LECLAIRE

Serge LECLAIRE

You had asked me whether this text [On the Introduction of Narcissism] had interested me. Interested me? Yes.
But I was uneasy about placing it back into perspective, into its time and into the rest of FREUD’s work.
I read a little of it with PERRIER, a little with Andrée LEHMANN, and I think everyone is uneasy.
There are viewpoints, formulations that seem outdated, where one stops.
And then it would have been necessary for us to reread all the other texts that precede and follow it and that can be connected to it.

Last time, in fact, I tried to summarize the first three or four pages. They seem important to me.
There are different ways of speaking about this text: to follow it step by step, or to make a free commentary on it.
But I do not think it is my role to make a free commentary on it, and I am going to follow it step by step.

LACAN – All right.

Serge LECLAIRE

It is not all that easy, given its construction. This text is divided into three parts. The first introduces precisely what we brought up last time, the fundamental distinction between a sexual energy, and an energy of the ego.
I believe it is around this distinction that he is led to the discussion of narcissism.

FREUD tells us that he is led to this conclusion, to this hypothesis – elsewhere – of a fundamental distinction between:
– a sexual energy: libido,
– and an energy of the ego drives.

I say ‘energy of the ego drives’ since that is what he calls it, but he immediately says that they cannot be distinguished from the stage or moment when object-cathexis occurs. So, in the state of narcissism, these two energies are inseparable. It is therefore on the subject of this distinction that he is led to the study of narcissism. One is led to consider narcissism as a perversion, but his first definition in this article is that it is a libidinal element of the egoism inherent in the […] and he links […] to […] primary narcissism.

All around this text, he repeats precisely this fundamental distinction between sexual energy and ego energy. He tries to situate narcissism and situates it in these terms: it is a libidinal cathexis of the ego. Where does this libidinal cathexis of the ego come from? The very term – moreover, in his view – ‘libidinal cathexis of the ego’ would already raise a certain number of problems, since it poses the problem of the energy it would invest by virtue of the cathexis and of the existence of the ego.

Obviously this problem […] since where does this cathexis come from? Well, it can come from the withdrawal of the libidinal cathexis of objects. And moreover, at this formulation he will stop to give the definition of secondary narcissism, running up against precisely a fact, of secondary cathexis by withdrawal of the libidinal cathexis of objects: libido withdrawn from objects and transferred to the ego.
However, he speaks to us of another conception, of an original libidinal cathexis of the ego.

He sees in it, following the observation of children’s behavior – and he tells us at once: that is where things become complicated – this original libidinal cathexis of the ego is the one that is later directed toward objects. And following these different questions, one arrives at the fundamental distinction between sexual energy: libido, and an energy of the ego drives. At that moment one cannot say that it is a rigorous development. And these are the two questions that we brought up last time, which arrive there as incidental, but which are extremely important: these are the relations between primary auto-erotism and narcissism.

The question that we brought up last time was the point on which I had insisted, this sentence:

‘there must exist a preexisting unity, a unity preexisting the ego, since auto-erotism is a completely primitive fact…’

[On the first question I note: It is a necessary assumption that a unity comparable to the ego is not present in the individual from the beginning; the ego must be developed. But the auto-erotic drives are primal; therefore something must be added to auto-erotism, a new psychical action, in order to shape narcissism.]

FREUD says that this distinction follows from the observation of neurotics, but that the development of the conception that separated sexual drives and ego drives is not the fruit of a rigorous demonstration, that it is a hypothesis.
And he insists on the entirely relative value of theories.

LACAN – How does he justify it?

Serge LECLAIRE

He gives a few arguments. He says that this theory can find a confirmation, the theory of this fundamental distinction can find a confirmation in certain arguments. Thus this popular distinction between hunger and love. One can also find a foundation in certain biological notions, and in a double simultaneous development of the individual on a biological plane, and on an individual plane. There, I am summarizing…

LACAN

No, no. Do not summarize! That is precisely what is interesting. Last time, if you remember the way I intervened, it was to point this out. You spoke of the historical situation of this article. I told you that this article, like most or almost all the articles of that time, that is to say the beginning of the war of 1914, it is still rather moving to think that FREUD was pursuing all this elaboration at that time, On the Introduction of Narcissism is from 1914, and everything that is going to follow, all the metapsychology in particular, everything that is classified by us under that heading, will develop between 1914 and 1918. This immediately follows the appearance, in 1912, of JUNG’s work, translated into French under the title ‘Metamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido’.

Here, he alludes to the war, since he uses the term promoted by JUNG of introversion, giving, in sum, to the whole range of mental illnesses… You know that JUNG had a quite different approach to these illnesses from FREUD’s, since it was, in sum, around his experience placing above all the emphasis on the study of the range of schizophrenias that JUNG’s experience was centered, whereas FREUD’s was centered on neurotics.

