🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We ended our interview last time by trying to summarize the case presented by FREUD, of female homosexuality.
I had sketched out for you in passing, at the same time as the twists and turns, something that one can call the structure,
since if it were not against the background of structural analysis that we were pursuing it, it would not have much more importance
than a picturesque case. It is appropriate to return to this structural analysis, for it is only on the condition of pushing it forward,
and as far as is possible, that there is any interest, in analysis, in committing oneself to this path.

That there is a lack in analytic theory is what it seems to me I see emerging at every moment.
It is not a bad thing, moreover, to recall that it is in order to respond to this lack, effectively, that here we are pursuing our effort.
Of course this lack is felt everywhere; I saw it again recently reawaken in my mind on seeing the statements of Miss Anna FREUD confronted with those of Melanie KLEIN.

No doubt Miss Anna FREUD has since then put a lot of water in her wine, but she founded the principles of her analysis of children on remarks such as this:

– that for example there could be no transference, at least no transference neurosis, because children, still included in the situation that creates neurotic tension, could not, properly speaking, have transference for something that was in the process of being played out.

– That, on the other hand, the fact that they can still be in relation with the objects of their inaugural attachment—another remark of the same kind in sum, but different—should change the position of the analyst who here would intervene in some way entirely on the current plane, and who therefore should profoundly modify his technique.

– His technique, on the other hand, was in some way profoundly modified, and in this Miss Anna FREUD pays homage to something that is like a presentiment of the importance of the essential function of speech in the analytic relationship.

– Assuredly the child will be able to be, she says, in a different relation from that of the adult to speech, or, in other terms, must be taken by means of play, which is the child’s technique, and which should also place the child in a position that does not allow the analyst to offer himself to him in the position of neutrality or receptivity that seeks above all to welcome, to allow to unfold, and, on occasion, to echo speech.

I would therefore say that the analyst’s involvement in something other in nature than the relation of speech, though not developed,
not even conceived, is nonetheless indicated.

Mrs. Melanie KLEIN, in her arguments, notes that nothing, on the contrary, is more similar than the analysis of a child, that even at an extremely early age already, what is at issue in the child’s unconscious has nothing to do—contrary
to what Miss Anna FREUD says—with the real parents.

That already between two and a half and three years the situation is so modified in relation to what one can observe in
the real relation, that it is already so much a matter of something that is an entire dramatization profoundly foreign to the actuality of the child’s family relation, that one has been able to observe, in a child who had for example been raised as an only child,
with a person who lived very far from the parents, an old aunt in sum, which put him in a relation
entirely isolated, a duel with a single person, one has been able to observe that this child nonetheless had no less reconstructed
an entire family drama with father, mother, and even with rival brothers and sisters, I quote.

What is at issue therefore is indeed, already, to reveal in analysis something that, at bottom, is not in the pure and simple immediate relation with the real, but is something that is already inscribed in a symbolization from that moment on…
I mean, if we admit Melanie KLEIN’s assertions, her assertions rest on her experience, and this experience is communicated to us in observations that sometimes push things toward the strange, for in truth one cannot not be struck to see this sort of ‘witch’s crucible’ or fortune-teller’s, at the bottom of which stir, in a global imaginary world, the idea of the container of the maternal body
…all the primordial fantasies present—and this in some way from the origin—tend to be structured in a drama
that appears preformed, and for which one must at every instant provoke the emergence of the most aggressive primordial instincts,
in order, in some way, to make the machine move.

We cannot but be struck, at once by the testimony of an adequation between all this phantasmagoria and
the unique data that Mrs. Melanie KLEIN handles here, and at the same time ask ourselves in the presence of what we are.

What can this dramatic symbolization mean, which seems to be found more filled in the further back one goes, as if in the end one could admit that the more we approach the origin, the more the Oedipus complex
is there filled in, articulated, ready to enter into action.

This deserves at least that one ask a question, and this question rebounds everywhere, by this precise path by which I am trying
to lead you for the moment, which is that of perversion. What is perversion? Within the same group
one hears the most discordant voices about it:

– some, believing they are following FREUD, will say that one must return purely and simply to the notion of the persistence of a fixation bearing on a partial drive and which would pass through, in some way unharmed, all progress, all the dialectic that tends to be established from Oedipus, but which would undergo absolutely none of the vicissitudes that tend to reduce the other partial drives in a movement that in the end unifies them and brings them to the genital drive. It is the essentially unifying ideal drive. That therefore what is at issue in perversion is something that is a kind of accident in the evolution of drives. But, translating in a classical way FREUD’s notion that ‘perversion is the negative of neurosis,’ they want purely and simply to make of perversion something where the drive is not elaborated.

