Let us redo our little diagram. Could someone, with a question, try to initiate the point where we were the last time?

Robert PUJOL

It is a simple question: You say ‘the desire of the other’. Is it the desire that is in the other, or the desire that I have for the other?
Is it the same thing? For me, it is not the same thing. But you say, every time, ‘the desire of the other’.

LACAN – That depends on what point. Suppose that it is…

Robert PUJOL

At the end of what you said last time, it was the desire that was in the other, and the ego can take it back, by destroying.
But it is at the same time a desire of him for the other.

LACAN

Is that not the foundation, wholly originary, specular, of the relation to the other, insofar as it is rooted in the imaginary?
The first alienation of desire is linked to this concrete phenomenon, from the fact – for the child – that play is wholly valorized
by the fact that it is the plane of reflection on which he sees manifest itself in the other an activity that anticipates his own,
that is somewhat more perfect than his own, more mastered, that is the ideal form of his own, this first object is valorized.

This is very important, because it posits on a wholly originary and contemporaneous plane – not only with the child’s first development,
but with the child’s pre-development – the condition of the human object, which is not simply and directly
the endoceptor, the complement of animal desire, but already mediated essentially by the route of rivalry, of rivalry
with all that it includes of maximum, of accent in the relation of the rival. Namely: everything that is the relation of prestige,
of bearing, is a relation already of the order of alienation, since it is first there that the subject grasps himself as ego.

The notion he has of the totality of the body as identical to something ineffable, of lived experience. The first impetus of appetite
and of desire passes through the mediation of this form that he first sees projected, external to him. And he first sees it in a way
particularly manifest and significant in his own reflection.

Second assimilated thing: he knows that he is a body, even though he never perceives it in a complete way since he is inside it,
but he knows it. This image becomes the strangulation, the ring through which this entire confused bundle of desire and needs will have to pass,
in its imaginary structure, in order to be him. Are you with me? So, when I say that man’s desire is the desire of the other,
this is a formula, like all formulas, that must be handled in its place. This can always lend itself to certain ambiguities,
which must be specified, because it is not valid in only one sense.

We are here, because this is one of the most crucial points that must guide our understanding of technique.
We started from the plane of this imaginary captation. But, as I told you, explained, anticipated, formulated,
at the end of the last session, I wanted there to be at least the beginning of that; it is absolutely not limited to that.

Without even that – I indicated in a mythical way – there would be no other possible interhuman relation than in this mutual
and radical intolerance of the coexistence of consciousnesses, as HEGEL expresses it, namely that every other being, by definition
and essentially, is the one who frustrates the human being, not of his object, but of the very form of his desire, if this desire
is precisely what the other sets in motion, and that the other is virtually already the one who deprives him of this object.

There is there a relation between human beings, inter-destructive and deadly. Moreover, that is what happens, what is always there
underlying the interhuman relation. The political myth, a particular style of interhuman relations, rivalry for life,
has been able to serve to insert quite a few things. Mr. DARWIN forged it like that, because he belonged to a nation of privateers,
for whom racism was the fundamental industry.

This notion of the struggle for life, you know how politically disputable it is, because the so-called survival
of the strongest species, everything goes against it. It is absolutely the opposite of the evidence. It is a kind of myth that runs
counter to things.

Everything we can manage to found on the zones and the areas of expansion of the different forms proves on the contrary that there are species,
points of constancy and equilibrium proper to each species, and which are not even conceivable without knowledge
of the same points and areas of equilibrium of the extension of other species with which the first live, in a kind
of coordination, even of ‘eaters’ with ‘eaten’. But it never goes to that kind of destructive radicalism, for the simple
reason that it would simply result in the annihilation of the ‘eating species’, which would have nothing left to eat. On the contrary,
on the plane of life, there is a tight inter-coaptation, entirely elsewhere than on the plane of struggle; it is entirely evident.

On the human plane, it is extremely important, because we do it, we do, implicating in the notion of aggressivity
as we handle it brutally without deepening it, the notion that it is something of that order,
that aggressivity is aggression. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. It is virtually at the limit that it resolves
into an aggression, but into an aggression that has precisely nothing to do with vital reality, which is an existential aggression,
linked to an imaginary relation. This is an absolutely essential truth, and it is a key that makes it possible to rethink, in a register
completely different, all sorts of problems, and not only ours.