At that time JUNG brings a kind of grandiose unitary conception of psychic energy, which is something fundamentally different in its inspiration, and even its definition, from the notion elaborated by FREUD under the term libido. Nevertheless, the theoretical difference is rather difficult to make at that moment, such that FREUD is grappling with certain difficulties, which is precisely reflected by this entire article.

An attempt to maintain, in a usage we would nowadays call ‘operational’, a well-delimited notion of libido and the theoretical notion that, by virtue of the prominence of the Freudian discovery, is in sum founded on this apprehension that in the neurotic’s symptom – this is the fundamental apprehension, in sum – a diverted form of sexual satisfaction is exercised.

FREUD said this about the symptoms of neurotics and demonstrated it there, in a concrete way, through a series of equivalences whose last is a therapeutic sanction, it is one and of value […] a term which is certainly not what FREUD liked to refer to, for FREUD always claimed that it was not a new totalitarian philosophy of the world that he was bringing but something well defined and founded on a certain field, perfectly limited, and entirely new moreover, of the exploration of a certain number of specifically psychopathological human realities, subnormal phenomena, that is to say not studied by normal psychology, namely dreams and disturbances, failures, slips, which are found in a certain number of the subject’s so-called higher functions. FREUD senses well that the problem that now arises is that of the structure of the psychoses: how the structure of the psychoses can be elaborated in relation to the general theory of libido.

JUNG brings this solution: the profound transformation of reality that manifests itself in psychoses is due to something that FREUD had glimpsed with regard to neuroses; it is to that change, to that metamorphosis properly speaking of libido – a differentiated term – that makes it the inner world – what is left in the greatest ontological vagueness – the subject’s inner world into which this libido introverts, that is responsible for the fact that reality for this subject sinks into a kind of twilight that allows us to conceive, with perfect continuity, the mechanism of psychoses with that of neuroses.

FREUD, very attached to a series of extremely reduced, precise mechanisms derived from experience, extremely concerned with his empirical reference, sees the danger of such an apprehension thus brought to the problem. He sees all that being transformed into a kind of vast psychic pantheism, of a series of imaginary spheres, no doubt equally imaginary, enveloping one another, whose interest for a kind of classification of contents, of events, of Erlebnis of individual life, is easy to see, up to what JUNG calls ‘archetypes’.

One clearly has the feeling that it is not along this path that a particularly clinical and psychiatric conception of the objects of his research can be pursued. And that is why, at that moment, he tries to make a critique of the reference that these drives can have with one another:
– on the one hand, sexual, to which he has given so much importance because they were hidden, because they were those revealed by his analysis,
– and those ego drives that he had until then left in the shadow and which are nonetheless indeed what is now being called into question.

Namely:
– are they – yes or no – such that one is the shadow of the other, in a way?
– is all reality constituted by that sort of universal libidinal projection that is at the foundation of Jungian theory?
– or is there this difference, this opposition, which gives all the value to FREUD’s conceptions of neurosis, an oppositional relation, a conflictual relation between ego drives and libidinal drives?

FREUD, with his usual honesty, clearly says:
– that after all, the fact that he is committed to maintaining this distinction is founded on his experience of neuroses,
– that after all it is only a limited experience and that, if one considers a broader set of facts, it could well after all change in value.

That is why he also said no less clearly that at the primitive stage…
at a stage prior to what our properly psychoanalytic investigation allows us to penetrate
…one must at least say that with – he says it formally – the ununterscheidbar state that does not allow a sufficient analysis, a sufficient dissection, for our analytic experience.

[Finally we infer for the distinction of the psychical energies that at first, in the state of narcissism, they are together and, for our coarse analysis, indistinguishable, and that it is only with object-cathexis that it becomes possible to distinguish a sexual energy, the libido, from an energy of the ego drives.]

We have a kind of stage where it is impossible, in the current state of our means, to discern these two fundamental tendencies which are inextricably mixed, beisammen, which at first are confused in the state of narcissism and are not unterscheidbar, distinct, for our coarse analysis: it is not possible to distinguish a Sexuallibido from the Ich–triebe, from the energy of the ego drives.

[We would then say: The patient withdraws his libidinal cathexes back onto his ego, in order to send them out again after recovery. ‘Only in the narrow cave,’ says W. Busch of the toothache-stricken poet, ‘does the soul dwell: in the molar tooth.’ Libido and ego-interest then have the same fate and are again indistinguishable from one another. The well-known egoism of the sick covers both. We find it so self-evident because we are sure that, in the same case, we would behave likewise. The driving away of even the most intense readiness to love by bodily disturbances, the sudden replacement of it by complete indifference, finds corresponding exploitation in comedy.]

He thus centers the whole question at the level of the question of the psychoses. But from the outset he will tell us why he attempts to maintain this distinction. The first question is founded on the experience of neuroses. The second question that he brings is this: the present lack, at that moment, in that state, of clarity in the distinction between ego drives and sexual drives is attributable, he says, perhaps only to this: that what we have begun to elaborate in experience as ego drives and sexual drives is something that is in sum the last point of reference of our theory, those famous drives.

