Who will volunteer to ask a question about what GRANOFF said last time? And insofar as his presentation was excellent, you were able to form an idea of what this book represents. Does one of you want to make a small effort to say what emerges, how the problem is posed, with regard to this book by BALINT? What major result it produced for one or another of you?

Octave MANNONI

The question posed like that embarrasses me. I am precisely in the process of gathering bits and pieces, and it is the whole that I am missing. It seems to me that the essential reproach GRANOFF made to BALINT is that he failed to express something that takes place in the analysis, and that is the type of relations between the analyst and the analysed.

It seems that the analyst’s role is to attend to the ascent and the descent, in a kind of scale, of his subject’s progress and regressions. He is, in a way, a witness to the manner in which the subject climbs and descends the scale of regressions, and the problem that arises is to know how one can say that one regresses or that one progresses. It seems to me that the difficulty is as follows:
– if libidinal love is a progression, what becomes of the earlier stages,
– and if, on the contrary, one can only gain access to libidinal love through a profound regression, I see BALINT’s difficulty in the way he did not succeed in dealing with the problem of regression.
Another difficulty: that of the analyst’s relations with the subject. It is confused, because you are catching me off guard.

LACAN

That is already something. We can start from it. Let us look at this conception that we call BALINT’s, which first relates to a very particular tradition, a Hungarian tradition, insofar as it was dominated by FERENCZI’s personality. Occasionally, incidentally, we will surely have to touch, through a thousand small anecdotal, amusing facets, on the relations between FERENCZI and FREUD.

FERENCZI was obviously somewhat regarded at the time, before 1930, as the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis. FERENCZI maintained, with respect to the whole concert of analysts:
– a great freedom of manner,
– a way of posing questions that perhaps did not partake of the very great concern to express oneself by what was ‘orthodox’, already at that time.

He introduced several times certain questions which, from a superficial view, can be grouped around the term of the question of ‘active psychoanalysis’. And when one says this term, which functions as a key, one believes one has understood something, and that it is, in sum, settled in the sort of confused aura that runs more or less from FERENCZI’s remarks—on a question that FERENCZI posed from that time onward—on the role that were to be played, at one moment or another of the analysis:
– first, the analyst’s initiative,
– then, the analyst’s being.

He began to pose these questions, but one must see in what terms, and not confuse, under the term ‘active’, every kind of intervention, which can range from prohibitions, such as last night you heard the question posed regarding the case that was reported to us by Dr MORGAN. The question I recalled last night, already evoked in FREUD’s Technical Papers and always admitted as perfectly evident by FREUD, that in certain cases one must know how to intervene actively by laying down certain prohibitions:

‘Your analysis cannot continue if you engage in this or that activity which, by saturating, in a way, the situation, sterilizes, in the strict sense of the term, what can take place in the analysis.’

We will try to see, starting from where we are, going back if you like starting from BALINT, what that means in FERENCZI, what, in sum, history has left to his credit as the introduction of the notion of ‘active psychoanalysis’. I point out in passing that FERENCZI himself, over the course of his life, changed his attitude, his position, several times. He went back on certain of his attempts, declaring that experience had shown them excessive, not very fruitful, even harmful.

Finally, BALINT belongs to that Hungarian tradition that flourishes and unfolds quite normally around the question of the relations between the analysed and the analyst, conceived as a person involved in an interhuman situation, and as such involving certain reciprocities in relations. In other words, this FERENCZI tradition can legitimately be traced back to a certain way of posing questions that are now expressed in the terms ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’, brought to the forefront of analytic relations. BALINT is positioned further ahead in this progress, from 1930 onward, therefore in a contemporary period; we could close FERENCZI’s personal influence around 1930, and then that of those who followed him, his students, manifested itself.

On the personal relations between FREUD and FERENCZI, I cannot commit myself now. It is very curious and it will be worth our while to come back to it. But we must go straight to our subject. BALINT is thus in this period that extends from 1930 to the present, and is characterized by a progressive rise of the notion of ‘object relation’. I believe that is the central point of BALINT’s whole conception, his wife’s, and that of their collaborators who took an interest in animal psychology.

It manifests itself in a book that is characterized, even though it is only a collection of articles spanning a period of 20 years, and thus can be rather fluttering, disparate, and yet has a remarkable unity. This unity can be brought out. Let us start from there; let us take the broad view. I assume it has been done, because what GRANOFF did is, in my opinion, presented well enough for you to be able to see how, in their mass and in their position, the different problems BALINT poses are situated.

