🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The analytic conception of the object relation already has a certain historical realization. What I am trying to show you takes it up in a partially different sense, partially also the same, but which nevertheless is, of course, so only insofar as it is inserted into a different whole that gives it a different meaning.

At the point we have reached, it is appropriate to punctuate clearly, in a marked way, how this object relation is placed, by the group of those who make more and more of it—and I was able to notice this recently when rereading certain articles—at the center of their conception of analysis. It is appropriate to mark clearly in what this formulation, which rushes forward, which asserts itself, and even to a certain extent asserts itself at the same time over the years, comes to something now very firmly articulated.

It happened that in certain articles I ironically wished that someone would really give the reason for the object relation as it is thought in a certain orientation [PDA]. My wish has been amply fulfilled since then; more than one person has given us this formulation, and more specifically a formulation that has been rather by softening on the part of the one who had introduced it with regard to obsessional neurosis [Bouvet], but for others one can say that there has been an effort of precision in the dominant conception.

And in the article on ‘Motricity in the object relation’ in the January–June 1955 issue of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse, Monsieur Michel FAIN gives us a living example and, I think, fully matching the summary I am going to give you of it. The things will certainly seem to you to go much further, on reading the article, than the idea I can give you of it in a necessarily shortened way in these few words.

Finally I hope you will see to what extent it is accurate that the relation between the analysed and the analyst is conceived from the start as that which is established between a subject (the patient) and an external object (the analyst), and, to express ourselves in our vocabulary, the analyst is conceived there as real. All the tension of the analytic situation is conceived on this basis that it is this ‘couple’ which by itself alone is an animating element of analytic development, that between a subject lying or not on a couch and the external object that is the analyst, there can in principle be established, be manifested only what is called the primitive drive relation, the one that must normally—the presupposition of the development of the analytic relation—be manifested by a motor activity.

It is on the side of the small traces, carefully observed, of the periods of the subject’s motor reaction that we find the last word of what happens at the level of the drive which will there in some sense be localized, felt alive by the analyst: it is insofar as the subject holds back his movements, insofar as he is forced to hold them back in the relation as it is established by analytic convention, it is at that level that there is localized in the analyst’s mind what is at issue to be manifested, that is to say the drive in the process of emerging.

In the end the situation is at base conceived as being able to externalize itself only in an erotic aggression, which does not manifest itself because it is agreed that it will not manifest itself, but of which, in some sense, it is desirable that erection should arise, so to speak, at any instant.

It is precisely to the extent that, within the analytic convention, the position of the rule, the motor manifestation of the drive cannot occur, that we will be allowed to notice that what interferes in this situation—this situation, considered as constituting—is very precisely formulated for us in this: that over the relation with the external object is superimposed a relation with an internal object.

That is how it is expressed in the article I have just cited to you. It is insofar as the subject has a certain relation with an internal object which is always considered as being the person present, but taken in some sense within the imaginary mechanisms already instituted in the subject, it is insofar as a certain discordance is introduced between this imaginary object and the real object, that the analyst will at each instant be appraised, gauged, and that he will model his interventions at each instant to the extent of the discordance between:

– this internal object of this fantasmatic relation to someone who is in principle the person present since there is no one other than those who are there to enter into play in the analytic situation

– and the notion highlighted by one of these authors—followed on this occasion by all the others—which is that of ‘the neurotic distance’ that the subject imposes on the object, refers very precisely to this analytic situation.

It is to the full extent that at a moment the fantasmatic object, the internal object will finally—at least in this suspended position and in this way lived by the subject—be reduced to the real distance which is that of the subject to the analyst, it is to the extent that the subject will realize his analyst as ‘real presence’.

Here the authors go very far. I have already alluded several times to the fact that one of these authors—it is true then in a postulant period of his career—had spoken, as of the crucial turning point of an analysis, of the moment when—and it was not a metaphor—his analysed had been able to feel him: it was not a matter of being able to feel him psychologically; he had perceived his smell.

