🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today we are going to make a leap into a problem which, if we had proceeded step by step, we should normally have had to encounter much further on in our discourse: that of the most problematic perversion there is from the perspective of analysis, namely female homosexuality. Why would I proceed in this way? I would say that there is in it a part of contingency.

It is certain that we could not proceed this year to an examination of the object relation without encountering the feminine object, and you know that the problem is not so much to know how we encounter the feminine object in analysis…
on that point analysis gives us enough to inform us when the subject of this encounter is not natural,
I showed you enough of it in the first part of these seminars of last term, by reminding you
that the feminine subject is always called, in its encounter, to a sort of rediscovery that places it at once
in relation to man, in this ambiguity of natural relations and symbolic relations
which is precisely what I am trying to demonstrate to you as the whole analytic dimension
…the problem is assuredly to know what the feminine object thinks of it—and what the feminine object thinks of it is even less natural
than the way the masculine subject approaches it—what the feminine object thinks of it, namely what its path is from its first approaches to the natural and primordial object of desire, namely the maternal breast. How does the feminine object enter into this dialectic?

It is not for nothing that I call it today an object; it is clear that this object must, at some moment, come into function, only it takes this very little natural position of object, since it is a second-degree position that has interest
in being qualified as such only because it is a position that is taken up by a subject.

Female homosexuality has taken on, in all of analysis, a particularly exemplary value in what it has been able to reveal of the stages, of the course and of the halts in this course that can mark the destiny of the woman in this relation that is natural, biological at the outset, but that never ceases to carry over onto the symbolic plane, onto the plane of assumption by this subject insofar as it is itself taken
in the symbolic chain.

It is indeed there that it is a question of the woman, and it is indeed to the extent that she has to make a choice—which must, in some respect
whatever it may be, be, as analytic experience teaches us, a compromise between what is to be attained and what has not been able to be attained—that female homosexuality is encountered every time the discussion is established on the subject of the stages that the woman
has to fulfill in her symbolic completion.

This must lead, during this interval, to exhausting a certain number of texts, namely those that are ranged,
as far as FREUD is concerned, between 1923—which you can note as the date of his article on Infantile genital organization, where he posits as a principle the primacy of phallic assumption as being at the end of the infantile phase of sexuality,
a phase typical for the boy as for the girl.

Genital organization is reached for the one as for the other, but on a type that makes possession, or non-possession, of the phallus the primordial differential element in which, at this level, the genital organization of the sexes is opposed.
There is not at that moment, FREUD tells us, a realization of the male and the female, but
– of what is provided with the phallic attribute,
– and what is deprived of it is considered equivalent to castrated.

And I add, to make his thought quite precise, that this organization is the formula of an essential and terminal stage of the first phase of infantile sexuality, the one that is completed at the entry into the latency period. I specify the thought: it is that this is founded,
for the one sex as for the other, on a misdeal, and this misdeal is founded on ignorance; it is not a matter of misrecognition but of ignorance of the fertilizing role of male seed, and, on the other side, of the existence as such of the female organ.
These are absolutely enormous assertions, and they require, in order to be understood, an exegesis, for we cannot find ourselves here in the presence of something that could be taken at the level of real experience.

I mean that—as have raised, moreover in the greatest confusion, the authors who from there went
into action following this assertion of FREUD—a very large number of facts shows that, on a certain number
of lived planes, all sorts of things allow the presence to be revealed, if not of the male role in the act of procreation,
assuredly of the existence of the female organ, at least in the woman herself.

That there is, in the early experience of the little girl, something that corresponds to vaginal localization,
that there are emotions, even an early vaginal masturbation, I believe that this can hardly be contested,
at least as being realized in a certain number of cases. And one starts from knowing whether in fact it is to the existence of the clitoris that this predominance of the phallic phase must be attributed, whether it is due to the fact that, as they say, libido
—let us make this term the synonym of any erogenous experience—is primitively and exclusively concentrated at the outset on
the clitoris, and whether it is perhaps only following a displacement that must be long and painful, and that requires a long detour.

