I left you, last time, with primary love, primary love, the dual relation, which is essentially constitutive, and on which this theory manages to place the emphasis in the analytic relation itself, that is to say this two bodies’ psychology, as BALINT expresses it with great rigor.

I think you understood what I showed you; I summarize it: to what impasse one arrives by making of this imaginary relation…
as essentially a saturating harmony of natural desire, this relation to an object that is an object of satisfaction
…to what impasse one arrives if one makes it the central notion of this dual relation.

I tried to demonstrate it to you in the phenomenology of the perverse relation as such. I emphasized sadism and scopophilia. I left aside—because it is a study infinitely nuanced, in the light of these remarks, within the order of this register—the homosexual relation, for it is precisely by deepening this face of the imaginary intersubjective relation…
such as I showed it to you last time, and that I am going to repeat to you, what essentially constitutes its uncertainty, its unstable balance, its essentially critical character
…it is by deepening it that an entire face of the phenomenology of the homosexual relation can be illuminated. But this would deserve a quite particular study. This point around which I made the study of this intersubjective relation as such revolve, on the plane of the imaginary, I placed it in the function, in the phenomenon, in the proper sense, of the gaze.

The gaze, I told you, is not simply something that is situated at the level of the eyes, someone who looks at you. It is a constitutive dimension of a relation as such that does not even necessarily presuppose the appearance of those eyes, which can just as well be masked, supposed by the gaze. In the gaze precisely that X appears that we see, and which is not necessarily the face of our fellow being, but just as well the window behind which we suppose he is lying in wait for us.

In the object that it is, beyond the object that it is not, there appears, on the contrary, the object before which it becomes an object.

I introduced you to the experience of this relation that I took, chose as elective, to demonstrate this dimension to you, that of sadism. I showed you that in the gaze of the being whom I torment, I must sustain my desire, in sum, by a defiance, a challenge of every instant.

If it is not above the situation, if it is not glorious, if I may say so, this desire falls into shame. This is just as true of the scopophilic relation. And I remind you of this analysis by Jean-Paul SARTRE, of the one who is caught in the act of looking, for whom indeed the whole color of the situation changes as a result of this surprise. It is that at that moment, in that moment of turning, and which is a total turning, a reversal of the situation, which depends exactly on this nothing: that I do not sustain it by a kind of triumph that must impose itself in a situation in which I am surprised. It depends on this reversal of the situation that I become a pure thing, a maniac.

Perversion is not defined simply as atypicality, aberration, anomaly in relation to social criteria, contrary to good morals—but of course there is also that register—or to natural criteria, namely that it deviates in a more or less accentuated way from the reproductive finality of sexual conjunction. But it is something else in its nature. It is not for nothing that one has said of a certain number of these perverse inclinations that they are ‘a desire that dare not say its name’.

Here we touch an essential register. In fact, it is indeed precisely already at the limit of this register, of the recognition that fixes it, situates it, stigmatizes it as perversion. But structurally, intimately, perversion as such, such as I defined it for you in this imaginary register, is that it can be exercised, sustained only in a precarious status that at every instant, and from within, is contested for the subject himself, untenable, fragile, at the mercy of this reversal, of this subversion of which I was speaking to you a moment ago, and which makes one think of that type of sign change that one adjoins in certain mathematical functions, at the moment when one passes from a variable’s value to the immediately following value; the correlate passes from plus to minus infinity from one moment to the next.

It is this fundamental uncertainty of the perverse relation, which finds no way to establish itself in any satisfying action, that precisely makes one face of the drama of homosexuality. I tell you: I cannot go into it today; I indicate it to you. It is in the triad of these three registers fundamentally grouped and developed in the dialectic of narcissism: scopophilia, sadism, and homosexuality. But it is also this structure that gives perversion its value as an experience that deepens what one can call, in the full sense, human passion, that is, that in which, to use the Spinozist term, man exercises, and man is opened—not in the fertile sense of the term: the essential opening of the world of truth—to this sort of division from himself that structures this imaginary that aims, between O and O’, at the specular relation.

It deepens indeed, in that within this gaping of human desire, all the nuances…
I alluded to a certain number, last time, which are ranged from shame to prestige, from buffoonery to heroism
…all these nuances appear, which make it so that this human desire is in a way entirely exposed—in the deepest sense of the term—to the desire of the other, and which makes it so that on the plane of this imaginary intersubjective desire…
remember that prodigious analysis of homosexuality that unfolds in PROUST on the plane of the myth of Albertine. It does not matter that this character is feminine; the structure of the relation is eminently homosexual
…and how far the demand of this style of desire goes, which can be satisfied only by an inexhaustible capture of the other’s desire, pursued—if you remember—into his dreams by the other’s dreams! Which implies at every instant a sort of entire abdication of the subject’s own desire.

It is in this mirroring—and I mean it in the sense of the lark mirror that at every instant makes the complete circuit upon itself—in this reversal…
pursuing itself at every instant, sustaining itself, exhausting pursuit of a desire of the other that can never be grasped as the subject’s own desire, the subject’s own desire never being anything but the other’s desire
…that the drama of this jealous passion resides, so well analyzed by PROUST, which is also another form of this imaginary intersubjective relation.