– Others, however—who are not for all that the most perspicacious nor the best, but alerted by experience and by something that truly imposes itself in analytic practice—will try to show that perversion is far from being that something pure that persists, and that, to put it plainly, perversion is indeed also part of something that has been realized through all the dramatic crises, fusions and de-fusions, that presents the same dimensional richness, the same abundance, the same rhythms, the same stages as a neurosis. They will then attempt to explain that it is ‘the negative of neurosis,’ by pushing formulas such as this one:
that what is involved there is the erotization of defense, as indeed all these plays through which an analysis of the reduction of defenses proceeds.

All right, it makes an image, but in truth why can that be erotized? That is indeed the whole question: where does this erotization come from?
Where is situated the invisible power that would project this coloring that seems to come there like a sort of superfluity, a change of quality, to put on defense what is, properly speaking, to be considered as libidinal satisfaction?
The thing, in truth, is not unthinkable, but the least one can say is that it is not thought.

In the end, one must nevertheless not believe that within the evolution of analytic theory, FREUD took notice of trying thereupon to give us a notion that is worked out. I would say even more: we have in FREUD himself
an example that proves that assuredly when he tells us that ‘perversion is the negative of neurosis,’ that is not a formula
to be taken as it was taken for a long time, namely that one would simply have to understand that in perversion,
what is hidden in the unconscious when we are faced with a neurotic case is there in the open air and in some way free.

It is quite something else that he proposes to us. Perhaps after all one must take it as having been given to us under these sorts
of tightened formulas to which our analysis must find its true sense, and it is by trying first to follow him and to see for example how he conceives the mechanism of a phenomenon that one can qualify as perverse, even of a categorical perversion, that we will in the end be able to realize what he means when he asserts that ‘perversion is the negative of neurosis.’

If we look at things a little more closely, if we took up this study that should be famous: ‘Contribution to the study
of the genesis of sexual perversions,’ we would notice that FREUD’s attention is characteristic…
and no less characteristic that he chooses as title this, he insists on it in the text, it is something that is not simply a label, but a phrase taken directly from the declaration of patients when they broach
this theme of their fantasies, roughly: sado-masochistic, whatever the role and the function they take
in this or that particular case
…FREUD tells us that he centers his study quite especially on 6 cases that are all more or less obsessional neuroses,
4 of women and 2 of men, and that behind that there is all his experience of all the cases about which he himself does not have so great an understanding. Thus, it seems, there is there a kind of summary, an attempt to organize a considerable mass of experiences.

When the subject declares that he brings into play in the treatment this something that is the fantasy, he expresses it thus in this remarkable form, through this imprecision, these questions that it leaves open and to which he answers only with great difficulty,
and in truth to which he cannot immediately give a satisfactory answer, he can scarcely say more to characterize it, not without this kind of aversion, even of embarrassment or shame, that there is not toward the practice of these more or less associated, oratorical fantasies…
and which in their exercise are in general taken by subjects as activities
that entail for them no kind of charter of guilt
…but which, on the contrary, present—this is something quite remarkable—very often not only great difficulties in being formulated, but provoke in the subject a rather great aversion, repugnance, guilt in being articulated.
And already one clearly senses there something that must make us prick up our ears, between the phantasmatic or imaginary use of these images
and their spoken formulation. Already this signal in the subject’s behavior is something that marks a limit:
it is not of the same order to play with them mentally or to speak of them.

On this fantasy: ‘A child is being beaten,’ FREUD will tell us what his experience has shown him, what that meant in subjects. We will not get to the end of this article today; I simply want to highlight certain quite manifest elements, because they directly concern the path on which I engaged you last time,
approaching the problem through the case of the psychogenesis of female homosexuality.

FREUD tells us: the progress of analysis shows that what is at issue in this fantasy is something that has been substituted, through a series of transformations, for other fantasies, which had a completely understandable role at the moment of the subject’s development.

It is the structure of these states that I would like to set out for you, to allow you to recognize in them something that seems
quite manifest on the sole condition of having one’s eyes open, at least to this dimension in which we are trying
to advance, and which is summed up under this title of subjective structure.

In other words, it is that against which we always try to hold ourselves in order to try to give their true position to what in theory often appears as an ambiguity, even an impasse, even a diplopia. It is to see at what level of
the subjective structure a phenomenon takes place. We note that it is in three stages, where FREUD tells us that the story is punctuated as it opens under analytic pressure, and which allows one to rediscover the origin of these fantasies.
He says moreover that he is going to limit himself…
in what allows him this first typical formulation of the fantasy
…that he is going to limit himself…
for reasons that he will specify later, but that we ourselves will leave aside today,
in the first part of his exposition that we will not put in the foreground this time
…that he is going to limit himself to what happens precisely in women.

The form taken by the first fantasy, the one that one can, he tells us, find there when one analyzes the fact, is this:

‘My father beats a child who is the child I hate.’

It is a fantasy more or less linked in the story to the introduction of a brother or a sister, a rival who at a moment
finds himself, by his presence, by the care given to him, frustrating the child of the parents’ affection.

