🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Ladies and Gentlemen, you heard last evening interventions on a subject: The image of the body. Circumstances meant that on certain of them I did not say anything other than the general affirmation of the good I thought of them, and if I had had to speak about it, it would have been to situate it in relation to what we are doing here, that is to say, in sum, to do teaching.
That is something to which I am reluctant in a context of scientific work that is truly of an entirely different nature,
and I am not displeased not to have had to speak about it.

But anyway, starting from this image of the body as it was presented to us last evening, I think that in order to situate it in relation
to what we are doing, you all know sufficiently this thing obvious above all: that it is not an object. There was talk of object there in an attempt to define the stages, and indeed the notion of object is important, but not only is this image of the body
as you saw it presented last evening not an object, but I would say that what will best allow us to situate it as against other imaginary formations is that it cannot itself become an object.

This is a very simple remark that was made directly by no one, except in a manner in some way indirect.
For if we have to deal, in analytic experience, with objects about which we can ask ourselves the question
of their imaginary nature – I did not say that they were; I say that it is precisely the question we are asking ourselves here – if that is
the central point from which we place ourselves to introduce at the level of the clinic what interests us in the notion of the object, that does not mean either that it is a point where we stand, namely that we start from the hypothesis of the imaginary object. We start from it so little that it is the question we ask ourselves.

But this possibly imaginary object as it is in fact given to us in analytic experience is already known to you: to fix ideas I have already taken two examples on which I said that I was going to focus: the phobia and the fetish.
These are objects that are far, up to now – you would be wrong to believe it – from having revealed their secret.

Whatever exercise, acrobatics, contortion, phantasmatic genesis one has indulged in, it nonetheless remains quite mysterious
that at certain periods of the life of children, male or female, they believe themselves obliged to be afraid of lions, which is not
an object encountered in an excessively common way in their experience. It is difficult to make emerge the form
of a kind of primitive datum for example inscribed in the image of the body.

One can do anything; there nonetheless remains a residue. It is always the residues in scientific explanations that are what is most fertile to consider; in any case it is certainly not by making them disappear that one makes progress. Likewise you may have noticed that it nonetheless remains everywhere quite clear that the number of sexual fetishes is quite limited. Why?

When you have gotten beyond shoes which play there such an astonishing role that one can wonder how it happens
that one does not pay more attention to them, one finds hardly more than garters, socks, bras, and others.
All that stays quite close to the skin, but the principal thing is the shoe; there too there is residue.

These are objects about which we ask ourselves whether they are imaginary objects, and whether one can conceive their kinetic value in the economy of libido, on the sole indication of what can come out of a genesis, that is to say in the end always the notion of an ectopy in a certain typical relation of something arisen from another typical relation,
said of stages, succeeding the previous ones. No matter!

Be that as it may, the objects…
if these are objects with which you dealt last evening
…it is quite clear that they represent something about which we are very embarrassed, which is certainly extremely fascinating: one only has to see the interest raised in the assembly and the importance of the discussion.

But these objects are, at first glance, if we wanted to bring them together, we would say that they are constructions
that order, organize, articulate, as was said, a certain lived experience, but what is quite striking is the use
that is made of them by the operator, Mrs DOLTO in this case: it is there a very certain way of something
that is situated straightaway and in a perfectly understandable way only from the notion of the signifier.

Mrs DOLTO uses it as the signifier:

– it is as signifier that it comes into play in her dialogue,

– it is as signifier that it represents something.

And this is particularly evident in the fact that none of them is sustained by itself: it is always in relation to another of these images that each takes its crystallizing value, orienting, penetrating in every way the subject with whom it deals, namely the young child.

We are thus brought back once more to the notion of the signifier, and for this I would like – since it is a matter of teaching
and since there is nothing more important than misunderstandings – to tell you that I have been able to ascertain in a direct and indirect way
that certain of the things I said last time were not understood.

When I spoke of the notion of reality, when I said that psychoanalysts had a notion of reality, scientific,
that it joins that which for decades has hampered the progress of psychiatry, and precisely it is the hindrance from which one could have believed that psychoanalysis would deliver it, namely to go looking for reality in something that would have the character of being more material.

