🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Certain texts in this booklet will allow you to rediscover a new attempt of logic, to rediscover it where it is, in a particularly vivid way, that is to say, in our practice.

And to take up exactly what I am alluding to, namely our famous odd-and-even game, you can very easily find there those three times of subjectivity, insofar as it is in relation to frustration and on the condition of taking frustration in the sense of lack of an object; you can find them easily if you reflect on what the zero position of the problem is: it is the opposition of the institution of the pure symbol: (+) or (–), presence or absence, in which there is nothing but a sort of objectifiable position of what is given in the game.

You will easily see there the second time in the fact that, in this kind of demand that the declaration in the game is, you place yourself in the posture of being or not being gratified, but by someone who, having from then on the dice in his hands, is in fact quite incapable of it; it no longer depends on him that what he has in his hand responds to your demand.

You thus have there the second stage of the dual relation insofar as it institutes this call and its response on which the level of frustration is established, and you see at the same time its absolutely vanishing character and literally impossible to satisfy.

If the game has something that interests you and that gives it its meaning, it is obviously because the third dimension, that of the law, you introduce it under this always latent form into the exercise of the game, namely that from the point of view of the demander, what is at stake?

The Other, obviously, is supposed at every instant to suggest to him a regularity, in other words a law, which at the same time he strives to steal from him. It is in this dimension of the institution of a law, of a regularity, conceived as possible and which at every instant and by the one who proposes the hidden side of the game is stolen from him, and of which he suggests to him for an instant the birth, it is at that moment that what is fundamental in the game is established, and that gives it its intersubjective meaning, what establishes it in a dimension no longer dual but ternary as it is essential.

It is on that that the value of my introduction rests, namely that it is necessary to introduce three terms so that something that resembles a law can begin to be articulated, these three intersubjective times which are those within which we try to see how this object is introduced which, from the sole fact that it comes within our reach, under our jurisdiction, in analytic practice, is an object that must enter into the symbolic chain.

That is where we had arrived last time at the moment when we were taking the story of our case of female homosexuality. We had arrived at what I called ‘the 3rd time’, that is to say the time that was constituted in the following way: in the 1st situation that we take arbitrarily as the starting situation, but there has already been a sort of concession to a progressive point of view, going from the past toward the future in this chronological ordering of the terms; it is to make things easier by bringing them closer to what is done in the dialectic of frustration which, being conceived in a summary way, that is to say without distinguishing the real, imaginary, and symbolic planes, leads to dead ends that the further we advance, the more I hope to make you feel. For the moment we are trying to establish the principles of these relations between the object and the constitution of the symbolic chain.

We thus have the position of the young girl when she is still at the time of puberty, and the first symbolic and imaginary structuring of her position is done in the classical way, as is ordered by theory, in this equivalence: imaginary penis – child, which establishes her in a certain relation of imaginary mother with respect to that beyond which is her father, who intervenes at that moment as symbolic function, that is to say as the one who can give the phallus, and insofar as this power of the father is at that moment unconscious, the one who can give the child is unconscious.

It is at this stage that the fatal moment occurs, if one can say so, where the father intervenes in the real to give a child to the mother, that is to say by making of this child, with respect to whom she is in an imaginary relation, something realized, and which consequently is no longer supportable by her in the imaginary position in which she instituted it.

We now find ourselves at the 2nd time, where the intervention of the real father at the level of the child of which she was then frustrated produces the transformation of the whole equation which is posed from then on as follows: the imaginary Father, the Lady, the symbolic Penis.

That is to say, by a sort of inversion, the passage of the relation—which is here in the symbolic order, that of her relation with her father—the passage of this relation in the sense of the imaginary relation, or if you prefer, in a certain way, the projection of the relation of the unconscious formula, which is at that moment that of her first equilibrium, into a perverse relation, an imaginary relation which is that of her relation with the Lady. It is thus that after a first application of our formulas, the position of these terms is posed in a way without any doubt enigmatic—even one on which we can pause for an instant. Nevertheless it is appropriate to note that these terms, whatever they may be, impose themselves, I mean: impose a structure, that is to say that if we were to change the position of one of them, we would have to place elsewhere, and never just anywhere, all the others.

