The modest remarks I am going to address to you today were announced under the title: The Topography of the Imaginary. It is understood, of course, that, for example, so vast a title can be conceived of, can be understood only in the chain of what we are pursuing here, namely: to cast certain light on technique, and specifically always on the basis of FREUD’s Technical Writings, or more exactly on the basis of the understanding we can form for ourselves of what, in analytic experience, has crystallized in these Technical Writings.

Consequently, I will not treat for you—you can imagine!—as a whole a subject that would be considerable enough to occupy several years of teaching. But it is insofar as a certain number of questions concerning the place of the imaginary in the structure arise along the thread of our discourse here that this talk can lay claim to that title.

Indeed, you see, you can imagine that it is not without a preconceived plan—and I hope that the whole will show you its rigor—that I led you last time through Mlle GÉLINIER’s commentary on a case that struck me as particularly significant, because it showed in a particularly reduced and simple way the reciprocal play of these three major terms, which we have already had occasion to emphasize greatly: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.

As these considerations unfold here, I will be able to note that it is absolutely impossible to understand anything about technique, about Freudian experience, without these three systems of reference. And many of the difficulties that arise—and, in particular, to take an example, the most important elements of incomprehension of all, which Mlle GÉLINIER marked the other day when faced with Mme Melanie KLEIN’s text—are justified on the one hand and clarified on the other when one brings these distinctions to bear.

I say that these elements are more important than anything, for indeed that is what is important:
– not so much what we understand when we try to elaborate an experience,
– but what we do not understand.

And that is precisely the merit of Mlle GÉLINIER’s presentation last time: to have brought out what, in this text, is not understood. This is where the method of commenting on texts proves fertile. When we comment on a text, it is like when we conduct an analysis. How many times have I pointed it out to those whose work I supervise. They say: ‘I thought I understood that he meant this, and that…’. It is one of the things we must most guard against
– understanding too much,
– understanding more than what is there in the subject’s discourse.

To interpret and to imagine that one understands are not at all the same thing; it is even exactly the opposite. I would go further: it is on the basis of a certain refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding. It is not enough that a text by X, or by Z, or by Melanie KLEIN, seems to hold together. Of course, it works within the framework of refrains to which we are accustomed: instinctual maturation, primitive instinct of aggression, oral sadism, anal sadism. Yet it nonetheless seemed, in the register she brought into play, that there were a certain number of contrasts, which I am going to take up in detail, since we have here the double of what was told to us last time.

You will see that everything turns, in what appeared singular, paradoxical, contradictory—what Mlle GÉLINIER highlighted—on the function of the ego, of the ego that is both too developed and that, because of that, stops all development, that ego which, in developing itself, reopens the door toward reality.

But how is it that this door to reality is reopened by a development of the ego that is precisely not demonstrated to us in its rigor, its mechanism, its detail? What does Kleinian interpretation consist of, and what is its proper function, with its truly intrusive character, of being imposed upon the subject—what I emphasized last time, at least for those who were able to stay until the end, the session having run slightly long? Those are all the questions we will have to revisit today.

To introduce you—for, after all, you must already have noticed that in the case of this young subject, the relation of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic is rather… They are there, absolutely at the surface, palpable. We are going to take it up in detail. In any case, you can sense that what is at issue is something that must truly lie at the heart of this problem.

The symbolic, I have taught you to identify with language. It is clear that it is insofar as, let us say, Melanie KLEIN speaks, that something has happened. And that, on the other hand, the function of the imaginary is what lies at the heart of the subject is well demonstrated to us from one end of the observation to the other. First, by the fact that what is being discussed is the notion of the constitution of objects.

Objects, Melanie KLEIN tells us, are constituted by a whole play of projections, introjections, expulsions of bad objects, reintrojection of these objects, of interplay among the objects, of the subject’s sadism which, having projected his sadism, sees it come back from these objects, and which for that reason would be blocked, stopped by a kind of anxious fear. You can sense that we are in the domain of the imaginary, and the whole problem is that of the junction of symbolism and the imaginary in the constitution of the real.

In an effort to shed a little light for you, I have devised for you a kind of little model, an example, a kind of small substitute for the mirror stage, about which I have often stressed that it is not simply a historical matter, a point of development, of genesis, but that it also has an exemplary function, by showing certain relations of the subject—toward what?—toward his image, precisely, and toward his image as Urbild of the ego.

Already this mirror stage, impossible to deny, has, in sum, a certain optical presentation. This cannot be denied. Is that by chance? It is not so much by chance as that! It is evident that the sciences, particularly sciences in gestation, like ours, frequently borrow models from various other sciences.

You cannot imagine, my poor friends, what you owe to geology! If there were no geology, of strata, and strata that shift, and of faulting when things no longer fit, the different levels of strata between two connected territories averaging out so that, roughly speaking, one passes, at the same level, from a recent stratum to a very much earlier stratum. What I am saying here, I am not inventing! You have only to read it from the pen of M. to evoke that there are chaotic situations that are not all due to analysis, but to the subject’s evolution. It is a way of drawing a stroke of the pen…

It is evident that, indeed, on that account, it would not be a bad thing for every analyst to buy a small geology book. There was even, formerly, an analyst who was a geologist, LEUBA. He made a good little geology book; I cannot recommend its reading to you too strongly; it will free you from a certain number of things. For when one sees things better, one puts each thing in its place.

