As we move forward in this year, which is beginning to take on the shape of a year, taking the slope of its decline,
it is a satisfaction to have heard, through a certain number of echoes and in a closer way through questions that were put to me,
to have received this response: that a certain number of you are beginning to understand that, in what I am in the process
of teaching you, it is a matter of the ‘Whole’ of psychoanalysis, I mean of the very meaning of your action.

Those of whom I speak are those who have understood that the conception of the ‘meaning of analysis’ is the very point from which alone
any technical rule can start. Every application depends on the dimension in which you apprehend it, in which you move,
so that you understand what the subject of your action is.

Of course, in what I am spelling out little by little before you, everything does not appear – to those who put these questions to me or who ask them of themselves –
everything does not yet appear absolutely clear, transparent. At least it seems that it is a matter of nothing less than a fundamental
stance on certain points of view that will then animate their action, their intervention in the understanding they will have,
as well, of the existential place of the analytic experience and as well of its ends, what one seeks to obtain in this action.

Last time, it seems… although I did not have the feeling of making you take a great step, or rather of having put you
at a certain central point, to make you understand at least something, a kind of game that must incidentally give you
a kind of pictorial materialization of something that always remains enigmatic in the way one has it intervene
in analysis, namely what is called in English ‘working through’, and which is so difficult to translate into French as ‘élaboration’,
‘work’, and which is this kind of dimension that can appear at first sight mysterious, which makes it necessary a hundred times to put back on the loom
our work with the patient, for a certain progress, crossing, essential passage, subjective, to be accomplished.

If something can be expressed, embodied in this kind of mill movement that those two arrows expressed, from 0 to 0’ and from 0’ to 0,
to manifest the play of going and returning, of shimmering through which there passes successively from this side to beyond the mirror, an image of the subject
insofar as it is a matter:
– of its completion in the course of analysis,
– of desire on the other hand,
of the subject insofar as it reintegrates it, insofar as it sees it manifest itself, arise in itself in the form of tension, and particularly acute
each time a new step is made in the completion of this image, of course this movement not stopping at a single revolution
but at as many revolutions as are needed for the different phases of imaginary, narcissistic, specular identification – these three words
are equivalent in the way of representing things in theory – as many revolutions as are necessary for this image
to be realized, clearly seen, detached.

And I did not tell you that this is where the phenomenon was exhausted since, as well, nothing is conceivable without the intervention
of this third element that I introduced at the end of the technical explanation last time, which is the conjunction of the subject’s speech.
The conjunction, not just any, but the conjunction at that significant moment of the emergence of desire, in this confrontation
with the image, that is, of the emergence of desire in general, in a particularly anxiety-provoking form in the moments that are
the moments of completion of the image, insofar as it is not without reason, no doubt, that the image had been made incomplete,
that the imaginary face had been non-integrated, repressed or foreclosed.

Well then, it is in the conjunction of speech with this desire, at the moment when it is, by the subject, felt – for it cannot be felt
without this conjunction of speech, and as well as it is pure anxiety and nothing else – it is in that moment that one finds
the fertile moment, the fertile point of everything that, for example, certain authors, like STRACHEY, have tried to specify.

STRACHEY tried to specify, to name, to delineate with all precision, what STRACHEY calls ‘transference interpretation’,
and more precisely ‘mutative interpretation’. STRACHEY indeed emphasizes that it is at a particularly defined, limited moment
that interpretation can have the value of progress, of change, that it is something decisive in analysis:
the occasions do not present themselves in a frequent way, nor in a way that can be grasped approximately.

It is not around it, nor nearby, nor before, nor after, that such an interpretation must be given, but precisely at a moment
when what is about to blossom, to arise in the imaginary, is at the same time there in analysis, in the verbal relation with the analyst,
and it is on this precise moment that, the interpretation being given, its decisive value, its mutative function can be exercised.

What does that mean, if not this that I am in the process of explaining to you: that it is at the moment when, in the presence of a situation
where the imaginary and the real of the analytic situation are confused, the subject’s desire is there, both present and inexpressible.

A certain contribution, support, of analysis through nomination, the naming intervention of what is in the situation itself brings
-according to STRACHEY- the articulation, the essential peg by which and to which the analyst’s intervention must be limited,
as being as well the only truly fertile point where his speech has to be added to that which is fomented by the patient
in the course of this long monologue, of this kind of milling, of this kind of word-mill, for which, in sum, this sort of rotating presentation

• see the movement of the arrows of the diagram – would justify the metaphor well enough.