I believe that assuredly it cannot be in these terms that FREUD’s assertion can be understood.
Too many facts, moreover confused, allow all sorts of objections to be raised on that point.
I allude only to one of them by reminding you that we must admit, if we want to conceive in a way that seems to be required by a certain number of premises—which are precisely those realistic premises that consider that any kind
of misrecognition presupposes in the unconscious a certain knowledge of the coaptation of the sexes—that there could not be
in the girl this prevalence precisely of the organ that does not belong to her as such and as her own, except on the basis
of a certain denial of the existence of the vagina, and that it is a matter of accounting for it.

It is from these hypotheses admitted as a priori that the girl strives to retrace a genesis of this phallic term.
In the girl we will go into detail and we will see this sort of necessity borrowed from a certain number of premises, partly expressed moreover by the author FREUD himself, and he shows well that by the very uncertainty of the final fact to which it refers—for the facts on which it relies, this ‘primordial experience of the vaginal organ’, are very cautious, even reserved—it is indeed in her case only a sort of reconstruction required by premises that are theoretical premises that stem precisely from a false path in the way it is appropriate to understand FREUD’s assertion, founded on his experience, advanced by him moreover with prudence, even with that share of uncertainty that is so characteristic of
his presentation of this discovery, but that is nonetheless asserted as primordial, and even as having to be taken as a fixed point, as a pivot around which theoretical interpretation itself must develop.

This is what we are going to try to do starting from this paradoxical assertion on the term of phallicism, between these assertions of FREUD at the point in his work where they occur, and the extensions he gives to it when, eight years later, in 1931,
he writes on female sexuality something even more enormous.

In the interval an extremely active discussion arises, a harvest of speculations, all the more since the fact is reported by[…] and by JONES as well. And there is there a whole genuine progress of approximations that is indeed the one to which I had to devote myself
during these holidays, and of which I would say that it seemed to me extremely difficult, without falsifying it, to give an account,
because what characterizes it is assuredly its uncontrolled character.

We are going to have to exhaust this profoundly uncontrolled character of the categories brought into play, and in order to give an account of it
and make oneself understood there is no way to proceed other than by mastering it, and to master it is already to change it completely in axis and in nature, and it is something that even up to a certain point cannot truly give a just perspective of what is at stake, for this character is really essential to this whole problem; it is really correlative
to what is here the second aim of our theoretical examination this year: to show us how, in parallel and inflexibly, analytic practice itself commits itself to an uncontrollable deviation.

And I would say that once again, to return to this precise incidence that is the object of what I am setting out for you in the midst
of all this mass of facts, it appeared to me this morning that it could be retained as a sort of exemplary image this little fact simply collected in the course of one of these articles—it is something admitted by all—it is that for the little girl,
at the turn of this evolution and at the moment when she enters into the Oedipus, it is indeed as a substitute for this missing phallus
that she begins to desire a child from the father. And one of these authors cited as an example an analysis of a child.

And to show how much there is there something that can come into play with a present incidence in the precipitation
of the movement of the Oedipus…
namely that the disappointment of not receiving a child from the father is something that is going to play an essential role in bringing the little girl back from that into which she has entered in the Oedipus, namely by this paradoxical path first of identification with the father, so that she resumes the feminine position; all the authors in principle admit it, by way of this deprivation of the desired child from the father
…and exemplifying this movement that is given to us as always essentially unconscious by a case where, in sum, an analysis had allowed a child to bring to light this image of the little girl who, having been in the course of analysis and finding herself as a result having more light than another following some clarification on what was going on in her unconscious,
would get up every morning asking whether the father’s little child had arrived, and whether it was for today or for tomorrow.

And it was with anger and tears that she asked it each morning.
This example seems to me once again exemplary of what is at stake in this deviation of analytic practice which is that
which is always the accompaniment of our theoretical exploration this year concerning the object relation, for in truth
we touch there with our finger the way in which a certain mode of understanding, of attacking frustrations is something
that in reality leads analysis to a mode of intervention whose effects not only can appear doubtful,
but manifestly opposite to what is at stake in what one can call the process of analytic interpretation.

