🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I did this week, for your benefit, some reading of what the psychoanalysts have written on this subject which will be ours this year, namely the object, and more especially this object we spoke about last time, which is the genital object. The genital object, to call it by its name, is the woman, so why not call it by its name? So that it is, in sum, a certain number of readings on female sexuality with which I treated myself.

It would be more important for you to do them than for me; that would make it easier for you to understand what I am going to be led to tell you on this subject, and then these readings are very instructive from other points of view as well, and chiefly on this one: that, if one thinks of RENAN’s well-known sentence: ‘Human stupidity gives an idea of the infinite’. I must add that if he had lived in our day he would have added: ‘…and the theoretical ramblings of psychoanalysts—not at all that I am in the process of assimilating them to stupidity—are an order of what can give an idea of the infinite.’.

For indeed it is extremely striking to see to what extraordinary difficulties the minds of the different analysts are subjected, after the statements themselves so abrupt, so astonishing, of FREUD. But FREUD, always all alone[sic], brought on this subject—for this is probably what the scope of what I will tell you today will be limited to: it is that assuredly if there is something that must to the maximum contradict the idea of this object… that we designated just now as a harmonious object, an object completing by its nature the subject’s relation to the object …if there is something that must contradict it, it is, I would not even say the analytic experience, for after all common experience, the relations between man and woman, is not a non-problematic thing: if it were not a problematic thing there would be no analysis at all but the precise formulations of FREUD are what bring most the notion of a step, of a gap, of something that is not right.

This does not mean that that suffices to define it, but the positive affirmation that it is not right is in FREUD:
– it is in Civilization and Its Discontents,
– it is in the lesson of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

This thus brings us back to questioning ourselves about the object. I remind you that the forgetting that is commonly made of the notion of object is not at all so pronounced in the relief with which the experience and the statement of Freudian doctrine situate and define this object:
– object which first presents itself always in a quest for the lost object,
– and for the object as always being the found object.

The two oppose in the most categorical way the notion of the object insofar as completing, to oppose the situation in which the subject in relation to the object is very precisely the object itself taken in a quest, whereas it is to the notion of an autonomous subject that the idea of the completing object leads. I also already emphasized last time this notion of the hallucinated object, of the hallucinated object against a background of anxious reality, which is a notion of the object as it arises from the exercise of what FREUD calls the primary system of desire.

And entirely opposed to that in analytic practice, the notion of object in the end that is reduced to the real. It is a matter of recovering the real. The object stands out, no longer against a background of anxiety, but against a background of common reality if one can say, the term of analytic research being to realize that there is no reason to be afraid of it, another term which is not the same as that of anxiety.

And finally the third term in which it appears to us when we see it and follow it in FREUD, is this term of imaginary reciprocity, namely that in every relation with the object the place of the related terms is occupied simultaneously by the subject, that identification with the object is at the root of every relation to the object.

In truth, this last point is not forgotten, but it is obviously the one to which the practice of object relation in modern analytic technique clings the most, with as a result what I shall call ‘this imperialism of meaning’. Since you can identify with me, since I can identify with you, it is assuredly of the two of us the ego that has the best adaptation to reality that is the best model.

In the end it is to identification with the analyst’s ego that, in an ideal outline, the progress of the analysis will be reduced. In truth, I would like to illustrate this to show you the extreme deviation that such partiality in handling the object relation can condition, by reminding you of this for example, because it has been more particularly illustrated by the practice of obsessional neurosis.

If obsessional neurosis is—as most of those who are here think—this structuring notion as to the obsessional that can be expressed roughly as follows ‘What is an obsessional?’: it is in sum an actor who plays his role, carries out a certain number of acts as if he were dead, it is a way of sheltering himself from death. This game to which he gives himself, in a way, is a living game that consists in showing that he is invulnerable. For this he practiced a sort of taming that conditions all his approaches to others. It is seen in a kind of exhibition to show how far he can go in the exercise.

There are all the characteristics of a game, including the illusory characteristics: how far can this little other go who is only his alter-ego, the double of himself, and this before an Other who attends the spectacle in which he himself is a spectator, for all his pleasure in the game and his possibility reside there.

