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(All parts in English)

Today we are going to try to talk about castration, about which you can observe in FREUD’s work that, in the manner of the Oedipus complex, if it is there everywhere, it is only practically for the Oedipus complex that FREUD tries to articulate its formula fully in an article from 1931 devoted to something entirely new.
And yet the Oedipus complex has been there from the beginning in FREUD’s thought, since one can think that this was the great personal problem from which he set out: what is a father? There is no doubt about this since we know from his biography that the Letters to FLIESS confirm these preoccupations and this presence, from the origin, of the Oedipus complex.
And it is only very late that FREUD explained himself about it.

For castration, there is nowhere anything similar. Never did FREUD fully articulate the precise meaning, the precise psychic incidence of this fear or of this threat, of this instance, of this dramatic moment where these words can also be posed with a question mark regarding castration.

And ultimately, when last time I began to approach the problem by the coming from below of frustration, of the imaginary phallic play with the mother, many of you, if they grasped the diagram I was making of the intervention of the father

• his symbolic personage being purely the symbolic personage of dreams – remained in questioning on the subject of “what is this castration?”, does this mean that for the subject to reach “genital maturity,” he must, in sum, have been castrated?

If you take things at the simple level of reading, even though it is articulated like this nowhere, it is literally, in FREUD’s work, implied everywhere. Castration, if you like,
– is the sign of the Oedipus drama,
– as it [the Oedipus] is its [castration’s] implicit pivot.
This can be evaded, can be taken in a sort of “as if,” which amounts to hearing the current of analytic discourse that seems truly questioned about its […] . But from the moment it is enough that the text, as I am doing for the moment, makes you stop there a little for indeed the abrupt side of this affirmation to seem problematic to you – and indeed it is – and on the other hand that the formula, however paradoxical it may be, to which I was alluding just now, you can take it as a starting point. What does such a formulation mean then? What does it imply? What does it presuppose?

It is indeed to this, moreover, that the authors have applied themselves, because all the same, there are some whom the singularity of such a consequence did not fail to stop, and in the first rank among them, for example, someone like Ernest JONES who – and you will realize it if you read his work – never managed to overcome the difficulties of handling the castration complex as such, and who tried to formulate a term that is particular to him but which of course, like everything that is introduced into the analytic community, made its way there and carried echoes: it is the notion that is his own and that is cited by the authors – mainly English – of ἀϕάνισις[aphanisis], “to disappear” in Greek.

The solution JONES attempted to give to the mode of incidence in the history of the psychic drama of castration is this.
The fear of castration, which we cannot, at least in his perspective, suspend from accident, from the contingency of threats nonetheless so singularly always reproduced in stories and in the fact expressed by the well-known parental threat: “Someone will be brought in who will cut that off.” The paradoxically motivated side, not rooted in a kind of necessary constant of the inter-individual relation, is not the only side that stopped the authors.

The very handling of castration that FREUD nevertheless articulates well as something that precisely threatens the penis, the phallus – the question is precisely there – this difficulty there is in integrating something so singular in its positive form,
pushed JONES to try to ground the mechanism of development around which it is mainly constituted.
That is his object at the moment when he truly begins to approach the problem around which the super ego must be constituted,
and which pushed him to put in the foreground the notion of aphanisis, which I think it will suffice that I articulate it myself for you
for you to see to what extent it too is not without presenting great difficulties.

Indeed, aphanisis is disappearance, but disappearance of what? In JONES, disappearance of desire.
The castration complex as aphanisis is substituted for castration: it is the fear for the subject of seeing desire be extinguished in him.
You cannot fail to see, I think, what such a notion represents in itself of a highly subjectivized relation.

It is perhaps indeed something conceivable as a source of a primordial anxiety, but assuredly it is an anxiety singularly reflected.

