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(All parts in English)

We are coming to the end of this year’s seminar that I placed under the heading of the formations of the unconscious.
Perhaps you can at least see the aptness of this title, ‘formations’: forms, relations, perhaps topology.
I had my reasons for avoiding frightening your ears right away with these words.

I think that if something must remain as a step, as a rung, more exactly as something on which one can place one’s foot in order to climb to the higher level next year, it is something that shows you that one cannot articulate anything whatsoever that properly pertains to the mechanisms of the unconscious that are the foundation of FREUD’s experience and discovery, by merely taking account of tensions considered as themselves merely the object of a sort of maturational progress that unfolds within the range of the pregenital and the genital. This on the one hand.

Nor can one merely take account of relations of identification such as apparently they are to us

• I say ‘apparently’ – given in the course of the Freudian work, if one wanted to reduce this relation to a sort of collection of personnages, if you like, in the manner of Italian comedy, in which there would come to the fore, for example, terms such as ‘the mother’, ‘the father’, even compléted by a few others. What I wanted to show is that it is impossible to articulate anything, either in this progress of the fixation of desire, or, on the other hand, in this intersubjectivity that indeed comes to the fore of our experience and of our preoccupations in analysis, if we do not situate them in relation to something that is called the conditions, the necessary relations that impose, not only on the desire of man but on the subject as such, relations of signifier.

That is why throughout this year I have tried to familiarize you with this ‘little graph’ that has seemed to me, for some time, opportune to put to use in order to support my experiences, to distinguish things that, for example, to take this signifier encountered everywhere, and for good reason since it cannot not be directly or indirectly implicated every time it is a matter, not of just any signification, but of signification as expressly engendered by the conditions that this living organism imposes on the organism, this living organism that has become the support, the prey, even the victim of speech, which is called man.

I shall take this up again today, simply to put you, as it were, at the edge of this pluri-presence, I shall say, of the signifier phallus in a determinate case, always the same, the one that has occupied us for several sessions, and simply to indicate that it is extremely important to distinguish the places where, in the subject, this signifier phallus makes its appearance.

To say, no doubt, that ‘the becoming conscious of penis envy is crucial in an analysis of female obsessional neurosis’, is to say something that goes without saying, for if one had never encountered the phallus in an analysis, whether feminine or not, of an obsessional neurosis, and even of any neurosis whatsoever, that would really be very strange.
It is possible that, by dint of pushing analysis in a certain direction, the one that is articulated in so-called ‘today’s’ psychoanalysis, namely the reduction of the fantasmatic productions of transference to what is called ‘this reality so simple’, that is to say the analytic situation, namely that there are there two persons who, of course, have nothing to do with these fantasies.

When one manages to reduce things totally to this schema, one will perhaps manage to do without the phallus entirely in the interpretation of an analysis. But we are not there yet, for all that are incomplete formulations, and in truth no analysis proceeds as one schematizes it in this little book.
Obviously we have something to do with this signifier phallus, and to say that ‘becoming conscious is the key’ in the occasion of the resolution of obsessional neurosis is naturally not to say very much.

For everything depends, of course, on the way one will interpret it, on the way one will situate it, on the way one will understand it at the different points where it appears. And at the points where it appears, it does not play a homologous function either: all this is no more reducible to a penis envy, in the sense that it would be a rivalry with the male, as indeed in this observation one nevertheless ends up, in the final analysis, formulating it, namely assimilating the patient’s relations with her husband with her analyst, with others in general, which is controuvé by the observation itself.
It is obviously not under that angle that the phallus appears. It appears at several points.

We shall try simply, without claiming, of course, to make an exhaustive analysis of an observation moreover given as an analysis not completed, and on the other hand, after all, as we have only documents that are partial but assuredly nevertheless quite well established, to allow ourselves to form a correct idea of it. I would first like to begin by making a few remarks to you that will initiate for you certain other properties of this graph that we use.

There is something that appears in this observation, which is pointed out to us as being the very acute feeling of guilt that accompanies, in the patient, her obsessions, for example her religious obsessions, and, if one may say so, the paradox represented by the so marked appearance that aims at feelings of guilt in obsessional neuroses, whereas assuredly it would seem that the subject could consider the parasitic thoughts imposed on him – as he does moreover in a correlative fashion – as something in some sense foreign to him, of which he is more the victim than the responsible party. This will perhaps allow us to try to articulate something about this feeling of guilt.

In sum, for some time now, one hardly speaks of anything but the term superego, which seems here to have covered everything.
One cannot really say that it has clarified things very much, for in truth, if you want to look at things closely, and very precisely consider what has been brought into the notion that the superego is something much older, archaic as a formation, than what had first been thought.

One had indeed first thought that the superego could be considered as the corresponding creation of the two complexes: Oedipus and castration, and, to put it plainly, as it had been written, the introjection of the character considered as eminently forbidding in the Oedipus complex, namely the paternal character. And you know that all experience forced us to show that there was an older superego; you will see that this something, which in certain respects imposed this older origin on us, was not without relation:
– neither, on the one hand, with the effects of introjection,
– nor, on the other hand, with the effects of interdiction.