Optics could also have its say, and in truth, if I made it have its say—which I am going to do, moreover, without further delay—I would not thereby find myself at odds with the master’s good tradition, for I think more than one of you may have noticed that in the Traumdeutung, in the chapter ‘Psychology of the Dream-Processes’, at the moment when, as you know, he shows us the famous diagram into which he is going to insert his entire process of the unconscious:

There perception [P], and here motricity [M], and inside he will place the different layers that will be distinguished from the perceptual level, namely from instantaneous impression, by a series of diverse impressions: S, S’, S’’… Which means at once image, memory, which allow us to locate at a certain level the traces recorded and subsequently repressed in the unconscious. This is a very pretty diagram, which we will take up again; it will be of service to us. But I would like to draw your attention to this: that it is accompanied by a commentary which is extremely significant. It does not seem ever to have attracted anyone’s eye very much, although it was taken up in another form in FREUD’s almost last work, in the abridgment, in the Abriss. I will read it to you from the Traumdeutung:

‘The idea thus offered to us is that of a psychical locality…

It is exactly what is at issue: everything that takes place between perception and the ego’s motor function: the field of psychical reality.

…Let us at once discard the notion of anatomical localization. Let us remain on psychological ground, and try only to represent to ourselves the instrument that serves psychical productions as a kind of complicated microscope, photographic apparatus, etc. The psychical locality will correspond to a point in this apparatus where the image is formed. In the microscope and the telescope, one knows that these are ideal points, to which no tangible part of the apparatus corresponds. It seems to me unnecessary to excuse myself for the imperfection my comparison may have. It is there only to facilitate the understanding of processes so complicated by breaking them down…//…There is no risk here, I believe we can give free rein to our suppositions, provided that we keep our cool and do not take the scaffolding for the building itself. We have need only of auxiliary representations in order to approach an unknown fact. The simplest and the most tangible are the best.’
[Die Idee, die uns so zur Verfügung gestellt wird, ist die einer psychischen Lokalität. Wir wollen ganz beiseite lassen, daß der seelische Apparat, um den es sich hier handelt, uns auch als anatomisches Präparat bekannt ist, und wollen der Versuchung sorgfältig aus dem Wege gehen, die psychische Lokalität etwa anatomisch zu bestimmen. Wir bleiben’ auf psychologischem Boden und gedenken nur der Aufforderung zu folgen, daß wir uns das Instrument, welches den Seelenleistungen dient, vorstellen wie etwa ein zusammengesetztes Mikroskop, einen photographischen Apparat u. dgl. Die psychische Lokalität entspricht dann einem Orte innerhalb eines solchen Apparats, an dem eine der Vor¬stufen des Bildes zustande kommt. Beim Mikroskop und Fernrohr sind dies bekanntlich zum Teil ideelle Örtlichkeiten, Gegenden, in denen kein greifbarer Bestandteil des Apparats gelegen ist. Für die Unvollkommenheiten dieser und aller ähnlichen Bilder Ent¬schuldigung zu erbitten, halte ich für überflüssig. Diese Gleich¬nisse sollen uns nur bei einem Versuch unterstützen, der es unter¬nimmt, uns die Komplikation der psychischen Leistung ver-ständlich zu machen, indem wir diese Leistung zerlegen, und die Einzelleistung den einzelnen Bestandteilen des Apparats zuweisen. Der Versuch, die Zusammensetzung des seelischen Instruments aus solcher Zerlegung zu erraten, ist meines Wissens noch nicht gewagt worden. Er scheint mir harmlos. (S. Freud : Traumdeutung, VII, 2 : Die Regression, éd. 1925, pp. 455-456)]

Needless to tell you that, since advice is made not to be followed, we have not failed, since then, to take somewhat ‘the scaffolding for the building’. On the other hand, this authorization he gives us to take ‘auxiliary representations in order to approach an unknown fact, the simplest and the most tangible being the best’, incited me myself to show a certain nonchalance in making a diagram.

An optical apparatus much simpler than a complicated microscope…
not that it would not be amusing to pursue the comparison in question, but that would take us a bit far
…something much simpler, almost childlike, is going to serve us today.

I cannot recommend too strongly, in passing, meditation on optics. Curious thing: an entire system of metaphysics was founded on geometry, mechanics, seeking in them kinds of models of understanding. It does not seem that, up to now, everything that can be drawn from optics has been drawn. And yet it is something that should lend itself well to a few dreams, if not to a few meditations—optics!

It is all the same a strange thing, all this science whose aim and function consist in reproducing by means of apparatuses something which—unlike all the other sciences that bring into nature something like a cutting-up, a dissection, an anatomy—strives, with apparatuses, to produce that singular thing called ‘images’.

Understand well that I am not trying, by saying this, to make you mistake bladders for lanterns and optical images for the images that interest us. But still, it is not for nothing that they have the same name. And on the other hand these optical images present singular diversities, and how illuminating:
– there are some that are purely subjective images, those called virtual,
– there are others that are real images, namely ones that in certain respects behave entirely like objects, which one can take for objects.
There are things even more singular still: these objects that are real images, we can take them up again and produce virtual images of them. The object, on this occasion, that is the real image can rightly take the name of virtual object. All of this is quite singular.