It seems that one must truly make a kind of leap in an understanding that leaves open, that supposes crossed at the same time an immense chasm, in order, from data that would be those of a subject taken from his very first movements of relation toward these objects, to suppose him already to be in a position to take this step back that makes him not only articulate a frustration as such, but to suspend from this frustration the apprehension of a drying up of desire. In fact,
it is indeed around the notion of privation, insofar as it brings forth the fear of aphanisis, that JONES attempted to articulate
his entire genesis of the super ego as the normal outcome, the formation to which the Oedipus complex normally leads.

And of course he immediately encountered the distinctions that are those to which I believe we are arriving at giving a form that is a bit more manageable. Namely that when he speaks of the term privation, he cannot – even for a single instant –
fail to distinguish privation as pure privation, which makes that the subject is not satisfied in any one of his needs,
and what he calls deliberate privation, that which supposes opposite the subject another subject who refuses him this satisfaction that he seeks.

Moreover, since it is not easy, from data so little sharply defined, to ally the passage from one to the other,
especially when one keeps them in the state of synonyms. He naturally comes to indicate that most frequently privation
is taken as a frustration, and is equivalent to frustration for the subject. From there, of course, many things are made easier in the articulation of a process, but if they are made easier for the speaker, that is not to say they are as much so for the somewhat demanding listener.

In fact, I do not at all give in this table the same meaning as JONES to the term privation.
The privation at issue in this table, insofar as it intervenes as one of the terms, is that something
in relation to which the notion of castration must be located.

If, as you have seen, I try to restore to the term frustration its complexity of true relation…
and this, in the session before the interruption, I did in a very articulated way, and enough remains for you to see that I do not use the term frustration in the summary form in which it is usually used
…privation and castration intervene here, distinguished, only because it is indeed not possible to articulate about the incidence
of castration something without isolating the notion of privation insofar as it is what I called a real hole [cf. table]. In other words, the privation at issue…
to restore things, and instead of muddying the waters, let us on the contrary try to isolate it well
…privation is privation of the fish: it is the fact that the woman especially does not have the penis.

I mean that this fact constantly brings its incidence into play in the evolution of almost all the cases he sets out for us, the fact: that the woman does not have a penis, that the assumption of the fact that the woman is deprived of it gives the boy the most striking example that we can encounter at any instant in the case histories of FREUD, that therefore castration, if it is that something we are seeking, takes as its base this apprehension in the real of the absence of a penis in the woman,
that this is the crucial point in the major part of the cases around which turns, in the experience of the male subject,
the foundation on which the notion of privation relies in a wholly especially anxiety-producing, effective way.

It is that effectively there is a part of beings in humanity who are – it is said in the texts – “castrated.”
Of course, this term is entirely ambiguous: they are “castrated” in the subjectivity of the subject. What they are in the real,
and what is invoked as real experience, is that they are in reality “deprived.” The one therefore to which I allude
is this reference to the real around which the experience of castration turns in the teaching of FREUD’s texts.

I pointed out to you on this point that we must, to articulate thoughts correctly, put in correlation
with this privation in the real, the fact that it is obligatorily – from the sole fact that we pose things thus
in a reference – not the experience of the patient – these are the experiences of our thought – the way of apprehending ourselves what is at issue. The very notion of privation is left particularly sensitive and visible in an experience like that, which implies the symbolization of the object.

In the real, nothing is deprived of anything, everything that is real suffices to itself, because the real by definition is full.
If we introduce into the real the notion of privation, it is insofar as we already symbolize the real enough,
and even insofar as we symbolize it fully, to indicate that if something is not there, it is because precisely we suppose its possible presence, that is to say that we introduce into the real – in order in a way to cover it,
to hollow it out, the[…] – the simple order of the symbolic. That is why I say that at the level of this step, the object at issue on the occasion is the penis: it is an object that is given to us in the symbolic state at the moment and at the level where we speak of privation.

