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(All parts in English)

This year we shall speak of a subject which is not, in what is called the historical evolution of psychoanalysis, without taking

• in an articulated way or not – a position that is altogether central in theory and practice. This subject is The object relation.

Why did I not choose it, this subject already current, already primary, already central, already critical, when we began these seminars? Precisely for the reason that motivates the second part of my title, that is to say because it can only be treated on the basis of a certain idea, of a certain distance taken from the question of what FREUD showed us as constituting the structures within which analysis moves, within which it operates, and quite especially the complex structure of the relation between the two subjects present in analysis: the analysand and the analyst.

This is what, through these three years of commentary on FREUD’s texts, of critiques, concerning:

– the 1st year what one can call the very elements of technical conduct,
that is to say the notion of transference and the notion of resistance,

– the 2nd year what one really must call the ground of Freudian experience and discovery, namely what, properly speaking, the notion of the unconscious is, of which I believe I have shown you enough in this second year that this notion of the unconscious is precisely what necessitated for FREUD the introduction of principles literally paradoxical on the purely dialectical level that FREUD was led to introduce in Beyond the Pleasure Principle

– Finally in the course of the 3rd year, I gave you a manifest example of the absolute necessity of isolating this essential articulation of the symbolic that is called the signifier, in order to understand – analytically speaking – something about what is nothing other than the properly paranoid field of the psychoses.

We are therefore armed with a certain number of terms that have resulted in certain schemas, whose spatiality is absolutely not to be taken in the intuitive sense of the term schema, which do not involve localization but which quite legitimately involve a spatialization, in the sense in which spatialization implies relation of place, topological relation, interposition for example,
or succession, sequence.

One of these schemas where everything we have arrived at after these years of critique culminates, is the schema
that we can call by definition, in opposition to the one that inscribes the relation of the subject to the Other insofar as it is
at the outset in the ‘natural’ relation as it is constituted at the outset of analysis: a virtual relation, a relation of virtual speech,
by which it is from the Other[A] that the subject[S] receives – under the form of an unconscious speech – his own message.

This ‘own message’ which is forbidden to him, is for him deformed, stopped, captured, profoundly misconstrued by this interposition of the imaginary relation between a and a’, that is to say of that relation which exists precisely between this ego and that other that is the ego’s typical object, that is to say insofar as the imaginary relation[a↔a’] interrupts, slows, inhibits, most often inverts, and profoundly misconstrues

• through an essentially alienated relation – the speech relation between the Subject and the Other, the big Other insofar as it is another subject,
  insofar as par excellence it is a subject capable of deceiving.

Here then is the schema at which we have arrived, and you can clearly see that it is not something that is not[…] at the moment when we have set it again within the analytic interior, such that, more and more, a greater number of analysts formulate it,
whereas we are going to call into question this prevalence in analytic theory, of the object relation, if one can say
uncommented, of the primary object relation, of the object relation,
– as coming to take, in analytic theory, the central place,
– as coming to re-center the whole dialectic of the pleasure principle, of the reality principle,
– as coming to ground all analytic progress around what one can call a reification of the relation of the subject to the object, considered as a dual relation, a relation – we are still told when one speaks of the analytic situation – excessively simple, this relation of the subject to the object which tends more and more to occupy the center of analytic theory.

It is precisely that which we are going to put to the test. We shall see whether one can, starting from something which in our schema relates precisely to the line a→a’, construct in a satisfactory way the whole set of phenomena offered to our observation,
to our analytic experience, whether this instrument by itself alone can make it possible to account for the facts, whether in other words
the more complex schema we have proposed must be neglected, even set aside.

That the object relation has become – at least in appearance – the primary theoretical element in the explanation of analysis,
I believe I shall give you a sustained testimony of it. Not precisely by telling you to immerse yourselves in what one can call a kind of collective work recently published, for which indeed the term ‘collective’ applies particularly well.
You will see from one end to the other the valorization, in a way perhaps not always particularly satisfactory in the sense of the articulated, but assuredly whose monotony, whose uniformity is quite striking, you will see promoted there this object relation expressly given in one of the articles called ‘Evolution of psychoanalysis’, and as the last term of this evolution you will see in the article ‘Psychoanalytic clinic’ a way of presenting the clinic itself, entirely centered
on this object relation.