So let us assume that things are already situated, and let us start from the ‘object relation’. It is at the center and at the heart of all the problems posed by BALINT, you will see it. Let us go straight to the problems, and to the distinction we will be led to make. We will see that what is his perspectival center in the elaboration of the notion of ‘object’ or ‘object relation’ is this: an object is above all, for him, in his conception, an object of satisfaction, which should not surprise us, since we are, with analytic experience, in the order of libidinal relations, of the relation of desire. But what does it mean to start from the interhuman experience of the object as being essentially, at the outset, what satisfies, what saturates a need?

Is that a point from which we can proceed? Is it a valid initial point from which we will be able to develop, group, explain what experience shows us, teaches us to encounter in analysis? That is where the question lies. We are going to see what happens in experience, namely the way BALINT is led to regroup analytic experience around this notion.

The fundamental object relation, for him, satisfies what one can call the full form, the typical form. The object relation is thus the one that joins to a need an ‘object’ that saturates it. Can that be considered sufficient? That is the question I am asking. It is given to him in a typical way in what he calls ‘primary love’, primary love, namely the relations between the child and the mother, which is expressed in the article ‘Mother’s love, and love for the mother’, ‘The mother’s love, and the love for the mother’.

This article, which is essential, is by Alice BALINT; it is Alice BALINT’s essential contribution to the common work. The crucial notion brought by this article is the following: what is proper to this relation of the child to the mother is that it implies that the mother, as such, satisfies all the child’s needs. That does not mean, of course, that it is always realized, but it is structural, internal to the situation of the human child. This implies the whole animal background of the situation, and moreover he adds this touch that is important, and that is superfluous in the case of the human infant:
– he is not only, like every young animal, for a certain time, coapted to this maternal companionship that saturates something of an essential, primitive need, of the first steps into the world of life,

– but he is so much more than another, because of this backwardness of his development, which makes it possible to say that the human being, in his development, appears with foetalized traits, that is to say, pertaining to a premature birth. This is barely touched on, and marginal. He notes it; he has good reasons for that.

Be that as it may, what is given as essential is sufficiently marked by this point, on which he insists and returns with a sort of feeling that it is a peg, an element, an essential articulation of his demonstration; this element to which he clings so strongly demonstrates much more than he believes, you will see it. He insists on this fact, so significant in his eyes, and rightly so, that the child–mother relation, as it is defined here, is so fundamentally what he says, that if it continues, if it is accomplished in a happy way, without accident, there can be disturbance only by accident. This accident can be the rule; that changes nothing: it is an accident with respect to the relation considered in its essential character. If, then, it is realized in its essential form, the whole situation will mutate.

If there is satisfaction, the desire of this primary relation, which he calls primary love, primary love, does not even have to appear; nothing appears. What therefore manifests from it is simply a snag in a situation conceived as fundamentally closed, in a relation between two. I cannot linger, because of what I have to unfold along a certain path, but this article by Alice BALINT develops this conception up to what I could call its ‘heroic’ consequences. I will show you in what sense this term must be used. She says:

‘For the child, everything that is good for him coming from the mother goes without saying. Nothing even has to arise for an instant that implies the autonomy of this sort of partner, the existence of this partner as being another subject. No, it goes without saying; the need demands. And everything, in the object relation, for the child goes without saying, as orienting itself toward the satisfaction of this need. If it is so in this conception of a preestablished harmony that makes the first object relation of the human being something closed, tending toward a perfect satisfaction in its essential relation, this strictly implies that it be strictly the same on the other side.’

The rigor of this development is precisely marked by the fact that Alice BALINT does not believe she has sufficiently demonstrated the fundamental scope, the breadth of conception, of what she brings. She has not demonstrated that it is exactly the same on the mother’s side, namely—for me to express it in an image—that the mother’s love for her offspring has exactly the same character of preestablished harmony on the plane of need at its primitive stage, that is to say that for her too, in all care, all manifestations of contact, of care, of cleanliness, of breastfeeding, of everything that binds her animalistically to her offspring, there is something that satisfies in her a need absolutely complementary to the first.

The situation is exactly complementary. And this complementarity, which I have called the ‘heroic’ extremity of Alice BALINT’s demonstration, is that she insists enormously on the fact that this has exactly the same limits as any vital need, namely that:

‘When there is nothing left to give, well then, one takes.’

And what seems to her one of the most demonstrative elements of the situation is that in this or that so-called ‘primitive’ society… in their register this alludes much less to the social or communal structure among these societies than to the fact that they are much more open to terrible crises on the vital plane of need, whether it is a matter of the Eskimos or wandering tribes lost in a miserable state in the Australian deserts
…from the moment there is nothing left to put under one’s tooth, well then, one eats one’s little one.

And that is part of the same system; it is in the same register of this vital satisfaction: there is no gap, no breach, between the two activities: one is entirely devoted to him, but at the same time, he is entirely yours. And by that very fact, he can quite well be destined to be ingested, from the moment there is no other way out. It is the satisfaction of an absolutely homogeneous vital need; it can go as far as absorption, which is part of inter-animal relations, which is part of object relations.

