🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I get from time to time echoes of the way you receive this little newcomer that I bring each time, or so I hope at least.
Last time I took a step in the direction of elucidating fetishism as a particularly fundamental example of the dynamic of desire, and especially of that desire which interests us in the highest degree, for the double reason that this desire is the one we have to deal with in our practice, namely not a constructed desire, but a desire with all its paradoxes.

Likewise we have to deal with an object with all its paradoxes; on the other hand, it is clear that Freudian thought started from these paradoxes, and in particular in the case of desire it started from perverse desire. It would really be a pity to forget that in this attempt at unification or reduction in the face of the most naively intuitive theories to which ‘Psychoanalysis Today’ can be related.

To take things up again at the level where we left them last time, I would first say that this small step that I took surprised some who were already quite satisfied with the idea of the theory of love as I present it to you, as founded on the fact that what the subject addresses is that lack which is in the object.

This had already provided some with the occasion for perception, for meditation that seemed sufficiently enlightening, although they had some trouble realizing that beyond this subject-object relation there is an beyond and a lack.

I brought last time an additional complication, namely yet another term situated before the object: the veil, the curtain, the place of imaginary projection where something appears that becomes the figuration of this lack, and as such can be the point offered, the support that opens onto something that there precisely takes its name: desire, but desire insofar as perverse. It is on the veil that the fetish comes to figure precisely what is lacking beyond the object.

This schematization is meant to institute these successive planes that must enable you in certain cases to find your way a little better in this sort of perpetual ambivalence and confusion, equivalence of yes with no, of what is directed in one sense with what is directed exactly in the contrary sense, with all that which unfortunately analysis and the analyst usually make use of to get out of difficulty, under the name of ambivalence.

Quite at the end of what I told you last time about fetishism, I showed you the appearance as if of a complementary position…
and which likewise appears in the phases of the fetishistic culture, even in the fetishist’s attempts to reach that object from which he is separated by this something, whose function and mechanism he of course does not understand himself
…of something that can be called the symmetric, the counterpart, the correspondent, the opposite pole of the fetishist, namely the function of transvestism, that is, that in which the subject identifies with what is behind the veil, and with that object to which something is lacking.

The transvestite—the authors have seen it clearly in analysis—is someone who, as they say in their language, identifies with the phallic mother insofar as, on the other hand, she veils this lack of phallus. This transvestism takes us very far into the question, for we did not have to wait for FREUD to approach the psychology of clothing.

In every use of clothing there is something that participates in the function of transvestism, and if the immediate, current, common apprehension of the function of clothing is to hide the pudenda from the analyst’s eyes, the question must become a little more complicated, especially if there is someone who must notice the meaning of what he says when he speaks of the phallic mother.

Clothes are not only made to hide what one has, in the sense of ‘having it or not’, but also precisely what one does not have. Both functions are essential.

It is not essentially and always a matter of hiding the object, but equally of hiding the lack of object, a simple application in this case of the imaginary dialectic of what is too often forgotten, namely of this function and of this presence of the lack of object.

Conversely, what in a sort of massive use of the scoptophilic relation is always implied as self-evident—that the fact of showing oneself is something quite simple, that is correlative to the activity of ‘seeing’, of voyeurism—this too is a dimension willingly forgotten, which is the one that makes it possible to say that the subject does not always and on every occasion simply ‘make himself seen’, insofar as what is at stake there is the correlative and corresponding relation of this activity of ‘seeing’, of the subject’s implication in a breath of visual capture.

There is also in scoptophilia this additional dimension of implication that is expressed in the use of language by the presence which is only a sign of the reflexive, which is also the one implied in the middle voice, in other forms of the verb, in other languages where it exists, which is ‘to give oneself to be seen’. And if you combine these dimensions with one another: what the subject gives to see in a whole type of activities that are here confused with the voyeurism-exhibitionism relation, what the other gives to see by showing himself, is also something other than what he shows, and which is drowned in what is massively called the scoptophilic relation.

Authors who are, under their apparent clarity, very bad theoreticians, like FENICHEL, but who are nonetheless not without analytic experience, noticed it very well. If you read the articles whose effort at theorization results in a despairing failure—as such this or that of FENICHEL’s articles—you sometimes find there very pretty clinical pearls, and even a kind of feeling or presentiment of a whole order of facts that must be grouped, and that are grouped by a kind of flair that the analyst fortunately acquires in his experience, around a theme or a branch chosen from the analytic articulation of fundamental imaginary relations.