And in truth, one thing is even more surprising: the theoretical foundations of optics rest entirely on a mathematical theory, without which it is absolutely impossible to structure optics:
– it is the deepening, ahead of the subject, of everything at issue, which consists in starting from a fundamental hypothesis, without which there is absolutely no optics,
– for there to be a possible optics, there must be the possibility of representing a given point in real space, any given point in real space. To this point there can correspond a point, one and only one, in another space which is the space of the imaginary. This is the fundamental structural hypothesis.

It seems exceedingly simple, but if one does not start from there, one absolutely cannot write the slightest equation, symbolize the slightest thing, that is to say: optics is absolutely impossible. Even those who do not know that this hypothesis is at the base could absolutely not do anything in optics if this hypothesis did not exist. Here too imaginary and real spaces are both conflated. That does not prevent their both having to be thought of as different.

One has many occasions, in the matter of optics, for deepening, for exercising oneself in certain distinctions that show you how important the symbolic lever is in the manifestation, in the structure of a phenomenon. On the other hand, a series of phenomena that one can say are in every respect quite real, since experience guides us in this matter, where nonetheless at every moment the whole subjectivity is engaged.

Understand, for example, this: when you see a rainbow, you see something entirely subjective. You see it at a certain distance that overlays the landscape. It is not there. It is a subjective phenomenon. And yet, thanks to a photographic apparatus, you record it entirely objectively. So what is it? Is it that we no longer know very well where the subjective is, where the objective is, or have we become accustomed, in our little comprenoire [wordplay: a portmanteau built on ‘comprendre’ (to understand) and ‘boîte noire’ (black box), i.e., an ‘understanding-black-box’], to placing a distinction between objective and subjective? Or is the photographic apparatus still rather a subjective apparatus, that is to say, entirely constructed with the help of a little x and a little y that inhabit the domain where the subject lives, that is, the domain of language?

I will leave these questions open, to go straight to this little example. I will first try to put it into your mind before putting it on the board. For nothing is more dangerous than things on the board. It is always a bit flat! In my place, put here an enormous cauldron, which would perhaps replace me advantageously, on certain days, as a sounding box, something as close as possible to a half-sphere, very well polished on the inside—in short: a spherical mirror.

If it is there, roughly, if it advances roughly here, up to the table, you will not see yourself in it… Do not believe it: that mirage phenomenon that occurs from time to time between me and my students will not occur even when I have been transformed into a cauldron. You know all the same that a spherical mirror produces something, what one calls a real image, because every light ray emanating from any point whatsoever of an object placed at a certain distance, preferably in the plane of the center of the sphere—to each of these luminous points (all this is approximate) there corresponds in the same plane, by convergence of the rays reflected on the surface of the sphere, another luminous point that gives of that object a real image.

It follows that—it is an experiment—I regret not having been able to bring the cauldron today, nor the apparatuses of the experiment; you will represent them to yourselves.

Suppose that this is a box, hollow on this side, and that it is placed there, at the center of the sphere; it is not quite built like that. Here is the half-sphere. Here is the box; it has a foot. How was the classic experiment done at the time when physics was fun, when one did experiments? Just as we are at the moment when this really is psychoanalysis: the closer we are to the psychoanalysis that was fun, the more it was true psychoanalysis. Later on, it will become routine, made only of approximations and tricks: one will no longer understand at all what one is doing. Likewise, one does not need to understand anything about optics to make a microscope. But let us rejoice: we are still doing psychoanalysis, even when we are doing what we are doing today.

Here, on the box, you are going to place a vase—the section of the vase—a real vase. Below, here, there is a bouquet of flowers, there. So what happens? I am going to make the cauldron bigger; the half-sphere must be enormous, there must be a fairly large opening to this spherical mirror. This happens: there is formed here—by virtue of the property of the spherical mirror—some luminous point

Here the bouquet is reflected here, on the spherical surface, to come to the symmetrical luminous point. Understand that all the rays do the same, by virtue of the property of the spherical surface: all the rays emanating from a given point return to the same point; thanks to that, a real image is formed [the real image of the bouquet of flowers forms ‘in’ the neck of the vase]. They do not cross quite properly in my diagram, but that is also true in reality. And it is also true for all optical instruments: it is never anything but an approximation.

These rays continue on their way; they diverge again, that is to say that for an eye that is there, they are convergent. The characteristic of rays that come to strike an eye in a convergent form is to produce what one calls a real image. Divergent as they come to the eye, they are convergent as they move away from the eye. If it is the opposite, if the rays come to strike the eye in the contrary sense, we have the formation of a virtual image. This is what happens when you see an image in a mirror: you see it where it is not, whereas there [the real image] you see it where it is, on the sole condition that your eye is in the field of rays that have already come to cross at the corresponding point, which is here.

That is to say that at that moment you will see here occur…
not seeing the bouquet, which is there hidden, if you are in the right field, all those who will be over there, roughly
…you will see a very curious imaginary bouquet appear, on which your eye, in order to see it, will have to accommodate, because this image forms right there in exactly the same way as on the object, the vase, and because of that, because your eye must accommodate in the same way, for the same plane, you will have what one calls ‘an impression of reality’, while still sensing well that there is something that will make you do like this, precisely because they do not cross very well; there will be something strange, somewhat blurred. But the farther away you are, that is, the greater what one calls parallax, minimal accommodation for the lateral displacement of the eye, the farther away you are, the more complete the illusion will be.