I had asked you to ask a question. You did well to ask it. Are you satisfied with that?
We nevertheless went further last time. This desire which is therefore in the human subject realized in the other,
as you say, in the other but therefore in the other, by the other, in, if you like, what we can call the second time,
that is to say the specular type, that is to say at the moment when the subject has integrated the form of the ego.

But he could only integrate it by a first game of seesawing or reversal, from the fact that he has precisely exchanged this ego for this desire
that he sees in the other: this desire of the other, which is the desire of man, enters into the mediation of language. It is in the other
and through the other that this desire is going to be named, recognized, is going to enter into the symbolic relation of ‘I’ and ‘you’,
with what it includes there of recognition, of reciprocity, of transcendence, simply because it has been named, because it enters into the order

• already quite ready to include the history of each individual – into the order of a faith.

I spoke to you of ‘Fort’ and ‘Da’: it is an example of the way the child naturally enters into this game.
So already he enters into this game: that is to say that he begins to play with the object, precisely on the sole fact of its presence
or its absence, that is to say an object already transformed, an object of symbolic function, that is to say that the object is already a sign,
already devitalized. It is when it is there that he drives it away, and when it is not there that he calls it.

The object is already, through the first games, through a kind of natural entry, we have to see it emerge, the object passes onto the plane
of language, of the symbol, which becomes more important than the object. If you do not get that well into your head – I have already repeated it so
many times! It must nevertheless begin to become integrated; one still cannot repeat it too much – the word or the concept
is nothing other than the word in its materiality, for the human being – and when I say ‘for the human being’, you will see
that it goes very far – it is the thing itself. Tell yourselves well that it is not simply a kind of shadow, of breath, of virtual illusion
of the thing: it is the thing itself.

If you reflect for a little instant, in the real it is, one can say that it is much more decisive for everything that has happened
to elephants – I mean: living – it is more decisive that in human language the word ‘elephant’ exists, thanks to which,
whatever the narrowness of doors, we really make the elephant enter here, into our deliberations. Namely that men,
by virtue of the existence of the word ‘elephant’ have taken with respect to elephants, even before touching them, decisions far more
decisive for everything that has happened in the world to elephants than anything that has happened in their history:
crossing a river, a lake, natural sterilization of a forest, or anything similar. With nothing but the word ‘elephant’
and the way men talk about it, that suffices for things to happen that are favorable or unfavorable, auspicious or inauspicious

• in any case catastrophic – for elephants, even before one has begun to raise a rifle or a bow toward them.

Well! Anyway, let us leave the elephants! It is quite clear that it is enough that I talk about them; there is no need for them to be there,
they are there thanks to the word ‘elephant’, there in a greater reality than the contingent reality of the individual elephant. Well!

Jean HYPPOLITE- I was saying: it is Hegelian logic.

LACAN – Is it for all that attackable?

HYPPOLITE- No, it is not attackable. MANNONI was saying a moment ago: ‘it is politics’.

Octave MANNONI

It is the side by which human politics inserts itself, in the broad sense, because if men do not act like animals,
it is because precisely they exchange their knowledge through language. And consequently, it is politics.
Politics vis-à-vis elephants is possible thanks to the word.

HYPPOLITE- But not only. It is the elephant itself that is affected; it is Hegelian logic.

LACAN

It is pre-political. It is simply a way of making you put your finger on the importance of the name. Of course we place ourselves there
simply on the plane of naming. There is not even syntax yet. But still, this syntax, it is quite clear that it is born
at the same time, and that particularly the child – I have already pointed it out to you – articulates elements of axioms before phonemes.

The ‘if ever…’ sometimes appears all by itself. It is something that does not allow us to decide on a logical anteriority;
strictly speaking it is only a phenomenal emergence. But be that as it may, it is quite certain that it is already
on the symbolic plane that this essential articulation is situated by which, from the origin, the child’s desires,
as they are going to be reintegrated by this game of seesawing which, of course, does not occur only once.

This mirror game that makes it so that constantly the projection of the image is succeeded by the projection of desire, with a correlative reintrojection
of the image, or reintrojection of desire, it is on the symbolic plane that desires are going to be re-assumed by the subject, after their passage
through this specular other, at the level at which they are approved or disapproved, accepted or refused by the other, and where already,
and from the origin, the child learns what is the foundation of this symbolic order, that is to say already a legal order.

