🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I intend today to take up again the terms in which I am trying, for you, to formulate this necessary recasting of the notion of frustration, without which it is possible to see the gap continually widen between the current dominant theories in psychoanalysis and the Freudian doctrine which, as you know, in my view constitutes nothing less than the only correct conceptual formulation of the experience that this very doctrine founded. I am going to try to articulate something today that will perhaps be a little more algebraic than usual, but it is prepared by everything we have done previously. Before setting off again, let us punctuate what must emerge from certain of the terms that we have been led up to now to articulate.

Frustration…
as I tried to situate it for you in the little triple table, namely between castration, from which one set out in the analytic expression of the Freudian doctrine, and then deprivation, to which certain people refer, or let us say that one refers it variously
…frustration in its fundamental experience…
and insofar as ‘Psychoanalysis today’ places it at the heart of all the faults that would be marked
in their analyzable consequences, in the symptoms properly speaking that are our field
…frustration, I say, it is necessary for us to understand it, so that we may make valid use of it.

Of course, if the problem of analytic experience has brought it to the foreground among the terms in use, that cannot be absolutely without reason. If on the other hand its prevalence profoundly modifies the economy of all our thinking in the face of neurotic phenomena, it brings it, in certain respects, to impasses. This is precisely what I am striving to demonstrate to you, successfully I hope, through many examples. This is what you will see demonstrated even more as you come to practice the analytic literature more with an open eye.

Frustration, let us first posit that it is not the refusal of an object of satisfaction in the pure and simple sense. Satisfaction means satisfaction of a need: I do not need to insist on this. One usually posits nothing, when one speaks of frustration. We have frustrating experiences, we think they leave traces, we make use of this without looking any further, we simply forget that for things to be so simple, it would then be fitting to explain why the desire that would thus have been frustrated would respond to this characteristic, this property, that FREUD, from the beginning of his work, accentuates in so strong a way, and of which I indicate to you that the whole development of his work is precisely always made to question this enigma, namely that desire in the unconscious, repressed, is indestructible.

This is, properly speaking, inexplicable in the sole perspective of need, for it is certain that all the experience we can have of what takes place in an animal economy, what is the frustration of a need must entail various modifications more or less bearable for the organism, but that assuredly if there is one thing that is quite evident, and confirmed by experience, that it must not engender, it is in some way the maintenance of desire as such:
either the individual succumbs, or the desire is modified, or it declines.

In any case there is no coherence that imposes itself between frustration and the maintenance of permanence, indeed of insistence, to use the term that I was led to bring to the foreground when we spoke of the repetition automatism, the insistence of desire. Likewise FREUD never speaks of frustration as of a Versagung, which inscribes itself much more adequately in the notion of denunciation, in the sense in which one says to denounce a treaty, a withdrawal of commitment. And this is so true that even occasionally one can place the Versagung on the opposite slope, the Versagung can even mean ‘promise’ and ‘breach of promise’, which here stand, as very often in these words preceded by this prefix ‘ver’ which is in German so essential, that it holds in the choice of words of analytic theory an eminent place.

Let us say it straight away, the triad frustration-aggression-regression is strictly, if it is given like that, very far from having the seductive character of a meaning more or less immediately understandable. It suffices to approach it for an instant to realize that it is not in itself understandable, that it poses the question of being understandable. There is no reason not to give any other sequence whatsoever, it is quite at random that I would tell you:
depression-contrition, I could invent many others.

What is at stake is to pose the question of the relations of frustration and regression. This has never been done in a satisfactory way. I say that it is not at all satisfactory because the notion of regression itself on this occasion is not elaborated.

Frustration then, is not a refusal of an object of satisfaction and it is not in that that it consists. It is…
and here I content myself with setting in sequence a series of formulas that have already been worked through here, I am therefore relatively dispensed, except by allusions, from making the proof, I want to unroll before you a chain such that you can retain its principal articulations, for the purpose of using them and seeing whether they serve
…it is originally…
since we submit ourselves to this path of taking things at the outset, I do not say in the development
for this no longer has the character of a development, but in the primitive relation of the child with his mother
…frustration in itself is not thinkable…
not as any frustration whatsoever, but as a frustration usable in our dialectic
…except as the refusal of a gift insofar as it is itself the symbol of something that is called love.

In saying this, I am saying nothing that is not in black and white in FREUD himself.