I apologize for having taken so much time to develop this little story for you, but it is an apologue that will be able to serve us greatly. Indeed, we have here, in a way, something which, of course, does not claim to touch anything essentially, substantially in relation to what we handle under the domain of so-called real or objective relations, or imaginary relations.

It is something that illustrates it, that will allow us to point out in a particularly simple way what results from the juxtaposition of the imaginary world, from the close interweaving of the imaginary world and the real world in the psychical economy. You will now see how. It is not for nothing that this little experiment smiled on me. It is entirely natural. It is not I who invented it; it has long been known under the title ‘inverted bouquet experiment’. Just as it is, in its innocence, and without any preconceived idea on the part of its authors, who did not construct it for us, it appears to us, even in its contingent details—vase and bouquet—particularly seductive.

Indeed, if there is something we will put at the basis of this dialectic of the primitive imaginary…
which is in relation to the grasp of the image of one’s own body, more deeply with the relations of the Ur-Ich, or the Lust-Ich, of this whole notion of a primitive ego that will be constituted in a kind of splitting, of distinction from the external world, or the relation of what is included within, of what is excluded by all these processes precisely of exclusion, Ausstossung, of projection, of delimitation, in sum, of the ego’s own domain
…if there is something that is placed in the foreground of all our conceptions at this primitive genetic stage of the formation of the ego, it is indeed precisely that of container and contained. And in this sense, this relation of the vase to the flowers it contains can serve us as a metaphor, and one of the most precious.

Indeed, when I insist, with regard to the theory of the mirror stage, on the fact that this awareness of the body as a totality is something that occurs in a premature way, though correlative, relative to the moment when functional development gives the subject the integration of his motor functions.

This—as I have emphasized, and in a precise form, many times—draws its value, in sum, from the fact that a virtual grasp of an imaginary mastery, given to the subject by the sight of the total form of the human body—whether, moreover, it is his own image or an image given to him by someone among his fellow beings—is something that, for him, in this experience, is detached, freed, does not merge with the process of this maturation itself. In other words, the subject as subject anticipates this physiologically completed mastery, and this anticipation will give its mark, its particular style to every subsequent exercise of this motor mastery once it has been achieved.

This was exactly nothing other than the original adventure in which man for the first time has the experience:
– that he sees himself,
– that he is reflected,
– that he conceives himself as other than he is.
And this is an absolutely essential dimension of the human, and wholly structural throughout his fantasmatic life.

In fact, then, everything happens as if, at a moment, loosened, untied from the bouquet of flowers, the imaginary pot that contains it, in relation to which the subject already makes a first grasp among all the Ids, all the Its that we suppose at the origin: we are there as object, instincts, desires, tendencies.

Everything is, in a way, that: pure and simple reality, in the sense in which reality is in no way delimited, cannot yet be the object of any kind of definition, whether qualitative, good or bad, like the series of judgments to which FREUD referred the other day in the article ‘Die Verneinung’: either that it is, or that it is not, where reality is in a way at once chaotic and absolute, originary. Within that, within this first grasp, the image of the body also gives the subject the first form that enables him to locate what is of the ego, and what is not. I am schematizing, you can sense it well, but any development of a metaphor, of an apparatus for thinking, requires that at the outset one convey what it is for and what it means. You will see that it makes possible, that it has a manipulability that makes it possible to play all sorts of reciprocal movements of this container that I suppose here to be imaginary.

Reverse the conditions of the experiment, for it could just as well be the pot there [the vase] below, and the flowers above.

I reversed the diagram: we can, as we please, make imaginary what is real, provided we keep the relation of the signs:

• – + or – + –, provided that the relation is preserved, that we are dealing with a hidden real and an imaginary that reproduces it, and a real put into connection with this imaginary. [for the + – + or – + -: cf. the seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’]

Well then, this first imaginary ego is what the first play of inclusion or exclusion of everything that is at issue in the subject will be situated in relation to, in the subject before the birth of the ego. What else does this diagram, this illustration, this apologue we are using show us? It shows us this: for the illusion to occur, that is, for a world to be constituted for the looking eye in which the imaginary can include and at the same time form the real, in which the real too can include and at the same time situate the imaginary, one condition is still required, that is— I told you—that the eye must be in a certain position: it must be inside this cone.

If it is there, outside this cone, it will no longer see what is imaginary, for a simple reason: nothing from this cone of emission, which is there, will strike it; it will see things in their utterly bare real state, that is, the inside of the mechanism:
– and a poor empty pot [Bouasse’s experiment: the bouquet is hidden underneath],
– or solitary flowers, depending on the case [Bouasse’s experiment modified by Lacan: the vase is hidden underneath].

What does that mean? You will tell me, we are not an eye. And what is this eye that wanders around there? And does all this mean anything?

This—the box—means: your own body. And here, the bouquet: instincts and desires, or the objects of desire that move about. And that, the cauldron—what is it? It could very well be the cortex. Why not? And if it were the cortex? That would be amusing. We will talk about it another day.

In the middle of that, your eye does not wander; it is fixed there; it is a kind of little tickling appendage of our cortex, precisely! So why tell us that this eye is in the process of wandering? Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not? Obviously! The eye is, as very often, the symbol of the subject, and all science rests on reducing the subject to an eye. And that is why all science is projected in this way before you, that is, objectified. I will explain that to you.

With regard to the theory of instincts, another year, someone had presented a very fine construction, which was the finest paradoxical construction I have ever heard uttered: a theory of instincts conceived as something reified. In the end, there was not a single instinct left standing. And it was, on that account, a useful demonstration to make.

