[Lacunary stenotype transcript]

For those who were not there last time, I am going now to locate the problem and the usefulness of the intervention of the article ‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’. You know that we have arrived at a point in our exposition of technique, in our examination of the foundations of technique.

Since I am led to modify a little the planned order of this meeting today, owing to the defection of our friend LIEBSCHUTZ [Leclaire], I will therefore perhaps be led — which will perhaps not be a bad thing — to short-circuit a little certain notions that I am usually led to repeat to you, almost to drum into you, with the aim of getting them to enter into your categories, and better still into your habits of thought.

How could we sum up the point we have reached? I noticed this week, and I cannot say it without satisfaction, that there are a few among you who are beginning to worry seriously about the systematic use that I have been suggesting to you here for some time, of a fundamental reference to the categories of the symbolic and the real.

You know that it is by insisting on this notion of the symbolic and by telling you that it is fitting always and strictly to start from it in order to understand what we are doing in the whole positive part of our intervention in analysis on the basis of this category of the symbolic, and always to ask yourselves what such an element of our intervention means and how it is situated, I repeat it, especially the positive interventions, namely interpretation.

We have thus come to insist greatly on this face of resistance that is situated at the very level of the emission of speech insofar as it can express the being of the subject, insofar as it succeeds in that — and can one say that it succeeds in it? Up to a certain point it will never succeed in it — we have, I say, arrived at this moment where we ask ourselves the question: what then, in relation to this fundamental element of communication, of speech, what is and how are situated all these affects, all these references — let us now call them by their name — imaginary, which are properly, commonly evoked when one evokes, when one wants to define the interpsychological action of transference in analytic experience? You have clearly sensed that it was not self-evident.[…]

It lies there in the gift of speech, insofar as when speech is given, the two subjects, the speaker and the addressee, if you like, as regards full speech, speech insofar as it aims at, insofar as it forms that truth establishing itself in the recognition of one by the other[…] one of the subjects finds himself afterwards, other than he was before. Full meaning has made a true act of speech[…] as being essential speech cannot be eluded from analytic experience.[…]We cannot think the whole analytic experience as a kind of game, of deception, of a sort of illusory maneuver, of suggestion after all, as people say.

If analysis is indeed an experience and brings about an authentic progress, it is at this level that the final term must hold[…]
In relation to this final term, I will say that the whole analysis holds on this side of it. And even the whole question of the[…] extreme point, is nonetheless something that animates the whole movement of analysis.

From this point once posited, as you have already been able to notice, many things become oriented and illuminated, and many paradoxes, contradictions appear. The importance of this conception is precisely to make these paradoxes and these contradictions appear, which does not mean for all that opacities and obscurings. It is often, on the contrary, what appears too harmonious, too understandable, that harbors within itself some opacity, and it is conversely in antinomy, in the gap, in the difficulty, that we find chances of transparency. It is on this point of view that our whole method rests, and I hope also our progress here.

The first of the contradictions, of course, that appears, is that it is assuredly odd that the analytic method, if we think that it aims to reach full speech, proceeds in a way that seems — it is indeed the case to say so — to be at the maximum a detour, since it seems to set out by the strictly opposite route.

Namely that insofar as it gives the subject as an instruction the object of a speech as untied as possible from any supposition of responsibility, insofar as it frees the subject himself from any demand for authenticity, insofar as he is told that he has to say everything that passes through his head, it is quite certain that thereby, the least one can say is that it facilitates for him in every way a return into the route of what, in speech, is, I would say, below the level of recognition, that is to say what concerns very specifically the third party, the object.

You have understood well that we have situated speech at these levels in its function of recognition. What does that mean?

That means that we have thereby discerned two planes in which this exchange of human speech is exercised:
– the plane of recognition of speech insofar as it binds between the subjects that pact by which the subjects themselves are transformed, are established as human and communicating subjects,
– and the order of what is communicated, which can itself be situated at all sorts of levels, from the level of the call of discussion properly speaking, of knowledge, even of information, and which in the final term tends to realize something that is agreement on the object.

You sense that the term agreement is still there, but that what matters is to know to what extent the emphasis is put on an object, that is to say something that is considered as external to the action of speech, that speech, in sum, signifies and even, in the final term, expresses.