Here it is quite especially a matter of the father. We will not insist here on this point, but we will not fail to note that it is a girl taken at a certain moment already when the Oedipus complex has been constituted, when the relation to the father has been instituted.
We will therefore leave for the future the explanation of this preeminence in a quite primitive fantasy of the person of the father,
it being understood that this must not be without relation to the fact that it is a girl. But let us set this problem aside.

What is important is this: we touch there at the start on a historical perspective that is retroactive. It is from the current point
where we are in the analysis that the subject formulates for the past, organizes a primitive dramatic situation, in a way
that is nonetheless inscribed in his current speech, in his present power of symbolization, and that we rediscover through the progress of analysis as the primitive thing, the most profound primordial organization. It is something that has this manifest complexity of having three characters:

– there is the agent of punishment,
– there is the one who undergoes it, and who is other than the subject, namely a child whom the subject hates and whom he thus sees fallen from this parental preference that is at stake; he himself feels privileged by the fact that the other falls from this preference,
– there is something that, so to speak, implies a dimension and a triple tension that presupposes the relation of a subject with two others whose relations themselves between each other are motivated by something that is centered by the subject:

‘My father—one can say, to accentuate things in one direction—beats my brother or my sister, for fear that I would believe that he is preferred to me.’

A causality or a tension, a reference to the subject taken as a third, in whose favor the thing occurs, is something that animates and motivates the action on the second character, the one who undergoes it. And this third that is the subject is himself here invoked, made present in the situation as the one before whose eyes this must take place, with the intention of making him know
that something that is his is given to him, which is the privilege of this preference, which is this precedence, this order, this structure that in a way reintroduces—just as a moment ago there was the notion of fear—that is to say a kind of anticipation,
a temporal dimension, a forward tension that is introduced as driving within this triple situation.

There is reference to the third as subject, insofar as he has to believe it or to infer something from a certain behavior
that is directed toward the second object which on this occasion is taken as an instrument of this communication between the two subjects,
which is in the end a communication of love, since it is at the expense of this second that there is declared, for the one who is
the central subject, this something that he receives on this occasion, and which is the expression of his wish, of his desire to be preferred, to be loved.

Formation, of course, already itself dramatized, already reactional insofar as it issues from a complex situation.
But this complex situation presupposes this triple intersubjective reference with all that it necessitates and introduces
of temporal reference, of time, of scansion, which presupposes the introduction of the second subject who is necessary. Why?
What is to be crossed from one subject to the other, he is its instrument, its spring, its medium, its means. In the end we find ourselves before a full intersubjective structure, in the sense that it is established in the completed crossing of a speech act.
It is not that the thing has been spoken; it is that the intersubjective structure itself in this ternary situation
that is established in the primitive fantasy bears within itself the mark of the same intersubjective structure
that constitutes all completed speech.

The second stage in relation to the first represents a reduced situation: FREUD tells us that one finds there in a very particular way a situation reduced to two characters: I am following FREUD’s text here. And one explains it as best one can.
FREUD indicates the explanation without dwelling on it, moreover; he describes it as a necessary and reconstructed stage, indispensable
for understanding all the motivation of what occurs in the subject’s history. This second stage produces:

‘I am being beaten by my father.’

It is here a situation reduced to two, of which one can say that it excludes any other dimension than that of the relation with the beating agent. There is there something that can lend itself to all sorts of interpretations, but these interpretations themselves will remain marked by the character of the greatest ambiguity.

If in the first fantasy there is an organization and a structure that gives it a meaning that one could indicate by a series
of arrows, in the other the situation is so ambiguous that one can wonder for a moment to what extent the subject participates with the one who aggresses and strikes him. It is the classic sado-masochistic ambiguity. And if one resolves it, one will conclude, as FREUD says, that it is something linked to this essence of masochism, but that the ego on this occasion is strongly accentuated in the situation.

The subject finds himself in a reciprocal position, but at the same time an exclusive one: it is either him or the other who is beaten,
and here it is him, and by the fact that it is him, there is something that is indicated, but that is not resolved.

One can—and the continuation of the discussion shows it—see in this very act of being beaten a transposition or a displacement also of something that, perhaps, is already marked by eroticism. The very fact that one can speak on this occasion
‘of the essence of masochism’ is quite indicative, whereas at the previous stage, FREUD said it, we were in a situation that, however extremely structured it had been, was in some way big with all virtuality. It was neither sexual nor especially sadistic; it contained them in potency, and this something that precipitates in one direction or the other, but ambiguously, is marked in the second stage, in this stage of the dual relation with all the problematic it raises on the libidinal plane.

