Rosine LEFORT

LACAN

Through our dialogue, you have been able to realize what presides over our commentary, over our attempt to rethink, to reunderstand ever better the fundamental texts of the analytic experience. You have been able to become familiar with this idea which is, in a way, the soul of our deepening: that what is always best seen in an experience is what is at a certain distance.

And since, moreover, it is not surprising that it is now and here in our interview that we are led to set out again, to understand the analytic experience, from what seems implied in its most immediate given—namely the symbolic function, namely what is exactly the same thing here in our vocabulary, the function of speech. This central domain of the analytic experience, we find it indicated everywhere, never named, but indicated at every step of FREUD’s work.

I do not think I am forcing anything in saying that it is almost to translate algebraically what can immediately be translated in this register, in the margin, in any Freudian text, which in many cases already gives at least a very important part of the solutions to the antinomies that manifest themselves there, with an openness, an honesty that makes a text by FREUD always an open text; it is never closed, sealed, as if the whole system were there.

In this sense, I am already indicating to you that I would very much like—and you will see how this fits into our progress—that for the next session someone would take on the commentary of a text which is not only exemplary of what I have just expressed to you, but which is situated as the essential theoretical counterpart of the period defined by the field of the Technical Papers, the one that runs from 1908 to 1920, which is situated very exactly between the text that you have in these Technical Papers translated as ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’, in German: ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’, and the text that is called ‘Observations on Transference-Love’, and which is situated between the two, that is to say between the two most important texts that are in this collection; it is called ‘Zur Einführung des Narzißmus’: ‘Introduction to the Concept of Narcissism’.

It is one of the texts that we cannot not integrate into our progress, for the simple reason that, as you are going to see, that is indeed what is at issue now. It is as a function of the situation of analytic ‘dialogue’… you know what that means, with the different phases, the different extensions that are implied in these two terms, of situation on the one hand, of ‘dialogue’ on the other, dialogue put in quotation marks… that we have progressed and tried to define in its proper field what is called ‘resistance’.

Then we were able to formulate a wholly general and fundamental definition for this experience, which is transference. Yet you can feel it well, you can see well, that there is a distance:
– between that something which separates the subject from that full speech that analysis expects from him,
– between that something which is precisely what we have manifested as resistance, and where we have shown that it is a function of anxiogenic inflection, which is, properly speaking, in its most radical mode, the phenomenon of transference at the level of symbolic exchange.

You can see clearly that there is something that separates all that from what we commonly call, what we handle in the notion—all these manifestations, all these phenomena—of a fundamental phenomenon that we are going to name and which is the one that we handle technically in analysis, which appears to us to be the energetic spring, as FREUD himself expresses it, fundamental, of transference in analysis.

In other words, transference in the sense of what FREUD does not hesitate—precisely in this text I was speaking about a moment ago: ‘Observations on Transference-Love’—to call by that name: ‘love’, and you will see, on reading this text—I think moreover that you have all already read it—to what extent FREUD scarcely distinguishes transference from love, how little he eludes the amorous, passionate phenomenon, in its more concrete sense, to the point that he goes so far as to say that:

‘At bottom, with what we know, what we call in life love, there is between transference and that no distinction that is really essential; that the structure of this artificial phenomenon that is transference and that of the spontaneous phenomenon that we call love, and very precisely passionate love, on the psychic plane, are equivalent.’

There is no elusion on FREUD’s part, no way of dissolving the scabrous into I do not know what that would be precisely, in the current sense of the word, in the sense of illusory, in the current sense of the word that one usually employs, that would be ‘symbolism’ in the sense where symbolism would be the unreal; there is no elusion of the phenomenon.

But this phenomenon is indeed what is commonly called love, and it is indeed around that that will be centered, in the interviews we are going to see, to finish the study of these Technical Papers—and I hope: not quite before the Easter holidays, but I would not want that to extend much beyond—that it is around the nature of this transference-love, of this transference-love in the most precise, the most affective sense. There, we can employ the term under which we can take it; we are going to direct our attention. And this will carry us into the heart of this other notion, which I am trying to introduce here, and without which it is also not possible to make a correct distribution of what we handle in our experience, and which is the function of the imaginary.

Do not believe that, any more than that of the symbolic function, this function of the imaginary is absent from FREUD’s texts. Quite simply, he did not put it in the foreground, did not single it out, everywhere one can find it. When we study the Introduction to Narcissism, you will see that FREUD himself, in his text, finds no other term to designate… and this, perhaps for some of you, will seem surprising… the difference between what is early dementia, schizophrenia, psychosis, and what is neurosis, than precisely this definition. He tells us:

‘That the patient who suffers from hysteria, or from obsessional neurosis, like the psychotic and as far as the influence of his illness extends, given his relation to reality… But that analysis shows that he has in no way, for all that, broken all his erotic relations with persons and things; he sustains them, maintains them, still retains them in fantasy… On the one hand he has substituted for real objects imaginary objects founded on his memories, or has mixed the two—remember our schema from last time—whereas on the other hand he has ceased to direct his motor activities toward the attainment of his aims in connection with real objects. It is only to this condition of the libido that we can legitimately apply the term introjection of the libido, which Jung has used in an undiscriminating way. It is otherwise with the paraphrenic. He seems really to have withdrawn his libido from the persons and things of the external world, without replacing them by other fantasies. This indeed means—namely when this happens, that he recreates this imaginative world—his imaginative faculty. The process seems a secondary process. A part of his effort toward reconstruction has the aim of directing the libido again toward an object.’