And in order to make myself understood I gave the example of the hydroelectric plant, and I said as if someone dealing with the different accidents that can happen at the hydroelectric plant, including among the accidents its reduction, its putting
into standby, its enlargements, its repairs, as if someone believed always to be able to reason in a valid way concerning what there is to do with the said plant by referring back to the primitive matter that comes into play to make it run,
namely on the occasion the waterfall.

To which one came to tell me:
what are you looking for there; imagine well that for the engineer this waterfall is everything, and since you speak of energy accumulated in this plant, this energy is nothing other than the transformation of the potential energy that is given in advance in the site where we have installed the plant, and when the engineer has measured the height of the water table for example
in relation to the level where it will discharge, he can do the calculation. Everything is already given of the potential energy that will come
into play, and the power of the plant is already given precisely by the prior conditions.

In truth, there are several remarks to make there. The first is this: that having to speak to you of reality, and having begun by defining it by Wirklichkeit, by the effectiveness of the whole system, on the occasion the psychic system,
that having on the other hand wanted to specify to you the mythical character of a certain way of conceiving this reality,
and having situated it by this example, I did not arrive at the third point which is still that under which this theme of the real can present itself, namely precisely what is before; we constantly have to do with it.

Of course this is still precisely a way of considering reality, what is before a certain symbolic functioning
has been exercised, and of course that is what is most solid in the mirage that rests in the objection that was made to me.
For in truth I am not at all in the process here of denying that there is something that is before: before for example that ‘I’ come about from the ‘self’ or from the ‘it’ or from the ‘id’, there was something of which the ‘id’ was, of course. It is simply a matter of knowing what this ‘id’ is.

I am told that in the case of the plant, what there is before is indeed energy. I have never said anything else, but between energy and natural reality there is a world, for energy only begins to count from the moment you measure it, and you only think of measuring it from the moment plants function, about which you are obliged to make numerous calculations among which there enters indeed the energy that you may have at your disposal.

But this notion of energy is very effectively constructed on the necessity of a producing civilization that wants to find itself in its accounts concerning the work that it is necessary to expend in order to obtain from it this available recompense of effectiveness. This energy you always measure, for example between two reference points. There is no absolute energy of the natural reservoir; there is an energy of this reservoir in relation to the lower level where the liquid will carry itself in flow when you have adjoined to this reservoir a spillway, but a spillway will not suffice, by itself alone, to allow any calculation of energy;
it is in relation to the plane, to the lower water level that this energy will be calculable.

Moreover the question is not there; the question is that certain natural conditions must be realized for this to have the least interest in being calculated, for it is always also true that any difference of level in the flow of water,
whether it is a small stream or even droplets, will always potentially have a certain value of energy in reserve, simply will interest strictly no one.

It must, to put it plainly, already be the case that there is something in nature that presents the materials that will come into play in the use of the machine in a certain privileged way, to put it plainly: ‘signifying’, that presents itself as usable, as signifying, as measurable on the occasion in order to allow the installation of a plant. On the plane of a system taken as signifying,
it is something of course that is not to be contested.

The important thing, the comparison with the psyche, we are going to see now how it takes shape. It takes shape in two points: FREUD, carried by the energetic notion precisely, designated something as being a notion of which one must make use
in analysis in a way comparable to that of energy.

It is a notion which like energy is entirely abstract and consists only in being able to posit,
and still in a virtual way, in analysis a simple petition of principle intended to allow a certain play of thought, energy strictly as that introduced by the notion of equivalence, that is to say the notion of a common measure
between manifestations that present themselves as qualitatively quite different. This notion of energy is precisely
the notion of libido; there is nothing less fixed to a material support than the notion of libido in analysis.

One marvels that in the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, FREUD hardly had to modify a passage about which
for the first time in 1905 he had spoken of the physical support of libido in terms such that the discovery,
the later diffusion of the notion of sexual hormones had led him to have almost not to modify this passage.

There is no marvel there. That means that in all cases this reference to a chemical support strictly speaking
is of no importance whatsoever. He says it:
– whether there is one,
– whether there are several,
– whether there is one for femininity and one for masculinity, or two or three for each,
– or whether they are interchangeable,
– or whether there is only one and one only as it is indeed quite possible that it is,
…this has – he says – no kind of importance, for in any case analytic experience gives us as a necessity
to think that there is only one single and unique libido.