It is quite clear that the notion we can have that at a given moment in the evolution the child appears
as an imaginary object, as a substitute for this missing phallus which plays an essential role in the evolution of the little girl,
is something that literally has no interest, that cannot be brought into play legitimately insofar as subsequently,
or even at a contemporary stage, the child, the subject has to do with it, enters into the play of a series of symbolic resonances that are going to be of interest in the past, that are going to bring into play what the child experienced in the phallic state, namely everything that can be linked for him to possessive or destructive reactions at the moment of the phallic crisis, with what it includes of truly problematic in the stage of childhood to which it corresponds.

It is in sum ‘after the fact’ that everything that relates to this prevalence or predominance of the phallus at a stage
of the child’s evolution will take on these incidences, and insofar as it enters into the necessity, at one or another moment, of symbolizing some event that will occur, whether the late arrival of a child for someone who is in immediate relation with the child,
or else that for the subject indeed the question of possession of the child, the question of her own maternity will arise.
But to make intervene, if not at that moment or at the moment when it occurs, not something that intervenes
in the symbolic structuring of the subject, but in a certain relation of imaginary substitution precipitated at that moment by speech into the symbolic plane, what at that moment is lived in a quite different way by the child, is to give it
in some sense already the sanction of an organization, the introduction into a sort of legitimacy that literally consecrates
frustration as such, establishes it at the center of experience, whereas it is legitimately introduced as frustration
only if it has in fact taken place at the level of the unconscious, as correct theory tells us.

This frustration is only an evanescent moment and also a moment that has importance and function only—for us analysts—on the purely theoretical plane of articulating what has happened. Its realization by the subject is by definition excluded, because it is extraordinarily unstable. It has importance and interest only insofar as it opens out
into something else that is one or the other of these two planes that I have distinguished for you, privation and castration,
the plane of castration being nothing other than:
– what establishes precisely in its true order the necessity of this frustration,
– what transcends it and establishes it in something that is a law that gives it another value,
– and what from there, moreover, consecrates the existence of privation, because on the plane of the real no kind of idea of privation is conceivable except for a being who articulates something on the symbolic plane, and it is only from there that a privation can be conceived effectively.

We grasp it in interventions that are in some sense supportive interventions, psychotherapeutic interventions like, for example, the one that I evoked for you quickly concerning the little girl who was in the hands of a pupil of Anna FREUD,
and who had that sketch of a phobia concerning the experience she had of being effectively deprived of something,
under conditions different from the one to which the child found herself constrained, and of which I showed you that it is not
at all in this experience that the spring of the necessary displacement of the phobia truly lies, but rather in the fact,
not that she did not have this phallus, but that her mother could not give it to her, and even more that she could not give it to her because she did not have it herself.

The intervention made by the psychotherapist, which consists in telling her—and she is quite right—that all women are like that, can lead one to think that it is a reduction to the real. It is not a reduction to the real because the child knows very well that she does not have
a phallus; she teaches her that the rule is, it is insofar as she makes it pass onto the symbolic plane of law that she intervenes in a way that is indeed debatable from the point of view of effectiveness, because in truth she only questions the fact that her intervention
may have been effective, or not, in a certain reduction of the phobia. At that moment it is clear that she is effective
only in an extremely momentary way, and that the phobia starts up again all the more.

It will be reduced only when the child has been reintegrated into a complete family, that is to say at the moment when in principle
her frustration should appear to her even greater than before, since here she is confronted with a stepfather,
that is to say with a male who enters into the play of the family—her mother having up to then been a widow—and with an older brother,
only at that moment the phobia is reduced because literally she no longer needs it to make up
for this absence, in the symbolic circuit, of any properly phallus-bearing element, that is, of males.

The essential point of these critical remarks on the use we make of the term ‘frustration’…
which of course is in a certain way legitimized by the fact that what is essential in this dialectic
is more the lack of the object than the object itself; in a certain way frustration appears to respond very well to this conceptual notion
…bears on the instability of the very dialectic of frustration.

Frustration is not privation. Why? Frustration is something of which you are deprived by someone else, from whom you could precisely expect what you asked of them. What is at stake in frustration is something that is less the object than the love of the one who can make you this gift, if it is given to you. The object of frustration is less the object than the gift.
We find ourselves there at the origin of a dialectic that is the symbolic gap, itself moreover at each instant evanescent since this gift is a gift that has not yet been brought except as within a certain gratuitousness.