The fundamental character of the love relation, with everything it implies by itself as elaborated, not in the second degree, but in the third degree, does not imply only, facing oneself, an object, but a being. This is in FREUD—in many passages—thought as being the relation that is at the outset. What does that mean?

It does not mean that the child has done the philosophy of love, that he has made the distinction of love or of desire, it means that he is already in a bath that implies the existence of this symbolic order, and that we can already find proofs of it in his conduct, namely that certain things occur that are conceivable only if this symbolic order is present.

Here we always have to do with this ambiguity, which arises from this, that we have a science that is a science of the individual, a science of the subject, and we succumb to the need to take from the outset: in the subject. We forget that the subject, as subject, is not identifiable with the individual, that even if the subject were detached, as an individual, from the whole order that concerns him as subject, this order exists. In other words, that the law of intersubjective relations, from the fact that it profoundly governs what the individual depends on, implicates him—whether he is conscious of it or not—as an individual, in this order.

In other words, far from even being able to attempt to succeed in this desperate attempt, yet all the time done and redone. I allude to those articles on phobias by someone named MALLET who wants to make us understand how, with regard to phobias, and primitive phobias, the first relations of the child with the dark are explained and in particular how from the emergence of these anxieties, the image of the father is going to come out.

It is an attempt that I can indeed qualify as desperate, and that can only be made thanks to ropes as thick as an arm. The order of paternity exists, whether the individual lives or does not live. Infantile terrors come to take on their sense, articulated in the intersubjective father-child relation, which is profoundly organized symbolically, and there they form, so to speak, the subjective context in which the child will undoubtedly have to develop his experience, this experience which at every instant is profoundly taken up, reworked by this intersubjective relation, retroactively reworked, and in which he engages by a series of starts, which are starts only insofar as precisely they are going to engage.

The gift itself implies the whole cycle of exchange, there is gift only because there is an immense circulation of gifts that takes up the whole intersubjective ensemble from the point of view of the subject who enters it and who introduces himself into it as primitively as you can suppose. The gift then arises from a beyond of the object relation, since precisely it presupposes behind it all this order of exchange for the child who is going to enter it, and it will arise from this beyond only in its character which is what properly constitutes it as symbolic, and which makes it so that nothing is a gift that is not constituted by this act that has previously annulled it, revoked it. It is on a background of revocation that the gift arises and is given.

It is therefore on this background, and as a sign of love first annulled, to reappear as pure presence, that the gift gives itself or not to the call. And I will even say more: I said ‘call’ which is the foreground, but remember what I said at the moment when we were doing psychosis [seminar 1955-56] and when we spoke of the essential call to speech. I would be wrong to stop there with respect to the structure of speech which implies that in the Other the subject receives his own message in an inverted form.

We are not there; what is at stake is the call. But the call, if we keep it isolated, the first time of speech cannot be sustained in isolation. This is what the Freudian image of the little child with his fort-da shows us. If we remain at the level of the call, there must be facing it its contrary, call it the marker; it is insofar as what is called can be repelled that the call is already fundamental and founding in the symbolic order, in any case is already a totally engaged introduction into the symbolic order.

It is precisely this insofar as this gift manifests itself at the call of what is when it is not there, and when it is there manifests itself essentially as only a sign of the gift, that is to say, in sum, as nothing, as an object of satisfaction. And when it is there it is precisely there in order to be able to be repelled insofar as it is this nothing. The therefore fundamentally disappointing character of this symbolic game, that is the essential articulation around which and from which satisfaction itself is situated and takes its meaning.

I do not mean, naturally, that there is not in the child, on occasion, this granted satisfaction where there would be pure vital rhythm, but I say that all satisfaction called into question in frustration comes on this background of the fundamentally disappointing character of the symbolic order, and that here satisfaction is only substitute, compensation: and that on which the child, if I may say, crushes what is disappointing in this symbolic game in itself, in the oral seizure of the object of satisfaction—the breast on the occasion—of the real object.

And indeed what lulls him to sleep in this satisfaction is precisely his disappointment, his frustration, the refusal that on occasion he has experienced, this painful dialectic of the object at once there and never there, in which he exercises himself in this thing that is symbolized for us in this exercise generally grasped by FREUD as being the outcome as being the pure game of what is the ground of the subject’s relation to the pair ‘presence-absence’. Of course there, FREUD grasps it in its pure state, in its detached form, but he recognizes this game of relation to presence on a background of absence, to absence insofar as it is what constitutes presence.