That is not what is really at the base of our construction; it is what is at the very top. That is to say that he himself emphasizes that the very notion of drives, Triebe, is an eminently abstract notion, and this is what he will also later call our mythology. And of course, he tells himself, with his mind aimed at the concrete, whether or not that is in accordance with his personal tendencies, always tending to put exactly in their place the speculative elaborations that were his, he knows well their limited value, he underscores it. He brings their reference to the notions also highest in physics, about which he says very well that one sees, over the course of the history of physics, notions like matter, force, attraction, were elaborated only in the course of historical evolution, and began with a kind of uncertain, even confused, form, before arriving at that purification that allows their quite precise application.

[These ideas are not, namely, the foundation of science on which everything rests; this is rather observation alone. They are not the lowest, but the highest of the whole structure and can be replaced and removed without harm. We are experiencing something of the sort again in our days with physics, whose basic conceptions about matter, centers of force, attraction and the like are hardly less questionable than the corresponding ones of psychoanalysis.]

He thus makes it clear that it is nothing other than that when it is a matter of maintaining the opposition between ego drives and sexual drives. Indeed it is to the elaboration, to the deepening of these notions that he will devote himself in this article: On the Introduction of Narcissism, For the introduction of the notion of narcissism. It is at that moment that he brings in, specifying that it is indeed a matter of elaborating these notions, which exactly leaves the door open with what we are in the process of doing, not in his wake, but accompanying him, because that is not to say that it is somewhere in FREUD’s work that [for that matter] the way one handles them, disseminates them, repeats them, is always truly appropriate, is in the very spirit of the research that FREUD indicates. Because precisely in this direction of research, we ourselves try to obey his watchword, his style.

At that moment he brings in the reference to a fundamental notion, namely that biology itself indicates to us, at least the evolution of biology as it was at the point it had reached in his time, namely that what at that moment astonished us in a ‘theory of instincts’ cannot not take into account a certain diffusion, a fundamental bipartition, between:
– the aims or purposes of preserving the individual,
– and those of the continuity of the species.

It is quite certain that what we have there in the background is nothing other – moreover they are expressly invoked – than the theories you must know; you must have kept some memory of them from your philosophy year: WEISSMANN’s theories. For WEISSMANN’s theory is not yet definitively proven: an immortal substance of the sexual cells, insofar as they would be generated, they are already differentiated directly in the nucleus of the sexual cells of the prior individual of the lineage, thus constituting an absolutely continuous sexual lineage, by continuous reproduction of cells that differentiate in the lineage as sexual, and making the […] plasma something that perpetuates, that endures, from one individual to another.

Whereas in sum the whole of the somatic plasma, of the soma, as WEISSMANN expressly says, presents itself as a kind of individual parasite, pushed laterally from the point of the reproduction of the species, with the sole aim of conveying this germinal plasma, eternal, and by the succession of individuals to that species. Here the Freudian reference is immediately supported by this, that what he constructs is assuredly not, and does not pretend to be, a biological theory, and that likewise, whatever the provisional value for him of this reference to which he nonetheless wants to cling until further notice and under benefit of inventory, if the examination of the facts as they develop in the proper domain of analytic investigation were to result in rendering the biological reference useless, in founding something that, being organized on the proper field of facts where his investigation is defined, not only useless but harmful – […] he specifies this reference as extreme, taken from another field – he would not hesitate to abandon it.

Even so, he says, it is nevertheless not a reason to drown, in the still unexplored field of the psychical facts with which he is dealing, to drown this Sexualenergie, this libido whose pathways and routes he has until then followed, in a sort of universal kinship with everything we can see as psychical manifestations, of which, he says, the result when it is a matter of pursuing the analysis of concrete facts would be quite comparable to this – the reference he gives is particularly exemplary – it would be roughly as in a case where we would have to decide an inheritance matter, and where someone has to produce proof before a notary of his rights as heir, and would invoke, in that connection, the universal kinship that certainly links – at least in the monogenetic hypothesis – all men with one another.

It seems that the comparison is entirely exemplary of FREUD’s thinking on this subject and this point. I would nevertheless like here to introduce, precisely with regard to this reference, a simple remark which perhaps will seem to you to cut, by its unusual character, against the remarks we make on this subject.

But you will see that after all it will at once bear at the heart of what our problem is, which is precisely to introduce a little more clarity into this elaboration, more exactly this discussion that FREUD is pursuing, and whose obscurities, dead ends – as you see, already just by the commentary on the first pages – are here in no way concealed from us, attenuated. One cannot say that this article provides a solution, but on the contrary a series of open questions.

