We are beginning a third term that will be short, thank God! The question is what we are going to use it for. In an initial project, I had thought of taking up the case of SCHREBER before we separated this year. That would have pleased me very much, all the more because, as you know, I had had the text translated for all useful purposes, the original work of President SCHREBER, on which FREUD worked, and to which he asks that we refer. A very futile recommendation up to now, because it is an unfindable work; I know of only two copies in Europe. I was able to obtain one, which I had microfilmed twice, one for my use, and the other for the use—now become current—of the library of the French Society of Psychoanalysis. For I announce to you that we have premises, on advantageous terms that will allow us to spend money to have books. To these microfilms will be added whatever can be done in the way of donations.

Let us return to President SCHREBER. Reading this translation is fascinating. There is a way to make out of it a truly complete treatise on paranoia, and to bring to the SCHREBER text a very rich commentary on the subject of the mechanism of the psychoses. M. HYPPOLITE said that my knowledge had set out from paranoid knowledge: if it set out from it, I hope it did not remain there.

There is a hole there. We are not going to fall into it right away, because we would risk remaining prisoners there, as M. HYPPOLITE feared. Since we have moved forward in FREUD’s Technical Writings, I believe it is impossible not to push further the implicit comparison that I have constantly made of these formulations with the current technique of analysis that one can call, in quotation marks, ‘its most recent advances’.

I have always done so in a more or less implicit way, referring to what you may have in your experience, the teaching that, practically, is given to you in supervisions, this tendency toward which the analysis of resistances has evolved, for example, the notion of analysis as analysis of the ego’s defense systems; all of that nevertheless remains poorly centered, since it is to concrete but unsystematized teachings, even sometimes unformulated, that we are referring there implicitly.

I believe I can discuss, and despite this scarcity that everyone points out, the analytic literature: in matters of technique itself, a certain number of authors have expressed themselves. When they did not manage to make a book of technique properly speaking, there are articles, sometimes fragmentary; others very curiously stopped along the way, and being among the most interesting. There is a literature there in which it should not be impossible, despite the difficulty that you all have it in hand, for us to advance a little.

The difficulty is this: first, that these writings, which bring together the most important ones, form a rather long corpus to go through. I hope to be able to count on the collaboration of certain of you, to whom I will lend certain of these articles, to serve as a basis for our discussion. But we will not be able to take all of them into view.

First, at the moment when, in 1925 at the Berlin symposium, there are the three articles by SACHS, ALEXANDER, and RADO, which are important, which you must know if you have dug into FENICHEL’s book. At the Marienbad congress, there is the symposium on the results—as they say—of analysis, for in reality it is less about the result than about the procedure that leads to these results that this discussion is about.

There, you can already see taking shape, in an unfolded way, what I call ‘the confusion of languages in analysis’, namely the extreme diversity, whatever one may think of it, of what the authors consider to be ‘the active paths’ in the analytic process. One sees that the precise definition is far from being assured as such in the minds of analysts: it is with a quite marked diversity that they express themselves. The third moment is the present moment.

There, it is appropriate to place in the foreground the definitions or the recent elaborations that they try to give to ego theory, for example, the American troika: HARTMANN, LŒWENSTEIN, and KRIS. It must be said: these writings are sometimes quite disconcerting, by something that reaches such a complication in the multiplication of concepts that, when they speak incessantly of desexualized libido, one almost ends up saying delibidinized, or of de-aggressivized aggressiveness.

This ego function that plays there more and more that problematic role it has in the writings of FREUD’s third period, which I left outside our field because, in the form of the commentary on the Technical Writings that I gave you, it is an attempt to make you grasp the middle period of 1910-1920. There begins to be elaborated, with the notion of narcissism, the direction in which FREUD will arrive, at the ego. I nevertheless advise reading or rereading; you must read the volume that is called, in the French edition Essays on Psychoanalysis (Payot): ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, and ‘The Ego and the Id’.

I advise you to read it because we cannot analyze it here. But it is indispensable for understanding the developments that the authors I am speaking to you about have given to the theory of treatment. It is always around FREUD’s last formulations that the formulations of treatment that have been given from 1920 onward are centered.

And most of the time, with an extreme clumsiness that stems from a very great difficulty in properly understanding what FREUD says—the text of FREUD in these three truly monumental articles—if one has not gone into the very genesis of the notion of narcissism, which I tried to indicate to you regarding the analysis of resistances and transference in the Technical Writings.