This kind of foregrounding, of surfacing, of the relation of subodorization is, I must say, one of the mathematical consequences of a similar conception of the analytic relation. It is quite certain that in a reined-in position within which there must little by little be realized a distance which is conceived as the distance here active, present, real, vis-à-vis the analyst, it is quite certain that one of the most direct modes of relations in this position, which is a real position and simply reined in, must be that mode of apprehension at a distance which is given by subodorization. I am not taking an example there; this has been repeated several times, and it seems that in that milieu one tends more and more to give a pivotal importance to such modes of apprehension.

Here then is how the analytic position is thought within this situation which is a situation of real rapport between two characters in an enclosure within which they are separated by a kind of barrier which is a conventional barrier, and something must be realized. I am speaking of the theoretical formulation of things; we will see afterward where this leads as to the practical consequences.

It is quite clear that such an exorbitant conception cannot be pushed to its last consequences. It is quite clear on the other hand that if what I teach you is true, this situation is not even really that; it is not enough to conceive it as such, of course, for it to be as one conceives it. One will conduct it awry because of the way one conceives it, but what it really is remains nevertheless that it is that something that I am trying to express to you by this schema:

which brings into play and intercrosses the symbolic relation and the imaginary relation, one serving in some sense as a filter for the other, and it is quite clear that this situation is not real insofar as one misconstrues it; it is therefore something that will come to manifest the insufficiency of this conception. But inversely the insufficiency of this conception can have some consequences on the way of bringing the whole of the situation to a good end.

It is an example of the species that I am going to highlight today before you to show you effectively what it can lead to. But already, here then is a situation conceived as a real situation, as a situation of reduction of the imaginary to the real, an operation of reduction within which a certain number of phenomena take place that will make it possible to situate the different stages where the subject has remained more or less adherent or fixed to this imaginary relation, and to do what is called the exhaustion of the various positions, positions essentially imaginary as has been shown, in the foreground of the pregenital relation as becoming more and more the essential of what is explored in analysis.

The characteristic of such a conception is assuredly that the only thing—and it is not nothing since everything is there—the only thing that is in no way elucidated, one can express it thus: it is that one does not know why one speaks in this situation, one does not know it assuredly; that does not mean that one could do without it; nothing is said as to the fact of the function, properly speaking, of language and of speech in this position.

Moreover, what we will see come to light is the very special value that is given… this again you will find in the authors and in the cited texts, punctuated in the most precise way… that only impulsive verbalization, the kinds of cries toward the analyst of the type ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ represent in the end that something which is valid insofar as it is a matter there of impulsive words, and to signal a verbalization has importance only insofar as it is impulsive, only insofar as it is motor manifestation.

In this operation of the setting, so to speak, of the distance of the internal object to which the whole technique will in some sense submit, what are we going to arrive at? What does our schema allow us to conceive of what can happen? This relation [a’→a] concerns the imaginary relation, the relation of the subject—as more or less discordant, decomposed, open to fragmentation—to a unifying image which is that of the little other, which is a narcissistic image.

It is very essentially on this line that the imaginary relation [a’→a] is established.

Just as it is on this line [A →S], which is not one since it is appropriate to establish it, that this relation to the Other occurs… which is not simply the Other who is there, which is literally the place of speech: it is insofar as there is already structured in the speaking relation this beyond, this Other beyond even that other that you apprehend imaginarily, this supposed Other which is the subject as such, the subject in which your speech is constituted, because he can, as speech, not only receive it, perceive it, but respond to it… it is on this line [A →S] that everything that is of the transference order properly speaking is established, the imaginary playing there precisely a role of filter, even of obstacle. Of course in each neurosis, the subject already has, so to speak, his own setting:
– it is to something that it indeed serves him as a setting with respect to the image,
– it is to something that it serves him, to both hear and not hear what there is to hear at the place of speech.