Now these are questions into which we are trying to insert ourselves. Well then, let us stop for a moment, since we are being led onto this terrain, and let us ask ourselves a few questions that are all the more interesting because – you will see – they are not questions that at present remain entirely up in the air, given that the theory of instincts has nonetheless made some progress since then.

As FREUD tells us somewhere, unfortunately we do not have, at the date when he writes, a ready-made theory of instincts, ready-made, off-the-rack. It is not off-the-rack at that moment; it still is not very much so in our own day. But, as you know, since the works of LORENZ and up to TINBERGEN, we have nonetheless taken a few steps. That is what justifies the remarks, perhaps a bit speculative, that I will be led here to bring you. Let us follow the biologists closely, more exactly the biological notions as they can appear to psychologists, to anthropologists.

If we hold as valid the Weismannian notion of the immortality of the germ, what results from it?
If we think this individual who develops, who is radically distinct from the fundamental living substance that constitutes the germ, which, for its part, does not perish, this theory of the individual parasite, what function does he play with respect to this propagation of life?

It is quite clear that in this register, in this mode of apprehension, as for what the phenomenon of life is, he plays a role that literally has nothing to do, as an individual properly speaking, with this propagation. These individuals, from the point of view of the species, they are, so to speak, already dead. At the level of each individual, this individual is nothing compared to this immortal substance that is hidden in his bosom, which is the only one that perpetuates itself with the right to represent authentically, substantially, what exists as life.

I will clarify my thought. This individual will be led – we now place ourselves from the psychological point of view – by this famous sexual instinct, to propagate what? Something that is nothing other than this immortal substance included in the properly germinal plasma, in the genital organs, represented at the level of vertebrates by spermatozoa and ova.

But that is what is propagated, and that alone. Is that all? Of course not. What is propagated is indeed an individual who has that function. An individual who has that function, what does that mean? It is an individual who reproduces itself, but reproduces itself not as an individual, but as a type. And that is indeed where the theory of instincts leads us.

It is that what supports the sexual instinct, what makes it the concrete psychological spring, which determines its putting into operation, the enormous mechanics, the trigger, as TINBERGEN expresses it after LORENZ, is precisely not at all a real individual, not the reality of the living being, of the sexual partner – let us now call it by its name – but precisely something that has the greatest relation with what I have just called ‘the type’, that is to say an image.

What the ethologists’ elaboration of the mechanisms of displacement of the pairing demonstrates to us is the wholly prevailing importance of an image so important that this image is constituted, is formed, appears in the form of a transitory phenotype, by particular colorations in a very large number of species, by modifications of external appearance, which by their model can serve for something one can even call a kind of signal, but a constructed signal, a Gestalt, as we say nowadays.

Ultimately what we see appear is that from the point of view of biology, a point on which already a few philosophers had reflected, if one wants to distinguish different planes of the human world, to recognize that what distinguishes its plane is very precisely this: that it belongs to a world in which something called heredity dominates, where the preformed element, the element of the past is what, in the scansion of the three temporal times – for the moment we are today at the common tripartition: past, present and future – it is the past that absolutely determines everything that occurs, with the exception of that completely enigmatic element that is called maturation. Let us leave that aside for the moment.

In the normal transmission of what is called the species, the individual only reproduces the type already realized by the whole lineage of its ancestors. In short, from the strictly animal point of view, as I told you, this individual is after all not only mortal, but something already dead, something without a future properly speaking. From the point of view of the species it is nothing other than the incarnation, the support of something that is not a horse, this or that horse, but that is ‘the horse’. And moreover it is on this very foundation that the concept of the species is founded. If the concept of the species is founded, if natural history exists, it is because there are not only horses, but ‘the horse’.

That this manifests itself on the psychological plane by the fact that what is proposed, what determines the bringing into play of what is properly of the mechanistic order, of the engaging, of the triggering of the sexual instinct, is essentially crystallized on a relation of images, I come to the term you are all waiting for: on an imaginary relation, this is sufficiently indicated, and it seems to me that the natural introduction to the problem of the relation of the Libidotriebe, Sexualtriebe, and the Ichtriebe – as it will be developed throughout this article from this notion, which is not new, which has already been expressed in many places – you have there the framework within which, for us, the problem must be posed.

The question is not already for you posed on the plane of the relations of the libidinal drive with these two domains that we use incessantly, but wrongly and indiscriminately, of the imaginary and of the real. And if already you do not see that libido is posed exactly, is centered around the function of the imaginary, not as a certain kind of idealist and moralizing transposition of analytic doctrine, as people wanted to make it believed, in a kind of progress toward a certain ideal, imaginary state, of genitality, which would in some way be the sanction and the final spring of the establishment of the real, well then, obviously you can understand nothing!

This is sufficiently indicated in this article, and you will moreover see in what follows, and it is from there that we must start, that it is from there also that the problem of the real function that the ego plays in the psychic economy is truly posed.

Would you like to move forward a bit?