The gift comes from the Other. What there is behind the Other, namely the whole chain by reason of which this gift comes to you,
is still unnoticed, and it will be from the moment when it is noticed that the subject will notice that the gift is much more complete
than it first appears, namely that it concerns the whole human chain.

But at the outset of the dialectic of frustration, there is only that: this confrontation with the Other, this gift that surges up,
but which, if it is brought as a gift, makes the object itself vanish insofar as it is an object.
– If, in other words, the demand were granted, the object would pass into the background.
– On the other hand if the demand is not granted, the object too in that case vanishes and changes meaning.

If you want to sustain the word ‘frustration’—for there is frustration if the subject enters into the claim that this term implies—
it is by bringing in the object as something that was claimable by right, that already belonged to them.
The object at that moment enters into what one could call the narcissistic era of the subject’s belongings.

In both cases, whatever happens, the moment of frustration is an evanescent moment that opens out onto something
that projects us onto another plane than the plane of pure and simple desire.

Demand, in a way, has something that human experience knows well: it has within itself something that means it can never, as such, truly be granted. Granted or not, it annihilates itself, is annihilated at the next stage, and it projects itself at once onto something else:
– either onto the articulation of the chain of gifts,
– or onto that closed and absolutely inextinguishable something that is called narcissism, and thanks to which the object for the subject is at once something that is him and that is not him, with which he can never be satisfied, precisely in the sense that it is him and that it is not him at once.

It is only insofar as frustration enters into a dialectic that, by legalizing it, also gives it this dimension of gratuitousness, situates it somewhere, that there can also be established this symbolized order of the Real where the subject can establish,
for example as existing and admitted, certain permanent privations.

This is something that, by being misrecognized, introduces all kinds of ways of reconstructing everything that is given to us
in experience as an effect linked to the fundamental lack of object, which introduces a whole series of dead ends always linked to the idea
of wanting to destroy—from desire considered as a pure element of the individual, desire with what it entails as a repercussion in its satisfaction as in its disappointment—of wanting to hold, to reconstruct the whole chain of experience
which can literally be elaborated, conceived only if we first posit as a principle that nothing is articulated, that nothing can be scaffolded in experience, if we do not posit as prior the fact that nothing is established, constituted as a properly analyzable conflict, except from the moment when the subject enters:
– into the legal order,
– into the symbolic order,
– enters into an order that is an order of symbol, symbolic chain, order of symbolic debt.

It is only from this entry into something that is preexisting to everything that happens to the subject, to any kind of event or disappointment, it is from that moment that everything by which he approaches it—namely his lived experience, his experience, that confused thing that is there before it is ordered—articulates itself, takes on its meaning and only as such can be analyzed.

We cannot anywhere better enter naively into these references, nowhere better can one make you see the soundness of this reminder, which should only be a reminder, than starting from some texts of FREUD himself.

Last night some spoke of a certain uncertain side, sometimes paradoxically wild, of some texts,
they even spoke of elements of adventure, or again one even said diplomacy—one does not moreover see why—
that is why I have chosen for you one of the most brilliant; I would even say almost one of the most troubling, but it is conceivable
that it could appear as truly archaic, even outdated. It is a psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality.
I would simply like to recall for you its essential articulations. It is a girl from a good Viennese family,
and for a good family it was to take a rather great step to send someone to FREUD; this takes place in 1920.
Something very singular had happened, namely that the daughter of the house, 18 years old, beautiful, intelligent, very high social class, is an object of concern for her parents because she runs after a person who is called a ‘society lady’,
10 years older than she is, and it is specified by all sorts of details given to us by the family that this society lady is perhaps from a world one could qualify as the ‘demimonde’ in the classification prevailing at that time in Vienna
and considered respectable.

The kind of attachment—of which everything reveals, as events advance, that it is truly passionate—
that binds her to this lady is something that puts her into rather painful relations with her family.
We learn thereafter that these rather painful relations are not foreign to the establishment of the whole situation;
to put it plainly, the fact that it makes the father absolutely furious is certainly a motive, it seems, for which the young girl in a certain way, not so much sustains this passion as conducts it. I mean the kind of quiet defiance with which she pursues her attentions toward the lady in question, her waiting in the street, the way she partially displays her affair
without making a show of it, all that is enough for her parents to be ignorant of none of it, and quite especially her father.
We are also told that the mother is not someone of complete calm; she has been neurotic and she does not take it so badly, in any case not so seriously.

