🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Here is the table we had arrived at in order to articulate the problem of the object as it presents itself in analysis.

I will try today to make you feel by what kind of confusion, of lack of rigor in this matter, one arrives at that curious slippage which makes it so that, in sum, analysis forms part of a sort of notion that I will call scandalous, that of man’s affective relations.

In truth, I believe I have already emphasized it several times: what, at the outset, provoked so much scandal in analysis, what brought out the role of sexuality — not always all the same; analysis played a role in the fact that it became a commonplace, and no one thinks of taking offense at it — is precisely that it introduced at the same time as that notion, and far more than it, the notion of paradox, of essential internal difficulty, if one may say, in approaching the sexual object. It is indeed singular that from there we should have slipped to this harmonious notion of the object, of which, to measure the distance from what FREUD himself articulated with the greatest rigor, I have chosen for you a sentence from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

People who are the least well informed regarding object relation remark that one can very well see that in FREUD it is a matter of many things concerning the object, the choice of the object for example, but that the notion itself of object relation is in no way brought into value there nor cultivated, nor even brought to the forefront of the question. Here is FREUD’s sentence that is found in the article on instincts and their vicissitudes:

‘The object of the instinct is that through which the instinct can attain its aim. It is what is most variable in the instinct, nothing originally attached to it, but something subordinate to it, only as a result of its suitability for the possibility of its appeasement, its satisfaction.’

[‘Das Objekt des Triebes ist dasjenige, an welchem oder durch welches der Trieb sein Ziel erreichen kann. Es ist das variabelste am Triebe, nicht ursprünglich mit ihm verknüpft, sondern ihm nur infolge seiner Eignung zur Ermöglichung der Befriedigung zugeordnet.’]

The notion, then, is articulated: that there is no preestablished harmony between the object and the tendency, that the object is literally bound to it only by the conditions that are with the object. One gets out of it as one can; it is not a doctrine, it is a citation, but it is a citation among others and one of the most significant.

What is at issue is to see what this conception of the object is, by what detour it leads us so that we arrive at conceiving its effective instance? And we have managed to bring this foreground into relief thanks to several points, otherwise articulated in FREUD, namely: the notion that the object is never anything but an object found again starting from a primitive Findung, and thus, in sum, a Wiederfindung that is never satisfying; the emphasis is put on that with the notion of reunion, that on the other hand we have seen, by other characteristics, that this object is on the one hand inadequate, on the other hand even withdraws partially from conceptual grasp. And this leads us to try to tighten more closely the fundamental notions, in particular to dissociate the notion placed at the center of current analytic theory, this notion of frustration, once entered into our dialectic — although I have emphasized to you many times how marginal it is with respect to FREUD’s own thought — to try to tighten it more closely, to look at it again, and to see to what extent it was necessitated, to what extent also it is fitting to correct it, to criticize it, to make it usable, and, to put it plainly, coherent with what forms the basis of analytic doctrine, that is, what remains still fundamentally FREUD’s teaching and thought. I reminded you of what presented itself at once in the given: castration, frustration, and privation, as three terms whose differences it is fruitful to mark.

That castration is essentially linked to a symbolic order insofar as instituted, insofar as involving a whole long coherence from which in no case could the subject be given, is sufficiently brought to light, as much by all our earlier reflections as by the simple remark that castration was from the outset linked to the central position given to the Oedipus complex as being the essential element of articulation of the whole evolution of sexuality, the Oedipus complex as already containing in itself and fundamentally the notion of the law which is absolutely ineliminable.

I think that the fact that castration is at the level of symbolic debt will seem to us sufficiently affirmed and sufficiently even demonstrated by this remark, appreciated and supported by all our earlier reflections. I indicated to you last time that certainly what is at stake, what is put into play in this symbolic debt instituted by castration, is an imaginary object, it is the phallus as such. At least that is what FREUD affirms, and that is the point from which I am going to start and from which we are going to try today to push a little further the dialectic of frustration.

Frustration itself, of course, taken as a central position on this table, is also something that has nothing that would even in itself throw in a misalignment or a disorder: if the notion of desire was put by FREUD at the center of analytic conflictuality, it is of course something that makes us grasp sufficiently that, in putting the accent on the notion of frustration, we do not depart much from that central notion in Freudian dialectic. What matters is to grasp what this frustration means, how it was introduced, and what it relates to.