The child feeds, absorbs, insofar as he can, his mother in normal times. The reciprocal is true: when the mother can do no otherwise, she sends him down her throat. And BALINT goes very far into extraordinarily suggestive ethnographic details. I do not know whether they are accurate; one must always mistrust reports, as they say, that come from far away.

Nevertheless, certain ethnographers’ reports suggest, for example, that in periods of distress one cannot even speak of shortage…
those sorts of atrocious famines that constantly form part of the rhythm of certain populations that have remained at very primitive stages, isolated also from the community point of view in extreme countries, like those to which I have just alluded
…it has for example been reported that in certain tribes in Australia one sees women in a state of gestation capable, with that remarkable dexterity of means that characterizes certain manifestations of primitive behavior, of causing themselves to miscarry in order to feed on the object of gestation thus prematurely brought to light.

Thus the child–mother relation is developed here as being the fundamental starting point of a complementarity of desire. Let us say, to indicate, illustrate, label the thing for your mind—although that is not what I like best—on the animal plane, a direct coaptation of desires that fit into each other, gird each other. And everything else that happens, the discordances, the gaps, are never anything but accidents. That is the starting point.

And by defining things thus, he specifies something that is in contradiction with an essential element that one can call the analytic tradition on the subject of what one can call development of the instincts, that is to say that he will contradict, oppose, the traditional admission of a primitive stage called ‘auto-erotism’.

This is the other element that highlights the scope of this conception. For there is contradiction, an essential distinction, between this way of conceiving the starting point—one can say the initial point—which will at the same time—you will see why—be and remain the pivot of the whole conception of object relations in BALINT’s and Alice BALINT’s case. There is an essential difference between that and what FREUD’s texts admit, promote, not without nuances—of course, very important nuances which in FREUD’s texts always leave the thing in a certain ambiguity—let us call it ‘the Viennese conception’ of the conception of libidinal development; one does not really know where to stop it, precisely for lack of theoretical and technical means.

There is a first phase:
– which some will limit to the first six months,
– which others will try to extend very far,
– and which others will perhaps push back even toward an earlier limit.

And as BALINT humorously emphasizes, there is always a moment when one can say:
‘At that moment the object relation is not yet born’ by a well-defined essentially negative characteristic.

There is a moment when the Viennese conception—let us call it ‘classical’—a conception defining libidinal development, there is a stage where—which is not at all the same—the infantile subject knows only his need; he has no relation with the object that satisfies it; he knows only his sensations, and he reacts on the stimulus–response plane. To illustrate what this notion of auto-erotism entails, there is, for him, no essential, primary, predetermined relation; there is only the feeling of his pleasure or his nonpleasure. The world is for him a world of undifferentiated sensations. And these sensations govern, dominate, incline his development. He lives in a world of desires. One does not have to take account of his relation to an object, because no object yet exists for him at that moment.

This is clearly marked in one of BALINT’s texts, by reference to an article by BERGLER who supports this thesis then considered in the Viennese milieu as classical, and which makes the Viennese milieu particularly impermeable to what was beginning to emerge in the English milieu, which consisted in emphasizing, in a different form from BALINT’s, what was later developed in Kleinian theory, namely the first traumatic elements linked to the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad object’, to all those primitive projections, introjections whose dialectic will have such an essential role in the development of all English thought, especially in that of child psychoanalysis.

What are the consequences of this conception of the object relation? First let us posit this: it is clear that BALINT and those who follow him, prolong, announce, go in the direction of a truth. Anyone who has observed a 15- to 20-day-old infant cannot say that there is not, in this infans subject, an interest in elective objects. The traditional idea of auto-erotism as being a primitive destiny of the libido must be interpreted. It certainly has its value, but it is precisely what I want to try to show you: if we take it on the behaviorist plane of the living being’s relation to its Umwelt, it is shown to be false.

It suffices to have considered for an instant a little child in his first month to see that there is an object relation. That does not mean that the theory of primitive auto-erotism does not correspond to something, but it is precisely that, in libido theory, one places oneself in another register.

Libido theory, as it was constructed by FREUD, is a way of approaching this register, namely the significance of libido theory that is thus given to us with regard to these developments which are, in a way, kinds of derivations that branch off from the theory of analysis, but which clearly represent, with respect to the fundamental inspiration of libido theory, a deviation, but one in which, for the moment, a considerable, majority part of the analytic movement is engaged.