Here is how our project is situated in the proper sense of the term. Today I would like to try at certain moments to proceed by the route that is not the one you know I am fundamentally. Fundamentally I am a discursive route, and even a route of discussion, to bring you to the problems, to bring you to them from the texts. I am trying to present you here with a problematics.

But from time to time, it is still necessary to concentrate, in something that presents a didactic formula, certain points of view, certain perspectives, during which the various formulations you can find of these problems can be connected, discussed, according to the very marked diversity of authors on these precise points in the history of analysis. Let us say that I adopt a sort of middle term, and I try to present to you a model, something that does not pretend to be a system, but an image presenting certain points that can serve as a reference.

This is what I tried to do by bringing you little by little, progressively, to this image with an optician’s aspect, which we have begun to form here. Now, it is beginning to become—I hope—familiar to your mind. And around the fundamental speculum, the fundamental mirror of the relation to the other, you have already seen that we can situate—if you wish today, to indicate the points where the problem arises—the famous real image.

I showed you how one could imagine it being represented, being formed at a point of the subject, which we will call 0. The virtual image where the subject grasps it, which is produced in the plane mirror, 0’, where the subject sees the real image that is at 0, insofar as by the intermediary of this mirror he finds himself placed here, somewhere at a point that is the virtual symmetric of the reflecting spherical mirror, thanks to which there is produced, let us say somewhere in the interior of the subject, this real image that is at 0

We are going to try to see, to explain to you how one can make use of it, and what that corresponds to. You are frowning, PUJOL. Is something wrong?

Robert PUJOL—For a month, I have had difficulty starting again.

LACAN

Let us say, for what follows, that this gives us two points 0 and 0’. A little girl…
a virtual woman, therefore she is obviously much more engaged in the real than males, from that fact alone. There are particular gifts!
…had this very pretty remark, all of a sudden: ‘Ah! One must not believe that my life will be spent at 0 and at 0’…’.

Poor dear! It will be spent at 0 and at 0’, like for everyone! But still, she has that aspiration! It is in her honor, if you wish, that I will call these points 0 and 0’. Then, there is a point A, and another point that we will call C. Why C? Because there is, here, a point B, which we must leave for later. And with that, we still have to manage.

One must, obviously, start in spite of everything, and nevertheless, from 0 and from 0’. You already know what happens at 0 and around 0, around 0’. It is fundamentally a matter of what relates to the constitution of the Idealich, and not of the Ichideal. In other words, the essentially imaginary, specular form of genesis, of the fundamentally imaginary origin of the ego. If you have not seen that emerge from what we have here tried to analyze, to transmit, to make understood, from a certain number of texts of which the principal is the ‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’, then we have done a futile work.

You must have understood the close relation there is at the level of FREUD’s discourse, of the ‘Introduction to narcissism’, between the formation of the object and that of the ego. And that it is because they are strictly correlative, that their appearance is truly contemporaneous, that there is the problem of narcissism, insofar as at that moment, in FREUD’s thought, in the development of his work, libido appears subjected to another dialectic, I would say: a dialectic of the object.

It is not only a matter of the relation of the biological individual with his ‘nature’ object, variously complicated, enriched. There is the possibility of a narcissistic libidinal investment, in other words, of a libidinal investment in something that cannot be conceived otherwise than as an image of the ego. I am saying things very roughly here; I could say them in a more technically elaborated, philosophical language, but I want to make you understand how one must indeed see things.

It is quite certain that from a certain moment in the development of the Freudian experience attention is centered around this imaginary function that is that of the ego. Since then, the whole history of psychoanalysis is reduced to this, to the ambiguities, to the slope that this new recentring of the problem has offered, to a slippage, a return to the notion—not traditional, because it is not that traditional—academic, of the ego conceived as a ‘synthesizing function’, as a psychological function.

Now, as I am going to show you, it is a matter of something that has its say in human psychology, but that can only be conceived on a transpsychological plane, or as FREUD says in so many words—for FREUD, if he had difficulties in this formulation, never lost the thread—of ‘metapsychology’. What does that mean, if not that it is something beyond psychology? Now let us try to start from the point where the problem arises.

What is it when you say ‘I’? Is it the same thing as when we speak of the ego, the ego, an analytic concept? We must indeed start from there. The question certainly arises for many of you, and must arise for all, it seems to me. The ‘I’, when you use it, you cannot fail to recognize that it is essentially and above all the psychological reference, in the sense that it is a matter of observing what happens in man, how he learns to say this ‘I’.