On the other hand, I remind you of the necessity of this table. It is entirely clear that castration – insofar as it is effective, insofar as it is experienced, insofar as it is present in the genesis of a neurosis – is the castration of an imaginary object. Never is any castration at issue in the incidence of a neurosis a real castration: it is insofar as it plays in the subject in the form of an action bearing on an imaginary object, that castration comes into play. The problem for us is precisely to conceive why, by what necessity, this castration is introduced into a development that is the typical development of the subject.

It is a matter of his joining this complex order that constitutes the relation of man to woman, which makes that genital realization
is subject in the human species to a certain number of conditions. We start again, as last time, from the subject
in his original relation with the mother, in the stage that is called pre-Oedipal, and about which we have seen
that one can articulate many things.

We hope to have articulated better than is usually done when one speaks of this pre-Oedipal stage, I mean
by taking into account in a more differentiated way what, moreover, is always found in the discourse of all authors. Even demonstrated, we believe they are less well handled, less well reasoned.

We are going to start again from there in order, so to speak, to try to grasp at its birth the necessity of this phenomenon of castration,
as symbolizing a symbolic debt, a symbolic punishment, something that is inscribed in the symbolic scene
insofar as it seizes as its instrument this imaginary object.

Already, to use as a guide, so that we can refer to terms that I first pose, and that I ask you to accept for a moment as acquired, the hypothesis, the supposition on which our articulation will be able to rely, we saw last time: behind this symbolic mother we say that there is this symbolic father who, is in a way a necessity of symbolic construction, but whom also we can situate only in a beyond, I would almost say in a transcendence, in any case in something that, as I indicated to you in passing, is reached only by a mythical construction.

I have often insisted on the fact that this symbolic Father ultimately is represented nowhere, and what follows will confirm for you
whether the thing is valid, whether it is indeed useful to us in making us find again in complex reality this element of the drama
of castration. Here we find the underlying real Father, and here the imaginary Father.

If the symbolic Father is the signifier, about which one can never speak except by finding again at once its necessity and its character,
which we must accept as a sort of irreducible given of the world of the signifier, if thus it is so for the symbolic Father,
the imaginary Father and the real Father are two terms regarding which we have far fewer difficulties.

The imaginary Father, we are dealing with him all the time; it was he to whom most commonly everything referred that belonged
to the permitted dialectic:
– the whole dialectic of aggressivity,
– the whole dialectic of identification,
– the whole dialectic of idealization,
…through which the subject accedes to something called identification with the father. All of that takes place at the level of the imaginary Father.
If we call it imaginary, it is equally because it is integrated into this relation of the imaginary that forms the psychological support of relations that are properly relations of species, relations to the similar, the same ones that are at the basis of all libidinal capture, as also of all aggressive reaction. This imaginary Father likewise participates in this fact,
has typical characteristics. This imaginary Father is at once the frightening father that we know at the bottom of so many neurotic experiences; it is a father who in no way, of necessity, has a relation with the real Father the child has.

This is what explains to us how frequently we see in the child’s fantasies a figure of the father intervene, especially of the mother too, this figure on occasion quite grimacing, which truly has only an extremely distant relation with what was there present of the child’s real Father. And this is solely linked to the period, and also to the function
that this imaginary Father is going to play at such a moment of development.

The real Father is something entirely different. It is something that the child…
because of this interposition of fantasies, of the necessity also of symbolic relation
…has never had – as for every human being – anything but an ultimately very difficult apprehension.
If there is something that is at the base and at the foundation of all analytic experience, it is this why we have so much trouble apprehending what is most real around us, that is to say, human beings as they are.

It is the whole difficulty, as much of psychic development as simply of daily life, of knowing with whom
we are really dealing, at least with a personage who is in ordinary conditions also bound by his presence
to the development of a child, who is a father, who can rightly be considered as a constant element
of what is nowadays called the child’s surroundings.