To illustrate this for you, I recalled last time the function of FREUD’s interpretations in the Dora case, including
their inadequate character, and the stoppage that resulted, in that mental wall, which corresponds to a first phase only of analysis.

Have some of you attended, two years ago, my commentary on the Wolf Man? I hope so…
There are not very many of you! I would like one of those – Father BEIRNAERT? – if you would like, for example
next time, to amuse yourself by rereading the Wolf Man, and you would see, for example, how much the observation of the Wolf Man,
all its discussion, is centered by FREUD around the elements of that infantile neurosis – since that is the title that the Wolf Man
has in the German edition – you would see how much this schema is truly explanatory, fundamental.

I think that even the others have a notion, at least approximate, of what there is in the story of the Wolf Man.
The Wolf Man is what one would call today a character neurosis, or else a narcissistic neurosis. As such,
this neurosis offers great resistance to treatment. FREUD chose, and deliberately chose, to present us with a part of it.

It is a matter of a man who at that time is about twenty-five years old at the moment when he analyzes him. He chose to set out for us
the infantile neurosis because, at that moment, it is for him of great usefulness, to pose certain questions that are the apparent axis
of the Freudian exposition on the value of trauma. It is a matter of the theory of the function of trauma.

We are then in the years 1913. It is therefore indeed something that is at the heart of the period of the development
of FREUD’s thought, which forms an ensemble in which we can, we must inscribe ourselves, in order to comment
on the Technical Papers, the field of the years 1910 to 1920, which is in sum the object of our commentary this year
and from which one cannot detach the Technical Papers.

Likewise, the Wolf Man is indispensable to the understanding of what FREUD at that moment elaborates in the course
of technique: the theory of trauma, called into question, shaken at that moment by JUNG’s obstinacy and remarks,
and of what is of[…].

In this observation of the Wolf Man, what do we see? Since it is a matter of the infantile neurosis, I remind you
of one of the salient traits of this text – an astonishing text -: everything that FREUD brings us there he brings us nowhere else,
and even less in the purely theoretical writings.

There are there supplements to his theory: I call ‘supplements’ the parts of this theoretical conception of repression
that are absolutely essential. Do not forget that in this text it is expressly formulated, repeated, in the most precise way,
that repression, which in the case of the Wolf Man is linked to the traumatic experience that is that of the vision,
of the spectacle of a copulation…
FREUD’s development and remarks made it possible to reconstruct, only reconstruct, for never could it be directly evoked, remembered by the patient
…between his parents, in a position which, restored by the consequences in the subject’s behavior, appeared to be a relation
a tergo, and that the subject’s history – it is indeed history that is at issue – and even patient historical reconstruction of an entirely surprising character[…]. It would be amusing to see the characteristics that one could bring out on this subject, of the historical method.

One arrives by this reconstruction at a rapprochement with what one can consider there as the analogue of monuments,
of archival documents, all those elements of the critique and exegesis of texts, which are linked to this: that if an element appears
in some point in a more elaborated way, it is certain that the less elaborated, but which provides an element of it, is earlier.

For example: one arrives at situating… FREUD situates it without equivocation, with an absolutely rigorous conviction, at a date defined
by ‘n + 1/2’ year, for the date of the event. And the ‘n’ cannot be greater than 1, because, at two and a half years, it cannot
take place, for certain reasons that we are forced to admit, like certain consequences brought about
by that spectacular revelation for the young subject.

He rules out⁶ months. It is not excluded that it happened at 6 months. But he rules it out because at that moment, all the same, it seems to him
a little – at that date and at that period – a little violent. I would like to remark in passing that he does not exclude, however, that it
happened at 6 months. In truth, neither do I exclude it, and I must say that I would rather be inclined – the only point on which
one could say something again about that observation, in fact, is this one – to believe that it is at 6 months, rather than at 1 year and a half.
I will perhaps tell you in a moment – if I do not forget – incidentally why.