They come to ask FREUD to arrange this, and he notes very pertinently the difficulties of establishing a treatment when it is a matter of satisfying the demands of the entourage. FREUD very rightly remarks that one does not do an analysis on command. In truth this only introduces something even more extraordinary, and that goes in a direction that is indeed the one that will make us see considerations of FREUD with respect to analysis itself which to some will appear
quite surpassed. Namely what FREUD told us, to explain that his analysis did not reach its term, that it allowed him to see very, very far—and that is why he shares it with us—but that assuredly it did not allow him to change
much of anything in the destiny of this young girl.

And to explain it he introduces this idea, which is not without foundation, although it may seem obsolete: it is a schematic idea that should rather encourage us to return to certain primary data than make us find ourselves more manageable, namely that there are two elements in an analysis:
– the first being, in a way, the gathering-up of everything one can know.
– then one is going to make the resistances bend that still hold perfectly, where the subject already knows a great many things.

And the comparison he introduces there is not one of the least astonishing: he compares this to the assembling of luggage before a trip, which is always something rather complicated, and then it is a matter of embarking and traveling the route.
This reference, in someone who has a phobia of railways and of travel, is all the same rather piquant!
But what is much more enormous still is that during all that time he has the feeling that in fact nothing is happening.
By contrast he sees very well what happened and he brings out a certain number of stages.

He sees well that in childhood there was something that seems not to have happened all by itself at the moment when, of her two brothers, she was able to apprehend, with regard to the elder precisely, the difference that made her, her, consist in someone who did not have an essentially desirable object, the phallic object, and it did not happen all by itself. One of these two brothers, he, is younger.
Nevertheless, up to then—he tells us—the young girl had never been neurotic; no hysterical symptom was brought to analysis,
nothing in the infantile history is notable from the point of view of pathological consequences.

And that is indeed why it is striking in this case—at least clinically—to see so late the triggering of an attitude that appears to everyone frankly abnormal, and that is that of this singular position she occupies vis-à-vis
this somewhat decried woman, and to whom she shows this passionate attachment that leads her to that outburst
that brought her to FREUD’s consultation. For if it was necessary to come to entrust oneself to FREUD, it is because something striking had occurred, namely that with this gentle flirtation the young girl carried on with danger, that is, that she would still
go strolling with the lady almost under the windows of her own house, one day the father comes out, sees that and—finding himself in front of other people—throws them a blazing look and goes away. By contrast the lady asks the young girl:
– ‘Who is that person?’
– ‘It’s papa.’
– ‘He doesn’t look pleased!’

The lady then takes the thing very badly. We are told that up to then she has had, with the young girl, a very reserved attitude, even more than cold, and that assuredly she did not at all encourage these attentions, that she did not especially desire to have complications, and she says to her: ‘In those conditions we won’t see each other anymore!’. There are in Vienna kinds of little belt railways; one is not very far from one of these little bridges, and there is the girl who throws herself down from one of these little bridges,
she falls, niederkommt. She breaks a few bones, but gets through it.

So, FREUD tells us, up to the moment when this attachment appeared, the young girl had had a development
not only normal, but one that everything suggested was orienting very well: had she not at 13 or 14 years,
something that gave hope for the most sympathetic development of the feminine vocation, that of maternity?

She was mothering a little boy of the parents’ friends and all of a sudden this kind of maternal love, which seemed to make her in advance the model of mothers, stops suddenly, and it is at that moment, FREUD tells us, that she begins to frequent—because the adventure in question is not the first—women he qualifies as ‘already mature’, that is to say kinds of maternal substitutes at first, it seems. All the same this schema does not hold so well for the last person, the one who really
embodied the dramatic adventure in the course of which the triggering of the analysis will turn, and likewise the problematic of a declared homosexuality, for the subject declares to FREUD that it is out of the question for her to abandon anything
of her pretensions, or of her object choice.