Are you with me? This too has experimental correlates. Suzan ISAACS for example, in one of her texts – and she is not
the only one; in KŒHLER’s school too it has been brought to light – notes that very early, at an age still infans,
somewhere between 8 and 12 months, the child does not react absolutely in the same way:
– to an accidental collision, to a brutality if one can say so, mechanical, linked to a clumsiness,
– a fall, the displacement of an object, or even someone who extends an arm without looking at what he is doing,
– and to something else that resembles it very much, a slap with punitive intent.

We can already distinguish in a very small child two completely different reactions, before the externalized appearance
of language. But we know, we must admit, even before this externalized appearance, precisely given the form,
the mode under which the externalized appearance manifests itself – I cannot commit myself to all paths at once –
the child already has a first apprehension of the symbolism of language, of its function precisely, of pact and law.

So, it is precisely here that we must try to grasp what is, in analysis, this function of speech, of speech insofar as
manifestation of this symbolic order, if you like, this millwheel through which human desire is ceaselessly mediated as it enters
into the system of language, which it accesses by concrete routes that become broader and broader over the course of its experiences.

It is here that one of the registers is situated, the one that I put in value, because it is the one most put in parentheses, the most forgotten,
the one from which one turns away in analysis, even though it should be something whose reference we should never lose.
In analysis, in sum, what do we usually talk about?

We do not talk, and that is why it is legitimate that I began by explaining to you the schema by the relation of O to O’,
by the imaginary relation to the other, in analysis we demonstrate, what we refer to without ceasing, moreover
often in a confused way and not even articulated at that level, it is there in any case that it enters, that it comes to be arranged in a coherent theory,
these are the imaginary relations of the subject to this construction of his ego.

We speak without ceasing of the dangers, the shakings, the crises that the subject experiences at the level of this construction of his ego.
We know on the other hand that it is precisely in the progressive relation, which evolves by virtue of the evolution of instincts
toward objects structured in a way that varies, which is very specially marked by the first emergence of the genital object,
in its emergence no less premature than everything else in the child’s development, it is in this first emergence
and in its failure that something major also happens. In what?

In this, precisely, that there is there something radically new, that there is a difference of level between the libido that fixes
the object to its own image, and the emergence of this premature libido. Everything on which I have insisted, of what we can think
of the structuration of the phenomenon, is that it is insofar as the child appears in the world in a premature state – structurally
from top to bottom, from end to end – that this first libidinal relation to his image exists, where the libido is situated in the resonances
that it most usually has for you, legitimately, the libido that is properly of the order of Liebe, of love,
that is to say finally of what I have, I think, shown you enough, which is precisely the great X of all analytic theory.

And if you think that it is still going a bit far to call it the great X, I will have no trouble producing for you
texts, and from the best analysts, for it is not by going to seek one’s models in people who do not know what they are saying
that one can make a valid demonstration; I will, when the occasion arises, charge someone to do it, to look in BALINT.

The question of what this supposedly accomplished genital love is remains entirely problematic, and the question of knowing
whether it is a natural process or a cultural realization of an extraordinarily delicate balance to obtain has not yet,
BALINT tells us textually, been decided by analysts. That is still a bit extraordinary as an ambiguity,
left at the very heart of what seems to be expressed, the most openly received, among us.

But be that as it may, it nonetheless remains that the eruption of libido that manifests itself on the plane of an attraction, itself, of a nature
that we must at least suppose – for the theory to stand and for experience to be explained – to be posed
on a plane not of immaturity or of vital prematuration, but to go beyond and respond to a first maturation, at least,
of desire, to be a vital desire, and we have no reason to reject it in principle. It is something that obviously brings
a total change of level in this relation of the human being to the image, of his fundamental relation to the other.
We must admit it because it is there the pivot point of what is called maturation around which the entire Oedipal drama takes place.
It is the instinctual correlative of what takes place in the Oedipal drama on the situational plane. What then takes place?

What takes place is that it is precisely in this conjunction of libido come to maturity and insofar – to use the last
Freudian vocabulary¹⁹³⁹ – that on the plane of Eros the relation to the narcissistic image passes onto the plane of Verliebtheit,
it is at that moment that the narcissistic image, insofar as captivating and insofar as alienating on the imaginary plane, becomes properly
the image invested with this special relation which is Verliebtheit, which is what we know phenomenologically
as the most evident of the register of love.

