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(All parts in English)

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

LACAN

To take things up again where we left them, I will tell you that today I intend to begin taking you
into this region, which can be said to have been delimited by what we said last time, but which is exactly the one
in which we have been moving forward from the start in this commentary on the Technical Writings, the region more exactly comprised between
– the formation of the symbol,
– and the discourse of the ego.

Today, in the seminar that we are going to continue together, I have given the title: « Analysis of discourse and analysis of the ego ».
I cannot say that I will fulfill so ambitious a title in a single session; it is rather a way of opening up for you
onto a certain number of problems and points of view.

I will say that, by setting these two terms in opposition, I am doing something that takes the place of the classic opposition between the analysis of the material,
as one says, and the analysis of resistances. In fact, to invoke a term that was highlighted last time by Mr. HYPPOLITE,
the use of the term Aufhebung in the text on Verneinung, which he was kind enough to comment for us by reminding you of the
very particular, very complex, workable meaning, for in German this term is at the same time ‘to negate’, ‘to suppress’,
but also ‘to preserve in suppression’, ‘to lift up’.

We have here, evidently, an example of a concept that could not be too deeply explored in order to reflect on what we are doing
in this dialogue, as psychoanalysts have noted for some time. Of course, we are dealing with the subject’s ego
with all its limitations, its defenses, its whole character, and one can say that the whole literature of analytic writings
is, as it were, embarrassed to define exactly what this mode of relation is, what this mode of action is, what this function is
that is indeed played by this ego with which we are dealing in the operation, the progress in which it turns out that we are prompted,
by the situation, to lead it, to make it advance.

It is certain that all the discussions and recent elaborations that have been made around this function of the ego, those that speak
of this ego of the analysand as having to be the solid point, the ally of the analyst in the great analytic work, have always shown
in their content and their progress some singular contradictions.

For, as I have taken care to emphasize on many occasions, at many turning points, it is very difficult—unless one ends up with the notion
of a kind, not only of bipolarity, of a bi-functioning of the ego, but, properly speaking, of splitting, a radical distinction
between two egos—to conceive how this ego of analysis, no less than a great philosophical tradition,
presents itself as master of errors, seat of illusions, locus of a passion that is its own and essentially tends toward misrecognition.

There are terms—when one reads them in this language, sometimes a bit disconcerting because of that thing-like character that is Anna FREUD’s
in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence—I assure you that there are paragraphs in her book where one has at once the feeling:
– that she speaks of the ego as something that is in the atmosphere and the style of understanding that we are trying to maintain here,
– and, on the other hand, that she speaks of the little man who is in man, something that would have a sort of subjective life,
autonomous within the subject, and that would be there defending itself: ‘Father, keep to the right. Father, keep to the left’ against what may assail it, from without as from within.

But on the other hand, if we take it from the angle of a description in the moralist style, she unquestionably speaks of the ego
as the seat of a certain number of passions that are[…] in a style not unworthy of what LA ROCHEFOUCAULD can say and point out at any moment as ‘the ruses of self-love’.

This situation of a dynamic function, to call things by their name, of the ego in the analytic dialogue, therefore remains…
and this appears even better every time we have approached the principles of technique
…up to now, it seems, for lack of a rigorous situation, profoundly contradictory.

I believe many of you have read this book by Anna FREUD, which is fairly widely read, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.
It is extremely instructive.
And certainly one can identify in it, because it is a fairly rigorous book, in a way the points in which there appear
in her very discourse, precisely because it has a certain rigor, the flaws in her demonstration, which are even more perceptible
when we approach what she tries to give us, namely examples. What she defines, for example, the very significant passages when she tries to tell us what the function of the ego is. It is quite certain that indeed she tells us:

« In analysis, the ego manifests itself only through its defenses… »

That is, insofar as it opposes what is properly speaking analytic work. Does that mean that everything that opposes
analytic work is an ego defense? She acknowledges elsewhere that this cannot be maintained; she acknowledges
that there are other elements of resistance than the ego’s defenses. And that is how I began to approach the problem
with you, in the slant we have taken, FREUD’s Technical Writings. Consequently, there are[…] many problems
addressed here if one wants to think in a rigorous way, that is, pen in hand, from this text that has the value of a kind of
legacy, really well transmitted, of FREUD’s last elaboration around the ‘ego’.

Someone close to us in the Society [Henri Hey ?], one day used, speaking of Anna FREUD, a term—he was seized,
I do not know why, by a lyrical impulse, this dear comrade—he called her ‘the plumb line of psychoanalysis’ at the Congress of 1950.
Well, a plumb line is not enough in architecture; there are a few other additional instruments, a spirit level for example.
In any case… ‘the plumb line’ is not bad; it allows us to locate the vertical of certain problems. It will serve as an introduction
to what you are going to see.

I wish to take up today, now, the tradition of the seminar. I believe this is not a bad introduction to something
I am going to ask Miss GÉLINIER to present to you at the heart of our problem, namely an article by Melanie KLEIN
entitled « The importance of symbol formation in the development of the ego ». I do not believe it is a bad way
to introduce it [the intervention of Miss Gélinier] to propose to you a text by Anna FREUD concerning what she calls
the way in which she understands the analysis of children, and especially ego defenses, in an analytic technical example.