It is clear that the notion of frustration, insofar as it is put in the foreground of analytic theory, is linked to the investigation of traumas, fixations, impressions of experiences that are in themselves pre-Oedipal, which does not imply that they are external to the Oedipus but that they provide, in a way, its preparatory ground, its base and foundation, that they shape it in such a way that already certain inflections are prepared in it and will give the slope in which the Oedipal conflict will be brought to bend in a more or less advanced way, in a certain sense more or less atypical or heterotypical.

This notion of frustration is therefore linked to the 1st age of life and to a mode of relation which by itself manifestly introduces the question of the Real into the progress of analytic experience. We see — put in the foreground in the conditioning, the development of the subject — we see introduced with the notion of frustration, those notions that are called — translated into a more or less quantitative metaphorical language — satisfactions, gratifications of a certain sum of benefits adapted, adequate to the stages of development of the young subject, and whose more or less saturation — or on the contrary lack — is considered as an essential element.

I believe it suffices to make this remark for this to awaken us to proofs, to refer back to the texts, to see what step has been taken in the investigation, guided by analysis, by the simple displacement of interest in analytic literature. One sees it already quite easily, at least for those who are sufficiently familiar with these three notions to recognize them easily. You will see that in a piece of analytic literature where one easily recognizes this element of the thing’s conceptual articulation, the sense will be put on certain real conditions that we identify, that we are supposed to identify in experience in a subject’s antecedents. This foregrounding of this element of interest is something which, from the first analytic observations, will appear to us on the whole absent, in the sense that it is articulated differently.

Here we are brought back to the level of frustration considered as a sort of element of real impressions, lived in a period of the subject where his relation to that real object, whatever it may be, is usually centered on the so-called primordial image of the maternal breast. And it is essentially in relation to that primordial object that there will form in the subject what I called just now his first slopes and his first fixations, which are those before which the types of the different instinctual stages have been described, and whose characteristic is to give us the imaginary anatomy of the subject’s development.

It is there that these relations of the oral stage and the anal stage came to be articulated with their subdivisions variously phallic, sadistic, etc. And all marked by this element of ambivalence by which the subject participates in his very position in the position of the other, where he is two, where he always participates in an essentially dual situation without which no general assumption of position is possible. Let us see, then, where all this leads us, simply limiting ourselves to that.

Here we are, then, in the presence of an object that we take in this position, which is a position of desire. Let us take it as it is given to us, as breast, as a real object. Here we are brought to the heart of the question:

‘What is this most primitive relation of the subject with the real object?’

You know how, on this, analytic theorists found themselves in a sort of discussion which at the very least seems to manifest all sorts of misunderstandings. FREUD spoke to us of the lived stage of autoerotism; this autoerotism was maintained as being the primitive relation between the child and that primordial maternal object. It was maintained at least by some. Others remarked that it was difficult to relate to a notion that seems to be founded on the fact that the subject it implies knows only himself, something that many traits of direct observation, of what we conceive as necessary to explain the development of the relations of child and mother, many traits seem to contradict: that on that occasion there are no effective relations with an object; and what is more manifestly external to the subject than that something of which he indeed has the most pressing need, is what is par excellence the first nourishment?

In truth, it seems that there is there a misunderstanding born essentially of a kind of confusion, and through which this discussion proves so plodding, arriving at diverse formulations, diverse enough moreover that it should lead us quite far to enumerate them, and that is why I cannot do it right away since we need to make a certain progress in the conceptualization of what is at issue here. But note simply that something we have already spoken about, which is Alice BALINT’s theory, which seeks to reconcile the notion of autoerotism, as it is given in FREUD, with what seems to impose itself as the reality of the object with which the child is confronted at the quite primitive stage of his development, arrives at this wholly articulated and striking conception which she calls ‘primary love’.