To explain things thus is to say that it is on an internal maturation linked then to development, to the subject’s vital evolution,
that depends this kind of filling, of completeness, even of overflow, of what, until then, was contained in the vagueness
of the primitive gaping of the libido of the immature subject. What we call pregenital libido at that moment is the sensitive point
where man plays between his weakness, his natural weak point, and a certain natural realization.

It is there that the mirage point plays between Ἔρως[Éros] and Θάνατος[Thanatos], between love and hate. More simply, I believe
that it is the simplest way to express, to make understood, felt – it is not I who invented it – the crucial problem
of the role played by the ego in the conception we can make of the role played by the so-called ‘desexualized’ libido of the ego
in this possibility of reversal, of instant turning of hate into love, of love into hate, which is for FREUD
the problem – you can refer to his writings on The Ego and the Id – which for him seemed to pose the most difficulties to resolve.

To the point that, in the text of which I am speaking to you, he even seems to make of it a kind of objection to the theory of death instincts
and life instincts as distinct. In fact, far from being an objection, I believe on the contrary that this agrees perfectly,
always on the condition that we have a correct theory of the imaginary function of the ego.

This may have seemed to you for the moment a bit difficult? I will return to it. If it seemed too difficult to you, I can nevertheless
give you an illustration of it right away. The aggressive reaction to Oedipal rivalry is very exactly linked to one of
these changes of level: it is precisely insofar as there is a decline of the Oedipus complex, namely that this father who first realized…
this is also entirely in conformity with what FREUD expresses
…one of the figures, on the imaginary plane, the most manifest of the Idealich, which as such was invested with a Verliebtheit,
perfectly as such isolated, named, described by FREUD, it is very precisely insofar as there is a certain regression
of the libidinal position that the subject attains at the Oedipal phase, that is to say between 3 and 5 years.

It is insofar as there is regression of the level of this libido that the feeling of aggression or rivalry toward the father appears, of hate let us say,
that is to say something that, at a threshold, at a very small change in libidinal level relative to a certain threshold, makes it so that
– what was love becomes hate,
– and – just as well and always thus – can oscillate for a certain time between these two phenomena.

Let us now take up things at the point where I left them the last time. I indicated to you this plane on which plays,
in the way we set out analytic theory itself, the way in which the imaginary relation plays as wholly
fundamental, as giving, if one can say so, in a definitive way the frameworks within which all the properly libidinal fluctuations will occur.

You know that the last time it was on the plane of symbolic functions that I left the question open and that right away I told you:
it is a matter of starting, so that we can say something organized and solid, from what takes place in treatment.
What does that mean? From the use we make of language and of speech in treatment.

And if my memory is good, I defined this mode, this use we make of language in treatment and of a language that is speech,
since there are there two subjects bound by a pact that is established at very diverse levels, even very confused at the origin,
but which is nonetheless essentially a pact, and which we do everything to establish well this character at the start.

It is a justification of all sorts of regulations, of preliminary rules that we give to the analytic relation.
Within this relation, we do everything to untie a whole series of moorings of speech in the mode of speaking,
in its style, in the way of addressing the one to whom he speaks, to his addressee; the subject is freed from a whole series of constraints,
of ties, not only of politeness, of courtesy, but even of coherence: one lets go a certain number of moorings of speech.

If we consider that there is a tight link that remains permanent between the way a subject can express himself, have himself recognized,
and the effective, lived dynamic of his relations of desire, we must see that that alone introduces what we effectively see
take place, namely a certain disinsertion, a certain wavering, a possibility of oscillations in what is precisely
the mirror relation to the other.

That is why my little model exists. You know that we very well managed to conceive how precisely
the oscillation of the incidence of his relation to the other is something that makes vary, make shimmer, complete and decomplete, makes oscillate
in all ways, the image that is a matter of perceiving precisely in this completeness to which the subject never has access,
for the simple reason that the model allows you precisely to imagine: the apparatus is badly made.

For the subject to be able truly to recognize at once all the stages of his desire, all the objects that have come, to that image,
to bring consistency, nourishment, sufficient incarnation, for the subject to constitute, by a series of resumptions
and successive identifications, the history of his ego.

In this spoken, floating rapport with the analyst, something happens that tends precisely to reproduce what does not occur in any other experience: variations repeated enough, even if they are infinitesimal, broad enough, even if they are sometimes limited, for the subject to perceive much more than he can perceive in other circumstances, namely this series of re-appropriations of these captivating images that are at the foundation of the constitution of his ego.