This second stage, which is dual, and where the subject finds himself included in a dual relation, and therefore ambiguous, with the other as such in this sort of ‘either…–or…’ that is fundamental to this dual relation, FREUD tells us that we are almost always forced to reconstruct it, so fugitive it is. This fugitiveness is its characteristic, and very quickly the situation precipitates into the third stage, that in which, so to speak, the subject is reduced to his most extreme point and apparently finds again his third position under the form of this pure and simple observer, who in some way reduces this
intersubjective situation with the temporal situation, after having passed to the second situation, dual and reciprocal, to the completely desubjectivized situation that is that of the terminal fantasy, namely: ‘A child is being beaten.’

Of course this ‘someone’ is something in which one can vaguely find the paternal function, but in general the father is not recognizable; it is only a substitute. On the other hand when one says: ‘A child is being beaten,’ it is the subject’s formula that FREUD
wanted to respect, but it is often a matter of several children; the phantasmatic production makes it burst by multiplying it
a thousandfold. And that indeed shows the character of essential desubjectivization that occurs in the primordial relation,
and there remains this objectification, this desubjectivization in any case radical, of the whole structure at the level of which the subject is no longer there except as a kind of spectator reduced to the state of spectator, or simply of eye, that is to say what always characterizes,
at the limit and at the point of the last reduction, every kind of object. One must at least, not always a subject,
but an eye to see it, an eye, a screen on which the subject is instituted.

What do we see there? How can we translate that into our language at the precise point where we are in our process? It is clear that at the level of the schema of the Subject, of the Other, and of the imaginary relation of the subject’s ego more or less fantasized, the imaginary relation is inscribed in this direction and in this more or less marked relation of specularity, of reciprocity between the ego and the other.

We find ourselves in the presence of something that is an unconscious utterance, the one that had to be found again through all the artifices of transference analysis, which is this:

‘My father, by beating a child who is the child I hate, shows me that he loves me.’
or:
‘My father beats a child for fear that I might believe that I am not preferred.’

…or any other formula that in some way brings out one of the accents of this dramatic relation.

This, which is excluded, which is not present in neurosis, which must be found again and which will have evolutions that are manifested elsewhere in all the symptoms that constitute this neurosis, this is found again in an element of the clinical picture that is this fantasy. How does it present itself? It presents itself in a way that still bears within it, very visibly, the testimony of the signifying elements of articulated speech at the level of this trans-object, so to speak: it is the big Other, the place where unconscious speech is articulated, the Es insofar as it is speech, history, memory, articulated structure.

Perversion or—let us say, to limit ourselves here—the perverse fantasy has a property that we can now bring out. What is this sort of residue, of symbolic reduction that has progressively eliminated the whole subjective structure of the situation, in order to let emerge only something entirely objectified, and in the end enigmatic, which keeps at once the whole charge, but the charge not revealed, not constituted, not assumed by the subject, of what is at the level of the Other as an articulated structure in which the subject is engaged?

We find ourselves there at the level of perverse fantasy, of something that has at once all its elements, but that has lost all that is meaning, namely the intersubjective relation; it is, so to speak, the maintaining in a pure state of what one can call, within it, signifiers in a pure state, without the intersubjective relation, signifiers emptied of their subject, a sort of objectification of the signifiers of the situation as such. This something that is indicated in the sense of a fundamental structuring relation of the subject’s history at the level of perversion is at once maintained, contained, but in the form of a pure sign.

And what is that other than everything we find again at the level of perversion? Picture for yourselves now what you know for example of the fetish, that fetish of which you are told that it is explainable by that beyond never seen. And for good reason! It is the penis of the phallic mother, and which is linked by the subject…
most often after a brief analytic effort, at least in the memories still accessible to the subject
…to a situation where, so to speak, the child, in his observation, stopped, at least in his memory, at the edge of the mother’s dress, where we find ourselves seeing a sort of remarkable concurrence between the structure of what one can call the screen memory, that is to say the moment where the chain of memory stops, and it stops indeed at the edge of the dress, no higher than the ankle:

and that is precisely why one encounters the shoe there,

and that is precisely why as well the shoe can, at least in certain particular cases, but it is an exemplary case, take on its function as substitute for what is not seen, but for what is articulated, formulated, as being here truly for the subject, the mother who possesses this phallus, imaginary no doubt, but essential to her symbolic foundation as phallic mother.

We find ourselves there too faced with something that is of the same order, faced with this something that freezes, reduced to the state of a snapshot, the course of memory by stopping it at this point that is called screen memory, in the manner of something that would be unfolding rather rapidly and would stop all at once at a point, freezing all the characters as in a cinematographic movement.

This sort of snapshot that is the characteristic of this reduction of the full, signifying, articulated scene from subject to subject, into something that immobilizes itself in this fantasy, which remains charged with all the erotic values that are included in what it expressed, and of which it is, so to speak, the testimony, the support, the last remaining support.