What then is there at the bottom of this relation, which is in a way graspable at every instant only at the limit and in these very reversals whose sense, in sum, is perceived in a flash? This relation that is sustainable on the one hand only from subject to subject, and presupposes at every instant an extreme instability, which is sustained only by the annihilation either of the other, or of oneself, as desire.

That is to say—think well—that in the other and in oneself, this relation dissolves the being of the subject—the subject of the other, of this very subject—in the form where, in the other, his reduction to being an instrument of the only subject that remains, namely for oneself, of one’s own position: like an idol offered to the desire of the other.

Perverse desire has this property of having at its limit the ideal, in the end, of an inanimate object. But not only can it not be content with this realized ideal, but as soon as it realizes it, it loses this object at the very moment when it attains this ideal. Its satiation is thus condemned by its very structure to be realized before the embrace by:
– or else the extinction of desire,
– or the disappearance of the object.

I underline ‘disappearance’ because you find in analyses like that the key, and the secret key of this something that certain analysts, not without value, not without rigor—even a certain density in what one senses they are approaching, by the need they have to complete for example certain registers of the analytic vocabulary of this disappearance of the object. It is the ἀϕάνισις[aphanisis] of which JONES speaks when he tries to see beyond the castration complex something that he touches in the experience of certain infantile traumas.

We lose ourselves there in a sort of mystery. We do not find again elsewhere in this structural, fundamental element that defines a zone, a plane of intersubjective relations and which is properly the plane of the imaginary. In the end, an entire part of analytic experience is nothing other than that: the exploration of these cul-de-sacs of imaginary experience with extensions that are not innumerable, that are limited in number, that rest on nothing other than on a certain number of dimensions of the somatic structure itself, of the body insofar as it appears as body and which as such defines a concrete topography.

It is not for nothing that I have especially evoked three registers today, just as there are three dimensions that conversely, it is in its history, at the limit of the term history, namely in its development, that certain fertile, temporalized moments appear, which are the different possible stages, different styles of frustration, which are defined and which define as a sort of negative of development, and not as development properly speaking, as also the hollows, the fissures and the gaps that appear in these developments, which define these fertile moments, developed, signaled, identified in a register, developmentally historical[…] as FREUD himself writes.

Likewise, it is by deepening this that something always fails in analytic discourse when one speaks to you of frustration, which is precisely what one always lets escape, because of I know not what naturalist slope of language. When the observer makes even the natural history of his fellow being, he omits to indicate to you that at the moment when the subject, however premature he may be, feels a bad object, it is not simply something that we objectify in this subject in the form of a sort of diversion of the act that unites him to this object of animal aversion […] the bad object is felt, itself, as frustration; frustration is felt in the other […]

The notion of what we can call ‘mortal relation’, this relation is structured by these two slopes, these two abysses where either desire is extinguished, or the object disappears. It is structured by a reciprocal relation of annihilation. This is what makes this marker of ‘the dialectic of the master and the slave’ useful to us. You see that at many a turning point I am obliged:
– either to refer to it, to explain it again,
– or to reintroduce it up to a certain point.

The sole fact that I could not take it and develop it before you cannot make it considered as exhausted. That some of you wish that one day it be set out for you by deepening it is something that is quite understandable! And in truth, it can be for you, I believe, a very great enrichment. But you see how much it is at the limit of what I am setting out to you. I am not in the process of telling you that this imaginary relation that HEGEL explained to you: ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’, for HEGEL starts from other problems, other faces of the concrete structure than the one that I am, here, in the process of isolating in analytic experience by way of example, and I would say by way of limit example, for of course this imaginary register appears only at the limit of our experience, for our experience is not total, but defined on another plane; this is what is going to constitute what I bring you today.

This plane is the symbolic plane. In what sense is it structured on the symbolic plane? This is what I am explaining to you today. But I stop for an instant at this ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’. What does HEGEL account for? For a certain face, a certain mode of the interhuman bond, which is fundamental as a whole:

– it has to answer not only for society, but for history,
– it cannot neglect any of its faces,
– it knows well that one of these essential faces is not simply collaboration between men, nor the pact, nor the bond of love, nor all that which without any doubt exists,
– it cannot either be placed at the center of the deduction[…]

In the edification that unfolds in passion, seriousness, and the negative of struggle and work, it is thus on this plane that it will be centered. And to structure itself in an originary myth that is this fundamental relation on the plane that he himself defines as negative, marked by negativity. The very necessity of its development pushes it there: what we could call a real relation of the use of man by man, as one sees certain insects present these forms of—why not?—societies; the term does not frighten me. There the difference between animal society and human society will be marked. Human societies are not marked nor conceivable by any analysis of an objectifiable, interindividual bond.

Precisely, the intersubjective dimension as such must enter into it. It is therefore not a matter of the domestication of man by man. That cannot suffice. He must introduce into it, into this foundation of the relation of master and slave, something that he calls not the fear of death; that is not what founds the relation, and the pact of master and slave is not that the slave or the one who admits defeat and asks for mercy and cries; that is not what founds the thing. It is that the master engaged in this struggle ‘for reasons of pure prestige’, that he opted ‘for reasons of pure prestige’, that he risked his life.