The only form — say Mr. and Mrs. BALINT — of love in which selfishness and giving are perfectly reconcilable, namely to admit as fundamental a perfect reciprocity — in the position of what the child demands of the mother, — and on the other hand of what the mother demands of the child, a perfect complementarity of the two kinds, of the two poles of need, which is something so contrary to all clinical experience, precisely insofar as we are dealing perpetually with the evocation in the subject of the mark of everything that could have occurred as discordances and truly fundamental discordances, which I am going to have to recall in a moment by telling you that it is an excessively simple element, in the couple that is not a couple, something so discordant with the signature given in the very statement of the theory of this so-called primitive perfect and complementary love, simply by the remark that this, Alice BALINT tells us, that these things — there where relations are natural, that is, among savages — have been done since always: there where the child is well kept in contact with the mother.

That is, always elsewhere, in the land of dreams, there where, as everyone knows, the mother always has the child on her back.

It is obviously there a sort of escape hardly compatible with a wholly correct theorization which in the end must be formulated as the admission that, therefore, it is in a wholly ideal, if not idealist, position that the notion of a love so strictly complementary, in a way destined by itself to find its reciprocity, can be articulated. I take this example in truth only because it introduces what we are going to point out at once, and which is going to be the driving element of the critique we are making about the notion of frustration. It is clear that this is not quite the fundamental representational image that a theory for example like the Kleinian theory gives us. It is amusing there too to see by what bias this theoretical reconstruction, which is that of the Kleinian theory, is attacked, and in particular since it is a matter of object relation, it happened that a certain activity bulletin fell into my hands, that of the Association of Psychoanalysts of Belgium.

These are authors whom we will find again in the volume on which I wrote my notes of my first lecture, and of which I told you that this volume is properly centered on an optimistic, unashamed, and wholly contestable view of object relation, which gives it its sense. Here, in a somewhat more confidential bulletin, it seems to me that things are attacked with more nuance, as if in truth it is out of lack of assurance that one felt a little shame to emit it in places where, certainly, when one becomes acquainted with it, it appears more meritorious.

We can see that an article by Messrs. PASCHE and RENARD reproduces a critique they brought to the Geneva congress concerning Kleinian positions. It is extremely striking to see, in this article, Melanie KLEIN reproached for having a theory of development which in a way — according to the critics and the authors — would put everything inside the subject, would put, in sum, in a preformed way, all the possible types of development already included in the instinctual given, and which would be, in sum, the coming-out, according to the authors, of the different elements, and already in some way potentially articulated in the way the authors ask to compare it, and thus for some in the theory of biological development: the whole oak would already be contained in the acorn.

That nothing would come to such a subject, in a way, from the outside, and that it would be by his primitive aggressive instincts, namely at the start — and indeed the prevalence of aggressiveness is manifest when one understands it in this perspective in Melanie KLEIN — and then by the intermediary of return shocks of these aggressive instincts felt by the subject from the outside, namely from the maternal field, the progressive construction — something which, we are told, can be received only as a sort of preformed oak — of the notion of the totality of the mother, from which is established this so-called ‘depressive position’ which can present itself in any experience.

All these critiques must be taken one after the other in order to appreciate them at their proper value, and I would simply like here to emphasize to you what, paradoxically, the whole of these critiques comes to. They come to a formulation which is this, and which makes the heart and the center of the article: that certainly the authors appear here fascinated by the question of knowing indeed how this fact of experience, what in development is brought from the outside, what they believe they see in Melanie KLEIN, is already given to us in an internal constellation at the start, and that it would not be surprising to see subsequently brought to the forefront, and in so prevalent a way, the notion of the internal object.

And the authors arrive at the conclusion that they think they can get out of the Kleinian contribution by putting in the foreground the notion of a ‘preformed schema’ — of which they say that it is very difficult to represent it to oneself — hereditarily preformed.

‘Therefore — they say — the child is born with inherited instincts, faced with a world that he does not perceive, but of which he remembers and which he will then have not to make start from himself nor from anything else, not to discover by a series of unusual findings, but to recognize.’