Here we can touch with a finger how what one can call ‘the mold of perversion’ is formed, namely this valorization of the image insofar as it remains the privileged witness of something that, in the unconscious, must be articulated, put back into play in the dialectic of transference, that is to say in this something that must recover its dimensions within analytic dialogue. The value, therefore, of imaginary dimension appears prevalent whenever it is a matter of a perversion.

And it is insofar as this imaginary relation is on the path of what passes from the subject to the Other, or more exactly of what remains of the subject situated in the Other, insofar precisely as it is repressed, that speech…
which is indeed that of the subject and which nevertheless, as by its nature as speech it is a message that he must receive from the Other in inverted form
…can just as well remain there in the Other, that is to say constitute there the repressed of the unconscious, instituting a possible relation but an unrealized one.

‘Possible,’ moreover, is not saying everything; there must also be some impossibility in it, otherwise it would not be repressed, and it is precisely because there is this impossibility in ordinary situations that it takes all the artifices of transference to make passable again, formulable, what must be communicated from this Other, big Other, to the subject, insofar as the ‘I’ of the subject comes to be.

Within this indication that Freudian analysis gives us in the clearest way, and everything is said and articulated still much further than what I am saying here, FREUD marks very clearly on this occasion that it is through the vicissitudes and the adventure of Oedipus, in the advancement and the resolution of Oedipus, that we must take up the question, the problem of the constitution of every perversion.

It is astonishing that one could even have thought to maintain the indication, the in a way popular translation, of perversion as being ‘the negative of neurosis,’ simply in this, that perversion would be a drive not elaborated by the Oedipal and neurotic mechanism, purely and simply survival, persistence of an irreducible partial drive, whereas FREUD, with regard to this primordial article and at many other points besides, indicates sufficiently that no perverse structuring, however primitive we may suppose it—at least of those that come to our knowledge as analysts—is articulable except as means, hinge, [French ‘cheville’ can also mean ‘ankle’] element of something that in the end is conceived, understood, and articulated in, by, and for—and only in, by, and for—the process, the organization, the articulation of the Oedipus complex.

Let us try to inscribe our case from the other day in this crossed relation of the Subject to the Other, insofar as:
– it is there [A → S] that symbolic meaning must prove itself, establish itself, all the current genesis of the subject,
– and the imaginary interposition [a’→ a] which is on the other hand that in which he finds his status, his object structure recognized by him as such, installed in a certain capture in relation to objects, let us say for him immediately attractive, which are the correspondents of this desire, insofar as he commits himself to the paths, to the imaginary rails that form what are called his libidinal fixations.

Let us try simply—although today we will not push it to its conclusion—to summarize. What do we see? One can put 5 times to describe the major phenomena of this establishment, not only of perversion, whether we consider it as fundamental or acquired, it does not matter on this occasion; we know when this perversion indicated itself, then established itself, then precipitated; we have its springs and we have its starting point.

It is a perversion that was constituted late; that does not mean that it did not have its premises in quite primordial phenomena, but let us try to understand what we see at the level where FREUD himself brought out the avenues. There is a state that is primordial at the moment when this woman is installed at the moment of puberty around 13–14 years. This girl cherishes an object that is linked to her by bonds of affection, a child that she takes care of; she shows herself, in everyone’s eyes, particularly well oriented in this sense, precisely in the paths that everyone can hope for as being the typical vocation of the woman, that of motherhood.

And it is on this basis that something happens that will produce in her a kind of reversal, the one that will establish itself when she will take an interest in love objects that will first be marked with the sign of femininity: they are women in a more or less maternal situation, neo-mothering, then finally that will bring her to this passion that we are literally told is ‘devouring,’ for this person whom we are also told is ‘The Lady,’ and it is not for nothing, for this Lady whom she treats in a style of chivalric and literally masculine relations, a style highly elaborated on the plane and from the point of view of the masculine.

This passion for The Lady is served, so to speak, without any demand, without desire, without even hope of return, with this character of gift, of projection of the lover beyond even any kind of manifestation of the loved one, which is one of the most characteristic, most elaborated forms of the amorous relation in its most highly cultivated forms.

How can we conceive this transformation? I gave you its first time, and between the two something happened, and we are told what. This transformation we are going to implicate in the same terms that served to analyze the position.

We know from FREUD that the element by which the male or female subject…
that is the sense of what FREUD tells us when he speaks of the phallic phase of infantile genital organization
…arrives, just before the latency period, is this phallic phase that indicates the point of realization of the genital.

Everything is there, up to and including object choice. There is however something that is not there: a full realization of genital function insofar as it is structured, really organized. There remains this something of fantasy, of essentially imaginary, which is the prevalence of the phallus, by means of which there are two types of beings in the world: beings who have the phallus and those who do not have it, that is to say who are castrated of it; FREUD formulates it thus.