‘I’ is a verbal term of learned usage in a certain reference to the other, but a spoken reference. The ‘I’ is born in a certain reference to the ‘you’. And everyone knows how, on that basis, psychologists have constructed famous things: a relation of reciprocity that is established—or is not established—which would determine I do not know what stage in the child’s intimate development.

As if one could, like that, be sure of it, and deduce it from the use of language, namely simply from this first clumsiness the child has in managing the three personal pronouns, and in not purely and simply, in an apprehension, repeating the sentence that is said to him with the term ‘you’, and repeating ‘you’, whereas he must make the inversion into the ‘I’ to repeat things.

It is indeed a matter of a certain hesitation in the apprehension of language; that is all we can deduce from it. We have no right to go beyond. But nevertheless, this is sufficient to warn us that the ‘I’, the approach as such, is constituted in an experience of language, in this reference to the ‘you’, and in a relation where the other, he, manifests what? Orders, desires, that he must recognize: from his father, from his mother, from his educators, or from his peers and comrades.

That said, it is quite clear that at the outset the chances are extremely minimal that he will have his own recognized, his desires, except in the simplest, most direct, and most immediate way, and that—at least originally—it is quite clear that we know nothing of the specificity, of the diversity, of the precise point of resonance where the individual is situated, of the idea of the little subject.

That is indeed what makes him so unhappy: how, moreover, would he have his desires recognized? for the simple reason that he knows nothing about them. We perhaps have every reason to think that he knows nothing about them, about his desires, but the reasons we have, we analysts, are not just any reasons, but reasons engendered by our experience of the adult. I will even say that it is our function: we know that he must indeed seek them out and find them. Without that, he would not need analysis.

This is therefore sufficiently an indication that what relates to his ego, namely what he can have recognized of himself, is separated from it by something. Well then, what analysis teaches us—you must on that point remember M. HYPPOLITE’s discourse on a quite precious text by FREUD that is called the Verneinung—is something that is already very significant and must be articulated in a certain way.

I say ‘he knows nothing about it’; it is a quite vague formula. Analysis taught us things by degrees, by stages; that is what makes it important to follow the progress of FREUD’s work. What analysis teaches us is that it is not a pure and simple ignorance. We must suspect it, for a very simple reason, which is that ignorance is itself a dialectical term, insofar as it is literally constituted as such only in a perspective of searching for the truth.

If the subject does not put himself in reference to the truth, there is no ignorance. If the subject does not begin again to pose to himself the question of knowing what he is and what he is not—which moreover is not at all obligatory: many people live without asking themselves such lofty questions—there is no reason for there to be a true and a false, nor even for there to be certain things that go beyond, namely this fundamental distinction of reality and appearance. There, we begin to be in full philosophy. Ignorance is constituted in a polar way with respect to the virtual position of a truth to be attained: it is a state of the subject insofar as he speaks. And I would say that, insofar as his speech begins to wander in search of correct language—that is to say, the ignorance of seeing things, for example—we begin to constitute it, from the moment we engage the subject in analysis, that is to say, in a only implicit way, where we engage him in a search for the truth.

But this is a situation, a position, a state in a sense purely virtual to a situation, insofar as we create it; it is not the given that is at stake when we say that the ego knows nothing of the subject’s desires. It is something that experience teaches us. We learned it in a second stage: the elaboration of experience in FREUD’s thought. It is therefore not ignorance, but precisely what is expressed concretely in the process of the Verneinung, and which in the static whole of the subject is called ‘misrecognition’. Now, misrecognition is not the same thing as ignorance.

Misrecognition represents a certain number of affirmations and negations, a certain structure, a certain organization. The subject is attached to it. And all of that would not be conceivable without a correlative knowledge: however we speak of a misrecognition, this must always imply that, since the subject can misrecognize something, he must still know around what sum this function, if one can say, of misrecognition has operated.

That is to say that there is, behind this misrecognition, a certain knowledge of what there is to misrecognize. When we find ourselves with a delusional person who lives in the misrecognition of the death of one of his relatives, one would be quite wrong to believe that he confuses him with a living person: he misrecognizes or refuses to recognize that he is dead, but all his behavior signifies that he develops an activity that presupposes that he knows there is something he does not want to recognize.

What is to be said? What is this misrecognition, implied behind the function, essentially, of ego knowledge? That is the point by which we can approach the function of the ego. I believe that it is one of the concrete, effective points of our experience, on which we cannot insist too much, because it would be a first step, the very origin of this experience. Namely that we are inclined to give ourselves over, in the presence at least of what interests us, of what is analyzable, to a whole operation of mantics, in other words of translation, of loosening, of something beyond the subject’s language, and of a language that as such presents itself in this ambiguous relation—I say ambiguous—on the plane of knowledge.