And assuredly, I ask you therefore to take what in some respects, perhaps at first glance, may present to you in its characteristics as having been the question that at first glance may seem paradoxical to you. Indeed, and contrary to a sort of normative or typical notion one would want to give it in the insistence of the castration complex in the drama of the Oedipus,
it is to the real Father that the salient function is in fact deferred in what happens around the castration complex.

So you see that, in the way I formulate it to you, what may already appear as contingency,
as little explicable – why this castration, why this bizarre form of intervention in the subject’s economy called castration – has something shocking in itself. I double its contingency by telling you that it is not
by chance, that it is not a kind of oddity of the first approaches to this subject that made that first the doctor
stopped at these things that were recognized to be more fantasmatic than was believed, namely the scenes of primitive seduction.
You know that this is a stage of FREUD’s thought, even before he analyzed, before being doctrinally fixed on this subject.
But for castration, it is not a matter of fantasizing the whole affair of castration as was done with the scenes of primitive seduction.

If indeed castration is something that deserves to be isolated, that has a name in the subject’s history, this is always linked
to the incidence, to the intervention of the real Father, or if you like also marked in a profound way, and profoundly unbalanced by the absence of the real Father, and it is only in relation to this necessity which introduces a kind of profound atypia,
and then demands the substitution for the real Father of something else that is profoundly neurosizing.

It is therefore on the supposition of the fundamental character of the link there is between the real Father and castration that we are going to start
in order to try to find ourselves again in these complex dramas that FREUD elaborates for us, and where very often we have
the feeling that he lets himself be guided in advance by a kind of straight line so sure from time to time,
as in the case of little Hans, that I pointed out to you that we ourselves have the impression of finding ourselves
guided at every instant, but without grasping anything, either the motives that make us choose at each crossroads. I ask you therefore
for a moment, provisionally, to admit that it is around such a position that we are going to begin trying
to understand this necessity of the meaning of the castration complex.

Let us take the case of little Hans. Little Hans, from four and a half years old, makes what is called a phobia, that is to say a neurosis.
This phobia is then taken in hand by someone who turns out to be one of FREUD’s disciples, and who is a very good man, namely what one can do best as a real Father, and likewise we are told that little Hans truly has for him all good feelings; it is clear that he loves his father very much, and in sum he is far from fearing from him
treatments as abusive as that of castration.

On the other hand, one cannot say that little Hans is really frustrated of something. As we see him at the beginning
of the observation, little Hans, an only child, bathes in happiness. He is the object of an attention that certainly the father
did not wait for the appearance of the phobia to show, and he is also the object of the tenderest care of the mother,
and even so tender that everything is allowed to him.

In truth, it takes the sublime serenity of FREUD to endorse the action of the mother: it is entirely clear that nowadays
all anathemas would be poured out on this mother who admits little Hans every morning as a third party in the marital bed,
this against the express reservations made by the father and husband.

He shows himself on occasion not only of a quite particular tolerance, but one that we can judge as entirely
off the mark in the situation. For whatever he says, things nonetheless continue in the most decided way:
we do not see for a single instant that the mother in question takes for a single minute the slightest account of the observation
that is respectfully suggested to her by the personage of the father.

This little Hans is frustrated of nothing, he is truly deprived in nothing. At the beginning of the observation, all the same, the mother went so far as to forbid him masturbation; not only is that not nothing, but she even went so far as to pronounce the fatal words:
“If you masturbate, we will bring Doctor A. who will cut it off.”

This is reported to us at the beginning of the observation, and we do not have the impression that it is something decisive. The child continues. Of course it is something that is not an element of appreciation, but assuredly this intervention
must be noted because of the scruple with which he recorded the observation of the fact that the parents sufficiently informed themselves,
which moreover does not prevent them from behaving exactly as if they knew nothing.