You see indeed, around the scoptophilia of transvestism, everything in which the author senses, in a more or less obscure way, a kinship, a community of grouped stems, of facts that are extremely well distinguished from one another. And in particular it is thus that, in informing myself about all this vast and insipid literature, necessary for me to realize to what extent analysts have penetrated into a real articulation of these facts, I recently took an interest in an article by FENICHEL published in the Psychoanalytical journal on what he calls the equation ‘girl = phallus’. He himself has authorized us to do so with regard to the equivalences in the series of well-known equations ‘feces = child = penis’; it is indeed an interesting equation that is not unrelated to the equation that FENICHEL tries to propose to us, the equation ‘girl = phallus’.

One sees clearly in this connection a lack of orientation that leaves us at every instant with, as a given, a logic exempt from the lack of orientation of certain theoretical analyses. We see there a series of facts grouped around these analytic encounters that make it so that from the outset the child can be held as equivalent, as equal in the subject’s unconscious—especially feminine—to the phallus. That is to say that, in sum, there is the phylum of everything that is connected to the fact that the child is given to the mother as a kind of substitute, even an equivalent of the phallus.

But alongside that there are indeed other facts. And the fact that they are gathered within the same parenthesis with that order of facts is quite surprising. When I spoke of the child, it was not specifically a matter of the female child, but here the article very specifically targets the girl, and assuredly it must start from a certain number of traits well known in the fetishistic or quasi-fetishistic specificity of certain perversions interpreted as the equivalent of the subject’s phallus.

This is something that belongs to the order of analytic data: that the girl herself, and in general the child, can conceive herself, show by her behavior that she posits herself as the equivalent of the phallus, namely that she lives the sexual relation as being that relation that makes it so that she herself brings to the male partner his phallus, that she sometimes situates herself, down to the details of her privileged amorous position, as something that comes to cling, to curl up in a certain corner of her partner’s body. Here is yet another kind of fact that cannot fail to hold us and strike us.

In certain cases, likewise, the male subject gives himself to the woman himself as being that something that is lacking to her, and bringing to her as such the phallus as that which is lacking to her, imaginarily speaking. It is toward all that that the set of facts highlighted here seems to point. But one can also see in the way of bringing them together, of putting them all into a single equation, that one is gathering there facts of extremely different orders, since in these four orders of relations that I have just sketched, the subject is absolutely not in the same relation with the object whether he brings, whether he gives, whether he desires, or whether he even substitutes himself for it.

Once our attention is drawn toward these registers, we cannot not see that it is indeed beyond a simple theoretical requirement that an author groups the equivalence thus instituted: that the little girl can be the object of a prevalent attachment for a whole type of subjects; that a mythical function, so to speak, can be extracted at once from these perverse mirages and from a whole series of literary constructions that we can group according to the authors, under headings more or less illustrious.

Some have willingly wanted to speak of ‘a MIGNON type’. You all know this creation of MIGNON, this gypsy girl in a bi-sexed position, as GOETHE himself very clearly emphasizes, and who lives with a kind of protector of a type at once enormous and brutal, and manifestly super-paternal, who is called HAFNER. He serves her, in sum, as a superior servant, but at the same time she is for him of great need.

GOETHE says somewhere, speaking of this couple: ‘Hafner whom she needs most, and Mignon without whom he can do nothing.’
We find there a sort of couple, between what one can call power in a massive, brutal, incarnated state, and on the other hand that something without which power is devoid of efficacy, what is lacking to power itself, and what is in the end the secret of its true power, that is to say that something that is nothing but a lack, which is the last point where the famous magic comes to be situated, always also attributed in such a confused way in analytic theory to the idea of omnipotence.

If there is already something that is not—contrary to what one believes—in the subject: the structure of omnipotence, but which, as I told you, is in the mother, that is to say in the primitive Other, it is the Other that is all-powerful, but moreover behind this all-powerful there is indeed that last lack on which its power is suspended; I mean that as soon as the subject perceives in the object from which he expects omnipotence this lack that itself makes him a powerful one, it is still beyond that that the last spring of omnipotence is displaced. Namely there where something does not exist, at the maximum: which in him is nothing but the symbolism of lack, fragility, smallness; it is there that the subject has to situate the secret, the true spring of omnipotence, and that is why this type that we call today ‘the Mignon type’, but which is reproduced in literature in a very large number of specimens, is of interest to us.