The child then, in satisfaction, crushes the fundamental unfulfillment of this relation, in the oral seizure with which he lulls the game to sleep. He stifles what emerges from this fundamentally symbolic relation, and nothing then for us to be surprised that it is precisely in sleep that at that moment the persistence of his desire manifests itself on the symbolic plane.

For I underline to you on this occasion, even the child’s desire in this supposedly archi-simple dream that is the infantile dream, the dream of little Anna FREUD, is not this desire tied to pure and simple natural satisfaction. Little Anna FREUD says ‘raspberry, custard’. What does that mean? All these objects there are transcendent objects, indeed already so much entered into the symbolic order that they are precisely all the forbidden objects insofar as forbidden. Nothing forces us at all to think that little Anna FREUD was unfulfilled that evening, quite the contrary. What is maintained in the dream as a desire no doubt expressed without certainly, but with the whole transposition of the symbolic order, is the desire for the impossible. And of course if you could still doubt speech playing an essential role, I would point out to you that if little Anna FREUD had not articulated that in words, we would never have known anything about it.

But then what happens at the moment when satisfaction, as satisfaction of need, enters here in order to substitute itself for symbolic satisfaction? Since it is there precisely to substitute itself for it, by that very fact, it undergoes a transformation. If this real object itself becomes a sign in the demand for love, that is to say in the symbolic request, it immediately entails a transformation.

I say that the real object here takes on the value of a symbol. It would be a pure and simple sleight of hand to tell you that by that fact it has become a symbol or almost, but what takes on accent and symbolic value is the activity that puts the child in possession of this object, it is his mode of apprehension, and it is thus that orality becomes not only what it is, namely the instinctual mode of hunger carrying a libido that conserves the proper body, that which FREUD questions.

What is this libido: the libido of conservation, or the sexual libido? Of course it is that in itself, it is even that which implies the destrudo, but it is precisely because it has entered into this dialectic of substitution of satisfaction for the demand for love, that it is indeed an eroticized activity: libido in the proper sense, and sexual libido. All this is not simply vain rhetorical articulation, for it is entirely impossible to get past, otherwise than by evading them, objections that not very subtle people could make to certain analytic remarks, on the subject of the eroticization of the breast, for example Mr. Charles BLONDEL. In the last issue of Études philosophiques made with regard to the commentary on FREUD, Mrs. FAVEZ-BOUTONNIER reminds us in one of her articles that Mr. Charles BLONDEL said:

‘Fine, I can hear anything, but what do they do with the case where the child is not at all fed at his mother’s breast, but with a bottle?’

It is precisely to this that the things I have just structured for you respond. The real object, as soon as it enters into the dialectic of frustration, is not in itself indifferent, but it has no need at all to be specific, to be the mother’s breast, it will lose nothing of the value of its place in the sexual dialectic, from which there emerges the eroticization of the oral zone, for it is precisely not the object that plays the essential role in it, but the fact that the activity has taken on this eroticized function on the plane of desire that is ordered in the symbolic order.

I also point out to you in passing that this goes so far that there is the possibility, to play the same role, that there be no real object at all, since what is at stake on this occasion is what gives rise to this substitutive satisfaction of symbolic satisfaction. This is what can—and what alone can—explain the true function of symptoms such as those of anorexia nervosa.

I spoke to you of the primitive relation to the mother, who at the same moment becomes a real being, precisely in this, that being able to refuse indefinitely, she can literally do anything, and as I told you, it is at her level…
and not at the level of I do not know what sort of hypothesis of a kind of megalomania
that would project onto the child what is only the analyst’s spirit
…that the dimension of omnipotence appears for the first time, the Wirklichkeit which in German means efficacy and reality, the essential efficacy that presents itself first at this level as the omnipotence of the real being, on which the gift or the non-gift depends absolutely and without recourse.

I am telling you that the mother is primordially omnipotent, and that in this dialectic we cannot eliminate her in order to understand anything that is worthwhile. This is one of the essential conditions. I am not telling you, with Mrs. Melanie KLEIN, that she contains everything. That is another matter to which I allude only in passing, and about which I pointed out to you that the immense container of the maternal body in which all the primitive phantasmatic objects gathered together are found, we can now glimpse how it is possible. For that it is possible is what Mrs. Melanie KLEIN has generally shown us, but she has always been very embarrassed to explain how it was possible, and of course this is what her adversaries are not deprived of invoking, to say that there no doubt Mrs. Melanie KLEIN was dreaming.