Let us say nothing more than this:
– if all our effort, all our interest bears solely on what is there [a’→a] in this transverse position with respect to the advent of speech [A→S],
– if everything is misconstrued of the relation between the imaginary tension [a’→a] and what must be realized, come to light of the unconscious symbolic rapport [A →S], because precisely that is the whole analytic doctrine there in a potential state, that there is something that must allow it to be completed, to be realized as much as history as as confession,
– if we abandon the notion of the function of the imaginary relation with respect to this impossibility of the symbolic advent that constitutes neurosis, if we do not think them ceaselessly each as a function of the Other,
…what one can expect in principle that there is to say is what precisely these authors, the proponents of this conception, call the object relation, and this distance to the object is precisely set toward a certain end.

If we are interested in it only in order, in some sense, to annihilate it, if indeed it is possible that by being interested only in it we arrive at something, at a certain result, let it suffice to know that we already have results of it: subjects have already come into our hands who have gone through this style of apprehension and testing.

There is something absolutely certain: that at least in a certain number of cases, and precisely cases of obsessional neurosis, this whole way of situating the development of the analytic situation in a pursuit of the reduction of this famous ‘distance’ which would be considered as characteristic of the object relation in obsessional neurosis, we obtain what one can call paradoxical perverse reactions.

For example the explosion which is quite unusual and which scarcely existed in analytic literature before this technical mode was put in the foreground, the precipitating of a homosexual attachment to an object in some sense quite paradoxical which in the subject’s relation remains even there in the manner of a kind of artifact, of a kind of gelification of an image, of a thing that has crystallized, precipitated around the objects that are within the subject’s reach, and which can manifest for a certain time a fairly durable persistence. This is not surprising if we take the relation of the imaginary triad mother-child-phallus.

At the point where I pushed things last time, you saw a line of research begin to take shape; it is assuredly for us to hold to the prelude of the bringing into play of the symbolic relation, which will be done only with the fourth function which is that of the father, which is introduced by the dimension of the Oedipus.

We are here in a triangle which in itself is pre-Oedipal, I underline it; it is there isolated only in an abstract way. It interests us in its development only insofar as it is then taken up in the quartet with the entry into play of the paternal function from this, let us say, fundamental disappointment of the child recognizing not only that he is not the mother’s unique object—we left open the question of how he recognized it—but noticing that the possible object—this more or less accentuated according to cases—of the mother’s interest is the phallus.

First question of the recognition of the mother-child relation. Noticing secondly that the mother is precisely deprived of, herself lacks this object, that is the point we had reached last time. I showed it to you by evoking the transitional case of a phobia in a very young child, which allowed us to study it, in some sense, in a very favorable way because it is the limit of the Oedipal relation that we could see following a kind of double disappointment:
– imaginary disappointment, locating by the child himself of the phallus that he lacks,
– then afterward in a second time the perception that the mother, that mother who is at the limit of the symbolic and the real, that mother also lacks the phallus.

And the blossoming, the call by the child to support in some sense this unbearable relation, and the intervention of this fantasmatic being which is the dog which intervenes here as the one who is in some sense properly speaking responsible for the whole situation, the one who bites, the one who castrates, the one thanks to whom the whole of this situation is thinkable, symbolically livable, at least for a provisional period.

What happens then, what is the possible position when this harnessing of the three imaginary objects on the occasion is broken? There is more than one possible solution, and the solution is always called in a normal or abnormal situation. What happens in the normal Oedipal situation?

It is through the intermediary of a certain rivalry punctuated by identification, in an alternation of the subject’s relations with the father, that something can be established, which will make it so that the subject will see himself—in some sense diversely, according to his own position as girl or boy—conferred, so to speak—for the boy it is quite clear—conferred within certain limits, precisely those that introduce him to the symbolic relation, conferred this phallic power.

And in a certain way, when I told you the other day that for the mother the child as a real being was taken as the symbol of her lack of object, of her imaginary appetite for the phallus, the normal outcome of this situation can be conceived as being this precisely realized at the level of the child, that is to say that the child receives symbolically this phallus that he needs, but for him to need it it is necessary that he have been previously threatened by the castrating instance which is originally and essentially the paternal instance. It is in a constitution on the symbolic plane, on the plane of a kind of pact, of right to the phallus that this virile identification is established for the child, which is at the foundation of a normative Oedipal relation.