But on the other hand he does not know what place he occupies, and that is what is unconscious in him. What he does, he does for alibi purposes, that he can glimpse; he clearly realizes that the game is not played where he is, and that is why almost nothing of what happens has for him any true importance, but not that he knows from where he sees all that, and in the end who it is that leads the game. Assuredly we know that it is himself, but we can also make a thousand errors if we do not know where it is led, this game, whence the notion of object, and of an object significant for this subject.

It would be quite erroneous to believe that it is in any terms of dual relation that this object can be designated, of course with the notion of the object relation as it is elaborated in the author. You will see where that leads…

But no doubt it is quite clear that in this very complex situation, the notion of the object is not given immediately since it is very precisely only insofar as he participates in an illusory game that what is properly speaking the object, namely the game of aggressive retaliation, this game of ruse, this game of going as close as possible to death, and at the same time being beyond the reach of all blows by killing in a way in advance within himself—and mortifying, if one can say, desire. The notion of object there is infinitely complex and deserves to be stressed at every instant so that we at least know what object we are talking about.

We shall try to give this notion of object a uniform use that allows us, in our vocabulary, to find our way. It is a notion, not one that slips away, but one that presents itself as absolutely difficult to pin down. To reinforce our comparison, it is a matter of demonstrating a certain thing that he has articulated for that other spectator that he is without knowing it, and in whose place he puts us as transference advances.

What is the analyst going to do with this notion of the object relation? I ask you to resume the analysis of the reading of the observations as representing the progress of the analysis of an obsessive in the case I am talking about, in the author I am talking about.

You will see that the way of handling the object relation in this case consists very exactly in doing something that would be analogous to what would happen if, attending a circus scene where one and the other administer to each other a series of alternating pairs of slaps, this consisted in going down into the ring and striving to be afraid of receiving slaps. On the contrary it is by virtue of his aggressiveness that he gives them and that the relation of the interview with him is an aggressive relation. Thereupon, ‘Monsieur Loyal’ arrives and says:

‘Come now, all this is not reasonable, let go, swallow your stick mutually, so you will have it in the right place, you will have internalized it.’

This is indeed a way of resolving the situation and giving it its outcome. One can accompany it with a little song, the truly imperishable one of a certain named […] who was a sort of genius. One will absolutely never understand anything, either about what I call on this occasion the character in a way sacred in a way of exhibition, of office to which one would attend on this occasion, however black it may appear, but one will not understand either perhaps what ‘the object relation’ properly speaking means.

There appears in filigree the character and the deeply oral background of the imaginary object relation which in a way also allows us to see what can be tightly, rigorously imaginary about a practice that cannot escape of course the laws of the imaginary, of this dual relation that it takes for real, for in the end what is the outcome of this object relation is the fantasy of phallic incorporation. Phallic why?

Experience does not follow the ideal notion we can have of its accomplishment; it necessarily presents itself by bringing its paradoxes into all the sharper relief, and you will see it, that is today what I introduce by the step I am trying to make you take, all the accomplishment that the dual relation as such makes—as one approaches it—something that is this imaginary object called the phallus come to the foreground as a privileged object.

The whole notion of object is impossible to conduct, impossible to understand, impossible even to exercise, if one does not put into it as an element, I do not say a mediator for that would be taking a step we have not yet taken together, a third element which is an element… the phallus, to say it plainly. What I recall today to the foreground in this schema that at the end of the previous year I had given you as at once a conclusion to the element of the analysis of the signifier to which the exploration of psychosis had led, but which was also an introduction, in a way the inaugural schema of what this year I am going to propose to you concerning the object relation.

The imaginary relation, whatever it may be, is modulated on a certain relation that is effectively fundamental to it, which is the ‘mother-child’ relation, of course with all that is problematic in it and assuredly well made to give the idea that it is a real relation. Indeed it is there the point toward which all the analysis of the analytic situation is currently directed, which tries to be reduced in the last terms to something that can be conceived as the development of ‘mother-child’ relations with what is inscribed from it and what later, in genesis, bears the traces and reflections of this initial position.

It is impossible, by examining a certain number of points of analytic experience, to exercise, to give its development, even in the authors who made it the foundation of all analytic genesis properly speaking, to bring in this imaginary element, without, at the center of the notion of the object relation, something we can call ‘the phallicism of analytic experience’ showing itself as a key point.