Here, for example, is a small example she brings us; it is, she says: ‘a young patient who is being analyzed for a state of severe anxiety
that disturbs her life and her studies…’, and who is being analyzed to obey her mother:

« In doing so—she says—her behavior toward me remains friendly and frank, but I nevertheless observe that she carefully avoids in her accounts
making the slightest allusion to her symptom and passes over in silence the anxiety attacks she undergoes in the interval between sessions. When it happens that I insist on bringing the symptom into the analysis or on interpreting the anxiety revealed by certain data in the associations, the patient’s friendly behavior is immediately altered. Each time she pours out at me a torrent of ironic remarks and mockery. I fail completely in trying to connect this attitude of the sick girl to her behavior toward her mother. The young girl’s conscious and unconscious relations with her mother offer a very different picture. Her irony, her constantly renewed sarcasms, disconcert the analyst and, for a certain time, make continuation of the treatment useless. However, a more thorough analysis later shows that banter and derision do not constitute, properly speaking, a transference reaction and are in no way linked to the analytic situation. The patient resorts to this maneuver, directed against herself, whenever feelings of tenderness, desire, or anxiety are on the point of emerging into consciousness. The more powerful the surge of affect, the more vehemence and acrimony the young girl puts into ridiculing herself. The analyst attracts these defensive reactions only secondarily because she encourages the appearance in consciousness of the patient’s feelings of anxiety. Knowledge of the content of the anxiety, even when the patient’s other statements allow its exact interpretation, remains inoperative as long as every attempt to draw nearer to the affect only intensifies the defense. It was possible in analysis to make the content of the anxiety conscious only after succeeding in bringing up into consciousness and thereby rendering inoperative the mode of defense against affects by ironic devaluation, a process which until then had automatically taken place in all the circumstances of the patient’s life. From the historical point of view, this defensive procedure by ridicule and irony is explained, in our patient, by an identification with her deceased father who had wanted to teach his daughter self-mastery and mocked her every time she let herself go to sentimental manifestations. The method of defense against affect thus fixes here the memory of a tenderly loved father. The technique required in this case is first of all to analyze the patient’s defense against her affects, which then makes it possible to study her resistance in the transference. Only at that moment does it become possible truly to analyze the anxiety and its prehistory. »

Does it not seem to you that in this short text, what we see in the form of this necessity, this need, so to speak,
to analyze the ego’s defense—what is it about? It is about nothing other than a correlative of an error. You see it in the text:
it is insofar as Anna FREUD immediately took things from the angle of the dual relationship, between herself and the patient, exactly,
insofar as she herself—Anna FREUD—acknowledges that she took the patient’s defense for what it appeared as,
namely an irony, even an aggression against her, Anna FREUD, that is, very precisely insofar as she felt, perceived,
on the plane of her ego, Anna FREUD’s own ego—you see how this connects to what I was elaborating, or commenting, indicating, in
the lecture about which I was putting that question to you a moment ago—and insofar as she took the manifestations—let us call them,
and that is very accurate—of ego defense, she took them, I would say, in a dual relationship with her, Anna FREUD, and she wanted immediately
at the same time to make of them a manifestation of transference according to the incomplete formula—although often given, to the point
that it can pass for classic—of the reproduction of a situation, without otherwise specifying how this situation is structured.

In other words, she immediately began to interpret in this sense: to seek to understand the [analytic] relation according
to the prototype of the dual relation, that is, the subject’s relation to his mother. And she found herself, so to speak, before a position
that not only got stuck, but was perfectly sterile.

And what does she call ‘having analyzed the defense against affects’? It does not seem that one can, from this text, see in it anything other
than her own understanding, Anna FREUD’s understanding, that it was not on this path that she could progress. In other words,
we find ourselves once again before this problem on which, I believe, I place the clearest distinguishing emphasis
by showing you the difference between:
– this dual interpretation where the analyst enters into an ego-to-ego rivalry with the analysand,
– and the interpretation that makes some progress—in what?—in the direction of the subject’s symbolic structuring, which is beyond the current structure of his ego.

In other words, we return to the question: what Bejahung, what assumption by the ego, what yes is involved in analytic progress?
What is the Bejahung that must be obtained and that constitutes the revelation, the essential unveiling in the progress of an analysis?
Somewhere, FREUD, in a writing that is not outside our circle, since he himself calls it ‘On psychoanalytic technique’,
which is in the Abrégé de psychanalyse, tells us something like this: ‘There is a pact that is concluded…’ which defines entry
into the analytic situation; this, by a pact concluded, is a way of presenting things, between the analysand and the analyst:

« A pact is concluded. The patient’s sick ego promises us total frankness, that is, the free disposal of everything that
his self-perception delivers to him. On our side, we assure him the strictest discretion and place at his service our experience in interpreting
material influenced by the unconscious. Our knowledge makes up for his ignorance and allows the ego to recover and govern the lost domains
of his psyche. It is this pact that constitutes the whole analytic situation. »

[Wir schließen einen Vertrag miteinander. Das kranke Ich verspricht uns vollste Aufrichtigkeit, d. h. die Verfügung über allen Stoff, den ihm seine Selbstwahrnehmung liefert, wir sichern ihm strengste Diskretion zu und stellen unsere Erfahrung in der Deutung des vom Unbewußten beeinflußten Materials
in seinen Dienst. Unser Wissen soll sein Unwissen gutmachen, soll seinem Ich die Herrschaft über verlorene Bezirke des Seelenlebens wiedergeben.
In diesem Vertrag besteht die analytische Situation.]

Well, the question I was posing in my last lecture, more or less formulated, implied, was this:
our knowledge no doubt comes to the aid of his ignorance, but there is also our ignorance, an ignorance that is not only
our ignorance of the situation—I would say situation in the register of the symbolic determination of his subject, the one who is facing us—
there is also, of course—why not?—a certain share of ignorance in the locating, I would say the structural locating,
of these various symbolic situations.