What FREUD specifies for us is this: that the traumatic value of the imaginary breach produced by that spectacle is in no way
to be situated immediately after the event, that it is at the moment when, between
– 3 years 3 months where something is exercised that plays a capital influence, that functions as a capital turning point in the subject’s history,
– and the age of 4 years, for which we have the date because the subject was born – decisive coincidence in his history moreover – on Christmas Day, for it is in the expectation of the events of Christmas, always accompanied for him as for all children by the bringing of gifts, supposed to come to him from a descending being
…it is at that moment that the subject has for the 1st time the anxiety dream that is the pivot, the center, of the whole analysis of that observation.

This anxiety dream is for us, thus, the first manifestation of the traumatic value of what I called a moment ago
‘the imaginary breach’. Let us say, if you wish, to borrow a term from instinct theory…
such as it has been elaborated in our day in a certainly more advanced way
than in FREUD’s time, especially for birds[Cf. Konrad Lorenz],
…the ‘Prägung’[strike, imprint, impression] – carrying with it resonances of striking, the striking of a coin –
the ‘Prägung’ of the originary traumatic event.

It is insofar, FREUD explains to us well and in the clearest way, as this ‘Prägung’…
which at first is situated in something that we cannot call theoretically, let us be content with this first approximation, we will perhaps later give it a more precise technique
…as this ‘Prägung’ is situated in an unrepressed unconscious…
let us say that it has been integrated in no way into the subject’s verbalized system, that it has not even
yet risen to verbalization, and one can say in that sense, not even to signification
…it is insofar as this ‘Prägung’, strictly limited to the domain of the imaginary, resurfaces by and in the course of the subject’s progress,
in an increasingly organized, symbolic world.

This is what FREUD explains to us by telling us the whole story of the subject, as it emerges, at that moment
from his statements, from the observation between that moment x, originary, and the moment of 4 years where he situates repression.
Repression there has the occasion to take place only insofar as the events of his early years are such,
historically, sufficiently eventful.

I cannot tell you the whole story:
– seduction by the elder sister, more virile than he, an object of rivalry and identification at the same time manifest,
– his recoil and his refusal before this seduction, of which, at that early age, the subject himself has neither the springs, nor the elements,
– then the attempt at an approach of active seduction, on his part, of seduction in the sense of a primary oedipal genital evolution, in substance entirely normatively directed, which is followed by the refusal, by the movement of rejection of the governess woman, Nania, which constitutes for him a drama,
– appearance of the first threat of castration at the same time.

Thus an entry into the oedipal dialectic, but an entry distorted by the first captivating seduction of the sister.
Thus he is pushed back from the ground on which he engages toward sado-masochistic positions of which FREUD gives us the whole register
and all the elements. I simply indicate to you these two points of reference.

It is insofar as the subject, while waiting to integrate himself into a symbolic world, which will moreover never cease to exercise
its directive attraction throughout the rest of his development since, as you know, later there will be moments
of happy resolution, and very precisely insofar as there will intervene properly speaking teaching elements, in his life,
the whole dialectic of passive rivalry for him with the father will at a certain moment be entirely relaxed by the intervention
of the figure invested with prestige who will be such or such a professor or, earlier, the introduction of the whole religious register,
will have in his development an influence of which FREUD shows us that it is properly insofar as his drama
is integrated into a myth having an extended, even universal, human value, that the subject realizes himself.
It is through the introduction into the symbolic dialectic that all outcomes, and the most favorable outcomes can be hoped for.
But what happens at that moment is something that allows us to feel that what happens in this period, between 3 years one month
and 4 years, we can assimilate in the most evident way with this schema, and by the same token with the process of analysis. Namely:

– insofar as the subject learns to integrate the events of his life into a law, into a field of symbolic significations, into a universalizing human field of significations, what constitutes an infantile neurosis in its beginnings, if you wish, at that time, at that date, is something that, exactly, is the same thing as a psychoanalysis,
at least at that date and at that time where we grasp it,

– and it is insofar as it plays the same role as a psychoanalysis, namely of reintegration of the past, of putting into function in the play of symbols the Prägung itself, which is there reached only at the limit by a retroactive play, nachträglich, FREUD writes strictly at that moment, insofar as it is by the play of events integrated in the form of a symbol, in history by the subject, that it comes to be very close to arising,

– then by the very fact of the particularly jolting form for the subject of this first symbolic integration, that it does arise indeed, that it takes after the fact, nachträglich, exactly, according to FREUD’s theory, 2 years and a half after, and perhaps, according to what I told you: 3 years and a half after it intervened in the subject’s life, on the imaginary plane, it takes its value, it, as trauma, in the sense in which trauma has a repressing action.