Serge LECLAIRE

Exactly, I would have wanted to ask questions, or make answers: I would like to give you a feeling that I did not have alone, in reading certain parts of this text, and to which I was alluding right at the beginning. In the text too, since in a commentary, in sum, one can grasp a certain number of passages that catch you. One sees precisely that FREUD says, in the second question that he poses, in these incidentals, after having posited this fundamental distinction, he poses two questions.

– He answers the first, as we have said: the necessity of an intermediate psychical action between primary auto-erotism and narcissism.

– To the second, he answers this: that the necessity of answering in a sharp way to the second question must bring about in each psychoanalyst a notable uneasiness. One defends oneself against this feeling of absorbing one’s attention in sterile difficulties, but one must nonetheless not renounce the search for a solution.

This second question is this one, that of fundamental psychical energy: would it not be simpler to have only one fundamental psychical energy? At certain moments, in reading this text, we have this impression of grasping notions that do not seem all that fertile to us.

And I have the impression, to take up the line of what you were saying, that this fundamental bipartition of libido into two types: Ich-libido and Objekt-libido, undeniably has a pragmatic value…
it is the only one that FREUD recognizes for it moreover in this text, the other terms coming only as confirmation
…it has a pragmatic value, as you were saying, in the study of neuroses. But what has been brought to light in the study of neuroses essentially? It is the sexual drives, precisely, that were hidden.

And it seems to me that since in a bipartition there must always be two terms, the whole difficulty results from the fact that the other term was called ‘ego libido’, ‘Ich-libido’, or ‘ego energy’ originally. That did not impose itself.

This ‘ego energy’ is a kind of differentiation of that fundamental energy that it evokes at every moment, and each time one speaks of this ‘ego energy’, we feel a bit of this uneasiness, from the moment one posits a systematic construction, when one tries to articulate, to specify, the relations between the two, since precisely this ego libido raises the question of narcissism.

And we shall see—in my view, it is in the third part—that the problem begins to become a bit clearer, from the moment he brings into play the notion of the ego ideal. It seems to me that to tackle the second term of this bipartition, ego energy, or ego libido, relates a little to the sterile effort we can make if we tackle the study of ‘primitive energy’.

Octave MANNONI

May one ask for the floor?

For some time I have been troubled by a problem that touches this somewhat, and seems to me to complicate and simplify things somewhat. It is that the cathexis of objects by libido is at bottom a realist metaphor, because it cathects only the image of objects, whereas the cathexis of the ego can be an intrapsychic phenomenon in which it is the ontological reality of the ego that is cathected. If libido has become object libido, it can no longer cathect anything but something that will be symmetrical to the image of the ego.

So that we will have two narcissisms: depending on whether it is a libido that intrapsychically cathects the ontological ego, or else it will be an object libido that will come to cathect something that will perhaps be the ego ideal, in any case an image of the ego. Then we will have a very well-founded distinction between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism.

LACAN

Obviously, MANNONI, in an elegant jump, introduces us very quickly to where you can feel that, bringing you along step by step like this, I want to lead you somewhere: we are not going entirely at random, although I am ready to welcome the discoveries we will make along the way. Of course, in the end, that is what it is about. I am glad to see that our friend MANNONI does it like this: one must from time to time make a leap into the subject.

I go back to my last step. You understood well what this is tending toward? It tends to connect up with this, which is indicated to us because there has been reference to biology, that fundamental experience that the current elaboration of instinct theory brings us. Namely that what is the trigger, the ‘objectal’ element in the triggering of libido, the setting in motion of the cycle of sexual behavior, is something about which one can say that the subject is essentially lureable.

For what the expressions of the ichthyologists show us is that if, on the one hand, the male stickleback must have taken on beautiful colors, on the belly or on the back, for this whole play to begin to be established, this dance, what I have in other circumstances already more or less set out for you and that I will set out again for you when the occasion arises, conversely, this presupposes that we can very well make any ‘cutting out’, a ‘cutting out’ that has to be specified, a kind of thing rather poorly rough-hewn in its whole, but which—on condition of bearing certain traits, certain marks, Merkzeichen—will have exactly the same effect on the subject.

We must never lose sight of these entirely fundamental elements that are at the very heart of the processes we are pursuing, representing what originally distinguishes, by entirely special properties, what is the instinctual cycle in the sexual order, namely—this is what I insisted on when I gave you my first presentation on the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, which was only a roughing-out—especially:

– sexual behaviors that are especially lureable, and this occurs in the biological lineage,

– the displacement phenomena that make the fundamental characteristic of everything that has developed as original in the development of perversions and neuroses hold together.

Wladimir GRANOFF

With regard to gesticulation, what you are saying—I do not have the text, but there is the Metapsychology text which is perhaps even more explicit—there is this sentence:

‘Thus the hereditary Self harbors innumerable individual resistances…//…in the Ego and the Self, and the Ego and the superego…’

There are a quantity of formulations as explicit as what MANNONI was saying.