I think that most of you recognize the Platonic character of this formulation, which cannot escape notice. This world that one has only to remember, this world, then, which will be instituted as a function of a certain imaginary preparation, to which the subject is already adequate, is something which certainly represents an oppositional critique, but we will have to see whether, under test, it will not go not only against everything FREUD wrote, but whether we cannot already glimpse that the authors themselves are much closer than they believe to the position they reproach in Melanie KLEIN, namely that it is they who already indicate in the subject the existence, in the state of a ‘preformed schema’ and ready to appear at the appointed time, of all the elements that will allow the subject to be counted into a series of stages that can be called ideal only insofar as it is precisely the subject’s memories, and very precisely the subject’s phylogenetic memories, that will give their type and norm.

Is that what Mrs. Melanie Klein meant? It is strictly unthinkable even to maintain it, for if there is precisely something of which Mrs. Melanie KLEIN gives an idea, and it is moreover the sense of the authors’ critique, it is certainly that the first situation is much more chaotic, truly anarchic at the start, that the noise and fury of the drives is characteristic at the origin. What is at issue precisely is to know how something like an order can be established from there.

That there is something mythical in the Kleinian conception is absolutely not doubtful. It is quite certain that the contradiction — if it brings a myth that they do not find again, although it resembles the Kleinian fantasy — is quite perfect. These fantasies indeed, of course, have only a retroactive character: it is in the construction of the subject that we will see reprojected onto the past, starting from points that can be very early, that it is a matter of defining; and why these points can be so early, why from two and a half years we already see Mrs. Melanie KLEIN read… in a way like the person who reads any mantic mirror, divinatory mirror… she reads retroactively into the past of an extremely advanced subject, she finds a way to read retroactively something that is nothing other than the Oedipal structure. There is some reason for that, for of course there is some manner of mirage.

It is of course not a matter of following her when she tells us that the Oedipus was in a way already there under the very fragmented forms of the penis moving amid different sorts, brothers, sisters, within the whole of this kind of field defined from within the maternal body, but that this articulation is detectable, articulable in a certain relation to the child, and this very early, that is something that certainly poses a fertile question for us: that every theoretical articulation which is in a way purely hypothetical allows us to give at the start something that can better satisfy our idea of natural harmonies, but is not in conformity with what experience shows us.

And indeed I believe that this begins to indicate to you the bias by which we can introduce something new into this confusion that remains at the level of the primordial mother-child relation. I believe that this holds to the fact that, not starting from a central notion, namely frustration, which is the true center, one does not start from frustration, one does not start from what it should not be; it is a matter of knowing how the child’s primitive relations are posed, situated.

Much can be clarified if we approach things in the following way, which is that in this ‘frustration’ there are from the origin two slopes whose brace we moreover find right to the end.

There is the real object — and as we are told, it is quite certain that an object can begin to exert its influence in the subject’s relations well before having been perceived as an object — the real object, the direct relation. And it is only as a function of this periodicity — where holes, lacks, can appear — that a certain mode of the subject’s relation will be established in which we can introduce something that, for the moment, would absolutely not require us even to admit that for the subject there is a distinction of an ego and a non-ego, for example the autoerotic position in the sense in which this is understood in FREUD, namely that there is not, properly speaking, a constitution of the other and first of all of the wholly conceivable relation.

The notion, in this fundamental relation — which is a relation of lack — to something which is indeed the object, but the object insofar as it has instance only in relation to lack, the notion of the agent is something that must allow us to introduce a wholly essential formulation from the outset of the way the general position is situated. The agent, on the occasion, is the mother. And what have we seen in our experience of these last years, and namely in what FREUD articulated concerning the wholly principal position of the child with respect to repetition games?

The mother is something other than that primitive object, and which moreover, in conformity with observation, does not appear as such from the outset, and of which FREUD clearly emphasized to us that she appears starting from that first game which is grasped and attacked in so dazzling a way in the child’s behavior, namely that game of taking an object in itself perfectly indifferent, an object with no kind of biological value, which is the ball on the occasion, but which can just as well be anything by which a six-month-old child makes it pass over the edge of his bed to catch it afterward.