Of course, this term ‘object’ — we envisage it only in its reference to speech — is something that is from the outset partially already entirely given by all sorts of hypotheses that are not all hypotheses conforming to reality, in this objectal, or objective, system, and by integrating into it the whole sum of prejudices that constitute a cultural community, up to and including hypotheses or even psychological prejudices from the most elaborated by scientific work to the most naïve and the most spontaneous, which certainly are not without communicating broadly with properly scientific references, and even up to impregnating them.

Thus the subject is invited, by the route in which the instruction engages him, to give himself over very precisely, in complete abandonment, to the system, that is to say to what he holds and possesses as system, scientific on the level of what he can imagine as such, on the level of the knowledge he has taken of his state, of his problem, of his situation, as well as the most naïve prejudices on which his illusions rest, including his neurotic illusions, insofar as what is at stake there is an important part of the constitution of neurosis.

It would seem in truth — and that is indeed where the whole problem is — either that this route is badly chosen, or that, if for some reason one cannot choose another, one sees poorly how progress would be established in this act of speech, except by the route of an intellectual conviction, which could be disengaged from the intervention properly speaking educational, that is to say superior, teaching, which would come from the analyst. And in the end that is what is aimed at when one speaks of a first state, of a first phase that would have been ‘the intellectualist phase’ of analysis. At least as one imagines it.

You naturally think that it never existed, but it could exist in the insufficiency of the conceptions that it then had of itself. But that does not mean that at the beginning of analysis one really did intellectualist analyses, since the forces that were authentically at stake were indeed there from the origin. And if moreover they had not been there, analysis would not have had the occasion to prove itself, to introduce itself as an evident method of psychotherapeutic intervention.

But to explain it thus is very important, because you see that what is called ‘intellectualization’ on this occasion is quite another thing than simply this connotation that it would be a matter of something intellectual. This ‘something intellectual’ is present in the whole later conception of the conception that we can have of analysis, and after all it is never anything but theory, understanding of what happens in analysis. And the better we will understand, analyze the various subjects of what is at stake, the better we will succeed in distinguishing what must be distinguished and uniting what must be united, the more effective our technique will be. That is what we are trying to do.

So it must indeed be a matter of this interval that is given, between the ideal point of aim of this essential action of speech, and the routes by which we pass. There must be something that explains, in another way than by ‘indoctrination’, the effectiveness of the interventions of analysis. We all know that, it is something that we do not[…] today, it is precisely what experience has demonstrated to be particularly effective in the action of transference.

Only, that is where opacity begins. For after all what is, in the end, this transference? You see that here the question is of a different nature. We have understood that in its essence the effective transference at issue is quite simply the act of speech. Each time that one man speaks to another, in an authentic and full way, it is a transference in the sense that something happens that literally changes the nature of the two beings in presence.

What is at stake here is another transference, the transference of this function first of all that has presented itself as not only problematic, but as an obstacle in analysis, namely that something happens on the imaginary plane, and for which everything you know was forged:
– repetition of old situations,
– unconscious repetition,
– putting into action of an action that can be considered as a historical reintegration, reintegration of history
…but in the contrary sense, namely on the imaginary plane, namely the past situation being lived in the present without the subject’s knowledge, insofar as the historical dimension is denied, that is to say properly speaking as unrecognized — I did not say unconscious, you will note — as unrecognized by the subject.

But this, these are explanations, this is what is brought to define the situation, to define what we observe; it is something that has all the value of an assured empirical finding and nevertheless does not thereby reveal any more its reason, its function, its meaning in the real. Why is it thus?

You will tell me it is perhaps there to be demanding, and particularly to manifest a sort of appetite, as to theoretical satisfaction, where after all certain brutal minds would perhaps desire to impose a barrier on us. First, besides the fact that the analytic tradition at this point — there must be reasons for that — is not distinguished by a special absence of ambition, I believe that, justified or not, carried along or not by FREUD’s example, one can hardly say that there are psychoanalysts who have not at some moment stumbled upon mental evolution.

