PERRIER

LACAN

…This imaginary is dominated by a certain mode of impression. It is possible to present the characteristics of the real on the image.
M. ALAIN emphasized that one did not count the columns on the mental image one had of the Panthéon. To which I would
willingly have replied: except for the architect of the Panthéon, that is the whole game. We are hereby introduced, through this little side door,
into something where, you will see, it will be a matter in abundance today of the relations of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Will we be able to ask you a question about the structure of the optical image, roughly, because that is going a bit fast;
I want to ask you for material clarifications.

LACAN – I am very happy that you ask them, for the time it takes PERRIER to catch his breath…

Jean HYPPOLITE

It may be because I understand a bit poorly, and if we talk about it again once or twice…
I ask your permission to ask you questions. Perhaps I have not understood well, materially.

LACAN

So, if you have not understood well, the others who are here…

Jean HYPPOLITE

If I have understood correctly, it is a matter of the material structure: there is a spherical mirror, whose object, situated at the center of the mirror,
has its real inverted image at the center of the mirror. This image would be on a screen. Instead of being made on a screen,
we can observe it with the eye.

LACAN

Exactly. Because it is a real image, insofar as the eye accommodates on a certain plane, moreover designated by the real object.
In the real experiment, it was a bouquet turned upside down that came to be situated in the neck of a real vase. Insofar as the eye
accommodates on the real image, it sees that image. It manages to form sharply insofar as the light rays
all converge on the same point of virtual space, that is, where, to each point of the object corresponds a point of the image.

Jean HYPPOLITE – The eye is placed in the light cone; it sees the image; otherwise it does not see it.

LACAN

Experience proves that, for it to be perceived, it is necessary that the observer be not too far from the axis of the apparatus,
of the spherical mirror, in a kind of extension of the opening of this mirror.

Jean HYPPOLITE

In that case, if we put a plane mirror, the plane mirror gives, from the real image considered as an object, a virtual image.

LACAN

Of course. Everything that can be seen directly can be seen in a mirror, and it is exactly as if one saw a set
composed of a real part and a virtual part that are symmetric, corresponding two by two. The virtual part
is constituted there as a phenomenon corresponding to the opposite real part, and conversely, so that what is seen in the mirror,
the virtual image in the mirror, is seen as the real image would be, which on this occasion functions as object, by an imaginary,
virtual observer who is in the mirror, at the symmetric place.

Jean HYPPOLITE

I started the constructions again, as in the time of the school-leaving exam or of the P.C.B.[Physics Chemistry Biology: preparatory year for the 1st year of medicine]:
a real image of a real object, a virtual image, etc. But there is the eye that looks into this mirror, to catch sight of the virtual image
of the real image.

LACAN

From the moment I can catch sight of the real image that would be here, by placing the mirror halfway I will see from where I am…
that is, somewhere that can vary between this real image and the spherical mirror, or even behind,
…appear in this mirror, provided it is suitably placed, that is, perpendicular to the axial line from earlier,
this same real image standing out against the confused background that will be given, in a plane mirror, by the concavity of a spherical mirror.

Jean HYPPOLITE – When I look into this mirror, I catch sight all at once of the virtual bouquet of flowers, and of my virtual eye.

LACAN

Yes, provided that my real eye exists and is not itself an abstract point. For I emphasized that we are not an eye.
And I am beginning to enter, there, into abstraction.

Jean HYPPOLITE – So, I have understood the image well. The symbolic correspondence remains.

LACAN – That is what I will try to explain to you a bit.

Jean HYPPOLITE

In particular, the correspondence…what is the play of the correspondences between the real object, the flowers, the real image, the virtual image,
the real eye and the virtual eye? Otherwise – let us begin with the real object – what do the real flowers represent for you, in the symbolic correspondence
to this diagram?

LACAN

The interest of this diagram is, of course, that it can serve several uses. And FREUD has thus already constructed for us something
similar, and has indicated to us quite especially, on the one hand in The Interpretation of Dreams, and on the other hand in the Abriss, that it was thus

• the form, the imaginary phenomenon – that the psychical agencies had to be conceived. He said it at the moment of The Interpretation of Dreams.
  And when he made the diagram of these thicknesses where come to be inscribed, from there, perceptions and memories, some composing
  the conscious, the others the unconscious, coming to be projected with consciousness, coming eventually to close the stimulus-response form,
  which at that time was the plane on which one tried to make the circuit of the living understood. And in these different thicknesses
  we can see something that would be like the superposition of a certain number of photographic films.
  It is certain that the diagram is imperfect. One must all the time suppose…

Jean HYPPOLITE – I have already made use of your diagram; I am looking for the first correspondences.

LACAN

The primitive correspondences? In this we can, to fix ideas, at the level of the real image, which is in the function
of containing and at the same time excluding a certain number of real objects, we can for example give it the meaning
of the limits of the ego, see them form at the level of the real image in a certain dialectic. For all this is only the use
of relations. If you give such a function to an element of the model, such another will take such another function. Let us start from there.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Could one, for example, admit that the real object signifies the Gegenbild, the sexual replica of the ego?
I mean, in the animal diagram, the male finds the Gegenbild, that is, its complementary counterpart in the structure.

LACAN – Since a Gegenbild is needed…

Jean HYPPOLITE – The word is HEGEL’s.