But for us to hold for a brief instant in our eye, it was precisely necessary that we put ourselves in the position of the scientist who decrees: it is not true. But he can decree that he is simply an eye, and he puts a sign on the door: ‘do not disturb the experimenter’. In life, of course, things are all different, precisely because we are not an eye. So what does it mean, this eye that is there? And what can we use it for in this comparison?

It means, in this comparison, simply that in this relation of the imaginary and the real, and in the constitution of the world such as must result from it, everything depends on the subject’s situation. And the subject’s situation—my God!—you must know it by now, since I keep repeating it to you, is essentially characterized by his place in the symbolic world, in other words, in the world of speech. It is exactly that place; I will say no more.

If you have understood what I have been telling you up to now, it implies many things: the relation to the other, etc. But please, before it is the relation to the other, it is his place in the symbolic world. Is it not? That is, whether or not he has the possibility or the prohibition of calling himself PEDRO. It depends: one case or the other, depending on whether he is called PEDRO or not, whether he is within the field of the cone or whether he is not.

That is what you must put in your head as a starting point. Even if it seems a bit stiff to you for understanding everything that follows, and quite specifically this text by Melanie KLEIN, that is, something we must take for what it is, that is, for an experience. Indeed, this is roughly how things present themselves. What does this case show us?

Mlle GÉLINIER tells it to us and summarizes it. Why not take her text? I reviewed it, and it is truly very faithful, which will not prevent us from referring back to Melanie KLEIN’s text. Here is a boy who, we are told, is about 4 years old, and who has a general level of development that is called 15 to 18 months. It is a matter of definition; one never knows what one means in such a case.

What measuring instrument? One often omits to specify it. What is called an affective development of 15 to 18 months remains even more vague than the image of one of my flowers in the experiment I have just produced for you. 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 has no desire to make himself understood; he does not seek to communicate; his only more or less playful activities would be to emit sounds and to take pleasure in sounds without meaning, in noises.’

In other words, what are we dealing with?
– With a child who, curiously, possesses something of language; that is clear; Melanie KLEIN would not make herself understood by him if he did not possess it.
– On the one hand, then, it seems that there are certain elements of the symbolic apparatus.
– On the other hand, we have his attitude, which is obviously quite striking.

Melanie KLEIN, from the first contact with the child—which is so important—characterizes the fact of apathy, of indifference. He is nevertheless not without being, in a certain way, oriented. He gives nothing like the impression of an idiot, far from it! He is there in Melanie KLEIN’s presence, and Melanie KLEIN distinguishes his attitude from that of all the neurotics she had previously seen as children.

She distinguishes this case from the case of neurotics by noting that he shows no kind of apparent anxiety, even in its masked, veiled forms, which are those that occur in the case of neurotics, that is, of course, not always explosive manifestations, but simply certain attitudes of withdrawal, stiffness, shyness, where one sees that something is held in, hidden, which does not escape someone with the experience of the therapist in question. On the contrary, he is there as if nothing made any difference. He looks at Melanie KLEIN as he would look at a piece of furniture.

I particularly emphasize these aspects, for what I highlighted is precisely the absolutely uniform, flat character, from a certain point of view, that reality has for him: everything, in a way, is equally real and equally indifferent. What does Melanie KLEIN tell us? This is where Mlle GÉLINIER’s perplexities begin.

Melanie KLEIN tells us:

‘The child’s world is produced from a container, which would be the mother’s body, and a content of this mother’s body.’

In the course of the progress of his instinctual relations with this privileged object, the child is led to proceed through a series of imaginary incorporations. He can bite, absorb, his mother’s body. And the style of this incorporation is a style of destruction. The child understands that incorporation is a destructive incorporation, that what he is going to encounter in his mother’s body is also a certain number of objects, themselves endowed with a certain unity, although they are included, but that these objects can be dangerous for him, for exactly the same reason that he is dangerous for them, that is, he endows them with the same capacities for destruction, if I may say so ‘in mirror’—it is indeed the case to say so—as those of which he feels himself, himself, bearer in this first apprehension of the first objects.

It is therefore on that account that he will accentuate, in relation to the first of the limitations of his ego or of his being, the exteriority of these objects: he will reject them as bad objects, dangerous objects, ‘caca’. And these objects themselves, once externalized, isolated from this first universal container, from this first great whole that is the phantasmatic image of the mother’s body, the total empire of the first childish reality at that moment, will nonetheless appear to him as still endowed with the same malevolent accent that will have marked his first relations with them.

That is why he will reintroject them a second time, and will direct his interest toward other, less dangerous objects; he will do what one calls the equation ‘feces = urine’, for example, and various other objects of the external world:
– which will be, in a way, more neutralized,
– which will be their equivalents,
– which will be linked to the first objects by an equation—I emphasize it—imaginary.

Here, it is clear that at the origin the symbolic equation that we later rediscover between these different objects, at the origin and at its birth, at its emergence, is a matter of an alternating mechanism of expulsion and reintrojection, of projection and reabsorption by the subject. That is to say, precisely, of that imaginary play that I am trying to symbolize for you here by these imaginary inclusions of real objects, or inversely by these takings of imaginary objects inside a real enclosure.