The original character determines a certain symbolic constellation in the subject’s unconscious, a constellation that must always be conceived
as structured, organized according to a certain order, and an order that is complex. It is not for nothing that the word ‘complex’ came…
we can say by a kind of internal force, for you know it was not FREUD himself who invented it, it was JUNG
…to the surface of analytic theory; it indicates sufficiently, by itself, that when we go to discover the unconscious,
what we encounter are structured, organized, complex situations.

That FREUD gave us what we can call the first model, the standard, in the form of the Oedipus complex…
You know well, I think, at least those of you who have followed this seminar for a long time have been able to see…
precisely with regard to the commentary on the least questionable cases, because truly the most richly delineated
by FREUD himself, namely two, even three, of his five major psychoanalyses
…know how, as we deepen the relation of the Oedipus complex, we see how many problems and ambiguities it poses.

And I would say that the whole development of analysis, in sum, has been made by a successive highlighting of each of the tensions
that are implied in this triangle, and that forces us to see something quite other than a massive, triangular block that one summarizes
in the classic formulation of sexual attraction toward the mother and rivalry with the father. You know that in the midst of the Oedipus complex,
and from the start, there is the profoundly symmetrical character in the structure of each of these dual relations, in any case those that connect
the subject both to the father and to the mother.

That, in particular, the distinction between the narcissistic or imaginary relation with the father, and the symbolic relation, and also a certain relation
that we must indeed call real, or residual, in relation to this architecture which is properly what concerns us
and interests us in analysis, already shows sufficiently at one point the complexity of the structure. In short, it is not inconceivable
that some other direction of research may allow us to elaborate the Oedipal myth as it has been formulated up to now.

Moreover, we have hardly moved off the ground, despite all the richness of the material, as one says, that has been approached, included within
this Oedipal relation. We have hardly approached much more than the schema given to us by FREUD himself.
It is not at all unthinkable that we will not succeed—and I think that over time I will succeed in showing it to you—in giving,
of the Oedipus complex, while maintaining its essential core, of course, for it is—you will see why—truly fundamental.

Not only fundamental for every understanding of the subject, but it is fundamental for every symbolic realization
by the subject of that self which is the Id, the unconscious, which is not simply a series of unorganized drives…
as a part of FREUD’s theoretical elaboration would tend to make one think, going so far as to formulate
that only the ego has in the psyche an organization, always and essentially[…]
…but speech instituting the subject in a certain complex relation.

The progress of analysis, we saw it last time with regard to the two stages that FREUD brings out of the appearance
of the repressed in the denied, and of the fact that the reduction even of this negation does not give us, for all that, on the part of the subject,
something that is—what?—precisely the Bejahung.

Here one would have to look closely at the value of the criteria we require, on which moreover we agree with the subject,
to obtain a particularly satisfactory Bejahung. You would see how in fact the problem is complex, which one takes up
from the angle of what one might call the authentication by the subject of what FREUD himself calls analytic reconstruction,
where the source of evidence lies, these gaps by means of which the memory must be ‘relived’.

What does that mean? We know well that ‘relived’ is something of a particular nature, which calls into question
the whole meaning of what is called ‘the sense of reality’; to put it plainly, it is quite rightly that FREUD reminds us
that we will, after all, never be able to trust memory completely.

What is it, then, that we require, or more exactly that with which we are satisfied when the subject tells us that indeed
things have reached that point of click-over—as FENICHEL writes somewhere—where the subject has the feeling of a genuine[…].
What is it? It is certain that this brings us to the heart of the problem of the sense of reality.

And you saw, with regard to the commentary, the other day, by Mr. HYPPOLITE, that I pushed in this direction an indication about
the very significant example of the Wolf Man, namely something that manifests itself more or less like this,
and that almost looks too transparent, too concrete, perceptible under this quasi-algebraic form: in sum, the real…
or what is perceived as real, if you remember what I had you notice,
as in the genesis of the hallucination of the Wolf Man,
…the real is, in sum, that something which absolutely resists symbolization. And ultimately, the maximum of the sense of the real
in its burning manifestation, namely that unreal reality, hallucinatory, whose term you will see reappear in a moment
in the text by Melanie KLEIN, there is nothing more manifest in the so-called sense of the real than when the real gives, corresponds to the real.

And there, what is most striking—well indeed, it corresponds to a stage of the Wolf Man’s life: symbolization, the realization
of the meaning of the genital plane, was verworfen, as I pointed out to you. Thus we have no reason to be surprised that
certain interpretations, called ‘content interpretations’, are indeed not only not at all realized by the subject,
are neither realized nor symbolized, since precisely they manifest themselves at a stage where they cannot in any degree
give the subject the only revelation that is possible of his situation in this forbidden domain, which is his unconscious.

They cannot give it to him as long as it is not complete. That it is precisely because we are still
either on the plane of negation, or on the plane of the negation of negation, but something has not been crossed, which is precisely
beyond discourse, which requires a certain leap in discourse, and precisely to the extent that there is only ‘Aufhebung’
of repression, and not disappearance of this repression.

I return, to conclude clearly, to what I mean in Anna FREUD’s text: what she calls ‘analysis of defenses against affect’
is only the step of understanding her own understanding, by which she realizes that she is going astray.
Once she has realized that she is going astray, by considering, starting from the feeling that the subject’s defense against affect
is a defense against herself, and where she, for[…] her part, increased herself to substitute herself for the subject’s mother, to make him understand
that this is an attitude—that is what she says when she says she has ‘analyzed the transference’.

It is when she abandons this first step that she can truly analyze transference resistance. And that leads her to what?
To someone who is not there, to a third party, to something that—she tells us no more—must strongly resemble
in the general structure the position of Dora.