This ‘presence-absence’ pairing, articulated extremely early by the child, is the something that characterizes, that connotes the first constitution of the agent of frustration, originally the mother, as agent of this frustration, the mother insofar as one speaks to us of her as introducing this new element of totality at a certain stage of development, which is that of the ‘depressive position’ and which is indeed characterized less by the opposition of a totality to a sort of chaos of fragmented objects which would be the preceding level, but in this characteristic of ‘presence-absence’, not only objectively deposited as such, but articulated by the subject as such, centered by the subject around something which is — we have already articulated it in our studies of the preceding year — this something that makes ‘presence-absence’ something that for the subject is articulated: – that the maternal object is here called when it is absent, – rejected according to the same register as the call, namely by a vocalization, when it is present.

This essential scansion of the call is something that does not give us, of course, far from it, from the outset the whole symbolic order, but that shows us the start and that shows us, that allows us to draw out as a distinct element of the real object relation, something else that is very precisely what will offer thereafter the possibility of the relation, of this relation of the child to a real object with its scansion, the marks, the traces that remain of it, which offer us the possibility of the relation of this real relation with a symbolic relation as such.

Before showing it in a more manifest way, I simply want to bring out what is entailed by the mere fact that, in the child’s relations, there is introduced by this relation to the person constituting the oppositional couple ‘presence-absence’ what is thereby introduced into the child’s experience and what, at the moment of frustration, naturally tends to fall asleep. We therefore have the child between the notion of an agent that already participates in the order of symbolicity; we saw it, we articulated it last year: it is the oppositional couple ‘presence-absence’, the connotation +/-, which gives us the first element.

It is not sufficient by itself alone to constitute a symbolic order, since what is then needed is a sequence, and a sequence grouped as such, but already in the opposition ‘more and less’, ‘presence and absence’ there is virtually the origin, the birth, the possibility, the fundamental condition, of a symbolic order.

How must we conceive the turning moment where this primordial relation to the real object can open onto something else? What, in truth, is the true turning, the turning point where the mother-child dialectic opens onto a more complex relation, opens onto other elements that will introduce into it properly speaking what we have called dialectic? I believe we can formulate it schematically by posing the question, if what constitutes the symbolic agent — the mother as such — essential to the child’s relation to that real object: what happens if she no longer responds? If, to that call, she no longer responds?

Let us introduce the response ourselves: what happens if she no longer responds, if she falls away? This symbolic structuring that makes her an ‘object present-absent’ as a function of the call, becomes real from that moment on; it becomes real—why?

What does this notion mean, that, out of this structuring, which is the very one within which up to then she exists as agent, we have disengaged her from the real object that is the object of the child’s satisfaction, she becomes real, that is, that she no longer responds, that she no longer responds, in a way, except at her pleasure; she becomes something into which there also enters the start of the structuring of all reality; thereafter she becomes a power.

By a reversal of position, this object, the breast, let us take it as an example, one may make it as enveloping as it may be, it does not matter since it is a real relation, but, on the other hand, from the moment when the mother becomes power and, as such, real, it is on her that, for the child, access to those objects will depend, and in the most manifest way; those objects which up to then were purely and simply objects of satisfaction, they will become, on the part of this power, objects of gift, and as such, in the same way — but no more than the mother had been up to now — capable of entering into a connotation ‘presence-absence’, but as dependent on that real object, on that power which is maternal power; in short, objects as objects in the sense in which we understand it, not metaphorically, but objects as graspable, as possessable.

The notion of ‘not me’, of non-me, is a matter of observation as to whether it enters first through the image of the other or through what is possessable, what the child wants to keep beside him of objects which themselves, from that moment on, no longer so much need to be objects of satisfaction as to be objects that are the mark of the value of that power that may not respond and which is the mother’s power. In other words, the position is reversed: the mother has become real and the object becomes symbolic; the object becomes above all testimony of the gift coming from maternal power. From that moment on, the object has two orders of satisfying properties; it is twice possibly an object of satisfaction: – insofar as it satisfies a need, certainly as before, – but insofar as it symbolizes a favorable power, no less certainly.