This is demonstrated by experience, by the evolution of analytic theory and in particular by what I will try to show you in the course of this lecture, namely the impasses that result from every attempt to reduce this imaginary phallicism to whatever real datum, through the absence of the trinity of terms: symbolic, imaginary and real.

One can, in the end, only seek—for recovering the origin of everything that happens, of all the analytic dialectic—one can only seek to refer to the real. To give a last stroke and a last touch to this aim, this way in which the dual relation is conducted in a certain orientation, a theorization of analytic experience, I will still make a whole reminder, for it is worth noting, on a point that is precisely the heading of the collective work I spoke to you about [La P.D.A.].

When the analyst, entering into the obsessional’s imaginary game, insists on making him recognize his aggressiveness, that is to say making him place the analyst in the dual relation, in the imaginary relation, the one I was calling just now that of the reciprocals, we have in the text something that gives, as a testimony of the refusal, of the misrecognition the subject has of the situation, the fact that for example the subject never wants to express his aggressiveness and expresses it only as a slight annoyance provoked by technical rigidity.

The author thus admits that he insists and that he perpetually brings the subject back to this theme, as if it were the central, significant theme, and the author adds in a significant way: ‘For after all everyone knows well that annoyance and irony are of the class of aggressive manifestations’, as if it were obvious that annoyance were typical and characteristic of aggressive relation as such; one knows that aggression can be provoked by any other feeling, and that for example a feeling of love is not at all excluded as being at the origin of a reaction of aggression. As for qualifying as being, by its nature, aggressive, a reaction like that of irony, that does not seem to me compatible with what everyone knows, namely that irony is not an aggressive reaction; irony is above all a way of questioning, a mode of question; if there is an aggressive element, it is secondarily to the structure of the question element that there is in irony.

This shows you to what reduction of plane an object relation leads of which, after all, I take the resolution in this form never again, from now on nor otherwise, to speak to you. By contrast here we are led to the question: what are the relations between anyone? And it is the question both first and fundamental from which we must indeed start because we will have to return to it; it is the one we will arrive at. All the ambiguity of the question raised around the object is summed up in this: ‘is the object or is it not the real?’. The notion of the object, its handling within analysis must it or must it not… but we arrive at it both by way of our elaborated vocabulary that we use here, symbolic, imaginary and real, and also by the most immediate intuition of what that can in the end represent for you spontaneously, on reading what right away the thing represents for you when one talks to you about it … is the object yes or no the real. When one speaks of the object relation, is one speaking purely and simply of access to the real, this access that must be the termination of analysis? What is found in the real, is it the object?

This is worth asking ourselves, for after all without even going to the heart of the problematic of phallicism, of the one I introduce today, that is to say without noticing a truly salient point of analytic experience by which a major object around which the dialectic of individual development turns, as well as all the dialectic of an analysis, that is to say an object that is taken as such, for we will see in more detail that one must not confuse phallus and penis.

If it was necessary to make the distinction, if around the years 1920-1930 the notion of phallicism and of the phallic period was ordered around an immense interloque that occupied the whole analytic community, it was to distinguish
– the penis as a real organ with functions we can define by certain real coordinates,
– and the phallus in its imaginary function.
If there were only that, it is worth our asking what the notion of object means.

For one cannot say that this object is not, in analytic dialectic, a prevailing object and an object of which the individual has the idea as such, whose isolation… for never having been formulated as being, properly speaking, only conceivable on the plane of the imaginary … nonetheless represents, since what FREUD brought of it at a certain date and what such and such replied, and in particular JONES, how the notion of phallicism implies a disengagement of this category of the imaginary. That is what you will see arise on every line.

But even before entering into it, let us ask ourselves the question of what the relation means, the reciprocal position of the object and the real. There is more than one way to approach this question, for as soon as we approach it we realize well that the real has more than one meaning. I think that some of you cannot fail to give a small sigh of relief:

‘At last he is going to talk to us about the famous real that until now had remained in the shadows’.

Indeed we do not have to be astonished that the real is something that is at the limit of our experience. It is that these conditions so artificial, contrary to what we are told—that it is such a simple situation—it is a position in relation to the real that is sufficiently explained by our experience; nevertheless we can only refer to it when we theorize. It is then appropriate to grasp what we mean when, in theorizing, we invoke the real.