Three years ago, I was on the point of announcing a lecture on The Devil in Love by CAZOTTE.
There are few things as exemplary of the deepest divination of the imaginary dynamic that I am trying to develop before you, and especially today. I remembered it as a major illustration that accentuates it, to give the sense of that magical being beyond the object to which a whole series of idealizing fantasies can attach. It is a tale that begins in Naples, in a cave where the author gives himself over to the evocation of the devil, who does not fail, after the customary formalities, to appear in the form of a formidable camel head especially provided with large ears, and he says to him with the most cavernous voice there is: ‘What do you want?’, ‘Che vuoi?’

I believe that this fundamental interrogation is indeed what gives us, in the most striking way, the function of the superego. But the interest is not that this image of the superego finds here a striking illustration; it is to see that it is the same being who is supposed to transform immediately once the pact is concluded, into a little dog which, by a transition that surprises no one, becomes a delightful young man, then a delightful young girl, the two moreover not ceasing until the end to intermingle in a perfect ambiguity and to become for a time, for the one who is the narrator of the story, the surprising source of all felicities, of the fulfillment of all desires, of the properly magical satisfaction of all that he can wish. All of it, however, in an atmosphere of fantasy, of dangerous unreality, of permanent threat that does not fail to give its accent to its surroundings, and resolving at the end in the manner of an immense mirage in a catastrophic break of this increasingly accelerated and mad course, which represents the relation with the loved character who has a meaningful name, but whose name I do not remember. All this ends with a kind of catastrophic dissipation of the mirage at the moment when the subject returns to his mother’s castle, as is fitting.

Another novel, by LATOUCHE, Fragoletta, presents a curious character clearly transvestite, since to the end and without anything finally being brought to light, except for the reader, it is a girl who is a boy and who plays a functionally analogous role to the one I have just described as being this ‘Mignon type’, with details and refinements that lead to a duel during which the hero of the novel himself kills the character of Fragoletta, who at that moment presents herself to him as a boy, without his recognizing her and showing well there the equivalence of a certain feminine object with the other insofar as rival, the same other who is the one at stake when HAMLET kills the character of OPHELIA’s brother.

Here we are in the presence of a fetish character, or fairy—it is fundamentally the same word, both being connected to feitiço in Portuguese, since it is there that historically the word ‘fetish’ was born; it is nothing other than the word ‘factice’—of an ambiguous feminine being who represents herself, and who embodies in a way beyond the mother the phallus that is lacking to her, and embodies it all the better in that she does not possess it herself, but rather in that she is entirely engaged in its representation.

Here we are in the presence of yet another function of the enamoring relation of the perverse paths of desire, which can be exemplary there in enlightening us about the positions that must be distinguished when we analyze it. We are thus led to finally pose the question of what is underlying, perpetually called into question by this very critique, namely the notion of identification which is latent, present, emerging at every instant, then disappearing again, in FREUD’s work from the origin, since there are already implications of identifications in The Interpretation of Dreams, and which reaches its major point of explanation at the moment when FREUD writes Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in which there is a chapter expressly devoted to identification.

This chapter has the property of showing us—as happens very often and as is the value of FREUD’s work to show it to us—the greatest perplexity in the author. There is an article where FREUD confesses to us his embarrassment, even his powerlessness, to emerge from the dilemma posed by the perpetual ambiguity that arises for him between two terms that he specifies, namely ‘identification’ and ‘object choice’. The two appearing in so many cases as substituting for one another with the most disconcerting power of metamorphosis, in such a way that the transition itself is not grasped, with the nonetheless evident necessity of maintaining the distinction between the two, for as he says: it is something else to be on the side of the object or on the side of the subject.
If an object becomes an ‘object of choice’, it is quite clear that it is not the same thing as if it becomes a ‘support of the subject’s identification’.

This is something tremendously instructive in itself, and which moreover immediately bears as instruction the disconcerting ease with which everyone seems to accommodate it, and uses, in a strictly equivalent way, one and the other on the side of observation and theorization, without asking more of it. When one asks more of it, one produces an article like that of Gustav Hans GRABER: The Two Kinds of Mechanisms of Identification, in Imago1937, which is indeed the most dizzying thing one can imagine, for everything is resolved for him, it seems, with the distinction between active identification and passive identification.