The consequences of this starting point—on that BALINT is quite clear—starting from this notion of the object relation as being defined by the satisfaction of a need to which the object corresponds in a closed, complete way, in the form of primary love, whose first model is given by the mother–child relation, it is entirely manifest, through the development of BALINT’s own thought; it is not we who reconstruct or deduce: we see what it yields when one embarks on this path. I could have led you there by another entry.

But by whatever entry you enter this thought of BALINT’s, you will always find the same impasses and the same problems. For it is a coherent thought, and it is something we can[…] by taking up the circuit in another direction. But if one starts from that object relation, there is no way out of it; that is to say that, whatever the progress, the stages, the crossings, the levels, the phases, the metamorphoses of the libidinal relation, experience manifestly shows us that it occurs in the course of the living being’s development. If one starts from there to define the object relation, there is no way, by making the nuances, the qualities of desire evolve in whatever way you wish, by passing from the oral to the anal, then to the genital, for the object relation not to be forced always to be defined in the same way, namely that there will indeed have to be an object to satisfy desire, whatever its metamorphoses, and that this object will also have the function of saturating said desire.

This whole consequence that the genital relation, in what it has of completeness, in its instinctual accomplishment, is exactly conceived, thought, recorded, and even theorized in the same way, in an avowed manner…
I can find the passage again; those who are interested will find it formulated as I am formulating it
…that what represents completed genital satisfaction is a satisfaction where the satisfaction of the one—I do not say ‘cares about’ the satisfaction of the other—but is saturated in that satisfaction.

It goes without saying that the other is satisfied in this essential relation. That is the axis of his conception of genital love, exactly like that of primary love. And he writes this because he cannot think things otherwise. From the moment the object is defined as an object of satisfaction, since it is quite clear that this then becomes much more complicated, that things take place thus at the level of adult development, that is to say at the moment when the human subject in fact has to put into exercise his capacities of genital possession, it becomes entirely clear, then, that one has to add an extension there, if I may say so, but that it is never anything but an extension, namely that one does not understand where it arose from.

But it is clear that this entails this sort of initiative of the subject, of the subject’s interest, of the apperception of existence or, as he says, of the reality of the partner, which must subject this realization, ideal but conceived as fundamentally of the same order.

To arrive at it, it requires all sorts of finalistic insights where the subject intervenes in a much more elaborated way. He has to take account, as a subject, of the existence of the other subject, likewise as such. It is entirely clear that there, it does not go without saying. He must concern himself with and take an interest not only in his partner’s enjoyment, but in all sorts of demands that exist around it.

It is through the intermediary of the notion of the other’s reality as subject that what constitutes the progress of genital love in relation to primary love intervenes. But you see it: it is simply linked to a kind of given: it is like that, because an adult is much more complicated than a child. But fundamentally, the order and the register of satisfaction are the same: a closed satisfaction between two, where the ideal is that each find in the other the object that satisfies his desire.

All sorts of qualities of appraisal of these needs, of these demands of the other, are thus required, and we will have to know where they are to be made to come from. For nothing indicates to us the way in which, in the subject, when it is a matter of libidinal relations, this sort of recognition of the other as such could be introduced into this closed system of the notion of object relation.

Nothing can introduce it. And that is what is quite striking. All these elements that he calls: tenderness, idealization, everything that is around the genital act, everything we could call ‘the mirages of love’, a term all the more valid in this register because, in the end, that is indeed what is at issue, if it is a matter of the saturation of desire and need as such, all that must come from somewhere at the moment when we arrive at the stage of genital love.

And here one only has to read BALINT’s text: when the subject has reached the stage of genital realization, all this civilized, cultural element of the relation with the other in completed love must come from somewhere. But given that the fundamental notion of the object relation has not moved, for a good reason, which is that when it is posited like that, one cannot make it evolve, nothing comes to introduce within it an antinomy that would make it appear structured in a different way when one reaches the genital level.

We therefore witness this paradoxical thing, which is not paradoxical, because it is suggested, even imposed, by the expression: when one has reached the genital level, all this element that I call the mirage of idealization, of tenderness, the whole Carte du Tendre of love, what is its origin? He cannot say anything else, because the clinic demonstrates it, but it is there that the tear appears, immediate, from top to bottom of his system: he says: ‘The origin of all that is pregenital.’

That is to say that once one has advanced to this stage of development that is the genital, he is forced to go and look back, in an anteriority, for his conception of primary love, to exclude everything that comes, at the moment of the genital, to be composed with the satisfaction of genital desire in order to give its completed form to this relation to the other that is extremely complex, rich, elaborated, which is indeed normally required in the interhuman relation that is called not simply copulation, but love.

He is therefore forced to have a conception of what is pregenital, in what is in the process of developing, as being essentially dominated, taken under the accent of a primary love, that is to say of an objectal relation purely closed in on itself in a reciprocal satisfaction of two objects by each other, which involves no intersubjectivity.