It is unlikely that at the outset we all have the same notion of this, but it is likely that we can all access a certain distinction, a certain essential dissociation to bring regarding the handling of this term real or reality, if we look closely at what use is made of it. When one speaks of ‘the real’ one can be aiming at several things. First the whole of what effectively happens; it is the notion of ‘reality’ that is implied in the German term which has there the advantage of discerning in reality a function that the French language poorly allows to isolate, Wirklichkeit. That is what implies in itself every possibility of effects, of Wirkung, of the whole mechanism.

Here I will make only a few reflections in passing to show to what extent psychoanalysts remain prisoners of this category extremely foreign to everything that their practice nonetheless should be able, it seems, to introduce them to, I would say gladly, at the point of this very notion of ‘reality’.

If it is conceivable that a mind of the mechano-dynamist tradition… of the tradition that goes back to the XVIIIth-century attempt at the elaboration of ‘Man the Machine’ in science … if it is conceivable that from a certain perspective everything that happens at the level of mental life requires that we refer it to something that presents itself as ‘material’, in what can this have the least interest for an analyst insofar as the very principle of the exercise of his technique, of his function, plays out in a succession of effects of which it is admitted by hypothesis, if he is an analyst, that they have their own order and that it is very exactly the perspective he must take on them if he follows FREUD, if he conceives what directs the whole spirit of the system, that is to say an energetic perspective?

Let me illustrate this by a comparison, to make you clearly understand the fascination of what one can find in matter, the primitive Stoff of what is put into play by something so fascinating for the medical mind, that one thinks one is saying something when one gratuitously affirms that we, like all other doctors, put at the base, at the principle, of everything that is exercised in analysis, an organic reality, something that, in the end, must be found in reality.

FREUD said it just as simply; one must refer to where he said it and see what function that has. But this remains at bottom a kind of need for reassurance that one sees analysts, in the course of their texts, take up incessantly as one knocks on wood. In the end it is quite clear that we do not put into play there anything other than mechanisms that are superficial and that everything must be referred to the last term, to something that we will perhaps know one day, which is the principal matter that is at the origin of everything that happens.

Let me make a simple comparison to show you the kind of absurdity, this for an analyst, provided that he admits the order in which he moves, the order of effectiveness, that is the first notion of reality: it is roughly as if someone who has to deal with a hydroelectric plant that is in the very middle of the current of a great river, the Rhine for example, proved that to understand, to speak of what happens in this machine… in the machine there accumulates what is at the principle of the accumulation of whatever energy, on this occasion this electrical force that can then be distributed and made available to consumers … it is very precisely something that has the closest relation with the machine above all, and that not only will one say nothing more, but that one will literally say nothing at all by dreaming of the moment when the landscape was still virgin, when the Rhine’s waters flowed in abundance. But to say that there is something in whatever that advances us by saying that ‘the energy was in a way already there in a virtual state in the current of the river’, is to say something that properly speaking means nothing.

For energy only begins to interest us on this occasion from the moment it is accumulated, and it is accumulated only from the moment the machines have begun to operate in a certain way, no doubt animated by a thing that is a sort of definitive propulsion that comes from the river’s current.

But reference to the river’s current as being the primitive order of this energy can come precisely only to the idea of someone who would be entirely mad, and to a notion properly speaking of the order of mana concerning this thing of a very different order that is energy, and even that is force, and who would at all costs want to recover the permanence of what is in the end accumulated as the element of Wirkung, of possible Wirklichkeit, with something that would be there in a way from all eternity. In other words this sort of need we have to think, to confuse the Stoff or the primitive matter or the impulse or the flow or the tendency with what is really at stake in the exercise of analytic reality, is something that represents nothing other than a misrecognition of symbolic Wirklichkeit.

Namely that it is precisely in conflict, in dialectic, in the organization and structuring of elements that are composed, that are built up, that this composition and this building give to what is at issue a wholly other energetic scope. It is to misrecognize the proper reality in which we move to preserve this need to speak of ultimate reality as if it were elsewhere than in this very exercise.