Are you following? Yes, roughly? Then, at that moment, we can clearly see that there is a certain sketch of imaginification [neologism: the process of making something ‘imaginary’ or of forming it as image], if I may say so, of the external world: we have it there, literally ready to come to the surface, but it is, in a way, only prepared.

The subject plays with container and contained. Already he has reified in certain objects—‘little train’, for example—the possibility of a certain number of individuations, of tendencies, even of persons: himself as ‘little train’, in relation to his father who is ‘big train’, quite naturally.

Moreover, the number of objects that are significant for him, surprising fact, is extremely reduced, to the minimal signs that make it possible to express this: the inside and the outside, the contained and the container: the black space immediately assimilated to the inside of the mother’s body, in which he takes refuge. But what does not occur is the free play, the conjunction between these different forms, imaginary and real, of objects. And that is what makes it so that, to Mlle GÉLINIER’s great astonishment, when he turns around and goes to take refuge in the empty and black interior of this maternal body, the objects are not there.

This is for a simple reason: in his case, the bouquet and the vase cannot be there at the same time. That is the key. In other words, the object of Mlle GÉLINIER’s astonishments rests on this: Mme Melanie KLEIN’s explanations, because for her everything is on a plane of equal reality—unreal reality, as she herself puts it—which does not make it possible to conceive, indeed, the dissociation of the different ‘sets’ of primitive objects at issue. Why?

Because she has no theory of the imaginary nor any theory of the ego. But if we introduce this notion, insofar as one part of this reality is imagined, the other real, but inversely insofar as one is reality, it is the other that becomes imaginary, we understand why at the outset this play of conjunction of the different parts, which I call different ‘sets’, can never be completed.

In other words, this is expressed in the following way: here we are only under the angle of the mirror relation, which is what we generally call the plane of projection—I am not saying introjection: the term is very poorly chosen. One would have to find another word to give the correlative word of this projection, namely everything that is of the order of the relation of introjection, such as we use it in analysis; this word is practically always used…
you will notice it, it will clarify things for you, at the moment when it is a matter of symbolic introjection
…the word introjection is always accompanied by a symbolic designation. Introjection is always the introjection of the other’s speech.

And this introduces a wholly different dimension. It is around this distinction that you can draw the line between what is a function of the ego and what is of the order of the first dual register and a function of the superego. It is not for nothing that in analytic theory they distinguish them, nor that one admits that the superego, the true, authentic superego, is a secondary introjection in relation to the function of the ideal ego. Those are lateral remarks. I return to my case, to the case described by Melanie KLEIN.

What else can we think, if not, in terms of the different references that I am in the process of imaging, of outlining for you? If we see what is going on, it is therefore this: the child is there; he has a certain number of meaningful registers: one in the imaginary domain, whose character Melanie KLEIN—here we can follow her—underscores by underscoring its extreme narrowness, the poverty of the possible play of imaginary transposition in which and through which alone this progressive valorization can occur on the plane commonly called ‘affective’, by a sort of multiplication, of fan-like unfolding of all the imaginary equations that allow human beings, among animals, to be the one that has an almost infinite number of objects at its disposal, that is, marked with a Gestalt value in its Umwelt, isolated as forms.

Melanie KLEIN indicates to us at once that, the poverty of this imaginary world, and at the same time the impossibility for this child to enter into an effective relation with these objects, these objects as structures. The important correlation is this. What is the significant point, if all one has to do is take the things that are the object of this child’s attitude? The significant point is simply this, if one sums up everything Melanie KLEIN describes of this child’s attitude: this child addresses no call.

This is a notion that I ask you to keep, for later you will see that we will have to bring it back. You are going to say to yourselves: ‘Naturally! With his call he brings back his language.’ But I told you that he already had it, his system of language. He already has it sufficiently. And the proof is that he plays with it. He even uses it for something very particular: to conduct a game of opposition with the intrusive attempts of these adults.

For example—it is well known—he behaves in a way that is, in the text, moreover, called ‘negativistic’: when his mother tells him, offers him a name, he is quite capable of reproducing it correctly, but he will reproduce it in an unintelligible way, distorted, ‘à propos de bottes’ [French idiom: ‘about boots’, meaning ‘irrelevantly / beside the point’], that is, in a way that serves no purpose.

Here we find again the distinction between negativism and denial, as M. HYPPOLITE showed it to us in a way that proves not only his culture, but that he has already seen patients and that he has seen what negativism and denial are for them. It is not at all the same thing. It is in a properly negativistic way that this child uses language.

Consequently, in introducing the call to you, it is not language that I am reintroducing to you. I would even say more: not only is it not language, but it is not a kind of higher level than language.

I would even say more: it is below language, if one speaks of levels. For you need only observe a domestic animal to see that a being deprived of language is quite capable of addressing calls to you. And up to a certain point, calls directed toward—all sorts of gestures to attract your attention—toward something that, precisely, at a certain point, is lacking to it.

The call in question, the human call, is a call for which a possible later development is reserved, richer, precisely because it occurs within a being that has already acquired the level of language. It is a phenomenon that goes beyond language, but that takes its value as articulation, as a second moment, if you like, in relation to language.