That is what is his superiority. It is in the name of that, and not in the name of his strength, that he is recognized as master by the slave. It is likewise in the name of that that the situation—exactly like the imaginary situation, and it is that which allows the rapprochement—begins with an impasse.

For if in the name of this risk, and of this risk assumed ‘for reasons of pure prestige’, the slave recognizes the master as master, this recognition for the master is worth nothing, since he is recognized by the slave, that is to say by someone whom precisely, in the name of the same register of risk, he does not recognize, he, as a man.

The situation would thus be without issue; it would remain on the plane of the imaginary. And I ask you to note in passing the affinity of the starting point of the structuration of the dialectic of master and slave in HEGEL with this imaginary situation. It is developed as such. This impasse of the relation of master and slave leads entirely[…] and it is its face of affinity with the register of the imaginary; the other face is precisely that which allows it, from there, to unfold. The whole dialectic of history is constituted by something else, which introduces us into the symbolic plane, that is to say all the extensions of this situation.

The extensions of this situation, you know them: it is precisely what makes one speak of the master and the slave. It is from this initial moment, and in sum mythical since it is imaginary, that the relation of enjoyment and work is established, that is, that an action organizes itself from there.

The rules are precisely the law imposed on the slave of a function that is to satisfy the desire and enjoyment of the other as such, which can be conceived only as organized and defined. Because it does not suffice for the slave to ask for mercy; he must then go to work. And to go to work, there are rules, hours. We enter the domain of the symbolic. And if you look at it closely, this domain of the symbolic is not there in a relation simply of succession to the knot, to the imaginary pivot of the situation which is constituted by the mortal relation, and the very definition of this imaginary relation.

We do not pass there by a sort of leap that goes from the prior to the posterior, following the pact and the symbol. If you deepen the myth, you see that it is conceivable only absolutely circumscribed by the register of the symbolic, for the reason that what I indicated to you, emphasized, underlined a moment ago, is that the situation cannot be founded in I know not what biological panic at the approach of something, after all never experienced, never real, which is death; man is never afraid except of an imaginary fear; the death in question in the risk of death is an imaginary death.

But that is not all: it is not even structured there as fear of death; I underlined it for you: it is structured as risk of death, and, to tell the whole truth, as stake. There is already in the constitution, at the origin, of the myth of master and slave, at the outset, a rule of the game. I do not insist on that today. I say it for those who are the most open, the most disposed to understand. It is essential. It is the story, the level where intersubjectivity is bathed from end to end, and even up to where we want to sustain it, in any development of the imaginary.

Every intersubjective relation insofar as it structures a human action is always more or less implicitly involved in a rule of the game. It is analyzable only as such. Let us take up again, under another face, my relation to the gaze, a gaze allied with the window, or with the edge of the wood, and me advancing in the plain, and supposing myself under a gaze.

What is at issue is not so much—in a concrete dialectic I mean, if I suppose this gaze that lies in wait for me—it is not so much that I fear some immediate action, some revelation of my enemy, some manifestation of his attack, for at once then the situation relaxes and I know who I have to deal with. As long as I sustain this situation of being supposed observed, what matters most to me is to know what he detects, what he supposes, what he imagines of my intentions, I who advance, since I am supposed in a situation of war; it is a matter of hiding my movements from the enemy; it is a matter of ruse.

And it is on this plane that the intersubjective dialectic of the gaze is sustained. It is therefore not that he sees where I am that is important; it is that he sees where I am going, that is to say very exactly that he sees where I am not. And it is always that which is suppressed in any analysis of the reciprocal, intersubjective relation: it is not what is there that is seen, that structures the situation; it is what is not there.

Game theory, as it is called, insofar as it is a mode of fundamental study of this subjective relation, illustrates sufficiently what we are saying for you to see that from the sole fact that it is a mathematical theory, we are already on the symbolic plane. There is nothing more to say about it. Open this or that modern book of what is called game theory, a quite improper label, for it is not limited to what you might believe, to more or less conventional games, whether it be the game of monopolies, bimonopolies on a market, or the game of draughts or chess.

The analysis of these structures is absolutely essential for any development of intersubjectivity, and this analysis always, in a certain way, supposes at the outset a certain number—however simply you define the field of this intersubjectivity—of numerical data, and as such symbolic.

If you read the SARTRE to which I alluded the other day, you will see that he lets appear something extremely troubling: after having so well defined this relation of intersubjectivity that he imagined, he seems to imply that if there is in this world of imaginary interrelations a plurality, this plurality would not be numerical insofar as each of the subjects would by definition be the unique one, at the center of references.

This is sustained, in the analysis of his starting point: analysis of the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for-itself’; he remains on a strictly phenomenological plane, which makes it so that he does not notice that, on the contrary, the intersubjective field cannot fail to lead to a numerical structuration, to this 3, and to this 4, on which I teach you to get your bearings, from the very moment when we try here to define analytic experience.