She will do whatever it takes to deceive her family, but she will continue to maintain her ties with the person for whom
she is far from having lost her taste, and who has found herself sufficiently moved by this extraordinary mark of devotion to have become much more tractable for her since. This relationship, then, declared, maintained by the subject, is something about which FREUD brings us very striking remarks. There are some to which he gives the value of a sanction:
– either explanatory of what happened before the treatment, for example the suicide attempt,
– or explanatory of his own failure.

The first seem very pertinent, the second too, perhaps not quite as he himself understands them,
but it is the property of FREUD’s observations always to leave us a great deal of extraordinary clarity,
even about the things that in a way surpassed him himself.

I am alluding to the observation of Dora, where FREUD saw clearly afterward; he had intervened with Dora
when he was misrecognizing the orientation of her question toward her own sex, namely Dora’s homosexuality.
Here one finds a misrecognition of an analogous order, but much more instructive because much deeper.

Then, there are also things he tells us, and from which he draws only an incomplete advantage, and which are certainly not the least interesting on the subject of what is at stake in this suicide attempt, which in a way is crowned in a significant act, a crisis of which one certainly cannot say that the subject is not intimately linked to the rise of tension,
up to the moment when the conflict breaks out and arrives at a catastrophe.

He explains this to us in the following way: it is in the register of an orientation in a way normal, toward a desire to have a child from the father, that one must conceive the originary crisis that made this subject commit herself to something that goes strictly
to the opposite, since we are told that there was a true reversal of position, and FREUD tries to articulate it.
It is one of those cases where disappointment by the object of desire is summed up by a complete reversal of position, which is identification with that object, and which by that fact—FREUD articulates it exactly in a note—is equivalent to a regression to narcissism.

When I make the dialectic of narcissism essentially this relation ‘I↔little other’, I do absolutely nothing other than bring to light what is implicit in all the ways FREUD expresses himself. What then is this disappointment, this moment toward the fifteenth year when the subject…
engaged on the path of a taking-possession of this imaginary object, of this imaginary child,
she busies herself with it enough for it to make a date in the patient’s antecedents
…effects this reversal?

At that moment her mother really has a child from the father, in other words the patient acquires a 3rd brother. Here then
is the key point, the also apparently exceptional character of this observation following something that happened.
It is now a matter of seeing where this will be interpreted best, because after all it is not banal either that there should result
from the intervention of a little one, late-arrived like that, a profound turning-over of the sexual orientation of a subject.

So it is at that moment that the girl changes position, and it is a matter of knowing what happens. FREUD tells us: it is something that must be considered as assuredly reactional—the term moreover is not in the text, but it is implied since he continues to suppose that resentment toward the father continues to play—it is there the major role, a peg in the situation, the one that explains the whole way the adventure is conducted.

She is clearly aggressive toward the father, and in the suicide attempt, following the disappointment produced by the fact that the object of her attachment in a way counters her, there would be only the father’s counter-aggressivity,
a turning-back of this aggression onto the subject herself, combined with something, FREUD tells us,
that symbolically satisfies what is at stake. Namely that by a sort of precipitation, of reduction to the level of the objects truly at stake, a sort of collapse of the whole situation onto primitive data, when the girl niederkommt,
falls to the bottom of this bridge, she performs a symbolic act that is nothing other than the niederkommen of a child in childbirth,
it is the term used in German to say that one is ‘delivered’, that one is ‘brought forth’.

There is there something that brings us back to the final and originary sense of a structure of the situation.

In the second order of the remarks FREUD makes to us, it is a matter of explaining in what the situation was without issue
within the treatment, and he tells us. It is insofar as the resistance was not overcome, that everything that one could say to her
never did anything but interest her enormously, without her abandoning her final positions, namely that she maintained all that, as one would say today, on the plane of an intellectual interest. He compares the person in her reactions, more or less to the lady to whom one shows various objects, and who through her lorgnette says ‘how pretty it is!’.

It is a metaphor. He says that nevertheless one cannot say that there was an absence of all transference, and he notes this presence of transference with very great perspicacity in something that is the patient’s dreams, dreams which in themselves…
and in parallel with the declarations, even unambiguous, that the patient makes to him of her determination
to change nothing in her behaviors toward the lady
…announce a whole astonishing reflowering of the most sympathetic orientation, namely the coming of some fine
and satisfying husband, no less than the expectation of the event of an object, fruit of this love.