LACAN

The very term Gegenbild implies correspondence to an Innenbild, what one calls correspondence of the Innenwelt and of the Umwelt.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Which leads me to say that if the real object, the flowers, represents the real object correlative—animal-speaking—of the perceiving animal subject,
then the real image of the flowerpot represents the reflected imaginary structure of that real structure.

LACAN

You cannot say it better. That is exactly, at the outset, when it is only a matter of the animal first, and in the apparatus when
it is only a matter of what is produced with the spherical mirror, that is, when the image is this first definition,
this first construction that I gave you of it, that from the spherical mirror the production of a real image
is this interesting phenomenon: that a real image comes to mingle with real things.

If we limit ourselves to that, it is indeed a way in which we can represent for ourselves this Innenbild, which allows the animal
to seek exactly—like a key seeking a lock, or like the lock seeking the key—its specific partner,
to direct its libido where it must be, for this propagation of the species, of which I remarked to you one day that,
in this perspective, we can already grasp in an impressive way the essentially transitory character of the individual
in relation to the type.

Jean HYPPOLITE – The cycle of the species.

LACAN

Not only the cycle of the species, but the fact that the individual is so captive to the type that, in relation to that type, it annihilates itself.
It is—as HEGEL would say, I do not know if he said it—already dead: in relation to the eternal life of the species, it is already dead.

Jean HYPPOLITE

I made HEGEL say this sentence, in commenting on your image, that in fact: ‘Knowledge—that is to say humanity—is the failure of sexuality’.

LACAN – We are going a little fast there!

Jean HYPPOLITE

It is simply the cycle… What was important for me is that the real object [flowers or vase, depending on the cases] can be taken as
the real counterpart that is of the order of the species for the real individual. But that then there is produced a development in the imaginary
that allows this counterpart in the sole spherical mirror to become also a real image that is, in a way, the image
that fascinates as such—in the very absence of the real object that has been projected into the imaginary—
that fascinates the individual and captures it up to the plane mirror.

LACAN

For example, that already allows us to grasp something in an imagistic way: this sort of thickening, in relation
to the perception of the external world, of condensation, of opacification, that libidinal captation as such represents.
One can say that in the animal, at least when it is caught in a cycle of behavior of an instinctual type, it opens itself in
the external world insofar…
you know how delicate and complex it is to measure what is perceived and not perceived by the animal. The animal’s perception
seems to go much further in it as well than what one can bring out regarding a certain number
of experimental behaviors, that is, artificial ones; we can note that it can make choices
with the help of things we did not suspect
…nevertheless, we also know that when it is caught in an instinctual behavior, it is so stuck in a certain
number of imaginary conditions that it is precisely there where it would seem precisely most useful that it not be mistaken
that we deceive it most easily.

In other words, this libidinal fixation on certain terms presents itself to us as a kind of funnel.
That is where we start from. But if it is necessary to constitute an apparatus a little more complex and astute
for man, it is that precisely for him it does not happen like that. So if you like, here…
since we have started, since it is you who had the kindness to prompt me again here, for today
…I do not see why I would not begin here by recalling the fundamental Hegelian theme: man’s desire is the desire of the other.
And how do we find it? Precisely, that is what is expressed in the model by the plane mirror.

That is also where we find again the classic mirror stage of Jacques LACAN, insofar as it is [classic] in a small circle;
that is where we find it again, since what appears in the development, the detouring character, the turning character, the pivot, that at a certain
moment the kind of triumph, of triumphant exercise of himself that the individual makes of his own image in the mirror,
and we can, by a certain number of correlations of his behavior, understand that this is, for the first time,
a kind of anticipatory grasp, a mastery.

There, we put our finger on something else, which is what I called the Urbild, but also in another sense than the word Bild
that served you a moment ago, the first model of something where there is marked in man this sort of delay,
of detachment, of gap, of gaping, in relation to his own libido, which makes there be a radical difference between the satisfaction of a desire
and the chase after the completion of the desire, which is essentially something else:
– a sort of negativity introduced at a moment not especially originary, but crucial, turning,
– a sort of negativity introduced into desire itself, grasped in the other first and under the very most radical, most confused form, but which does not cease to develop thereafter.

For this relativity of human desire, in relation to the desire of the other, we know it in every reaction where there is rivalry,
competition, and even all the way into the whole development of civilization, including that sympathetic and fundamental
‘exploitation of man by man’ whose end we are not about to see, for the reason that it is absolutely structural,
and that it constitutes—once and for all admitted by HEGEL—the very structure of the notion of work. It is no longer desire, there,
but the complete mediation of activity as properly human, engaged in the path of human desires.
That is what we find there: the dual origin.

For this value of the image, what we see is that if desire is originally already located and recognized in the properly human imaginary,
it is exactly at that moment, since it is through the intermediary not only of his own image,
but of the body of his fellow that this happens, it is at that moment that there separates in the human being consciousness as
consciousness of self. We will return to it again. It is exactly insofar as it is in the body of the other that he recognizes
his desire, that the exchange takes place, and insofar as his desire has passed to the other side, that body of the other he assimilates,
he recognizes himself as a body.