I spoke of ‘small oscillations’, of ‘limitation in these oscillations’. I do not need, for the moment, to expand on what constitutes their smallness and their limitation. There is obviously braking, stoppages. Everything that technique teaches us to get across, even to fill in, even sometimes to reconstruct, you know it: FREUD already indicated it in this sense.

But what you must begin to glimpse is why there occurs, with such a technique, something which… for as much or as little as it may be …which is—in the subject—to be reconstructed: this relation of imaginary mirage with himself, beyond all the limits that everyday lived experience allows him to obtain, tends to create artificially and in mirage what is precisely the fundamental condition of every Verliebtheit.

In other words it is exactly because this real image, which you know cannot be perceived from where the subject is except in a mirror, but in a way always more or less blurred, and by that very fact clear only at certain points, but where precisely the loosening of the moorings of speech allows him to see at least successively the various parts of this image, in short to obtain what we can call a narcissistic projection maxima, it is in its whole character—let us say it, you sense well that it is to that that it is going to come—still rudimentary, it consists—one must say it—in going there by letting go of everything and by seeing at the beginning what it is going to produce.

It is not inconceivable that things could have been, or could be, conducted otherwise. But what tends to be produced with the help of small patterns, of small schemas, you can conceive that if there is one thing it must tend to produce to the maximum, it is precisely this narcissistic revelation, which takes place on the imaginary plane and which is precisely what is the fundamental condition of what we have called Verliebtheit.

The state of being in love, when it occurs, occurs in a wholly different way: it requires a surprising coincidence. The state of being in love does not occur for just any partner, or just any image; certain conditions must be realized: I alluded to the maximal conditions of the coup de foudre of WERTHER.

In analysis precisely, insofar as and as a function of this loosening of the moorings of speech, and only because of that, the point where—in A—there was focalized the identification of the subject at the level of the narcissistic image, that is what is called transference. Transference, in the second sense, that is to say not in the dialectical sense in which I was explaining it to you, for example in the case of Dora, what produces negative transference—moreover it is not negative transference, it is a mistake of FREUD—but what is commonly called transference as an imaginary phenomenon, is that.

We have not advanced much today, but I believe that one must advance very slowly and step by step. I do not nevertheless want to leave you before showing you to what acute point this goes, to a point that is truly the watershed point in technique. I simply want to make a remark to you. I am going to comment on a text by BALINT.

BALINT, as I told you, is one of the most conscious, the most lucid figures in the exposition of what he does. BALINT is at the same time one of the best examples of the wholly coherent conception of what is the tendency into which the entire analytic technique has gradually entered. He simply says, in a way a bit more coherent and a bit more open than the others, what is entangled, confused in a scholasticism where a cat would not find her kittens, in many other authors.

BALINT says exactly this: first, that everything that is the progress of analysis consists in this tendency for the subject to rediscover what he calls ‘primary love’, the primary love, that is to say the need to be the object of love, of care, of affection, of interest of another object, without any regard on his own part with respect to the needs or even the existence of this object. It is the motor of analysis.

BALINT articulates it. I am grateful to him for articulating it. That does not mean that I approve it. The fact of placing the whole play of analysis on this tendency and on this plane, without any kind of corrective or other element, will already seem surprising, but indeed in the line of an evolution of analysis that ends up placing more and more emphasis on relations of dependence, on instinctual satisfactions, even on frustration, which is the same thing.

This is what he describes on the other hand as being what one observes at the end of analysis, as marking in the rare cases—he says that there are no more than 25%, where analyses are completed, truly finished—he describes them as a state of narcissism in the subject—he says ‘of narcissism in the subject’—which goes toward a kind of unbridled exaltation of desires, which gives the subject a kind of intoxicated sensation of mastery of reality, still wholly illusory, which the subject needs in a period, if one can say ‘post-terminal’, in order to free himself by a kind of progressive putting-back-into-place of the nature of things.

He describes the last session as I do not know what, which does not take place without, in both partners, the strongest desire to cry, and he writes it. Do you not see that there is there something that at once has the importance and the value of an extremely precious testimony, what can be described not only as the extremes, but the point of an entire way of operating in analysis, and at the same time must nevertheless leave us an impression then of an extraordinarily unsatisfying game after all!