[Auch der Hysteriker und Zwangsneurotiker hat, soweit seine Krankheit reicht, die Beziehung zur Realität aufgegeben. Die Analyse zeigt aber, daß er die erotische Beziehung zu Personen und Dingen keineswegs aufgehoben hat. Er hält sie noch in der Phantasie fest, das heißt, er hat einerseits die realen Objekte durch imaginäre seiner Erinnerung ersetzt oder sie mit ihnen vermengt, anderseits darauf verzichtet, die motorischen Aktionen zur Erreichung seiner Ziele an diesen Objekten einzuleiten. Für diesen Zustand der Libido sollte man allein den von Jung ohne Unterscheidung gebrauchten Ausdruck: Introversion der Libido gelten lassen. Anders der Paraphreniker. Dieser scheint seine Libido von den Personen und Dingen der Außenwelt wirklich zurückgezogen zu haben, ohne diese durch andere in seiner Phantasie zu ersetzen. Wo dies dann geschieht, scheint es sekundär zu sein und einem Heilungsversuch anzugehören, welcher die Libido zum Objekt zurückführen will…]

Here we enter into all that the analysis of SCHREBER—which I hope we will be able to begin before the end of the year—will allow us to deepen, namely this essential distinction between the functioning of the imaginary in neurosis and psychosis. This nevertheless cannot be placed from now on in the background, in the backdrop, of what I will express to you, I think, next time, under the general title that I announced to you: ‘The Function of Transference in the Imaginary’.

And that is why it seemed to me entirely happy, favorable, to have learned last night that in our sub-group on Child Psychoanalysis, Rosine LEFORT—who is present here to my right, and who is my student—has brought an observation of which she has spoken to me for a long time, that I know in that capacity, of a child who is in an extremely particular situation, which, like the greatest number of observations of children in severe cases like those, certainly leaves us in great embarrassment, in great ambiguity from the diagnostic and nosological point of view.

But that she has in any case been able to see with great depth, as you will be able to ascertain. And just as we set out, two conferences back, from Melanie KLEIN’s observation as an introduction to many things that I was then able to express to you in the conference that followed, so we will use today this alternating rhythm and will yield the floor to Rosine LEFORT, who will at once present to you a particularly suggestive case, as regards the function of the imaginary in the child’s formation, and open, to the extent that time allows us, to these questions, so that next time I can insert what could be brought as an answer to them, into the whole of what I will have to set out under the heading: ‘Transference in the Imaginary’.

Dear Rosine, I yield you the floor; present to us the case of Robert, with the questions that already allowed—like elaborating, last night—
– to pose them,
– and to leave certain ones pending.

Rosine LEFORT

Robert is a little boy, born on 4 March 1948. His history was reconstructed with difficulty, and it is above all thanks to the material brought in sessions that one was able to know the traumas suffered. His father is unknown. His mother is currently committed as a paranoid. She had him with her up to the age of 5 months, wandering from mother-and-baby home to mother-and-baby home.

She neglected the essential care to the point of forgetting to feed him; one had constantly to remind this woman of the care to give her child, and especially the bottle: he was so neglected that he really suffered from hunger. He had to be hospitalized at the age of 5 months in a severe state of hypotrophy and undernourishment. Barely hospitalized, he developed a bilateral otitis that necessitated a double mastoidectomy. He was then sent to ‘Paul PARQUET’ whose strict prophylactic character everyone knows.

He is isolated, not seeing the other children, fed by tube because of his anorexia. And he is returned by force to his mother for two months. Nothing is known of his life during that time. Then at 11 months his mother leaves him at the Assistance publique intake depot, and a few months later he is registered, his mother not having seen him again. From that time—he is 11 months—until the age of 3 years 9 months, this child underwent 25 changes of residence, children’s institutions or hospitals, never a foster placement properly speaking because of his condition.

These hospitalizations were necessitated by childhood illnesses, by an adenoidectomy, and by neurological examinations, ventriculography, electroencephalography, normal examinations. One notes sanitary, medical evaluations that indicate profound somatic disturbances. Then, the somatic being improved, psychological deteriorations. The last evaluation from ‘Denfert’, at 3 years and a half, proposes an institutionalization that could only be definitive, with a para-psychotic state not frankly defined. The GESELL test gives a DQ of 43. He thus arrives at 3 years 9 months at the institution that is a dependency of the Denfert depot, where I took him into treatment.

At that moment, he presents in the following way:
– From the height-weight point of view, in very good condition, apart from a chronic bilateral otorrhea.
– From the motor point of view, he had a pendular gait, a great incoordination of movements, a constant hyperagitation.
– From the point of view of language, total absence of coordinated speech, frequent cries, guttural and discordant laughter. He knew how to say only two words that he shouted: ‘madame’, and ‘the wolf’. This word, ‘the wolf’, he repeated all day long, which is why I nicknamed him ‘the wolf-child’; it was truly the representation he had of himself.
– From the behavioral point of view, he was hyperactive, all the time agitated by abrupt and disordered movements, without aim. Incoherent grasping activity: he threw his arm forward to take an object and, if he did not reach it, he could not correct and had to start the movement again from the beginning. Various sleep disturbances.

On this permanent background, he had convulsive agitation crises, without true convulsions, with flushing of the face, piercing howls, on the occasion of the routine scenes of his life: the potty, and especially the emptying of the potty, undressing, food, open doors that he could not bear, nor darkness, nor the cries of the other children, and, as we shall see, changes of rooms.

More rarely, he had crises diametrically opposed in which he was completely prostrated, looking without aim, of a depressive type. With the adult, he was hyperagitated, undifferentiated, without real contact. With the children, he seemed to ignore them perfectly, but when one of them shouted or cried, he entered a convulsive crisis.

In these moments of crisis he became dangerous, he became strong, he strangled the other children, and one had to separate him from the others for the night and for meals. One felt then no manifestation of anxiety nor any emotion experienced. From the diagnostic point of view, we will speak of it again later because we did not know very well in which category to place him. One nevertheless attempted a treatment while wondering whether one would arrive at something.