The relation of this symbolism, however primitive it may be, that which is structured in the situation by a certain number of markers, of numbers, puts us exactly and at once on the plane of language. There is no numeration conceivable otherwise. In seeking for you a certain number of examples, points of support, illustrations of what I am developing here, I note it to you because it came to me; it is still a little parenthesis of what I teach you: I was reading, no later than three days ago, an old work from the beginning of the century: History of new world called America (History of the New World called America). It was precisely the problem that, from the point of view of the genesis of language, attracted the attention, even provoked the perplexity of quite a few linguists, and which is essentially in relation with the notion we can form of the origin, of the genesis of language.

Every discussion of the origin of language is always tainted with an irremediable childishness. Each time one tries to make language come out of I know not what progress of thought—there is there a circle absolutely cretinized by secondary formation—I know not what progress of thought would set about isolating in the entire situation, to circumscribe, the detail, the particularity, the combinatory element.

How to suppose that thought precisely grasps the combinatory element, that it passes beyond the stage of detour that marks animal intelligence, in order precisely to pass to the stage of the symbol, that here one does not first have the symbol, which is the structure of human thought, namely to substitute for elephants the word ‘elephant’, and even for the sun the sign of a roundness?

I do not know if you realize what that represents as an abyss to cross: this thing which is the sun by essence and phenomenologically precisely, the center of what runs over the world of appearances, the unity of light, and that one suddenly makes of it a circle, by grasping one of its particular aspects, and that one makes of it a circle; it is a thing that already is, after all, an abyss that one could cross! Must one believe that this still would be something: that the sun is an aspect of a plate, or of a dish; what would be the progress over animal intelligence? Absolutely none. The sun is precisely worth nothing insofar as it is designated by a circle, on occasion, but it is worth something insofar as this circle is put in relation with a series of other formalizations which constitute with it this symbolic ‘Whole’ within which it holds its place at the center of the world for example, or the periphery, it does not matter, but where it is organized in a world of symbols.

With regard to people who speculate on the origin of language and try to make transitions between this appraisal of the total situation and symbolic fragmentation, there is one thing that has always struck people: what are called holophrases. That is, in the usage of certain peoples—and be certain that you would not need to look far to find in this experience holophrases, in our current, common usage, things that precisely are not decomposable and do indeed relate to a situation taken as a whole—one seems to grasp there a line between that animal world which passes without structuring situations, and that human world which is the symbolic world.

And then, always to proceed there as we proceed in analysis, we call into question the question of autosymbolism, as SILBERER puts it: when a subject passes into a state of fatigue, of half-sleep, it may be that the thought he was pursuing immediately finds its figuration in the first hypnagogic images that arrive.

And analysts come and say that in the concrete situation there is not simply that; this figuration always has a meaning: one finds there the conflict, the superego, the subject’s history. The analysts are quite right, but they simply seem to fail to recognize that SILBERER is not saying the contrary, but that he shows a certain turning, the appearance of the figurative phenomenon.

I came upon an analogous phenomenon, in connection with one of these holophrases, in connection with the work I cited a moment ago: it is among the Fijians. The Fijians utter a certain number of situations with the following phrase, which is not a phrase of their language, which is reducible to nothing: ‘ma mi la pa ni pa ta pa’.

I am not telling you that, by shading it with pronunciations proper to English, it would not have to yield something different, but it is not reproduced in the book in phonetic writing; I can only tell it to you more or less as it is read, with the phoneticization one gives it. And then I read under the author’s pen—you will see what direct relation with what I teach you the holophrase indicates:
– state or events: l’état ou les événements
– of two persons: de deux personnes
– looking at the other: chacune regardant l’autre
– hoping that other will: espérant chacune de l’autre qu’elle
– offer to do something: va s’offrir à faire quelque chose
– which both parties desire: que les deux parties désirent
– but are unwilling to do: mais ne sont pas disposées à faire.

We find there defined—with an entire innocence on the part of the ethnographer, who was not precisely a theoretician of intersubjectivity—defined, disentangled with a kind of exemplary precision, that state of […], of inter-looking, where each waits for the other to decide on something that has to be done by two, that is between the two, but where each does not want to enter into it, nor get involved. That it is at that, precisely, at that limit that there appear[…]Then you see well there: it is quite the contrary. One must, as always, reverse the central point of the perspective: it is not a genesis, an intermediary that is at issue, between I know not what that would be a primitive assumption of the situation as total, that is to say of the register, of the mode of animal action, and symbolization by means of I know not what that would be I know not what first gluing of the situation in a verbal mode. It is, on the contrary, a matter of something where what is of the register of symbolic composition is defined at the limit, at the periphery. I leave it to you to bring me a certain number of phrases or holophrases that are of our current usage; there is more than one, believe me; listen well to the conversation of your contemporaries, and you will see the number of holophrases it includes. You will also see to what kinds of limit situations, situations of suspension of the subject in a specular relation of one to the other, always in a more or less direct way, they are attached.

So here we have arrived, with the analysis made to reverse for you a certain perspective, which is precisely that of the interobjectal relation conceived as founded on a complementary, natural satisfaction between the two objects of which one speaks to you in psychology. Where do we arrive? We arrive at BALINT’s article ‘On transference of emotions’, ‘Sur le transfert des émotions’, which already in its title carries with it the announcement of what I can truly call the delirious plane on which it will unfold, in the technical and original sense of the term ‘delirious’.