Of course she was dreaming, she was right to dream because the fact is possible only by a retroactive projection in the direction of the maternal body, of the whole lyre of imaginary objects. But they are indeed there, since it is from the virtual field, symbolic nullification that the mother constitutes, that all the objects to come will draw, each in turn, their symbolic value. Taking it simply at a somewhat more advanced level, a child around the age of two, it is not at all surprising that she finds them projected there retroactively, and one can say in a certain sense that like everything else:
since they were ready to come there one day, they were already there.

We thus find ourselves before a point where the child finds himself in the presence of maternal omnipotence. Since we are at the level of Mrs. Melanie KLEIN, you will observe that if I have just made a quick allusion to what one can call the paranoid position, as she herself calls it, we are already at the level of maternal omnipotence in this something that suggests to us what the depressive position was, for before omnipotence we can suspect that there is there something that must not be without relation to the relation to omnipotence, this kind of annihilation, of micromania, which quite the contrary of megalomania, takes shape, according to Mrs. Melanie KLEIN, at this state. It is clear that one must not go too fast, because this is not in itself given by the sole fact that the coming to light of the mother as omnipotent is real. For this to engender a depressive effect, the subject must be able to reflect on himself and on the contrast of his impotence.

This allows us to specify around this point what corresponds to clinical experience, since around this point we are put around that sixth month that FREUD noted, and where the phenomenon of the mirror stage already occurs. You will tell me: ‘you taught us that at the moment when the subject can grasp his own body in its totality, in its specular reflection, it is rather a feeling of triumph that he experiences, that total other in which he is completed in some way, and presents himself to himself’. Indeed this is something that we reconstruct, and moreover not without confirmation from experience, the jubilatory character of this encounter was not doubtful. But let us not forget that one thing is the experience of mastery—which will give an element of splitting that is entirely essential to the distinction with himself, and to the very end to the child’s relation to his own ego—
…another thing of course is the experience of mastery and of the encounter with the master.

It is precisely because in fact the form of mastery is given to him under the form of a totality alienated to himself but in some way closely linked to him and dependent, but that once this form is given, it is precisely before this form in the reality of the master, that is to say whether the moment of his triumph is also the intermediary of his defeat, and whether it is at that moment that this totality in whose presence he is, this time under the form of the maternal body, does not obey him. It is therefore very precisely insofar as the reflected specular structure of the mirror stage comes into play, that we can conceive that maternal omnipotence is then reflected only in a clearly depressive position, namely the child’s feeling of impotence. It is there that can be inserted this something to which I alluded a moment ago, when I spoke to you of anorexia nervosa.

One could here too go a little fast, and say that the only power the subject has against omnipotence is to say no at the level of action, and to introduce there the dimension of negativism, which of course is not without relation to the moment I am aiming at. Nevertheless I would point out that experience shows us, and no doubt not without reason, that it is not at the level of action and under the form of negativism that resistance to omnipotence in the relation of dependence is elaborated; it is at the level of the object insofar as it has appeared to us under the sign of nothing, of the object annulled insofar as symbolic; it is at the level of the object that the child brings his dependence to failure, and precisely by feeding on nothing; it is even there that he overturns his relation of dependence by making himself by this means master of the omnipotence avid to make him live, he who depends on her, and of whom from then on it is she who depends by her desire, which is at the mercy through a manifestation of his whim, namely of his omnipotence, his.

We therefore very much need to sustain before our mind that, very early on, if one may say as the necessary bed for the very entry into play of the first imaginary relation, on which the whole play of the projection of its contrary can be done, we need to set out from this essential point: that the intentionality of love—to illustrate it now in psychological terms but which represent only a degradation compared to the first account I have just given you—
this intentionality very early constitutes above all a beyond of the object, this fundamentally symbolic structuring impossible to conceive, except by positing the symbolic order as already instituted, and as such already present.

This is shown to us by experience. Very quickly Mrs. Suzan ISAACS for a very long time has pointed out to us that at an age already very early, a child distinguishes, from a fortuitous mishap, a punishment. Before speech a child does not react in the same way to a bump and to a slap. I leave you to meditate on what this implies. You will tell me: it is curious, the animal too, at least the domestic animal. You will perhaps make an objection that I believe easy to overturn, but that could be put to use as a contrary argument.