I am going to speak to you about the first year of treatment. Then, it was stopped for a year. It can be divided into several parts. A preliminary phase in which he had the behavior he had in life, guttural cries; he entered the room, running without stopping, howling, jumping into the air and falling back squatting, taking his head between his hands, opening and closing the door, turning the light on and off. The objects, he took them, or rejected them, or piled them on me. Very marked prognathism.

However, the only thing I was able to extract from these first sessions was that he did not dare to approach the bottle that was on the table; he dared to approach it only if the table was empty, in which case he did not touch it, but blew on it. And also another interest in the basin which, full of water, seemed to trigger a real panic crisis.

At the end of this preliminary phase, at a session, after having piled everything on me in a state of great agitation, he bolted, and I heard him at the top of the staircase, which he did not know how to go down by himself, say in a pathetic tone, in a very low tonality that was not his style: ‘maman’, facing the void. This preliminary phase ended: outside the treatment, one evening after being put to bed, standing on his bed, with plastic scissors he tried to cut his penis in front of the terrified little girls.

In the second part, he began to set out what ‘the wolf’ was for him. He shouted that all the time, and I did not represent to myself very well what it was for him. He began, one day, by trying to strangle a little girl whom I had in treatment. One had to separate them and put him in another room. His reaction was violent, in the form of an intense agitation. I had to come and bring him back into the room where he usually lived. As soon as he was there, he howled ‘the wolf!’ and threw everything across the room—it was the refectory—food and plates.

The following days, each time he passed through the room where he had been put, he howled ‘the wolf!’. And this theme had struck me greatly. And this also sheds light on the behavior he had toward doors that he could not bear open. He spent his time in session opening them for me to close them again and howling ‘the wolf!’. If one remembers his history, the changes of places and also the changes of rooms were for him a destruction, since he had changed places and adults without stop.

It had become for him a true principle of destruction that had intensely marked the foundation of the primordial manifestations of his life of ingestion and excretion. He expressed it principally in two scenes: one with the bottle, and the other with the potty.

He had ended up taking the bottle. And one day he went to open the door and held the bottle out to someone imaginary, for when he was alone with an adult in a room, he continued to behave as if there were other children around him; he held the bottle out, he came back pulling off the teat, and made me put it back on, held the bottle out again outside, left the door open, turned his back on me, swallowed two gulps of milk, and facing me pulled off the teat, threw his head back, flooded himself with milk, poured the rest on me, and seized with panic, he left, unconscious and blind. I had to pick him up on the staircase where he was beginning to roll. I had the impression that he had swallowed destruction at that moment—where the open door and the milk were linked.

The potty scene that followed was marked by the same character of destruction. He believed himself obliged, at the beginning of the treatment, to poop in session, thinking that if he gave me something, he kept me. He could do it only pressed against me, sitting on the potty, holding with one hand my apron, with the other hand the bottle or a pencil, in a great state of fear. He ate afterward, and especially before. And for pee he drank. The emotional intensity testified to a great fear. And the last of these scenes clarified for him the relation between defecation and destruction through changes.

In the course of this scene, he had begun by pooping, seated next to me. Then, his poop next to him, he leafed through the pages of a book, turning the pages. Then he heard a noise outside. Mad with fear, he went out, took his potty and placed it in front of the door of the person who had just entered the adjacent room. Then he came back into the room where I was and pressed himself against the door, howling ‘the wolf! the wolf!’. I had the impression of a propitiatory rite.

This poop, he was incapable of giving it to me. He knew to a certain extent that I did not demand it. He went to put it outside; he knew well that it was going to be thrown away, therefore destroyed. I explained it to him. Thereupon, he went to fetch the potty, put it back in the room, next to me, hid it with a paper, as if not to be obliged to give it.

Then he began to be aggressive against me, as if by giving him permission to possess himself, through this poop that he could dispose of, I had given him the possibility of being aggressive. Obviously, up to then, not being able to possess, he did not have the sense of aggressiveness, but of self-destruction, which moreover explained his behavior with the other children.

From that day on, he no longer believed himself obliged to poop in session; he used symbolic substitutes: sand. He showed the confused representation he had of himself. His state of anxiety, of agitation became greater and greater in life; he became unmanageable. I myself witnessed in session real whirlwinds with which I had quite difficulty intervening.

That day, after having drunk a little milk: he spilled some on the floor, then threw sand into the basin of water, filled the bottle with sand and water, peed in the potty, put sand in it, then he gathered up milk mixed with sand and water, added everything into the potty, placing on top the rubber doll and the bottle, and he entrusted the whole to me. At that moment, he went to open the door, and came back with a face convulsed with fear, took back the bottle that was in the potty and broke it, attacking it until he reduced it to little crumbs. Then he carefully gathered them and buried them in the sand of the potty. He was in such a state that I had to take him back down, feeling that I could do nothing more for him. He took that potty with him. A speck of sand fell to the floor, triggering in him an unbelievable panic. He had to pick up the slightest fragment of sand, as if it were a piece of himself, and he howled ‘The wolf! the wolf!’. He could not bear staying in the community; he could not bear that any other child come near. One had to put him to bed in a state of intense tension, which yielded in a spectacular way only after a diarrheic débâcle, which he spread everywhere with his hands in his bed as well as on the walls. This whole scene was so pathetic, lived with such anxiety, that I was very worried, and I began to realize the idea he had of himself.

He specified it the next day, when I had had to frustrate him: he ran to the window, opened it, shouted ‘the wolf!’, and seeing his image in the pane, struck it while shouting ‘the wolf! the wolf!’. Robert thus represented himself: he was the wolf, therefore this principle of destruction that he strikes in his own image, or that he evokes with such tension. This potty where he put what enters into himself and what comes out of it, the pee and the poop, then a human image, the doll, then the debris of the bottle, was truly an image of himself, similar to that of the wolf, as the panic testified when a little sand had fallen to the floor.