This is very important because one of the most cumbersome notions of all analytic theory as it is formulated since it has become, according to a formula, a ‘genetic psychoanalysis’, is the notion of the so-called omnipotence of thought, of all-powerfulness that one imputes to everything that is farthest from us. How it is conceivable that the child has the notion of all-powerfulness, he perhaps indeed has what is essential of it, but it is entirely absurd, and it leads to dead ends, to conceive that the all-powerfulness in question is his. The all-powerfulness in question is the moment I am in the process of describing to you of the realization of the mother; it is the mother who is all-powerful, it is not the child; the decisive moment, the passage of the mother to reality starting from a wholly archaic symbolization, is that one; it is the moment when the mother can give anything at all.

But it is entirely erroneous and completely unthinkable to think that the child has the notion of his all-powerfulness; not only does nothing indicate in his development that he has it, but almost everything that interests us and all the mishaps are there to show us that this all-powerfulness and its failures are nothing in the question, but, as you will see, the lacks, the disappointments touching maternal all-powerfulness.

This investigation may seem a bit theoretical to you, but it has at least the advantage of introducing essential distinctions, openings that are not those that are effectively put into use. You will now see where that leads us, and what we can already indicate of it. Here, then, is the child who is in the presence of something he has realized as power, as something that all of a sudden has passed from a plane of the first connotation ‘presence-absence’ to something that can refuse and that holds everything the subject may need, and just as well even if he does not need it, and that becomes symbolic from the moment when that depends on this power.

Let us pose the question now from quite another starting point. FREUD tells us: there is something in this world of objects that has a wholly decisive function, paradoxically decisive: it is the phallus, that object which is itself defined as imaginary, which in no case is it possible to confuse with the penis in its reality, of which it is, properly speaking, the form, the erected image. This phallus has such decisive importance that its nostalgia, its presence, its instance in the imaginary is found to be more important, it seems, even for the members of humanity to whom it is lacking — namely the woman — than for the one who can assure himself of having it in reality, and whose whole sexual life is nevertheless subordinated to the fact that imaginatively indeed he assumes, and in the end assumes as licit, as permitted, its use, that is, the man. That is a given.

Let us now look at our mother and our child in question; let us confront them as I first confront what Michael and Alice BALINT, according to them, just as in the spouses MORTIMER at the time of Jean COCTEAU, have only one heart: the mother and the child — for Michael and Alice BALINT — have only one totality of needs. Nevertheless, I keep them as two external circles.

What FREUD tells us is that the woman has, in her lacks of essential objects, the phallus; that not only does that have the closest relation to her relation to the child for a simple reason: it is that if the woman finds in the child a satisfaction, it is very precisely insofar as she saturates at her level, insofar as she finds in him that something that calms her more or less well, this penis, this need of phallus. If we do not bring this in, we misconstrue not only FREUD’s teaching, but something that is manifested by experience at every instant. Here, then, are the mother and the child who have between them a certain relation: the child awaits something from the mother; he also receives something from her in this dialectic into which we cannot not introduce what I introduce now: the child, in a way, can — let us say approximately in the way Mr. and Mrs. BALINT formulate it — believe himself loved for himself.

The question is this:

– to the extent that this image of the phallus for the mother is not completely brought back to the image of the child, – to the extent that this diplopia, this division of the primordial object, supposedly desired, which would be that of the mother in the presence of the child is in reality doubled by, on the one hand, the need for a certain imaginary saturation, and on the other hand by what it can indeed have of real, efficient, instinctual relations, at a primordial level that always remains mythical, with the child, – to the extent that for the mother there is something that remains irreducible in what is at issue, in the end if we follow FREUD,

…that is to say that the child, as real, symbolizes the image.

If it is important that the child, as real, for the mother, takes on for her the symbolic function of her imaginary need, the three terms are there, and all sorts of varieties will be able to be introduced there. The child set in the presence of the mother, all sorts of already structured situations exist between him and the mother, namely from the moment when the mother has been introduced into the real in the state of power, something for the child opens the possibility of an intermediary as such, as an object of gift.

The question is to know at what moment and how, by what mode of access, the child can be introduced directly to the Symbolic-Imaginary-Real structure, as it occurs for the mother? In other words, at what moment can the child enter, assume in a way we will see more or less symbolized, the imaginary, real situation of what the phallus is for the mother; at what moment can the child, up to a certain extent, feel himself dispossessed himself of something he demands of the mother upon noticing that it is not he who is loved, but something else which is a certain image.