When one looks closely it is impossible not to see—moreover he himself notices it—the two poles active and passive in each kind of identification, so that we must indeed return to FREUD, and in a way take up point by point the way he himself articulates the question. ChapterVIII of this work: ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ follows immediately after the chapter that is properly speaking the one ‘Identification’, and it begins with a sentence that immediately restores the atmosphere of something otherwise pure than what we usually read:

‘Linguistic usage remains, even in its caprices, always faithful to some reality.’
[Der Sprachgebrauch bleibt selbst in seinen Launen irgendeiner Wirklichkeit treu.]

I would like to note in passing how, in the previous chapter, FREUD spoke of identification. He begins by speaking of identification with the father as an example, the one by which we enter in the most natural way into this phenomenon. We arrive at the second paragraph, and here is an example of the bad French translations of FREUD’s texts. We read in the German text:

[Gleichzeitig mit dieser Identifizierung mit dem Vater, vielleicht sogar vorher, hat der Knabe begonnen, eine richtige Objektbesetzung der Mutter
nach dem Anlehnungstypus vorzunehmen.]

‘At the same time as this identification with the father, perhaps even a little earlier…

which is translated as: ‘a little later’!

…at that moment the little boy begins to direct toward his mother his libidinal desires.

and one can ask with this translation whether identification with the father would not be prior.

We find another example of it in the passage I want to come to this morning and that I chose for you as the most condensed and the most suited to show you what I called ‘FREUD’s perplexities’. It is a matter of the amorous state in its relations with identification: identification, a more primitive function—to follow FREUD’s text—more fundamental insofar as it involves an object choice, but an object choice that cannot fail to have to be articulated in a way that is itself very problematic.

This object choice, so deeply linked by all Freudian analysis to narcissism, this object which is a sort of other self in the subject, to go as far as one can go in the direction that FREUD articulates perfectly, it is thus that which is at stake: how to articulate this difference between identification and Verliebtheit in its highest formations—in the sense, it seems, the fullest, which one calls fascination, amorous belonging—in its highest manifestations known under the name of infatuation, or of amorous belonging that is easy to describe.

[Im ersteren Falle hat sich das Ich um die Eigenschaften des Objekts bereichert, sich dasselbe nach Ferenczi’s Ausdruck « introjiziert »,
im zweiten Fall ist es verarmt, hat sich dem Objekt hingegeben, dasselbe an die Stelle seines wichtigsten Bestandteils gesetzt.]

We read in the French translation:

‘In the first case, the ego enriches itself with the qualities of the object, assimilates it…’

In truth, one must simply read what FERENCZI renders, namely: ‘introjects it’, and there is the question of introjection in its relations with identification.

‘…in the second case, it impoverishes itself, having given itself entirely to the object, having effaced itself before it…’

…translates the French author. That is not quite what FREUD says:

‘…this object that it has placed in the position of its most important constituent element.’

This is quite effaced in this sentence, and one does not see that it translates something so articulated by ‘having effaced itself before it’.

Here, FREUD stops on this opposition between:
– what the subject introjects and by which he enriches himself,
– and on the other hand that something which takes something from him and impoverishes him, for a moment earlier he had lingered at length on what happens in the amorous state as being that something where the subject more and more dispossesses himself—for the benefit of the loved object—of everything that is his own, which becomes literally seized by humility, by a complete subjection in relation to the object of his investment.

FREUD here articulates that this object for the benefit of which he impoverishes himself is the very one that he places in the position of his most important constituent element. This is FREUD’s approach to the problem; he pursues it by going back, for FREUD does not spare us his movements: he advances and realizes that it is not complete, he is going to come back and say: this description brings out oppositions that in reality do not exist from the economic point of view.

[Es handelt sich ökonomisch nicht um Verarmung oder Bereicherung, man kann auch die extreme Verliebtheit so beschreiben,
daß das Ich sich das Objekt introjiziert habe.]

‘From the economic point of view, it is a matter neither of enrichment nor of impoverishment, for even extreme being-in-love can be conceived as an introjection of the object into the ego.’