That is, insofar as indeed the subject identified with her father, and that in this identification, indeed, her ego was structured
in a certain way, and that this structuring of the ego, which is designated there as a defense, is indeed a part,
the most superficial part of this identification through which one reaches the deepest level of recognition of the subject’s situation
in the symbolic order, that is, that by which she assumes, in an order of symbolic relation which is the one that covers
the whole field of human relations, and whose initial cell is, if you like, the Oedipus complex, and where the subject is situated,
that is, there, in a way where perhaps she comes into conflict with her sex.

I yield the floor to Miss GÉLINIER, who will show you, in opposition to what in Anna FREUD is always first,
an approach from the ego, as if the ego were really Anna FREUD: a person armed with a plumb line, as she emphasizes moreover,
it is first a median position, rational to the maximum, in the sense in which we heard it the other day after the commentary
on FREUD’s text, an essentially intellectualist position, if one can say so; she says it somewhere:
everything must be conducted in analysis from this median, moderate position, which is that of the ego.

And it is first from a kind of education, of persuasion, of approaching the ego that everything starts, and it is there that everything must return.
We are going to see, in contrast with this position of Anna FREUD—and it is not for nothing that these two ladies who have
analogies have Merovingian rivalries opposed each other—for you are going to see from where and what is the point of view of Melanie KLEIN,
to approach problems that are those posed by a particularly difficult subject, about whom one asks:
– how Anna FREUD could have, with him, made use of this kind of position of prior re-education of an ego that we call strong, weak. But what does that mean, in analysis, ‘strong ego’, ‘weak ego’?
– How for Melanie KLEIN the problem is approached?
…and thereby to be able to judge at the same time which one is better aligned with the axis of the Freudian discovery.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

It is an article that dates from 1930 and is entitled Importance of symbol formation in the formation of the ego. It seemed difficult to me
to summarize it. It was necessary to juxtapose notions that I had difficulty connecting. I am not going to repeat its plan exactly.
I am going to begin by presenting the case of the child in question, a four-year-old boy, so that the question posed appears
more concretely.

I will then tell you—this is the introduction of the chapter—how she generally conceives the passage from a certain stage to another,
and then how she applies these considerations, how she understands through these considerations the child’s case,
the beginning of the treatment she gives us, her understanding of the treatment. To finish, I will say how I dealt with it in the face of that.

It is a child, a four-year-old boy, who has the following characteristics:
– he has a general level of development that corresponds, she says, to 15 to 18 months,
– a very limited vocabulary, and more than limited, incorrect: he distorts words and uses them inappropriately most of the time, whereas at other moments one realizes that he knows their meaning.

She insists on the most striking fact: this child does not have the desire to make himself understood; he does not seek to communicate;
she finds that he has no adaptation to the real and no emotional relation; he is devoid of affect in all the circumstances
of everyday life: he does not react, neither to the presence nor to the absence of his mother or his nurse; he shows no anxiety
in any circumstance; he does not play. His only more or less playful activities would be to emit sounds and to take pleasure
in sounds without meaning… to which one cannot give meaning, in noises. He is completely insensitive
to physical pain: he does not react when he hurts himself.

With regard to adults—mother, father, nurse—he has two attitudes in turn. She explains this with regard to vocabulary: either he systematically opposes,
for example when one wants to make him repeat words: either he does not repeat them or he distorts them, or else if he
pronounces the words correctly, he seems to take away their meaning, and he mills them, he repeats them in a stereotyped way, although
the words are correct, it no longer means anything. Moreover, he never seeks any caress from those close to him, from his parents.

And she ends the description by insisting on his physical clumsiness. Two things: on the one hand he is clumsy in general,
and poorly coordinated; more precisely, he shows himself incapable of holding scissors and knives, whereas he handles very well
his table spoon.

These are the elements of the child’s history. At birth, the mother did not have enough milk, and it was not good.
She nevertheless insisted on nursing him for seven weeks, and for seven weeks he wasted away continuously.
At the end of seven weeks, a wet nurse was proposed, but he refused the breast. Then the bottle was proposed, he refused it.
When the age of solid foods arrived, he also refused them: he does not want to bite.

From the outset he had significant digestive troubles; a little later, hemorrhoids and an anal prolapse. The child is
always a severe anorexic; he always has been; it is the symptom that will yield most difficultly to treatment. She says that in addition
this child has never been surrounded by true love. His mother was anxious, not very maternal. His father and his nurse, very indifferent.
At two years old he received a positive affective input: a new nurse who, she, was loving and affectionate, and a grandmother with whom
he had contact. From that moment, the child was clean. He came to control his excrement and to desire it, for the nurse,
it seems, to please her.

He made what Melanie KLEIN calls an attempt at adaptation. He partially managed, learned a certain number of words,
suddenly increased his vocabulary, but continued to use it mechanically. He showed himself sensitive to the nurse’s prohibitions,
one only concerning masturbation: she called him a ‘naughty boy’, and since then he has no longer—at least he was no longer seen to—
masturbate. So a certain improvement: increase of vocabulary, attempt at adaptation to objects.

But the anorexia continues; he still does not hold knives and scissors any better, and refuses to take in any food whatsoever,
other than liquid or mush. What Melanie KLEIN emphasizes in ending this description is that despite these advances
made through the presence of the nurse, he had no emotional contact with the nurse: a few superficial advances,
but real emotional contact did not exist for all that.

The problem Melanie KLEIN poses in taking this child into treatment is simply: why such an absence
of contact with human beings and with things? What is happening? How to describe such a situation?

I ask you now to set aside the child’s clinical case, whose name is DICK, to return to the theoretical considerations
that form the beginning of the chapter and in reality introduced this case. These theoretical considerations, I had a great deal
of difficulty summarizing. What seemed difficult to me is that she continually moves, in the text, from the level of contents,
of what the child says, to the level of structures, and without saying that she moves there. And one is always lost between the two.