Successively and at the same time, he is all these elements that he put in the potty, the pieces of the broken bottle, which remain the last image of himself just after having linked this action of breaking it with the door, the outside, the changes. He was only a series of objects by which he came into contact with daily life, symbols of the contents of his body:
– sand is the symbol of feces,
– water, that of urine,
– and milk, that which enters his body.

But the potty scene shows that he differentiated very little among all that. For him, all the contents are united in the same feeling of permanent destruction of his body, which, in opposition to these contents, represents the container, and which Robert symbolized by the broken bottle. In the next phase, he was exorcising the wolf. Exorcism, for this child gave me the impression of being a possessed one, and that, thanks to my permanence, he was able to exorcise, with a little milk he had drunk, the scenes of everyday life that hurt him so much.

At that moment, my interpretations tended above all to differentiate the contents of his body from the affective point of view: milk is what one receives. Poop is what one gives, and its value depends on the milk one has received. Pee is aggressive. Numerous sessions took place. At that moment, when he peed in the potty, and then he announced to me: ‘not poop, it’s pee’, he was distressed.

I reassured him, telling him that he had received too little to be able to give something without its destroying him. That reassured him. He could then go and empty the potty in the toilets. The emptying of the potty was surrounded by many protective rites. He began by emptying the urine into the WC sink while letting the water tap run so as to be able to replace the urine with water. He filled the potty, making it overflow widely, as if a container had existence only through its content and had to overflow as if to contain it in its turn.

There is here a syncretic vision of being in time, as container and at the same time as content, as in intrauterine life. Here he finds again this confused image he had of himself. He emptied this pee, and tried to catch it, convinced that it was he who was leaving. He howled ‘the wolf!’, and the potty could have reality for him only when full. My whole attitude was to show him the reality of the potty that remained after having been emptied of his pee, as he—Robert—remained after having peed, as the tap was not carried away by the water that runs, but was always there, even when the water was not running.

Through these interpretations and my permanence, Robert progressively introduced a delay between emptying and filling, until the day when he was able to come back triumphant with an empty potty in his arm. He had visibly gained the idea of the permanence of his body.

In parallel, he was carrying out another experience of his body: his clothes were for him his container, and when he was stripped of them, it was certain death. The undressing scene was for him the occasion of real crises. The last one had lasted three hours, during which the staff described him as ‘possessed’; he howled ‘the wolf!’, running from one room to another, smearing the feces he found in the potties on the other children; he could calm down only when tied.

The next day after this scene, he came to session, began to undress in a great state of anxiety, and completely naked he got into the bed. It took three sessions for him to manage to drink a little milk completely naked in the bed. He pointed to the window and the door, and struck his image while howling ‘the wolf!’.

In parallel, in everyday life, undressing became easy, but then was followed by a great depression: in the evening he began to sob for no reason, and he went down to be comforted by the supervisor downstairs, and he fell asleep in her arms.

In conclusion of this phase, he exorcised with me the emptying of the potty, as well as the undressing scene; he did it through my permanence, which had made milk a constructive element. But Robert, driven by the necessity to construct a minimum, did not touch the past; he counted only on the present of his everyday life, as if he were deprived of memory.

In the following phase, I became the wolf. And he made use of the little construction he had done to project onto me all the evil he had drunk, and in a way thus recover memory. He will be able to become progressively aggressive.

This is going to become tragic. Pushed by the past, he has to be aggressive toward me; at the same time, in the present, I am the one he needs. I must reassure him by my interpretations, speak to him of the past that forces him to be aggressive, which does not entail my disappearance nor his change of place, which was taken by him as a punishment.

As he had been aggressive toward me, he tried to destroy himself; he represented himself by an unbroken bottle and he tried to break it. I took it from his hands; he was not in a state to bear breaking it. He resumed the course of the session and of his aggressiveness toward me.

At that moment, he made me play the role of his starving mother, forced me to sit on a chair where his cup of milk was, so that I would spill this milk, thus depriving him of his good food. Then he began to howl ‘the wolf!’, took the cradle and the baby and threw them out through the window, in a furious state of accusation against me.

He then turned against me and made me swallow dirty water with great violence, howling ‘the wolf! the wolf!’. This bottle represented bad nourishment because of separation and all the changes, after a bad mother who had deprived him of food. In parallel, he loaded me with another aspect of the bad mother, the one who leaves. He saw me leave one evening from the institution. The next day he reacted; he had already seen me leave other times, but without being able to express the emotion he could feel from it.

That day, he peed on me in a great state of aggressiveness and also of anxiety. This scene was only the prelude to a final scene whose result was to load me definitively with all the evil he had suffered and to project into me ‘the wolf!’. I had therefore swallowed the bottle with the dirty water, received the aggressive pee on me because I was leaving. I was therefore the wolf.

Robert separated himself from it in the course of a session by locking me in the toilets, while he returned to the session room alone, got into the empty bed and began to moan.

He could not call me, and I had to come back, since I was the permanent person. I came back. Robert was stretched out, with a pathetic face, the thumb held two centimeters from his mouth. And for the first time in a session, he held out his arms to me and let himself be comforted. From this session on, one witnesses in his life a total change of behavior. This child who attacked the others, strangled them, tore with his teeth, became the gentlest being imaginable, defending the little ones, comforting them, making them eat.

I had the impression that he had exorcised the wolf. From that moment on, he no longer spoke of it, and he was then able to pass to the next phase: body regression, this construction of the ego-body that he had never been able to do. To use the dialectic he had always used, of contents-containers, Robert had to, in order to build himself, be my content, but he had to ensure my possession, that is to say his future container.

He began this period by taking a bucket full of water, whose handle was a rope. This rope, he absolutely could not bear it being attached at both ends. It had to hang on one side.