To start, to advance, in this register, one must ask what this knowledge is that orients and directs this misrecognition. It is there that we find the reference to a sort of parallel, of analogical elaboration, with respect to what one can call animal knowledge, insofar as in the animal there is knowledge and coaptation, imaginary coaptation, structuring of the world in the form of Umwelt.

And this by correspondence, by a projection onto this world of a certain number of relations, of Gestalten that structure this world, that specify it for each animal, into a milieu that is the one in which it evolves, that weaves, distinguishes, separates, in the indistinctness of the reality to which it is opposed, a certain number of preferential approaches in which its behavioral activities engage. That is what exists in the animal. The psychologists of animal behavior, the ethologists for example, define as innate the Gestalten that one can call innate structuring mechanisms, or innate discharge paths for the animal. What about man? All our experience indicates quite clearly that there is in man nothing similar, as is shown very precisely by what one can call the anarchy of his elementary drives, and the fact is demonstrated to us by analytic experience.

His partial behaviors, his relation to the object, and to the libidinal object, are subject to all sorts of contingencies, where in most of our experience, synthesis fails, to show us that there is a quite particular fact of man in his relation of images constituting his world. What is it—for man—that corresponds to this innate knowledge which is nonetheless what one can call, in the balance of the living, ‘the guide of life’?

There is something where one finds oneself in a quite special reference which, just as something is distinct from the animal imaginary function, also places man in a distinct relation from the viewpoint of the living relation with this image; this something that cannot either be very far from what the image is in its animal functions, this something is the image of his own body, which in the animal also has an extreme importance.

Here I make a small leap, because I suppose that we have already, together, carried out the steps, and that you can accept as a theorem what I now summarize. The conception of the mirror stage is this: that what one sees in the child’s attitude in the presence of the mirror, of an image reflecting his own image between such-and-such a date and such-and-such a date—6 months and 18 months—is something that informs us in a fundamental way about the relation of the human individual, biological, animal. This exaltation, this jubilation of the child throughout this period, I showed it last year in front of a film that had been made by M. GESELL, who had never heard of my mirror stage, and for whom no kind of question of an analytic nature had ever arisen, I beg you to believe.

That does not prevent—it gives it all the more value—that he isolated within this parenthesis the significant moment of which he himself does not underline the true fundamental trait, this exalting and manifestly stimulating, transporting character, so to speak, in the subject’s current behavior before the mirror, in an epoch and in a particularly defined and determined field. What is most important is not the appearance of this behavior at 6 months, but its decline at 18 months.

Namely how, suddenly, the behavior—I showed it last year—changes completely so as to become thereafter only an appearance, Erscheinung, a thing among others on which one can exercise an activity of control, of experimentation, of instrumental play, but which manifestly no longer has any of the signs so manifestly pure, accentuated, that it has in that period. This must help us, we who are accustomed to these things and already have at our disposal a certain number of terms that we use confusedly, but which correspond for us at least to a sort of mental schema that it is precisely a matter here of refining, defining, elaborating.

There is no drawback to my already, there, to explain what happens, referring to something that certain readings must at least have made familiar to you: what happens at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex. Something occurs that we call ‘introjection’. And I beg you not to rush to give this term an overly definite meaning, for that is precisely what I am going to put—in the lessons that will follow, in this one already—into question.

What does this term ‘introjection’ mean? Something happens, a reversal:
– what was outside becomes the inside,
– what was the father becomes the superego.

Something happened at the level precisely of this invisible, unthinkable subject, that one never names as such. One will say: is it at the level of the ego, of the Id? Yes, it is between the two; that is why it is called the super-ego. One will make all that specialized demi-mythology that is the one where our mind usually expends itself. That is what we are trying here to give a more acceptable form, for we always live amid schemas that are unacceptable[…]

If one asked a psychoanalyst: ‘Do you really believe that the child then gobbles up his father, and that it goes into his stomach, and becomes the superego?’ We continue to operate as if all that went without saying. And I will show you in the analysis of the function of treatment, namely what is at stake, what is carried out, how it can be realized, progress, the innocent ways of using the term ‘introjection’, which go so far! Suppose that one suddenly sent an ethnologist from a country that had never heard of this damned analysis, and who would be here suddenly, and would hear what happens in analysis; he would say:
‘Very curious! Very curious primitives, the analysands, who gobble up their analyst in little pieces…’

Balthasar GRACIÁN, I consider him a fundamental author; NIETZSCHE and LA ROCHEFOUCAULD are small beside him, his treatise El Comulgatorio [The Art of Taking Communion] on communion conceived in a concrete and valid way. From the moment one believes in communion, there is no reason to think that one does not eat CHRIST and thus the delicate lobe of his ear. There is no reason not to develop the notion of communion as a sort of ‘à la carte’ communion. That is indeed for those who believe in transubstantiation.