But let us nevertheless try to look at things more closely. Here is an obsessional neurosis and, as in every neurosis, what we must first make appear, precisely insofar as we are not hypnotisers, insofar as we do not treat by suggestion, but that it is at a point beyond that we in some way give the subject an appointment.

At this point, which is represented here by the 2nd line, the upper line², the horizon, if you like, of signifying articulation.
And from there, the subject – as I explained to you at length last time – is confronted with his demand.

This cannot mean anything else, when we speak of this alternating process of regression and successive identification, the two alternating since insofar as he encounters one by regressing, he stops on the path of a regression that as a whole is inscribed, as it were, in this retroactive opening that opens for the subject as soon as he simply articulates his speech, that is to say insofar as speech makes arise all the backlog and all the history, up to its origin, of this demand in which his whole life as a speaking man has been inserted.

If we look at it closely, and without moreover doing anything there other than finding again what has always been articulated concerning obsessional neurosis, there is a fundamental form for obsessional neurosis that we find in this demand, on the horizon of every demand of the subject. And precisely, what in him most obstructs the articulation of this demand is this something that experience teaches you to qualify as ‘aggressiveness’, which has led us more and more toward the consideration and the access of what one can call a ‘death wish’.

The inaugural difficulty, the major difficulty before which, so to speak, the obsessional’s demand breaks, fragments, becomes disarticulated, what motivates the accumulation of all the defenses, and very primordially in great obsessives, that silence so often prolonged that you sometimes have the utmost difficulty overcoming in the course of an analysis, and I evoke it here because it is precisely what is evoked for us in the case on which I base myself, is indeed that this demand is a demand for death.

In fact it is very striking to see it absolutely spread out, repeated throughout the observation, without ever being properly articulated. As if the thing were part of I know not what natural expression of a tension that is at bottom the relation of this demand for death with the difficulty of articulation itself, which nevertheless is connoted in the same pages within a few lines, and which is absolutely never brought into relief.

And yet is that not something that demands that we pause there?
If this demand is a demand for death, if this demand is what sketches the horizon of the obsessional’s demand, it is because his first relations with the Other, as FREUD’s theory teaches us, were essentially made of this contradiction: that the demand addressed to the Other on whom everything depends, achieves, has for its horizon – for a reason that moreover at that moment is attached to the hook of the question mark…

Because we must not rush; we shall see afterward why and how that can be conceived.
It is not so simple to speak – with Mme Mélanie KLEIN – of a ‘primordial aggressive drive’. If we start from there, let us read the sort of primordial badness of this infant of whom the Marquis de SADE underscores for us that his first movement was, after all, and if he could, to bite and tear his mother’s breast.

Of course, in truth this articulation of the problem of desire in its fundamental perversity is indeed something that it is not in vain that it brings us back to that horizon of the ‘divine Marquis’ who, as you know, is not the only one of his time to have posed, in a very intense and very acute way, this question about the relations of desire and ‘nature’, about this fundamental ‘harmony’ or ‘disharmony’ that in sum constitutes the basis of this passionate interrogation that is absolutely inseparable from all the so-called philosophy of the Aufklärung, which carried all[…] of the literature of the time, on which, in older seminars – I am thinking of my first seminars – I had relied to show an analogy on which I shall return next year concerning desire, this kinship between the first interrogation and the interrogation on the limit:
– to its philosophical clarity [cf. Aufklärung],
– but also to all its accompaniment, to all its theme of literary eroticism, which is its absolutely indispensable correlative.

…So this demand for death we do not know where it comes from. Before telling ourselves that it arises from the most primordial instincts, from a nature turned against itself, let us only begin by situating it where it is, that is to say at the level where, I will not say that it is articulated, but where it prevents any articulation of the subject’s demand, where it obstructs the obsessional’s discourse, both when he is alone with himself and when he begins his analysis, when he finds himself in that disarray that our analyst describes for us on the occasion. That is to say this sort of impossibility of speaking that his analysand has at the beginning of his analysis, which translates only into reproaches, even insults, even the display, the articulation, of everything that obstructs a patient speaking to a physician:

‘…I know doctors well enough to know that among themselves they make fun of their patients[…]
You are more educated than I am[…]
It is impossible for a woman to speak to men[…]’ [R.F.P. 1950, p. 221.]

It is a deluge that simply shows there the correlative emergence of the activity of speech, of this difficulty of simple articulation, something that in no way can evoke on the horizon the basis of this demand that is already there in the fact of entering the field of analytic therapeutics, which is in fact what presents itself at once there.