Let us be schematic: there is an M. Karl BÜHLER who made a theory of language. It is not the only one, nor the most complete theory. But there is something in it: the three stages in language. Unfortunately, he set them out with registers that do not make them especially accessible or understandable. The three stages are as follows:

– the utterance, taken as such, which is a level that has its value as such; I mean almost like a kind of level of natural datum. We will consider the utterance when, for example, between two people, I am in the process of saying the simplest thing, an imperative. At the level of the utterance we can recognize this: it is all things concerning the nature of the subject. It is evident that a man, an officer, a professor, will not give his order in the same style, the same language, as someone else, a worker, a foreman. At the level of the utterance, everything we learn is about the nature of the subject, in his very style, right down to his intonations. This plane can be separated out.

– there is another plane, in any imperative whatsoever, precisely that of the call: the tone in which this imperative is given. It is also very important, because with the same text, the same utterance can have completely different values. The simple utterance ‘stop’ can have, in different circumstances, a completely different call value, and different depending on what is at issue.

– the third value is, properly speaking, communication: what is at issue and its reference with the whole situation. Here we are at the level of the call. It is something that has its value within the already acquired system of language, and what is at issue is very precisely that this child emits no call. That is where, in a way, the system is interrupted, the system by which the subject comes to situate himself in language, at the level of speech, which is not the same thing.

This child is master of language, strictly speaking, up to a certain moment, up to a certain level. That is quite clear. He does not speak; what I was telling you last time is that he is a subject who is there and who, literally, ‘does not respond’. Speech has not come. What happens? This is said at length and breadth in the clearest way, throughout Melanie KLEIN’s text. There she has renounced any technique. She has the minimum of material. She does not even have toys; this child does not play. And even when he takes the little train a bit, he does not play; he does that as he passes through the atmosphere, not as an invisible, but everything is, in a certain way, invisible for him.

What does she do? One would have to reread Melanie KLEIN’s sentences, her remarks, to bring out what is at issue. She herself has a keen awareness that she is doing no kind of interpretation. She says:

‘I proceed from my already known and preconceived ideas of what it is, of what happens at that stage. So I go at it straight: I tell him “Dick-train” and the big train is “Papa-train”.’

At that, the child begins to play with his little train. He says the word ‘station’. That is the sketch, the coupling of language to this imaginary system, its excessively short register composed of trains, the possibility of valorizing a black place, door knobs… That is what the faculties are limited to—not of communication, but of expression. For him, everything is equivalent, the imaginary and the real. And what does she tell him at that moment? Melanie KLEIN tells him: ‘The station is Mummy. Dick enters into Mummy.’

It is from there that everything is set off. She will do only ones like that for him, and no others. And very, very quickly the child tries it. It is a fact; that is where the object of the experience is, in the same way as the bouquet of flowers on the table. And there is another register, you see what is at issue? There is also there, interior and exterior. And it is from there that everything will start. Of course, it will be enriched, but she did nothing other than bring the verbalization, the symbolization of an effective relation, that of a being named with another.

And it is from there that the child, after a first ceremony that will have been to take refuge in the black space, to have in a way reestablished contact with the container, for the first time on the basis of this kind of verbalization, of symbolization imposed onto the mythical situation, to call it by its name, brought by Melanie KLEIN. That is what Melanie KLEIN notes perfectly—how the novelty awakens—the verbalization too by the child: a call, but a spoken call.

There had been no call in the style of what we commonly call psychic contact; on the spoken plane, there is a first call. The child asks for his nurse right away afterward, that nurse with whom he entered, whom he let leave as if nothing: he did not register the blow of the separation.

And, for the first time, he produces a call reaction, that is, something that is not simply an affective call, something mimed by the whole being, but that is, in its first form, a verbalized call, which in a way includes response, a first communication, in the proper and technical sense of the term. When Melanie KLEIN will have pursued the whole line of her experience—and you know that things then develop to the point that she brings in all the other elements of a situation henceforth organized, much richer, and up to the father himself, who comes to play his role. And moreover, in the external situation, Melanie KLEIN tells us:

‘relations develop on the plane of the Oedipus, in a way that is not doubtful.’

He ‘realizes’ here, ‘symbolizes reality’ around him, from this kind of initial nucleus, this little throbbing cell of symbolism that Melanie KLEIN gave him. What is all that? It is what Melanie KLEIN will afterward call: ‘having opened the doors of his unconscious’. I am not even asking you there to reflect: ‘In what way did Melanie KLEIN do anything whatsoever that manifests, that signifies any apprehension of I do not know what recessus that would be, in the subject, his unconscious?’ She admits it like that, from the outset, out of habit.

I simply want you all to reread this observation; this work of Melanie KLEIN is not impossible to obtain, and you will see there the absolutely sensational formulation that I always give you: ‘The unconscious is the discourse of the other.’ Here is a case where it is absolutely manifest. There is no kind of unconscious in the subject.

It is Melanie KLEIN’s discourse that makes, if I may say so, that onto this situation of ego-inertia in the child are grafted his first absolutely brutal symbolizations, which appear arbitrary to us in certain cases, of the Oedipal situation as Melanie KLEIN practices it, always more or less implicitly, with her subjects, and which engender and determine, in this particularly dramatic case, in this subject who has not acceded to human reality—there is in him no call—the position from which he will be able:
– to conquer literally, for that is what is at issue, a series of developments, a series of equivalences, a system of substitution of objects,
– to realize the whole series of equations that will allow him, in the most visible way, to pass from the interval between the two door leaves in which he used to take refuge in the absolute black of the total container, to a certain number of objects that little by little he will substitute for it: the basin of water, in relation to which he unfolds, articulates, his whole world, and from the basin of water to I do not know what electric radiator, something more and more elaborated, more and more rich, more and more pleated as to its possibilities of content, and also as to its possibilities of definitions of ‘content’ and of ‘non-content’.

