysteric, is fixed by her, by a certain detour, a certain detour that she describes or that he describes on the model of what allows him to situate his ego.

The hysteric, like all subjects, knows well that it is by a certain detour, and insofar as he fixes himself with respect to the image of the other, that she finds the place of her ego, the place of desire.

She obtains it, in exactly the same way, at the higher level, so to speak, only if she separates herself, turns away from the Other [A] and from the signified of the Other [s(A)], and thus comes to situate herself in a certain ideal type, in a certain image with which she identifies. It is likewise by an analogous detour—I already explained it to you—that Dora identified with Monsieur K. She finds, if she is a woman, the place of this desire whose point she seeks to situate, namely how can one desire a woman when one is impotent. That is the case for Dora.

For the obsessive the procedure is the same, except that, just as it was at the level of the ideal, of the mask of identification that the hysteric was trying to locate the difficulties of her position, it is on the contrary on what one can call the stronghold of his ego that the obsessive situates himself in order to try to find the place of his desire. That is why I say that he is going to make somewhere too, as we know by all experience, those famous VAUBAN fortifications that I spoke of elsewhere. These sorts of fortresses in which a desire always threatened with destruction entrenches itself, it is something he does on the model of his ego, and with respect of course to the image of the other.

This relation to the image of the other consists very precisely, this phallus signifier, always threatened with destruction because taken up in a denegation, in finding it again in the relation to the Other. That is to say that for example, you see this something indicated in all the observations of the author of whom I am speaking on this occasion: that is to say that always in every obsessive, man or woman, you see—playing an essential, fundamental role—appear at a given moment of their history this identification to the other, with a small a, a similar, a comrade, a barely older brother, a contemporary comrade, but who all have, and in all cases, for him the prestige of being those who are more virile than he, those who have power. Here, the phallus appears under its form, not signifying, not symbolic but under its imaginary form, imaginary as complement of an image stronger than themselves, an image of power.

This is not I who articulate it; you will find it articulated properly speaking in the article that I am citing to you. This person sets out in the proper place the very terms that I cite. It is recognized by those very people whom their experience of these subjects inspires; it is something that functionally is quite essential. The accent, if you like, is put on the image of the other insofar as: – imaginarily the form—this time in the imaginary sense—the phallic form is accentuated there, underlined, – that it is this here that takes value and function, no longer of symbolization of the Other’s desire, but of this imaginary relation of prestige, of bearing, of precedence of which we already marked the function at the level of the narcissistic relation.

This is what occurs as such in the obsessive symptom, in the obsessed one’s history, and this is what marks the special function that the relation of the subject as such takes in fantasies with this imaginary other who is his similar. This distinction… – of the presence of the Other with a big A, – and of the presence of the other with a small a, …is perceptible in the very evolution of the observation. If you read this observation attentively, namely the observation of the woman in question, you will see for example a very curious evolution between the beginning of the treatment, where she cannot speak, and what follows, where she does not want to speak.

Because, at first it is at the level of speech that the analysand’s relation with the analyst was instituted, and at that level, she refuses, and the analyst perceives very well that she refuses. That is not how he expresses it, but that is how her demand can only be a demand for death. Of course, after that something else happens, and it is very amusing to see that the analyst perceived very well that there was a difference: the relations have improved; nonetheless, she still does not speak: now she does not want to speak. The difference between the two is that when one does not want to speak, it is because of the presence of the Other with a big A.

Only what is precisely disturbing is that if she cannot speak, it is because what came to the place of this Other with a big A is precisely the other with a small a, that the analyst did everything to presentify.

He did everything to presentify the other with a small a. Why? Because, nonetheless following the trace of things on the trail, he sees well—from the content of what the subject brings—the place the phallic fantasy plays there. Of course it is with that that the subject defends herself; he spends his time droning at her that she would like to be a man. It depends how one hears it. It is true that the subject, at the imaginary level, does indeed make of this phallus a breast, that the condition of man insofar as endowed with the phallus, and only insofar as endowed with the phallus, is something that represents a certain element of power. What is at stake is precisely why she so much needs this reference and this element that happens to be an element of power, which is the phallus.

From another side, it is in all authenticity that she absolutely denies having the slightest desire to be a man. Only there, she is not let go. I mean that one interprets for example in summary terms of ‘aggressiveness’, indeed even of ‘desire for castration of the man’, things that are of a much more complex articulation, that must be articulated quite differently if we follow here what we are trying to sketch.

The whole evolution of the treatment, the way it is directed, and it is there that all the ambiguity between interpretation and suggestion takes place, tends on the contrary to indicate this term, not to use others, to the subject about something that is quite other, and no one doubts it, so to speak. The author himself underscores it enough in the way he articulates his own action, namely that it is a benevolent mother, that it is another much nicer than the other with whom the subject had to deal, who intervenes to tell her, according to the very formula that the author uses elsewhere in terms that are roughly those I am going to tell you:

‘This is my body, this is my blood…This phallus, you can trust me, man as such, absorb it, I allow you to, this phallus is what must give you force and vigor, it is the something that must resolve for you all your obsessive difficulties.’

In fact, what is given at the end of the treatment as being its result is literally this: that not a single one of the obsessions in reality has yielded, that they are simply endured, but experienced without any guilt. This is modeled strictly on what I am telling you which should normally be the result of such a mode of intervention.

Conversely, as I told you, it is also striking to see the treatment end with the fact that, at the point where he left the patient, she sends to the analyst her own son. It is certain that this action is rather astonishing, because the fact that the subject, we are told, experienced throughout her life a holy terror before this son, of whom one senses—from the context, the perspective, the images the analyst makes of him—that one senses that there was always a problem with this son. That is the least one can say.

Would not precisely the fact that on this occasion this son is offered to the analyst at the end be in a way the mark, as acting out marking what was precisely missed?

That is to say that it is at that point, at that point of mediation where the phallus is something quite other than an accessory of power, where it truly is this means, this mediation by which, at the signifying level, what happens between man and woman is symbolized.

Is this child, of whom moreover analytic experience—and I mean: what FREUD articulated of the woman’s relations to the father—showed us the equivalence between this desire for the symbolic gift of the phallus and this child who comes to substitute after? It is very precisely insofar as the child occupies the same place… – this place that was not worked through, – that was not elucidated in the treatment, namely a symbolic place …it is insofar as the subject, despite herself and in a certainly unconscious way, but in quite the same way that an acting out presents itself when something was missed in an analysis, shows that something else should have been realized.

That what in the treatment leads to this kind of intoxication of power, of goodness, of quasi-manic intoxication which is the ordinary thing and the sign of these treatments that end with an imaginary identification which is what, in the end? Nothing other than a certain way of pushing to their last consequence, of facilitating, so to speak, by the path of suggestive approval that was already in the obsessive’s defense mechanisms, the idea that the solution, so to speak, is given by the additional approval of what is now a good mother, a mother who allows one to absorb the phallus.

Must we be content, for the solution of a neurosis, with something that is there only posited at the last term of one of these components constituting neuroses as such, with a more successful symptom, so to speak, freed from the others?

I do not think we can hold ourselves to it as entirely satisfied. I do not think either that I have said everything I can say about this treatment on this point.

And today, once again time catches up with us. I will choose, at least by next time, the three or four points in the observation that will put in still better and still more value what I have just tried to articulate to you today. Then we will say a few concluding words on our formations of the unconscious to summarize the circuit that we have carried out this year.

After which, there will remain only to wait, in order to engage ourselves in a new stage next year.