He thus situates libido right away on a plane, if I may say, neutralized. As paradoxical as the term may seem to you, libido is
that something that will link together the behavior of beings, for example, in a way that will give them the active or passive position, but he tells us, in all cases we only take this libido insofar as it has effects that are
in any case, even in the passive position, active effects, for indeed it takes an activity to adopt the passive position.

Libido – he even comes to indicate – as a result takes an aspect such that we can only see it under this effective, active form, and thus always rather akin to the masculine position. He goes so far as to say that there is only the masculine form
of libido that is within our reach.

What does that mean? And how paradoxical all that would be if it were not simply a notion that is there
only to allow to embody, to support the linking of a particular type that occurs at a certain level, and that
strictly speaking is precisely the imaginary level, the one that links the behavior of living beings in the presence of another living being by what are called the bonds of desire, all the envy that is one of the essential springs of Freudian thought
to organize what is at stake in all the behaviors of sexuality.

The Es then, the one that we are accustomed to considering in its own way also as something that has the greatest relation with tendencies, with instincts and with in some way precisely libido, what is it?
And to what does this comparison allow us precisely to compare it?

We are permitted, the Es, to compare it to something that is very precisely the plant, to the plant for someone who sees it
and who absolutely does not know how it works, to the plant as seen by an uncultivated character, who indeed thinks
that it is perhaps the genie of the current that inside starts to play tricks and to transform water into light or into force.

But the Es, what does it mean? The Es, that is to say what in the subject is capable of becoming I, for that is still the best definition we can have of the Es. What analysis has brought us is that it is not a brute reality, nor simply ‘what is before’; it is something:
– that is already organized as the signifier is organized,
– that is already articulated as the signifier is articulated.

This is true as for what the machine produces: already all the force could be transformed, with this difference all the same,
that it is not only transformed, but that it can be accumulated; that is even the essential interest
of the fact that the plant is a hydroelectric plant and not simply for example a hydromechanical plant.

It is true of course that there is all this energy; nonetheless no one can contest that there is a sensible difference

• and not simply in the landscape, but in the real – when the plant is built; the plant did not build itself by the operation of the Holy Spirit – only the Holy Spirit – if you doubt it you are wrong. It is precisely to remind you of the presence
  of the Holy Spirit, absolutely essential to the progress of our understanding of analysis, that I give you this theory
  of the signifier and the signified.

Let us take that up at another level, we said.

The reality principle and the pleasure principle, as long as you oppose the two systems: primary and secondary…
which represent both, if you hold only to what defines them taken from the outside, namely
– that what happens at the level of the primary system is governed by the pleasure principle, that is to say by the tendency to return to rest,
– that what happens at the level of the reality system is defined purely and simply by what forces the subject in reality as one says, external, to the conduct of the detour
…nothing can, by itself alone, give the feeling of what in practice will emerge from the conflictual, dialectical character
of the use of these two terms.

Simply in its concrete use as you all do it every day, you will never fail to use each
of these systems, provided with a particular index that is in some way for each its own paradox often evaded,
but nonetheless never forgotten in practice, which is this: that what happens at the level of the pleasure principle is something that presents itself indeed as indicated to you as linked to the law of return to rest and to the tendency of return to rest.

It nonetheless remains that it is striking – and that is indeed why FREUD introduced, and he says it formally in his text,
the notion of libido – that paradoxically pleasure in the concrete sense…
Lust in German, with its ambiguous sense in German, as he emphasizes, pleasure and desire [German ‘Lust’ means both pleasure and desire/craving], that is to say indeed two things that can seem contradictory, but that are nonetheless effectively linked in experience
…that pleasure is linked not to rest, but to desire or to the erection of desire.

Conversely that a no lesser paradox is found at the level of reality is that there is not only the reality one bumps into;
there is in this reality something – just as there is the principle in sum of return to rest, but also desire – at this level, on the other side too, there is the principle of the contour, of the detour of reality.

This thus appears clearer if we bring in, correlatively to the existence of these two principles: reality and pleasure,
the correlative existence of two levels which are precisely the two terms that link them in a way that allows
their dialectical functioning: these are the two levels of speech as they are expressed in the notion of signifier and signified.

I have already put in a kind of parallel superposition:

– this course of the signifier or of concrete discourse for example,

– and this course of the signified insofar as it is that in which, and as which, the continuity of lived experience presents itself, the flow of tendencies in a subject and between subjects.