It is quite clear that there is there something that really suggests a problematic from which, in truth, authors do not manage to get out, insofar as it is a matter of justifying this in any way by motives determined for the subject in the real. I already told you that I will put in parentheses the extraordinary modes of explanation to which this has constrained authors. Their general mode is summarized more or less as follows: it must be that, as everyone knows, everything is already guessed and inscribed in unconscious tendencies, that the subject already has the preformation by his nature of this something that makes the cooperation of the sexes adequate.

It must therefore be that this is already a kind of formation where the subject finds some advantage, and that already there must be there a process of defense. This is not, in effect, inconceivable in a kind of perspective, but it pushes the problem back, and that in effect engages authors in a series of constructions that do nothing but place at the origin the whole symbolic dialectic, and that become more and more unthinkable the further back one goes toward the origin.

Let us admit that simply for the moment, and let us also admit this thing, easier to admit for us than for the authors: it is simply that on this occasion the phallus is found as this imaginary element—it is a fact that must be taken as fact—by which the subject at the genital level is introduced into the symbolism of the gift.

The symbolism of the gift and genital maturation are two different things; they are linked by something that is included in the real human situation by the fact that it is at the level of rules established by the law in the exercise of its genital functions insofar as they actually come into play in inter-human exchange; it is because things happen at that level that in effect there is such a close link between the symbolism of the gift and genital maturation.

But it is something that has no kind of individual inter-biological coherence for the subject. By contrast it turns out that the fantasy of the phallus within this symbolism of the gift at the genital level takes on its value, and FREUD insists on it. It does not have, for a good reason, the same value for the one who really possesses the phallus, that is to say the male child, and for the child who does not possess it, that is to say for the female child.

For the female child it is very precisely insofar as she does not possess it that she will be introduced to the symbolism of the gift, that is to say that it is insofar as she phallicizes the situation, that is to say that it is a matter of having or not having the phallus, that she enters the Oedipus complex, whereas what FREUD underscores for us is that for the boy it is not there that he enters it; it is by that that he leaves it. That is to say that at the end of the Oedipus complex, that is to say at the moment when he will have realized on a certain plane the symbolism of the gift, it will indeed be necessary that he make a gift of what he has.

Whereas if the girl enters the Oedipus complex, it is insofar as what she does not have, she has to find it in the Oedipus complex, but what she does not have…
because we are already at the level and on the plane where something imaginary enters into a symbolic dialectic,
…what one does not have is simply something that is just as existing as the rest, and that is marked with the minus sign; she therefore enters with this minus.

Entering with the minus or entering with the plus does not prevent that what is at issue…
there must be something so that one can put plus or minus, presence or absence
…that what is at issue is there in play, and it is this bringing into play of the phallus that, FREUD tells us, is the spring of the girl’s entry into the Oedipus complex. Within this symbolism of the gift, all sorts of things can be given in exchange, so many things can be given in exchange, that in the end that is precisely why we have so many equivalents of the phallus in what actually goes on in symptoms.

And FREUD goes further. You will find in this ‘A child is being beaten’ the indication formulated in quite crude terms that if so many elements of pregenital relations come into play in the Oedipal dialectic, that is to say if frustrations at the anal, oral levels tend to occur, which are nonetheless things that come to realize the frustrations, the accidents, the dramatic elements of the Oedipal relation, that is to say something that according to the premises should be satisfied only in genital elaboration, FREUD says this: it is that, with regard to this something obscure that goes on at the level of the ego, for of course the child has no experience of it, the elements, the objects that are part of the other pregenital relations are more accessible to verbal representations.

He goes so far as to say that if pregenital objects are brought into play in the Oedipal dialectic, it is insofar as they lend themselves more easily to verbal representations, that is to say that the child can tell himself more easily that what the father gives to the mother on the occasion is his urine, because his urine is something whose use he knows well, very well its function and its existence as an object that is easier to symbolize, that is to say to endow with the sign plus or minus, than an object that has taken a certain realization in the child’s imagination, than something that nonetheless remains extremely difficult to grasp, and difficult of access for the girl.

Here then is the girl in a position of which we are told that the first introduction into the dialectic of Oedipus is due to this: the penis she desires, she will receive it from the father in the manner of a substitute: the child. But in the example that concerns us, it is a real child, for she nurses a solid child who is in the game.

On the other hand the child she nurses, since that can satisfy in her something that is the phallic imaginary substitution, it is by substituting it and constituting herself as subject without knowing it, as imaginary mother, that she satisfies herself in having this child. It is indeed to acquire this imaginary penis of which she is fundamentally frustrated, thus by placing this imaginary penis at the level of the ego.

I am doing nothing other than highlighting this which is characteristic of originary frustration: that every object that is introduced under the title of frustration, I mean that is introduced by a realized frustration, can only be and cannot be anything but an object that the subject takes in this ambiguous position which is that of belonging to his own body.