She centers these theoretical considerations around the following problem: how can a child, a human being, pass
from the sadistic-oral stage—I will specify—to the next stage, which is the stage of symbolism? The sadistic-oral stage, she describes it above all
—and that is what is difficult—by the content, what you all know:
– how the child desires to appropriate the mother’s body, the contents of the mother’s body,
– how he makes an equivalence between the contents of the body and excrement, possible children, the father’s penis in the mother’s body,
– how the child, introjecting all that, is then invaded by bad things, which he has only to expel, in order to re-introject them again.

She describes a vicious circle that one does not see how it can be broken in fact, of introjections and expulsions,
and where I did not understand where she located the child himself. One sees only the circuit, but not the subject himself.

LACAN – That is precisely what it is about.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

So, she poses the following question: the subject, the child, is anxious about what? About the sadism he feels, that he manifests toward
the mother, the mother’s body, the contents of the mother’s body and their equivalents. He is anxious about destroying the mother,
and also about destroying himself in return, since he introjects the mother, thus his own sadism. He is anxious about destroying
the love object and about destroying himself.

Χ – It is quite complicated, all that.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

Yes. It is very complicated. So, she thinks that this anxiety triggers the first mode of defense, which one can describe,
a mode of defense that she says is fundamentally different from the later mechanisms of depression.

LACAN

Relying on a text by FREUD, saying that at the origin there must be something other than everything that we can insert
into the structures around the notion of the ego. Evidently, since we are before the formation of the ego.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

These mechanisms of repression are of two kinds: expulsion, rejection to the outside of one’s own sadism, and destroying this dangerous object.
But what I do not understand is that these defense mechanisms do not get out of the vicious circle, since they reproduce it.
I do not understand how she herself finds her way through it. The question is: how can the child get out of this anxious situation…

LACAN – Anxiety-producing…

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

…of this anxiety-producing situation, whose origin is his own sadism? Here she introduces the notion of symbolism, referring
to FERENCZI and JONES for whom symbolism is the foundation of all sublimation and of all action on the external world.
That is almost the most important thing in the text. And I hope I have properly understood how she understands the notion of symbolism.

For her, symbolism is the fact that the subject makes an equation, an equality between his bodily self, his body, himself as a whole, or parts
of his body, the mother’s body, penis, vagina, children, excrement, and external objects. For her, symbolism is an equality
set between one’s own body and external objects. She then thinks that it is by making such multiple equations…

LACAN

The term equation, moreover, is in FREUD, with regard to the article where he shows the equivalences in anal structures,
where he presents the very large schema, even drawn, objectified, where he shows the equivalence: child = phallus = excrement etc.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

She therefore thinks that it is by making the greatest possible number—and this is very important to emphasize—of these equations
that the child will best come out of his anxiety. We arrive at the following situation: the child, in order to relieve his anxiety, projects it,
distributes it, onto the external world, onto objects.

LACAN – Are you quite sure there is that?

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

Yes. She says that these multiple equations are the foundations of relations to reality and to the external world in general.
And she adds that it is later the ego that will be able, but she does not say how…

LACAN – Yes, that is correct.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

…to make emerge beneath this reality—which is not one, since it is only projected anxiety—the true reality, which she does not specify either.
She concludes that one sees well that, for the ego to develop well, for the anxiety of the sadism of the oral phase
to be overcome, there must be a certain minimum quantity of anxiety, failing which the subject would not distribute it onto the external world,
but that there must not be too much: it is a whole question of optimum quantity; the ego must be able to tolerate it in order to master it.
She does not specify the mastering either.

Now she takes up again her general considerations with regard to the case of DICK, a four-year-old boy.
She thinks that DICK—and she does not justify this at all—has a constitutional capacity of his ego to tolerate anxiety.
She then thinks—and she justifies it later, in a way I do not understand—that genital drives, properly
genital, were particularly early in DICK, and that these genital drives brought about a lesser tolerance
of sadistic drives and increased defenses against sadistic drives.

And then, she says, DICK could not…
because he was too afraid of his sadism, being too genital, bearing this sadism too badly
…could not make this distribution of anxiety onto the objects of the external world, but only onto two or three objects that she cites,
which were the only playful activities of DICK: interest in trains, in stations, in doors, the three things he handled.

LACAN

Perhaps, there, you are nonetheless making an omission, it seems to me, that is important if you maintain it, from the description
you made of the clinical case. There was something else, which is DICK’s behavior in Melanie KLEIN.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER – I come to it afterward.

LACAN

Because what you have just said, the stories concerning doors, stations, and trains, that is especially in Melanie KLEIN
that it takes place.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

Here, that is what she says before. She thinks that the only distributions made onto the outside—given his anxiety—are trains,
stations, doors, and that these three objects represent symbolically: the train: the penis, the station: the mother, and the door knobs: […]
And she thinks that the distribution of anxiety onto objects stopped there. This stoppage of the distribution of anxiety onto the external world
constitutes DICK’s lack of contact, who is in contact with nothing, because he did not distribute his anxiety onto the outside.
And then, she says that it is his fear of his sadism, his defense against his sadism, which likewise makes him incapable of any
aggressive act, such as biting, handling scissors and knives. And this same defense prevents him from translating into fantasies
everything he lives, his sadistic relation to the mother’s body.