Perhaps I shall even give some ideas of what such a presentation can arrive at. Assuredly, the whole
is quite striking, it is around the object relation that those who practice analysis try to order their minds,
the understanding they can have of their own experience. Also it does not seem to us that it must give them
a full and complete satisfaction.

But on the other hand, this orients, penetrates their practice very deeply only insofar as they conceive that their own experience in this register is not something that truly has consequences in the very modes of their intervention,
in the orientation given to the analysis, and by the same token in its results. This is what one can misconstrue by simply reading, commenting, whereas one has always said that analytic theory and practice cannot be separated, dissociated from one another.

From the moment one conceives it in a certain sense, it is inevitable that one also conducts it in a certain sense, if the theoretical sense
and the practical results can only be the same as glimpsed. To introduce the question of the object relation, of the legitimacy,
of the unfoundedness of its situation as central in analytic theory, I must remind you, briefly at least,
what this notion owes or does not owe to FREUD himself.

I shall do so not only because that is indeed a kind of guide, almost a technical limitation that we have imposed on ourselves here, to start from Freudian commentary, and likewise I have sensed this year some questions, if not worries,
as to whether I was or was not going to start from Freudian texts, but it is very difficult to start, concerning the object relation, from FREUD’s texts
themselves, because it is not there – I am of course speaking of something that is very formally asserted here,
as a deviation of analytic theory – so I must indeed start from recent texts, and by the same token start from a certain critique of these positions.

But that we must in the end refer to Freudian positions, on the other hand this is not doubtful and by the same token we cannot not evoke, even if only very rapidly, what in the properly Freudian fundamental themes
turns around the very notion of object. At our outset we will not be able to do it in a developed way, I shall try
to do it as quickly as possible. Of course, this implies that it is precisely what we shall have more and more,
in the end, to take up again, to develop, to recover and to articulate. I therefore simply want to remind you briefly, and in a way that would not even be conceivable if there were not behind us these three years of collaboration in analysis of texts, if you had not already with me encountered under diverse forms this theme of the object.

In FREUD
– one speaks of course of object, the division of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is precisely called the search, or more exactly the finding of the object,
– one speaks of the object in an implicit way each time the notion of reality comes into play,
– one speaks of it again in a 3rd way each time the ambivalence of certain fundamental relations is involved, namely the fact that the subject makes himself an object for the other, that there is a certain type of relation in which reciprocity for the subject of an object is patent and even constitutive.

I would like to lay more pointed emphasis on the three modes under which these notions relative to the object appear to us.

That is why I allude to one of the points where in FREUD we can refer in order to prove, to articulate, the notion of object. If you refer to that chapter of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, you will see there something that is already there
since the time when this was published only by a kind of historical accident – FREUD not only did not want
it to be published, but in sum it was published against his will – nevertheless we find the same formula
concerning the object already in this first Project for a Scientific Psychology[cf. ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in Letters to W. Fliess].

FREUD insists on this: that every way for man to find the object is – and is never anything but – the continuation of a tendency
in which it is a matter of a lost object, of an object that is a matter of finding again. The object is not considered, as in modern theory, as being fully satisfying:
– the typical object,
– the object par excellence,
– the harmonious object,
– the object that grounds man in an adequate reality, in the reality that proves maturity, the famous genital object.

It is quite striking to see that at the moment when FREUD makes the theory of instinctual evolution as it emerges
from the first analytic experiences, he indicates it to us as being grasped by way of a search for the lost object.
This object corresponds to a certain advanced stage of the maturation of the instincts, it is the object found again from the first weaning,
the object precisely that was first the attachment point of the child’s first satisfactions, it is an object found again.

It is quite clear that:

– the discordance instituted by the sole fact, that this term of repetition: this term of a nostalgia that binds the subject to the lost object and through which all the effort of the search is exercised and which marks the finding again as the sign of an impossible repetition, since precisely it is not the same object, it could not be

– the primacy of this dialectic which puts at the center of the subject-object relation a fundamental tension which makes it so that what is sought is not sought on the same footing as what will be found, that it is through the search for a past and surpassed satisfaction that the new object is sought and found and grasped elsewhere than at the point where it is sought,

– the fundamental distance that is introduced by the essentially conflictual element that there is in every search for the object, this is the first form under which in FREUD this notion of the object relation appears.