Nevertheless, it is certainly not at that moment that even for a single instant FREUD himself thinks of relating
anything decisive regarding the appearance of the phobia. The child hears this threat, I would almost say “as is fitting.”
And you will see that even afterwards, this implication emerges that after all one can say nothing more to a child,
that it is precisely what will serve him as material to construct what he needs, that is to say precisely the castration complex.
But the question of knowing why he needs it is precisely another question, and it is that one we are at,
and we are not close to giving it an answer right away.

For the moment it is not a matter of castration; that is not the support of my question; it is a matter of the phobia and of the fact
that we cannot in any case even relate it in a simple and direct way to the prohibition of masturbation.
As FREUD says very well, at that moment masturbation in itself is something that entails no anxiety; the child will continue his masturbation. Of course, he will integrate it thereafter into the conflict that is going to manifest at the moment
of his phobia, but that is certainly not anything apparent, a traumatizing incidence that occurs at that moment that would allow us to understand the emergence of the phobia.

The conditions around this child are optimal, and the problem of the scope of the phobia remains a problem that one must know how to introduce with precisely its truly worthy character, questionable on the occasion, and it is from there that we will be able to find this or that overlap that will be for us enlightening, even favorable.

There are two things: a consideration that I am going to make before you, which will be a reminder of what we can call
the fundamental situation regarding the child’s phallus in relation to the mother. We said it: in the pre-Oedipal relation, in the relation of the child to the mother, what do we have? The relation of the child to the mother insofar as she is:
– object of love,
– object desired for her presence,
– object that presupposes a relation as simple as you can suppose it, but which is very early manifestable in experience, in the child’s behavior, sensitivity, reaction to the mother’s presence, and very quickly its articulation into a pair “presence-absence.”

It is – you know it – what we start from, and if difficulties have been raised regarding what one can call “the child’s first objectal world,” it is because of an insufficient distinction of the very term “object.” That there is a primordial object.
That we cannot, in any case, ideally constitute – that is to say in our idea – this “world of the child” as being a pure state of suspension with indeterminate limits from the organ that satisfies him, that is to say from the feeding organ,
this is something I am not the first to contradict.

The whole work and articulation of Alice BALINT, among others, for example, is there to articulate in a different way,
less tenable I believe, but to articulate what I am telling you, namely that the mother exists…
but that does not for all that suppose that there is already that something called me and not-me
…and that the mother exists as a symbolic object and as an object of love. This is what both experience will confirm, and what I am formulating in the position I give here to the mother on this table, insofar as she is first, we are told, a “symbolic mother,” and that it is only in the crisis of frustration that she begins to be realized through a certain number of shocks and particularities which are what happens in the relations between the mother and the child, this mother as object of love who can at every instant be the real mother precisely insofar as she frustrates him of this love.

The child’s relation with her is a relation of love; it indeed has that something that can open the door to what one usually calls “the first undifferentiated relation,” but it is for lack of knowing how to articulate it. In fact what happens fundamentally,
what is the first concrete stage of this relation of love as such, namely that something that forms the background on which the child’s satisfaction takes place or does not take place with a meaning, what is it?

It is that the child takes this relation by including himself in it as the object of the mother’s love, that is to say that the child learns this: that he brings the mother pleasure; it is one of the child’s fundamental experiences that he knows that if his presence commands, even a little, the presence that is necessary to him, it is because he himself introduces something into it,
this illumination that makes that presence there surround him as something to which he brings a satisfaction of love.

“Being loved” is fundamental; it is the ground on which everything that will develop between the mother and the child will be exercised; it is precisely insofar as something is gradually articulated in the child’s experience that indicates to him that
in this presence of the mother to himself, he is not alone. It is around this that the whole dialectic of the progress of this relation of the mother to the child will be articulated. I indicated it to you: the question posed by the facts is to know how
he apprehends what he is for the mother, and – you know it – we posed it as a basic hypothesis.