But even here I make you a remark in some sense lateral. What results from this? There is something rather singular, even paradoxical, in the original formulations that are under FREUD’s pen of the distinction between
– the anaclitic relation,
– and the narcissistic relation.

In the Oedipus this libidinal relation… In the adolescent, FREUD tells us that there are two types of love object:
– the anaclitic love object which bears the mark of a primitive dependence on the mother,
– the narcissistic love object which is modeled on the image, which is the image of the subject himself, which is the narcissistic image. It is this image that we tried here to elaborate by showing its root in the specular relation to the other.

The word ‘anaclitic’—even though we owe it to FREUD—is really very badly made because in Greek it really does not have the sense that FREUD gives it, which is indicated by the German word Anlehnung, relation; it is a relation of leaning against. This moreover still lending itself to all sorts of misunderstandings, some having pushed this leaning against to the point of being something that is in the end a kind of defensive reaction. But let us leave that aside; in fact if one reads FREUD one sees very clearly that it is a matter of this need for support and of something that indeed asks only to open up on the side of a relation of dependence.

If one pushes further one will see that there are singular contradictions in the opposed formulation that FREUD gives of these two modes of relations: anaclitic and narcissistic. Very curiously he is led to speak in the anaclitic relation of a need to be loved much more than of a need to love. Inversely and very paradoxically the narcissistic appears all at once in a light that surprises us, for in truth certainly he is attracted by an element of activity inherent in the very special behavior of the narcissistic; he appears active insofar precisely as he always misconstrues the other up to a certain point.

It is with the need to love that FREUD clothes him and of which he gives him the attribute, which makes of it quite paradoxically and suddenly a kind of natural place of what in another vocabulary we would call oblative, and which can only disconcert. I believe that there is something there to return to, but that once again it is in the misconstrual of the position of the intrasubjective elements that these paradoxical perspectives take their origin, and at the same time their justification.

What is called the anaclitic relation where it has interest, that is to say at the level of its persistence in the adult, is always conceived as a kind of pure and simple survivance, prolongation of what is called an infantile position.

If indeed the subject who has this position… and whom elsewhere in the article on libidinal types, FREUD calls neither more nor less than the erotic position, which shows well that it is indeed the most open position… what makes its essence misconstrued is precisely not noticing that insofar as the subject acquires, in the symbolic relation, is invested with the phallus as such, as belonging to him and as being for him of an exercise, so to speak, legitimate, he becomes with respect to what succeeds the maternal object… to this found-again object, marked by the relation to the primitive mother which will be in the normal Oedipal position, always in principle, this from the origin of the Freudian exposition, the object for the male subject… that is to say that he becomes the bearer of this object of desire for the woman.

The position becomes anaclitic insofar as it is from him, from the phallus of which he is now the master, the representative, the depositary, it is insofar as the woman depends on him that the position is anaclitic. The relation of dependence is established insofar as, identifying with the other, with the object partner, he is indispensable to this partner, that it is he who satisfies her, and he alone because he is in principle the sole depositary of this object which is the object of the mother’s desire.

It is as a function of a completion of the Oedipal position that the subject finds himself in the position that we can qualify as optima in a certain perspective with respect to the found-again object which will be the successor of the primitive maternal object, and with respect to which he will become, he, the indispensable object, and that, knowing himself indispensable, a part of the erotic life precisely of subjects who participate in this libidinal slope is entirely conditioned by the once experienced and assumed need of the other, of the maternal woman, as needing in him to find her object which is the phallic object. That is what makes the essence of the anaclitic relation insofar as opposed to the narcissistic relation.

This is only a parenthesis intended to show the usefulness of always bringing into play this dialectic of the relation, here of the three first objects, around which there remains for the moment, except in the general notion of something that embraces them all and binds them in the symbolic relation, around which there remains for the moment localized the fourth term which is the father insofar as he introduces here the symbolic relation, the possibility of the transcendence of the relation of frustration or of lack of object, into the relation of castration which is something entirely different, that is to say which introduces this lack of object into a dialectic, into something that takes and gives, that institutes, invests, confers the dimension of the pact of a prohibition, of a law, of the prohibition of incest in particular, in all this dialectic.