This sort of metapsychological enterprise is in truth quite impossible for reasons that will be revealed a little later. To practice psychoanalysis even for a second without thinking in metapsychological terms is exactly like Mr. JOURDAIN who was indeed forced to make prose, whether he wanted it or not, from the moment he expressed himself. That being said, even if there were not this truly structural fact of our activity, it is only too clear that at every instant the question reopens — in the most practical way — for us of knowing what we must consider transference to be.

Last time I alluded to FREUD’s article on ‘Transference love’ integrated into his Technical Papers. Given the strict economy of FREUD’s work, and how much one can say that he did not truly approach a subject that was not absolutely urgent, indispensable to treat, in a career that was barely commensurate with human life — especially if one thinks of at what moment of his concrete, biological life he began it, this teaching career — we cannot fail to see that, for example, the points indeed the most important are to know the relation that there is between these transference ties and these positive and negative characteristics — positive on occasion — namely the relation that is properly speaking the love relation, nonetheless a singular thing. Which raises a question about this love relation, and to the extent that precisely I have not concealed from you in FREUD that it carries along the whole question of the love relation.

Well then, clinical experience, and at the same time also theoretical history, the discussions promoted within what is called the mainspring of therapeutic effectiveness, a subject that is in sum the subject on the agenda since about the 1920s:
Berlin Congress first, Salzburg Congress, Marienbad Congress, one has never done anything but that: to ask oneself — of course we had used up his forces — the usefulness of the function of transference in the handling we do of our patient’s subjectivity.

And we have also indeed realized that even something that goes so far as to be called not only ‘a transference neurosis’, a nosological label that designates what he is affected by, but a secondary neurosis, if one can say artificial, which is the actualization of this transference neurosis in the transference, in short the transference neurosis in the second sense that this term has, namely the neurosis insofar as it has tied into its threads the imaginary person of the analyst.

We know all that. Still the question of what makes the mainspring of what acts, not of the ways by which we act, but of what is essentially the source of therapeutic effectiveness, and which remained until an epoch — which is exactly the one at which I am speaking to you — obscure enough that the least one can say.

It is that the greatest diversity of opinion is displayed on this subject in the whole analytic literature, namely, to go back to the old discussions you only have to refer on that to the last chapter of FENICHEL’s little book. It does not often happen that I recommend to you the reading of FENICHEL, but on this occasion, for these historical data, he is a very instructive witness. And you will see there the diversity of opinions: SACHS, RADO, ALEXANDER, when this was addressed at the Salzburg Congress.

What is striking even is that you will see there a kind of announcement of what, for example, the one named RADO does, who announces in what direction he intends to push the theorization, the elaboration of what properly speaking constitutes analytic effectiveness, and — a singular thing — this is followed by nonexecution. Never — after having promised to elaborate, to put in black and white the exposition of the direction in which he saw for himself the solution to these problems — did he actually do it.

It seems that some mysterious resistance indeed acts so that it remains in a relative shadow, which does not seem to be due solely to the obscurity of the subject, since sometimes dazzling lights appear in the directions shown by one or another of these researchers or of these meditating subjects.

One truly has the feeling that, as closely as possible, something is approached that relates to what is effective in the actions in presence, but it is as if, faced with the elaboration, the putting into concepts of what is sometimes so well glimpsed, there were exercised I do not know what that seems to forbid the subject something, about which we could make different hypotheses.

It is quite certain that there is indeed sometimes a certain suspension of the mind above certain problems, and that there perhaps, more than elsewhere, the dangers of a certain precipitation, of a certain prematuration, the completion of theory at least, even only of its progress, might be felt as a danger; it is not excluded. It is undoubtedly the most favorable hypothesis.

What is at stake, what we have seen manifest itself in the continuation of these discussions of these theories on the nature of the imaginary place established in the transference, has the closest relation with the notion, you know it, of objectal relation. It is this notion that has now quite come to the foreground and onto the agenda of the elaboration of the analytic notion as being fruitful.

And you also know how much on this point theory is hesitant and how, to take things at the current point to which they have come, it is extremely difficult to know. Take for example reading an article on this subject, on the mainspring of therapeutic effectiveness, for example that of James STRACHEY in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis — a fundamental article, it is one of the best elaborated — which places all the emphasis on the role of the superego.