There is one thing that certainly remains, absolutely, let us say in the form of a question mark, that nothing allows one to affirm,
to conclude: it is that the animal has a consciousness separated from its body as such, that its corporality is for it an
objectifiable element, which is situated somewhere, which is located as body.

Jean HYPPOLITE – Statutory, in the double sense.

LACAN

Exactly, whereas it is quite certain that if there is a datum for us fundamental even before any emergence of the register
of ‘unhappy consciousness’, by giving, as a moment ago, the first emergence, it is in this distinction of our consciousness
and our body, something that makes of our body something factitious, from which our consciousness is indeed powerless
to detach itself, but which it conceives of—the terms are perhaps not the most proper—as distinct.
This distinction of consciousness and body is made in this sort of abrupt interchange of roles that takes place
in the mirror experience when it is a matter of the other. In other words, in the same way as we were saying yesterday evening,
it is perhaps about that, it is when, regarding the mechanism, MANNONI brought us the notion that in interpersonal relations themselves,
something always factitious is introduced; it is the projection of the mechanism of the other onto ourselves,
and the same thing as the fact that we recognize ourselves as body insofar as these others—indispensable for
recognizing our desire—also have a body, more exactly that we have it like them.

Jean HYPPOLITE – What I understand poorly, rather than the distinction of oneself and the body, is the distinction of two bodies.

LACAN – Of course.

Jean HYPPOLITE – Since the self represents itself as the ideal body and the body that I feel, there are two…?

LACAN

No, certainly not! Because precisely, that is exactly where the discovery and the dimension of the Freudian experience take
their essential relation: that man in his first phases does not arrive immediately, in any way, at an overcome desire.
He is first a fragmented desire. What he recognizes and fixes in this image of the other is a fragmented desire. And the apparent mastery
of the mirror image is given to him at least virtually as total, as ideally a mastery.

Jean HYPPOLITE – That is what I call the ideal body.

LACAN

Yes. It is the Idealich. Whereas his desire, he, precisely is not constituted; what he finds in the other is first a series of planes
ambivalent, alienations of his desire, but of a desire itself that is still a desire in pieces, like everything we know
of instinctual evolution gives us the diagram of it, since the theory of libido in FREUD is made of the conservation, of the
progressive composition of a certain number of partial drives, which succeed, or do not succeed, in arriving at a mature desire.

Jean HYPPOLITE

I think we agree well. You said no earlier. We agree well. If I say two bodies,
it simply means that what I see constituted, whether in the other or in my own image in the mirror, is what
I am not, in fact, what is beyond me. That is what I call the ideal body, statutory, or statue, as VALÉRY says
in La Jeune Parque: ‘but my statue at the same time shivers’, is that the exact word? That is to say it decomposes.
Its decomposition is what I call the other body.

LACAN

The body as fragmented desire seeking itself, and the body as ideal of self are reprojected on the side of the subject as fragmented body, while
he sees the other as perfect body. For him, a fragmented body is an essentially dismemberable image of his body.

Jean HYPPOLITE

The two are reprojected one onto the other in the sense that, all at once, he sees himself as statue and dismembers at the same time,
projects the dismemberment onto the statue, and in an unfinishable dialectic. I apologize for having repeated what you had said,
to be sure I had understood correctly.

LACAN

We will, if you like, take a step further in a moment. Finally, the real, as of course, although it is there on this side of the mirror,
what is beyond? We have already seen that there is this primitive imaginary of the specular dialectic with the other, which is absolutely fundamental.
So, let us underline in passing that we can say, in two senses, that it already introduces the mortal dimension of the death instinct,
dimension of destrudo:
1) insofar as it participates in what has for the individual something irremediably mortal in everything that is of the order of libidinal captation, insofar as it is in the end subject to this x of eternal life,
2) this is what I believe is the important point brought out by FREUD’s thought; this is also what is not completely distinguished in what he brought us in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: that the death instinct takes in man another meaning precisely in this, that his libido is originally in a way constrained to pass through an imaginary stage.

Moreover this image of image, if you like, is explained precisely: it is all the guidance for him of the attainment of the maturity of the libido
to that adequation of the reality of the imaginary that there would be in principle by hypothesis—after all, what do we know of it?—
in the animal, of which it seems, and always:
– that it is so much more evident,
– that it is from there that came out the great fantasy of the natura mater, of the very idea of nature,
– that man, in relation to that, represents his originary inadequation by something that is expressed in a thousand ways, even quite objectifiable in his being, a very special powerlessness from the origin of his life.

This prematuration of birth, it is not the psychoanalysts who invented it. It is evident—histologically at least—
that this nervous apparatus which plays in the organism this role still subject to discussion, is unfinished at birth. It is insofar
as it has to reach the completion of its libido before reaching its object, that this special fault is introduced, which perpetuates itself in him
in this relation then to another, infinitely more mortal for him than for any other animal, and that he confuses this ‘image of the master’,
which is in sum what he sees under the form of the specular image then, which he confuses in a completely authentic way,
which he can name, with the image of death. He can be in the presence of the ‘absolute master’; he is there originally, whether one taught it to him
or not, insofar as he is already subject to this image.

Jean HYPPOLITE – The animal is subject to death when it makes love, but it knows nothing of it.

LACAN – Whereas man, he, knows it. He knows it, and he experiences it.