And then when he arrives at the genital, where intersubjectivity must indeed be manifestly required, from this object relation, since nothing can make it so that something more is required in the genital act of the object relation, he makes reemerge, from pregenital fantasies, everything that comes to be added to it in order to compose, as it were, an intersubjective relation, rich and nuanced.

That is the contradiction of his doctrine: he conceives the pregenital as formed by an object relation, let us say animal, and in which the object is, as such, in an absolute unselfishness; that is what characterizes everything he qualifies, in his first development, as primitive object relation.

The object is not selfish, that is to say that it is not a subject. The term is not formulated, but the very formulas he uses clearly show what is at issue. Subjectivity is selfishness: it is to think that the other is a self. He says: in the pregenital, there is absolutely no self, outside the one who lives. The object is there to saturate his needs.

And when one arrives at the level of the genital relation, since one cannot get out of this thus-defined notion of the object relation, there is no way to make it progress, for desire may well change, the object will always be something complementary to desire.

And he is then led, by a kind of gap that nothing can fill, but which he is nonetheless forced to bring into his system, because indeed the expression that shows it is this perfectly perceptible fact that one sees betrayed in analytic experience: that precisely everything that comes to enrich experience as intersubjective, that takes account of the other’s selfishness, comes precisely from that pregenital stage from which he previously excluded it. He is forced into it, because experience shows it: that is where this draws its origin, but he is incapable of explaining this contradiction. And it is there, on the sole plane of theoretical statement, that one sees what impasse one is engaged in by taking the object relation under a certain register.

Dr LANG

It seems to me that there is another contradiction, which can also be seen in the presentation you have given by the terms you used. It is, in this closed world that he describes at the beginning, primary love, an internal contradiction that likewise manifests itself and that has to do with this fact that there is a complete and systematic confusion between need and desire. Moreover, you yourself have used, to clarify his thought, sometimes one term, sometimes the other. It is perhaps by bringing one’s attention to that point that one would see where the fault lies. There is a question I would like to ask. Does he, too, use indifferently the two words need and desire? For you emphasized at the beginning that desire cannot appear; there is no point of emergence of desire in this closed world.

LACAN

He uses the two alternately. The foundation of the thought is need, need, and it is accidentally, in lacks, that need manifests itself as wish. Now, that is indeed what is at issue. Is the human wish simply the lack inflicted on need? Is it simply that desire comes out only from frustration? That is what is at issue.

Well, there is something there that implies that one is carried so far in the direction of a sort of essentially frustrating pathogenesis of everything that takes place in analysis. We have been led, from all sorts of sides of the horizon, and in a way how much less coherent than in BALINT’s thought, we have been led so much to the forefront
– dependency complexes, etc.,
– and primary, secondary, primitive, complicated frustration, etc.,
– the frustrating element as being the essential register in which we come to think analysis,
that one really has to detach oneself for an instant from this fascination, recall certain absolutely fundamental things, in order to land back on one’s feet.

That is what I am nevertheless going to try to remind you of now. There is something that analysis has taught us: that if we have discovered, and notably made a positive conquest in the order of libidinal development, it is precisely that, let us say, the child is a pervert, and even a polymorphously perverse one, that before the stage of genital normalization which turns, in its first outline, around the Oedipus complex, the child is delivered over to a whole series of phases that one qualifies or connotes with the term ‘partial drives’ and which are the first types of libidinal relations to the world.

It is precisely on this outline that we are in the process of applying the notion of object relation that is implicit in a whole register which is, if you like, taken in its widest field; LANG’s notion at this point is extremely fertile, taken in the notion of frustration or nonfrustration. What is the experience of perversion? For after all, if we call the child polymorphously perverse, that does indeed mean something. We start from an experience that gives a first sense to this term perversion.

One must nevertheless relate this to the following: analytic experience started from a certain number of clinical manifestations among which perversions, and when one introduces perversions into the pregenital, one must remember what that means. Where one sees them in a clear and detached way,
– is it in the phenomenology of perversion, to take this example insofar as it relates to this pregenital phase?
– is it even in the phenomenology of love, in its most satisfying form between two subjects?
– is it the notion of object relation as we have just emphasized it, through BALINT’s presentations, that applies?

Well there, it is quite clear that it is exactly the opposite, namely that there is not a single form—to begin with—of perverse manifestations that does not imply, in order to be sustained in its very structure, I mean at every instant of its lived experience, this intersubjective relation.

For the voyeuristic, exhibitionistic relation, let us leave that aside; it is too easy to demonstrate. But let us take as an example the sadistic relation. Looking in a limited way at as particular a case as you wish, whatever the form in which you engage in the lived experience of the sadistic experience, whether it is an imaginary form, whether it is a paradoxical clinical form into which you enter, there is one thing that is quite certain: the properly sadistic relation is sustained only insofar as the other is right at the limit where the other remains a subject.