I would say that it is by articulating it poorly in terms that would be philosophically elaborated that we would have to resolve here,
to give its full accent to what I am underscoring here…
I do not do it intentionally, I reserve it for our return to this term, for those for whom these terms already have a meaning by virtue of certain philosophical knowledge
…all the ‘distance’ of the relation of the subject to the object in FREUD, in relation to what precedes it in a certain conception of the object as being the adequate object, as being the object expected in advance, coapted to the maturation of the subject, all this distance
is already implied in what opposes a Platonic perspective…
the one that founds all apprehension, all recognition on the reminiscence of a type in some sense preformed
…to a profoundly different notion, of all the distance there is between modern experience and ancient experience,
the one that is given in KIERKEGAARD under the register of ‘Repetition’, this repetition always sought,
essentially never satisfied insofar as it is by its nature not ever reminiscence, but always repetition as such,
therefore impossible to assuage. It is in this register that the notion of finding again the lost object in FREUD is situated.

We shall retain this text, it is essential that it suffice in the first account FREUD gives of the notion of object.
Of course, it is essentially on a notion of a profoundly conflictual relation of the subject with his world
that things are posed and specified. How could it be otherwise since already at that time it is essentially
a matter of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle?

That if the reality principle and the pleasure principle are not detachable from one another, I would say more: they imply and include
one another in a dialectical relation, so that as FREUD has always instituted it, the reality principle is constituted
only by what is imposed for its satisfaction on the pleasure principle, it is in some sense only its prolongation.

If conversely the reality principle implies in its dynamic and in its fundamental pursuit the fundamental tension
of the pleasure principle, it nonetheless remains that between the two – and this is the essential of what Freudian theory brings –
there is a gap that there would be no reason to distinguish if they were one simply following the other:

– that the pleasure principle tends to realize itself in a profoundly unrealistic formation,

– that the reality principle implies the existence of an organization, of an autonomous structuring that is different and which includes that what it grasps can be precisely something fundamentally different from what is desired.

It is in this relation, which itself introduces within its very dialectic of the subject and the object another term, a term that is
here posited as irreducible:
– just as the object, a moment ago, was something that was founded in its primordial exigencies as something that is always devoted to a return, and thereby devoted to an impossible return,
– likewise in the opposition reality principle and pleasure principle, we have the notion of a fundamental opposition between reality and what is sought by the tendency.

In other words the notion that the satisfaction of the pleasure principle, insofar as it is always latent, underlying every exercise of the creation of the world, is something that always more or less tends to realize itself in a more or less hallucinatory form.
That the fundamental possibility of this organization – which is the one underlying the ego, the one of the tendency of the subject as such –
is to satisfy itself in an unreal realization, in a hallucinatory realization, there is the other term on which FREUD
powerfully lays the accent, and this from The Interpretation of Dreams, from the Traumdeutung, from the first full and articulated formulation
of the opposition of the reality principle and the pleasure principle.

These two positions are not as such articulated with one another. It is precisely by the fact that they present themselves
in FREUD as distinct, that this is well marked, that it is not around the relation of the subject to the object
that the development is centered. Each of these two terms finds its place at different points of the Freudian dialectic for the simple reason that in no case is the subject-object relation central; it appears only in a way that can appear as being supported in a direct way and without gap.

It is in this relation of ambivalence, or in that of a type of relations that have been called since ‘pregenital’,
which are the relations ‘seeing-being seen’, ‘attacking-being attacked’, ‘passive-active’, that the subject lives these relations which always, more or less implicitly, in a more or less manifest way, imply his identification with the partner of this relation, namely
that these relations are lived in a reciprocity – the term is valid here – of ambivalence of the position of the subject and of the partner.