Here then is the signifier[A], and here the signified[B], representation all the more valid since nothing can be conceived, not only in speech nor in language, but in the very functioning of everything that presents itself as phenomenon
in analysis, unless we admit essentially as possible perpetual slidings of the signified under the signifier, of the signifier over the signified, that nothing in analytic experience is explained except by this fundamental schema that what is signifier
of something can at any instant become signifier of something else, and that everything that in the desire, the tendency, the libido of the subject presents itself is always marked with the imprint of a signifier.

Insofar as this interests us, there is no other: there is perhaps something else in the drive and in desire that is in no way marked with the imprint of the signifier, but we have no access to that. Nothing is accessible to us except marked with this imprint of the signifier which in sum introduces into natural movement, into desire, or into the English term demand particularly expressive which resorts to this primitive expression of appetite, of requirement, nothing that is not marked by the laws proper to the signifier.

That is why desire comes from the signifier, and likewise there is something in the existence and in this intervention of the signifier;
there is something that indeed poses a problem posed just now by reminding you what the Holy Spirit is in the end, of which we saw the year before last what it was for us, and what it is precisely in thought, in FREUD’s teaching. This Holy Spirit as a whole is the coming into the world, the entry into the world of signifiers.

What is it?

It is very certainly what FREUD brings us under the term death instinct: it is this limit of the signified that is never reached by any living being, that is not even reached, except in an exceptional case, probably mythical, since we
encounter it only in the ultimate writings of a certain philosophical experience which is nonetheless something
that virtually is found at the limit of this reflection of man on his very life, which allows him to glimpse death as his limit, as the absolute condition, unsurpassable as HEIDEGGER expresses it, of his existence.

It is very precisely to this possibility of suppression, of putting in parentheses of everything that is lived, that the existence in the world in any case of possible relations of man with the signifier as a whole is linked.
What is at the foundation of the existence of the signifier, of its presence in the world, is something that we are going to put there,
and which is this effective surface of the signifier as something where the signifier reflects in some way what one can call
‘the last word of the signified’, that is to say of life, of lived experience, of the flow of emotions, of the libidinal flow.

It is death that is the support, the base, the operation of the Holy Spirit by which the signifier exists. Whether this signifier – which has its own laws that are or are not recognizable in a given phenomenon – whether this signifier is there or not, what is designated in the Es,
that is the question we ask ourselves and that we resolve by positing that to understand anything whatsoever about what we do in analysis, one must answer: yes, that is to say that the Es in question in analysis is signifier that is already there in the Real.

Uncomprehended signifier is already there, but it is signifier; it is not some I know not what primitive and confused property belonging to
I know not what preestablished harmony which is always more or less the hypothesis to which return those whom I do not hesitate
to call on this occasion ‘the weak spirits’, and at the first rank of whom appears Mr JONES, of whom I will tell you later how he approaches the problem for example of the early development of the woman and of the famous castration complexes in the woman, which pose an insoluble problem for all analysts from the moment this comes to light,
and who starts from the idea that since there is, as one says, the thread and then the needle, there is also the girl and the boy, that there can be between
the one and the other the same preestablished harmony and that one cannot but say that if some difficulty manifests itself it can only be:
– by some secondary disorder,
– by some defensive process,
– by something that is there purely accidental and contingent.

The notion of primitive harmony is in some way supposed, this starting from the notion that the unconscious is something by which what is in the subject is made to guess what must answer it in another, and thus to oppose this very simple thing of which FREUD speaks in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality concerning this very important theme of the development of the child as to his sexual images, namely that it is indeed a pity that it is not in fact thus, in a way that in some way already shows the built rails of man’s free access to woman, and of an encounter that has no other obstacle
than the accidents that can happen on the road.

FREUD posits on the contrary that infantile sexual theories, those that will mark with their imprint the whole development and the whole history of the relation between the sexes, are linked to this: that the first maturity of the properly so-called genital stage that occurs before the complete development of the Oedipus, is the so-called ‘phallic’ phase in which there is this time, not in the name of a union of a sort of fundamental energetic equality and only there for the convenience of thought, not from the fact that there is a single libido, but this time on the imaginary plane, that there is a single primitive imaginary representation of the genital state and stage, it is the phallus as such… the phallus which is not by itself simply the male genital apparatus as a whole; it is the phallus, with the exception, he says, in relation to the male genital apparatus, of its complement: the testicles for example …the erected image of the phallus is what is fundamental. There is no other choice than a virile image or castration.