This demand for death, if it is situated where we have placed it, that is to say at this horizon of speech, in this implication that constitutes the basis of every possible articulation of speech, if it is it that obstructs, I think that this schema will perhaps show you a little better that this logical articulation can also be made, but not without a few suspensions or stops of thought: that if the demand for death is something that represents for the obsessional subject this sort of impasse from which results what one improperly calls ambivalence, and which is rather this movement of rocking or seesaw in which the obsessional is sent back as to the two buffers of an impasse from which he cannot get out, if indeed this demand for death is this something that – as the schema articulates it – requires to be formulated in the place of the Other, in the discourse of the Other,
– it is not simply by reason of a story of anything whatsoever that concerns, for example, the mother as having been the object of this wish for death on account of some frustration,
– it is essentially and internally, the demand for death insofar as it concerns that Other, because that Other is the place of demand, implies the death of demand.

The demand for death cannot be sustained in the obsessional – that is to say insofar as he is organized according to the laws of signifying articulation – without in itself bringing about this sort of destruction that we call here the death of demand.
It is condemned to this endless rocking that makes it so that as soon as it sketches its articulation, this articulation is extinguished. And that is indeed what constitutes the basis of the difficulty of articulating the obsessional’s position.

It is indeed that also that makes us say that between:
– the relation of the obsessional, of the obsessional subject to his demand [S◊D],
– and this maintenance of the Other [A] that is so panic-strickenly necessary to him but that maintains him,
for without that he would be something other than an obsessional
we find this desire [d(0)] in itself annulled, but whose place is maintained, this desire that we have characterized by a Verneinung, for it is expressed, but in negative form, the one under which we effectively see it appear in analysis.

When the analysand tells us: ‘It’s not that I’m thinking of such and such a thing’, when he articulates for us what is a desire that is aggressive, disapproving, depreciative toward us, he in fact manifests there something that is indeed his desire, but he cannot manifest it – this is the fact that experience gives us concerning Verneinung – he manifests it under this denied ground.
How is it that this denied form is nonetheless correlative of a feeling of guilt, since, in sum, it is denied?

It is there, I believe, that our schema will allow us some distinctions that will serve us again later. I believe that the obscurities concerning the incidences of the superego that have corresponded to the extension of our experience concerning this instance stem very essentially from this, that it is fitting to distinguish concerning guilt: that after all there is a relation of the subject to the Law, but that guilt arises without any kind of reference to this Law. That is the fact that analytic experience has brought us.

In other words, the step, if one may say ‘naïve’, of the dialectic of the relation of ‘sin’ to the Law, since it was articulated to us in the speech of Saint PAUL, namely that ‘it is the Law that makes sin’, from which it would result – I insisted on this at one time by evoking the phrase of old KARAMAZOV: ‘If there is no God, then everything is permitted’.
It is quite clear that what experience brings us – analysis had to bring it to us and it is quite naturally one of the strangest things there is – what experience shows is that there is no need for any reference whatsoever, neither to God nor to his Law, for man literally to be steeped in guilt. It even seems that one can formulate the contrary expression, namely that ‘If God is dead – as has been said – nothing is permitted anymore’.
I have already recounted all that in its time.

How then are we going to be able to try to understand and articulate this relation as it arises in the life of the neurotic subject, which is called the appearance of the ‘feeling of guilt’? Let us refer ourselves to the first steps of analysis in this direction. On what occasion did FREUD first make it appear as fundamental, as concerning an essential subjective manifestation of the subject? It is in connection with the Oedipus complex: very exactly insofar as the contents of analysis made arise for us – what? –

– the relation of a desire that was not just any desire, a desire until then deeply hidden: the desire for the mother,
– with what? with the intervention of a character who is this father, as he emerged from the first apprehensions of the Oedipus complex: destructive.

And this Father who specifically intervenes in the form of the complexes first given by castration fantasies…
also: discovery of analysis, a discovery of which one had not the slightest suspicion before analysis, a discovery whose link, I believe, I articulated to you this year with the necessary unthinkability
…apart from the fact that the phallus has this role, very precisely, of being brought to signification, signifying an image, a privileged image, vital, namely the image of the phallus, but which here takes the function of this something that in sum is going to mark this sort of incidence, of impact, in which desire is struck by prohibition [→ d(0)].

In fact, if we want to distinguish the three stages that correspond strictly to those that are schematized there: 1,2,3 and in which everything that relates in our experience to the superego must be articulated, we shall say that, at the level of this horizon line, which precisely is the one that does not get formulated in the neurotic – it is precisely for that reason that he is neurotic – here reigns the commandment, call it whatever you like, call it the 10 commandments on the occasion, why not? Since I told you that the 10 commandments were very probably the commandements that are the laws of speech, namely that all disorders begin to enter into the functioning of speech from the moment when the 10 commandments are not respected.

Let us take them there in some form or other. It is a matter of the demand for death, and it is obviously the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ that is there on the horizon to make the drama of it. But you see that it is not either because what, as response, has that place to punish the one who kills, that the commandment effectively takes its impact.

It is very precisely because the demand for death – for reasons that have to do with the structure of the Other for man – the demand for death is equivalent to the death of demand. This is the level of the commandment.
This level of the commandment exists; it exists so well that in truth it emerges, it emerges all by itself.