Here is introduced this relation between the subject and the object which, for its part, is not only direct, without gap, but which is literally equivalence of the one to the other and it is that which could provide the pretext for bringing the object relation as such to the foreground.
But what are we going to see? This relation which in itself already announces, specifies, deserves the term ‘mirror relation’
which is that of reciprocity between the subject and the object, this something that in itself already raises so many questions
that it is to try to resolve them that I myself introduced into analytic theory this notion of ‘mirror stage’…
which is far from being purely and simply this connotation of a phenomenon in the development
of the child, that is to say of the moment when the child recognizes his own image, namely: it is that everything he learns in this captivation by his own image and precisely all the distance there is from his internal tensions to those very ones that are evoked in this relation to realization, to identification with this image
…this is nonetheless something that has served as theme, as central point for bringing this subject-object relation to the foreground as being, so to speak, the phenomenal scale to which could be related in a satisfactory and valid way
what until then had presented itself in terms not only pluralist but properly speaking conflictual,
as introducing an essentially dialectical relation between the different terms.

That one believed one could…
and one of the first to have emphasized it – but not as early as one believes – is ABRAHAM
…try to re-center everything introduced up to then in the evolution of the subject, in a way that is always seen
by reconstruction, in a retroactive way, starting from a central experience which is that of the conflictual tension between conscious
and unconscious, of the conflictual tension created by this fundamental fact that what is sought by the tendency is obscure,
that what consciousness recognizes of it is first and foremost misrecognition, that it is not along the path of consciousness that
the subject recognizes himself. There is something else and a beyond, and this beyond thereby and by that very fact poses the question of its structure,
of its principle and of its sense, being fundamentally misconstrued by the subject, beyond the reach of his knowledge.

This is abandoned by the very initiative of a certain number: first of personalities, then of significant currents
within analysis, as a function of an object whose terminal point is not the point from which we start:
we start backward to understand how this terminal point is reached, which moreover is never observed,
this ideal object which is literally unthinkable.

It is on the contrary conceived as a kind of point of aim, a point of culmination to which will converge a whole series of experiences, of elements, of notions partial to the object from a certain period, and quite especially from the moment when ABRAHAM in 1924 formulates it in his theory of the development of the libido, and which for many grounds the very law of analysis, of everything that happens there.

The coordinate system within which the whole analytic experience is situated, is that of the completion point
of this famous ideal, terminal, perfect, adequate object, of the one that is proposed in analysis as being the one that marks
by itself the goal attained, normalization if one can say, a term which already by itself alone introduces a world of categories
quite foreign to this point of departure of analysis, the normalization of the subject.

To illustrate this for you, I think I cannot do better than indicate to you that from the very formulation, and by the same token
from the admission of those who are engaged in this path – this is assuredly something that is formulated in very precise terms –
what is considered as the progress of analytic experience is to have brought to the foreground the relations of the subject to his environment.
This emphasis placed on ‘the environment’, this reduction that every analytic experience gives to something that is a kind
of return to the frankly objectifying position that puts in the foreground the existence of a certain individual and of a relation
more or less adequate, more or less adapted to his environment, this is something that, from page 761 to page 773
of the collective work[the P.D.A.] of which we were speaking, is articulated in these terms.

After having clearly marked that it is the emphasis placed on the relations of the subject to his environment that is at stake in the progress
of analysis, we learn incidentally that this is ‘particularly significant’ in the observation of little Hans:
in the observation of little Hans, the parents appear – we are told – without a personality of their own.

We are not forced to subscribe to this opinion, but what matters is what follows, this bears on what we were:

“…before the war of 1914, at the time when Western society, sure of itself, did not ask itself questions about its own permanence. On the contrary since 1926 the emphasis is placed on anxiety and the interaction of the organism and the environment,
it is also that the foundations of society have been shaken, the anxiety of a changing world is lived each day,
individuals recognize themselves as different. It is the very time when physics is searching for itself, when relativism, uncertainties, probabilism, seem to take from objective thought its confidence in itself.”

This reference to modern physics as the foundation of a new rationalism seems to me to be able to do without commentary. What is important is simply that there is there something that is curiously confessed in an indirect way:
it is that psychoanalysis is envisaged as a kind of social remedy, since that is what is put in the foreground
as characteristic of the driving element of its progress.