That is to say that at the moment when suffering overflows, the inflection of suffering where the other becomes nothing more than flesh that reacts, a kind of mollusk, whose edges one tickles and that palpitates, there is no longer any sadistic relation; something can come out of it which, according to the greater or lesser authenticity or scope of the realizations of which the sadistic subject is capable, will stop there, in a form all of a sudden of emptiness, of gap, of hollow.

But the sadistic relation implies that what is handled in the relation between the two subjects is something that hooks the partner’s consent, consent in the sense of the broadest acceptance. It is consent, freedom, the avowal of the partner’s humiliation that is at issue.

And the proof of it is even more manifest in the forms one can call benign; it is true that most sadistic manifestations remain rather at the door of execution than they seem, on the contrary, to push themselves to their extreme. And it is precisely in all sorts of elements that one can qualify as the other’s waiting, the other’s fear, the pressure, the threat exerted, the observation of the more or less secret forms of what I will call in a moment the other’s consent, of his participation in the game, that it is a matter.

You know how much, in the form of perversions, the greatest part of the clinical sum we know remains on the plane of a kind of playful execution, which implies this sort of correspondence in the subject that is not that of the correspondence of a subject subjected to a need, but of a subject who participates in the mirage of the game through identification with the subject, just as the subject identifies with the other in this game. Intersubjectivity is the essential dimension.

This has been expressed…
and I cannot not refer to the author who has most masterfully described it in pages that are part of a work that one can philosophically bring under the scope of all sorts of critiques, but which assuredly, in this part of the phenomenology, has attained, if only through his talent and his brilliance, something quite especially convincing
…I am alluding to this phenomenology of the apprehension of the knowledge of the other that is in the second part of Jean-Paul SARTRE’s Being and Nothingness. This is admirably brought out there.

The author turns his whole demonstration around the fundamental phenomenon he calls ‘the look’. The human object, in what makes it original in a quite particular way within the field of my human experience, is absolutely distinguished, originally, ab initio, from my whole field of experience; it is absolutely assimilable to no other perceptible object in that it is an object that looks at me.

On this, SARTRE places all sorts of extremely fine accents: this look that is at issue is absolutely not to be confused with the fact, for example, that I see his eyes. I can feel myself looked at by someone whose eyes I do not even see, and even whose appearance I do not see, but whom something signifies to me as being possibly there. For example, that window: if it is a bit dark and if I have reasons to think there is someone behind it, there is already a look there, and as such, as a subject, I shape myself; and from the moment this look exists, I am already something other than what would consist in the fact that, in this relation with the other, I feel myself becoming, for the other’s look, an object.

But in this position, which is reciprocal, he too knows that I am an object that knows itself to be seen. This whole phenomenology of shame, of modesty, of prestige, this particular fear engendered by the other’s look, is admirably described. And I advise you to refer to it in SARTRE’s work; it is an absolutely essential reading for an analyst.

Especially at the point where we have just come to forget this register of intersubjectivity, here in a form literally woven within a certain register of experience where you must immediately recognize the plane that I teach you here always to distinguish as being precisely the plane of the imaginary. Observe carefully that if we suspend ourselves in this plane, which is that of a series of manifestations called perverse, we obtain there something, a whole series of nuances, that are far from being confused with what I teach you to put at the pivot of the symbolic relation, namely the plane of recognition.

One would have to insist on certain characteristics of this relational zone that is made around this pivot of the other as look. You have already been able to see that these are extremely ambiguous forms: it is not for nothing that I spoke of shame.

If we were to go in the direction of prestige, we would in fact see that, by analyzing things in a finer way, what we would come upon, if we want to keep ourselves strictly on this plane of the sole action of the other’s look, are derisory forms of prestige: the style it manifests in children, this kind of form of excitation…

A friend was telling me an anecdote about that sort of joke that precedes bullfights, in which one has clumsy people participate, in Spain. He described to me an extraordinarily beautiful scene, where the crowd is seized by that sort of collective sadism; you will see how far ambiguity goes in these sorts of manifestations.

They had paraded one of these half-idiots. In such circumstances, they dress them in the finest ornaments of the matador, and he paraded in the arena before those little beasts enter that take part in these sorts of games that consist in jumping on them, but which are not completely harmless.

And the crowd cries out: ‘But him, there, who is so handsome!’ The character enters into a kind of panic, with his half-idiocy, well within the tradition of the great court games of ancient Spain, and begins to recuse himself. The comrades say: ‘Go on, you see, everyone wants you.’ Everyone takes part in the game. The character’s panic increases; he refuses. He wants to evade. They push him out past the barriers.