Let us now try to see what this means. Its meaning is given to us by the analysis. And what does FREUD tell us at the crucial moment of this observation, at this point where, by a certain conception he has adopted of the position in question, by an intervention he makes in that direction, he crystallizes in a certain way the position between him and the patient, and in an unsatisfactory way since FREUD denounces and affirms that it is at that moment that the analytic relation breaks? In any case, whatever FREUD thinks about it, he is far from being inclined to put the whole burden of it on an impasse of the patient’s position; in any case his intervention, or his conception, his prejudices about the position, must indeed be for something in the fact that the situation breaks.

Let us recall what this position is, and how FREUD formulates it for us: he tells us that the patient’s resistances have been insurmountable. These resistances, how does he materialize them? What examples does he give of them? What sense does he give them? He sees them particularly expressed in dreams that, paradoxically, could have given many hopes, namely hopes of normalization of the situation: they are in fact the dreams where it is only a matter of reunion, of conjugo, of fertile marriage.

The patient is subjected there to an ideal spouse, and has children by him; in short, the dream manifests something that goes in the direction of what—if not FREUD here, society represented here by the family—can wish for as the best outcome of the treatment. FREUD, strengthened by everything the patient tells him about her position and her intentions, far from taking the text of the dream at face value, sees in it—as he says—only a ruse of the patient, and something expressly destined to disappoint him, more exactly in the way I evoked earlier in this use of the intersubjective game of guessing, to delude him and disillusion him at the same time. It is remarkable that this presupposes—as FREUD notes—that one could object to him at that moment: ‘But then the unconscious can lie!’, a point on which FREUD dwells at length, which he discusses and on which he takes care to respond in a very articulated way.

For, taking up again the distinction that there is in The Interpretation of Dreams between the preconscious and the unconscious, he shows what likewise he recalls in another observation… to which we will come, and with regard to which I gave, following LAGACHE’s report on transference, a small summary intervention of the positions in which I think one must conceive the Dora case… what in the Dora case it is a matter of detaching, a passage of the Traumdeutung which is the comparison regarding the relations of unconscious desire and preconscious desire, the comparison between capitalist and entrepreneur.

It is the preconscious desire which, so to speak, is the entrepreneur of the dream, but the dream would have nothing sufficient to be instituted as representative of that something that is called the unconscious, if there were not another desire that gives the ground of the dream and that is the unconscious desire.

He thus distinguishes this very well, except that he does not draw the extreme consequences from it. What is, in sum, distinct between:
– what the subject brings in his dream which is at the level of the unconscious,
– and the factor of the dual relation, of the relation to the one to whom one addresses oneself when one recounts this dream, when one approaches it in analysis.

And it is in this sense that I tell you that a dream that occurs in the course of an analysis always has a certain direction toward the analyst, and this direction is not always obligatorily the unconscious direction. The whole question is to know whether one must place the emphasis:
– on what is of the intention, and which always remains the intentions that FREUD tells us are in an admitted way those of the patient, namely those of playing with her father where the patient manages to formulate the game of deceit, that is to say of pretending to get treated and of maintaining her positions and her fidelity to the Lady,
– or whether this something that is expressed in the dream must purely and simply be conceived in this perspective of deceit, in other words, in its preconscious intentionalization?
It does not seem so. For if we look closely at it, what do we see being formulated?

No doubt there is a dialectic of deceit, but what is formulated, brought back to the signifier, is precisely what is diverted at the origin in the first position and which is called—in the unconscious at this stage, and thus equally in the unconscious at the third stage—which is this that is formulated in the following way: coming from the father… in the way the subject receives his message in an inverted form of his own message, in the form: ‘You are my wife’, ‘You are my master’, ‘You will have a child by me’… it is at the entry into the Oedipus, or as long as the Oedipus is not resolved, the promise on which the girl’s entry into the Oedipus complex is founded; that is where the position started.