That is to say that at that moment something detaches itself, so to speak, from the subject in the symbolic world itself that he is in the process
of integrating and becomes:
– something that is no longer of the subject,
– something that the subject no longer speaks, no longer integrates, but that nevertheless remains there, somewhere,
– something that will remain spoken, so to speak, spoken by something of which the subject no longer has the integration nor the mastery, and that will be the first nucleus of what will later be called his symptoms.

Are you following me? In other words there is not, between this moment of analysis that I described to you, and the intermediate moment,
between the strike and symbolic repression, there is not essentially any difference. There is only one difference, it is that
since at that moment no one – is that not so? – is there to give him the word, repression begins, having constituted
its first nucleus and thus at the same time a central point around which all the symptoms can then be organized,
the successive repressions, and by the same token also – since repression and the return of the repressed are the same thing – the return of the repressed.

Does it not surprise you, PERRIER, that the return of the repressed and repression are the same thing?

François PERRIER – Oh, nothing surprises me anymore!

LACAN – There are people whom that surprises, although PERRIER tells us, he, that nothing surprises him anymore.

MANNONI – That eliminates the notion one sometimes finds of successful repression?

LACAN

No, it does not eliminate it. But to explain it to you one would have to enter then into the whole dialectic of forgetting.
Every successful symbolic integration involves – but that would take us far from the Freudian dialectic – a kind of normal forgetting.

Octave MANNONI – But without the return of the repressed, then?

LACAN

Yes, without return of the repressed. Integration into history obviously involves the forgetting of an entire world of shadows that are not brought
to symbolic existence, and if that symbolic existence is fully successful, assumed, assumable by the subject, without leaving any
weight behind it. We fall there then, one would have to bring in Heideggerian notions: there is in every passage,
every entry of being into its dwelling of words a margin of forgetting, a complementary λήθη[lêthé] of every ἀλήθεια[aléteia].

HYPPOLITE – Forgetting is not nothing.

It is itself contained in symbolic expression.

LACAN – Yes, exactly.

HYPPOLITE

It was the word ‘successful’ that I did not understand in MANNONI’s formula. What does ‘successful’ mean?
That is what I do not understand.

LACAN – It is a therapist’s expression. It is a λήθη[lêthé] absolutely essential.

HYPPOLITE – Because ‘successful’ could mean precisely the most fundamental forgetting.

LACAN – That is what I am speaking of, on the condition of giving to ‘fundamental’ the meaning you say.

HYPPOLITE

This ‘successful’ means then, in certain respects, what there is of most failed: you have in the end achieved that being is integrated.
For that, it was necessary that it forget the essential. This success is a failure.

LACAN

I am not sure that this is what HEIDEGGER means when he indicates that fundamental Irre[errance] in every temporal incarnation

• ‘temporal incarnation’ is not his – of being.

HYPPOLITE

It is another question that I pose for HEIDEGGER. He would not accept the word ‘successful’: ‘successful’ can only be
a therapist’s point of view.

LACAN

Yes, that is it, it is a therapist’s point of view. Nevertheless, this kind of margin of error that there is in every realization of being
is always reserved, it seems, by HEIDEGGER for a kind of fundamental Verborgenheit[secret], of shadow of truth.

HYPPOLITE

The therapist’s success, for HEIDEGGER, is what there is of worst, it is the forgetting of forgetting. That is what is most serious
for HEIDEGGER, who does not place himself from the therapist’s point of view, it is the forgetting of forgetting. Whereas Heideggerian authenticity
is precisely that one does not sink into the forgetting of forgetting.

LACAN

Yes, because HEIDEGGER made a kind of philosophical law of that return to the sources of being. For the moment we will leave
this question in suspense. If I introduce it here, and if I do not let MANNONI’s intervention pass – I could just as well have
set it aside – it is, I believe, because we will have to pose the question:
– to what extent can a forgetting of forgetting be successful?
– To what extent must every analysis lead to what I called, at this very moment, that return upward in being, or to a certain retreat in being, taken by the subject at the place of his own destiny?

In other words, since I always seize the ball on the bounce, I anticipate a little the questions that could be posed
thereafter, namely:
– if the subject in sum who starts from there, from O, point of confusion and innocence at the start, if the dialectic of symbolic reintegration of desire, which comes from there, from C, which is going to pose other questions: where is that going to go, in the end?