The idea that we can form would itself be the idea of a utopian ideal, which certainly disappoints something in us.
Is it not possible to conceive how a certain way of understanding analysis, or more exactly of not understanding certain elements or certain springs absolutely essential in analysis, must lead not only to such a conception, but—as you see—also to such results? I leave this suspended.

What I want to tell you… I am going to take an example, which is already extremely familiar to you, because I have come back to it twenty times, it is the case of Dora. I am going to come at once to the point. What is neglected is obviously the function of speech as a function of recognition, as the dimension by which the subject’s desire is authentically integrated on the symbolic plane.

How must we, it seems, correctly conceive, situate, the point where this conjunction must be made of the recognized desire of the subject with this formulation, this nomination before the other, by which is established what is properly not the satisfaction of desire, nor of I do not know what primary love, but the recognition of desire whatever it may be, and at whatever level it may be situated in the composition of the subject? I am going to tell you the point on which this line is situated, this divide that it seems to me that the whole completion of what we have to say on technique must bring you the foundations and the bases.

Remember what FREUD does with Dora. Dora is a hysteric. FREUD at that moment does not know sufficiently… by his own admission, he wrote it and rewrote it and repeated it, put it back in a note everywhere, in all corners, and even in the text …what he calls the homosexual component, which means nothing, in the end it is a label. That amounts to saying that he did not notice precisely Dora’s position, what precisely Dora’s object was. He did not notice, to tell the truth, that there in O’ it is Mrs. K.

What does FREUD do by his intervention? He approaches Dora on the plane of what he himself calls ‘resistance’, that is to say what?

I have already explained it to you: FREUD brings in—it is absolutely manifest—his ego, the conception he has, he, of ‘what a girl is made for’: a girl—I have already told you—is made to love boys. It is very manifest that there is there something that is not going, that torments her, that is repressed; what is repressed ‘it sticks out like a sore thumb’[for Freud]: she loves Mr. K. She perhaps loves FREUD a little as well on the same occasion, when one enters into this line; it is entirely evident.

FREUD, for certain reasons that are also linked to his erroneous starting point, does not even interpret for her the manifestations of purported transference toward him, that is to say that he does not have the opportunity to be mistaken by telling her that she begins to manifest something that is a fiction of transference with respect to him, FREUD. He speaks to her simply of Mr. K. What does that mean? That precisely at this level, there where the subject has to recognize her desires, he speaks to her at the level of the experience of others, and if they[her desires] are not recognized, they are as such forbidden, and it is there that repression indeed begins.

Dora, at the usual level, at that where she has already learned, if one can say so, to understand nothing, it is there that the analyst comes to intervene, in an experience that is in sum in every respect homogeneous with the experience of chaotic recognition, even aborted, with which she has already made all her experience. FREUD is there, and says to her: ‘You love Mr. K!’.

It happens moreover that he says it rather awkwardly so that Dora breaks off immediately. But he could have said it, if at that moment he had been initiated into what is called ‘the analysis of resistances’, make her taste it, in small mouthfuls, that is to say that he would have begun to teach her that such and such a thing was in her ‘a defense’, and by force, remove from her like that a whole series of little defenses. He would have done very exactly what is properly suggestive action, that is to say that he would have introduced into her ego[the ego of Dora] the element, the addition, the supplementary motivation.

FREUD wrote somewhere that transference is that, and in a certain way he is right: it is that! Only, one must know at what level.
He would have quite progressively modified her ego so that Dora would make the marriage, as unhappy as any marriage, on that occasion, with Mr. K.

What must we, on the contrary, conceive as having been what should have happened? It is that the speech of FREUD, instead of intervening there in O’, where it intervenes as ego of FREUD, and as such as an attempt—moreover wholly as valid as another—at re-kneading, re-modification, supplementary addition to Dora’s ego, if it had intervened by showing her on the contrary that in O’ it is Mrs. K herself…

Indeed he intervenes at the moment when by this game of seesawing Dora’s desire is there in O’, moment of Dora’s desire for Mrs. K. It is the very story of Dora in this state of oscillation where she does not know whether what she loves:
– is herself, her magnified image in Mrs. K.,
– or whether it is her desire for Mrs. K.

And it is very precisely because this oscillation, perpetual seesawing, occurs without ceasing, that Dora does not get out of it.
It is at the moment when desire is there in O’, that FREUD must name it: at that moment, it is effectively realized, it can be realized,
to the full extent that the intervention is repeated enough, complete enough, the Verliebtheit that is misrecognized can indeed be realized,
which is broken, perpetually refracted, like an image on the water that one cannot manage to grasp. Here Dora, in fact, can recognize her desire
and the object of her love, as being effectively Mrs. K.