You will see to what difficulty this conception leads and how, around this fundamental marker, and to support it, to make it subsisting, viable, the number of additional hypotheses that the said author — STRACHEY — is led to introduce. For example, the distinction between the superego function that the analyst would occupy in relation to the subject, and this precision that it is a parasitic superego. Indeed, it absolutely cannot hold if we wanted to admit that the analyst should be purely and simply the support — which he already is for the subject — of the superego function insofar as it is precisely one of the most decisive mainsprings of neurosis. One would not see how to get out of this circle if one did not have to introduce this additional notion, and to introduce it one is forced to go too far.

One sees it in STRACHEY’s article, that is to say, for the superego to be a parasitic superego, there must have taken place between the analyzed subject and the analyst subject a series of exchanges, of introjections and projections, which carry us very specifically to the level of the mechanisms of constitution of ‘good and bad objects’, which has been addressed in the practice of the English school by Melanie KLEIN, and which is itself not without presenting the danger of making them be reborn without rest.

It is on an entirely different plane, the whole question of the relations between the analysand and the analyst, that is to say not on the plane of the superego, but on the plane of the ego and the non-ego, that is to say very essentially on a plane of the subject’s narcissistic economy. Moreover, from always, this question of what transference love means has been too narrowly linked with the whole analytic elaboration of the notion of love itself.

Namely love, not love insofar as ἔρως[eros], the universal presence, the power of bond between subjects, which is the one that is in some way underlying the whole reality within which analysis moves, but passion-love, as it is indeed and concretely lived by the subject as a kind of catastrophe in the psychological domain, and which, as you know, raises entirely other questions, very precisely — I anticipate here, because you will have to confirm it — how, in what way this passion-love is in its foundation likewise linked to the analytic relation.

After having told you some good about it, I must tell you some bad about FENICHEL’s book. It is obviously as amusing as it is striking to note in passing the kind of revolt, even insurrection, that the remarks of two authors seem to provoke in Mr. FENICHEL, extraordinarily pertinent precisely in their analysis of the relations of love and transference, where they precisely and to the maximum place the emphasis on this narcissistic character of the imaginary love relation: how and how much the loved object is confused, by an entire side of its qualities, of its attributes, and also of its action in the psychic economy, with the subject’s ego ideal.

There one sees curiously conjoin this general syncretism of Mr. FENICHEL’s thought and this kind of middle way that is his, with a kind of repugnance before paradox, the true phobia that there is in this type of imaginary love which in fact makes it, in sum, of course in its foundation, something that participates essentially in illusion.

And one sees him precisely stop almost with a kind of horror that Mr. FENICHEL feels, indeed often as devaluing the very function of love, whereas it is precisely a matter of that: what is this love, insofar as it arises as an imaginary mainspring in analysis? It is something that marks a deep correlation in the subjective structure of the personage in question.

Well then, that is what is at stake: what we can identify as notion, category, line of force, structure, between:

– the narcissistic relation insofar as we make use of it in analytic theory,

– the function of love in all its generality,

– and transference in its practical effectiveness.

To say on that something that allows you to find your bearings, to orient yourselves, at each crossroads, among ambiguities that renew themselves, I think that, however little you may have been able to become acquainted with the literature of analytic theory, you have noticed that this ambiguity renews itself at every step.

There is more than one method[…] I think I am teaching you like this the introduction of this or that new category that makes it possible to introduce essential distinctions, and that are not external, scholastic distinctions, in some way in extension, to oppose such a field to such a field, to multiply bipartitions to infinity. It is a mode of progress that is always permitted; it is what is called always introducing additional hypotheses; but, on the contrary, a progress in understanding, that is to say to bring out what simple, already existing notions imply.

There is no interest in decomposing indefinitely, as one can do, as has been done in an exceedingly remarkable work on the notion of transference. There is interest, on the contrary, in leaving the notion of ‘transference’ in all its empirical totality, but also in understanding that it has several faces, that it is polyvalent, that it is exercised at once in several registers, and in that which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real introduce. Those are not three fields.