There is no need to know whether this is or is not well-founded, these are things that seem to us of little weight, it is simply
the context of things that are admitted there with a very great lightness that in itself can be of a certain use to us.

This is not unique, for what is characteristic of this collective work communicating within itself in a much more

• it seems – way made of a kind of curious homogenization than of an articulation properly speaking, is also that
  which in the first article to which I alluded a moment ago, marks in a deliberate way, by the notion truly formulated, that in the end what will give us the general conception necessary to the current understanding of the structure of a personality, is the angle of vision that one says is the most practical and the most prosaic there is: that of the social relations of the patient(underlined by the author)[P.D.A. pp. 761-773].

I shall pass over other terms which, with regard to the nature of confession, tell us that one conceives that one can see as shifting, artificial, such a conception of analysis. But does this not depend on the fact that the very object of such a discipline has – something no one thinks of contesting – marked variations over time?

This is indeed an explanation for the somewhat dazzling character of the different modes of approach given along this line, but it is perhaps not an explanation that should entirely satisfy us; I do not see what the objects of any discipline are that are not likewise subject to variations over time.

On the relation of the subject to the world we shall see affirmed and emphasized a kind of parallelism between the more or less assured state of maturation of instinctual activities, and the structure of the ego in a subject at a given moment. In short, from a certain moment this ego structure is considered as the lining, and very exactly in the end as the representative of the state of maturation of instinctual activities. There is no longer any difference, either on the dynamic plane or on the genetic plane, between the different stages of the progress of the ego and the different stages of instinctual progression.

These are terms which may to some of you not appear in themselves very essentially open to criticism; it does not matter, the question is not there, we shall see to what extent we shall or shall not be able to retain them. The consequence of this is their installation at the center of analysis in an altogether precise way that presents itself as a topology: there are the ‘pregenitals’ and the ‘genitals’.

The ‘pregenitals’ are weak individuals, and the coherence of their ego ‘depends closely on the persistence of certain objectal relations with a significant object’. This is written and articulated.

Here we can begin to ask questions. We shall perhaps see in a moment in passing, by reading the same texts, how far the notion of this unexplained ‘significant’ can go. Namely the absolute lack of differentiation, of discernment in this ‘significant’. The technical notion that this implies is the bringing into play, and by the same token the valorization within the analytic relation, of pregenital relations, those that characterize the relation of this ‘pregenital’ to his world, of which we are told that these relations to their object are characterized by some deficit:

‘…the loss of these relations, or of their object, which is synonymous since here the object exists only as a function of its relations with the subject, some leading to serious disorders of the activity of the ego, such as phenomena of depersonalization, psychotic disturbances.’

Here we find the point in which is sought the test of the testimony of this profound fragility of the relations of the ego to its object:

‘…the subject strives to maintain his object relations at any price, using all sorts of arrangements for this purpose – change of object with use of displacement or symbolization which, by the choice of a symbolic object arbitrarily charged with the same affective value as the initial object, will allow him not to find himself deprived of objectal relation.’

For this object onto which the affective value of the initial object is displaced, the term ‘auxiliary ego’ is fully justified, and this explains that:

‘…The genitals on the contrary possess an Ego whose strength and the exercise of its functions does not see itself depend on the possession of a significant object. Whereas for the former the loss of an important person subjectively speaking, to take the simplest example, brings their individuality into play, for them this loss, however painful it may be, in no way disturbs the solidity of their personality. They are not dependent on an objectal relation. That does not mean that they can easily do without any objectal relation, which moreover is practically unrealizable, so multiple and varied are object relations, but simply that their unity is not at the mercy of the loss of a contact with a significant object. That is what, from the point of view of the relation between the Ego and the object relation, differentiates them radically from the preceding.’
‘If, as in every neurosis, a normal evolution seems to have been stopped by the impossibility in which the subject found himself of resolving the last of the structuring conflicts of childhood, the one whose perfect liquidation, if one can express oneself thus, results in that so happy adaptation to the world that one calls the genital object relation and which gives every observer the feeling of a harmonious personality and to analysis the immediate perception of a sort of crystalline limpidness of the mind, which is, I repeat, more a limit than a reality, this difficulty of resolving the Oedipus very often has not been due to the sole problem it posed.’