LACAN

Since we are there and since we have all rights in a commentary, I am going—before we part—to introduce something: a supplement to the schema I gave you three seminars ago, when I gave you that little course, on what I called The Topic of the Imaginary. I worked hard enough to make you feel clearly what one could draw from a certain model, of which I indicated to you sufficiently that it is in the line of FREUD’s own wishes.

For quite formally he says somewhere, in several places—and I told you especially in the Traumdeutung and the Abriss—that these agencies that he brings in as being the fundamental psychical agencies must be conceived for the most part as representing what occurs in a photographic apparatus, namely those images—either virtual or real—that follow from the functioning of the apparatus.

The organic apparatus representing precisely the mechanism of the apparatus, and what we apprehend being precisely those images whose functions are not homogeneous, for it is not the same thing, a real image or a virtual image. And it is by a schema of this kind that what he elaborates as agencies must be interpreted, and not as being something, as being substantial, epiphenomenal with respect to the modification of the apparatus itself. A thing that FREUD indicated many times and that he never realized.

If you still remember the schema I made for you, I give you a summarized reminder of it on the board, namely: the concave mirror thanks to which the phenomenon of the inverted bouquet occurs:

…which we ourselves transformed, because it is more convenient, into that of the inverted vase:

Here a vase, which will—by the play of the reflection of rays on a sufficiently extended spherical surface—be reproduced here in a real image, and not a virtual one, on which the eye can accommodate, which will give us here, assuming that we have already arranged a few flowers, the eye can bring about, if it accommodates exactly at the level of the flowers, the real image of the vase will surround them, will give them that style, that unity, that unification, reflection of the unity of the body itself. Of course, this is a model and serves you to understand something.

I pointed out this to you, by showing you the play of rays, that for the image to have a certain consistency, it had to truly be an image. What is the definition of the image in optics? That to each point of the object there corresponds a point of the image, that all the rays emitted intersect again somewhere at a unique point. An optical apparatus is defined in no other way than that: a convergence of rays univocal or biunivocal, as one says in axiomatics, from one point, of an object, into another precise point where the image is specifically constituted. That is what it is about in optics. For this image to be visible, assuming that the concave apparatus were here, and that our little conjurer’s setup were in front.

It is certain that the image can be seen with sufficient sharpness to produce the illusion of reality…
this very particular illusion that is called a real illusion—it is not like the image you see in the mirror, which is not where you see it—image which is there where you see it
…it is necessary that you find yourselves placed at a certain angle, a certain extension defined by a cone in relation to the whole of the apparatus. So I told you that no doubt, according to the different positions of the eye that would look at the whole of this apparatus, we could distinguish a certain number of cases that would perhaps allow us to understand certain distinctions of the position of the subject with respect to reality. Of course, a subject is not an eye, I told you, but if this model applies, it is because we are in the imaginary, and the eye has a great deal of importance.

Since someone introduced the question of the two narcissisms, you can feel that that is what it is about, the relation there is between the constitution of reality, and a certain relation—which in a more or less appropriate way MANNONI called ‘ontological’—with the form of the body.

Well then, tell yourselves this: I who am here, let us suppose that I am between the object and the construction from which the illusory real image is going to be made, the foundation of this amusing physics experiment, let us suppose that I am, in a way, leaning back against this concave mirror, on which I indicated to you that we can already project, in our model, probably all sorts of things that have an organic meaning, I told you that it is very probably the cortex.

But let us not substantify too quickly ourselves, because this is not—as you will see better later on—anything other than pure and simple elaboration of the theory of the ‘little man who is in the man’. For if it is in order to remake the ‘little man who is in the man’, I do not see why then I would criticize it all the time. But it also has its reason for being. It is part of the mirage to which the academic psychologist yields all the time. And if he yields to it, it is because there is some reason for him to yield to it.

Let us place ourselves for a moment in the position of the eye, of that hypothetical eye, of which I spoke to you. And let us put this eye there, somewhere, here, between the concave mirror and the object. Well then, for this eye, which is here, to have exactly the illusion of the inverted bouquet, of the inverted vase on this occasion, that is to say, to see it under optimal conditions, as optimal as that of the one who is at the back of the room, one single thing is necessary and sufficient: that there be here, toward the middle of the room, a mirror.

In other words, this experiment, which as you know is entirely concrete and successful: one sees a bouquet where it is not, a vase where it is not, for me who am against the concave mirror to see it as well as someone who is at the back of the room, whereas I do not see, in a direct way, the real image, in the position where I am, for all sorts of reasons. But thanks to this mirror that is in the middle of the room, I find myself placed in the same position as the one who is at the back of the room.

For the rays appear to me as if I were in this position. What am I going to see in the mirror?
– First, my own figure, where it is not.
– And second, here, at a point symmetrical to the point where the real image is here, I am going to see appear, as virtual, this real image.