This proves precisely indeed that the animal can arrive at this sort of sketch that places it, in relation to the one who is its master, in very particular relations of identification, at a sketch of a beyond, but that it is precisely because the animal is not inserted like man by its whole being into an order of language, although it arrives at something as elaborated as distinguishing the fact that instead of being hit on the back, it is given a correction, but that gives nothing more in it.

Let us recall this well again, since for the moment it is a matter of illuminating the contours. You may perhaps have seen emerge a kind of notebook that appeared in 1939, as the fourth issue of the year of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. It seems that people said to themselves ‘There is nevertheless something in this language’, and it seems that a few persons were called upon to respond to the order. I base myself on the article by Mr. LOEWENSTEIN marked by a prudent distance not without skill, which consists in recalling that Mr. De SAUSSURE taught that there is a signifier and a signified, in short in showing that one is a bit in the know, this absolutely inarticulated to our experience, if it is not that one must think about what one says, so that remaining at this level of elaboration, I forgive him for not citing my teaching, because we are much further along.

But there is a Mr. RYCROFT who, under the title of the Londoners, tries to put a little more into it, that is to say to tell us what, in sum, we do: analytic theory with regard to intrapsychic agencies and their articulation among themselves. But perhaps one will have to remember that communication theory must exist, and that one would have to remember it with regard to fields in the analytic field, and that must communicate. And we are reminded that when a child cries, this can be considered as a total situation: the mother, the cry, the child, and that consequently we are there in full communication theory. The child cries, the mother receives his cry as a signal. If one started from there, perhaps one could arrive at reorganizing our experience, he tells us. So here is the cry that intervenes here as a signal of need; moreover this is fully articulated in the article.

The distinction between this and what I am in the process of teaching you is that it is absolutely not a matter of that: the cry at issue is a cry that already—as what FREUD brings out in the child’s manifestation shows—is a cry that is not taken as a signal; it is already the cry insofar as it calls for its response, insofar as it calls, if I may say, on a background of response, insofar as it calls in a state of affairs in which language not only is already instituted, but the child already bathes in a milieu of language where already it is as an alternating pair that he can grasp and articulate the first scraps of it.

The fact is here absolutely essential: it is a cry, but the cry at issue, the one we take into account in frustration, is a cry insofar as it inserts itself into a synchronic world of cries organized into a symbolic system. There are already here and virtually, cries organized into a symbolic system. The human subject is not only alerted as to something that each time signals an object. It is absolutely vicious, fallacious, erroneous, to pose the question of the sign when it is a matter of the symbolic system, by its relation with the object of the signal, with the object of the ensemble of the other cries. The cry already, from the origin, is a cry made for one to take note of it, indeed for one to have to give an account of it to an Other beyond. Besides, one only has to see the interest the child takes and the essential need the child has to receive these modulated cries that are called language, these articulated cries that are called words, and the interest he takes in this system for itself.

And if the type tone is precisely the tone of speech, it is because indeed here tone, if I may say, is equal in its principle, and that from the origin the child feeds on words as much as on bread, for he perishes from words, and as the Gospel says: ‘man does not perish only by what enters his mouth, but also by what comes out of it’.

It is then a matter of making the next step. You have certainly noticed this, or more exactly you have not noticed it but I want to underline to you, that the term ‘regression’ can take here for you an application, appear to you under an incidence under which it does not ordinarily appear to you in all respects. The term ‘regression’ is applicable to what happens when the real object, and at the same time the activity that is made to seize it, comes to substitute itself for the symbolic demand.

When I told you: the child crushes his disappointment in his saturation and his assuagement at the contact of the breast or of any other object, it is properly speaking there a matter of what will allow him to enter into the necessity of the mechanism, which makes it so that to a symbolic frustration can always succeed, can open the door of regression.

We must now make a jump, for of course we would do something entirely artificial if we contented ourselves with remarking that from now on everything goes by itself, namely that in this opening given to the signifier by the imaginary entry, namely all the relations that are now going to be established to the proper body by the intermediary of the specular relation, you see very well how can come into play the advent in the signifier of all belongings of the body.

That excrements become the elective object of the gift for a certain time, this certainly is not to surprise us since it is quite evidently in the material that offers itself to him in relation to his own body that the child can find on occasion this real made to nourish the symbolic. That it is there too on occasion that retention can become refusal, all that has absolutely nothing to surprise you, and whatever the refinements and the richness of the phenomena that analytic experience has discovered at the level of anal symbolism, it is not that which is made to stop us for long.