Do not forget that if you read the notes that FREUD took on his case of an obsessional: The Rat Man, he will tell you…
it is the supplement published in the Standard Edition, in this very pretty complement where we see in the notes certain chronological elements appear, notes that remain quite precious to know
…he will tell you that first, what the subject speaks to him about as obsessional content are commandements that he receives. And you know the importance of these commandments that the subject receives:

‘You will pass your exam before such and such a date…’
or
‘What would happen, he says, if I received the commandment: ‘You are going to cut your throat’?’

And you know in what state of panic he enters when the commandment comes to his mind:
‘You are going to cut the old lady’s throat’, who at that moment keeps his friend far from him. We also see these commandments appear in another context, and in the clearest way, among psychotics, of whom you know that these commandements they receive, and it is indeed one of the firm points of the classification of the psychotic to know to what extent he obeys them. In short, the autonomy of this function on the horizon of the subject’s relation to the speech of the commandment is something that we can only hold to be fundamental.

This commandment can therefore remain veiled. It is veiled, it is fragmented, it does not appear except in pieces in our obsessional.
And guilt, where are we going to situate it? Guilt, as Monsieur de La PALICE would say, is a demand ‘felt as forbidden’, and in truth one usually feels there – and I will say that everything gets drowned in the term prohibition, the notion of demand remaining eluded when it seems that the two go together. This is not certain, however, as we shall see – that there is something whose essential dimension, phenomenologically, I ask you to retain, and at which one is truly astonished that no analyst, if not any phenomenologist, has taken account. Why is it ‘felt as forbidden’?

If it were purely and simply felt as forbidden because, as one says, it is forbidden, there would be no problem whatsoever. How do we see it appear in the clinic at the level of the point where we are accustomed to say that guilt intervenes? The distinctions we have made, we made them to articulate what is at stake, and they will perhaps help us to articulate what one calls neurotic guilt, which consists in what? There is nevertheless a fact that one does not articulate it as such and one does not make it a criterion. Yet it is essential to make it a criterion.

The demand is ‘felt as forbidden’, a demand, or more exactly a feeling of guilt, insofar as it is such an approach of demand – and it is precisely in that it differs from diffuse anxiety, of which you know how different it is from a demand – ‘felt as forbidden’ that calls for the emergence of the feeling of guilt; this demand is ‘felt as forbidden’ because it kills desire.

It is in the relation of desire to demand, in the fact that everything that goes in the direction of a certain formulation of demand is accompanied, by a mainspring, by a mechanism whose features we see here, the threads written in this little graph on the board, but which, precisely because it is in this little graph, precisely for that reason, cannot be felt, determined in its mainspring, lived in its mainspring by the subject.

Because the subject, he, is condemned always to be at one of these places, but he cannot be at any of these places all at the same time: that is guilt, that is this something where prohibition appears, not this time insofar as it formulates, but insofar as it strikes desire, makes it disappear, kills it. Thus there is something clear: insofar as the obsessional is condemned to conduct his battle for salvation, for his subjective autonomy, as one puts it, at the level of desire[2], everything that appears at this level of desire, even under a denied form, is linked to this guilt.

And below that, that is to say at the 3rd level, at the level that we shall call on this occasion—no one will contest this locating—that of the superego, which is called, I do not really know why, in the observation we followed in the Revue de Psychanalyse, ‘feminine superego’. Why ‘feminine’? Let us say ‘maternal’. In any case, it is ordinarily regarded as the maternal superego in all the other texts of the same register. There is an anomaly inherent in the observation itself and in that kind of obsession engendered by the fact that it is a matter there of penis envy and of something that concerns the woman as such.

In this maternal superego, this archaic superego, this superego to which are attached the effects of the primordial superego of which Mélanie KLEIN speaks, it is a matter of something, of course, that we now understand to have been put, if one may say so, in the same perspective, in the same line of sight, as what occurs at the level of the commandment, of guilt, linked in sum, you see, to the Other of the Other. [the ‘Name-of-the-Father’, keystone of the place of speech]

At the level of the first Other—insofar as it is the pure and simple support of the first demands, of demands, if I may say, emerging, of these first vagish articulations of his need at the level on which one insists so much nowadays, of the first frustrations—what do we have there?

We have what has been called dependence, and indeed it is precisely around this something called dependence that everything of the maternal superego is articulated. Here, what is it that makes it possible for us to place it in the same register and not to distinguish it fundamentally? It means that already this two-story structure that we see here must be there. If at the start there were only ‘the infant’ and ‘the mother’, if the relation were dual, it would be something entirely different from what we have articulated in the relation to the commandment, in the relation of guilt. It is very precisely because one must admit from the origin that, by the sole fact that it is a matter of the signifier, there are these two horizons of demand.