There is another use of the notion of reality that is made in analysis, that one much more important has nothing to do with this reference that I can truly qualify on this occasion as superstitious, which is a kind of sequel, of so-called ‘organicist’ postulate that can literally have no meaning in the analytic perspective. I will show you that it has no meaning any longer in that order there where FREUD apparently mentions it; the other question, in the object relation, of reality, is the one that is put into play in the double principle: pleasure principle, and reality principle. What is at issue there is something quite different, for it is quite clear that the pleasure principle is not something that is exercised in a less real way, I even think that analysis is made to demonstrate the contrary. Here the use of the term reality is entirely different.

There is something rather striking: it is that this usage, which proved at the outset so fruitful, which allowed the terms primary system and secondary system in the order of the psyche, as the progress of analysis advanced, proved more problematic, but in a way somewhat very elusive. To notice the distance traveled between the first use that was made of the opposition of these two principles and the point we arrive at now with a certain slippage, one almost has to refer to what happens from time to time: is the child who says that ‘the king is completely naked’ a simpleton, is he a genius, is he a wag, is he ferocious?

No one will ever know anything about it. He is assuredly someone rather liberating in any case, and things like that happen: analysts return to a kind of primitive intuition that everything one had been saying up to then explained nothing.

That is what happened to D.W. WINNICOTT; he wrote a short article to speak about what he calls the ‘transitional object’. Let us think object transition or transitional phenomenon. He simply notes that as we become more interested in the function of the mother as being absolutely primordial, decisive in the child’s apprehension of reality, that is to say as we have substituted for the dialectical and impersonal opposition of the two principles, the reality principle and the pleasure principle, something to which we have given actors, subjects, no doubt these are very ideal subjects, no doubt these are actors who resemble much more a kind of figuration or imaginary puppet show, but it is there that we have arrived:

– this pleasure principle we have identified with a certain object relation, namely the maternal breast,

– this reality principle we have identified with the fact that the child must learn to do without it.

Very rightly Mr. WINNICOTT notes that in the end if everything goes well… for it is important that everything goes well, we are at the point of making everything that goes wrong derive from a primordial anomaly, from frustration, the term frustration becoming in our dialectic the key term … WINNICOTT notes that in sum everything is going to happen as if at the outset, for things to go well, namely for the child not to be traumatized, it was necessary for the mother to operate by always being there at the moment it is necessary, that is to say precisely by coming to place at the spot—at the moment of delirious hallucination—the real object that fills him.

So there is at the outset no kind of distinction in the ideal ‘mother-child’ relation between:
– the hallucination arisen in principle from the notion we have of the primary system, the hallucination arisen of the maternal breast,
– and real fulfillment, the encounter with the real object at issue.
So there is at the outset, if everything goes well, no way for the child to distinguish:
– what is of the order of satisfaction founded on hallucination, which is the one that is linked to the exercise and functioning of the primary system,
– and the apprehension of the real that fills him and effectively satisfies him.

All that will be at issue is that progressively the mother teaches the child to undergo these frustrations, at the same time to perceive, in the form of a certain inaugural tension, the difference there is between reality and illusion. And the difference can be exercised only by way of a disillusionment, that is to say that from time to time reality does not coincide with the hallucination arisen from desire.

WINNICOTT simply notes that the primary fact is that it is [desire] strictly inconceivable within such a dialectic, this: how could anything be elaborated that goes further than the notion of an object strictly corresponding to primary desire, and that the extreme diversity of objects, both instrumental and fantasmatic, that intervene in the development of the field of human desire are strictly unthinkable in such a dialectic from the moment one embodies it in two real actors, the mother and the child.

The second thing is a strictly experiential fact: it is that even in the very small child, we see appear these objects that he calls ‘transitional’ of which we cannot say on which side they are situated in this dialectic, this reduced dialectic, this embodied dialectic of hallucination and real object, namely what he calls transitional objects. Namely, to illustrate them: all these objects of the child’s play, toys properly speaking—the child does not need to be given them in order to make them with everything that falls under his hand—these are the transitional objects about which there is no question to be asked whether they are more subjective or more objective, they are of another nature beyond which WINNICOTT does not cross the limit.