Let us return to our subject: what happens if it is the imaginary relation that becomes the rule and the measure of the whole anaclitic relation?

Exactly this will happen: that at the moment when there enter into disagreement, into non-link, into the destruction of links for some evolutive reason of the historical incidences of the child’s relation to the mother with respect to the third object, the phallic object which is at once what the woman lacks and what the child has discovered that the mother lacks, there are other modes of reestablishing this coherence.

These modes are imaginary modes; they are imaginary modes which, non-typical, consist in the identification of the child with the mother, for example from an imaginary displacement of the child with respect to his maternal partner, the choice in her place, the assumption for her of this lack toward the phallic object as such. The schema I give you there is nothing other than the schema of fetishistic perversion. That is an example of a solution if you like, but there is a more direct way.

In other words other solutions exist for access to this lack of object which is already on the imaginary plane the human way of a realization which is the relation of man to his existence, that is to say to something that can be called into question, which already makes something different from the animal and from all possible animal relations on the imaginary plane, that is to say within certain conditions which will be conditions in some sense punctuated, extra-historical, such as the paroxysm of perversion always presents itself.

Perversion has this property of realizing a certain mode of access to this beyond of the image of the other that characterizes the human dimension, but it realizes it simply in a moment, as the paroxysms of perversions always produce, which are in some sense syncopated moments within the subject’s history.

There is a kind of convergence or rising toward the moment that is perhaps very significantly qualified as passage to the act, and during this passage to the act something is realized:

– which is fusion,
– which is access to this beyond,
– which is properly speaking this trans-individual dimension that Freudian anaclitic theory formulated as such, and teaches us to call eros, this union of two individuals each being torn away from himself and for an instant more or less fragile, transitory, even virtual, constituting this unity. This unity is realized at certain moments of perversion, and what constitutes perversion is precisely that it can never be realized except in these moments not symbolically ordered.

The subject finally finds his object, and his exclusive object, and he himself says it, all the more exclusive and all the more perfectly more satisfying insofar as it is inanimate, at least in that way he will be quite calm about having no disappointment on its part. When the subject loves a slipper, there is the subject who really has, so to speak, the object of his desires within reach; it is safer, an object itself devoid of subjective, intersubjective, even trans-subjective property. The fetishistic solution is incontestably, as concerns realizing the condition of lack as such, one of the most conceivable conditions in this perspective, and it is realized.

We also know that the proper of the imaginary relation being to be always perfectly reciprocal, since it is a mirror relation, we must expect to see appear in the fetishist from time to time the position not of identification with the mother, but of identification with the object. That is indeed what we will see occur in the course of an analysis of a fetishist, for this position as such is always what there is most unsatisfying.

It is not enough that for a short instant the fascinating illumination of the object that was the maternal object should be something that satisfies the subject, for around that there to be able to be established a whole erotic equilibrium, and indeed for the moment if it is with the object that he identifies, he will, one can say, lose his primitive object, namely the mother; he will consider himself for the mother as a destructive object; it is this perpetual play, this kind of profound diplopia that marks the whole apprehension of the fetishistic manifestation into which we will have to enter later.

But it is so visible and manifest that someone like Phyllis GREENACRE, who sought to seriously deepen the foundation of the fetishistic relation, tells us that it seems that one is in the presence of a subject who would show you with an excessive speed his own image in two opposing mirrors. It came out to her like that without her knowing very well at that moment why, for it comes like a bolt from the blue, but she suddenly had the feeling that it is that: he is never there where he is for the good reason that he has left his place, that he has passed into a specular relation from the mother to the phallus, and that he is alternately the one and the other, a position that manages to stabilize only insofar as is grasped this sort of unique, privileged and at the same time impermanent symbol that is the precise object of fetishism, that is to say the something that symbolizes the phallus.

It is therefore on the plane of analogous relations—at least that we can conceive as being essentially of a perverse nature—that the results must manifest themselves, at least transitorily, at least in the face of a certain way of handling the anaclitic relation, if we center it entirely on the object relation insofar as bringing into play only the imaginary and the real, and regulating on a supposed real of ‘the presence of the analyst’ the whole accommodation of the imaginary relation.