It is a matter of transference; we are told at once: first paragraph, the two fundamental phenomena of analysis are evoked: resistance and transference. Resistance, everyone knows what it is. It is moreover defined very well by relating it precisely to the phenomenon of language: everything that slows, alters, delays the flow, or else interrupts it completely. One goes no further; one draws no conclusion from it, and one passes to the phenomenon of transference.

How can an author so subtle, so fine, so delicate a practitioner, so admirable a writer, I would even say, as BALINT, develop an entire study of some fifteen pages on transference, starting from a definition of transference which, precisely, in order to situate itself on a psychological departure, namely that it must be something that has to exist inside, then it is necessarily, one knows not what: feelings, emotions…
the word ‘emotion’ always makes a better image, so one speaks of emotions
…and what is important to show is how human emotions become incarnated, are projected, are disciplined, are finally symbolized—it must be said—by something that obviously has no relation to them.

So we speak of the national flag, of the British lion and unicorn, of officers’ epaulettes, and of whatever you like—read the history of two countries with their two roses of different colors—everything that is just as much on the surface of the life of the British community or of any other community. One finds there piquant examples, since judges wear wigs, and that can be matter for meditation. But what is at issue?

The domain of the symbol is here introduced, not in its general structuration and insofar as it matters to us…
and we shall see it when he brings in concrete examples, how one must examine the question of symbol
…but only insofar as it is a displacement, since by definition and at the outset one sets in parallel, in ‘pendant’, the so-called emotion, the phenomenon of psychological surging that would be there the real, and the something in which it is to find its expression, its realization; it is therefore under the angle of displacement.

Of course, the symbol in itself plays a function in everything that is realized as displacement. But the whole question is: is that its function? Must one define it in this vertical register, as displacement? One sees well enough to what extent it is a false track, a false path, in that what appears from these fundamental remarks, of which nothing is erroneous in themselves, is simply that the path is taken exactly in the transversal sense: instead of being in the sense in which it must advance, it is in the sense in which everything stops.

One sees the dialectic and the analysis continue by the reminder of the metaphor of what one calls the face of a mountain, the foot of a table, etc. We continue always in the phenomena of language. What does it come to? One believes one is going to understand the nature of language? No! What is at issue is to say that in the end the type of the operation of transference is this: you are angry; it is at the table that you deliver a punch! As if indeed, because I deliver a punch to the table, there were there a fundamental error. Nevertheless, that is what is at issue: to see:
– how the act is displaced in its aim,
– how the emotion is displaced in its object,
– how this kind of ambiguous relation between the real structure and the symbolic structure is made in the vertical sense, the point-to-point relation of one of these universes with the other, with this reservation that the notion of universe not being there, there is no means of introducing it.

Consequently this is sustained to the end of the article. This analysis he gives of it, the notion of transference as such transference of emotions, that onto which the emotion is transferred in all these examples is an inanimate object. He poses the question humorously: I do not ask you what the inanimate object thinks of it. Indeed, it is intentionally that I chose the inanimate object, because there the situation is clear, simpler. Otherwise, if we do not suppose it inanimate—I point out to you that the word ‘inanimate’, you saw it appear a moment ago at the limit of the imaginary dialectical relation—it is that if we think that the other is also a subject, we enter into a complication from which, he says, there is no longer any way out.

If there is no way out of it, there is no way to do analysis. That is indeed moreover what we have been arriving at for some time. Such a fuss is made, promises are made with an air of bravado, which is not without revealing I know not what embarrassment, which manifests itself by the very style of this braggadocio put around the notion of countertransference. What does it mean in the end, this point, this extension, this accentuation: that in the end there is no way out of it.

We are here before the famous problem, with the two bodies’ psychology, the unresolved statement in physics, the two-body problem. Indeed, if one remains on this plane of two bodies, there is no way to give a satisfactory symbolization.

What is at issue is to know whether it is that, whether it is by engaging in this path and by speaking first of transference as being essentially the phenomenon of displacement, that one effectively grasps what the phenomenon of transference is. As soon as, on the contrary, he passes to it, that is to say he illustrates it by examples taken from our experience—which means in the clinic, in what happens for us in analysis and not only on the blackboard—he tells a first pretty story.

A gentleman who comes to see him is there on the verge of analysis. We know this situation well, and he does not decide. He has seen several analysts. Finally, he comes to see BALINT. He tells him a long story, very rich, very complicated, with details, things he feels, that he suffers. And it is there that our BALINT…
whose theoretical positions I am in the process of defaming, and God knows that I do so only with regret, but it is essential, for it is a matter of knowing where one is going
…reveals himself as the wonderful character one sees living in this story. It is there that is revealed, not countertransference, as one says in the key language in which we wallow, which consists in calling ‘ambivalence’ the fact of hating someone, or calling ‘countertransference’ the fact of being an imbecile.