To name them, we will call them simply imaginary. We will immediately be so well within the imaginary that, through the certainly very hesitant works, very full of detours, very full of confusion as well of the authors, we see that it is nevertheless always to these objects that the authors are brought back who, for example, seek to explain to themselves the origin of a fact like the existence of the fetish, the sexual fetish, how they are led to do as much as they can to see what are the common points there are with the fetish, which comes to occupy the foreground of objectal demands for the major satisfaction there can be for a subject, namely sexual satisfaction.

They are led to seek, to spy in the child the somewhat privileged handling of a tiny object, a handkerchief stolen from his mother, a corner of bedsheet, some accidental bit of reality made reachable to the child’s grasp and which appears in this period which, to be called here ‘transitional’, does not constitute an intermediate period but a permanent period of the child’s development; they are led there to almost confuse them without asking themselves the distance there can be between the erotization of this object and the first appearance of this object as imaginary.

Here what we see is what is forgotten in such a dialectic, a forgetting which of course forces these forms of supplementation on which I put the accent with regard to WINNICOTT’s article; what is forgotten is that one of the most essential springs of all analytic experience—and this from the beginning—is the notion of the lack of the object, which is not quite the same thing. And I remind you that things have gone in a certain direction: that never in our concrete exercise of analytic theory can we do without a notion of lack of the object as central, not as a negative, but as the very spring of the subject’s relation to the world.

Analysis begins from its outset—analysis of neurosis—begins with the notion—so paradoxical that one can say that it is not yet completely elaborated—of castration. We believe that we always speak of it, as one spoke of it in FREUD’s time; that is quite an error: we speak of it less and less; we are wrong besides because what we speak about much more is the notion of frustration. There is still a third term that one begins to speak about, or more exactly that we will see how necessarily the notion was introduced, and in what path and by what requirement: it is the notion of privation. These are not at all three equivalent things. To distinguish them I would like to make you a few remarks that are simply first to try to make you understand what it is.

Of course one must begin with what is most familiar to us by usage, that is to say the notion of frustration. What difference is there between a frustration and a privation? One must indeed start from there since one is at the point of introducing the notion of privation and of saying that in the psyche these two notions are experienced in the same way.

That is something very bold, but it is clear that privation, we will have to refer to it insofar as if phallicism, namely the requirement of the phallus, is, as FREUD says, the major point of the whole imaginary game in the conflictual progress that is the one described by the analysis of the subject, one cannot speak, with regard to anything other than the imaginary, namely the real, one can speak in his case only of privation. It is not by that route that the phallic requirement is exercised. For one of the things that appears most problematic is how a being presented as a totality can feel deprived of something that by definition he does not have? We will say that privation is essentially something that, in its nature as lack, is a real lack, it is a hole.

The notion we have of frustration, simply by referring to the usage that is actually made of these notions when we speak of them, is the notion of a harm. It is an injury, a damage. This damage as we are accustomed to seeing it be exercised, the way we bring it into play in our dialectic, it is never a matter of anything but an imaginary harm. Frustration is by essence the domain of the claim, the dimension of something that is desired and that is not held, but that is desired without any reference to any possibility, either of satisfaction or of acquisition.

Frustration is by itself the domain of unbridled demands, the domain of lawless demands. The center of the notion of frustration, insofar as it is one of the categories of lack, is an imaginary harm. It is on the imaginary plane that frustration is situated.

It may be easier for us, from these two remarks, to notice that castration, whose nature I repeat to you, namely the essential nature of drama, castration has been much more abandoned, neglected, than it has been deepened. It suffices, to introduce it for us—and in the most vivid way—to say that it is in a way absolutely coordinated with the notion of the primordial law, of what there is of fundamental law in the prohibition of incest and in the structure of the Oedipus, that castration was introduced by FREUD, no doubt through something that in the end represents, if we think of it now, the sense of what was first stated by FREUD.

This was done by a kind of deadly leap in experience. That he put something as paradoxical as castration at the center of the decisive crisis, of the formative crisis, of the major crisis that is the Oedipus, is something we can only marvel at afterward, for it is certainly marvelous that we think only of not speaking about it.