You see that it is an illustration of what I was telling you a moment ago: if FREUD had revealed to Dora that she was in love with Mrs. K, she would have become so effectively. Is that the goal of analysis? No, it is its first step! And if you missed it, either you break the analysis, as FREUD did, or you do something else: you do an orthopedics of the ego, but you do not do an analysis.

Do you conceive in what sense analysis, conceived as progressive peeling, stripping, in the way one peels a fruit, of defense systems is something that has no reason not to work? This is what analysts call ‘finding in the subject’s ego, or in the healthy part as they say, their ally’, that is to say simply that they manage to pull indeed to their side half of the subject’s ego, then half of the half, etc. And why would it not work with the analyst, since it is thus that the ego is constituted in existence?

Only, it is a matter of knowing whether that is what FREUD taught us, by showing us that speech was already evident, incarnated in history itself: if the subject has not incarnated it, in other words if this gagged speech is latent in the subject’s symptoms, if we must deliver it like ‘Sleeping Beauty’, or if we must not deliver it?

If we must not deliver it, then let us do a type of analysis that is based on the term analysis of resistances.
But that is not what FREUD meant when he originally spoke of analyzing resistances.
We will see what legitimate sense must be given to this term analysis of resistances.

We thus see that if FREUD had intervened there, in O’, if he had allowed the subject to name her desire—it was not necessary that he name it for her—there would have been produced precisely in O’ this: the state of Verliebtheit. One must not omit that on the other hand the subject would very well have known that it was FREUD who had given her this object of Verliebtheit.

That is not where the process ends. When this seesawing has taken place, which made it so that the subject at the same time as her speech reintegrated the speech of the analyst-mirror[A], a recognition is permitted to her of her desire. That does not occur in one go. And it is because the subject sees something as precious as this completeness, which approaches, toward which she goes, as before what appears more and more, in these very ‘moltings’…
retain this term, we will return to it. It is not I who invented it; people spoke of ‘mutative interpretations’
…in these ‘moltings’ as in a mirage, it is to the extent that the subject reconquers her Idealich,
that FREUD can then take his place at the level of the Ichideal. We will stop there for today.

This notion of the relation of the analyst with the Ichideal raises the whole question of the superego. You know that sometimes it is even taken
as a synonym of the superego, the Ichideal. You sense that I took things by one end, as one climbs a mountain.
There is obviously another path by which one could have taken it, a descending path: to pose at once the question
‘what is the superego?’.

It seems self-evident, but it is not self-evident. Up to now all the analogies that have been given, the references
to ‘the categorical imperative’, to conscience, are extremely confused analogies. But it is nonetheless not the same, otherwise
one would not speak of superego.

So let us leave things there. Let us also leave the evolution suspended. What you have seen of what can be considered
as a first step, a first phase of analysis: the passage of something that is in O—that is to say of the subject’s ego,
insofar as constituted but unknown to the subject, there inside him, on this side of what he can recognize—the progressive passage
of this image into O’, that is to say there where the subject can recognize his successive imaginary investments.

You have seen that it is correlative also with the possibility for the subject to put into action, to reintegrate into this image
and insofar as each time this image that is projected awakens for him the feeling of unbridled exaltation, of mastery
of the possibility of all outcomes, which is already given at the origin in the mirror experience, but in a certain way: by being able
at the same time to name it, because he has nevertheless lived since that time, he has learned to speak, otherwise he would not be there in analysis.

That is a 1st step. And I would almost say a first step that has a very strong analogy with the point where Mr. BALINT leaves us.
For what is this kind of ‘unbridled narcissism’, ‘exaltation of desires’? What is it, if not the point where already—where I led it—
where already Dora could have reached?

Are we going to leave her there in this ‘contemplation’ as—somewhere in the observation—before the image of the MADONNA
before which a man and a woman are in adoration? How must we conceive the continuation of the process?
I leave you there today, because to make the next step, one must deepen what the function of the Idealich is,
of which you see that the analyst occupies the place at a moment, insofar as he makes his intervention in the right place,
at the right moment, in the right place. What is he going to do with this function, with this place that he occupies?

It is the next chapter of the handling of transference, which I leave open as such, today.