I am not in the process of endorsing this term of FREUD; I am telling you that this is the starting point that FREUD gives us when he makes this reconstruction, which does not seem to me myself [so natural as that], although of course in relation to everything that precedes, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality consist in indeed going to look for natural references to this idea discovered in analysis, but precisely what it underscores is that there is a crowd of accidents in what we discover in experience, which are far from being ‘so natural as that’.

Moreover if we posit what I am putting there for you—here—at the principle, namely that the whole analytic experience starts from the notion that there is signifier already installed, already structured, already a plant made and functioning… it is not you who made it; it is language that has been functioning there for as long as you can remember, literally that you cannot remember beyond; I am speaking in the overall history of humanity …since there are signifiers functioning there, subjects are organized in their psyche by the proper play of this signifier, and that is precisely what makes that the Es of this given, that this something that you go to look for in the depths, is it, even less than the images, something ‘not so natural as that’, for it is very precisely the very opposite of the notion of nature that the existence in nature of the hydroelectric plant is; it is precisely this scandal of the existence in nature of the hydroelectric plant, once it has been made by the operation of the Holy Spirit, it is in this that the analytic position lies. When we approach the subject we know that there is already in nature something that is its Es and that thereby is structured according to the mode of a signifying articulation marking with its imprints, with its contradictions, with its profound difference from natural co-optations, everything that is exercised in this subject.

I thought I had to recall these positions that seem fundamental to me. I point out that if I put behind the signifier for you this ultimate reality but completely veiled to the signified, and moreover the use of the signifier as well, which is the possibility that nothing of what is in the signified exists, that is nothing other than the death instinct for us to notice that life is completely obsolete, improbable, all sorts of notions that have nothing to do with any kind of living exercise, the living exercise consisting precisely in making one’s little passage in existence exactly like all those who preceded us in the same typical line. The existence of the signifier is linked to nothing other than the fact, for it is a fact, that something exists which is precisely that this discourse is introduced into the world on this more or less known, more or less misrecognized background.

But it is nonetheless curious that FREUD was carried by analytic experience to be unable to do otherwise than articulate something else, to say that if the signifier functions, it is on the background of a certain experience of death… experience that has nothing to do with the word ‘experience’ in the sense that it would be a matter of anything lived …for if there is something our commentary on FREUD’s text about that showed two years ago, it is that it is nothing other than a reconstruction on the fact of certain paradoxes, in other words inexplicable in experience, that is to say on the fact that the subject is led to behave in an essentially signifying way by indefinitely repeating something which, it, is properly speaking deadly.

Conversely, just as this death, which is there reflected at the bottom of the signified, likewise there is a whole series of things in the signified that are there, but that are borrowed by the signifier, and it is precisely these things that are at issue, namely certain elements that are linked to something as profoundly engaged in the signified as the body. There are a certain number of elements, of accidents of the body that are given in experience. Just as there are already certain natural reservoirs in nature, likewise there are in the signified certain elements that are taken up in the signifier to give it, if one can say, its first weapons.

Namely things extremely elusive and yet very irreducible:
– of which precisely the phallic term, pure and simple erection, upright stone, is one example,
– of which the notion of the human body insofar as heir is another,
– of which thus a number of elements all linked more or less to bodily stature and not purely and simply to the lived experience of the body,
form the first elements and are effectively borrowed, taken from experience, but completely transformed by the fact that they are symbolized, that is to say always something that is articulated according to logical laws.

If I brought you back to the first of these logical laws by making you play at least the game of even and odd with respect to the death instinct, it is to remind you that the last reducible of these logical laws, that is to say of (+) or (-), and of grouping by two or three in a temporal sequence, is that there are ultimate laws that are the laws of the signifier, of course implicit in any starting point, but impossible not to encounter.

Let us now return to the point where we left things last time, namely at the level of analytic experience. The central object relation, the one that is dynamically creative, is that of lack, findung, of the object—FREUD tells us—which is a Wiederfindung, from the start of the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, as if it were a work written in a single burst.