– Or if it is enough simply that the subject in some way names his desires, has in sum the permission to name them, for analysis likewise to be finished and ended?

It is precisely there that the question is that I am going to pose perhaps at the end of this session. You will see that I do not stop there.
But at the end, at the very end of analysis, after a certain number of circuits accomplished, which will have allowed the complete reintegration
of his history, will the subject still be there: in O, or rather a little more over there: toward A? In other words, does something remain
of the subject at the level of the point of sticking that is called his ego?

Does analysis have only and purely to do with what one considers, what one seems to consider, as a kind of given,
namely the subject’s ego, as if it were a structure only internal, that one could in some way perfect
by exercise? And you will see that it is indeed to that that a BALINT, whom I will have to comment on in the following sessions, and a whole
tendency in analysis, come to think that either the ego is strong, or the ego is weak, and that this ambiguity persists.

On that, if it is weak, one could normally be quite embarrassed! But they are led to this position by a kind
of internal logic, to think that if it is weak, it must be strengthened.

And from the moment when one thinks that the ego, without any other supplement, is purely and simply this exercise of mastery of the subject
by himself, which is in some way situated somewhere in his interior, that is, from the moment when one maintains the notion
of the ego as a wholly given power of mastery, which is there somewhere, at the top of the hierarchy of nervous functions,
one goes straight down this path: that likewise what is at issue is to teach him to be strong, one enters into the notion of an
education by exercise, of a learning, even – as a mind as lucid as BALINT writes – into the path of performance.

With regard to this strengthening of the ego in the course of analysis, BALINT ends up doing nothing less than remarking how perfectible the ego is. He says: only a few years ago what in such-and-such an exercise or sport was considered the world record is now just necessary to single out an average athlete. So something is happening around which the human ego, when it puts itself in competition with itself, achieves increasingly extraordinary performances. Whereby one is led to deduce…

We have no proof of it, and for good reason! In what way would an exercise like that of analysis structure the ego, introduce the ego’s functions? Such a learning as this would be nothing other – that is what one is talking about, when one speaks in analysis of weakness or strength of the ego – than making it capable of tolerating a greater amount of excitation?

In what way could analysis, by itself a verbal game, serve for anything in the genre of that learning? That is all it is about! Namely whether, if we do not do that, and that is what I am in the process of teaching you, if we do not see that, if we blind ourselves to this fundamental fact that analysis brings us that the ego is an imaginary function, it is the whole difference between the path into which all analysis, or almost, commits itself in a single step nowadays, and what I teach you, the radical difference there is between a certain conception of the ego, and this conception of the ego as an imaginary function, whose form and springs, faces and stages, I am showing you here.

That is why, from the moment we consider the ego as an imaginary function, it is far from being confused with the subject, it is not confused with the subject at the outset. For what do we call a subject? Very precisely that which, in the development of objectification, is outside the object. The ideal of all science up to certain limits is to reduce the object to something that can close and loop within a system of interactions of forces, where in the end the object is never anything but an object for science.

There is only one subject: the scientist who looks at the whole, and hopes one day to reduce everything to a certain determined play of symbols enveloping all interactions between objects. He is all the same forced, in a certain domain, always to imply that there is something that comes out of it, which is action, which is that, when it is a matter of an organized being, one can consider it from the two angles, but when one speaks of it, as long as one speaks of it and maintains, and supposes its value as organism, more or less implicitly, one introduces into it the notion that it is a subject.

But likewise one does…
and one can do for a certain time, throughout a certain time, throughout all the development of analysis
…of an instinctual behavior one can eliminate, neglect this subjective position, but there is a domain where it is absolutely not negligible, it is precisely in the domain of the speaking subject. And why? Because the speaking subject as such, we must necessarily admit it as subject for a simple reason: that it is capable of lying, that is to say that it is distinct from what it says.
Well then, this dimension of the speaking subject, and of the speaking subject insofar as deceiver, is what FREUD uncovers for us in the unconscious.