Jean HYPPOLITE – That goes so far as to say that it is he who gives himself death; he wants through the other his own death.

LACAN – We all agree that love is a form of suicide.

Dr LANG

There is a point on which you insisted, whose bearing I did not grasp well, at least the bearing of your insistence: it is the fact
that one must be in a certain field in relation to the apparatus in question. That is evident from the optical point of view.
But I saw you insist on it several times.

LACAN

Indeed! I see that I did not show enough the tip of the ear. You saw the tip of the ear, but not its point of insertion.
It is certain that what is at issue here, too, can play on several planes, whether we interpret things at the level
of structuration, of description, or of the handling of the cure. But you see that it is particularly convenient to have
a diagram such that the subject—the observer in my diagram—remaining always in the same place, it is convenient that it can be
on the mobilization of a plane of reflection that, at a given moment, the whole appearance of this image depends.

For if indeed one can see it with sufficient completeness only from a certain virtual point of observation, if you can make
this virtual point change as you like, it is clear that, when the mirror turns, it will not be only the background—that is,
what the subject can see at the back, for example himself or an echo of himself, as M. HYPPOLITE remarked—
that will change. Indeed, when one moves a plane mirror, there is a moment when a certain number of objects go out of the field;
it is obviously the closest that go out last.

Which can already serve to explain certain ways in which the Idealich is situated in relation to something else that I leave
for the present in an enigmatic form, which I called the observer. You can well imagine that it is not only a matter of an observer.
It is in the end precisely a matter of the symbolic relation, namely the point that is spoken of, from which it is spoken.

But it is not only that which changes. If you incline the mirror, the image itself changes, that is to say that, without the real image
moving, by the sole fact that the mirror changes, the image—which the subject, placed here, on the side of the spherical mirror, will see in this mirror—
will pass, I believed I had indicated it, from a mouth form to a phallus form, or from a more or less complete desire, to this type of desire
that I called a moment ago fragmented. In other words, this will make it possible to join—what has always been FREUD’s idea—
the notion of topical regression, to show its possible correlations with the regression he calls zeitlich-Entwicklungsgeschichte,
which shows well how much he himself was embarrassed by everything that was of temporal relation.

He says: zeitlich, that is to say temporal, then a dash and: of the history of development. You know well what kind of internal contradiction
there is between the term Entwicklung and the term Geschichte. And he joins all three, and then make do with it!
But, of course, if we did not still have to make do with it, there would be no need for us to be here, and that would be a great pity.

Go ahead, PERRIER.

François PERRIER

François PERRIER – Yes, this text …

LACAN – This text struck you as a bit bothersome?

François PERRIER

Indeed! I think the best would no doubt be to sketch an outline of the article. That is simply what I have done up to now. I think you then want to go on to the discovery, in a more precise and more detailed way. It is an article that FREUD introduces by telling us that there is interest and advantage in establishing a parallel, that it is instructive to establish a parallel between certain morbid symptoms and the normal prototypes that allow us precisely to study them, for example mourning, melancholia, the dream, and sleep, and certain narcissistic states.

LACAN

By the way, he uses the term Vorbild, which fits well with the sense of the term Bildung, to designate the normal ‘prototypes’.

François PERRIER

He comes to the study of the dream with the aim, which will appear at the end of the article, of deepening the study of certain phenomena such as one encounters them in narcissistic affections, in schizophrenia for example.

LACAN – The normal prefigurations in a morbid affection, Normalvorbilder krankhafter Affektionen.

François PERRIER

So he tells us that sleep is a state of psychical undressing that brings the sleeper back to a state analogous to the primitive fetal state. This state also leads him to undress himself of an entire part of his psychical organization, as one gets rid of a wig, of one’s false teeth, of one’s clothes, before falling asleep.

LACAN

It is very curious and amusing that, regarding this very image of the subject’s narcissism, which is given as being the fundamental essence of sleep, FREUD makes this remark that does not seem to go in a very physiological direction… It is not true for all human beings. No doubt it is customary to take off one’s clothes, but one puts on others.

This image he suddenly produces for us: to take off one’s glasses—we are a certain number endowed with the infirmities that make them necessary—but also one’s false teeth, one’s false hair, a hideous image of the being that comes apart, and precisely in that connection, one can thus gain access to the register of the partially decomposable character, especially detachable and also imprecise as to its limits, of what the human ego is, since in the end, indeed, false teeth certainly are not part of my ego. But to what extent are my real teeth part of it? Since they are so replaceable. Already the idea of the ambiguous, uncertain character of what is properly certain, the limits of the ego, is put here quite in the foreground, right at the first portico-entry of this introduction to the metapsychological study of the dream, whose portico is first the preparation, and at the same time the signification, of sleep.

François PERRIER

In the following paragraph, he comes to something that seems to be an abridgment of everything he is going to study thereafter. It is a bit difficult to understand when one has not read the rest. He comes to recall that, when one studies the psychoses, one finds that one is each time confronted with temporal regressions, that is, with those points up to which each case returns along the stages of its own evolution. So he tells us that one finds such regressions, one in the evolution of the ego and the other in the evolution of the libido:
– the regression of the evolution of the libido, in what corresponds to all that in the dream, will lead, he says, to the reestablishment of primitive narcissism
– and the regression of the evolution of the ego, in the dream as well, will lead to the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire.