But for us analysts, concerned with science, and reasonable, we can see, under the pen of M. STEKEL or other authors, what it is, in the end, that kind of measured introjection of the analyst, which an outside observer could transpose only onto the mystical, communion-related plane, which is nevertheless quite far from our real thought.

Insofar as we think…
But—thank God!—we do not think, and that is what excuses us. The great error is always to imagine that beings think what they say! Consequently, we do not think. But that is still not a reason not to try to understand what it means, why manifestly nonsensical words have been uttered.

So let us take up again the moment where we are. This moment of the end of the mirror stage represents something analogous to that tipping that occurs at certain moments of psychic development. It is quite probable that this moment of the tipping is a quite significant and fundamental moment, from certain points of view, and we can observe it through the subsequent manifestations of man, in this phase of the child’s development.

We can observe it in quite significant phenomena, namely those phenomena of equivalence that occur for him between two things, yet as different as the action of the other and our action, and his action of child transitivism that makes him express himself in this register and say ‘François beat me’ when it is he who beat François, this child transitivism, an unstable mirror between the child and his fellow being.

We see exactly the function of what happened, this, absolutely necessitated by every kind of theorization of interhuman behavior. There is a moment when this image, where the child has carried what I call the jubilant assumption of mastery, which he has not yet obtained, the subject is quite capable of assuming—if one can say—I am deliberately expressing myself roughly this morning—of assuming it inside. But of course, he can do so only in the state of an empty form, of this form of mastery, of this form of envelope, which is something so sure and certain that FREUD, who arrived at it by rather different routes, by the routes of the dynamics of libidinal investment—I beg you to read what he writes in The Ego and the Id in this regard—cannot express himself otherwise.

When FREUD speaks of the ego, he is not speaking at all of that ego that would be I do not know what incisive, determining, imperative thing, by which the ego retrieves what are called in academic psychology the higher agencies. He underlines it in lines as significant as possible: that it must have the greatest relation with the surface of the body. But it is not a matter of this sensitive, sensorial, impressed surface, but of this surface insofar as it is reflected in a form. It is always the definition of a form: there is no form that does not have surface; a form is defined by the surface, the difference in the identical, that is to say, the surface. It is insofar as this fundamental image of the other’s form is assumed and is situated inside, in the form of this surface, indeed, thanks to which there is introduced fundamentally into human psychology this relation of the inside to the outside, of the self by which the subject knows himself, knows himself as body. We have no proof of it, moreover.

It is the only truly fundamental difference between human psychology and animal psychology: man knows himself as body, whereas after all there is no reason for him to know himself since he is inside; that is what makes his difference from animal behavior. The animal is inside, and we have no reason to think that it represents itself. Man represents himself. And in this tipping where he has learned himself as body, as empty form of the body, the exchange was made in this, that everything that was then in him, in the state of pure desire, of that desire moreover unconstituted and confused that was spoken of at the origin, which is the one that is expressed in the infant’s crying, this desire was inverted into the other, whom he will learn to recognize it in. I say ‘will learn’, for he has not yet learned, as long as we have not spoken of something else, namely communication.

Up to that point, the desire that is in a kind of moment of anteriority, not chronological, but logical, for all this takes place in an extremely concentrated period, and we are making there only a deduction, but absolutely fundamental, for it is thanks to that that we can distinguish these different planes of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, without which there is no way to advance in analytic experience, except under verbal forms that border on mysticism. But you will see the interest there is in making a coherent discourse, for it carries over as far as the discourses that we must hold in our methodical use of the intervention of speech in analysis.

Up to the moment when this desire learns to recognize itself—let us now say the word—by the symbol, that is to say in language, this desire is felt and seen only projected in the other, already alienated at the origin, and on the sole plane of this imaginary relation of the specular stage, it is in the other.