The following distinction might perhaps bear on essential points:

[Im Falle der Identifizierung ist das Objekt verloren gegangen oder aufgegeben worden; es wird dann im Ich wieder aufgerichtet, das Ich verändert sich partiell nach dem Vorbild des verlorenen Objekts. Im anderen Falle ist das Objekt erhalten geblieben und wird als solches von seiten und auf Kosten des Ichs überbesetzt.]

‘In the case of identification, the object has volatilized and disappears in order to reappear in the ego, which undergoes a partial transformation after the model of the disappeared object. In the other case the constituted object finds itself endowed with all qualities by the ego and at its expense.’

That is what the French text tells us. Why would the object volatilize and disappear in order to reappear in the ego after having undergone a partial transformation after the model of the disappeared object? It is better to refer to the German text.

[Vielleicht trifft eine andere Unterscheidung eher das Wesentliche. Im Falle der Identifizierung ist das Objekt verloren gegangen.]

‘Perhaps another distinction would be the essential one. In the case of identification, the object has been lost.’

This is the reference to that fundamental notion that one finds all the time from the beginning of the notion of the formation of the object as FREUD explains it to us, the notion as fundamental of identification with the lost or abandoned object. It is therefore not a matter of an object that ‘volatilizes’ nor that ‘disappears’, for precisely it does not disappear.

[Im Falle der Identifizierung ist das Objekt verlorengegangen oder aufgegeben worden; es wird dann im Ich wieder aufgerichtet, das Ich verändert sich partiell nach dem Vorbild des verlorenen Objekts. Im anderen Falle ist das Objekt erhalten geblieben und wird als solches von sehen
und auf Kosten des Ichs überbesetzt. Aber auch hiegegen erhebt sich ein Bedenken. Steht es denn fest, daß die Identifizierung das Aufgeben
der Objektbesetzung voraussetzt, kann es nicht Identifizierung bei erhaltenem Objekt geben ?Und ehe wir uns in die Diskussion dieser heikeln Frage einlassen, kann uns bereits die Einsicht aufdämmern, daß eine andere Alternative das Wesen dieses Sachverhaltes in sich faßt,
nämlich ob das Objekt an die Stelle des Ichs oder des Ichideals gesetzt wird.]

‘It is then erected again in the ego, and the ego partially transforms itself after the model of the lost object.
In the other case the object has remained preserved and as such is overcathected on the part and at the expense of the ego.
But this distinction in its turn raises a new reflection: is it really certain that identification presupposes the abandonment of the cathexis of the object; can one not also have an identification with the preserved object? And before we enter into this particularly thorny discussion, we must also for an instant stop at this consideration that we present: that there is another alternative in which the essence of this state of affairs can be conceived, and namely that the object is placed in the position of the ego or of the ego ideal.’

It is a text whose procedure leaves us quite embarrassed; it seems, nothing very clear results from these forward-and-backward movements in which FREUD manifestly makes patent the fact that the ambiguity about the very place that we can give to the object in these different moments of comings and goings, around which it constitutes itself as an object of identification or as an object of amorous capture, remains almost entirely in a state of questioning.

Still, the questioning remains posed, and that is only what I wanted to bring out for you, for we find ourselves there before one of the texts of which one cannot say that it is FREUD’s testamentary text, but it is one of those in which he reached the summit of his theoretical elaboration.

Let us therefore try to take up the problem from the markers we have given ourselves in the elaboration that we are attempting here of the relations of frustration with the constitution of the object. It is first of all a matter of conceiving the link that we commonly establish in our practice, in our way of speaking, between identification and introjection.

You saw it appear from the beginning of the FREUD passage that I have just read to you.
I propose this: the metaphor underlying introjection is an oral metaphor.

Whether it is a matter of introjection or incorporation…
what one most commonly lets oneself slide into in all the articulations that are given in the Kleinian period, for example, of the famous constitution of primordial objects which are divided, as is fitting, into good and bad objects, in this alternation of the introjection of objects, held to be something simple, given in that something that would be that famous primitive world without limits where the subject would make a whole of his own enveloping within the maternal body…
introjection is held there to be a function strictly equivalent and symmetric to that of projection.

Likewise one sees, in the use made of it, that the object is perpetually in this kind of movement, of passage from outside to inside, in order afterward, being from inside, to be pushed back outside when it has become too intolerable within, which leaves in a perfect symmetry ‘introjection’ and ‘projection’.