In short something so almost forced in the idyllic character of this spouse announced by the dream[in response]
to the efforts undertaken in common, that anyone who would not be FREUD would have been mistaken about it, would have taken the greatest hopes from it.
FREUD is not mistaken about it; he sees in it a transference in the sense that it is the lining of that kind of game of counter-decoy
that she carried on in response to disappointment, for assuredly with the father she was not only aggressive and provocative,
she also made concessions: it was only a matter of showing the father that she was deceiving him.

And FREUD recognizes that it is something analogous and that this is the transference meaning of these dreams:
it is a matter of reproducing with him, FREUD, the fundamental position of cruel play that she carried on with the father.
Here we cannot not enter into this kind of fundamental relativity that is the essential of symbolic formation,
I mean insofar as it is the fundamental line of what constitutes for us the field of the unconscious.
This is what FREUD expresses in a very correct way, and which has only the fault of being a bit too accentuated. He tells us:

‘I believe that the intention to mislead me was one of the forming elements of this dream. It was also an attempt
to win my interest and my good disposition, probably in order later to disillusion me all the more deeply.’

Here the point appears of this intention imputed to the subject to come in this position of captivating him, of taking him, FREUD says, in order to make him fall from higher up, to make him fall from all the higher up as he is up to then something
where in a way he himself, one can say, is caught in the situation, for it does not appear at all doubtful, hearing the accent of this sentence, that there is what we call a counter-transference action.

He is right that the dream is deceptive, and he is going to retain only that. Immediately afterward he is going to enter into the discussion
properly speaking of what it is thrilling to find under his pen, namely that the typical manifestation of the unconscious can be a deceptive manifestation, for it is certainly true that he hears in advance the objections that are going to be made to him:
‘If the unconscious too lies to us, then what can we rely on?’. What are his disciples going to tell him? He is going to give them a long explanation, moreover somewhat tendentious, to explain to them that in the end it contradicts nothing at all, to show them how it can happen.

It remains no less that what is the ground, what is put there in the foreground for us by FREUD in 1920, is exactly the essential of what is in the unconscious: it is this relation of the subject to the Other as such, which implies very precisely at its base
the possibility of deception, at that level. We are in the order of lying and truth.

But if this is very well seen by FREUD, it seems that it escapes him that it is a true transference, namely that it is in the interpretation of the desire to deceive that the path is opened, instead of taking that as something that is—let us say things in a somewhat rough way—directed against him.

For it was enough that he made this one more sentence: ‘It is also an attempt to string me along, to captivate me, to make me find her very pretty.’
—and this young girl must be ravishing—for that, as with Dora, he is not completely free in this affair, and what he wants to avoid is precisely that he asserts that the worst is promised to him, that is to say something where he will feel himself dis-illusioned, that is to say that he is quite ready to make illusions for himself. By warning himself against these illusions, already he has entered
into the game, he realizes the imaginary game[a ↔ a’ ].

From that moment on he makes it become real since he is in it, and moreover it does not miss, for in the way he interprets the thing, he tells the young girl that her intention is indeed to deceive him as she is accustomed to deceive her father.
That is, he cuts short immediately what he has realized as the imaginary relation, and in a certain way his counter-transference there could have served, on condition that it were not a counter-transference, on condition that he himself did not believe in it, that is to say that he was not in it.

To the extent that he is in it and that he interprets too prematurely, he makes this desire of the girl enter into the real, which is only a desire,
which is not an intention to deceive him; he gives it a body, he operates with her exactly like the person who intervened
with the little girl, like a statue[?] and like the symbolic thing that is at the heart of what I explain to you
when I speak to you of this sliding into the imaginary that becomes much more than a trap, a sore, from the moment
when it has been established, in a way, as doctrine. Here we see a limit example of it, transparent; we cannot
misrecognize it; it is in the text: it is insofar as with his interpretation, at that moment FREUD makes the conflict burst, gives it a body, whereas precisely, as he senses himself, that is what it was about: to reveal this lying discourse
that is there in the unconscious; indeed it is not about anything else. Instead of that, FREUD separates while wanting to unite:
he tells her that all that is done against him, and indeed the treatment does not go much further, that is, it is interrupted.