But at that moment it can provoke strictly only the most outcome-less tension, that is to say, which has no other outcome, than that—it is what HEGEL’s very elaborated thought teaches us—it identifies with the destruction of the other. There is no kind of resolution to this tension, since very precisely this desire of the other is, in the subject’s desire, projected, cannot absolutely be concentrated, confirmed, except in a competition, a radical rivalry with the object toward which this desire tends. And that each time we approach this imaginary root of the conjunction of human desire, in this primordial alienation, there can be engendered only the most radical aggressiveness, that is—relative to the other—the only possible mediation, which is: the desire for the disappearance of the other, insofar as precisely what he supports is precisely the subject’s desire.

In other words, we meet again there other things that psychologists, by the sole observation of the subject’s behavior, the most ravaging, most unleashed jealousy, the one that Saint AUGUSTINE points out in the famous sentence that I have often repeated, that absolutely ravaging jealousy that the little child feels for his fellow being—latched on or not—and principally when he is latched on to his mother’s breast, that is to say to the object of desire that is essential for him.

What then is this absolutely central function? The imaginary relation that exists in the relation of the subject to this Urbild, to this Idealich, which is the first step by which precisely he learns, in what answers for him to the function of the imaginary, and first, to know himself as form. Well then, it is always, and to the end, the possibility always of this tipping or of this reversion, which makes it so that each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, and constitutes himself in his status, in his stature, in his statics, that each time that happens, his desire is projected outside and that he is—thank God!—in a world of others who speak.

For thanks to that, this desire then is susceptible, in the world of the symbol, in the world of language, to a certain mediation, to a certain recognition. Without that, every human function could be exhausted, if one can say, only in an indefinite wish for the destruction of the other, as such is this desire. Conversely:

– each time that in the other something appears, in the appearance, in the phenomenon of the other, something that allows the subject, again, to reproject, to recomplete, to nourish, as FREUD says somewhere, this image of the Idealich,
– each time that can be redone in an analogous way and on another plane this sort of assumption, that I called jubilant, mirror phenomenon, in other words,
– each time that the subject is captivated by one of his fellow beings in a sufficiently significant way—we will see in a moment what this ‘sufficiently significant’ means—conversely, desire returns, so to speak, into the subject, but it returns verbalized.

In other words, the most exemplary phenomenon of what happens each time these object identifications of the Idealich occur, the one to which I have drawn your attention from the beginning, at the moment when we began to initiate this discourse through the intermediary of the problems that we posed to ourselves, is what?

It is all Verliebtheit: encounters that are not just any kind between Verliebtheit and transference. The difference between Verliebtheit and transference is that Verliebtheit does not occur automatically; certain conditions determined by the evolution of the subject are required. We will see what ‘evolution’ means in that case. Verliebtheit—what FREUD also underlines—is, determines… for, do not forget it, in this article that is read badly, because everyone, when they read this article, thinks only of that famous stupid schema, schema with the stages, the little lens, the sides, the thing that goes in and that he calls the superego, and which is enough for everyone… What an idea he had to bring that out, when he surely had other schemas!

One must read this article, and know that it says that the ego is made of the succession of identifications, with its loved objects that thus allowed it to take its form: it is an object made like an onion; one could peel it, and one would perceive the succession of identifications that constituted it. It is written in the same articles of which I was speaking to you a moment ago.

The perpetual reversion of desire to form, and of form to desire…
in other words of consciousness and the body, of desire—insofar as partial—
to the loved object, insofar as the subject literally loses himself in it and identifies with it
…is the fundamental mechanism around which everything that relates to the ego turns, on this condition: that we must indeed understand that this play would truly be of flame and fire, and that it would lead to immediate extermination, as soon as the subject is capable of doing something, and believe me, he is capable of it very quickly.

One of the first activities that I was able to observe in a little girl, of whom I spoke to you a moment ago, and who has nothing especially ferocious, is, at an age when she was barely still walking on her feet, in a country garden where she had taken refuge, to apply herself very calmly to applying a stone of a rather large kind to the skull of a little neighboring comrade, who was the one around whom she was making her first identifications.

CAIN’s gesture does not need to reach a very great motor completeness to be realized in the most spontaneous way, I must even say: the most triumphant, for she felt no feeling of guilt: ‘Me break head So-and-so…’ She formulated it with assurance and calm. I do not for all that promise her any future as a criminal. She manifests the most fundamental structure of the human being, on the imaginary plane: to destroy the one who is the seat of alienation.

What did you mean, GRANOFF?

Wladimir GRANOFF

How then, at that moment, is one to understand the masochistic outcome at the mirror stage, properly speaking?

LACAN

Give me time; I am here to explain that to you. For when one begins to call that ‘the masochistic outcome’, it is precisely at that moment that it begins… that the cat no longer finds her kittens there. For there are so many things around masochism, that precisely one must try to understand.