What I explained to you by telling you that even behind the most primitive demand, that of the breast and the object that the maternal breast represents, there is this doubling created in demand by the fact that demand is a demand for love and an absolute demand. A demand that symbolizes the Other as such, that thus distinguishes:
– the other as real object, capable of giving such satisfaction,
– from the Other as symbolic object that gives or refuses, what is called ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ and which is the matrix in which will crystallize those fundamental relations that are on the horizon of every demand, those relations that will be called love on the one hand, hate on the other hand, and ignorance of course.

It is because the first relation of dependence is linked to this threat called loss of love, and not simply to this threat called hunger or deprivation of maternal care, that it is something that already in itself is homogeneous with what thereafter will be organized, articulated in the perspective of the laws of speech. They are already here instant, virtual, preformed from the first demand. They are not completed, they are not articulated, and that is why an infant does not begin, from his first feeding, to be an obsessional, but from his first feeding he can already very well begin to create this gaping lack that will make it precisely in the refusal to feed that he will find the testimony demanded by him of the love of his maternal partner. In other words, we can see appear very early the manifestations of anorexia nervosa.

What specifies the case of the obsessional? What specifies the case of the obsessional, who is thus suspended precisely on the early formation, on this horizon of the relation of demand, of what here we first articulated as demand for death—demand for death is not purely and simply, in and of itself, a death-dealing tendency, it is an articulated demand. And by the sole fact that it is articulated, it is precisely for that reason
– that it does not occur at this level of relation to the other,
– that it is not a dual relation,
– that it aims, beyond the other, at his being, his symbolized being.

And that is also why moreover it is felt, lived by the subject in its return [A→γ]: it is that the subject, because he is a speaking subject and only because of that, cannot reach the Other without reaching himself, and that the demand for death is death of demand. It is within this that everything I shall call ‘the avatars of the signifier phallus’ will be situated, because in truth I see no way at all not to fall into stupor and astonishment when one sees it indeed—once one knows how to read—re-emerge at every point of this phenomenology of the obsessional. Nothing else allows one to conceive this kind of ‘poly-presence of the signifier phallus’ at the level of the different symptoms, if one does not essentially make of it, if one does not find there the confirmation of the function of the phallus as ‘signifier of the incidence of the signifier on the living’ insofar as, by its relation to speech, it is fated to fragment into all sorts of signifier effects.

What do we find? We are told that this woman is possessed by penisneid. Very well, but then why is the first thing we encounter in the observation itself concerned with her obsessions? And the first one cited to us is the obsessing fear of having contracted syphilis, which led her, it is written, to oppose, in vain moreover, the marriage of her eldest son, of this son about whom I spoke to you at great length in the significance he takes throughout the course of this observation. In the end, then, here is this: it is quite simple: miracles and sleights of hand to which we would do well always to pay attention as such, to tell ourselves that it would be fitting from time to time to make shine again a little, to polish our capacity for astonishment.

What do we see in male obsessional subjects? the fear of being contaminated and of contaminating. It is something of which ordinary experience shows us how important it is. The male obsessional has in general been initiated rather early into the dangers of so-called venereal diseases, and everyone knows the place that can hold in his psychology in a very large number of cases. I do not say that it is constant, but we are accustomed to interpret it as something that goes well beyond the rationality of the thing; this exists in HEGEL, as always.

And if things for some time now are going so well thanks to a few medicamental interventions, it remains no less that the obsessed person remains very obsessed concerning everything his impulsive acts can engender in the libidinal order, and that we, we will be accustomed to consider it as something that is what? Namely that under this libidinal impulse, the aggressive impulse shows through, that in some way the phallus is something dangerous. If we stick to the notion that the subject is in a relation, if one may say so, of narcissistic exigence toward the phallus, it appears very difficult to motivate it. Why?

Precisely because at this level the patient makes of it this use that is strictly equivalent to what a man will make of it, namely that, by the intermediary of her son, this woman considers herself as dangerous. She gives him on this occasion as, as it were, her prolongation, that is to say that consequently no penisneid stops her, she has it, in the form of this son, she has it indeed, this phallus, since it is on him that she is going to crystallize the same obsession that a male patient will make on this occasion. The infanticidal obsessions that follow, even the obsessions of poisoning and the others, I am not going to linger on them here. What one can say is that something very quickly in the observation and in all its import will come to give confirmation to what we advance on this subject, and this I read because it is worth it:

‘…the very violence of her complaints against her mother was the testimony of the immense affection she bore her.’ [p.219]

we are told, after having made a few bows and curtsies around the possibility or impossibility of a truly Oedipal relation, by brandishing arguments that are completely foreign to the question.

‘She found her of a higher social milieu than that of her father, judged her more intelligent and, above all, was fascinated by her energy, her character, her decisiveness, her authority.’ [p.219]

This is the first part of a paragraph in which it is a matter of making us see something that incontestably exists, namely the imbalance of the parental relation, the side, I would say, oppressed, even depressed, of the father in the presence of a mother who may above all have been virile. Thus one interprets the fact that the subject demands, as it were, that the phallic attribute, under some title, be linked to her.