And in fact if we find in the dream something that is articulated as a situation that satisfies this promise, it is always the same content of the unconscious that proves itself, and if FREUD hesitates before it, it is very precisely for lack of arriving at a completely purified formulation of what transference is.

There is in transference an imaginary element and a symbolic element, and consequently a choice to make. If transference has a meaning… if what FREUD later brought us with the notion of wiederholungszwang, such as I took care to spend a year around it to show you what it could mean… it is above all and only insofar as there is an insistence proper to the symbolic chain as such. This insistence proper to the symbolic chain is not, by definition, assumed by the subject.

Nevertheless the mere fact that it reproduces itself and that it comes at stage three as subsisting, as being formulated in a dream, even if this dream at the imaginary level, that is to say in the direct relation with the therapist, appears a deceptive dream, it is nonetheless, properly speaking, and it alone, the representative of transference in the proper sense.

And it is there that FREUD, with a boldness that would have been founded on a less oscillating position of his notion of transference, could with certainty have placed his trust, and could have intervened on the condition of conceiving very precisely:
– that transference takes place essentially at the level of symbolic articulation,
– that when we speak of transference, when something takes its meaning from the fact that the analyst becomes the place of transference, it is very precisely insofar as it is a matter of symbolic articulation as such,
…this before of course the subject has assumed it, for it is very precisely a transference dream.

FREUD notes that at that moment something nonetheless occurred that is of the order of transference; he simply draws neither the strict consequence, nor the correct method of intervention from it. I point this out because in truth this is not simply something to be remarked on a particular case that would be this case; we also have another case in which the problem opens at the same level in the same way, except that FREUD makes exactly the opposite error, and that is very precisely the Dora case.

These two cases, if one can say so, balance each other admirably; they strictly cross each other, but not only insofar as there occurs there:
– in one sense in one of the cases this confusion of the symbolic position with the imaginary position,
– and in the other case the confusion in the contrary sense.
One can say that in their total constellation, these two cases correspond strictly to each other, except that one is organized in relation to the other in the form of positive to negative: I could say that there is no better illustration of FREUD’s formula that ‘perversion is the negative of neurosis’. Still, it must be developed.

Let us quickly recall the terms of the Dora case, by the community they have with the terms of the present constellation. We have in the Dora case, exactly in the foreground the same characters: a father, a daughter, and also a Lady: Mrs K. And it is something all the more striking for us, because it is also around the Lady that the whole problem turns, even though the thing is concealed from FREUD in the presentation of the girl who is a little hysteric, and whom one brings to him for some symptoms she has had, no doubt minor, but nonetheless characterized.

And above all the situation has become intolerable following something that is a sort of demonstration or intention of suicide that ended up alarming her family. When she is brought to FREUD, the father presents her as a patient, and without any doubt this passage to the level of the consultation is an element that by itself denotes a crisis in the social whole where until then, the situation had been maintained with a certain balance.

Nevertheless this singular balance had already broken two years earlier, and was constituted by a position at first concealed from FREUD, namely that the father had Mrs K. as his mistress, that this woman was married to a man called Mr K., and that they lived in a sort of quartet relation with the couple formed by the father and the daughter, the mother being absent from the situation.

We already see, as we go further and further, the contrast with the situation of the young homosexual: here the mother is present since it is she who snatches from the girl the father’s attention, and introduces this element of real frustration which will have been the determinant in the formation of the perverse constellation.

Whereas in Dora’s case it is the father who introduces the lady and who seems to maintain her there, here it is the daughter who introduces her. What is striking in this position is that Dora immediately marks to FREUD her extremely vivid claim concerning her father’s affection, of which she tells him that it has been taken from her by this liaison, whose existence and permanence and preeminence she immediately demonstrates to FREUD that she has always followed, and that she has come to no longer be able to tolerate, and with respect to which all her behavior manifests her claim. FREUD—by a step that is the most decisive of the properly dialectical quality of the first step of the Freudian experience—brings her back to the question:

‘What you are rebelling against there as against a disorder, is it not something in which you yourself participated?’