This a priori does not seem extremely clear, or at least not to me.

LACAN – Will it perhaps be a bit clearer with this diagram?

François PERRIER – Yes, Sir, but I am not at the stage where I have confronted this text with your diagram.

LACAN

That is why I am asking you to speak today at the level where everyone can take it up. It is very good indeed to underline the properly enigmatic points.

François PERRIER

One can already sense it, by thinking that he starts from temporal regression, from regression in the subject’s history, and thus the regression of the evolution of the ego will lead to that quite elementary, primordial, non-evolved, non-elaborated state, which is the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire.

He will first make us retrace our steps with him in the study of the dream process, and in particular in the study of what one can call the narcissism of sleep, to deepen the knowledge one can have of it as a function of what happens, that is, of the dream. He speaks first of the egoism of the dream—and it is a term that is a bit jarring—in order to compare it to narcissism.

LACAN – How does he justify the egoism of the dream?

François PERRIER – He says that, in the dream, it is always the person of the sleeper who is the central character.

LACAN

And who plays the principal role. Who can tell me what agnoszieren is exactly? It is a German term that I did not find, but its sense is not doubtful: it is a matter of this person who must always be recognized as the proper person ‘als die eigene zu agnoszieren’. [So wissen wir, der Traum sei absolut egoistisch, und die Person, die in seinen Szenen die Hauptrolle spiele, sei immer als die eigene zu agnoszieren]. Can someone give me an indication on the usage of this word? Andrée [Lehman]?

Precisely he does not use anerkennen, which would imply the dimension of recognition as we constantly understand it in our dialectic. The person of the sleeper is to be recognized, at the level of what? Of our interpretation or of our mantic? It is not quite the same thing; there is precisely all the difference between the plane of anerkennen and the plane of agnoszieren, what we understand, and what we know, that is to say, in any case, what nonetheless bears the mark of a fundamental ambiguity.

For it is certain that FREUD himself, when in The Interpretation of Dreams he analyzes for us the famous dream, regarding which he marks for us in the most moving way—because the further we go, the more we will be able to see what was genial in these first approaches toward the meaning of the dream and of its scenario.

[To Mrs X] – Perhaps you can give an indication on this agnoszieren?

Mrs X.

Sometimes FREUD uses words that were used in Vienna. It is something one no longer uses in German. But the meaning you gave is correct.

LACAN

It is interesting, indeed, this meaning of the Viennese milieu. FREUD gives us on this point such a profound apprehension of his relation with the fraternal character, with that friend-enemy, of whom he tells us that it is a character absolutely fundamental in his existence, that there must always be one that is covered over by this sort of Gegenbild.

But at the same time, it is through the intermediary of this character, who is here embodied by his laboratory colleague… we evoked his person at the beginning of these seminars, when we spoke a bit about the first stages of FREUD in scientific life… it is about and through the intermediary of this colleague, of his acts, of his feelings, that he projects, makes live in the dream what is the latent desire of the dream, namely the deep claims of his own aggression, of his own ambition.

So that this eigene Person is quite ambiguous. It is in the other, and within the very consciousness of the dream, more exactly of its mirage, within the mirage of the dream, indeed, that we must seek, in the person who plays the principal role, the sleeper’s own person. But precisely, it is not the sleeper; it is the other.

François PERRIER

So, he asks himself whether narcissism and egoism are not in truth one and the same thing. And he tells us that the word ‘narcissism’ serves only to better mark, to underline the libidinal character of egoism, and, in other words, that narcissism can be considered as the libidinal complement of egoism. He comes to an aside. He speaks of the diagnostic power of the dream, reminding us that one often perceives in these dreams, in a way absolutely unapparent in the waking state, certain organic modifications that make it possible to pose, in a way, prematurely, the diagnosis of something still unapparent in the waking state, and at that moment the problem of hypochondria appears.

LACAN

So there, something a bit astute, a bit more settled. Think carefully about what that means. I spoke to you a moment ago about that sort of exchange that occurs, about that image of the other insofar as it is precisely libidinalized, narcissized, in the imaginary situation. It is at the same time exactly as I was telling you a moment ago: in the animal, certain parts of the world were opacified so as to become fascinating; it is so, it too.

For finally, if we are capable [in the dream] of agnoszieren the sleeper’s proper person in a pure state, in the waking state, if he has not read The Interpretation of Dreams, but in that very measure it is striking enough that his power of fine distinction, of knowledge, is all the more increased, whereas his body precisely, those sensations that herald something internal, coenesthetic, capable of announcing themselves in man’s sleep, in the waking state—within his self-sufficiency—he will not perceive them.

It is precisely insofar as the libidinal opacification in the dream is on the other side of the mirror that his body is, not less well felt, but better perceived, better known. Do you grasp the mechanism there? And how precisely in the waking state, it is insofar as this body of the other is sent back to the subject that many things of himself are misrecognized, just as moreover the ego is a power of misrecognition; it is the very foundation of the whole analytic technique.

But that goes very far, up to the structuration, the organization, and at the same time properly speaking the scotomization—here I would quite readily see the use of the term—and to all sorts of things that are as many pieces of information that can come from ourselves to ourselves, which is in fact this particular play that returns to us this corporality too of foreign origin. And that goes as far as:

‘They have eyes so as not to see…’ [Jeremiah 5:21]

Let us leave that aside. One must always take the phrases of the Gospel literally; otherwise obviously one understands nothing in them; one thinks it is irony.