BALINT is not an imbecile. He listens to this fellow. He has already heard quite a few things, people; he is seasoned, he is someone, he is a man, a being. He does not understand… There! There are stories like that: one does not understand them. When you do not understand a story, well then, do not accuse yourself at once; tell yourself: ‘it must have a meaning that I do not understand’. And there BALINT not only does not understand, but acts like someone who does not understand, and considers that from the moment he does not understand, he is entitled not to understand. And there must be a cause. He says nothing to his fellow and has him come back. The fellow comes back and continues to tell his story, and adds more. And BALINT still does not understand. And there is something, obviously: they are things as plausible as others, only there, they do not go together.

It is a clinical experience; it happens to us, those things, and one must always take the greatest account of them. Sometimes that projects us toward a diagnosis, namely that there must precisely be something organic in certain cases. It is thus that FREUD teaches us to make a diagnosis in certain cases. But here it is not a matter of that. In this complicated story, nothing appears on the horizon that is not foreign. Well then, there: he says it:

‘It is curious; you tell me all sorts of things, very interesting, but I must tell you that your story: I do not understand a thing about it.’

Then the fellow blossoms, a broad smile on his face, and says:

‘You are the first sincere man I have met, for all these things that I have just told you, I told them to a certain number of your colleagues who immediately saw in them the indication of the interesting, complex, refined structure… But all that, I told you as a test, and to see whether or not you were, like all the others, a charlatan and a liar.’

What is interesting is the example, for you must feel what range there is between the two registers:

– BALINT’s register at the blackboard, which sets out to us that it is the emotions of English citizens that are displaced onto the British lion and the two unicorns,
– and BALINT when he is in function, when he speaks intelligently of the things he experiences.

Do you realize it? It is not there that we begin to enter into aberration, when we simply make an irrelevant remark, to say: ‘That is very good, all that.’ This fellow, after all, is within his rights to operate thus. But is it not an uneconomic way? Is it not a very long detour?

And here we have entered into aberration, on the plane of something that has no relation. It is not a question of knowing whether it is economic or not economic. It is sustained in its register, and highly so, for in truth, if it is a matter of something in transference—and he is quite right to situate that somewhere precisely at the outset of analytic experience—this register in which speech is lying, and that it is precisely
– because it is lying,
– because it establishes, because it introduces into reality the lie, that is to say something that is not,
– it is because it introduces what is not that it can also introduce what is.

For before speech, nothing is nor is not. Everything is there without doubt, but it is with speech that there are ‘things that are’, true or false: that are, and ‘things that are not’. It is with this dimension of speech that truth is hollowed out in the real, which, before speech, has no reason to be introduced there, for there is nothing, neither true nor false; everything is there in the situation; there is no kind of true nor false before speech can, by introducing itself, introduce into it what?

I spoke of the lie, because it is a matter of lying, but there are other registers. Tell yourselves that these registers…
let us call them, let us connote them, before we part today, in a sort of triangle with three summits:
– we would place precisely the lie at one summit,
– at another, something that is not the lie but is also introduced by speech: misprision; it is intentionally that I say misprision, and not error. I shall return to it.
– and then, what else? Ambiguity. We shall return to it as well.

From the fact that precisely speech, insofar as it is it that founds this register of what is true, that it is precisely by its act that it founds it, always leaves, behind this founding of truth, that something of its act that is beyond and that posits, behind the very fact of the founding, that by which it founded it. And by its very nature, not only is speech devoted to this ambiguity, but if it is not by essence ambiguous, it is no longer speech.

It is precisely starting from the establishment of this domain of speech that there is hollowed out in the real, and, if one can say: symmetrically, this hole, this gaping of being as such. You know well that the very notion of being, as soon as we try to insert it, shows itself as ungraspable as speech. For Being—the Verb itself—exists only in the register of speech which introduces this hollow of being into the texture of the real. The one and the other hold and balance each other; they are exactly correlative.

Another example that BALINT brings us…
it is no less significant than the first, and one wonders how he can bring them and even attach them to this register of displacement, this register of displacement in which transference as such has been amplified
…it is another story: it is a charming patient who presents this type illustrated in certain English films of what is called chattering: talking, talking, talking in order to say nothing. That is how her sessions go. There is something that makes the case even more significant: she too has already been through it, but in analysis; she has already done long stretches of analysis with another. Finally, she comes into BALINT’s hands, who listens to her, who realizes well—it is even admitted by the patient—that when there is something that bothers her, she fills it by recounting anything at all.

Where is the quite decisive turning point in the story? It is when one day, after a painful hour around the same mode of proceeding by the patient, BALINT ends up putting his finger on what is there that day, that is to say what she does not want to say. And what she does not want to say is that she received from a doctor friend of hers, who is not in relation with the prior analysis, a letter of recommendation so that she may find work, and where it is said of her that she is a perfectly[…] We go further and enter into this dialectic of work insofar as inserted into the symbol, into the law.

That day, he makes the subject turn around herself, finds the pivot moment around which the entire analysis will turn, and where she will finally be able to engage in something. He finds it in the fact that he manages to make the patient admit that what is at issue for her, and always has been, is precisely this: that it must not be that everyone finally knows that one considers her as[…] that is to say someone whose words commit her.