In my Rome Report I made somewhere an allusion to this mode of object relation by comparing it to what I called a kind of bundling pushed to its supreme limits in the matter of psychological testing. This little passage could have gone unnoticed, but by a note I enlighten the reader and specify that bundling is something very precise that concerns certain customs that still exist in these kinds of cultural islets where old customs persist.

But we already find some in STENDHAL, who recounts that as a kind of particularism of Swiss fantasists or of southern Germany, in different places that are not indifferent from the geographical point of view.

This bundling consists very exactly in the conception of amorous relations as a technique, as a pattern of relations between male and female that consists in this: that one admits that under certain conditions for another partner for example who approaches the group in a privileged way, someone of the house—the girl generally—can, in the course of a relation that is essentially founded as a type of relation of hospitality, offer him to share her bed, and this being linked to the condition that contact will not take place, and it is from there that bundling comes. The girl is very frequently in these modes of usages wrapped in a sheet, so that there are all the conditions of approach, aside from the last.

This, which can pass for being simply a happy fantasy of morals of which we can perhaps regret not being participants, could be amusing, deserves a certain attention, for in the end there is nothing forced in saying that the analytic situation 17 or 18 years after FREUD’s death is paradoxical and ends up being conceived, and formalized, in this way.

There is there the report of a session, noted in 1933 or 1934, with all the movements of the patient during the session, oriented insofar as she manifests something that is the more or less manifest impetus at more or less distance with respect to the analyst who is there, behind her back. There is there all the same something rather striking, although this text appeared since I wrote my report, and that proves that I forced nothing in saying that it was to this aim and to these psychological consequences that the practice of analysis was reduced in a certain conception.

I indicate to you that if we find these paradoxes in the usages and customs of certain cultural islets, there is a Protestant sect about which someone has done fairly advanced studies: it is a sect of Dutch origin that has preserved in its relations in a very precise way the local customs linked to a religious unity; it is the sect of the AMISH.

But it is quite clear that all this pertains to misunderstood remnants of course, but of which we find the symbolic formulation quite coordinated, deliberate, organized in an entire tradition that one can call religious, even symbolic. It is clear that everything we know of the practice of courtly love and of the whole sphere in which it was localized in the Middle Ages implies this kind of very rigorous technical elaboration of amorous approach that included long reined-in stages in the presence of the loved object, and that aimed at the realization indeed of this beyond that is sought in love, this properly erotic beyond, and that these techniques, all these traditions, from the moment one has the key to them, one finds again in a quite formulated way, in other cultural areas, the points of emergence.

It is an order of research in amorous realization which, on several occasions, is posed in the history of humanity in a quite conscious way.

What is ordered, what is indeed attained, we do not have here to call it into question; that it aimed at something that tried to go beyond the physiological short-circuit, if one can express oneself thus, it is also not doubtful that that has a certain interest. It is not there something that is introduced here outside a certain reference that allows us to situate exactly, and this metaphor, and at the same time the possibility of integrating at various levels, that is to say in a more or less conscious way, what one does with the use of the imaginary relation as such… perhaps itself employed in a deliberate way… the use, so to speak, of practices that can seem in the eyes of a naïve person to be perverse practices, and which in reality are no more so than any regulation of amorous approach of a defined sphere of morals and patterns, as one expresses oneself. It is something that deserves to be signaled as a point of reference for knowing where we situate ourselves.

Now let us take a case that is developed in this journal cited last time, which reports the sincere questions of the members of a certain group concerning the object relation. We have there under the pen of a person who has taken rank in the analytic community, the observation of what she rightly calls a phobic subject. This phobic subject presents himself as someone whose activity has been sufficiently reduced to arrive at a kind of almost complete inactivity; the subject has, as the most manifest symptom, the fear of being too tall; he always presents himself in an extremely bent attitude; almost everything has become impossible in his relations with the professional milieu; he leads a life reduced under the shelter of the family milieu, nevertheless not without his having a mistress—who was provided to him by his mother—herself older than he.