But there is something much more interesting that is emphasized by FREUD, but that is not interpreted by him:
it is this that is absolutely enormous and that did not escape him: it is the nature of the young girl’s passion for the person in question; it is not a homosexual relation like the others. The property of homosexual relations is to present exactly the whole variety, and perhaps even some others, of heterosexual variations.

Now, what FREUD underscores in an absolutely admirable way is what he calls ‘this object choice of the properly masculine type’ and he explains what he wants to tell us by that; he articulates it in a way that has an extraordinary relief: literally it is Platonic love in what it has most exalted; it is something that asks for no other satisfaction than the service of the Lady,
it is truly sacred love, one could say, or courtly love in what it has most devotional.

He adds a few words like ‘exalt’, which has a very particular sense in the cultural history of Germany [cf. Minnesänger],
it is this exaltation that is at the bottom of the relation properly speaking. In short, he sketches for us something that situates this amorous relation at the high degree of symbolized amorous relation, posited as service, as institution, as reference,
and not simply as something undergone, as something that is an attraction or a need.

It is something that in itself not only dispenses with satisfaction, but aims very precisely at this non-satisfaction.
It is the institution of lack in the relation to the object as being the very order in which an ideal love can blossom.
Do you not then see that there is there something that conjoins, in a kind of knot, the three stories of what I am trying
to make you feel in what is at the knot of this whole process that is going to be found there, let us say from frustration to symptom,
if you are willing to take the word symptom as the equivalent—since we are questioning it—of the enigma.

This is how the problem of this exceptional situation will come to be articulated, but which has interest only to be taken
in a register that is its own, namely that it is exceptional because it is particular. We have the lived reference in an innocent way to the imaginary object, this child, which interpretation allows us to conceive as a child received from the father.

We have already been told it: homosexuals, contrary to what one might believe, are those who at one moment
made a very strong paternal fixation. What happens? Why is there truly a crisis? It is because the real object intervenes at that moment: a child given by the father, it is true, but precisely to someone else, and to the person who is closest to her.
At that moment a true reversal occurs: we are explained its mechanism.
I believe it is of high importance to see that in this case this something was already instituted on the symbolic plane,
for it is on the symbolic plane that she satisfies herself with this child as with a child that was given to her by the father so that she would be,
by the presence of this real object, brought back for an instant onto the plane of frustration.

It is no longer something with which she satisfied herself in the imaginary, that is to say something that already supported her
in the relation between women, with the whole institution of the paternal presence as such, as being
– the father par excellence,
– the fundamental father,
– the father who will always for her be any kind of man who will give her a child,
…here is something that for the moment brings her back onto the plane of frustration because the object is there for an instant real,
and it is materialized by the fact that it is her mother who has it beside her.

What is more important at that moment, is it only this kind of turning-over that makes it so that at that moment
she identifies with the father? It is understood that that played its role. Does she herself become this kind of latent child
who will indeed be able to niederderkommen when the crisis has arrived at its end?

And I think one could perhaps know after how many months that arrived if one had the dates as for Dora.

What is more important still is that what is desired is something that is beyond this woman; this love she vows to her is someone who is other than her; this love that lives purely and simply in the order of this devotion, that carries
to the supreme degree attachment, the annihilation of the subject in the relation, it is something that—and it is not for nothing—
FREUD seems to reserve for the register of masculine experience.

For indeed it is to a kind of institutionalized blossoming of a very elaborated cultural relation where these things are observed, are upheld [cf. courtly love]. The passage, the reflection at that level of the fundamental disappointment, the outcome the subject finds,
poses the question of knowing: what is, in the amorous register, in the woman, loved beyond herself? That calls into question exactly everything that is truly fundamental in the questions that relate to love in its completion.

What is properly desired in[by] her is precisely what she lacks, and what she lacks on this occasion is the return to the primordial object of which the subject was going to find the equivalent, the imaginary substitute, in the child. It is precisely the phallus.
What—at the extreme, in the most idealized love—is sought in the woman is what she lacks; what is sought beyond her is the phallus as the central object of the whole libidinal economy.