I have given you several concrete examples of it, even in the animal kingdom you have been able to see that it is with regard to the same actions, the same behaviors that one can distinguish precisely, because it is a matter of something other than something that can be embodied in what one can distinguish as functions of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, from behavior, for the reason that they are not situated in the same order of relations.

There are several ways of introducing this notion. It has its limits, like any dogmatic exposition, whereas its usefulness is to be critical, that is to say to arise at the point where the concrete empirical effort of researchers meets with a difficulty in handling already existing theory. That is what makes it interesting to proceed by the route of commenting on texts.

If our dear LIEBSCHUTZ [Leclaire], who was to bring his little text, wanted simply to consider that even if he has not completely elaborated what he had… what he believed he had to do today, if he simply gives it to us, that will allow us to reply more easily, with regard to his first reading of the first pages. Tell us simply, for example, for this single fact, this single usefulness that it is not I who read this text — what is annoying is that not everyone has been able to read: most have not read it — would you like to read the first pages of this text on narcissism, the points or the turns where you bring out an articulation of FREUD’s thought?

Serge LECLAIRE

I have read only the first ten pages. It would have to be situated in its era, which is difficult for me. In these first pages one passes through several formulations of the notion of narcissism. He eliminates first of all the notion of narcissism as perversion, that is to say defined thus as love of one’s own body, loved in the same way as the body of another. That is how he defines it, how he at least cites it without naming it.

LACAN — That, that is to exclude it.

Serge LECLAIRE

To exclude it; that is indeed what I am saying. To consider that narcissism exists as a form of libido in many other behaviors. One arrives fairly quickly, it seems to me, at a definition of narcissism that is this — I will return later perhaps to the motives that led him to define narcissism thus — narcissism would be libido withdrawn from the external world and carried back onto the ego. That is the basic definition, I have the impression, of this article on narcissism.

LACAN — Why do you say ‘from the external world’?

Serge LECLAIRE — ‘Außenwelt’.

LACAN — The Außenwelt you speak of is at the moment when he takes the comparison of pseudopods, of protoplasm…

Serge LECLAIRE — It is a little before.

LACAN — That introduces it.

Serge LECLAIRE

Not exactly. At bottom, what pushes him — if I have understood this first reading well — to give, to formulate a theory of narcissism, is that one has been led to see, to study how the study of dementia praecox and schizophrenia could be integrated into the theory of libido.

That is in fact what seems to him to make urgent the elaboration of a theory of narcissism. And I believe that it is from these clinical considerations that he starts to differentiate first the behavior of these psychotics, the behavior of neurotics, mainly hysterics. And that he arrives precisely at this formulation: that it seems to him that the libido that has been withdrawn from objects in the neurotic is invested or remains free to apply itself to imaginary objects or to objects at least… yes, imaginary objects.

That is what he calls the paraphrenic. It is not so, he says; it seems that the schizophrenic has withdrawn all his libido from persons and things of the external world, without having invested it in fantasies, in phantasmatic objects. It is following that that he arrives at this definition of narcissism as libido withdrawn from the objects and things of the external world and carried back onto the ego. That is how one arrives precisely at this distinction that he judges fundamental, of object-libido and ego-libido, of which he moreover says that it is only a hypothesis.

Of course it is a hypothesis that seems to him founded by the results of his clinical experience in the study of neurotics. It was there mainly that I was stopped, for the question that I am going to ask.

LACAN — That’s it; ask one, that will be enough for today.

Serge LECLAIRE

I would like to articulate it on his text. I would not like to ask it outside his text. In sum, he distinguishes following that, from these considerations, a sexual energy: libido, from an energy of the ego. But precisely, before going further, he asks two questions. He wants at least to address two questions, the first of which is this: ‘What becomes of narcissism in autoeroticism?’, which he described as a behavior or as a manifestation that is quite primitive, primary, of libido? That is the first question he asks. It is very important. He will answer it a little further on.