And finally, the swinging, the tipping occurs, in an absolutely total way: the character, all of a sudden, frees himself from those who are pushing him to enter the game, and according to that sort of crushing insistence of the people’s clamors, he pushes everyone aside and all of a sudden substitutes himself in this sort of buffoon hero, who, involved in the structure of the situation, goes off with all the characteristics of a sacrificial attitude—except that it still remains on the plane of buffoonery—toward the beast, and in fact immediately and radically gets stretched out on the ground, and they carry him off!

This absolutely sensational scene seems to me to define the ambiguous zone of this relation whose intersubjectivity is essential. And you could almost say that there the symbolic element, the pressure of the clamor, plays an essential role, in a way quasi annulled by the character of mass phenomenon that it takes on on this occasion. The whole phenomenon is brought back to this level of intersubjectivity, which is what I am trying to define for you as being that of a series of manifestations that provisionally we connote as perverse.

But one can go further. And SARTRE—it is not for nothing that I put forward my author, for I believe that SARTRE’s analysis, there, goes very far—goes further and gives, of the phenomenology of the amorous relation in itself, a development, a structuring that seems to me absolutely irrefutable. I cannot redo it for you in its entirety, because there, I would have to pass through all the phases of the dialectic of ‘the for-itself’ and of ‘the in-itself’. You have to take a bit of trouble and refer yourselves to the authors.

But the level, the storey where SARTRE tries to pin down the dialectic of love in its acute, concrete, and also completed form, he makes it very rightly remarked: what, in the lived experience of love, we demand of the object by whom we desire to be loved is not what one could call a completely free commitment; we are loved only by reason of the initial pact, of that ‘you are my wife’, or ‘you are my husband’ to which I often allude when I speak to you of the symbolic register.

It is quite certain that there would be there something that, in its kind of Corneille-like abstraction, would truly have nothing to saturate our real and fundamental demands. What SARTRE observes in the register of his dialectic of ‘the in-itself’ and of ‘the for-itself’, and especially of freedom in its relation with that sort of bodily sticking in which the nature of desire is expressed when it is referred to this plane of freedom: that is indeed what is at issue.

We want to become for the other that sort of object that has, for him, that same value of limit that his own body has, with respect to his freedom. We want to become for the other that in which not only his freedom is alienated. Without any doubt, this freedom has to intervene, and commitment is of course an essential element of our demand to be loved, but it has to be much more than a simple free commitment. It has to be a freedom that itself accepts renouncing itself, from now on, in order truly to be limited to everything that the paths into which this captivation by this object that we ourselves are drags it can have of captive, capricious, imperfect, even inferior.

This, I believe one cannot fail to see as being absolutely essential: this fact of becoming, by our contingency, our particular existence in what it has of the most carnal, the most limiting for ourselves and our own freedom, the consented limit and the form of abdication of the other’s freedom—that is what phenomenologically shows, what situates love in its lived form, even concrete, required, genital love as our good friend BALINT said just now.

That is what precisely institutes it in this intermediate, ambiguous zone between the symbolic and the imaginary, but entirely taken up and stuck, it too, in this domain of the imaginary, in this imaginary intersubjectivity, which is what I thus wish to center your attention on, but of which you also see how much, in its completed form, love requires the participation of this symbolic register, which is precisely what I call the freedom–pact change, for that plane is embodied—in what?—in the word given.

You thus see there a whole zone being tiered, where you will be able to distinguish planes of what we call, in our often imprecise language: ‘identifications’, with a whole range of nuances, a whole fan of forms that play between the imaginary and the symbolic, and which is the plane within which we displace our whole experience.

But you also see, at the same time, that we cannot… quite the opposite of BALINT’s perspective, on the contrary, and this is much more in keeping with our experience …start from a radical, fundamental intersubjectivity, namely from the total admission of the subject by the other subject, as such, in order to have it retroactively—I mean nachträglich—that is to say, starting from present adult experience up to everything we can suppose of original experiences, by tiering the degradations, without being able, any more than he can, ever to get out of the domain of intersubjectivity.

In other words, insofar as we remain in the analytic register, we have to admit intersubjectivity all the way back to the origin. There is no transition between the two registers:

– between object-to-object relations as two extreme terms, which is what one has in the dialectic of animal desire,

– or, in the other register, that of the recognition of desire, which is exactly the second degree.

If we start from there, we must, from the outset, know how far this property of essential intersubjectivity degrades, but at the same time where it starts from. There is no possibility of making it emerge at a moment, if one starts from a starting hypothesis of intersubjectivity. One must know where intersubjectivity is at the very origin, where it is not manifest. But it can only be at the beginning, since it must be at the end.