For if her words commit her, it will be necessary that she set herself—as in the example from earlier—that she set herself to work, that she enter the world of work, the world of the homogeneous adult relation. And what is at issue for her always, what she understood very well, is the difference there is between the way one receives the words of a child…
of course, all that is not said quite as I say it to you,
but sufficiently to render legitimate what I highlight here
…and the way one receives the words of an adult. So as not to be forced to be committed, to be situated here or there, as the world of adults appears, where one is more or less reduced to slavery. And the relation between that and the fact that she chatters in order to say nothing, that she furnishes her sessions with emptiness, hollow, wind, is this.

Moreover, we can stop and meditate for an instant that the child too has speech. The difference between the child’s speech and the adult’s is not at all that his speech is empty. It is as full of meaning as the adult’s speech. It is even so full of meaning that adults spend their time marveling at it:

‘How intelligent he is, the dear little darling! Did you see what he said the other day? Ah! My dear!…’

But precisely: everything is there! It is that indeed, as for earlier in that element of idolification that intervenes in the imaginary relation, this admirable speech is a transcendent speech, a revelation from heaven, an oracle of the little god! But it is quite evident indeed that it commits him to nothing and that one makes all one’s efforts indeed to wrest from him, when things are not going well, words that commit.

And God knows how the adult dialectic arranges itself, there, to skid! We know it all too well! But that is what is at issue. It is precisely the value of speech insofar as it commits itself in a dialectic, that is to say that one binds the subject to his own contradictions, in order to tell him that one is making him sign something.

At a more advanced, more developed point of the analytic situation, the transference situation…
it is not I who say it, it is he; I am only commenting on the text, and he is right
…he gives it as an example of transference. You see that it is indeed a matter of something other than a displacement.

And once again, it is a matter of the value of speech, this time no longer as creator of this fundamental ambiguity, but as the properly symbolic function of the pact, binding and uniting as such subjects with one another in a human action par excellence founded originarily and initially on the existence of this world of the symbol, namely laws and contracts.

It is on this register that BALINT, when he is in the concrete, in his function as analyst, marks, detects, makes the situation turn between him and the subject, and that from that day he can make her notice all sorts of things:
– the way she behaves in her positions, namely that as soon as she begins to gather general confidence, she arranges precisely to do some little something that gets her thrown out,
– the very form of the jobs she finds, too, is very significant; they are very amusing details: on the telephone, receiving things and sending others to do various things, switching jobs that allow her to feel outside the situation. In the end, she nevertheless always arranges to get herself dismissed.

Here is on what plane the transference relation comes to play, around some way whatever:
– either of the institution of the symbolic relation,
– or of its prolongation,
– or of its support.

It is in this domain of the function of speech, of the properties of speech, that we essentially see transference develop: with incidences, projections, articulations, so much of the order of the imaginary, but which is situated entirely in the symbolic relation.

It is simply there today, with the help of this little commentary on a particularly significant text by BALINT, that I want to bring you. What does that imply? This world of speech is not simply on a single plane. By definition, speech always has its backgrounds, ambiguous, which go as far as the ineffable, at the moment when it can no longer say itself as speech, found itself as speech. It is there a point at which we arrive at a beyond. But you see that this beyond is not the same as the one we seek in the psychology of the subject.

It is in the very dimension of speech. In relation to that [other] beyond that it is customary to go looking for in I know not what mimicry, cramp, agitation of the subject, the emotional psychological correlative of speech, this beyond is then on the other side; it is a this-side. That is what is at issue. And in this sense the essential realization that is made in analysis is hollowed out. When we speak of the being of the subject, that does not mean something that goes in the sense of his psychological properties, but in the sense of a deepening of this experience of speech in which analysis is situated, and that allows us at the same time to better realize what the analytic situation is. If one wants to compare the analytic situation to something, it is very precisely to what I evoked a moment ago: it is, in the order of an exchange of speech, of the symbolic relation, something that is constituted at the outset by a certain rule of the game.

Analytic experience is enclosed in certain regulated usages with rules certainly very striking and very paradoxical:
– it is a dialogue that is at once as monologic as possible,
– it is a rule of the game entirely in the symbolic order in which it develops.

Are you with it? That is what I wanted today to exemplify by the contrast between the concrete examples that BALINT gives and that in which the typical phenomena of transference manifest themselves for him, and rightly so, and the examples he gives of them. Naturally, in the end, what seems most striking to him in the situation is the exercise, the use that these two persons made of speech, as if that were the spring truly of the situation.

You see that it is an abusive extrapolation, for the situation is not at all the same as that kind of speech at once triumphant and innocent that the child can use before he has entered the world of work, and the fact, in the world of work, of sustaining an expressly insignificant discourse.

It is only by deduction of a certain established relation that one can link the two. The foundation is different. It is not simply an ectopy of the child situation; it is the maintenance, the attempt to maintain an atypical situation by constructing, in a certain way, in the register of primary love of which we speak incessantly; we try to justify it by thinking that it is there a certain search[…]
That is true under certain angles. But not under all, and by limiting oneself to that angle one can embark on false perspectives, namely ones that can motivate on our part an intervention that is disorienting for the subject. It is not sure that one must say: it is such and such child relations. And the fact proves it: it was not by doing as the analyst who preceded BALINT, namely by saying that she was reproducing there such a situation of her childhood, that BALINT made the thing turn, but around the concrete fact, the fact that that lady had that morning in her possession a letter that allowed her to find a position, precisely in the register of this function of speech, of the guarantee given of answering for someone.