« Die Objektfindung ist eigentlich eine Wiederfindung Sexualobjekte der Säuglingszeit.[Fußnote]Die Psychoanalyse lehrt, daß es zwei Wegeder Objektfindung gibt, erstens die im Text besprochene, die in Anlehnung an die frühinfantilen Vorbilder vor sich geht, und zweitens die narzißtische, die daseigene Ich sucht und im anderen wiederfindet. Diese letztere hat eine besonders große Bedeutung für die pathologischen Ausgänge, fügt sich aber nicht in denhier behandelten Zusammenhang.(5 : Die Objektfindung)»

There is precisely no work of FREUD that not only has been subject to revision, for all the works of FREUD have had notes added, but extremely few text modifications; the Traumdeutung enriched itself without anything being changed in its original balance. By contrast the first thing you should get into your head is that if you read the first edition of the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, you would not get over it, if I may put it that way, for you would recognize in nothing what to you seem the familiar themes of the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ as you usually read them, that is to say with the additions that were made principally in 1915, that is to say several years after.

That is to say that everything concerning the pregenital development of libido is only conceivable after the appearance of the theory of narcissism, but in any case was never introduced into the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality before everything that was sexual theory of the child—with its major misunderstandings, which consist, FREUD says by name, in the fact that the child has no notion of coitus nor of generation, and that this is their essential defect—had been modified.

That this is also given after 1915 is essentially linked to the promotion of this notion that will only come to fruition just after this last edition in 1920 in the article on Die infantile Genital-organization, crucial element of genitality in its development and which remains outside the limits of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which do not quite arrive there, but which do not explain themselves in their progress, namely in this search for the pregenital relation as such, except by the importance of sexual theories and of the theory of libido itself.

The chapter of the theory of libido, the one that in that title very precisely is a chapter concerning the narcissistic notion as such, the discovery and the origin, hence the very idea of the theory of libido, FREUD tells us, we can do it since we have the proposed notion of an Ich Libido as the reservoir, constituting the libido of objects. And he adds: ‘On this reservoir, we can,’ he says, ‘only cast a small glance over the walls’.

It is in sum in the notion of narcissistic tension as such, that is to say of a relation of man to the image, that we can have the idea of the common measure and at the same time of the reserve center from which every object relation is established insofar as it is fundamentally imaginary. In other words, that one of these essential articulations is the fascination of the subject by the image: it is an image that in the end is never anything but an image he bears within himself. That is the last word of narcissistic theory as such.

Everything that therefore oriented itself afterward in the direction of an organizing value of fantasies is something that presupposes behind it, not at all the idea of a preestablished harmony, of a natural suitability of the object to the subject, but on the contrary something that presupposes first and foremost an experience… the one the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ give us in their simple, first and original version …turning entirely around development in two times, the two-tiering in two times of the development of infantile sexuality, which makes that the refinding of the object will always be marked by the fact that, by virtue of the fact of the latency period, of latent memory that traverses this period, FREUD articulates it, and which makes that the first object precisely, that of the mother, is recalled in a way that could not change, which is, he says: verbünden war, irreversible; the object Wiedergefunden, the object that will never be anything but a refound object, will be marked by the first style of this object which will introduce an essential division, fundamentally conflictual, in this refound object, and the very fact of its refinding.

It is around therefore a first notion of the discordance of the refound object in relation to the sought object that the first dialectic of the theory of sexuality in FREUD is introduced. It is within this experience and by the introduction of the notion of libido that the proper functioning is installed within this fundamental experience which, it, essentially presupposes the preservation in memory without the subject’s knowing it, that is to say signifying transmission within, during the latency period, of an object that then comes to divide itself, to enter into discordance, to play a disturbing role in every later object relation of the subject.

It is within this that properly imaginary functions are discovered at certain moments, in certain chosen articulations, at certain times of this evolution, and everything that is of the pregenital relation is taken within the parenthesis, is taken in the introduction of the notion of the imaginary layer in this dialectic which is first essentially in our vocabulary a dialectic of the symbolic and of the real.

This introduction of the imaginary which has become so prevalent since is something: that only occurs starting from the article on narcissism, that is only articulated in theory on sexuality in 1915, that is only formulated with respect to the phallic phase in 1920, but that is only formulated in a categorical way, which, from that time, seemed disturbing, plunged the whole analytic audience into perplexity and which very exactly is expressed thus […] Things stand such that it is in relation to ethics that this so-called dialectic, at the time, ‘pregenital’, is situated, and I would have you note, not pre-Oedipal.