And indeed he very quickly brings to light that up to a critical moment, this position was supported in the most efficient way by Dora herself, who found herself far more than accommodating to this singular position, but who was truly its linchpin:
– protecting, in a way, the asides of the couple of the father and the lady,
– moreover substituting herself in one of the cases for the lady in her functions, that is to say taking care of the children for example,
– and on the other hand as one goes further into the notion and the structure of the case, even marking a quite special bond with the Lady of whom she happened to be the confidante, and seems to have gone with her very far in confidences.

This case is of such richness that one can still make discoveries in it, and this rapid reminder can in no way replace attentive reading of the case. Let us note among other things, this interval of nine months between two symptoms, and which FREUD believes he discovers because the patient gives it to him in a symbolic way. But if one looks closely, one will realize that in the observation it is in reality a matter of fifteen months. And these fifteen months have a meaning because it is a fifteen that is found everywhere in the observation, and it is useful for understanding insofar as it is based on numbers and on a purely symbolic value.

I can only remind you today in what terms the whole problem is posed throughout the observation:

– it is not only that FREUD afterward realizes that if he fails it is because of a resistance of the patient to admit what is, as FREUD suggests to her with all the weight of his insistence and his authority, the love relation that binds her to Mr K,

– it is not simply that which you can read throughout the observation,

– it is not simply in a note and afterward that FREUD indicates that there was without doubt an error, namely that he should have understood that the homosexual attachment to Mrs K. was the true meaning: both of the institution of her primitive position, and of her crisis to which we are coming,

– it is not only that FREUD recognizes it afterward; throughout the observation FREUD is in the greatest ambiguity concerning the real object of Dora’s desire.

Here again we find ourselves in a position of the problem which is that of a possible formulation of this, in a way, unresolved ambiguity. It is clear that Mr K., in his person, has a quite preeminent importance for Dora, and that something like a libidinal bond is established with him. It is clear also that something that is of another order and that yet is also of a very great weight, at every instant plays its role in the libidinal bond with Mrs K.

How are we to conceive the one and the other in a way that would justify the progress of the adventure, its crisis, the breaking point of the balance, that would also make it possible to conceive both the progress of the adventure and the moment when it stops? Already in a first critique or approach to the problem and to the observation that I made five years ago, in accordance with the structure of hysterics, I indicated this:
– the hysteric is someone who loves by proxy: you find this in a multitude of observations of hysterics,
– the hysteric is someone whose object is homosexual and who approaches this homosexual object by identification with someone of the other sex.

It is a first, so to speak clinical, approach to the patient. I had gone further, and starting from the notion of the narcissistic relation insofar as:
– it is founding of the ego,
– it is the matrix of this constitution of this imaginary function that is called the ego,
…I said that in the end we have traces of it in the observation: it is insofar as the ego—only the ego—of Dora made an identification with a virile character—I am speaking in the complete situation in the quadrille—it is insofar as she is Mr K., that men are for her so many possible crystallizations of her ego, that the situation is understood. In other words, it is by the intermediary of Mr K., it is insofar as she is Mr K., and it is at the imaginary point constituted by Mr K.’s personality, that she is attached to the character of Mrs K.

I had gone still further, and I had said: Mrs K. is someone important, why? She is not important simply because she is a choice among other objects; she is not simply someone of whom one can say that she is invested with this narcissistic function which is at the bottom of every enamoration. Mrs K.—as the dreams indicate, for it is around the dreams that the essential weight of the observation lies—Mrs K. is Dora’s question.

Let us now try to transcribe that into our present formulation, and to try to situate what, in this quartet, comes to be ordered in our fundamental schema. Dora is a hysteric, that is to say someone who came to the level of the Oedipal crisis, and who in this Oedipal crisis could at once, and could not, cross it. There is a reason for that: it is that her father, contrary to the father of the homosexual, is impotent. The whole observation rests on this central notion of the father’s impotence.