‘The rare moments when the mother relaxed filled her with an indescribable joy. But, up to now, there has never been any question of desires to possess the mother frankly sexualized.’ [p. 219]

There is no trace of anything that resembles it. See how one expresses oneself:

‘Renée was linked to her on an exclusively sadomasochistic plane. The mother-daughter alliance played here with an extreme rigor and any transgression of the pact provoked a movement of an extreme violence which, until recent times, was never objectified. Any person inserting himself into this union was the object of wishes of death…’ [p. 219]

This point is truly important, and you will not find it only in obsessional neuroses.

But these powerful ties of daughter to mother, under whatever angle we see their incidence in our analytic experience, this kind of knot where we find ourselves once again before something that goes beyond a kind of distinction, I shall say, the carnal distinction between beings, that makes what is expressed there exactly this ambiguity, this ambivalence, as I called it a moment ago, that makes the demand for death equivalent to the death of demand, but that further shows us that the demand for death is there—I say nothing new, for FREUD perceived it very well on the occasion—the demand for death that Madame Mélanie KLEIN will try to refer for us to the subject’s ‘primordial aggressive drives’.

But the observation shows us that it is not simply the tie that unites the subject to the mother, the demand for death; it is the mother’s demand itself. It is insofar as the mother bears within herself this demand for death—and the whole observation shows it to us—that she exerts it on this unfortunate paternal character, a gendarmerie brigadier, who despite his kindness and his gentleness of which the patient speaks first, shows himself all his life aggrieved, depressed, taciturn, not managing to overcome the mother’s rigidity nor to triumph over his wife’s attachment to a first love, moreover platonic, jealous and breaking his mutism only for a demand from which he always emerged defeated.

No one doubts, of course, that the mother is there for something. We are told that one translates that under the angle and under the form of what one calls ‘the castrating mother’. On the occasion, perhaps, there is reason to look at things more closely and to see that, in sum, here the term ‘demand for death’ is worth much more for this man than ‘castration’, ‘privation of the loved object’, which the mother seems to have been.

And the inauguration in him of this depressive position is indeed that which FREUD teaches us to recognize as being determined by a wish for death upon oneself. But upon oneself insofar as it aims at what? A loved and lost object. In short, the dialectic of the demand for death, insofar as it is already and here present in the previous generation, is it the mother who incarnates it?

It is this demand for death insofar as precisely it is here mediated by nothing, not at the level of the subject, for if it were mediated by nothing at the level of the subject, if there were not this Oedipal horizon in sum that allows this demand to appear on the horizon of speech and not in its immediacy, we would not have an obsessional but a psychotic.

By contrast, in the relation between the father and the mother, this demand for death for the subject is in no way mediated by anything that testifies here to a respect for the father, to a placing in a position of authority and support of the Law by the mother with regard to the father. The demand for death in question at the level where the subject experiences it and sees it being exercised between the mother and the father is a demand for death directly exercised, directly manifested in this something by which the father turns aggression against himself: grief, quasi-deafness, and depression.

It is quite different from this demand for death that could be in question, that is always in question in any intersubjective dialectic and that is expressed before a tribunal when the prosecutor says: ‘I demand death’. And he does not demand it from the subject in question; he demands it from a third party who is the judge, and that is the normal Oedipal position.

Thus, in the midst of what context is the penisneid—or what is called such—of the subject brought to play its role. We see it there in the form of this dangerous weapon. What does that mean? It is there only as signifier of the danger manifested by any emergence of desire in the context of this demand. And indeed, this character of signifier, we shall see it even in the details of certain of the subject’s obsessions. One of her first obsessions was very pretty: it was to fear putting pins in her parents’ bed—and why?—to prick her mother, not her father.

That is the first level of appearance of the phallic signifier. Here what is it? It is the signifier of this desire insofar as dangerous, of this desire insofar as guilty. It seems to me that it is not the same function in which it appears, for example at another moment. Moreover it does not appear under the same form but in an entirely clear way, under its form of image after all, everywhere I showed it to you. There, it is veiled.

It is in the symptom, it comes from elsewhere, it is fantasmatic interference, that is to say that it is for us, as analysts, that it suggests the place where it exists as fantasy. But it seems to me that it is something else when this phallus appears in a quite other function, namely when it ‘projects itself’, if one may say, in front of the image of the host for the subject.

I already alluded to these kinds of profanatory obsessions by which the subject is inhabited, and there, it seems to us indeed that if, insofar as religious life, under this profoundly reworked form, infiltrated with symptoms in which it presents itself in the obsessional and which moreover, by a kind of curious conformity—this religious life, and especially this sacramental life—proves so appropriate to give to the obsessional’s symptoms the path, the furrow into which it flows so easily, it is nevertheless indeed insofar as, especially in the Christian religion…
I do not have much practice of obsession among Muslims for example, but it would be worth seeing how they manage, I mean what office on the occasion, on the horizon of their beliefs as it is structured in Islam, comes here to be implicated in obsessional phenomenology
…assuredly in Christianity one cannot not see…
and each time FREUD had an obsessional—whether ‘The Rat Man’ or ‘The Wolf Man’—of Christian formation, he indeed showed its importance in their evolution and in their economy
…one nevertheless cannot not see that by its articles of faith, the Christian religion places us before this effectively astonishing, daring solution—it is the least one can say, brazen—to make effectively be borne by something that is ‘man-god’, an incarnated person, precisely to make be borne by him this function—since he is the Word—this function of the signifier in which we say is marked precisely the action of the signifier on life as such.