The term ‘pre-Oedipal’ was introduced with respect to feminine sexuality and was introduced ten years later. At that moment, it is a matter of the pregenital relation which is this something that is situated in the memory of preparatory experiences, but that is only articulated in Oedipal experience. It is from the signifying articulation of the Oedipus that we see in the signifying material these images, these fantasies which themselves indeed come from something, from a certain experience at the contact of the signifier and the signified in which the signifier took its material somewhere in the signified, in a certain number of exercised, living, lived relations and in which they allowed us to structure, to organize, in this past grasped after the fact, this imaginary organization that we encounter with, above all, this character of being paradoxical.

It is paradoxical; it opposes—still much more than it accords—with any idea of a regular harmonious development; it is on the contrary a critical development in which, even from the origin, the objects—as they are called—of the different oral and anal periods, are already taken for something other than what they are, are already worked over. These objects on which one operates in a way from which it is impossible to extract the signifying structure, are precisely those that are called by all the notions of incorporation which are those that organize them, dominate them and allow them to be articulated. We find, after what I told you last time, that it is around the notion of the lack of the object that we must organize the whole experience.

I showed you three different levels of it that are essential to understand everything that happens each time there has been crisis, encounter, effective action of this search for the object which is essentially in itself a notion of critical search:
– castration,
– frustration,
– privation.
Their central structures, what they are as lack, are three essentially different things.

In the lessons that will follow we are going to very precisely put ourselves exactly at the same point where in practice, in our way of conceiving our experience, modern theory, current practice, analysts as they reorganize analytic experience, put themselves, starting no longer from the notion of castration which was the experience, the original discovery of FREUD with that of the Oedipus, but at the level of frustration.

Next time I will start from an example that I took at random in the Psychoanalytic, in volumes 3-4 published in 1949, a lecture by Mrs SCHNURMANN, a pupil of Anna FREUD, who saw for a short time occur in one of the children who were entrusted to the care of Anna FREUD, a phobia.

This observation, one among a thousand others, we will read it and we will see what we understand in it; we will also try to see what she who reports it understands in it with every appearance of exemplary fidelity, that is to say something that does not exclude a certain number of preestablished categories, but that gathers them for this purpose so that we may have the notion of a temporal succession.

We will see how around a certain number of points and references the phobia will appear and then disappear. We will see in this subject a phobia, a privileged imaginary creation, prevalent for a certain time, and which has a whole series of effects on the subject’s behavior.

We will see whether it is possible for the author to articulate what is essential in this observation, simply by starting from the notion of frustration as it is currently given as simply something that relates to the deprivation of the privileged object which is that of the stage of the period where the subject finds himself at the moment of the appearance of the deprivation; it is an effect more or less regressive that can even be progressive in certain cases. Why not?

We will see whether it is in this register that in any way a phenomenon, by its sole appearance, its sole situation in a certain chronological order, can be understood.

We will see on the other hand whether by reference to these three terms—I simply want to underscore what they mean—which mean:
– that in castration there is fundamentally a lack that is situated in the symbolic chain,
– that in frustration there is something that can only be understood on the imaginary plane, as an imaginary dam,
– that in privation there is only purely and simply something that is in the real, real limit, real gap, but assuredly that has interest only in that we, we see there that it is not at all something that is in the subject. For the subject to accede to privation he must already symbolize the real, he must conceive the real as being able to be other than it is.

The reference to privation as it is given here consists in positing, before we can say sensible things, in experience that everything does not happen in the fashion of an idealist dream where we see this subject in some way obliged. In the genesis that is given to us of the psyche, in our current psychogenesis of analysis, the subject is like a spider that should draw all the thread from itself, namely each subject is there wrapping itself in silk in its cocoon, all its conception of the world it must bring out of itself and of its images.

That is where everything I explain to you goes, with this preparation that will hold for some time the question which is this: is it or is it not conceivable to make this psychogenesis that is currently made for us, namely the subject secreting from itself its successive relations in the name of I know not what preestablished maturation with the objects that will come to be the objects of this human world that is ours. This despite all the appearances that analysis delivers of the impossibility of engaging in a similar exercise, because one perceives only the illuminating aspects and each time we are in the process of getting entangled, this seems to us simply only a difficulty of language.