Here then is the opportunity to bring out in a particularly exemplary way what the function of the father as such can be, with respect to the lack of an object: by what does the girl enter into the Oedipus? What can the function of the father be as donor? In other words, this situation rests on the distinction that I made regarding primitive frustration, from that which can be established in the child-to-mother relation, namely this distinction between the object insofar as:
– after frustration its desire subsists,
– the object is belonging of the subject,
– frustration has meaning only insofar as this object subsists after frustration,
…the distinction of that in which here the mother intervenes, that is to say in another register:
– insofar as she gives or does not give,
– insofar as this gift is or is not a sign of love.

Here is the father who is made to be the one who symbolically gives this missing object. Here he does not give it because he does not have it. The father’s phallic deficiency is what runs through the whole observation like an absolutely fundamental, constitutive note of the position. Are we here again, in a way, on only one plane, namely that it is purely and simply in relation to this lack that the whole crisis will be established? Let us observe what is at stake.

What is it to give? In other words, what dimension is introduced into the object relation at the level where it is carried to the symbolic degree by the fact that the object can or cannot be given? In other words, is it ever the object that is given?

That is the question of which we see in the Dora observation one outcome that is quite exemplary, for this father from whom she does not receive the virile gift symbolically, she remains very attached to him; she remains so attached to him that her story begins exactly with—at that age of coming out of the Oedipus—a whole series of hysterical accidents that are very clearly linked to manifestations of love for this father who, at that moment, appears more than ever and decisively as a wounded and sick father, as a father struck in his vital powers themselves.

The love that she has for this father is, very precisely at that moment, linked strictly correlatively, coextensively, to the diminution of this father. We thus have there a very clear distinction: what intervenes in the love relation, what is demanded as a sign of love, is never anything but something that has value only as a sign, or to go even further: there is no greater possible gift, no greater sign of love than the gift of what one does not have.

But let us note this well: the dimension of the gift exists only with the introduction of the law, with the fact that the gift, as the whole sociological meditation affirms to us and posits for us, is something that circulates.

The gift that you give is always the gift that you have received. But between two subjects, this cycle of gifts comes from elsewhere as well, for what establishes the love relation is that this gift is given, so to speak, for nothing.

The ‘nothing for nothing’ which is the principle of exchange is a formula—like every formula in which nothing intervenes—ambiguous.

This ‘nothing for nothing’ which appears to be the very formula of interest, is also the formula of pure gratuitousness. There is in fact in the gift of love only something given ‘for nothing’, and which can only be ‘nothing’. In other words, it is insofar as a subject gives something in a gratuitous way, insofar as behind what he gives there is everything that he lacks, that the primitive gift—moreover such as it is effectively exercised at the origin of human exchanges in the form of the ‘potlatch’—what makes the gift is that the subject sacrifices beyond what he has.

I ask you to note that if we suppose a subject who has in him the charge of all possible goods, of all riches, who has in a way the possible fullness of everything one can have, a gift coming from such a subject would literally have no value whatsoever as a sign of love.

And if it is possible that believers imagine they can love God because God is supposed to have in him effectively this total plenitude and this fullness, it is quite certain that if the thing is even thinkable of this recognition, for anything whatsoever, with respect to the one who would have posited that very precisely at the bottom of all belief there is all the same this something that remains there as long as this being who is supposed to be thought as a being who is a whole, he undoubtedly lacks the principal in being, that is to say existence.

That is to say that at the bottom of all belief in God as perfectly and totally munificent there is this I know not what that he always lacks and that makes it still always supposable that he does not exist. There is no reason to love God, except that perhaps he does not exist. What is certain is that that is indeed where Dora is at the moment when she loves her father: she loves him precisely for what he does not give her.

The whole situation is unthinkable outside of this primitive position which is maintained until the end, but of which there is to conceive how it could have been supported, tolerated, given that the father commits himself before Dora in something else, and that Dora even seems to have induced. The whole observation rests on this that we have: the Father, Dora, Mrs K.:

The whole situation is instituted as if Dora had to pose herself the question: ‘What is it that my father loves in Mrs K.?’ Mrs K. presents herself as something that her father can love beyond herself, and what Dora attaches herself to is to this something that is loved by her father in another, in this other insofar as she does not know what it is, this very in accordance with what is supposed by the whole theory of the phallic object, that is to say that for the feminine subject to enter into the dialectic of the symbolic order, she must enter into it through something that is this gift of the phallus. She cannot enter into it otherwise.