I had been struck by the fact that, when I had been obliged to tighten it in order to carry the bucket, it put him in a state of almost physical pain. Until the day when, in a scene, he put the bucket full of water between his legs, took the rope and attached it to his navel. I then had the impression that the bucket was me, and he was attaching himself to me by a rope, an umbilical cord.

Then, he poured out the contents of the bucket of water, got completely naked, then lay down in this water, in fetal position, curled up, stretching from time to time, and going so far as to open his mouth and close it on the liquid, as a fetus drinks amniotic fluid, as the latest American experiments have shown.

All these activities were the evident tracing of fetal activity. And I had the impression that he was building himself thanks to that. At first excessively agitated, then he became aware of a certain reality of pleasure, and everything led to two crucial scenes acted with an extraordinary recollection and a state of fullness astonishing given his age and his condition.

In the first of these scenes, Robert, completely naked, facing me, scooped up water in his joined hands, brought it up to shoulder height, and let it run down along his body. He repeated this several times, then said to me softly ‘Robert, Robert’, becoming aware of his body. This baptism by water—for it was a baptism, given the recollection he put into it—was followed by a baptism by milk.

He had begun by playing in the water with more pleasure than recollection. Then he took his glass of milk and drank it. Then he put the teat back on and began to let the milk from the bottle run down along his body. As that was not going fast enough, he removed the teat and began again, letting the milk run over his chest, his belly, and down along his penis with an intense feeling of pleasure. Then he turned toward me and showed me this penis, taking it in his hand, looking delighted.

Then he drank milk, thus putting it on himself and in himself, in such a way that the content was at once content and container, thus finding again this scene he was acting with water.

In the phases that followed, he is going to pass to the stage of oral construction. This stage is extremely difficult and very complex. First, he is 4 years old and he is living the most primitive of stages. Moreover, the other children whom I was then taking into treatment in this institution are girls, which is a problem for him. Finally, Robert’s behavior patterns have not totally disappeared and tend to return each time there is frustration.

In the sessions that followed this baptism by water and by milk, Robert began by living this symbiosis that characterizes the primitive mother-child relation. But when the child truly lives it, there normally exists no problem of sex, at least in the sense of the newborn toward his mother, whereas here there was one.

And Robert had to make the symbiosis either with a phallic mother, such as he was ready to accept her, or with a feminine mother, which then posed the problem of castration; the problem was to manage to have him receive nourishment without its entailing his castration. He first lived this symbiosis in a simple form: seated on my knees, he ate. Then, he took my ring and my watch and put them on himself, or else he took a pencil from my blouse and broke it with his teeth.

Then I interpreted it to him. This identification with a castrating phallic mother then remained on the level of the past, and was then accompanied by a reactional aggressiveness that evolved in its motivations. He no longer broke the lead of his pencil except as self-punishment for this aggressiveness.

Afterward, he could drink the milk from the bottle, lying in my arms, but it was he himself who held the bottle, and it was only later that he was able to receive it directly, with me holding the bottle, as if the whole past forbade him to receive into himself, from me, the content of an object so essential. His desire for symbiosis was still in conflict with what we have just seen. That is why he took the way of giving the bottle to himself.

But as Robert experienced, through other foods, such as porridges and cakes, that the nourishment he received from me through this symbiosis did not identify him with me to the point of being a girl, he could then receive from me.

He first tried to differentiate himself from me by sharing with me: he gave me something to eat and said, palpating himself: ‘Robert’, then palpating me: ‘not Robert’. I made much use of that in my interpretations to help him differentiate very quickly.

The situation ceased to be only between him and me, and he brought in the little girls whom I had in treatment. It was a problem of castration, since he knew that before him and after him a little girl came up to session with me. And emotional logic required that he make himself a girl, since it was a girl who broke the symbiosis with me that he needed.

The situation was conflictual. He acted it in different ways, peeing while seated on the potty, or else doing it standing up while showing himself truly aggressive. Robert was therefore now capable of receiving, and capable of giving; he then gave me his poop without fear of being castrated by this gift.

We thus arrive at a plateau of the treatment that can be summarized as follows: the contents of his body are no longer destructive, bad; he is capable of expressing his aggressiveness by peeing standing up, without the existence and integrity of the container, that is to say of the body, being called into question.

The DQ on the GESELL has gone from 43 to 80. And on the TERMAN–MERILL he has an IQ of 75. The clinical picture has changed; the motor disturbances have disappeared, the prognathism as well. With the other children he has become friendly. One can begin to integrate him into group activities. Only language remains rudimentary: he never makes sentences, uses only essential words. Then, I go on vacation, am absent for two months.

When I returned, he acted out an interesting scene showing the coexistence in him of the patterns of the past and the construction made in the present. During my absence, his behavior remained as it was, that is to say he expressed, in his old mode, in a very rich way because of what had been acquired, what separation represented for him, and that he feared losing me.

When I returned, he emptied, as if to destroy them, the milk, his pee, his poop, then removed his apron and threw it into the water. He thus destroyed his former contents and his former container, brought back by the trauma of my absence.

The next day, overwhelmed by his psychological reaction, Robert expressed himself on the somatic level: profuse diarrhea, vomiting, syncope. Robert was emptying himself completely of his past image. Only my permanence could make the linkage with a new image of himself, like a new birth.

At that moment, he acquired this new image of himself. We see him in session replay old traumas that we did not know. One especially: Robert had drunk from the bottle and put the teat in his ear, drank again, then broke the bottle in a state of very great violence. He was able to do it without the integrity of his body suffering from it. He had separated himself from his symbol of the bottle and could express himself through the bottle as an object.