It is simply a manifestation of the error we are in, namely that one cannot correctly pose the problem of object relations except by positing a certain framework that must be fundamental to the understanding of this object relation, and that the first of these frameworks is that in the human world the structure, the starting point of objectal organization is the lack of the object, and that this lack of the object we must conceive at its different levels. That is to say not simply in the subject at the level of the symbolic chain that escapes him in its beginning as in its end, and at the level of frustration in which he is indeed installed in a lived experience thinkable by himself, but that this lack we must also consider in the real.

That is to say to think well that when we speak of privation here it is not a matter of a privation felt in the sense of a reference to what we need so much that everyone makes use of it; simply the trick consists at a certain moment—and this is what Mr JONES does—in making this privation the equivalent of frustration.

Privation is not the equivalent of frustration; it is something that is in the real but that is in the real quite outside the subject; for him to apprehend it he must first symbolize it. How is the subject led to symbolize? How does frustration introduce the symbolic order? That is the question we will pose and it is the question that will allow us to see that on that the subject is not isolated, is not independent; it is not he who introduces the symbolic order.

One quite striking thing is that last evening no one spoke of a major passage of what Mrs DOLTO brought us, namely that, according to her, only the children of either sex whose mother happens to have had to bear a disturbance in the object relation with her own parent, the mother, of the opposite sex, become phobic.

We are thus introduced to a notion that assuredly brings in something altogether other than the relations of the child and the mother, and indeed if I posed for you the trio of the mother, the child and the phallus, it is assuredly to remind you that more or less always alongside the child there is in this mother the demand for the phallus, which the child symbolizes or realizes more or less; the child, who has his relation with his mother, the child knows nothing of it, for in truth there is one thing that must also have appeared to you last evening when one spoke of image of the body with respect to the child: it is that this image of the body, if it is accessible to the child, is it like that that the mother sees her child? It is a question that was not posed at all.

Likewise at what moment is the child in a position to notice that what his mother desires in him, saturates in him, satisfies in him, is her phallic image, she the mother, and what is the possibility for the child to accede to this relational element? Is it something that is of the order of a direct effusion, even of a projection that seems to suppose that every relation between subjects is of the same order as her relation with her child.

I am surprised that no one asked her that if she sees all these images of the body, is there anyone outside of a male or female analyst—and even then, of her school—who happens to see in the child these elements and these images? That is the important point. The way in which the male or female child is induced, introduced to this imaginary discordance that makes that for the mother the child is far from being only the child since he is also the phallus, how can we conceive it?

It is something that is within reach of experience because certain elements can be brought out of experience that show us for example that there must already be a time of symbolization for the child to accede to it, or that in certain cases, it is in a manner in some way direct that the child approached the imaginary dam, not his own, but the one in which the mother is with respect to this privation of the phallus. If it is truly essential in development, it is around these crucial points, namely of knowing whether an imaginary here is reflected in the symbolic, or on the contrary whether a symbolic element appears in the imaginary, that we pose for ourselves the question of phobia.

So as not to leave you completely unsatisfied, and in order already to light my lantern, I will tell you that in this triple schema of the mother, the child and the phallus, what is at issue is why in fetishism the child comes more or less to occupy this position of the mother with respect to the phallus, or on the contrary in certain very particular forms of dependence, certain anomalies can present themselves with every appearance of the normal; he can come also to occupy the position of the phallus with respect to the mother. Why is he brought there?

It is another question, but assuredly it is a question that will lead us far, for it seems well that it is not in a spontaneous and direct way that this mother-phallus relation is given to the child… everything is done simply because he looks at his mother and notices that it is a phallus that she desires …that by contrast phobia when it develops is not at all of the order of this link that the child establishes between the phallus and the mother, putting of his own into it and to what extent. We will try to see it.

Phobia is something else; it is another mode of solution to this difficult problem introduced by the relations of the child and of the mother. I already showed it to you last year to show you that for there to be these three terms, it was a closed space; it required an organization of the symbolic world that is called the father.

Phobia is rather of that order, of that encircling link, that is to say of the call for rescue at a particularly critical moment that opened no path of another nature to the solution of the problem, of the call to a symbolic element whose singularity is to appear always as extremely symbolic, that is to say extremely distant from all imaginary apprehensions, where the truly mythical character of what intervenes in phobia is something that is called at a moment to the rescue of the essential solidarity to be maintained in the gap introduced by the appearance of the phallus between the mother and the child, in this orientation between the mother and the child.