Are you with me? This is not difficult to understand, when you get home: put yourselves in front of a mirror, put your hand in front of you… This little schema is only a very simple elaboration. The same thing that I have been trying to explain to you for years in the mirror stage allows us to see many things. You will see it in what follows. For just now MANNONI was speaking of the two narcissisms: the narcissism that relates to the bodily image insofar as it is inscribed, for the best reasons, it is identical in the set of the subject’s mechanisms, it is what gives its form to his Umwelt, insofar as he is a man and not a horse. This image that makes the unity of the subject, and that we see projected in a thousand ways, including in the source and origin of what one can call the imaginary source of symbolism, that by which symbolism is linked to feeling, to the Selbstgefühl that the human being, the Mensch, has of his own body.

There is a certain narcissism that is situated, if you like, there, at the level of the real image of my schema, and insofar as it makes it possible to organize the whole of reality in a certain number of preformed frames. This of course is entirely different in an animal that is by its own formations formed, adapted to a uniform Umwelt.

There will be a certain number of pre-established correspondents between these imaginary structural elements, and the only things that interest it in this Umwelt, the only structures that are interesting for the perpetuation of these individuals, themselves a function of the typical perpetuation of the species.

But man precisely, for whom—almost only for him—there exists:

– not only of course, you understand it, this reflection in the mirror which is a phenomenon nonetheless so important that I believed I had to shed on it always and for a very long time a fundamental light, as manifesting a noetic possibility, for man properly speaking entirely original,

– but which of course goes much further, since it is nothing other, you feel it, than this pattern which is at once and immediately what is the relation to the other.

For it is obviously always through the intermediary of the other, insofar as the other has a wholly special value, the one that I have elucidated, highlighted, developed in the theory of the mirror stage, the other has this captivating value by the anticipation that the unitary image represents as it is perceived in the mirror or in any reality of the similar for man, which makes it that it is through the intermediary of this other, through this alter-ego…
which is more or less confused according to the stages of life with this Ich-Ideal, this ego ideal that you are going to see invoked all the time in this text
…it is insofar as man reflects himself, identifies himself, as you see—but the word ‘identification’ taken undifferentiated, as a block, is unusable—it is this narcissistic identification, that of the second narcissism of which MANNONI spoke, it is this identification with the other which in the normal case precisely is what allows man to situate exactly what in his being has the fundamental libidinal imaginary relation to the world in general, that is to say allows him to ‘see’ in his place, to structure, as a function of this place, his world, what is properly his being—since he said ontological a moment ago, I am willing—his libidinal being: he ‘sees’ it in this reflection, in relation to the other, in relation to this Ich-ideal.

You see there distinguished the functions of the ego:

– insofar as, on the one hand, they play, as in all other living beings, a fundamental role in the structuring of reality,

– and insofar as, on the other hand, in man they must pass through the intermediary of this fundamental alienation in the reflected image of oneself, which is as much the Ur-Ich, the original form of the Ich-Ideal, and as much of the relation with the other.

Is this sufficiently clear to you?
Do you simply understand well that this little schema, it is first of all a matter of understanding it well? Afterward, we will use it.
I had given you one element. I am giving you another today: the combination with the reflective relation to the other. You will see afterward what it is for. For you can well imagine that it is not for the pleasure of approaching more or less amusing constructions here that I made you this schema. It will be extremely useful.

It will allow you, within this schema, to pose to yourselves more or less all the practical clinical, concrete questions that arise concerning the use of the function of the imaginary and especially of these libidinal cathexes whose meaning one ends up no longer understanding, when one handles them. You will see the use this will have, the metapsychological supplement, the theory of dreams, which I tasked someone quite especially with working on: GRANOFF?

Wladimir GRANOFF

That obviously leads to the ego, and to the self, and to hypnosis. One can proceed in the following way: by bringing up for example the role of pain, which he brings in this sentence that ends in the following way:

‘That gives an idea of the way we rise to the representation of our body in general…’

And this other sentence:

‘That it represents only our body… what I wanted to come to is that the state of being in love, which rests on the co-existence… the attracting object on a part of the narcissistic libido of the ego, this state is limited to the ego and to the object. Hypnosis resembles the state of being in love…//…but it rests principally on inhibited sexual tendencies and puts the object in the place of the ego ideal.’

There, the whole optical schema is found again in the two sentences.

LACAN

The notion of the strict equivalence of the object and the ego ideal in the amorous relation is one of the most fundamental notions, and one finds it everywhere in FREUD’s work. You cannot—because you encounter it at every step—not all the same have asked yourselves the question: then all the same, if the loved object is in the end, in amorous cathexis, in the capture of the subject by the object of love, something that is strictly equivalent to this ego ideal…

And that is why there is:
– this economic function so important in suggestion, in hypnosis,
– this state of dependence, a true perversion of reality, of fascination, overvaluation of the loved object,
– all this psychology of love life already so finely developed by FREUD and of which we have here an important piece, so huge that, as you see, we are scraping at it, we are barely ‘grasping’ it today.