Crystalline limpidness… We also see where this author, with the perfection of the objectal relation, can take us,
it is also to this:

‘The drives at issue will bring us to this notion, whereas pregenital forms mark this need for possession that is incoercible, unlimited, unconditional, involving a destructive aspect, (in genital forms), they are truly loving,
and if the subject does not for all that show himself to be oblationary, that is to say disinterested, and if his objects are as fundamentally narcissistic objects as in the preceding case, he is here capable of understanding, of adaptation to the other’s situation. Moreover the intimate structure of his object relations shows that the participation of the object in his own pleasure, is indispensable to the subject’s happiness. The proprieties, the desires, the needs of the object are taken into consideration to the highest degree.’

This suffices to show us, to open up a very serious problem, which is that of knowing what it matters to distinguish in maturation, which is neither a path, nor a perspective, nor a plane on which we could not indeed pose the question:

‘What does the outcome of a normal childhood and adolescence and maturity mean?’

But the essential distinction between the establishment of reality with everything it raises in problems of adaptation:
– to something that resists,
– to something that refuses,
– to something that is complex,
– to something that in any case implies that the notion of objectivity, as the most elementary experience shows us: that it is a thing distinct from what is aimed at in these very texts under the more or less implicit notion and covered by the different term of objectality, of the plenitude of the object.

This confusion that there is, is moreover articulated because the term objectivity is found in the text as being characteristic of this form of completed relation. There is assuredly a distance between:

– what is implied by a certain construction of the world considered as more or less satisfying at such and such an epoch, in effect determined certainly outside any historical relativity,

– and on the other hand this very relation to the other as being here its affective register, indeed sentimental, as the taking into consideration of the needs, the happiness, the pleasure of the other.

Assuredly this carries us much further since it is a matter of the constitution of the other as such, that is to say insofar as he speaks, that is to say insofar as he is a subject. We shall have to return to that. This is something it is not enough to cite, even by formulating the humorous remarks they sufficiently suggest by themselves, without for all that having made
the progress that is imposed.

This extraordinarily primary conception of the notion of instinctual evolution in analysis is something that is far from being received universally. It is certain that the notion of texts such as those of GLOVER for example, will bring you back
to a very different notion of the exploration of ‘object relations’, even named and well defined as such.

You will see, on approaching GLOVER’s texts, that essentially what seems to me to characterize the stages, the steps of the object at the different periods of individual development, is the object conceived as having quite another function. Analysis insists on introducing into the object a functional notion of a nature very different from that of a pure and simple correspondent, of a pure and simple coaptation of the object with a certain demand of the subject.

The object there has a quite other role; it is, so to speak, placed against a background of anxiety. It is insofar as the object is an instrument
to mask, to ward off, against the fundamental background of anxiety that characterizes, at the different stages of the subject’s development,
the relation of the subject to the world, that at each stage the subject must be characterized.

Here I cannot, at the end of today’s talk, not punctuate, illustrate with some example whatsoever that gives its relief to what I am bringing you concerning this conception, make you notice that the fundamental classical Freudian conception
of phobia is exactly nothing other than this.

FREUD and all those who have studied phobia with him and after him cannot fail to show that there is no direct relation of the supposed fear that would color with its fundamental mark this object by constituting it as such as a primitive object.
On the contrary there is a considerable distance between the fear at issue, which can indeed in certain cases be, and which can indeed also in other cases not be, a quite primitive fear, and the object which, in relation to it, is very essentially constituted to keep it at a distance, to enclose the subject in a certain circle, in a certain rampart, within which he shelters himself from these fears.

The object is essentially linked to the issuing of an alarm signal; the object is above all an advanced post against an instituted fear that gives it its role, its function at a moment, at a determined point of a certain crisis of the subject which is not for all that fundamentally
either a typical crisis, or an evolutive crisis.