Castration is something that can only be classed in the category of symbolic debt. The distance there is between:
– symbolic debt,
– imaginary debt,
– and hole, real absence,
is something that allows us to situate these three elements, these three elements that we will call the three reference terms of the lack of the object. This no doubt may perhaps seem to some not to go without some reserve. They will be right because in reality one must hold strongly to the central notion that these are categories of lack of the object for this to be valid. I say lack of the object but not ‘object’, for if we place ourselves at the level of the object we will be able to ask ourselves the question: what is the object that is lacking in these three cases?

It is at the level of castration that it is immediately the clearest: what is lacking at the level of castration insofar as it is constituted by symbolic debt, the something that sanctions the law, the something that gives it its support and its inverse, what is punishment, it is quite clear that in our analytic experience it is not a real object. It is only in the law of Manu that one says that he who has slept with his mother cuts off his genitals and—holding them in his hand—goes straight toward the west until death ensues. We have, until further order, observed these things only in exceedingly rare cases that have nothing to do with our experience, and that seem to us to deserve explanations that moreover remain of an entirely different order than that of the structuring and normalizing mechanisms ordinarily brought into play in our experience. The object is imaginary; the castration at issue is always an imaginary object.

What made it easier for us to believe that frustration was something that should allow us to go far more easily to the heart of the problems is this community there is between the imaginary character of the object of castration and the fact that frustration is an imaginary lack of the object. Now it is not at all required that lack and object and even a third term that we will call the agent be of the same level in these categories. In fact the object of castration is an imaginary object; that is what must make us pose the question of what the phallus is that one took so long to identify as such.

By contrast the object of frustration is indeed—however imaginary the frustration may be—in its nature a real object; it is always of something real that, for the child for example, for the subject chosen of our dialectic of frustration, it is indeed a real object that is in trouble.

This will help us perfectly to notice what is an obviousness, for which a bit more metaphysical handling of the terms is needed than one is accustomed to doing when one refers precisely to these criteria of reality of which we were speaking just now: it is that it is quite clear that the object of privation, it, is never anything but a symbolic object. This is quite clear.

What is of the order of privation, what is not in its place or precisely what is not from the point of view of the real, that means absolutely nothing. Everything that is real is always and obligatorily in its place, even when one disturbs it. The real has as a property, first, to carry its place on the sole of its shoes; you can upset the real as much as you like, it nonetheless remains that our bodies will, after their explosion, still be in their place, in their place as pieces.

The absence of something in the real is a purely symbolic thing, that is to say insofar as we define by the law that it should be there, it is that an object is lacking in its place. Think as a reference that there is none better than thinking of what happens when you ask for a book in a library: one tells you that it is missing from its place; it can be right next to it, it nonetheless remains that in principle it is missing from its place; it is in principle invisible; that does not mean that the librarian lives in an entirely symbolic world. When we speak of privation, it is a matter of symbolic objects and nothing else.

This may seem a bit abstract, but you will see how much it will serve us later to detect these kinds of sleight-of-hand tricks thanks to which one gives solutions that are not solutions to problems that are false problems. In other words, thanks to which later, in the dialectic of what is discussed to arrive at breaking with what seems intolerable, which is the completely different evolution of what is called sexuality in analytic terms in man and in woman, the desperate efforts to bring the two terms back to a single principle whereas perhaps from the outset there is something that allows one to explain and to conceive in a very simple and very clear way why their evolutions will be very different.

I simply want to add to it something that will also find its scope: it is the notion of an agent. I know that here I am making a leap that would require that I return to the imaginary triad of the mother, the child and the phallus, but I do not have the time to do it; I simply want to complete the tableau. The agent too will play its role in this lack of the object, for for frustration we have the preeminent notion that it is the mother who plays the role.

What is the agent of frustration? Is it symbolic, imaginary or real? What is the agent of privation? That is to say in the end is it something that has no kind of real existence as I noted just now? These are questions that at least deserve to be asked.

I will leave—at the end of this session—this question open, for if it is quite clear that the answer could perhaps here begin, even be deduced in an entirely formal way, it could in no case, at the point we are at, be satisfactory because precisely the notion of the agent is something that falls entirely outside the framework of what we limited ourselves to today, namely a first question involving the relations of the object and the real.

The agent is manifestly here something that is of another order. Nevertheless you see that the question of the qualification of the agent at these three levels is a question that manifestly is suggested by the beginning of the construction of the phallus.