It is very precisely against this abuse, which is very far from being a Freudian abuse, that, among other things, what I am going to try to articulate before you will rise up. I believe that it is strictly impossible to conceive—I do not say simply in conceptualization, something ordered in thoughts, but in practice, in the clinic—to conceive the links that there are between phenomena such as manifest oral impulses…
for example, correlative to turning moments of that symbolic reduction of the object to which we attach ourselves from time to time with more or less success in patients, that something which makes bulimic impulses appear at such a turning point of the cure of a fetishism…
it is strictly impossible to conceive this evocation of the oral drive at a certain moment if we hold ourselves to the vague notion that will always in these cases be at our disposal: at that moment, the subject regresses, we will be told, because, of course, he is there for that. Why?

Because at the moment when he is in the process of progressing in analysis, that is, of trying to take the perspective of his fetish, he regresses. One can always say it; no one will come to contradict you. It is quite certain that the evocation of the drive—as each time the drive appears in analysis or elsewhere—must be conceived:
– in relation to a certain register,
– in relation to its economic function,
– in relation to the unfolding of a certain symbolically defined relation.

And is there not something that allows us to approach it, to illuminate it in the primitive schema that I gave you of the child, between:

– the mother as support of the first amorous relation, insofar as love is something symbolically structured, insofar as she is the object of appeal, and thus an object as absent as present, the mother whose gifts are a sign of love, and as such are only such and annulled by that very fact insofar as they are something entirely other than signs of love,

– and on the other hand the object of need, which she presents to him in the form of her breast?

Do you not see that between the two it is a matter of a balance and a compensation?
Each time there is a frustration of love, the frustration is compensated by the satisfaction of need.

It is insofar as the mother is lacking to her child who calls her, who clings, who clings to her breast and who makes of it something more significant than all that something from which—as long as he has it in his mouth, and as long as he is satisfied by it—he cannot be separated, that something also which leaves him fed, rested, satisfied. Here, the satisfaction of need is at once the compensation, and I would almost say, begins to become the alibi of the frustration of love.

From then on, the prevalent value that the object takes—the breast on the occasion, or the dummy—is precisely founded on this: that a real object
– takes on its function as part of the object of love,
– it takes on its meaning as symbolic,
– it becomes as a real object a part of the symbolic object; the drive addresses the real object as part of the symbolic object.

It is from there that every possible understanding opens of oral absorption, of the supposedly regressive mechanism of oral absorption insofar as it can intervene in every amorous relation.

For of course, this object that satisfies a real need, at this stage of this object, from the moment when a real object has been able to become an element of the symbolic object:

– any other that can satisfy a real need can come to take its place,

– and in the first rank what is already symbolized, but which, as perfectly materialized, is also an object, and can come to take this place, namely speech.

It is insofar as the oral reaction to the primitive object of devouring comes as compensation for the frustration of love, insofar as this is a reaction of incorporation, that the model, the mold is given for that kind of incorporation which is the incorporation of certain words among other things, and which is at the origin of the early formation of what is called the superego.
What, under the name of the superego, the subject incorporates, is that something analogous to the object of need not insofar as it is itself the gift, but insofar as it is the substitute in default of the gift, which is not at all the same.

It is from there likewise that the fact of possessing or not possessing a penis can take on a double meaning, enter by two at first very different routes into the subject’s imaginary economy, for the penis can situate an object at a given moment somewhere in the line and in the place of that object that is the breast and the dummy; this is one thing.

And there is an oral form of incorporation of the penis that plays its role in the determinism of certain symptoms and certain functions. But there is another way in which the penis enters into this economy: it is not insofar as it can be an object, so to speak, compensatory for the frustration of love, but insofar as it is precisely beyond the object of love, that it is lacking to this one.

– The one, let us call it this penis, with all that it entails, is all the same an imaginary function insofar as it is imaginarily that it is incorporated.

– The other is this phallus insofar as it is lacking to the mother and is beyond her, beyond her power of love, that something that is lacking to her and about which I have been putting the question to you since I began this year this seminar: at what moment does the subject discover this lack in such a way that he can himself find himself engaged to come to substitute himself there, that is, to choose another path in the re-finding of the object of love that slips away, namely to bring her himself his own lack?