This modern notion, so to speak, of phobia, is something that can be more or less legitimately affirmed.
We shall also have to criticize it, at the origin of the notion of object as it is promoted in the works and in the mode
of conducting analysis that is characteristic of the thought and technique of a GLOVER. That it is a matter of an anxiety
that is the anxiety of castration, we are told, is something that until a recent period was little contested.

It is nonetheless remarkable that things have come to the point that the desire for reconstruction in the genetic sense
has gone as far as this attempt to make us deduce the very construction of the paternal object from something that would come as the continuation, the culmination, the flowering of primitive objectal phobic constructions. There is a certain Report published on phobia and which goes exactly in this direction by a kind of curious reversal of the path which in analysis
had indeed allowed us to go back from phobia to the notion of a certain relation with anxiety,
of a protective function that the object of phobia plays in relation to this anxiety.

It is no less remarkable, in another register, to see what also becomes of the notion of fetish and the notion of fetishism.
I also introduce it today to show you that the fetish comes to – if we take the thing in the perspective
of ‘the object relation’ – fulfill a function which is indeed in analytic theory articulated as itself also
a certain protection against anxiety and – curious counter-thing – the same anxiety, that is to say the anxiety of castration.

It does not seem that it would be by the same bias that the fetish would be more particularly linked to castration anxiety insofar as it is linked to the perception of the absence of a phallic organ in the female subject, and to the negation of this absence. What does it matter!
You cannot fail to see that here too the object has a certain function of complementation in relation to something which
here presents itself as a hole, indeed as an abyss in reality, and that the question of knowing whether there is a relation between the two, whether there is something common between this phobic object and this fetish, arises.

But in posing the questions in these terms, perhaps it is necessary, without refusing to approach the problems from the object relation, to find in the phenomena themselves the occasion, the starting point of a critique which, even if we submit to the interrogation posed to us concerning the typical object, the ideal object, the functional object, all the forms of object you can suppose in man, brings us to take up in effect the question in this light.

But then, in not contenting ourselves with uniform explanations for different phenomena, and in centering for example our question at the outset on what makes the essentially different function of a phobia and a fetish, insofar as they are centered one and the other on the same background of fundamental anxiety, on which one and the other would be called as a measure of protection, as a measure of guarantee on the part of the subject. It is indeed there that I resolved to take
my starting point to show you from what point we started in our experience to arrive at the same problems.

For there is indeed to pose – no longer in a mythical way, nor in an abstract way, but in a direct way,
as objects are proposed to us – to realize that it is not enough to speak of the object in general, nor of an object that would have, by I know not what virtue of magical communication, the function of regulating relations with all the other objects.
As if the fact of having managed to become a ‘genital’ were enough to pose and to resolve all questions for us, namely for example
whether what can be for a ‘genital’ an object which does not seem to me not to have to be less enigmatic from the essentially biological point of view that is put in the foreground here, than one of the objects of ordinary human experience,
namely a coin, does not by itself pose the question of its objectal value.

Does the fact that in a certain register we lose it as a means of exchange, or any other kind of consideration for the exchange of any element whatsoever of human life transposed into its commodity value, not introduce for us in a thousand ways the question of what has in fact been resolved by a term very close, but not synonymous with the one we have just introduced in the notion of ‘fetish’, in Marxist theory[cf. Marx: commodity fetishism, Capital].
In short… the notion of object, the notion also if you like of screen object, and by the same token the function of this constitution of reality so singular on which from the beginning FREUD cast this truly striking light and to which we ask ourselves why one does not continue to grant its value: the notion of ‘screen memory’ as being quite especially constitutive of the past of each subject as such?

All these questions deserve indeed to be taken in themselves and for themselves, analyzed in their reciprocal relations, since it is from these relations that the necessary level distinctions can re-emerge that will allow us to define
in an articulated way why ‘a phobia’ and ‘a fetish’ are two different things, and whether there is indeed any relation
with the general use of the word ‘fetish’ in the particular use one can make of it concerning the precise form,
and the precise employment, that this term has to designate a sexual perversion.

It is therefore thus that we shall introduce the subject of our next talk; it will be on phobia and ‘the fetish’,
and I believe that this return to what is in fact experience, is the way by which we shall be able to restore
and give back its true value to the term object relation.