The second question also seems to me very important; it is this: ‘Could one not limit this distinction?’ I do not want to address this second question, since it is to the first that he answers.
The first: ‘What becomes of narcissism in autoeroticism?’ He answers that it seems necessary to him to distinguish in the individual a unity different, different at least since, indeed, the ego must be the result of a process of development, so the ego already appears to him as something secondary. The autoerotic drives, by contrast…

LACAN

May I? I am going to quote what you are not quoting. What you are saying there is quite right. The question at issue, the one LIEBSCHUTZ [Leclaire] is in the process of setting out for you, is this: there is a relation between a certain thing, x, that has taken place on the plane of libido and this disinvestment of the external world, which is characteristic of the forms of dementia praecox. This being understood in a sense as broad as you can imagine it.

That is where the problem is most acute, because to pose the problem in these terms generates extreme difficulties with respect to analytic theory as it already exists, already constituted at that moment. This relates to the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ to which this notion of primordial autoeroticism refers, outside of which — by a sort of evasion, of prolongation, of pseudopods — this libido constitutive as such of objects of interest of this autoeroticism, is distributed, is constituted by way of a certain emission by the subject of his libidinal investments: the different forms and stages where — according to his own instinctual structure and by a sort of elaboration of the world — the subject’s instinctual progress would be constituted.

This seems to go all by itself, and of itself, at a stage where FREUD gave libido the definition he gave it by leaving outside the mechanism of libido everything that could relate to another register than the properly libidinal register of desire as desire, defined and situated by him as a sort of extension of everything that manifests itself concretely as sexual, as a sort of absolutely essential dyadic relation of the animal being with the Umwelt, with its world.

Everything is bipolarized in this conception. FREUD has always felt very well that this conception did not work if one neutralized in some way, if one generalized this notion to excess. It is well admitted that nothing is explained, nothing essential is brought in the elaboration of the facts of neurosis, especially if one considers this as approximately identical to what Mr. JANET could call, for example, the function of the real.

Within real or realizing relations, within a whole series of functions that have nothing to do with this function of desire, namely everything that relates to the relations of the ego and the external world, everything that relates to instinctual registers other than the sexual register, namely for example what relates to the whole domain of nutrition, of assimilation, of hunger, insofar as it serves the preservation of the individual as such, it is within that, against the broader, more general background of these very real relations, that libidinal relations are situated, that libido is situated.

If libido is not isolated from the whole of the functions of preservation of the individual, it loses any kind of meaning.

It is precisely from the fact that something happens in schizophrenia that completely disturbs the subject’s relations to the real, and that drowns, if one can say so, the background with the form, and that all at once raises the question of whether the theory of withdrawal of libido does not go much further than what has been properly defined starting from this organizing, central nucleus of properly sexual relations.

That is where the question begins to be posed. It is posed so well that historically it has already been crossed. I will show it to you at the moment when we analyze the commentary on the case of President SCHREBER. FREUD, in the course of the commentary he makes on this written text of SCHREBER, is led to become aware of the difficulties posed by the problem of libidinal investment in the psychoses. And he employs notions there that are ambiguous enough for JUNG to be able to say that he has renounced the properly libidinal and sexual character of the fundamental function of his whole theory of instinctual evolution, namely a single force called ‘libido’ and which is essentially of a sexual nature.

JUNG takes that step and introduces the notion of introversion, which for him — as FREUD expresses it — presents itself…
this is the critique FREUD makes of him
…as a notion ohne Unterscheidung, without any distinction, which results in the vague and general notion of psychic interest, in which you see that it drowns into a single register what is of the order of the properly speaking sexual polarization of the individual toward his objects, in a certain relation to himself, which is of the libidinal order, which he says is entirely centered and ordered around realization as an individual in possession of genital functions.

That is why I say that historically the question has already been posed, introduced by JUNG’s notion of introversion, and you see how psychoanalytic theory is in some way at that moment open to this kind of neutralization of the problem to this: that on one side one strongly affirms that it is a matter of libido, and that on the other one says that it is simply a matter of something that is a property of the soul, insofar as it is creative of its own surroundings and of its world.

And this is extremely difficult to distinguish from analytic theory insofar as, in sum, at that instant, apart from this indication, the idea of autoeroticism from which the constitution of all objects would progressively emerge is at that stage of FREUD’s thought something that is, in sum, almost equivalent in its structure to JUNG’s theory.