This distinction is crucial; it will allow us today to pose a first outline of what is at least required for this time to occur. We already have symbolic structuring, possible introjection, and as such the most characterized form of primitive Freudian identification posed. It is in this second time that Verliebtheit can occur. Verliebtheit is absolutely not conceivable, and it is nowhere articulated—except in the register of the narcissistic relation—other than the specular relation as the one who speaks to you has defined and articulated it.

It is insofar as, at a date that is datable, that is necessarily not before the sixth month, this relation to the image of the other occurs, insofar as it gives the subject this matrix around which can be organized for him what I would call ‘his lived incompleteness’, namely the fact that he is in default, that something can be lacking to him with respect to this image that presents itself as total, as not only fulfilling for him, but as a source of jubilation for him, insofar as there is a specific relation of man to his own image.

It is insofar as the imaginary comes into play that, on the foundation of these first two symbolic relations between the object and the mother of the child, this can appear: that to the mother as to him something can be lacking imaginarily, that something beyond can exist that is a lack, insofar as he himself has the apprehension and the experience, in the specular relation, of a possible lack.

It is therefore not beyond narcissistic realization, and insofar as begins to organize this tension-filled coming-and-going, profoundly aggressive toward the other around whom will be nucleated, crystallized the successive layers of what will constitute the ego, that at that moment can be introduced what makes appear to the subject beyond what he himself constitutes as object for his mother, that can appear this form that in any case the object of love is itself taken, captivated, held in something that he himself, as object, does not manage to grasp, namely this nostalgia, namely that something that relates to his own lack.

In fact all this, at the point we have reached, rests on the fact of transmission which makes it so that we suppose…
because it is experience that imposes it on us, and because it is an experience to which FREUD remained completely adherent until the last moment of his formulations…
that no satisfaction by any real object whatsoever that comes to substitute itself there ever manages to fill this lack, which makes it so that in the mother, alongside, the relation to the child remains like a point of attachment of her imaginary insertion to this lack of the phallus.

And it is insofar as the child, the subject, accedes, after the second time of specular imaginary identification, to the ‘body image’ as such and insofar as it is at the origin and gives the matrix of his ego, it is insofar as from there he has already been able to realize what is lacking to the mother. But it is a condition, a prior requirement of this specular experience of the other as forming a totality, in relation to which something can be lacking to him that the subject brings: beyond the object of love this lack for which he can be led himself to substitute himself, for which he can propose himself as being the object that fills it.

I think you keep in mind this: that I have led you up to completion, to the proposal of a ‘form’ that you must simply keep in mind so that we can exactly take things up again and show you, this ‘form’, what it already answers to. What you see being outlined there is a new dimension, a new property of what is proposed to you in the actual, in the completed subject—when the functions are differentiated: superego, ego ideal, ego—in this function of the ego ideal.

It is a matter of knowing, as FREUD saw very well and says at the end of his article, what this object is that, in Verlibtheit, comes to be placed in the position of the ego or of the ego ideal. Up to now, because I had to, in what I explained to you about narcissism, put the accent on the ideal formation of the ego…
I say: the formation of the ego insofar as it is an ideal formation, that it is from the ego ideal that the ego detaches itself…
I have not articulated enough for you the difference that there is.

But if you simply open FREUD with his fertile obscurities and his schemas that pass from hand to hand without anyone having thought for a single instant to reproduce them, what do you find in what he gives us at the end of this chapter?
Here is where he places the egos of the different subjects. It is a matter of knowing why the subjects commune in the same ideal.

He explains to us that there is identification of the ego ideal with objects that are there in the text; all these objects are supposed to be the same, simply if one looks at the schema one notices that he took care to connect these three objects one could suppose to be the same with an external object that is there behind all the objects.

Do you not find there a striking indication of a direction, a resemblance with what I am in the process of explaining to you, namely that, with regard to the Ich-ideal, it is not simply a matter of an object, but of something that is beyond the object and that comes to be reflected in this case—as FREUD says—not purely and simply in the ego, which doubtless feels something of it, can be impoverished by it, but in something that is in its very underpinnings, in its first forms, in its first requirements, and to put it plainly the first veil that is projected under the form of the Ego Ideal.

I will therefore take things up again next time at the point where I leave them: relation of the Ego Ideal, of the fetish, of the object insofar as it is the object that is lacking, that is to say the phallus.