And that is indeed what experience shows. Namely that if analytic theory has qualified as polymorphously perverse this or that mode or symptom of the child’s behavior, it is precisely in this register, and insofar as it implies this dimension of imaginary intersubjectivity that I tried to make you grasp just now, in this kind of double look, which makes it so that I see that the other sees me, and that this or that intervening third party sees me seen. There is never simple duplicity of term. It is not only that I see the other; it is that I see him seeing me, and that, seeing him see me, this implies the third term, namely that he knows that I see him. The circle is closed. There are always three terms, even if there are not three terms present.

And then, what does that mean? Does it mean that what we call polymorphous perversion in the child is lived with that sensible richness of which we can say, through its intermediary in the adult:
– that perversion is, in sum, a mode of privileged exploration of a certain existential possibility of human nature, of a certain internal tearing which is this gap through which this whole supernatural world of the symbolic could also enter,
– that everything that makes the qualitative value of perversion lived in the adult we would have to, as they say, project onto the child?

Does it mean that? But of course not. In other words, the question I am posing to you is this: must we look for this fundamental intersubjectivity in the child, if it is the one we see as constitutive of perversion in the adult? Well, no! What strikes, for example, the authors in question when they speak to us of the child, what they rely on to speak to us of this primary love, which takes no account at all of the other’s selfishness, are words like these, which are well known: even the child who loves his mother best says to her coldly, ‘when you are dead, Mommy, I will take your hats’, or anything at all… Or: ‘when grandpa is dead…’

This kind of adulation of the other, so easy in the child’s discourse, which appears to us adults, in this misunderstanding that makes of the child this scarcely conceivable divine being, whose feelings escape us when we come upon phenomena as paradoxical as these, and that one then tries to resolve by projecting it, in the right way moreover, in the eternal way: when men have to resolve the question of the transcendent, when they no longer understand, they think it is a god or an animal, and children are taken far too much for gods to admit it, so they are taken in terms of animality.

And that is what BALINT does when he thinks that the child truly has no kind of recognition of the other object except in relation to his need. That is an absolutely total error. And this simple example of the ‘when you are dead…’, which the child says so easily, shows us the point where fundamental intersubjectivity—what we must find again from the origin—effectively manifests itself in the child: it is precisely the fact that he can make use of language.

And that is exactly what GRANOFF said the other day: one senses the place of what I am… The child, with his first games of occultation of the object, manifests this kind of capacity he evoked; I do not say to call presence in absence, but to reject the object in presence. But precisely what BALINT misrecognizes is that this is a phenomenon of language. He then sees only one thing: that he does not take account of the object; that is what seems important to him. But what is important is not that he does not take account of the object, but that he is capable, as a little human animal, of making use of this symbolic function thanks to which, as I explained to you, we can bring elephants in here, whatever the narrowness of the door.

Intersubjectivity is first given with the maximum accent in the register of the handling of the symbol. And this, from the origin. And it is precisely starting from there that there occurs, in an increasingly complicated way, this sort of incarnation of the symbolic in imaginary lived experience, which then shapes, in a certain way, all the inflections that, in the adult’s lived experience, this kind of imaginary engagement of captation, of fixation, everything that first departed from this possibility of naming, can take, which is at once:

– destruction of the thing,

– and passage of the thing to that other plane which is the symbolic plane, and thanks to which the properly human register becomes established.

The relation is intersubjective, essentially. And, by neglecting this dimension, one falls into the register of this object relation from which there is no way out, and which leads us to theoretical impasses as much as technical ones, as I am trying to show you. Have I at least closed a loop well enough this morning that I can leave you there? That does not mean that there is not a continuation. This is summarized, for those who would want a rough sketch: for the child there is first symbolic and real, contrary to everything one believes, and that everything we see being composed, enriched, diversified, in the register of the imaginary must first start from an essential predominance of these two poles.

If that seems surprising to you, if you believe that the child is more captive of the imaginary than of the rest, in a certain sense I will say that you are right, because the imaginary is naturally there. But precisely it is absolutely inaccessible to us. It is accessible to us only starting from its much later realizations in the adult.

And when we seek to see what we can evoke, what by which we can truly reach, in an analytically correct way, the past, the lived experience, the history of our subject, what we will have to see as infantile, childish behavior in analysis, is not what, very confusedly, clumsily, someone like the one you heard last night represents to us as being the behavior, the dozes, the fumblings of the subject during the analysis. If we are to get something out of it—and we do, whether we know it or not—it is the adult’s childish language.

I will demonstrate it to you next time. In this article by FERENCZI, you will see that he saw, masterfully, the importance of this question:
– what makes the child participate within the adult in an analysis?
– What share must we give it?
– What usable thing comes out of it?

It is quite clear: what is verbalized in an irruptive way in the analysis.