Then she tells us the first analysis sessions, very summarized, and DICK’s attitude during the first sessions:
he entered her home, he left his nurse without any emotion, wandered aimlessly in the treatment room, took no interest
in any object, made completely uncoordinated, disordered movements, without meaning, a frozen facial expression,
a completely lost and absent gaze, and, she says:

« As if I were nothing other than a piece of furniture, none of his attitudes was addressed to me. »

She insists on the fact that DICK had toward her a conduct, an attitude different from the great neurotics she usually treats.
She describes the most neurotic neurotics, who put themselves in a corner or hide. She insists: « It is as if he had been in the void. »
And knowing his interest in trains and stations, and knowing that it was his only anxious cathexis of objects,
she took a large train that she placed next to a small train.

LACAN – Are you sure there is that, that she knew that? She knew nothing of the sort; she shoved the train into his hands.

X – Yes! She knew it, she knew it beforehand.

LACAN – Besides, that does not change much.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

He calls the big train ‘Daddy-train’, and the small train ‘Dick-train’. He takes the small Dick-train, rolls it up to under the window.
And already she verbalizes: ‘The station is mummy. Dick goes into Mummy.’ Then at that moment, the child drops the train and runs
as fast as he can into a dark space between two doors, into the double door of the consulting room. She goes, and he says: ‘Black.’
She verbalizes: ‘It is black in Mummy.’ At that moment the child asks, saying: ‘Nurse?’ But with a voice that, this time,
had a meaning: he asks for his nurse, which he never did. She replies: ‘Nurse will come back soon.’

The child repeats these words, in an intelligent way; they have a meaning that corresponded to the situation. And Melanie KLEIN remarks
that from that day she thinks he learned these words, that he remembered them. He reused them afterward correctly.
At the next session, he enters the treatment room in exactly the same way, but this time, he goes into the black corner
and he puts the Dick-train in this black corner and wants it to stay there. And he repeats: ‘Is nurse coming?’ The third time, he also goes
into the black corner behind the chest of drawers, and there he is very anxious, and for the first time he calls the analyst over to him.

The analyst notes that the fact that he invests a larger number of objects: the chest of drawers, the black corner of the door, in addition to the trains,
corresponds with a feeling of dependence with regard to the nurse and to herself, since he demands their presence, with the first
expressed, manifested anxiety, which is calling the nurse. Then, at the fourth session, he points to a small coal wagon
saying: ‘cut!’, cut. The analyst gives him a pair of scissors. He tries to manhandle the contents of the small coal wagon,
but does not manage. The analyst takes the scissors on her own account, the sadism on her own account, and herself performs
the dismembering of the contents of the coal wagon. Once it is finished, the child takes everything, throws it into a drawer, and says: ‘Gone!’
Then she verbalizes: ‘Dick wanted to remove, cut, the excrement from his mother’s body.’

The next time, he sees the same coal wagon again, hides it, anxious, under the other toys. She repeats his anxiety to him.
He brings out the coal wagon. She tells him that he wanted to take and cut what was in his mother’s body.
At that moment the child again runs into the dark space between the two rooms and—Melanie KLEIN says—he shows well
that the dark space between the two rooms also represented his mother’s body, for when I told him that ‘he wanted to attack the inside
of his mother’s body’, with his nails he scratches, that is, repeats the same thing: he damages the inside of his mother’s body.
There is nothing else in what she gives as content, except that these same sadistic games continue.
He distributes onto more and more objects, onto a larger and larger number of objects. Then there intervened: the sink, other games, the sideboard.

This is how, afterward, she comments on these few analytic indications she gives us, and how she understands
DICK’s case. She repeats that what made him defend himself more strongly than another against his sadism
was his early genital development. And there she gives as signs of this early genital development the fact
that when the child had, for example, just wanted to eat a small toy, a small toy figure, which represented the father’s penis,
after doing it, he showed feelings of pity for the figure thus harmed, and pitied it, and wanted to restore what he had
wanted to take from it and possess.

His early capacity for sympathy, for feeling what the other feels, is what she gives as a sign of early genital development.
As a result of that, he withdrew his interest from the whole external body, which was the body, the penis, and all that became dangerous, aggressive.
He cut himself off from reality, and the development of fantasies stopped. That seems extraordinary to me.
He takes refuge in a single fantasy, in the fantasy of the empty and dark, black, body of the mother, and he withdraws his intention from external objects
that represented the contents of the mother’s body.

This is how she understands analytic action for DICK. She thinks that the interpretations she gave—she emphasizes
a technical point by saying that usually she never interprets on such unique material; she waits to have the material.
But here, since there was only one kind of material, she acted at once; she thinks that having resolved or reached the unconscious problem
brought about a sedation of anxiety. This relaxation of anxiety permitted a new influx of anxiety, and thus each time,
at each new interpretation, and that each anxiety, thus fallen after the interpretation, distributed itself, as she described it
at the outset, onto external objects, which moreover one sees well, because in treatment, as in everyday life,
he had contact and took interest in a number of beings that was increasing.
She describes his general progress:
– he can be more aggressive,
– takes interest in more and more objects,
– the transference with her is stronger,
– the vocabulary increases: she says that he learns new words and that he remembers more words,
– he becomes more affectionate with his mother and with his father. She does not specify, but his attitude changes: he seems to enter an Oedipal phase.

She makes a kind of conclusion of the theoretical understanding of all that, repeating that being able to master anxiety better
is being able to distribute it onto more numerous objects and interests, and that thus the quantities of anxiety are regularized;
the ego thereby becomes capable of tolerating them and mastering them. If one wants to summarize, one can say:
– that the child starts from an initial stage where mechanisms of introjection and expulsion dominate, a stage of generalized identification,
– and that he must pass to a stage of symbolic formation, of which identification is a sort of precursor.