The masochistic outcome…
since you are pressing me again, I never refuse resumptions and reminders, even if they must interrupt my development a little, I will tell you something, then
…it is not conceivable, it has no essential, fundamental, structuring sense; we cannot understand it without the dimension of the symbolic. It is at the point of junction between the imaginary and the symbolic that there is situated, in its structuring, fundamental, not deviated form, what is generally called primordial masochism. In other words, that special corner of the manifestation of what is also called on this subject the death instinct, as something constituting the fundamental position of the human subject.

Do not forget that when FREUD isolated this primordial masochism, he embodied it precisely in a childhood game. I did not speak of it this morning but I can speak of it precisely at the emergence of this age, for he is 18 months precisely, this child of whom one speaks.

It is the game by which the child, FREUD tells us, substitutes for the painful tension engendered by this fact of experience absolutely impossible to avoid, inevitable, of the presence and the absence of the loved object, a game by which he himself handles, takes pleasure in commanding the absence and the presence, as such. He does it by the intermediary, I believe, of a little ball at the end of a string, which he throws and brings back.

But what is evident, fundamental, manifested in the example…
because it is not the same thing to push oneself a dialectic,
or to be in a position, as I am here, in this sense that I try to respond to FREUD, to elucidate its foundations
…what FREUD does not underline, but what is there in the most evident way, is that, as always, his observation allows the situation to be completed.

This is accompanied by a vocalization that is characteristic of what is the very foundation of language, from the viewpoint of linguists, what allows the problem of language to be grasped, namely a simple opposition. It is not that the child says more or less approximately the ‘Fort-Da’, which in his mother tongue amounts to ‘Far’, ‘There’. He pronounces them moreover in an approximate way.

It is that already, and from the origin, it is a first manifestation of language, under the form of a couple, of an opposition, and precisely of an opposition where he transcends, where he carries onto a symbolic plane as such, the phenomenon of presence and absence, that he makes himself master of the thing, insofar as precisely he destroys it.

And there, since after all we read from time to time a bit of a text of FREUD, for the first time we will go to a text of LACAN:

‘It is these games…

Have I written in a text—I reread it recently, I found that it was understandable, but I was in a privileged position, I would like to urge you to see that it can be read: [‘Function and field of speech and of language in psychoanalysis’, in Écrits pp. 318-319]

‘It is these games of concealment that Freud, in a genial intuition, has produced before our eyes so that we recognize in them that the moment when desire becomes human is also the one when the child is born into language. We can now grasp in them that the subject does not master there only his deprivation by assuming it—that is what FREUD says—but that he there raises his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object that it makes appear and disappear in the provocation—in the proper sense of the word ‘pro-vocation’: by the voice—the anticipatory provocation of its absence and its presence. It thus negates the field of forces of desire so as to become, to itself, its own object. And this object, immediately taking body in the symbolic pair of two elementary ejaculations—the ‘Fort!’ and the ‘Da!’—announces in the subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of phonemes…

That means simply that by that sole fact he has the entry door into what already exists,
the sequence of phonemes that compose a language

…of which existing language offers the synchronic structure to its assimilation; likewise the child begins to engage in the system of the concrete discourse of the environment, by reproducing more or less approximately in his ‘Fort!’ and in his ‘Da!’ the vocables that he receives from this environment.’

Thus, it does not have such importance, but it is from outside that he receives it.

‘Fort!’, ‘Da!’ it is indeed already in his solitude that the desire of the little man has become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own pain. Whether the child now addresses an imaginary or real partner, he will see him obey equally the negativity of his discourse, and his call…

For do not forget that when he says ‘Fort!’, it is that the object is there and when he says ‘Da!’, it is absent

…and his call having the effect of making it withdraw, he will seek in a banishing affirmation…

He will learn very early the force of refusal

…the provocation of the return that brings his object back to that desire.’

It is the negativing of the simple call, before the introduction of the ‘no’ where the subject learns, with the other’s refusal, to constitute what M. HYPPOLITE showed us the other day. Before that already, by the sole introduction of a simple couple of symbols, facing the contrasted phenomenon of presence and absence, the introduction of the symbol reverses the positions:

– absence is evoked in presence,
– and presence in absence.

That seems like silly things, and as if it went without saying. But one still has to say it and reflect on it! And it is insofar as the world of the symbol allows this inversion, that is to say cancels the existing thing, that it opens with it the whole world of negativity, which constitutes at once the discourse of the human subject and the reality of his world insofar as human.