And it is in this constellation that the woman analyst in question takes hold of him and begins to approach with him the question. The diagnosis of the subject is made in a fine way, and the diagnosis of phobia does not suffer from difficulty despite the paradox of the fact that the phobogenic object at first sight does not seem to be external. It is nevertheless in this, that at a moment we see appear a repetitive dream that is the model of an externalized anxiety.

In this particular case the object is discovered only on a second approach; it is precisely the phobic object itself that we know perfectly recognizable: it is the substitute for the paternal image which is quite lacking in this case; it is the image of a man in armor, moreover provided with a particularly aggressive instrument which is none other than a fly-tox tube that is going to destroy all the little phobic objects, insects, which is there wonderfully illustrated.

And it is of being tracked and suffocated in the dark by this man in armor that the subject reveals himself to have the fear, and this fear is not nothing in the general balance of this phobic structure. After a certain time one obtains the emergence of this image. The woman analyst who is in charge of the subject gives us there an observation entitled: Of a perverse reaction or of the appearance of a perversion in the course of an analytic treatment. It is not forcing things—transitory sexual perversion—on my part to introduce this question of perverse reaction since the author places the emphasis on the interest of the observation as being this interest, and indeed the author is not at ease; not only is the author not at ease, but the author has very well noticed that the reaction she calls perverse—of course it is a label—appeared in precise circumstances.

In any case, the fact that the author poses the question around this moment proves that she is aware that the question is there, from the moment when, having finally seen the phobogenic object come to light—the man in armor—she interprets it as being the phallic mother. Why the phallic mother when it is really the man in armor with all his heraldic character. Why the phallic mother?

Throughout this observation are reported, with I believe an incontestable fidelity and in any case fairly well underlined, the questions that the author asks herself.

The author asks herself the following question: did I not make there an interpretation that is not the good one since right away afterward this perverse reaction appeared, and that we were then engaged in nothing less than a period of three years where, by stages, the subject first developed a perverse fantasy that consisted in imagining himself:
– seen urinating by a woman, who very excited then came to solicit him to have amorous relations with her,
– then afterward a reversal of this position, that is to say he, the subject, observing, while masturbating or not masturbating, a woman in the process of urinating,
– then in a third stage the effective realization of this position, that is to say the discovery in a cinema of a small room that was providentially provided with little windows thanks to which he could indeed observe women in the neighboring W.C. while he himself was in his own little closet.

We thus have there something about which the author herself questions the determining value of a certain mode of interpretation with respect to the precipitating of a thing which first took on the appearance of a fantasmatic crystallization of something that obviously forms part of the components of the subject, namely not of the phallic mother, but of the mother in her relation with the phallus.

But the idea that there is in the matter a phallic mother, the author herself gives us the key to it. The author questions herself, at a moment, on the general conduct of the treatment, and she observes that she herself has in the end been much more forbidding or prohibitive than the mother had ever been. Everything makes it appear that the entity of the phallic mother is there produced because of what the author herself calls her own counter-transferential positions.

If one follows the analysis closely one absolutely does not doubt it, for while this imaginary relation was developing, of course to the full extent that it had been developed by the analytic misstep, we see:

1. the analyst intervene with regard to a dream where the subject, finding himself in the presence of a person from his past history, vis-à-vis whom he claims to have amorous impulses, claims himself prevented by the presence of another female subject who also played a role in his history, a woman whom he saw in his childhood urinate in front of him at a much more advanced period of his childhood, that is to say past the age of 13.

The analyst intervenes in the following way:

‘No doubt you prefer to take an interest in a woman by watching her urinate than to make the effort to go on the attack toward another woman who may please you but who happens to be someone married.’

By this intervention the analyst thinks to reintroduce the truth in a somewhat forced way, for the masculine character is indicated in the dream only by associations, namely the alleged husband of the mother. The husband who comes to reintroduce the Oedipus complex intervenes in a way that has all the characteristics of provocation, especially if one knows that it is the analyst’s husband who sent the subject to her. At that moment, it is precisely something that is a turn; it is at that moment that the progressive reversal of the observation fantasy occurs, from the sense of being observed to that of observing oneself.