What does it mean, then, to speak in this case of development of the ego? This rests on the latest ambiguities that emerge in the analysis that always confuses ego and subject. It is insofar as the subject is integrated into the symbolic system, and exercises himself there, and asserts himself there by the exercise of a true speech…
and you will notice: it is not even necessary that this speech be his
…a true speech can be brought there, in the couple momentarily formed, in its nonetheless least affect-laden form between the therapist and the subject, within that, that a certain speech—no doubt not just any speech, for it is there that we see precisely the virtue of what we call this symbolic situation of the Oedipus, which is truly the key.

It is a key that is very reduced. I already indicated to you that there was very probably a whole bunch of keys; perhaps one day I will give you a lecture on what one of the primitive myths gives us in that regard. I will not speak of ‘the least primitive’, for they are not the least… they know much more than we do. When we look at a mythology…
the one that may perhaps come out with regard to a Sudanese population
…we see that the Oedipus complex for them is only a thin little joke, and a very small detail of an immense myth, which makes it possible to collate a whole series of interrelations among subjects of a richness and a complexity beside which the Oedipus seems only such an abridged edition that in the end one can say that it is not always usable.

But what does it matter! For us analysts, up to now we have been satisfied with it. People do try to elaborate it a bit, but timidly. And one always feels horribly entangled because of an insufficient distinction between imaginary, symbolic, and real. She approaches the Oedipus schema, and the subject is situated. At that moment, the already constituted imaginary relation is complex, but the relations he has with the external world—only excessively reduced, extremely poor—allow him to introduce into the world that we call real this primitive real that for us is literally ineffable, this child’s world into which, when he tells us absolutely nothing, we have no way of penetrating, except by symbolic extrapolations.

This is the ambiguity of all systems like Melanie KLEIN’s when she tells us that, within this empire within the body, he is there with all his brothers, not counting the father’s penis. This world, I have—in a first stage of structuration between the imaginary and the real—shown its movement: how to understand its movement, that is, what we call the successive cathexes that will delimit the variety of objects, and of human objects, that is, summable, from this first fresco—since I called it that—of what is, strictly speaking, a significant speech, as formulating a first fundamental structure of what in the law of speech humanizes man.

How can I tell you that still in another way? And to initiate later developments: what does she call, in itself? What does the field of the call represent within speech? The possibility of refusal! I say ‘the possibility’ of refusal: the call does not imply refusal; it implies no dichotomy, no bipartition. But you see that it is at the moment when the call occurs that we manifestly see relations of dependence become established in the subject. For from that moment on, he will welcome his nurse with open arms, and he will manifest toward Melanie KLEIN, by going to hide behind the door on purpose, the need to have, all of a sudden, a companion in this reduced corner that he had gone to occupy for a moment: dependence will become established afterward.

You therefore see playing independently in this observation the series of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ language relations, preverbal and postverbal, in the child. And you realize precisely that the external world…
what we call the real world, and which is only a humanized, symbolized world, made only of the transcendence introduced by the symbol into primitive reality
…can be constituted only when there have occurred, in the right place, a series of encounters, a series of positions that are of the same order as those which, in this diagram, mean that the eye must not be just anywhere for the situation, in a certain way, to be structured.

I will make use of this diagram again; here I introduced only a bouquet, but one can introduce the others, the Other. But before speaking of the Other, of identification with the other, I wanted today simply to say […] within these relations between real, imaginary, and symbolic, and to show you this significant observation.

It can happen that a subject who has, in a way, all the elements—language, a certain number of possibilities for making imaginary displacements that allow him to structure his world—is not […] in the real, is not […] solely because things have not come in a certain order, because the figure, as a whole, is disrupted.

There is no way for him to give this whole the slightest development, what is in this case called ‘development of the ego’. It is in a more technical sense.

If one goes back over Mlle GÉLINIER’s text, one will see to what extent… And even better in Melanie KLEIN’s text, when she says at once that the ego was developed in a premature way, in the fact that the child has a relation that is too real to reality, of course in a certain sense too real, because the imaginary cannot be introduced, and in a second part of her sentence she uses ego in saying that it is the ego that stops development. That simply means that the ego cannot, in a certain position, be validly used as an apparatus in the structuration of this external world, for a simple reason: it is that, because of the bad position of the eye, it does not appear, literally, purely and simply.

Let us suppose that the vase is virtual: the vase does not appear, and the subject remains in a reduced reality, with an imaginary baggage that is also reduced. The hinge-point of this observation is that you must understand, because it is said in a particularly significant way, the virtue of speech, of the act of speech, as symbolic functioning coordinated with a whole symbolic system already established, typical and significant, the function of speech in the development of the real, imaginary, and symbolic system, what is its basis.

I think that perhaps this would merit
– that you ask questions,
– that you reread this text,
– that you also handle this little diagram,
– that you yourselves see how, in reality, it can be of use to you.

What I gave you today has the value of a theoretical elaboration made right up against the text of the problems raised last time by Mlle GÉLINIER. You will see what it will be of use to us for, not next Wednesday, but the Wednesday after:

‘Transference, at the distinct levels at which it must be studied.’

There is another face of transference, more familiar: transference in the imaginary. You will see what use the considerations set out today will be to us.