I spoke to you of a jump; it is because it is now a matter of seeing how the phallus is introduced into this dialectic of frustration. Here again defend yourselves against vain demands for a natural genesis, and if you want to deduce, from any constitution whatsoever of the genital organs, the fact that the phallus plays an absolutely prevailing role in all genital symbolism. Simply you will never succeed: you will give yourselves over to the contortions that I hope to show you in their detail, those of Mr. JONES to try to give a satisfactory commentary on the phallic phase as FREUD affirmed it so brutally, and to try to show us how it happens that the phallus that she does not have can have such an importance for the woman.

It is truly something quite funny to see, for in truth the question is absolutely not there. The question is first and foremost a question of fact; it is a fact: if we did not discover in the phenomena this demand, this prevalence, this preeminence of the phallus in all the imaginary dialectic that presides over the adventures, the vicissitudes and also the failures, the shortcomings of genital development, indeed there would be no problem.

And it is not doubtful that there is no need at all to exhaust oneself, as some do, to point out that the child [girl] must she too have her own little sensations in her belly, which is an experience that without a doubt, and perhaps from the origin, is distinct from that of the boy. The question is absolutely not there, as FREUD remarks. Besides, it is quite clear that this goes without saying.

If the woman indeed has much more trouble than the boy, by her own account, bringing this reality of what happens on the side of the uterus or the vagina into a dialectic of desire that satisfies her, it is indeed because she has to pass by something with respect to which she has a wholly different relation than that of the man, namely very precisely that which she lacks, that is, the phallus. But the reason for knowing why it is thus is certainly not, in any case, to be deduced from anything whatsoever that takes its origin in any physiological disposition whatsoever of either of the two sexes.

One must start from this: that the existence of an imaginary phallus is the pivot of a whole series of facts that demand its postulate, namely that one must study this labyrinth where the subject usually gets lost, and would even come to be devoured, and whose thread precisely is given by the fact that what is to be discovered is this: that the mother lacks a phallus, that it is because she lacks it that she desires it, and that it is only insofar as something gives it to her that she can be satisfied. This may appear literally stupefying. One must start from the stupefying.

The first virtue of knowledge is to be capable of confronting what does not go without saying; that lack should be here the major desire, we are nevertheless perhaps a little prepared to admit it. If we admit that it is also the characteristic of the symbolic order, in other words that it is insofar as the imaginary phallus plays a major signifying role that the situation presents itself thus, and it presents itself thus because the signifier is not something each subject invents at the whim of his sex or his dispositions, or of his frolic at birth: the signifier exists. That the phallus as signifier has an underlying role, that does not admit of doubt since it took analysis to discover it, but it is absolutely essential. It is something of which simply in passing I underline to you the question it poses, for us to go for an instant elsewhere than on the ground of analysis.

I posed the following question to Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS, around ‘The Elementary Structures of Kinship’, I said to him:

‘You give us the dialectic of the exchange of women across lineages, which you posit by a sort of postulate and choice: one exchanges women between generations; I took from another lineage a woman, I owe to the next generation or to another lineage another woman, and there is a moment when it must close. If we do this by the law of exchange and of preferential marriages with cross-cousins, things will circulate very regularly in a circle that will have no reason to close itself, nor to break, but if you do it with what are called parallel cousins, things can happen that are rather annoying because things tend to converge after a certain time, and to make breaks and pieces in the exchange within lineages.’

I therefore pose the question to Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS:

‘In the end if you made this circle of exchanges by reversing things, and by saying that according to generations it is the female lineages that produce the men and that exchange them…

for after all this lack we are speaking of in the woman, we are immediately already warned that it is not a real lack, for the phallus, everyone knows she can have one, they have phalluses, and moreover they produce it, they make boys, phallophores

…and consequently one can describe exchange across generations in the simplest way, one can describe things in the inverse order, one can describe from the point of view of formalization, exactly the same things symmetrically, by taking an axis of reference, a coordinate system founded on women.’

Only, if one does it thus, there are a heap of things that will be inexplicable and that are explained only by this: that in all cases where political power, even in matriarchal societies, is androcentric, it is represented by men and by male lineages, and that this or that very bizarre anomaly in these exchanges, this or that modification, exception, paradox that appear in the laws of exchange at the level of the elementary structures of kinship, are strictly explicable only in relation and in reference to something that is outside the kinship game, and that is the political context, that is to say the order of power, and very precisely the order of the signifier, the order where sceptre and phallus are confused.