The Christian λόγος[logos] insofar as it is the incarnate λόγος[logos], gives the precise solution to this mystery of the relations of man and speech, and it is not for nothing precisely that the incarnate God was called the Word. That at the level of the very symbol, ever renewed, of this incarnation the subject makes the signifier phallus appear, which substitutes itself there for her, and which of course does not as such belong to the religious context, we still do not have to be astonished, if what we say is true, to see it appear in that place.

But when the subject sees it appear in that place, it is quite certain that it plays there a quite other role than where we first saw it interpreted. And I believe that it is then quite abusive, at a later point of the observation, to interpret the function of the signifier phallus as homogeneous with the angle under which it intervened. Here for example, at the level of the symptom when, at a period much more advanced in the observation, the subject communicates to her analyst this fantasy:

‘I dreamed that I was crushing Christ’s head with kicks, and that head resembled yours.’

It is certain that at that moment the function of the phallus is here identified, not, as one believes one must say, with the analyst insofar as he would be bearer of the phallus, but insofar as it is quite obviously at this level of transference, at this point of the history of transference, that the analyst is identified with the phallus. He is identified with the one who, at that moment, incarnates for the subject precisely this effect of the signifier, this relation to speech that she at that moment begins to project a little more by the effect of a certain number of effects of relaxation.

And to interpret it homogeneously in terms of penisneid at that moment is precisely to miss the opportunity to put the patient in relation to what is deepest in her situation. Namely, to notice perhaps the relation that, in a distant time, was made by her between,
– on the one hand, this something of x that fundamentally provoked toward the Other this demand for death, for death of demand,
– and on the other hand the very first apperception, the form under which for her rivalry first appeared as intolerable, namely on the occasion the mother’s desire for that distant love that distracted her both from her husband and from her child, for example.

Assuredly, in any case, the fact that the phallus here—and in a repeated way for there is a 2èmeexemple that is given after—appears in this position, namely somewhere that must be situated at the level of the signifier of the Other as such insofar as reached, insofar as barred [A], insofar as identical to the deepest signification that the Other has reached for the subject, must not be neglected as such.

And on the other hand, when the phallus appears at another moment of the analysis, at a moment of the analysis that is slightly subsequent to it, because at that moment already many interpretations have entered into line of account that brought it to light under that angle, namely in these dreams where the patient—it is one of the most common dreams, which is observed, I would say, in most neuroses—where the patient realizes herself as phallic being, that is to say sees one of her breasts replaced by a phallus, even a phallus situated between her two breasts, it is one of the most frequent dream fantasies one can encounter, the question, I must say, seems to me linked on this occasion to something quite other than a desire, as one says, ‘of masculine identification with phallic possession’.

Indeed, one speculates: if she sees her own breasts transformed into penises, does she not displace onto the man’s penis the oral aggressiveness directed primitively against the maternal breast? It is an act of reasoning. But on the other hand, if one observes the extreme extension, under its given form, of the fact that these forms themselves can be—this is well known—essentially polyphallic, I mean that as soon as there is more than one phallus, I would say almost that we find ourselves before an entirely fundamental image, that the ‘Ephesian DIANA’ gives us enough, in this kind of streaming of breasts of which her whole body, as it were, is made.

Here is what this patient sees, what follows immediately, I mean that it follows immediately the first two attempts and is considered as confirming them moreover, since the analyst has already made at that moment the equivalence of the shoe with the phallus:

‘I have my shoe repaired by a cobbler, then I climb onto a platform adorned with blue, white, red lanterns, where there are only men—my mother is in the crowd and admires me.’ [p. 225]

Can we here be content to speak of penisneid? Is it not evident that the relation to the phallus is here of another order than the dream itself in question, and indicates that it is linked to a relation of exhibition, of exhibition not before those who bear it, those other men who are with her on the platform and of which it is almost too good to say, the blue, white, red lanterns evoke for us there all sorts of backdrops diversely obscene, but it is before her mother, and as such, that she exhibits herself. In other words, we find ourselves here before this compensatory fantasmatic relation of which I spoke last time: this relation of power no doubt, but of power with regard to the third party that is her mother.

And that is something that occurs at this level in the relation where the subject is with the image of her fellow, of this little other, of the image of the body, and what is to be studied is precisely the function of this fantasmatic relation in the subject’s balance. And to interpret it and to assimilate it purely and simply to the function and to the appearance of the phallus at the other points is also something that testifies, I would say, to a lack of criterion in the orientation of interpretation.