And it is precisely because, without theorizing it, without knowing it, he was on this plane, that he was effective. You see how important it is to situate things. I would not want to finish without saying all the same how precisely, through this theory which is shifted, degraded as well, and it is indeed of this displacement of theory that it is at issue here to see what its sense is, and why it is done—and it is there that we shall come next time—in this little triangle of speech, with these functions and these resonances in being. That will make the subject of what we shall say next time. And I will not even hesitate to fall into spatial schematization and to make you on the blackboard the sort of little pyramidal representation of it. I will indicate to you that on the other side, if one takes the text, one finds, as you have just seen by these examples, wonderfully luminous, explanatory examples. BALINT, naturally an excellent practitioner, cannot fail to recognize in what dimension he is moving.

Among the references, there is one to a couplet by the one he calls ‘one of our colleagues’—and my God, why not?—that of Johannes SCHEFFLER, who at the beginning of the 17th century did very advanced medical studies—that probably had more sense at that time than in our days. Under the name of Angelus SILESIUS, he wrote a certain number of the most striking couplets on the relations of […] and of deity. One could summarize the general axis of his couplets, of which one cannot say that they are mystical. It is a matter of deity, of creativity by essence which is around the function of human speech as far as it carries its deepening, and even that it ends up falling silent.

The two lines that BALINT quotes are very beautiful; it is nothing less than being insofar as bound to the contingent, to the accidental in the realization of the subject. The fact that BALINT could look for such a thing is very significant, because for him to have the practice of these texts… The texts of Angelus SILESIUS are, among the ‘mystical’ texts—let us call it that, in single quotes. In truth that is perhaps not the most exact term—the most striking. They are posed above all in the not very orthodox perspective in which Angelus SILESIUS always affirmed himself, which poses the most impressive enigmas to all historians of religious thought. It is not by chance. He is a significant figure of what one can call the German cycle from[…] to[…] . To see him emerge in BALINT’s text is certainly not a fact of chance. I indicate it to you only here, to tell you also that it is precisely in this perspective of the deepening of the action of speech that we can also conceive the beyond, not only[…] but quite essential dimension of this progress, which theoretically—and if one is to believe and to follow BALINT and other authors—would lead to that kind of reintegration or narcissistic eruption of which I showed you, during an interview, that the authors, and especially BALINT, seem to see in it the final term of analytic progress.

What I once indicated to you on the blackboard by an arrow—this kind of retreat of point O toward somewhere behind, and which for us must come to give an entirely different sense to FREUD’s formula, which is usually taken according to a quite coarse and summary spatialization: ‘Where the id, the It was, the ego must be’. It is indeed in this direction of the deepening of the act of speech that we shall truly find its sense. And by failing to recognize this dimension it is impossible to escape this schema which makes the reconquest of the id something which is in the end an act of mirage. The ego sees itself in a self that is only a last and more perfected alienation of itself than all those it has known up to then. If we do not attach ourselves to giving ourselves the idea of what constitutes the act of speech in itself, you will not be able to see what it is: that it is a matter not of a sort of enlargement, of reconquest by the ego of a certain field, of a certain slope, of a certain fringe of the unknown, but of a true reversal, of a displacement, of a change of place, a kind of minuet executed between the ego and the id.

Couplet 30, in the 2nd book of the Cherubinic Pilgrim of Angelus SILESIUS:

‘Man become essentially what you are, for when the world declines…

It is indeed of that that it is a matter: of a twilight, of an imaginary decline of the world, and even, up to a certain point, of a certain experience at the limit of depersonalization, in a certain relation which is that of the departure of the neurotic or of the subject who is in analysis

…it is then that the contingent, the accidental, the trauma, the snags of history, falls away, and it is being that then comes to be constituted.’

Such is more or less the commented translation that one can give of it in order to be in the most accurate. I cannot too strongly advise someone who does analysis to obtain these works of Angelus SILESIUS. They are not so very long, translated into French; they are found at Aubier (The Cherubinic Pilgrim). There you will see many other things, objects of meditations:
– the relations of Wort: speech—thanks to the possible pun in German—and of Ort: place. [pun: in German, Wort (‘word’) and Ort (‘place’) are near-homophones and can be played against each other]
– the extremely condensed aphorisms, and quite accurate, on temporality.

I will perhaps have occasion to touch another time also on extremely closed, and opening, formulas, objects of first-rank meditations, and admirable. We are manifestly with the experience, connoted to that period of his life when Angelus SILESIUS wrote, that is to say at the moment when he was doing his medical studies. The end of his life was troubled by the dogmatic wars of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. He took an extremely passionate attitude. But ‘The traveler…’ gives a transparent, crystalline sound. It is certainly one of the most significant examples of certain moments of human meditation on being.

It is certainly an important thing, and richer for us in resonances than is The Dark Night of St JOHN of the Cross that everyone reads, and that no one understands.

I cannot too strongly advise you, those who want to introduce themselves to this register, to read this admirable text.