Primordial masochism is around this first negativing, and even murder of the thing, to tell the whole truth, at the origin. We will still say a little concluding word. We have not come quite as far as I would have hoped.

Nevertheless, if you grasp this: that it is through the intermediary of desire…
insofar as alienated, as perpetually reintegrated again by reprojecting outward the Idealich, this desire once verbalized
…you can understand how the tipping play between the two inverted relations: the specular relation of the ego, insofar as the subject assumes and realizes it, with this projection, always ready to be renewed in an Idealich which, for him, gives the fundamental frame within which all eroticism is possible, that is to say something that goes beyond this primordial relation, which becomes a condition to which then the object of eros, as such, must be subjected, that is to say, the object relation must always submit to this narcissistic frame within which it must inscribe itself. It certainly transcends it, but in a quite impossible way to realize on the subject’s imaginary plane.

That is what makes for the subject the necessity of relations, of what I will call love, for a creature, with a reference to that beyond of language, to that pact, to that engagement, which constitutes him, properly speaking, as another. That creates as another, included in the general system, or more exactly universal system, of interhuman symbols, which makes it so that there is no functionally realizable love in the human community, except through the intermediary—always at diverse levels—of a certain pact, which always tends to isolate itself, whatever form it takes, in a certain function, both inside language and outside. That is what is called the function of the sacred, but which is beyond this imaginary relation. We will return to this.

Today, perhaps, I am going a bit fast. Simply to tell you that what is manifested by this original story, with the supplement that GRANOFF’s question elicited, is that the play of what I called the other day this mirror, thanks to which the subject sees more or less well in the other the totality. But he never sees, for reasons that the optician metaphor allows one to image very easily, more than a part; it is never completely in focus.

But the relation of this ‘I’ to the other, this specular relation to the other, with symbolic naming, with the recognition of desire, the fact that it is never reintegrated except under a verbal form, that is what FREUD called the ‘verbal nucleus of the ego’. This to allow us to understand the whole analytic technique. Namely how, by letting go, in a certain way, all the moorings of the spoken relation, and by launching the subject into a certain way of moving in the universe, as much as possible, and in a certain way having broken this mooring, that is, the relation of courtesy, of respect, of obedience to the other, everything that we call, we, a ‘free association’, excessively badly defined by that term, insofar as it is the moorings of conversation with the other that we try to cut, at certain points, that the subject finds himself in a certain mobility relative to this universe of language in which we engage him.

At that moment can occur this development, this oscillation of the mirror, on the imaginary plane, which allows the subject to encounter in a certain simultaneity, or in certain contrasts, things that do not have the habit of coexisting for him, imaginary and real, namely where he accommodates his desire in the presence of the other. You see all the questions that that opens.

Namely, first:
– What is this ‘breaking of moorings’?
– What results from it?
– What can we say about it, as being its consequences on the plane of language?

In other words—I will develop it next time…—there is there an essentially ambiguous relation:
– What do we attempt in analysis, to show the subject?
– Where do we try to guide him, in authentic speech?

I told you so, when we placed ourselves in the phenomenon of transference, at the level of the formulation of being. But precisely the paradoxical path by which we arrive consists precisely in extracting speech from language. For in the end, all our attempts and instructions aim, at the moment when we free the subject’s discourse, to remove from it every true function of speech.

By what paradox will we manage to find it again? And what will thereby be the whole scope of the phenomena that will take place in the interval? This is the horizon of the question that I am trying to develop before you. I will show you next time what happens as a result, what is essentially, following this experience of unmoored discourse, what must deductively occur, very precisely there, at the level of this oscillation of the mirror, what allows the tipping play between the O and the O’, and why correctly conducted analyses… I say ‘conducted correctly’: I will tell someone to criticize that.

BALINT gives us a sensational definition, founded, expressed, by one of the rare men who are capable of accounting, in a correct and truly felt way, what one usually obtains ‘at the end of the rare analyses that one can consider as finished’. It is he himself who expresses himself thus, he BALINT, one of the rare ones who know what they are saying. The way he depicts what happened, I assure you it is quite dismaying. This text is worth being highlighted. Now, it is a matter there of the correctly conducted analysis. What must we deduce from it? First, that! And secondly: there is the analysis generally practiced and of which I showed you that it is strictly the incorrect analysis. The analysis founded on the theme of ‘the analysis of resistances’ is legitimate as a title, but as a practice, I think that this schema will allow you to formulate how much that leads to formulating pathetically that it is not in the ends implied in the premises of analysis.

That is still a second question. For today, let us leave them as they are.