Namely that where…
for up to now in science, the subject ends up no longer… one ends up no longer retaining and maintaining it except on the plane of consciousness, of course, since I told you that the subject, at bottom, is the scientist who possesses in himself the system of science, it is there that the scientist maintains the dimension of the subject: he is the subject, insofar as he is the reflection, the mirror, the support of everything that belongs to the objectal world
…from the moment FREUD shows us that in the human subject, not only is there something that speaks, but that speaks in the full sense of the word ‘to speak’: there is something that lies knowingly and outside the contribution of consciousness, there is then the reintegration – in the obvious, imposed, experimental sense of the term – of the dimension of the subject.

But this dimension of the subject, at the same time, is no longer at all confused with the ego. One can no longer at all say…
The ego is dethroned by that very fact from its absolute position in the subject, the ego is a mirage, like the rest, an element of the subject’s objectal relations. Are you with it?

Well then, precisely, that is why I noted in passing the introduction by MANNONI: it is that the question arises of knowing whether it is only in analysis a widening of the objectifications correlative to an ego considered as something wholly given, a center more or less narrowed, as Mrs Anna FREUD expresses it: more or less narrowed is the exact sense of the word she uses in German, and which would be a matter of its enlarging?

When FREUD writes ‘Where the Id was, the ego must be’, must we take that sentence in the sense of this widening of the field of consciousness. Or else is it a displacement that is at issue, that is to say that: where the Id was…
Do not believe, moreover, that it is there! It is in many places. There in my schema, the subject watches the play of the mirror in A, for an instant let us identify the subject with the Id, and let us say that the Id was in A, that where the Id was: in A, the ego must be?

Namely that the ego has shifted, at the end of the day in an ideal analysis it must no longer be there at all, that is quite conceivable, since everything that is there must be realized there, in what the subject recognizes of himself. It is there, in all this dialectic, the question to which I am introducing you. Does that indicate a direction sufficiently for you? It is not exhausted…

You follow, MANNONI? MANNONI – who posed the question – follows, that is already something!

Be that as it may, at the point I had reached with the remark about the Wolf Man, you see the utility of such a schema, in the sense that it unifies, in accordance moreover with the best analytic tradition, the original formation of the symptom, the signification of repression itself, with what takes place in the analytic movement, itself considered as a dialectical process, at least at this departure of the analytic movement.

I will leave to R.P. BEIRNAERT, with this simple beginning, the care of taking his time to reread the observation of the Wolf Man and one day make me a little summary, and even also the bringing into relief of a certain question that it can pose, when he will have brought these elements together with what there is in the Wolf Man. What I want for the moment, since we will remain there on the subject of the Wolf Man, is to advance a little in certain questions that are not only linked to this schema, but that are linked to what essentially it aims at: the understanding of what is the therapeutic procedure, the spring of therapeutic action in analysis. Precisely there where I placed the question for you: what does this nomination mean, this recognition of desire, at the point where it has arrived: at 0?

Is it there that everything – in some way – must stop? Or else is a step beyond exigible?
To try to make you understand the sense of this question, I am going to take right away a step forward.

It is very clear that everyone has long noticed that the analyst occupied a certain position, a certain place relative to an absolutely essential function in what I have just reminded you of, in the fact that what is at issue is the symbolic integration by the subject of his history. This function has been called the superego. It first appeared in the history of Freudian theory under the form of what? Of censorship. I could just as well, a moment ago, have advanced at once, in illustration of the remark I made to you, that from the origin we are – regarding the symptom, and likewise regarding all the unconscious functions, in the analytic sense of the word, in everyday life – in the dimension of speech.

If censorship is exercised, it is precisely in the absolutely essential aim of lying, by mission of deceiving. It is not for nothing that FREUD chose this term censorship, this notion of an agency insofar as it splits, cuts in two…
– into an accessible, recognized part
– and an inaccessible, forbidden part
…the subject’s symbolic world. This same notion we find again – barely evolved, transformed, changed in accent –
under the register of the superego, and it is absolutely impossible to understand what this notion of superego is if one does not refer to its origins. I am going to put the accent right away – one must always show where one is going – on the opposition between the notion of the superego as I am in the process of reminding you of one of its faces, and that which is commonly used.

Commonly, the superego is always thought in the register of a tension, scarcely if this tension is not brought back to purely instinctual references: primordial masochism, for example. FREUD goes even further, at a certain moment

• precisely in the article ‘Das Ich und das Es’, ‘The Ego and the Id’ – he goes so far as to remark, strikingly, that the more the subject represses his instincts, the more in the end, in a certain register, one could consider his conduct as ‘moral’, the more the superego exaggerates its pressure, becomes severe, imperious, demanding. It is a clinical observation that is not universally true.