This session was so striking, he repeated it twice, that I made an inquiry to find out how his antrotomy undergone at 5 months had taken place. It was then learned that, in the E.N.T. service where he had been operated on, he had not been anesthetized, and that during this painful operation, they kept in his mouth a bottle of sweetened water.
This traumatic episode clarified the image Robert had constructed: of a starving mother, paranoid, dangerous, who certainly attacked him, then this separation, a bottle held by force making him swallow his cries and the evil done to him, force-feeding by tube, and 25 successive changes.

Robert could not have any other image of himself. I had the impression that Robert’s drama was that all the oral-sadistic fantasies he could have had had been realized by these conditions of existence; these fantasies had become reality.

Recently, I had to confront him with a reality. I was absent for a year, and I returned eight months pregnant. He saw me pregnant. He began by playing out fantasies of destruction of this child. I disappeared for childbirth. During my absence, my husband took him into treatment, and he played the destruction of this child.

When I returned, he saw me flat, and without a child. He was therefore convinced, still being at this stage, that his fantasies had become reality, that he had killed this child, therefore that I was going to kill him. He was extremely agitated during these last 15 days, until the day when he was able to [tell it to me?]. Then I confronted him with reality: I brought him my daughter, so that he could now make the cut. His state of agitation fell abruptly, and when I took him back in session the next day, he began to express to me at last a feeling of jealousy; he was attaching himself to something living and not to death.

This child has always remained at the stage where fantasies were reality. Reality had imposed his fantasies on him.
Thanks to his fantasies of intrauterine construction, which, in the treatment, were reality, he was able to make this astonishing construction. If he had gone beyond this stage, I would not have been able to obtain this construction of himself.

As I was saying yesterday, I had the impression that this child had sunk under the real, that there was in him at the beginning of the treatment no symbolic function, and even less an imaginary function.

LACAN – He did have two words, all the same.

Jean HYPPOLITE

It is about the word ‘the wolf!’ that I would like to ask a question. Where did ‘the wolf’ come from?

Rosine LEFORT

In children’s institutions, one often sees the nurses frighten [them] with the wolf. In the institution where I took him into treatment, one day when the children were unbearable, they were locked in the kindergarten garden, and a nurse went outside to make the wolf’s cry to make them behave. He gave this form that he made concrete.

Jean HYPPOLITE

It would remain to explain why this wolf story, whose fear fixed itself on him, as on so many other children.

Rosine LEFORT – The wolf was obviously the devouring mother, in part.

Jean HYPPOLITE – Do you believe that the wolf is always the devouring mother?

Rosine LEFORT

In children’s stories, they always say that the wolf is going to eat. At the sadistic-oral stage, the child wants to eat his mother, so he thinks that his mother is going to eat him, and this wolf with which one threatens him is going to eat him, so his mother is going to eat him; she becomes the wolf. I believe that that is probably the genesis. I am not sure.

In this child’s history there are lots of unknown things that I was not able to learn. I believe it is thanks to that that he gave this image, the wolf. When he wanted to be aggressive toward me, up to now he did not get down on all fours, and did not bark. Now he does. Now he knows that he is a human, but he needs from time to time to identify with an animal, as an 18-month-old child does. And when he wants to be aggressive he gets down on all fours, and goes ‘ooh, ooh’, without the slightest anxiety. Then he stands back up and continues the course of the session. He still cannot express his aggressiveness except at this stage.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Yes, he thus overcomes… It is between zwingen and bezwingen. It is the whole difference between the word where there is constraint and the one where there is not constraint. Constraint, Zwang, which is the wolf that gives him anxiety, and anxiety overcome, Bezwingung, the moment when he plays the wolf.

Rosine LEFORT – Yes, I quite agree.

LACAN

‘The wolf’ naturally raises all the problems of symbolism, which is not at all limitable, since you can see clearly that we are forced to seek its origin in a general symbolization. Why the wolf? It is not a character that remains so familiar to us, in our regions at least. The fact that it is the wolf that is chosen to produce these effects connects us directly with a broader function: on the mythical, folkloric, primitive religious plane, we see the wolf play a role.

And the fact that it thus connects to a whole filiation, by which we arrive at secret societies, with what they contain of initiatory in the adoption either of a totem, or more precisely of the organization of this style of community, identification with a character.

We cannot make these distinctions of plane concerning a phenomenon so elementary. But this superego… I wanted to draw your attention to it; you will see that among the questions that will arise for us later is the reciprocal function, the difference between:
– what one must call superego, in the determinism of repression,
– and what one must call ego ideal.

I do not know whether you noticed this: that there are two conceptions there which, as soon as one brings them into any dialectic to explain a sick person’s behavior, seem directed exactly in a contrary sense:
– the superego being simply constraining,
– the ego ideal being exalting.

These are things one tends to erase, because one passes from one to the other as if the two terms were synonymous. It is a question that will deserve to be posed concerning the transference relation concerning the analyst, depending on the angle from which one approaches the problem, when one seeks what one calls the foundation of therapeutic action. One will say that the subject identifies the analyst with his ego ideal or on the contrary with his superego, and one will substitute one for the other in the same text, as the successive points of the demonstration require, without explaining very well the difference.

I will certainly be led—I did not do it earlier because I want to limit myself to the level of the texts where we are, and the notion of the superego has not been elaborated—to examine the question of what it is in the different registers that we pick out, how one must consider this superego.

Anticipating this, I will say that it is quite impossible to situate, except in an entirely mythical way and in the manner of a key word, of a power word, a mythical elaboration that one handles for the use one can make of it, without seeking further, a new idol. If we do not limit ourselves to this blind use of a term, to this use on the theoretical mythical plane, if we want to seek to understand what the superego is, to seek what its essential elements are, well surely the superego, unlike the ego ideal, is situated essentially and radically on the symbolic plane of speech.