It is at that moment, at the moment when he writes this article, it is one of the reasons for this article, that FREUD returns to the necessity of strongly distinguishing what is of selfish libido and what is of sexual libido, and of maintaining the distinction. The problem is extremely arduous for him to resolve since precisely, while maintaining the distinction, he turns throughout this article around the notion of their equivalence.

How can this be so closely, rigorously distinguished, and at the same time how can we preserve the notion of a sort of energetic equivalence between the two terms, which would mean that it is precisely insofar as libido is disinvested from the object that it comes back to be carried over into the ego? That is the whole problem that is posed, developed, brought to a point of concrete elaboration across all the planes where he can find a criterion of the experience that is pursued within this article. Let us posit that at the start what LIEBSCHUTZ [Leclaire] was introducing a moment ago is this: he is led thereby to conceive narcissism as a secondary process, to emphasize that a unity in some way comparable to the ego does not exist at the origin, nicht von Anfang, is not present from the beginning in the individual. The Ich must develop, entwickelt werden.

The tendencies, autoerotic drives are on the contrary there from the beginning, Urbild. He introduces that — and without otherwise resolving it — with regard to the notion of what this Urbild of the ego can be. Those who are somewhat accustomed to what I have brought with the mirror stage must understand the analogy with what the notion of a unity means. This is articulated in FREUD.

This confirms the usefulness of a conception such as the one I teach you by way of the mirror stage, namely that it is at a defined and determined moment that this unity comparable to the ego is constituted, which will be this Urbild from which the ego begins to constitute its functions. From that moment the human ego is constituted by a certain relation, which is precisely this imaginary relation, this imaginary function, of which I hope you will be able to see developed, in the two or three lectures that follow, some precisions on the very precise, at once limited and distinct use that we must make of it, and you will see that it is plural. I began with the diagram I gave you the other day about the real image: the bouquet; I began to give you the indication of what this imaginary function is, at least as container of the plurality of lived experience, of the individual.

But it does not stop there; you will see why: precisely because of this necessity to distinguish the psychoses and the neuroses. There are two registers involved at this mirror stage. That, I have not yet taught you, and in the light of FREUD’s article, you will see why this is necessary, and also how this is usable, and simply usable.

He defines this imaginary function of the ego as having to have eine neue psychische Gestalt; one can also say something that goes precisely in the direction of what I explain to you, namely, in the function of Gestalt, of formation, and of imaginary formation. That is what is designated by this neue psychische Gestalt: something new that appears at a moment of development, in the development of the psyche, and whose role is to give form to narcissism, if not by this imaginary origin of the ego function.

You will see in the course of this text itself all the impasses one reaches. So it is on this plane that the problem is posed. What is important in the beginning of this text is this: the difficulty he has in defending the originality of psychoanalytic dynamics against what one can call, I will not even say the generalization, but ‘the Jungian dissolution of the problem’.

I very rightly remark that if this general schema of ‘psychic interest’ insofar as it goes, comes, goes out, comes in, colors, which in sum reduces, according to a very traditional perspective of thought, and which shows the difference of orthodox analytic thought which finds again a traditional thought by drowning in a sort of universal illusion the magma that is at the bottom of all Jungian elaborations of the constitution of the world, it is a matter of nothing other than a kind of alternating illumination, which can go, come, project itself, withdraw itself from reality, at the whim of the pulsation of the psychic in the subject, which is a pretty metaphor, but which, in truth, in practice illuminates nothing and — as FREUD underscores — the differences there can be between this kind of withdrawal of interest from the world that can happen to the anchorite, and the nevertheless structurally quite different result which is the one we see, not at all directed, withdrawn, sublimated, but perfectly stuck-fast in it, in the schizophrenic.

It is certain that if many things have been brought clinically by Jungian investigation, interesting for its picturesqueness, its style, namely for example the rapprochements between the productions of such or such mental or religious ascesis and the productions of schizophrenics, there is there perhaps something that has the advantage of giving color and life to the interest of researchers, but which certainly has elucidated nothing in the order of mechanisms, and FREUD does not fail to underscore it rather cruelly in passing.