François PERRIER

The dream is also a projection: externalization of an internal process. And he recalls that this externalization of an internal process is a means of defense against awakening. In the same way as the mechanism of hysterical phobia, there is this same projection that is itself a means of defense, and that comes to replace an internal functional demand. Only, he says, why is the intention to sleep thwarted? It can be so either by an irritation coming from outside, or by an excitation coming from inside. The case of the internal obstacle is the most interesting; it is the one we are going to study.

LACAN

One must follow this passage closely, because it makes it possible to put a bit of rigor into the use in analysis of the term ‘projection’. That does not mean that one always makes rigorous use of it, far from it! On the contrary, we perpetually make the most confused use of it. In particular, we slide all the time into the classic use, which indeed is the projection of our feelings, as one commonly says, onto the similar. And that is not quite that, you will see, that is at issue when we have to use, by force of circumstances, by the law of coherence of the system, when we have to use in analysis the term ‘projection’. I will return to it many times. For if we can get to address next term the SCHREBER case, the question of the psychoses, we will have to put the final precisions on the meaning we can give to the term projection.

It is quite certain that, if you have followed what I said a moment ago, you must see that it is always first from outside that what is called here this internal process comes; it is first through the intermediary of the outside that it is recognized.

François PERRIER

So, it will be a matter of knowing, of in a way beginning to breach this total narcissism that would be that of perfect sleep, and of seeing how one can explain precisely the dream insofar as the dream itself requires certain exceptions in the establishment of total narcissism; in other words, insofar as, for the dream to occur, there is not total withdrawal of all the investments, whatever they may be.

First of all, he tells us, one knows that the promoters of the dream are the day residues. In other words, these day residues are not subject to a withdrawal of the investment: what remains is at least partially invested—and thereby there is already an exception—in the narcissism of sleep. For these day residues, there remains a certain quantity of libidinal interest, or other. These day residues appear to us in the form of the latent thoughts of the dream. We are obliged, he says, given the general situation, and in accordance with their nature, to consider them as belonging to the preconscious system.

Another difficulty that will have to be resolved, which can be summarized thus: if the day residues force access to the conscious in the dream, is that due to their own energy, or not? In fact, he says, it is difficult to admit that these day residues seize during the night enough energy to be able to force the tension of the conscious, and one is inclined to believe that their energy in fact comes from unconscious drives. And it is all the easier to admit because everything also suggests that during sleep, the barrier between the unconscious and the preconscious is greatly lowered.

But, he says, a new difficulty: if sleep consists in a withdrawal of unconscious and preconscious investments, how could the unconscious invest the preconscious? One must therefore admit, to answer this question, that a part of the unconscious—precisely the part where the repressed does not submit to the ego’s wish for sleep—keeps a certain independence with respect to the ego. That leads to an immediate consequence: there is therefore nonetheless drive danger. And if there is drive danger, there is nonetheless a necessity of a counterinvestment. So the repressing energy must also be maintained during sleep. It is no doubt lowered, but it must be maintained to meet this drive danger.

And he cites, in support of this thesis, the case where the sleeper renounces sleep out of fear precisely of his dreams, therefore out of fear of these drive demands. He reconsiders the possibility for certain day thoughts to preserve their investment, but insofar as these day thoughts were in a way the substitutes of the drive demands: it comes down to the same. It is nonetheless a matter of admitting the transmission of energy from the unconscious to the preconscious. And finally, he gives the following formula: first, formation of the preconscious wish of the dream, which allows the unconscious drive to express itself, thanks to the material of the preconscious day residues.

Here too a difficulty that I encountered, that we encountered, with Father BEIRNAERT and Andrée LEHMAN who helped me, last night: the preconscious wish of the dream, what is it?

LACAN – What he calls ‘the wish of the dream’ is the unconscious element.

François PERRIER

Precisely. He says: first there is formation of the preconscious wish of the dream, I suppose in the waking state, which allows the unconscious drive to express itself thanks to the material, that is, in the preconscious day residues. That is where the question comes in, the study of this wish of the dream, which embarrassed me, because he speaks of it immediately as wish of the dream, after having used the term preconscious wish of the dream, to say of it that it did not need to exist in the waking state, and can already possess the irrational character proper to everything that is unconscious. It is translated into conscious terms.

LACAN – Which is important.

François PERRIER – One must beware, he says, of confusing this wish of the dream with everything that is of the order of the preconscious.

LACAN

There! Note that there are 2 ways of accepting that, namely as one usually accepts it after having read it. That is how it is: there is what is manifest, what is latent. But then one will enter into a certain number of complications. What is manifest is the composition. What the dream-work has arrived at in order to make—very nice turn from its first aspect of memory, which the subject is capable of evoking for you—it is extremely settled—what is manifest.

And what composes it is something we must seek and that we first encounter. And this is truly what is of the unconscious: we find it or we do not find it, but we never see it except as something that stands out behind, as the guiding form, so to speak, that forced all the Tagesresten—those vaguely lucid investments—to organize themselves in a certain way, which resulted in the manifest content, that is, in the end, in a mirage that in no way corresponds to what we reconstruct, that is, the unconscious wish. How can one represent that with my little diagram?