It is precisely for reasons inscribed in the symbolic order, that is to say in this something that transcends individual development, it is insofar as symbolized imaginary that the fact that one has or does not have a phallus takes the economic importance that it has at the level of the Oedipus, and that motivates at once the importance of the castration complex and the preeminence of the eminent instance of that famous fantasy of the phallic mother, which since it rose on the analytic horizon has made the problem you know.

Before leading you to the way in which at the level of the Oedipus, and insofar as being completed and resolved, this dialectic of the phallus is articulated, I want to show you that I too can remain for a certain time in the preoedipal stories, and on the sole condition of being guided by this guiding thread of the fundamental role of the symbolic relation, and to make to you a few remarks which are the following: it is that at the level of its imaginary function, at the level of the supposed demand of the phallic mother, what role does this phallus play?

I want here to show you once more how this notion of the lack of the object is absolutely essential, simply to read the good analytic authors, and among whom I place Karl ABRAHAM who made a purely admirable article on ‘The Castration Complex in Women’ in 1920. At the chance of these lines, he gives us as an example the story of a little girl of two years who goes to the cigar cabinet after lunch, she gives the first to daddy, the second to mommy who does not smoke, and she puts the third between her legs. Mommy gathers up all the paraphernalia and puts everything back in the cigar box. It is not by chance that the little girl returns and begins again: it comes well in its place.

I regret that it is not commented on in a more articulated way, for if one admits that the third gesture…
as Mr. ABRAHAM implicitly admits since he cites it as an example
…indicates that this symbolic object is lacking for the little girl, she thereby manifests this lack, and it is no doubt in this capacity that she first gave it to the one to whom it is not lacking, to show what the one to whom it is lacking—the mother—has to do with it, and to clearly mark that in which she can desire it—precisely as experience proves—in order to satisfy the one to whom it is lacking, for if you read FREUD’s article on female sexuality, you will learn that it is not simply a matter of lacking the phallus as regards the little girl, but it is indeed a matter of giving it or giving its equivalent—just as if she were a little boy—to her mother.

This is only an introductory story to this fact, that you must know how to represent to yourselves that nothing is conceivable in the phenomenology of perversions, I mean in a direct way, if you do not start from this much simpler idea than what is usually given to you…
in this kind of darkness of identification, reification, projection, and of all the meshes—one gets lost in this labyrinth—
…that it is a matter of the phallus. It is a matter of knowing how the child more or less consciously realizes that his mother is fundamentally omnipotent of something, and it is always the question of knowing by what route he is going to give her this object that she lacks, and that he himself always lacks too.

For let us not forget, after all the little boy’s phallus is not much more valiant than the little girl’s, and this naturally was seen by good authors, and Mr. JONES nevertheless noticed that Mrs. Karen HORNEY was rather for the one with whom she was in conflict, with FREUD on the occasion.

And this fundamentally deficient character of the little boy’s phallus, indeed of the shame he can feel about it on this occasion, of the profound insufficiency in which he can feel himself, is something she knew very well how to bring out, not in order to try to fill in this bridge that there is in the difference between little boy and little girl, but to illuminate the one by the other.

Let us not forget in this light the value of the little boy’s discovery about himself, in order to understand the exact value that the attempts at seduction vis-à-vis the mother of which one always speaks have. These attempts at seduction are profoundly marked by the narcissistic conflict; it is always the occasion of the first narcissistic lesions that are there only as preludes, and indeed even as presuppositions, of certain later effects of castration, but at which it is fitting to stop.

In the end, it is indeed, rather than simple drive or sexual aggression, the fact that the boy wants to make himself believe a male or a bearer of phallus, whereas he is only half so. In other words, what is at stake throughout the whole pre-Oedipal period where perversions take origin is a game that continues, a game of furet, or again of bonneteau, indeed our game of odd and even.

This phallus, which is fundamental insofar as signifier in this imaginary of the mother whom it is a matter of reaching for absolutely fundamental reasons, since it is on this omnipotence of the mother that the child’s ego rests, it is a matter of seeing where it is and where it is not. It is never really there where it is; it is never quite absent there where it is not.