But there is there every color on this subject of the fundamental relations with what he calls object choice.

Serge LECLAIRE – That relates very exactly to what you were saying. I was struck…

LACAN

Let me finish my sentence, will you? You cannot not see what kind of contradiction there is between that and what, in certain mythical conceptions of the libidinal ascesis of psychoanalysis, people constantly give as what must be the ‘completion of affective maturation’: namely that at the last degree of the genital we would be I do not know what, this kind of fusion, of communion, of realization properly speaking of the kind of correlation that one would put between genitality and the constitution of the real. I am not saying that there is not something essential there for the constitution of reality, but one must still understand how.

For it is one or the other:
– either love is what FREUD describes: imaginary in its foundation,
– or else it is something else: the foundation and base of the world.
Just as there are two narcissisms, there must be two loves: ἔρως[érôs] on the one hand, and ἀγάπη[agapè].

LECLAIRE

I was struck (page 47) by the fact that, the first time he uses the term that we call ego ideal, he does not use that term, but uses the term ideal ego. That signifies that it is indeed a realized object. And moreover he uses it only twice, and afterward he uses Ich-ideal.

LACAN

You see, today I am simply giving you this little apparatus. It came like that. We are in a seminar and not a teaching ex cathedra or systematic. We are trying to orient ourselves, to understand and to draw the maximum profit from a text, and above all from a thought that develops, believe it well, around all that, and God knows how little by little the documents accumulate.

How the others, and among the best, tried—including ABRAHAM and FERENCZI—to manage with respect to this problem of the relations between the development of the ego and the development of libido, that is the object of the last article that came out in the New York school. Let us stay at the level of FERENCZI and ABRAHAM.

FREUD refers to it, if we make the critique of this text, he refers to it incessantly, he even relies on FERENCZI’s article published in 1913 on the sense of reality. It is very poor. Obviously it is he who began to put into people’s heads these famous ‘stages’, since afterward everything is mixed up moreover, where primitive omnipotence, the time of the omnipotence of gestures and the omnipotence of words […] And then it is general confusion. One would think that the […] invents all the words. FREUD refers to it.

It is certain that at the point of emergence that these first attempts by FREUD represent in the theory, to apprehend what makes it possible to articulate properly speaking the springs of the constitution of the real, it is of fairly great help to him to have heard this answer in the dialogue: something was brought to him, he uses it. But God knows that this article in the end, FERENCZI’s, insofar as it exerted a decisive influence, is like repressed things that are all the more important because one does not know them.

Likewise when a guy writes a fine piece of nonsense, it is not because nobody read it that it does not continue its effects, for without having read it, everyone repeats it. There are like that a certain number of things conveyed, and that operate through a certain number of mixtures of planes to which people pay no attention, for example this certain impregnation, first theory of the constitution of the real in analysis, by the dominant ideas of the time, those that are expressed in the terms, in the more or less mythical idea of the ‘stages of the evolution of the human mind’, the idea that drags everywhere, also in JUNG surfacing more or less, that the human mind would have made, in the very latest times, decisive progress, and that previously one was still at a prelogical confusion.

As if it were not clear that there is no structural difference between the thought of Mr. ARISTOTLE and that of a few others. These ideas carry with them their power of disorder and their poison, and awaken problems instead of clarifying them.

One sees well moreover, in the uneasiness FREUD himself shows, when he refers to it, where he refers to it, to FERENCZI’s article: when one speaks of ‘primitives’ or so-called ‘primitives’ and of the mentally ill, it goes very well, but where it becomes complicated, the evolutionary point of view, is what happens with children. There, all the same, FREUD is forced to say

‘it is all the same the same mode of entering the world, of entering in children—FREUD adds—whose development for us is far from being as transparent.’

[We expect a quite analogous attitude toward the external world in the child of our time, whose development is for us far more opaque.]

Perhaps it would indeed be better not to refer to falsely evolutionist notions in the end, for it is probably not there that the fertile idea of evolution must reside, but rather to elucidate structural mechanisms, always in operation, perfectly perceptible in our analytic experience centered first in adults, and which allows us retroactively to shed light on what can take place more or less hypothetically and in a more or less controllable way in children.

This structural point of view, we are in the straight line in following it, for that is what FREUD ended up arriving at. The last development of his theory moved away from these analogical, ‘evolutionary’, cruises made on a superficial use of certain watchwords. What FREUD always insists on is exactly the opposite, namely the conservation, at all levels, of what one can consider as different stages.

We shall try to take one step further next time. Today, consider all this as beginnings.

You will see the close and direct relation of it with what we can consider as the phenomenon of transference, imaginary, that is its essential nature.