There is something that goes further: this phallic image, the child realizes it on himself; that is where, properly speaking, the narcissistic relation intervenes.

– To what extent, at the moment when the child apprehends, for example, the difference of the sexes, does this experience come to be articulated with what is offered to him in the very presence and action of the mother, toward the recognition of that third imaginary term which is the phallus for the mother?

– Much more, to what extent is the notion that the mother lacks this phallus, that the mother is herself desiring, not only desiring something other than himself, but desiring as such, that is, struck in her power, something that, for the subject, can be, will be, more decisive than anything?

I announced to you last time the observation of a phobia. I indicate to you right away what its interest will be: it is a little girl, and we have — thanks to the fact that it is the war and that she is a pupil of Anna FREUD — all sorts of good conditions: the child will be observed from end to end, and since she is a pupil of Mrs. Anna FREUD, to that extent she will be a good observer because she understands nothing; she understands nothing because Mrs. Anna FREUD’s theory is false and consequently that will put her before the facts in a state of astonishment which will make all the fertility of the observation. And then one notes everything, day by day.

The little girl notices that the boys have a ‘pee-thing’, as one expresses it in the observation of little Hans. For quite some time she sets herself to function in a position of rivalry — she is two years and five months — that is, she does everything to do like the little boys.

This child is separated from her mother, not only because of the war, but because her mother lost, at the beginning of the war, her husband. She comes to see her; the relations are excellent; the ‘presence-absence’ is regular, and the games of love, of contact, with the child are games of approach: she comes up on tiptoe, and she distills her arrival; one sees her function as symbolic mother. Everything is going very well: she has the real objects she wants when the mother is not there; when the mother is there she plays her role of symbolic mother.

This little girl therefore makes the discovery that the boys have a ‘pee-thing’; it results in, certainly, something, namely that she wants to imitate them and that she wants to handle their ‘pee-thing’; there is a drama, but one that absolutely entails nothing as consequences.

Now, this observation is given to us as being that of a phobia, and indeed one fine night she will wake up seized by a mad fright, and it will be because of the presence of a dog that is there, that wants to bite her, which makes her want to get out of her bed and that one has to put her in another. This observation of phobia evolves for a certain time. Does this phobia follow the discovery of the absence of penis? Why do we pose the question? We pose the question because this dog — we will know it insofar as we analyze the child, that is, insofar as we follow and understand what she recounts — this dog is manifestly a dog that bites, and that bites the sex.

The first sentence — for she is a child who has a certain delay — truly long and articulated that she pronounces in her development is to say that dogs bite the legs of naughty boys, and it is right at the origin of her phobia. You also see the relation there is between symbolization and the object of the phobia. Why the dog, we will speak of it later. But what I want now to make you notice is that this dog is there as agent that withdraws what at first was more or less admitted as absent.

Are we going to short-circuit things and say that it is simply, in the phobia, a passage to the level of the law, that is, that something — as I was telling you just now — provided with power, is there to intervene and to justify what is absent, ‘to be absent because’: to have been taken away, bitten? It is in this sense that I was indicating to you that I tried to articulate today as a schema what allows us to make the crossing, to see this thing that seems very summary.

One does it at every instant. Mr. JONES tells us very clearly: for the child, after all, the superego may perhaps be only an alibi; the anxieties are primordial, primitive, imaginary, and in a way there he returns to a sort of artifice: it is the counterpart or the moral contravention; in other words it is the whole of culture and all its prohibitions; it is something caducous, under whose shelter what is fundamental, namely the anxieties in their uncontained state, comes, in a way, to take its rest.

There is in that something correct; it is the mechanism of phobia, but the mechanism of phobia is the mechanism of phobia, and to extend it, as Mr. PASCHE does at the end of this article I spoke to you about, to the point of saying that this mechanism of phobia is that something that explains, at bottom, the death instinct for example, or again that dream images are a certain way the subject has of dressing his anxieties, of personalizing them as one might say, that is, of always returning to the same idea, that there is there no misconstrual of the symbolic order, but the idea that it is there a kind of clothing and pretext of something more fundamental. Is that what I want to tell you by bringing in this phobia observation? No!