The superego is an imperative: ‘superego’, as common sense and the usage one makes of it indicate, is coherent with the register and the notion of law, that is to say the whole system of language, insofar as it defines the situation of man as such, and not only of the biological individual.

On the other hand, what we can also emphasize is the often underscored and elaborated character, the contrary character, absurd, blind, of pure imperative, of simple tyranny that there is in the superego. This makes it possible to indicate in which direction we can make the synthesis of these notions. I will say quite evidently that the superego:
– on the one hand has a certain relation to the law,
– and on the other hand has an exactly contrary relation: it is a senseless law, a law reduced to something that goes so far as to be a misrecognition of it.

It is always thus that we see acting in the neurotic what we call the superego, that for which the elaboration of the notion in analysis has been necessary, insofar as this morality of the neurotic is a senseless, destructive, purely oppressive morality, always intervening in a function that is literally, in relation to the register of the law, almost anti-legal.

The superego is at once the law and its destruction, its negation. The superego is essentially speech itself, the commandment of the law, insofar as nothing remains of it except its root. The law reduces itself entirely to something that one cannot even express, like the ‘you must’, which is simply a word stripped of all its meanings. And it is in this sense that the superego ends up identifying with what is only most ravaging, most fascinating, in the premature, primitive experiences of the subject, who ends up identifying with what I call ‘the ferocious figure’, at once with the figures that, in a more or less direct way, we can link to the primitive traumas, whatever they may be, that the child has undergone.

But what we see there is, in a way, in a privileged and embodied case, this function of language; we touch it with our finger in its most reduced form: in the end it is in the form of a word, whose sense and scope we ourselves are not even capable of defining for the child, that something is reduced which nevertheless links him to the human community.

As you have pertinently indicated, it is not only a wolf-child who would have lived in simple savagery: he is all the same a speaking child. But it is through this wolf that you had, from the beginning, the possibility of instituting dialogue. What is admirable in this observation is the moment when this use of the word ‘the wolf’ disappears, after a scene that you described, and how around this pivot of language, of this relation to this word ‘the wolf’, which is for him in a way the summary of a law, around this word ‘the wolf’ the turn takes place from the first to the second phase.

How then begins an extraordinary elaboration whose termination will be this moving self-baptism, which ends with the pronunciation of his own first name. We cannot but touch there with our finger something extraordinarily moving: the fundamental relation, in its most reduced form, of man to language.

What do you still have to put forward?

Rosine LEFORT – Only as diagnosis.

LACAN

As diagnosis, well… there are people who have already taken a position on that. LANG? I was told that you had said something last night about it, and what you said seemed interesting to me. I think that the diagnosis you made is only an analogical diagnosis. If one places it in the existing table that we know, in nosography, if one can situate it somewhere, you pronounced the word of…?

Dr LANG

Of hallucinatory delusion. In relation to this whole, to this more or less shapeless magma of schizophrenia where one can always try to seek an analogy between quite profound disorders of children’s behavior. It is something that satisfies us because we know it in adults. And most often one speaks of infantile schizophrenia when one does not understand very well what is happening. There is an essential element that is missing for schizophrenia: dissociation. There is no dissociation, because there is hardly any construction. It seemed to me rather to recall certain forms of organization of hallucinatory delusion. I made great reservations last night, because there is a step to be crossed, that of direct observation of the child of such an age to what we know of the usual nosography. And there would be in this case lots of things to make explicit.

LACAN

Yes. That is obviously how I understood it when it was reported to me, for a hallucinatory delusion, in the sense in which you understand it as a chronic hallucinatory psychosis, has only one thing in common with what is happening in this subject, and that is this dimension that Mme LEFORT finely remarked, which is that this child lives only the real.

Insofar as the word ‘hallucination’ signifies something, namely this feeling of reality, insofar as it goes beyond and detaches itself from all interpretation, there is something truly assumed as real by the patient. We can say something similar. You know how that remains, even in a hallucinatory psychosis, problematic. There is in the adult Chronic Hallucinatory Psychosis a synthesis of the imaginary and the real, which is the whole problem of psychosis. There is a secondary imaginary elaboration which is precisely what Mme LEFORT highlighted here, as being literally not nonexistence, but in a nascent state. This observation, I had not looked at again for a long time.

The last time we met, I had made for you the large schema of the vase, the flowers, where the flowers are imaginary, virtual and illusory and the vase real, or inversely, for one can arrange the apparatus in the contrary sense.

Real vase and real image of imaginary flowers Real flowers and real image of the imaginary vase

On this occasion I cannot fail to point out to you the pertinence of this kind of model of the relation between the flowers contained and the containing vase, for it is quite certain that the container-contained system, insofar as I put it in the foreground of the meaning that I give to the mirror stage, we see it there, playing to the full, naked. We truly see:
– the child in the process of behaving with a more or less mythical function, and everything he stuffs into it or takes out of it, and with the way he behaves with regard to this container, and, as Mme LEFORT noted, in the end being able to bear it empty, that is to say, properly speaking, in the state of container,
– and the identification of this vase as such with an entity for the first time a properly human object, that is to say an instrumental object, the instrument detached from its function, whereas up to then he could bear it only function-nothing.

It is something also extraordinarily expressive and significant of the elements of construction, not of the human world, of the world insofar as in the human world there is not only the ‘useful’, but also the ‘tool’, that is to say instruments, things that are independent, that exist as such.

HYPPOLITE – Universal.

Dr LANG

The passage from the vertical position of the wolf to the horizontal position is very amusing; we spoke about it. It seems to me precisely that the wolf of the beginning is lived.

LACAN – It is neither him nor someone else, at the beginning.

Dr LANG – It is reality.