For in the end, toward what will all the interventions of the analyst in this observation tend?

To facilitate in her what he calls becoming aware of I know not what lack or nostalgia for the penis as such, by facilitating the outlet of her fantasies, by centering her on this fantasy as such, as being a fantasy of lesser power, whereas most of the facts go against this interpretation.

What does the analyst do by restoring to the patient or to the subject the legitimate phallus? He changes its meaning for her. I mean by that that one does something that amounts more or less to teaching her to love her obsessions, for in fact that is what is given to us as the balance sheet of this therapy: the obsessions have not diminished, simply the patient no longer feels them as guilty, which is produced by a certain intervention essentially centered on the weave of fantasies and on the valorization of this fantasy as a fantasy of rivalry with the man, supposed, by a simple supposition, transferred from I know not what aggressiveness toward the mother whose root is in no way reached. It is something that leads to this: that, in sum, the weave of the obsessions is, by the authorizing operation of the analyst, disjoined from this fundamental demand for death.

But I would say that to operate thus, that is to say to legitimize in the end her obsessions—for one can only legitimize in a block, to the full extent that the fantasy is authorized by interpretation—is that the obsession of the genital relation is consummated as such. I mean that from the moment when the subject learns to love her obsessions as such, insofar as it is they that are invested with the full signification of what is happening to her, we see develop, at the end of the observation, all sorts of intuitions no doubt extremely exalting.

Please refer back to it, because the hour is too late for me to be able today to read it to you, but assuredly this has entirely the aspect of that style of narcissistic effusion that some have highlighted as a phenomenon occurring at the end of analyses, and about which moreover the author does not entertain too many illusions:

‘Positive transference—he writes—became more definite, with its Oedipus characteristics very strongly pregenitalized…’

And it is on a note of profound incompletion, and I must say of very few illusions concerning a truly genital solution, as one puts it, concerning the outcome of this analysis, that he himself concludes.

What does not at all seem to be seen there is precisely that this is in close correlation with the very mode of interpretation, the centering of an interpretation on something that in the end aims at the reduction of demand rather than at its fundamental elucidation. And this is all the more paradoxical nowadays, in that one is nevertheless accustomed, for example, to show the importance of the interpretation of aggressiveness as such. Perhaps this term precisely is too vague for practitioners always to find their bearings in it, and that the term demand for death, which would be advantageously substituted for it in German, would be what it is required to reach as the level of the subjective articulation of demand.

I would like, in closing, since I alluded a moment ago to something that was called ‘The Commandments’, to draw your attention—since I also spoke of Christianity—to something that is not precisely one of the least mysterious commandments of what one could call, not a morality, for in truth it is not a moral commandment, it is a commandment precisely grounded on identification, it is the one that, on the horizon of all commandments, is promoted by Christian articulation under the term of:

‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’.

I do not know whether you have ever paused over what that entails. It entails all sorts of rather astonishing objections. First the beautiful souls will cry out:

– ‘As yourself!’ but more:

– ‘Why as yourself? That is very little!’

On the other hand, people of greater experience will say to themselves:

– ‘But after all, is it really certain that one loves oneself?’

Experience proves to us that we have the most contradictory feelings about ourselves, the strangest, and that, after all, this reference to an ‘yourself’ suddenly seems to put egoism into a certain perspective at the heart of things and to make of it the measure, the module, the benchmark of love. It is all the same one of the things that surprises the most. I believe that in truth these objections, which are in some way entirely valid and which one could in sum very easily embody by the impossibility of responding to this kind of interpellation in the first person.

No one has ever supposed that to this ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ an ‘I love my neighbor as myself’ could respond, because there, obviously, the weakness of this formulation bursts before everyone’s eyes.

In fact, I believe that if something allows one to pause over this formulation as over something that interests us deeply and that, in some way, illustrates what I have called here the horizon of the commandment, the horizon of speech, it is indeed something that makes it so that, if we articulate it from where it must set out, that is to say from the place of the Other, if symmetrically and in parallel to the point ‘You are the one who kills me’ that I was showing you here as underlying the taking up of position of the Other at the simple level of the first demand, the ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ is a circle, and ‘you’ has led us to recognize in this ‘yourself’ nothing other than the ‘you’ at the level at which the commandment itself is articulated, to be completed by an ‘as yourself’:

‘As yourself, you are, at the level of speech, the one whom you hate in the demand for death, whom you hate because you do not know him.’

It is at this level that the Christian commandment joins the one that gives us the horizon point where FREUD’s injunction is articulated: ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.’ It is still the same thing that another wisdom expresses in the ‘You are’ that must in the end complete an authentic and full assumption of the subject in his own speech: that he recognize himself where he is at this horizon of speech, which is the one without which nothing in analysis can be articulated, except to produce false paths and misrecognitions.

[End of the seminar 1957-58: ‘The formations of the unconscious’]