2. as if that were not enough, the analyst, to a request by the subject to slow the rhythm of the sessions, answers him:

‘You manifest there your passive positions because you know very well that in any case you will not obtain it.’

At that moment the fantasy crystallizes completely, which proves that there is something more. The subject, who understands quite a lot of things in his relations of impossibility of reaching the feminine object, ends up developing his fantasies within the treatment itself: fear of urinating on the couch, etc. He begins to have reactions that manifest a certain drawing nearer of the distance to the real object; he begins to spy on the analyst’s legs, which the analyst moreover notes with a certain satisfaction. There is indeed something that is on the edge of the real situation, of the constitution of the mother not phallic but aphallic.

If there is something that is indeed the principle of the institution of the fetishistic position, it is very precisely in this: that the subject stops at a certain level of his investigation and of his observation of the woman insofar as she has or does not have the organ that is put in question. We thus find ourselves there before a position that gradually leads the subject to say:
‘My God there would be no solution except if I slept with my analyst.’ He says it.

At that moment the analyst begins to find that it gets a bit on her nerves and makes to him this remark about which she then questions herself anxiously, ‘Did I do well to say that?’:

‘For the moment you amuse yourself,’ she tells him, ‘by frightening yourself with something that you know very well will never happen.’

Anyone can question the degree of mastery that an intervention like that involves, which is a somewhat brutal reminder of the conventions of the analytic situation. It is quite in accord with the notion one can have of the analytic position as being a real position. So there are the things set straight.

It is very precisely after this intervention that the subject passes definitively to the act and finds the perfect place, the chosen place in the real, namely the organization of the little urinal of the Champs Elysées where he will find himself this time really at the good real distance, separated by a wall, from the object of his observation, which he could this time observe indeed, not as phallic mother, but very precisely as aphallic mother, and suspend there for a certain time all the erotic activity which is so satisfying that he declares that up to the moment of this discovery he lived like an automaton, but that now everything is changed. That is where things stand.

I simply wanted to make you touch with your finger that assuredly the notion of distance of the object, the analyst as real object, and the so-called notion of reference, can be something that is not without effect; these are perhaps not the most desirable effects in the end. I am not telling you how this treatment ends; it would have to be examined minutely, so rich in teaching is each detail. The last session is eluded; the subject also has himself operated on for some varix; everything is there, the timid attempt of access to castration and a certain freedom that can result from it is even indicated there.

After that one judges that it is sufficient; the subject returns with his mistress, the same one he had at the beginning, the one who is 15 years older than he, and as he no longer speaks of his great height one considers that the phobia is cured. Unfortunately from that moment on he thinks only of one thing, it is the size of his shoes: they are sometimes too big, he loses his balance, or they are too small and they squeeze his foot, so that the turn, the transformation of the phobia is accomplished.

After all, why not consider that as the end of analytic work? In any case, from the experimental point of view there is something that is assuredly not devoid of interest.

The summit of course of access to the supposed good ease, to the real object, is given as if there were there almost a sign of recognition—I speak among initiates—at the moment when the subject has the perception, in the presence of his analyst, of an odor of urine, this being considered as the moment when the distance to the real object… throughout the observation it is indicated to us that this is the point through which the whole neurotic relation fails… where the distance is finally exact, this of course coinciding with the summit, the apogee of perversion.

When I say ‘perversion’, tell yourself well—no more moreover than the author conceals it from herself—one must not consider this properly speaking as a perversion, but rather as an artifact. These things, although they can be permanent and very durable, are nevertheless artifacts susceptible to rupture, to dissolution, sometimes fairly abrupt.

After a certain time the subject gets himself surprised by an usherette. The mere fact of being surprised by this usherette makes the fréquentation of the particularly propitious place that the real had come to offer him at the right time fall from one day to the next: the real always offers at the right time everything one needs, when one has finally been set by the right ways, at the right distance.