If FREUD lets himself be carried away by his object, which is neurosis, and goes so far as to consider the superego as something like
those toxic products that would be produced, whose action one sees, and which from their vital activity would release a series of toxic substances
that would put an end to the cycle of their reproduction under given conditions…
one must see how far it is pushed! It is interesting, because in reality it is implicit
in a whole latent conception that reigns in analysis concerning the superego.
…there is all the same something else that it would be appropriate to formulate in opposition to that conception, it is this: the superego is
very precisely of the domain of the unconscious, a splitting of the symbolic system integrated by the subject as formation of the totality
that defines the subject’s history.

Thus that the unconscious is a splitting, limitation, alienation by the symbolic system for the subject and insofar as it is valid for his subject,
the superego is something analogous that occurs, in what? Also in the symbolic world, but that is not limited only to the subject,
for the subject’s symbolic world is realized in a language that is the common language, that is the universal symbolic system,
insofar as it is in its empire, over a certain community to which the subject belongs.

The superego is precisely this splitting insofar as it occurs – and not only for the subject in his relations with what
we will call the law. I am going to illustrate that by an example, because there, you are so little accustomed to this register, in truth, by what
one teaches you in analysis, that you are going to believe that I go beyond its limits. It is nothing of the kind. I am going to refer to one of my patients.

He had already done an analysis with someone else before referring to me. He had quite singular symptoms in the domain
of the activities of the hand, a significant organ for diverting activities on which analysis shed vivid light.
An analysis conducted along the classical line had exerted itself, without success, to organize at all costs his different symptoms
around, of course, the history of infantile masturbation, and the prohibiting and repressive activities that these activities would have entailed
in the patient’s surroundings. Of course these existed since they always exist. Unfortunately that had explained nothing,
made nothing understood, resolved nothing.

This subject was – one cannot conceal this element of his history, even though it is always delicate to report particular cases
in a teaching – of Islamic religion. And one of the most striking elements of his history of subjective development
was the kind of distancing, of aversion manifested as detachment, indifference, with regard to what is, as you know, an
essential register of individuals in that culture, Qur’anic law, which is something infinitely more total than we can
suppose in the cultural era that is ours and that has been defined by ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s’.

It is absolutely not on these bases that things are instituted in the Islamic area, where on the contrary the law has a totalitarian character,
which absolutely does not allow defining, discerning, isolating the juridical plane from the religious plane. Hence in this subject a kind of
ignorance of Qur’anic law. In a subject belonging moreover, by his ancestors, his functions, his future, to that cultural area,
it was something quite striking. This as a function of the idea that I believe rather sound: that one cannot ignore a subject’s
symbolic belongings. This thing struck me in passing, and that is what led us straight to what was at issue.

Qur’anic law carries this, concerning the person who has made himself guilty of theft: one will cut off the hand. Now, in a particularity
of his story, the subject had during his childhood been caught in the middle of a private and public whirlwind, which expressed itself roughly
in this, that he had heard it said – a whole drama: his father was a civil servant and had lost his position – that his father was a thief,
that he must therefore have his hand cut off. Of course, it has been a long time since the Qur’anic prescription – no more than that of the laws
of MANU, which tells us ‘He who has committed incest with his mother will tear off his genitals and, carrying them in his hand, will go toward the west’ –
has been carried out! It nevertheless remains in that order of symbolic foundation of interhuman relations that is called the law.

And it is precisely insofar as, for this subject, this part of the law was isolated from the rest in a privileged, fundamental way,
which at that moment passed into his symptoms, it is at that moment that for that reason that likewise for him too the world
of his symbolic references, of those primitive arcana around which are organized for a defined subject the most
fundamental relations to the universe of the symbol, why also the rest was struck by that kind of dethronement, by reason itself
of the wholly individual prevalence that this prescription took for him, which is for the whole of a whole series of unconscious
symptomatic expressions in him, which were linked to the character precisely that makes them inadmissible, originally,
conflictual of that experience of his childhood.

In other words, what do we see there mean? That just as I represent for you in the progress of analysis
that the revolution of symptoms is around the approaches to those traumatic elements, because founded in an image
that has never been integrated, it is there that the points, the holes, the points of fracture occur in the unification, the synthesis
of the subject’s history, in which, entirely, he can regroup himself in the different symbolic determinations
that make of him a subject having a history.