LACAN

No, I believe that it is essentially speech reduced to its stump, if I may say so; it is neither him nor someone else. He is obviously the wolf, insofar as he says that word. But whoever is the wolf is anything whatsoever insofar as it can be named. You see there speech in the nodal state. There we have an ego completely chaotic. Speech is stopped, but it is nevertheless from there that he will be able to take his place and build himself.

Dr BARGUES

I had remarked that at one moment there was a change: when the child was playing with his excrements, at a given moment he loaded and took sand and water. I was speaking rather of the imaginary: it is indeed the imaginary that he was beginning to build and to manifest. And there could already have been a certain greater distance with the object, first his excrements, and then he was farther and farther away. I do not believe one can speak of symbol in the sense in which you understand it. And yesterday I had the impression that Mme LEFORT was speaking of it, on the contrary, in the sense of symbol.

Rosine LEFORT – I have not gone very deeply into this question.

LACAN

It is a difficult question, and it is precisely the one in which we are training ourselves here, insofar as it can be the key to what we designate as ego. The ego, what is it? They are not homogeneous agencies. Some are realities, others are images, imaginary functions. The ego itself is one of them. That is what I would like to come to before leaving each other: what must not be omitted is what you told us at the beginning, the motor behavior of this child. You described it to us in a fascinating way at the beginning. This child seems to have no lesion of the apparatuses. He now has a motor behavior of what nature? How are his grasping gestures?

Rosine LEFORT – He is no longer as at the beginning.

LACAN

You portrayed him as being unable, at the beginning, when he wanted to reach an object, on the plane of sensori-motor adaptation, to seize or catch the object except in a single gesture, and that if he missed it he had to begin again from the start. That presupposes all sorts of notions: that he controls visual adaptation; this even presupposes disturbances of the notion of distance, which shows there interesting things: the dependence of functions which could be elaborated theoretically as being situated on a plane only elementary of the integrity of sensory and motor apparatuses, even at the animal level, was sufficient.

This wild child can always, like a well-organized little animal, catch what he desires. From what you said, there was a fault or slip of the act that he could correct only by taking everything up again. Whatever we may think of it, what we can nevertheless say broadly is that this is a child in whom it does not seem that there is a deficit or a delay affecting the pyramidal system.

We find ourselves before manifestations of which one can say that they are breaks in the ego’s functions of synthesis, at least in the sense in which we normally understand it in analytic theory. There is something else as well: that this absence of attention that you noted, this vivid portrait of this sort of inarticulate agitation of this child at the beginning, is also a function of the ego absolutely without contest that is at issue. It is no less interesting to relate it, given analytic theory, to the function of sleep, which goes so far as to make it, in certain respects, a function of the ego.

Rosine LEFORT

An interesting thing: this child who did not sleep and did not dream, from the famous day when he locked me in, the motor disturbances lessened, and he began to dream at night, and to call his mother in a dream, whereas before there was no question of dreaming.

LACAN

That is what I wanted to come to. I do not fail to link directly what we call the atypia of sleep to the absolutely anomalous character of his development, of his developmental delay, which is situated precisely on the plane of the imaginary, on which develops this observation of the ego as imaginary function.

And in this register this observation is quite specially significant, insofar as it allows us to note certain dependencies such that, such a point of imaginary development being delayed, it results in things that go much further than what we call imaginary functioning—let us call it, if we wish, superstructure—but it is in the measure of a certain subjective realization of this superstructure that certain functions apparently lower can literally be situated. In other words, the relations of function, of development and strictly sensori-motor maturation, the relation between that and the functions of imaginary mastery in the subject: that, broadly, is the very great interest of this observation. And the whole question is there: it is a matter of knowing to what extent it is this articulation there that is implicated in schizophrenia.

We will never be able, insofar as this question will remain pending, and in sum what this shows us, the rational elaboration of schizophrenia, is that in fact we can, according to our inclination and the idea that each of us has of schizophrenia, of its mechanism and essential driving force, situate or not situate this within the framework of a schizophrenic affection. It is certain that it is not a schizophrenia in the sense of a state, very exactly insofar as this state not only is not installed, but insofar as you show us its meaning and its mobility. But all the same it is an appearance, a structure, a kind of image of a schizophrenic relation to the world, and there is a whole series of phenomena of the catatonic series, strictly speaking, that we could simply relate to it by placing it in the same class, for it is evident that there is, properly speaking, none of the symptoms, so that we cannot situate it in such a framework otherwise than as LANG did, by situating it only by a kind of locating.

If we suppose certain things, certain deficiencies, certain lacks of human adaptation, at this level and at this age, we open something to what later, analogically, will present itself as a schizophrenia. I nevertheless believe that this framework, which is vague in certain respects, that of schizophrenia, is the one in which one can nosographically situate a similar case. I truly believe that one cannot say more about it, except that it is what we call a demonstration case. And after all we have no reason to think that nosological frameworks have been there since all eternity and were waiting for us. As PÉGUY said: ‘The little screws always go into the little holes’. But there occur atypical, abnormal situations, where little screws no longer correspond to little holes. Whether it is something of the psychotic order, whether we are there more exactly before phenomena that can end in psychosis, that does not seem doubtful to me, which does not mean that every psychosis presents analogous beginnings.

LECLAIRE, it is very specially of you that I ask for next time to extract something for us
– from the Introduction to Narcissism, which is found in volume IV of the Collected Papers,
– or in volume X of the Complete Works, Zur Einführung des Narzißmus.

You will see that it is only questions posed precisely by this register—the imaginary—that we are in the process of seeing here. And the two subjects, psychosis on the one hand, and this love, and precisely love insofar as it concerns transference. It is an arc that joins these two points that seem as opposed as possible to one another, and which nevertheless are united by this imaginary function. In short, everything that, at this stage of FREUD’s thought, is absolutely indispensable for understanding the full way in which he understands and elaborates technique, namely this function of narcissism, as it is also at this stage contained in this text, and we cannot avoid it.