Symbolic identifications would be at the basis of all later sublimations and activities. And that this establishment
of the symbolic stage will allow the free play of fantasy, of phantasy; the passage between the two is made by the distribution of anxiety,
which cathects objects of the external world that are more and more numerous. I dropped the end of the chapter on diagnosis.

LACAN – There, you did well. For today, that is enough.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

I am going to give my personal reactions to this text. I centered myself around the notion of symbolism, which seemed to me crucial,
entirely posited in it. But before that I must say that one could make, on almost each paragraph of this text,
remarks that made understanding difficult for me. For example these: things that seem to me
contradictory all the time; I will point out one or two.

LACAN – Well… Let’s go.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

For example, she says that the child withdrew his interest from the external world, from objects, that he denied this external world, because too
dangerous. And she says: ‘Therefore there is no relation.’ That seems contradictory to me. If he denies something, it is that he denies a relation, and that
this relation, therefore these objects, are invested with something that he seeks to deny. If he denies, it is that there is something. For me,
it seems one should not be satisfied with her clinical description at the outset, saying that DICK has a relation with nothing.
It seems to me that there are relations, but that he denies them, because these relations are dangerous. Also the passage where she says
that he takes refuge in the fantasy of his mother’s empty and black body, and, she says:

« He withdraws his interest from objects that would represent the contents of this body: children, excrement, penis… »

I cannot understand how a fantasy could be fragmented like that, how the child could be reassured
inside the body and that this inside of the body would not imply all the rest; it has to be somewhere. Can one take
a small piece of something? There, I cannot understand.

A 3rd thing on which… that seemed to me quite curious: how she understands the fact that DICK recovers vocabulary.
She seems to think that from the beginning when she treats him he learns words, as if he began to have
memory and to desire to learn. That struck me, because I had the opportunity to investigate a child:
– he was DICK’s age, five years old,
– he had exactly the same clinical picture,
– there is no particular difference; all these vocabulary stories were similar.

And from the moment he began to speak, it was very clear: in that case, he was not learning words; he knew them, but he no longer denied
knowing them. In other words, he had a whole acquisition of syntax and vocabulary, but he denied them, just as he denied his relations
with external objects. And then she thinks he began to learn words. I come—to finish—to her notion, to the critique
of her notion of symbolism. If I have understood correctly, it seems that for her, therefore, symbolism is a very simple, unilinear procedure,
with no top or bottom, which is an equation between the body, total or partial, and objects of the external world.
Then questions arise. It is that in describing that, she notes very well—and she insists on it a great deal—the correlation in time
between the advent of symbolism, the moment when there is symbolism, and the moment when there is strengthening of the ego. But she does not explain
the connection. She does not make it understandable: she shows that it goes more or less together, and the function of the ego is not at all
specified, nor even approached.

It seems that she considers, she, symbolism as a mechanism, among others, of adaptation. Of course, she says that it is
fundamental, and that without it nothing could work, because, DICK not having acquired this mechanism, he is blocked.
But for her this mechanism is only a mechanism among others, which does not change the structure of the subject as a whole,
but makes easier and more possible the ego’s task, which is to master anxiety and adapt.

And finally, she does not at all account for how this distribution of anxiety onto objects—that is, how from this
phantasmatic world one passes to relations with a true real, a real real. She says that a stronger ego can do it. But how?
And what is this real, she does not say it at all. So, here is how it seems that I would formulate these problems
to make them coherent for myself: it is to consider the first stage from which she starts, the stage of the sadistic-oral phase,
which she describes above all by its contents. If one considers that this stage, especially from the point of view of its structure, of its organization,
one can perhaps say that everything there is at once phantasmatic and real, in the sense that there is not yet either real or true phantasmatic,
since nothing differentiates them. It is a pre-real and a pre-phantasmatic.

LACAN – Besides, she says it, she formulates it: ‘unreal reality’.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

It seems that this stage is characterized by an undifferentiation of the whole, and that the subject in it is nothing other than this double movement
of introjection and expulsion, which is a vicious circle, and whose every moment is anxiety-provoking, whether it is the moment
of introjection or the moment of expulsion: by introjection of sadism, and expulsion of what is good.

LACAN – If you like. But it is rather what is bad that is expelled.

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER

Yes. But he expels everything at once. I must say that the anticipation of a new structure always presents itself first
under negativity before passing to another form. And in this case negativity is sadism. But as long as this negativity
remains within this register of undifferentiation, where the real and the phantasmatic are confused, in what ego does he feel the quasi-real?
One always remains in the vicious circle, because this negativity cannot go to its term where it would be structuring
and would make one pass to another stage of differentiation, where the differentiation of the phantasmatic and of the real would be carried out.

In DICK’s case, it seems that this passage was made by the intervention of the analyst, who intervenes here as a third term,
who in this case understands the fantasy, gives it value, allows sadism, because through verbalization she differentiates the symbolic from the real:
she makes the mother’s body symbolic and makes sadism symbolic.

LACAN

She forces symbolism on him with the last brutality. She begins right away by slamming the major interpretations onto him,
she slams him into an absolutely brutal verbalization, and almost as revolting for us as for any reader,
of what the Oedipal myth is: ‘You are the little train, you want to screw your mother.’ That is her method! Obviously, this lends itself
to all sorts of theoretical discussions, which cannot be dissociated from the diagnosis of the case. But it is certain that following
this intervention something happens, and everything is there!

Marie-Cécile GÉLINIER – She, she seems to think that something happens because she has…

LACAN

What you explain, the lack of contact, is the defect of the ego. This subject has, properly speaking, an ego that is not formed.
And the way she distinguishes, precisely, even in the profound indifference, apathy, absence, of this subject at the beginning,
the way she distinguishes him, the way she cuts him off from the other neurotics, was already significant enough.