I underscore it for you because when one speaks of the child’s primordial relations with the mother, one places the whole accent on the notion of passively taken frustration. We are told: the child makes the first test of the relation of the pleasure principle and the reality principle in frustrations felt on the part of the mother, and following that you see the term frustration of the object, or loss of the love object, employed indifferently.

Now if there is something on which I insisted in the preceding lessons, it is indeed the bipolarity or the quite marked opposition that there is between
– the real object, insofar as the child can be frustrated of it, namely the mother’s breast,
– and on the other hand the mother insofar as she is in a position to grant or not to grant this real object.
This presupposes that there be a distinction between the breast and the mother as total object, and that is what Mrs. Melanie KLEIN is talking about when she talks first about partial objects, and about the mother insofar as she is instituted as total object and can create in the child the famous depressive position.

This is indeed one way of seeing things, but what is elided in this position is that these two objects are not of the same nature. But whether they are distinguished or not, it remains that the mother insofar as agent is instituted by the function of the call, that she is already under the most rudimentary grip as object marked and connoted by a possibility of plus or minus insofar as presence or absence, that the frustration realized by whatever relates to the mother as such is frustration of love, that everything that comes from the mother as responding to this call is something that is gift, that is to say something other than the object.

In other words there is a radical difference between
– the gift as a sign of love, and which as such is something that radically aims at a beyond, something else, the mother’s love,
– and on the other hand the object, whatever it may be, that comes there for the satisfaction of the child’s needs.

The frustration of love and the frustration of enjoyment are two things, because the frustration of love is in itself big
with all the inter-subjective relations such as they will be able to be constituted later. But the frustration of enjoyment
is not at all in itself big with anything whatsoever.

Contrary to what is said, it is not the frustration of enjoyment that engenders reality, as Mr. WINNICOTT perceived very well
—with the ordinary confusion that one reads in analytic literature, but nonetheless very well understood all the same.
We cannot found the slightest genesis of reality on the fact that the child has or does not have the breast: if he does not have the breast,
he is hungry and he will continue to cry.

In other words, what does the frustration of enjoyment produce? It produces the re-launching of desire at most, but no kind
of constitution of an object whatever it may be. And in the end that is indeed why Mr. WINNICOTT is led to make for us
the remark that the thing truly graspable in the child’s behavior, which allows us to shed light
that there is indeed a progress—progress that is constituted and that requires an original explanation—is not simply because the child is deprived of the mother’s breast that he foments its fundamental image, nor any kind of image either;
it is necessary that this image in itself be taken as an original dimension, this nipple of the breast which is absolutely essential; it is to it that the phallus will be substituted and superimposed.
They show on this occasion themselves that they have in common this character of having to stop us insofar as they constitute themselves as image, that is to say that what subsists, what succeeds, is an original dimension. What succeeds the frustration
of the object of enjoyment in the child is something that is maintained in the subject in the state of an imaginary relation, which is not simply something that polarizes the thrust of desire in the way where, as in the animal, it is always a certain lure
in the end that is oriented—these behaviors always have something significant—in the feathers or in the fins of its adversary, which thereby makes it an adversary, and one can always find in it this something that individualizes the image in the biological.
It is present there no doubt, but with this something that accentuates it in man, and that is observable
in the child’s behavior.

These images are referred to that fundamental image that gives it its global status, as that overall form to which
he clings to the other as such, which makes that there is there also this image around which subjects can group and ungroup
as belonging or not belonging, and in sum the problem is not to know to what more or less great degree narcissism, conceived at the outset as a kind of imagined and ideal auto-eroticism, is elaborated; it is on the contrary
to know what the function of originary narcissism is in the constitution of an object-world as such.
That is why WINNICOTT dwells on these objects that he calls ‘transitional objects’ and without which we would have no kind of testimony to the way the child could constitute a world at the outset from his frustrations,
for of course he constitutes a world.

But one must not tell us that it is with respect to the object of his desires of which he is originally frustrated. He constitutes a world
insofar as, directing himself toward something that he desires, he can encounter something against which he bumps
or burns himself. But that is not at all an object as engendered in any way by the object of desire;
it is not something that can be molded by the stages of the development of desire insofar as it is instituted and organized in infantile development; it is something else.

The object insofar as it is engendered by frustration itself is something in which we must admit the autonomy of this imaginary production in its relation to the body image, namely as this ambiguous object that is between the two,
with respect to which one can speak neither of reality, nor speak of unreality. That is how Mr. WINNICOTT expresses himself with much pertinence, and instead of introducing us into everything that this opens as problems regarding the introduction
of this object into the order of the symbolic, he comes to it as if despite himself, because one is forced to go there once one commits oneself
to this path of these half-real objects that are the transitional objects that he designates.