This therefore supposes that real need—which is not denied by FREUD, which pertains to the female organ as such, to the physiology of the woman—is something that is never given from the outset in the establishment of the position of desire. Desire aims at the phallus insofar as it must be received as a gift. For this it must be brought to the level of the absent or present gift. Moreover, it is insofar as it is raised to the dignity of an object of gift that it makes the subject enter into the dialectic of exchange: that which will normalize all these positions, up to and including the essential prohibitions that found this general movement of exchange. It is within that that real need, which FREUD never thought of denying as existing, linked to the female organ as such, will find its place and will be satisfied, so to speak, laterally.

But it is never symbolically located as something that has a meaning; it is always essentially problematic to itself, placed before a certain symbolic crossing, and that is indeed what is at stake throughout the whole deployment of these symptoms and the deployment of this observation. Dora asks herself: ‘What is a woman?’ And it is insofar as Mrs K. incarnates this feminine function as such that she is for Dora the representation of that into which she projects herself as being the question. It is insofar as she is, she, on the path of the dual relation with Mrs K., in other words that Mrs K. is what is loved beyond Dora, it is in sum why she herself—Dora—feels herself interested in this position: it is that Mrs K. is in a way loved beyond herself.

It is because Mrs K. realizes what she, Dora, can neither know nor recognize of this situation in which Dora does not find a place to lodge herself:
– insofar as love is something that, in a being, is loved beyond what he is, it is something which in the end, in a being, is what he lacks, and to love for Dora is situated somewhere between her father and Mrs K.,
– insofar as because her father loves Mrs K., she, Dora, feels satisfied, but on the condition of course that this position be maintained.

This position which moreover is symbolized in a thousand ways, namely that this impotent father makes up by every means of symbolic gift—including material gifts—for what he does not realize as virile presence, and he indeed makes Dora benefit from it in passing, by all sorts of munificences which are distributed also over the mistress and over the daughter.

He thus makes her participate in this symbolic position. Nevertheless this is not enough yet, and Dora tries to reestablish, to restore access to a position manifested in the inverse sense. I mean that it is, no longer vis-à-vis the father, but vis-à-vis the woman she has facing her: Mrs K., that she tries to reestablish a triangular situation, and it is here that Mr K. intervenes, that is to say that effectively through him the triangle can be closed, but in an inverted position.

Out of interest for her question she will consider Mr K. as someone who participates in what symbolizes in the observation the question side of Mrs K.’s presence, namely this adoration still expressed by a very manifest symbolic association, given in the observation, namely the Sistine Madonna.

Mrs K. is the object of the adoration of all those who surround her, and it is insofar as participating in this adoration that Dora in the end situates herself with respect to her. Mr K. is the way in which she normalizes this position by trying to reintegrate something that brings the masculine element into the circuit, and effectively it is at the moment when Mr K. tells her… not that he courts her or that he loves her, not even that he approaches her in a way intolerable for a hysteric… it is at the moment when he tells her: ‘Ich habe nichts an meiner Frau.’ that she slaps him.

The important element is that Mr K. declares at a moment something that has a particularly vivid meaning, if we give this term ‘nothing’ its full scope and its full meaning; the very German formula is particularly expressive. He tells her in sum something by which he withdraws himself from the circuit thus constituted, and which in its order is established as follows:

Dora can well admit that her father loves in her and through her what is beyond: Mrs K. But then for Mr K. to be tolerable in this position, he must occupy the exactly inverse and balancing function, namely that Dora, she, be loved by him beyond his wife, but insofar as his wife is for him something. This something is the same thing as this nothing that there must be beyond, that is to say Dora in the occasion.