But what is entirely clear is, in sum, what? What corresponds to what I told you: what is not symbolized
is reality, before any formation of a symbol. One can say that this young subject—that is what limits him.
He is entirely within reality in the pure state, unconstituted: what is not differentiated.

That is what she shows us: it is interest in objects insofar as distinct, insofar as objects of human interest,
in great number, in equivalent objects; it is the development of this infinite world of objects that constitutes a human world.
And what she indicates to us—what makes her text precious, because she is what one could call someone, a therapist,
a woman of experience—she senses these things, she expresses them poorly; one cannot reproach her for it.

In any case, in truth, the theory of the ego is incomplete; she is perhaps not decided to give it, and that is what is missing.
But what she explains very well is this…
I am forced to go quickly today, and I will take it up again next time
…what she shows is this: that if the objects of the human world multiply, develop, with the richness that constitutes
the originality of this world, it is to the extent that, in a sort of process of expulsion, linked to the primitive destruction instinct,
these objects, in their first signification that we will call, if you like, ‘affective’ to go quickly today,
since we have somewhat exorcised this word and understood what it means, it is a certain primitive relation at the very instinctual root
of being that is at issue, insofar as these objects are created, appear, by a process of expulsion and destruction,
and also that as these ejections occur in relation to the world of the primitive subject, not yet organized in the register
of reality properly human, communicable, there arises each time—what?—a type of identification which, let us say,
is not supportable.

Anxiety is not a kind of energy that the subject would have to distribute in order to constitute objects—moreover there is no turn
of phrase properly speaking in that sense—anxiety is always defined as arising, ‘arising’.
To each of these object relations corresponds a mode of identification of which anxiety is, properly speaking, the signal.

Each time the subject identifies with anything whatsoever—and here it is something that precedes the identification that is properly speaking
egoic; even when egoic identification will have been made, every new re-identification of the subject will make anxiety arise,
‘anxiety’ in the sense that ‘anxiety’ is temptation, vertigo, re-loss of the subject in order to find himself again at these extremely primitive levels.

Anxiety is such that effectively there cannot occur this play where the subject introduces himself for each object of anxiety,
but that is only a connotation. Anxiety is a signal, as FREUD has always—when he approached the notion of anxiety—
very well sensed and formulated, that it was a sort of signal, a quality, a subjective coloration. This anxiety is precisely
what, in sum, does not occur, for the subject cannot even arrive at this sort of identification that would already be a sketch
of symbolism. He remains facing reality, this subject, paradoxical as it is; he lives in reality:
– he is in Melanie KLEIN’s office,
– there is for him no other,
– there is for him no self,
– there is a reality pure and simple: the interval between the two doors is his mother’s body.

The trains and everything that follows are something, but something that is neither nameable nor named, before Melanie KLEIN dares,
with that something she has, this sort of brute instinct, which moreover made her pierce this sort of sum
of knowledge that until then was impenetrable, she dares to speak to him and to speak to a being who literally gave her every possible
apprehension beforehand, who in the symbolic sense of the term is a being who does not respond; he is there:
– as if she did not exist,
– as if she were a piece of furniture.

She speaks to him, that is, she literally gives their names to that something which nonetheless participates in the symbol,
since it can be immediately named, but which is literally, properly speaking, up to then, for the subject, only pure and simple reality.
And it is in that that the term ‘prematuration’ she uses takes its significance, to say that this subject has, in a way, already reached
the genital stage; it is true, insofar as the genital stage, after the whole phase of symbolization of fantasies,
linked by these back-and-forth movements of the subject’s identifications which, insofar as he sketches them, withdraws them,
does them again, with other objects, alongside, gives to the major objects of his primitive identification a series of equivalents
that multiply his world and allow, through the imaginary, to give the frames to this real infinitely more developed, more complex,
which is human reality.

It is insofar as the subject cannot make these back-and-forth movements, that he is immediately in a reality that signifies
at his level of reality, which is something absolutely dehumanized:
– because there is no development; at the origin there is not this series of back-and-forth movements that substitutes itself for a series of objects,
– because each time anxiety stops definitive identification, the fixation of reality.

It is—one can say—a reality already symbolized, since one can give it a meaning, but since it is before any kind
of movements of coming and going. It is an anticipated, primary, fixed symbolization, a single and unique primary identification,
something that has a name: ‘the void’, and ‘the black’, which is what corresponds in the subject’s own structure to ‘human’ at the origin,
and essentially, as I indicated, gaping, which does not fully have contact, naturally and simply before this gaping,
and in this gaping counts only a certain number of objects, very limited, of reality, which he cannot even name.

What is that to say? You noted it very well: he cannot name them, at a certain level, for he already has a certain
apprehension of vocables; let us say that of these vocables he has not made the Bejahung, he does not assume them. A paradoxical thing,
precisely in the function where there exists in him at this level, paradoxical as that may seem, a possibility of empathy
that is much greater than normal; that is what Melanie KLEIN seems to indicate, for he is so well related
to reality[…] rarely, but in a distant way, not anxiety-producing.

When Melanie KLEIN has the small shavings of a pencil, the fragmenting of what is not yet made, for let us not forget
that it is when one begins to demolish that the little[…] is articulated, and also the triggering of the mechanism,
when he sees the small pencil shavings on Melanie KLEIN’s bodice, he says ‘Poor Melanie Klein’.
Do you see the indication of the direction in which the problem is posed?

I will return to it next time, when we will find ourselves at the heart of the problem of the relation of symbolism and the real, taken at the angle,
at its point of origin of genesis, the most difficult. You also see its relation with the region we designated
the other day in Mr. HYPPOLITE’s commentary: the function of destructionism in the constitution of human reality.