And the whole classification of perversions must be understood in this: that whatever the value of what one could have brought as identification to the mother, identification to the object, etc., what is essential is that…
let us take for example transvestism, the article by Otto FENICHEL from the introduction of the International Journal
…the subject calls his phallus into question in transvestism. One forgets that transvestism is not simply a matter of homosexuality more or less transposed, that it is not simply a matter of fetishism particularized to the fact that the fetish has to be worn by the subject, FENICHEL shows, who very well emphasizes the fact that what is under women’s clothes is a woman. The subject identifies with a woman who has a phallus, only she has one insofar as hidden. We see from this fact that the phallus must always partake of this something that veils it, and we see there the essential importance of what I called ‘the veil’, the existence of clothes which makes it so that it is by them that the object is materialized.

Even when the real object is there, one must be able to think that it may not be there, and that it is always possible to think that it is there precisely where it is not. Likewise in male homosexuality—to limit ourselves to it today—it is still a matter of his phallus in the subject, but a curious thing, it is still of his, insofar as he goes to look for it in another. To put it plainly, all perversions can be placed in this measure where always by some side they play with this signifying object insofar as it is by its nature and by itself a true signifier, that is to say something that in no case can be taken at its spatial value.

And even when one lays hands on it, when one finds it in order to fix oneself on it definitively in the perversion of perversions, the one that is called fetishism—for it is the one that really shows not only where it really is, but what it is—when one finds it, it is exactly nothing: they are old worn clothes, a cast-off outfit; a part of fetishism is what one sees in transvestism, and in the end it is a little worn shoe. When it appears, when it really unveils itself, it is the fetish. What is that to say?

It is that at this stage and just before the Oedipus, between this first relation that I founded for you today, and from which I set out, of primitive frustration and the Oedipus, we have as constituting the intersubjective dialectic the stage where the child engages in the dialectic of the lure, where very essentially in order to satisfy what cannot be satisfied, namely a desire of the mother which in its foundation is unassuageable, the child by whatever route he does it, engages in this route of making himself a deceptive object.

I mean that this desire that cannot be assuaged, it is a matter of deceiving it, and it is very precisely insofar as it shows that it is not his mother’s that this whole progression is constructed around which the ego takes its stability. These most characteristic stages are already marked—as FREUD showed in his last article on Splitting—by the fundamental ambiguity of the subject and the object.

Namely that it is insofar as the child makes himself an object in order to deceive that he finds himself engaged vis-à-vis the other in this position where the intersubjective relation is entirely constituted; it is insofar not simply as a kind of immediate lure, as occurs in the animal kingdom where it is, in sum, a matter for the one adorned with the colors of display to set up the whole situation by presenting himself, but on the contrary insofar as the subject supposes desire in the other, that it is a desire of the second degree that must be satisfied, and since it is a desire that cannot be satisfied, one can only deceive it.

It is in this relation that what is so characteristic and that one always forgets is instituted: human exhibitionism is not the exhibitionism of others, like that of the robin; it is something that at a given moment opens trousers, and that closes them again, and if there are no trousers a dimension of exhibitionism is missing. So what happens?

We also possibly find regression again, for in the end this unassuaged, unsatisfied mother, around whom the whole ascent of the child on the path of narcissism is constructed, is someone real; she is there and like all unassuaged beings, she is there seeking what she is going to devour. What the child himself once found to crush his symbolic assuagement, he finds again before him possibly as the open maw: the projected image of the oral situation, we also find it at the level of imaginary sexual satisfaction. The gaping hole of MEDUSA’s head is a devouring figure that the child encounters as a possible issue in this search for the mother’s satisfaction.

It is a great danger which is precisely what our fantasies reveal to us. In the fantasy of devouring we find it at the origin, and we find it again at this detour where it gives us the essential form under which phobia presents itself. We can find this again by looking at little Hans’s own fears. Little Hans now presents himself perhaps in conditions a little more clarified.

At this detour, if you have the support of what I have just brought you today:
– you will see better the relations of phobia and perversion,
– you will also see better what I indicated to you last time: how the function of the ego ideal will be outlined,
– you will interpret better—I think—than FREUD could do, for there is a wavering on this point in his observation, the way in which one must identify what little Hans calls ‘the big giraffe’ and ‘the little giraffe’.

As Monsieur PRÉVERT said:

‘The big giraffes are mute, the little giraffes are rare.’

In little Hans it is very badly interpreted; one nevertheless comes close to what is at stake, and this is quite clear, from the sole fact that little Hans sits on it, despite the cries of the big giraffe which is indisputably his mother.