If he tells her that there is nothing on the side of his wife, this ‘an’ in German marks well in this very particular relation that he does not say that his wife is nothing to him: there is nothing. ‘An’ is something that we find in a thousand German locutions; the German formula that is particular to it shows that an is an addition in the beyond of what is lacking. That is precisely what we find here; he means that there is nothing after his wife: my wife is not in the circuit.

What results from it? Dora cannot tolerate that: that is to say that he takes an interest in her, Dora, only insofar as he takes an interest only in her. The whole situation, at the same time, is broken. If Mr K. takes an interest only in her, it is that her father takes an interest only in Mrs K., and at that moment, she can no longer tolerate it. Why?

She nonetheless enters, in FREUD’s eyes, into a typical situation as Mr Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS explains in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the exchange of the bonds of alliance consists exactly in this: ‘I have received a woman and I owe a daughter.’ Only this, which is the very principle of the institution of exchange and of law, makes the woman purely and simply an object of exchange; she is integrated into it by nothing.

If, in other words, she has not herself renounced something, that is to say precisely the paternal phallus conceived as an object of gift, she can conceive nothing, subjectively speaking, that she does not receive from others, that is to say from a man. Insofar as she is excluded from this first institution of the gift and of the law in the direct relation of the gift of love, she can live this situation only by feeling herself reduced purely and simply to the status of object.

And that is indeed what happens at that moment. Dora absolutely revolts and begins to say: my father sells me to someone else, which is indeed the clear and perfect summary of the situation, insofar as it is maintained in this half-light. In fact it is indeed a way of paying, so to speak, for the complaisance of the husband, that is to say of Mr K., to let him pursue, in a sort of veiled tolerance, this courtship to which over the years he has devoted himself toward Dora. It is therefore insofar as Mr K. has confessed himself as being someone who is not part of a circuit in which Dora can either identify him with herself, or think that she, Dora, is Mr K.’s object beyond the woman through whom she is attached to him. It is as rupture of these subtle and no doubt ambiguous ties, but which in each case have a sense and a perfect orientation, that this rupture of these ties is heard and that Dora no longer finds her place in the circuit except in an extremely unstable way.

But she finds it in a certain way, and at every instant it is insofar as rupture of these ties that the situation becomes unbalanced and that Dora sees herself fallen into the role of pure and simple object, and then begins to enter into a claim for this something that she was very disposed to consider, that she had until now received, even through the intermediary of another, which is her father’s love. From that moment on she claims it exclusively, since it is refused to her totally. What difference appears between these two registers and these two situations in which respectively are involved the one and the other, namely Dora and our ‘homosexual’?

To go quickly and to end on something that makes an image, I will tell you this, which we will confirm: if it is true that what is maintained in the unconscious of our homosexual is the father’s promise: ‘you will have a child by me’, and if what she shows in this exalted love for the Lady is precisely, as FREUD tells us, the model of absolutely disinterested love, of love for nothing, do you not see that in this first case everything happens as if the girl wanted to show her father what a true love is, this love that her father refused her.

No doubt he was involved in it in the subject’s unconscious, no doubt because he finds more advantages with the mother, and in fact this relation is fundamental in every entry of the child into the Oedipus, namely the crushing superiority of the adult rival. What she demonstrates to him is how one can love someone, not only for what he has, but literally for what he does not have: for this symbolic penis that she knows well, she, that she will not find in the Lady, because she knows very well, she, where it is found, that is to say in her father who is not, he, impotent.

In other words, what perversion expresses in this case is that it is expressed between the lines, by contrasts, by allusions; it is this way one has of speaking of something altogether other, but which necessarily, by a rigorous sequence of the terms that are brought into play, implies its counterpart which is what one wants to make the other hear. In other words, you find there what I once called before you, in the broadest sense, metonymy, that is to say to make something be heard by speaking of something altogether other. If you do not grasp in all its generality this fundamental notion of metonymy, it is quite inconceivable that you will arrive at any notion whatsoever of what perversion can mean in the imaginary.