What is at stake for FREUD is to give an idea of the different distinctions that exist between:
– this ‘withdrawal from reality’ that we observe in a special form and structure: in the neuroses,
– and this other that we observe in the psychoses.

Now then, in a surprising way, in any case surprising for those who have not more specially attached themselves to these questions, gripped by these problems, what FREUD tells us is that one of the major and fundamental distinctions is this: that in this misrecognition, this refusal, this barrier of reality that is the neurotic’s, we observe something that he himself defines by this: a recourse to Phantasie.

There is a function there: in his vocabulary, it cannot be taken otherwise than as being in the order of everything that is of the imaginary register. And of course we return immediately to that when we know how much the persons, the things, of the neurotic’s surroundings are entirely charged with value in relation to a function that nothing prevents [us from qualifying] in the most immediate way… without seeking a more elaborate theory of what it means in language …as ‘imaginary’, which one can indeed call imaginary, in the sense that the word ‘image’ has:
– first: relation with formative identifications for the subject; that is the full sense of the term ‘image’,
– and second, with respect to the real, that character of the illusory which is the face most often brought into value of the imaginary function.

But what is quite striking, whether wrongly or rightly, it matters little to us for the moment, is that FREUD underscores that in psychosis there is nothing similar. Namely, what does that mean then: this subject who loses the realization of the real, the psychotic, of whom FREUD tells us — it is assuredly that which he underscores — that he finds no substitution of the imaginary, that that is what distinguishes the psychotic from the neurotic.

That may seem extraordinary at a first glance at things. You can clearly sense that one must nonetheless make a certain step there in conceptualization to follow FREUD’s thought. For what do we call a delusional psychotic subject? Normally, it is one of the most widespread conceptions: the psychotic subject is that he dreams, that he is fully within the imaginary. So it is necessary that in FREUD’s conception the function of the imaginary not be simply the same thing as the function of the unreal. It is completely different. Without that one does not see why he would refuse the psychotic this access to the imaginary.

And since Mr. FREUD, in general, knows what he is saying, we should at least try to elaborate, understand, deepen what on this point he means. You will see that it is precisely that which will introduce us to one of the most coherent conceptions of the most fundamental relations of the imaginary and the symbolic.

For I can say that it is one of the things on which he bears with the most energy this difference of structures: it is that in this kind of need for ‘reconstruction of the world’ that is the psychotic’s, what is it that will first be invested…
and you will see into what also unexpected route, I think, for many of you, this commits us
…it will be words. There you will not be able not to recognize the category of the symbolic.

Thus, we will find ourselves faced with this result. We will be able to push further what this critique already initiates: that it would be in a symbolic unreal, or a symbolic marked by unreal, that what is the psychotic’s proper structure would be situated, and that the imaginary function would be something quite elsewhere.

Then there, you begin to see the difference there is in the apprehension of the position of the psychoses between Mr. JUNG and Mr. FREUD. Because for Mr. JUNG the two domains, the symbolic and the imaginary, are completely confused. Whereas one of the first articulations that allow us to bring out this article of FREUD is a strict distinction. You will see that this article contains many other things as well.

Today this is only a priming of problems. But after all, for things as important as these, priming cannot be too slow. Consequently, if today I have only introduced for you, as moreover the very title of the article expresses it, Einführung, a certain number of questions that had never been posed, that will give you time to simmer, to work a little until next time.

Next time I would like to have a collaboration as effective as possible from our friend LECLAIRE. And I would not be displeased to associate with that GRANOFF, who seems to have a sort of special propensity to take an interest in FREUD’s article on Transference love, which seems to have struck him. [To Granoff] It could be the occasion for you to intervene by introducing this article specifically.

There is a third article; I would very much like to entrust it to someone for a next time, and it is an article that is situated in the metapsychology of the same period. It relates closely to our object, and it is nothing other than the article: ‘Metapsychological supplement to the doctrine of dreams’, which is translated into French ‘The doctrine of dreams’, and which I would like to give to whoever will kindly take charge of it, for example our dear PERRIER, which will give him the occasion to intervene on the subject of schizophrenics. You can in advance take this article, the point of departure designated by its title for all these questions that we have barely introduced today.