M. HYPPOLITE—opportunely—forced me, in a way, to invest everything a bit at the beginning of this session. Obviously we will not settle this question today, but we will see how far it will take us; one must advance a bit. It is indispensable here to bring in what one can call precisely the controls of the apparatus insofar as the mobile part of the apparatus, the famous [plane] mirror.

Agreed: the subject becomes conscious of his wish in the other, through the intermediary of this image of the other that gives him the phantom of his own mastery. And after all, if likewise one can always engage in this game, just as it is fairly frequent in our scientific reasonings that we reduce the subject to an eye, we could just as well also reduce him to a sort of instantaneous character in this relation to this anticipated image of himself, independently of his evolution.

But it remains that he is a human being, that he was born in a certain state of helplessness, and that very early words, language, served him for something. This is beyond doubt. They served him as a call, and as one of the most miserable calls when it was on his cries that his nourishment depended. This relation, this primitive mothering, has been sufficiently highlighted and related, to speak of states of dependence. But in the end that is no reason to mask:

– that just as early, this relation to the other is named by the subject,
– that the person as such has a name, however confused it may be, which designates a determined person,
– and that very quickly it is exactly in that that the passage to the human state consists.

Namely: at what moment does what must define that man becomes human, that he is a human being?
At the moment when, however little it may be, he enters into the symbolic relation. The symbolic relation—I have already told you, underlined—is eternal, not simply because there must in fact always be three persons; it is eternal already in this, that the symbol introduces a third, an element of mediation, which in itself situates and modifies, makes pass onto another plane, the two characters present.

I want to take this up once again from afar, even if today I must stop along the way. Somewhere, Mr KELLER, who, as you know, is a Gestalt philosopher, and as such believes himself very superior to mechanistic philosophers, makes all sorts of ironies on the stimulus-response theme. He says: it is all the same very funny to receive from Mr So-and-So, bookseller in New York, the order for a book. Well then, if we were in the stimulus-response register, my response would follow: I was stimulated, this order was placed with me, and I will make the response. But oh dear, oh dear, says KELLER—appealing to lived intuition in the most justified way—it is not simple. I do not content myself with responding to this invitation; I am in a state of frightful tension.

To write this article, well, it is at the same time the whole Gestalt notion of equilibrium, which will be found again only when this tension has taken the same form, the form of the realization of the article. There will be a dynamic state—and it will not be only a response—a dynamic state of imbalance, owing to this call received, which will be satisfied only when it has been assumed, when the circle—already anticipated by the fact of this call—of the full response will have been closed.

It is quite clear that this is in no way a sufficient description. That, supposing the model, already preformed in the subject, of the good response—that is to say, if one also introduces an element of already-there—that to content oneself with this, which almost at the limit seems almost an answer to everything by the ‘dormitive virtue’, that insofar as the subject has not realized or fulfilled the model already wholly inscribed in him, that it is only there that the register of relations generating all action lies. There is here only the transcription, at a more elaborated degree, of the response of mechanistic theory: what is in a way the good formula cannot ignore the symbolic register, which is that through which the human being is constituted as such.

It is that from the moment Mr KELLER has received the order and has answered ‘yes’, has signed this commitment, Mr KELLER is not the same Mr KELLER. There is another KELLER, and also another publishing house, a publishing house that has one more contract, one more symbol, just as there is no longer the same Mr KELLER as before; there is Mr KELLER committed.

I take this example because it is in a way coarse, tangible; it places us squarely in the dialectic of work. But in the sole fact that I define myself—vis-à-vis a gentleman—as ‘his son’, and him as ‘my father’, there is something that, however immaterial that may seem, weighs just as heavily as the carnal generation that unites us, and that practically, in the human order, weighs more heavily. For even before I am in a state to pronounce the words ‘father’ and ‘son’, and even if he himself is senile and can no longer pronounce these words, the whole human system around us already defines us, with all the consequences that entails, as father and son.

The dialectic therefore of the ego to the other is already transcended, placed on a higher plane:
– by this relation to the other of which I spoke a moment ago,
– by the sole existence and the function of this system of language insofar as it is more or less identical, but fundamentally bound to what we shall call the rule, or better still the law.

This law insofar as:
– precisely it is something that at each instant of its intervention creates something new,
– each situation is transformed by the intervention, more or less whatever it may be, except when we speak in order to say nothing.

But even that—I explained it elsewhere—also has its meaning.

This realization of language that serves only as ‘…a worn coin that one passes on in silence…’, cited in my Report, and which is by MALLARMÉ, shows once more the pure function of language, which is precisely to assure us that we are, and nothing more. The fact that one can speak in order to say nothing is just as significant as the fact that when one speaks in general, it is for something. But what is striking is that even to say nothing there are many cases where one speaks, whereas one could very well be silent. But then to be silent is precisely what is most settled.

We are thus introduced—at this level of language insofar as it is immediately attached to the first experiences, and there, for once, a vital necessity that makes man’s vital milieu this symbolic milieu—into this relation of the ego and the other. It suffices to suppose, and this is the interest of this little model, that it is in the intervention of these relations of language that these dissociations can be produced, these turns of the mirror, which will present to the subject in the other, in the absolute other, different figures of his desire.