This metonymy is the principle of everything one can call, in the order of fabulation and art, realism. For realism literally has no kind of sense. A novel that is made of a heap of little traits that mean nothing has no value, if very precisely it does not make vibrate harmonically something that has a meaning beyond. If the great novelists are bearable, it is insofar as everything they apply themselves to show us finds its meaning, not at all symbolically, not allegorically, but by what they make resound at a distance. And it is the same for cinema. Likewise the function of the perversion of the subject is a metonymic function.

But is it the same thing for Dora who is a neurotic? It is quite another thing. Looking at the schema one observes that in perversion we are dealing with a signifying conduct which indicates a signifier which is further along in the signifying chain, insofar as it is linked to it by a necessary signifier. In Dora’s case it is insofar as Dora, taken as subject, puts herself at every step under a certain number of signifiers in the chain, it is insofar as literally Mrs K. is her metaphor. Because Dora can say nothing of what she is, nor what she is for, nor what love is for. She simply knows that love exists, and she finds in it a historization in which she finds her place in the form of a question which is centered on the content and the articulation of all her dreams which signify nothing else: the jewelry box, etc.

It is insofar as Dora questions what it is to be a woman that she expresses herself as she expresses herself: by symptoms. These symptoms are signifying elements, but insofar as under them runs a perpetually moving signified which is the way Dora implicates herself in them and is interested in them. It is insofar as metaphorical that Dora’s neurosis takes its meaning, and can be untied. And it is precisely by his, FREUD’s, having introduced into this metaphor, and having wanted to force the real element which in all this metaphor tends to reintroduce itself into it, by saying: what you love is this precisely, that of course something tends to be normalized in the situation by the entry into play of Mr K. But this something remains in the metaphorical state, and the proof of it is that if FREUD can indeed think—with this kind of prodigious intuitive sense he has, of meanings—that there is something that resembles a sort of impregnation of Dora, of something after the crisis of rupture with Mr K., it is indeed a sort of strange significant miscarriage that occurs.

FREUD believes ‘nine months’ because Dora herself says ‘nine months’, and she herself admits by that that there is there as it were a sort of pregnancy. But it is indeed beyond that, after what it is normal to call for Dora the term of delivery, that it is significant that Dora sees the last reverberation of this something in which she remains knotted to Mr K. And indeed we find there under a certain form, the equivalence of a sort of copulation which is translated in the symbolic order, and purely in a metaphorical way. Once again, the symptom is there only as a metaphor, as an attempt to rejoin what is the law of symbolic exchanges with the man to whom one unites or disunites.

By contrast the delivery which is also found on the other side, at the end of the observation of the homosexual before she came into FREUD’s hands, manifests itself in the following way: suddenly she throws herself from a small railway bridge at the moment when once again the real father intervenes to show her his irritation and his wrath, and that the woman who is with her sanctions it by telling her that she does not want to see her anymore.

The young girl at that moment finds herself absolutely deprived of her last springs, for up to then she has been sufficiently frustrated of what was to be given to her, namely the paternal phallus, but she had found the means, by way of this imaginary relation, to maintain desire. At that moment, with the rejection by the lady, she can no longer sustain anything at all, namely that the object is definitively lost, namely that this nothing in which she instituted herself to demonstrate to her father how one can love, no longer even has any reason to be, and at that moment she kills herself.

But FREUD underlines it for us: this also has another meaning; it has the meaning of a definitive loss of the object, namely that this phallus that is decidedly refused her, falls, niederkommt. It has there a value of definitive privation, and at the same time of mimicry as well of a sort of symbolic delivery.

And this metonymic side I was speaking to you about, you will find it there, for if this act of hurling herself from a railway bridge at the critical and terminal moment of her relations with the lady and the father, FREUD can interpret it as a sort of demonstrative way of making herself this child that she did not have, and at the same time of destroying herself in a last act significant of the object, it is only founded on the existence of the word niederkommt which indicates metonymically the last term, the theme of suicide where there is expressed in the homosexual in question, what is the sole and unique spring of all her perversion… and this in accordance with everything FREUD has many times affirmed concerning the pathogenesis of a certain type of female homosexuality… namely a stable and particularly reinforced love for the father.