These objects to which the child holds by a kind of clinging, which are a little corner of his sheet, a bit of bib,
and this is not seen in all children but in most, these objects whose terminal relation with the fetish he sees very well must be, which he is wrong to call primitive fetish, but which indeed is its origin, Mr. WINNICOTT
stops and says to himself that after all this object, which is neither real nor unreal, is this something to which we accord neither full reality, nor a fully illusory character.

Everything in the midst of which a good English citizen lives, knowing in advance how one must behave, that is to say your philosophical ideas, that is to say your religious system, no one thinks of saying that you believe in this or that doctrine
in religious or philosophical matters, no one thinks either of taking them away from you; it is this domain between the two.
And he is not wrong indeed; it is right in the midst of that that life is situated, but how would one organize the rest if that were not there?
He remarks that one must not have too much demand there either, and that the character of half-existence in which these things are instituted is well marked by the only thing that no one thinks of, unless one is forced to impose it on others as being an object to which one must adhere, the authenticity or the ‘hard as iron’ reality of what you promote
as a religious idea or as a philosophical illusion. In short, that the well-inspired world indicates that everyone has the right to be mad, provided one remains mad separately, and it is there that the madness of imposing one’s private madness on the whole set of subjects would begin, constituted each in a kind of nomadism of the transitional object.

This transitional object, this imaginary penis by the fact of having her child, is nothing other than what one is telling us by affirming
that in sum she has her imaginary penis from the moment she nurses her child. So what is necessary for her to pass to the 3rd time, that is to say to the 2nd stage of the 5 situations that we will not see today, at which this young girl in love arrives? She is homosexual, and she loves like a man, FREUD tells us.

Although the translator translated that as ‘feminine,’ our homosexual woman is going to be in the virile position, that is to say that this father who was at the level of the big A in the first stage is at the level of the ego insofar as she has taken the masculine position.
Here there is The Lady, the love object that has been substituted for the child, then the symbolic penis, that is to say what is in love
at its most elaborated point, what is beyond the loved subject. What in love is loved is what is beyond the subject;
it is literally what he does not have; it is insofar precisely as The Lady does not have the symbolic penis, but she has everything to have it,
because she is the chosen object of all the adorations for the subject, that she is loved.

A permutation occurs such that the symbolic father has passed into the imaginary through the subject’s identification with the father’s function. Something else has come here into the ego in the matter of love object: it is precisely to have this beyond, which is the symbolic penis, which was first at the imaginary level.

Let us simply note this: what happened between the two? The 2nd time, and the characteristic of the observation—
and which one finds again at the 4th—is that at the level of the imaginary relation there was introduction of the father’s real action,
this symbolic father who was there in the unconscious. For when the real child begins to be substituted for the desire for the penis,
a child that the father is going to give her, it is an imaginary or real child already there. It is rather unsettling that it is real,
but it was of a father who, he, nonetheless remains—and all the more since the child was real—unconscious as progenitor.

Only the father really gave a child, not to his daughter, but to the mother, that is to say that this real child unconsciously desired by the girl, and to which she gave this substitute in which she satisfied herself, already shows without any doubt
an accentuation of need that gives the situation its dramatism. The subject was frustrated of it in a very particular way
by the fact that the real child, as coming from the father as symbolic father, was given to her own mother.

That is the characteristic of the observation. When one says that it is without any doubt to some accommodation of instincts
or tendencies, or of such-and-such primordial drive, that we owe in such a case that things were specified in the direction of a perversion, does one always properly set out these 3 absolutely essential elements, provided one distinguishes them,
which are imaginary, symbolic, and real?

Here you can note that it is insofar as the real was introduced, a real that answered the unconscious situation at the level of the plane of the imaginary, that the situation revealed itself, for very structured reasons, as a relation of jealousy. The untenable character of this imaginary satisfaction to which the child confined himself is that through a kind of interposition it is there, realized on the plane
of the imaginary relation, it has indeed entered into play, and no longer as symbolic father.

At that moment another imaginary relation is established that the child will complete as she can, but which is marked
by this fact: that what was articulated in a latent way at the level of the big Other begins in the manner of perversion…
and that is why moreover it results in a perversion and not for anything else
…begins to be articulated in an imaginary way, in this that the girl identifies at that moment with the father; she takes his role
and becomes herself the imaginary father, and she too will have kept her penis and attaches herself to an object to which necessarily
she must give this something that the object does not have.

It is this necessity to motivate, to axis her love on, not the object, but on what the object does not have, this something that
puts us precisely at the heart of the amorous relation as such and of the gift as such, this something that makes necessary
the third constellation of this subject’s history.

That is where we will take things up again next time.

This will allow us to deepen at once the dialectic of the gift insofar as it is seen and experienced quite primordially by the subject, namely to see the other face, the one that we left aside a moment ago. I stressed the paradoxes of frustration on
the side of the object, but I did not say what the frustration of love gave, and what it meant as such.