It is in this connection between the symbolic system, insofar as the subject’s history is inscribed there quite particularly, the side not of Entwicklung, development, but properly Geschichte, that in which the subject recognizes himself correlatively in the past and in the future—I say these words, I know that I say them quickly, but to tell you that I will take them up more slowly—and how precisely this past and this future correspond, and not in just any sense, and not in the sense you might believe and that analysis indicates, namely that it goes from the past to the future.

On the contrary, and in analysis precisely, because the technique is an effective technique, it goes in the right order: from the future into the past. Contrary to what you might believe: that you are in the process of searching the patient’s past in a trash can, it is as a function of the fact that the patient has a future that you can go in the regressive direction. I cannot tell you right away why.

I continue: it is precisely as a function of this symbolic constitution of his history… that is to say, of what, in the whole, the universe of symbols insofar as all human beings participate in it, are included in it and undergo it, much more than they constitute it, and are much more its supports than they are its agents… it is as a function of that that these variations are produced and determined, in which the subject is liable to take these variable images, broken, fragmented, even on occasion unconstituted, regressive images of himself, which are properly speaking what we see in these normal Vorbilder of the subject’s everyday life as well as what happens in analysis in a more directed way.

What is it then, in all that, that the unconscious and the preconscious are?

I will have to leave you with that today, to leave you hungry. But know nonetheless the 1st approximation we can give of it. In this perspective under which today we are approaching the problem, we will say that they are certain differences, or more exactly certain impossibilities tied to the subject’s history, and to a history of the subject insofar as precisely he inscribes his development there.

We see here to revalue FREUD’s ambiguous formula from a moment ago: zeitliche-Entwicklungsgeschichte. Let us limit ourselves to history, and that it is by reason of certain particularities of the subject’s history that there are certain parts of the real image or certain sudden phases. Moreover, it is a mobile relation.

We have here a first possible temporal development in the instantaneous, in the intra-analytic play, certain phases or certain faces—let us not hesitate to make puns [jeu de mots: ‘faces’ as aspects, and ‘faces’ as faces]—of the real image, which will never be able to be given in the virtual image; everything that is accessible by simple mobility of the mirror in the virtual image, what you can see of the real image in the virtual image, all that is in the sense of the preconscious. What can never be seen, if you like, the places where the apparatus jams, where it blocks—we are not at a point where we cannot push the metaphor a bit far—what makes it so that there is a certain difference, certain parts of the real image will never be seen, that is the unconscious.

And if you believe you have understood, you are surely wrong. Since from there you will see the difficulties that this notion presents. I have no other ambition than to show you that the difficulties this notion of the unconscious presents, from the moment I have defined it for you thus, namely that:
– on the one hand it is something negative, ideally inaccessible,
– and on the other hand it is something quasi real,
– on the other hand it is something that will be realized in the symbolic, or more exactly that, thanks to symbolic progress in analysis, will have been.
And I will show you, from FREUD’s texts, that the notion of the unconscious must satisfy these three terms. To illustrate the third, which can seem a surprising irruption, I am going to go further right away and give you what I think of it. Do not forget this, that the way FREUD explains repression is first a fixation. But at that moment there is nothing that is repression, as in the case of the Wolf Man; it occurs well after fixation. The Verdrängung is always a Nachdrängung.

And then how are you going to explain the return of the repressed? I tell you today already, however paradoxical it may be, there is only one way to explain the return of the repressed, however surprising that may seem to you: it does not come from the past, but from the future. To give yourself a just idea of what the return of the repressed is in a symptom, one must take up the same metaphor… that I gleaned from the cyberneticians—it spares me from inventing it myself; one must not invent too many things… which supposes two characters whose temporal dimension would go in reverse directions from one another, which of course means nothing.

And it happens all at once that the things that mean nothing signify something, but in a wholly other domain. So that if one sends a message to the other, for example a square, the character who goes in the contrary direction will first see the square being erased; if it is a signal, he will see the signal first in the process of vanishing before seeing the signal. That is in the end what we too see. What we see in the symptom is something that presents itself first as a trace, and that will never be anything but a trace and will always remain misunderstood until analysis has proceeded far enough, until we have realized its meaning.

And in this sense one can say that indeed, just as the Verdrängung is never anything but a Nachdrängung, what we see under the return of the repressed is the erased signal of something that will take its symbolic realization, its historical value, its integration into the subject, only in the future, and that literally will never be anything but something that, at a given moment of fulfillment, will have been.

You will see that the conditions of this little apparatus that I am trying […]. I will confide something to you: I am thinning it down at the same time as I speak to you about it. I add a little bit to it every day. I do not bring you that all made, like MINERVA coming out of the brain of a JUPITER that I am not. We will follow it far until the day when, when it begins to seem tiring to us, we will drop it.

Until then, it can serve to show us that one can see there quite clearly the construction… in a vivid and settled way that no longer presents contradictions, as PERRIER encounters all the time, in his text at least… as these three necessary faces of the notion of the unconscious for us to understand it.

We will leave it there today.

I have not yet shown you why the analyst is found in the place of the virtual image, but the day you have understood why the analyst is found there, you will have understood more or less everything that happens in analysis.