The interest of this is to notice that the phobia took well over a month to break out; it took well more time, but a time marked between the discovery of her aphallicness or aphallicism for this child and the blossoming of the phobia. Something had to happen in the interval, which is that first the mother ceased to come because she had fallen ill and had to be operated on. The mother is no longer the symbolic mother; the mother was lacking. She returns; she plays again with the child; still nothing happens. She returns leaning on a cane; she returns weak; she no longer has the same presence nor the same gaiety, nor the same relations of approach, of distancing, which founded all the attachment with the child, sufficient, which took place every eight days.

And it is at that moment, then, in a third time very distant, that the discovery is born that, thanks to the observers, we can know: that the Oedipus comes not from aphallicism, from the second break in the rhythm of the alternation of ‘coming-being come’ of the mother as such; it still had to be that the mother appear as someone who could be lacking. And her lack is inscribed in the reaction, in the behavior of the child, that is, that the child is very sad; one had to encourage her. There was no phobia. It is when she sees her mother again under a feeble form, leaning on a stick, ill, tired, that the next day the dream of the dog breaks out and the development of the phobia.

There is only one thing in the observation more significant and more paradoxical than that — we will speak again of this phobia, of the way the therapists attacked it, what they believed they understood — I simply want to mark for you in the antecedents of the phobia that at least that poses the question of knowing from what moment it is as the mother, she, lacks phallus that the something that is determined and that balances itself in the phobia rendered the phobia necessary. Why it is sufficient is another question that we will take up next time.

There is another point no less striking: it is that after the phobia, the war ends, the mother takes back her child, she remarries. She finds herself with a new father, and with a new brother, the son of the man with whom the mother remarries, and at that moment the brother she has acquired all at once, and who is clearly older than she, about five years older than she, sets himself, with her, to engage in all sorts of games at once adoratory and violent, among which the request to show themselves naked, and manifestly the brother does precisely, on her, something that is entirely linked to the interest he takes in this little girl insofar as she is ‘a-penial’, and there the psychotherapist is astonished: it should have been a fine occasion for relapse of her phobia, since in the theory of the ‘environmental’, which is the one on which all of Anna FREUD’s therapeutics is founded, it is namely that it is insofar as the ego is more or less well informed of reality that discordances are established.

Is it at that moment, newly re-presentified with her lack, with the presence of a man-brother, of a figure not only phallic, but bearer of the penis—would there not be there an occasion for relapse? Far from it: she has never been so well; there is not a trace at that moment of mental trouble; she develops perfectly well.

We are told moreover exactly why. It is that she is manifestly preferred by her mother to this boy, but nevertheless the father is someone sufficiently present to introduce precisely a new element, the element we have not yet spoken of up to now, but which all the same is essentially linked to the function of phobia: a symbolic element beyond the relation of power or powerlessness with the mother; the father properly speaking, himself as disengaging from his relations with the mother the notion of power; in short, what on the contrary seems to us to have been saturated by the phobia, namely what she dreads in the castrating animal as such, which proved, of all necessity, to have been the essential articulating element that allowed this child to get through the grave crisis into which she had entered in the face of maternal powerlessness.

There she finds her need saturated by maternal presence and, in addition, by the fact that something… of which precisely it is the question of knowing whether the therapist sees so clearly… namely that there may perhaps be all sorts of pathological possibilities in this relation where she is already daughter of the father, for we can notice, under another face at that moment, that she has become, she entirely, something that is worth more than the brother. In any case she will become certainly the phallus-sister that people speak of so much, and it is a matter of knowing to what extent, thereafter, she will not be implicated in this imaginary function.

But for the immediate, no essential need is to be filled by the articulation of the phallic phantasm; the father is there; he suffices for it; he suffices to maintain, between the three terms of the mother-child-phallus relation, the sufficient gap such that the subject does not have to give of himself, to put anything of his own into it in any way to maintain this gap.

How is this gap maintained, by what route, by what identification, by what artifice? That is what we will begin next time to try to attack by taking up this observation a bit, that is, by introducing you thereby, at the same time, to what is most characteristic in the pre-Oedipal object relation, namely the birth of the fetish object.