Likewise it is also in this relation to something more vast that is absolutely fundamental for the existence of every human being,
which is the law to which he is attached, within which is situated everything that can happen to him as personal, particular, individual
that unifies his history insofar as he says himself such-and-such of those backgrounds that structure and found a determined symbolic universe,
and that is not the same for all.

It is there that intervene, through tradition and language, symbolic diversifications, in the subject’s reference,
it is insofar as something in the law is discordant, ignored, must be abolished, or on the contrary is promoted to the foreground by
a traumatic event in the subject’s history, where the law is simplified into this kind of point that becomes inadmissible,
unintegrable, which is this something blind, repetitive, that we habitually define in the term superego.

I hope that this little observation that I put in the foreground will have been for you striking enough to give you the idea
of a dimension in which our reflection does not often go, but which is indispensable if we want to understand something
that is not ignored in analysis, since likewise, in the sense of the whole analytic experience, this dimension of the Law.
We can never suppress it completely, since everything there is perfectly clear, all analysts testify to it, affirm
that there is no possible resolution of an analysis, whatever the diversity of the iridescences of the archaic events
that it brings into play, if all that does not in the end come to be knotted around a hold that is essentially dominated
by this legal, legalizing coordinate, which is called ‘the Oedipus complex’.

This is so essential to the very dimension of analytic experience that it appears from the beginning of FREUD’s work,
the preeminence in the edifice, as a system of coordinates, of the Oedipus. That was maintained until the end of his work.
That is to say that this ‘Oedipus complex’ occupies a privileged position in the current stage of our culture, in the current state
extremely complex in Western civilization, where man is put in the presence of an evolution of tradition,
of a situation of the individual with respect to several.

I alluded a moment ago to the division into several planes of the register of law in our cultural area, and God knows
that the multiplicity of planes is not what makes life easiest for the individual: we find ourselves constantly in the presence
of conflicts between these different registers. But what is now in individual development most frequently,
in the most dominant way, is in some way strict Freudian theory, which has its roots in the most
ancient, most fundamental form.

For as a civilization evolves in the complexity of its different languages, its point of attachment with the more primitive forms
of law becomes this essential but extremely reduced point that is the Oedipus complex, and precisely what is put
forward by the expression of neuroses as being this resonance in individual life of this register that I call of the law.

But this is not to say that, because it is the most constant intersection point, the one that is minimally exigible,
that it is the only one and that it is outside the field of psychoanalysis…
that one allow the subject to refer precisely in this extraordinarily complex, structured, organized,
even antinomic, world, which is his personal position, given his social level, his future, his projects in the
fullest, existential, sense of the term, his education, his tradition
…that we are discharged from everything that is relation of this recognition of the subject’s desire, which takes place there, at point O,
with the whole of the symbolic system in which the subject himself is ‘called’, in the full sense of the term, to take his place.

And if we forget it, we can – we – encounter, as in this clinical case, what one can call a pure and simple misrecognition
of what is at issue in the subject’s history. The fact that the Oedipus complex is always exigible in its presence,
its structure, does not for all that exempt us from noticing that other things of the same level, on the plane of law,
can there play, in a given case, a role just as decisive.

Consequently you see well that once this something, this number of turns that is necessary for this appearance
in the subject’s objects of the completion of his imaginary history to be realized, everything is not finished here in the successive nomination
of what is, in the presence of this image, the reintegration of the desires also successive, tension-laden, suspended,
very precisely anxiety-provoking. This is not for all that accomplished.

Thus what was there, first in O, then here in O’, then returns there in O, must go to be carried back there from where it comes?
Speech emerged from the analyst’s silence, namely into the completed system of symbols, insofar as the outcome of analysis requires it.
Where must this stop? Is it to say that we should push our analytic intervention as far as fundamental dialogues
on justice and courage which are those of the great dialectical tradition?

That is a question. And it is a question that is not easy to resolve, because, in truth, contemporary man
has become singularly unskilled at approaching these great themes. He prefers to resolve things in terms of conduct, of adaptation,
of group morality, and other balderdash! But obviously, that also poses a serious question,
namely that of the analyst’s human formation.

Well then, it is the hour when we usually end, I will leave you there for today.