If he is not alone and if everything turns around that, this of course opens in our mind one of the most common experiences: that first he is not alone because there are other children. But we indicated as a basic hypothesis
that there is another constant and radical term, independent of contingencies and of the particularities of history and of the presence
or absence of the other child for example: it is the fact that the mother retains, to a different degree according to subjects, the penisneid that makes that the child is something in relation to that. He fills it or he does not fill it, but the question is posed.
The discovery, both of the phallic mother for the child and of the penisneid for the mother, are strictly coexistent with the problem
that we are trying to approach for the moment.

It is not at the same level, and I chose to start from a certain point to arrive at a certain point, and it is at this stage that we must hold, as one of the fundamental data of analytic experience, this penisneid, as a term of constant reference of the relation of the mother to the child, which makes what experience proves…
because there is no way to articulate perversions otherwise, insofar as they are not integrally explicable contrary to what is said, by the pre-Oedipal stage
…where one sees that it is in the relation to the mother that the child experiences the phallus as being the center of the mother’s desire, and where he situates himself in different positions, through which he is led to maintain, and very precisely to deceive this desire of the mother. That is what the articulation of the lesson I alluded to a moment ago was about. In some way, the child presents himself to the mother as being that something that offers her the phallus in himself, and to degrees and in diverse positions. Here he can:

– identify with the mother,
– identify with the phallus,
– identify with the mother as bearer of the phallus
– or present himself as bearer of the phallus.

There is here a high degree, not of abstraction, but of generalization of this level of the imaginary relation, of the relation
that I call deceiving, through which the child in a way attests to the mother that he can fill her, not only as child,
but also as regards what is desire and what is lacking – in short – in the mother.

The situation is certainly structuring, fundamental, since it is around that – and only around that – that the fetishist’s relation to his object can be articulated: for example all the intermediate ranges that bind him to a relation as complex and as elaborated, and to which analysis alone was able to give its accent and its term: transvestism, with homosexuality here reserved for what is at issue in homosexuality, that is to say, the need for the object and the real penis in the other.

At what moment are we going to see that something puts an end to the relation thus sustained?
What puts an end, in the case of little Hans for example, whom we see at the beginning of the observation, through a sort of happy encounter of illumination, of happy miracle that occurs each time we make a discovery, we see the child completely engaged in this relation where the phallus plays the most evident role. The notes that are given by the father as being what was recorded in the development of the child up to hour H when the phobia begins, teach us
that the child is all the time fantasizing the phallus, questioning his mother about the presence of the phallus in the mother
very precisely, then in the father, then in animals.

One speaks only of the phallus; the phallus is truly the pivot object, the central object of the organization of his world, at least if we hold to the remarks that are brought to us. We are before FREUD’s text; we are trying to give it its meaning.
What then has changed, since truly nothing important, nothing critical occurs in little Hans’s life?
What has changed is that his penis begins to become something entirely real; it begins to move;
he begins to masturbate, and it is not so much that the mother intervenes at that moment that is the important element,
[but rather] that already the penis becomes something real.

This is the massive fact of the observation; from there it is entirely clear that we must ask ourselves whether there is not a relation between that and what appears at that moment, that is to say, anxiety. I have not yet approached the problem of anxiety here, because things must be taken in order. Anxiety, you know it, throughout FREUD’s work is truly
one of the permanent questions, namely how we must conceive it.

I do not give in a single sentence the summary of the path traveled by FREUD; it is nonetheless something that,
as mechanism, is always there present in the stages of his observation; doctrine comes after.
The anxiety at issue on this occasion, how must we conceive it? As close as possible to the phenomenon.

I ask you for a moment simply to try this sort of approach that consists in showing a bit of imagination,
and in noticing that anxiety, through this extraordinarily evanescent relation by which it appears to us each time
the subject is, however imperceptibly, unglued from his existence, and where, for so little, he notices himself as being on the point of being taken back up into something that you will call whatever you like depending on the occasions: image of the other, temptation, in short that moment where the subject is suspended between a time where he no longer knows where he is, toward a time where he is going to be something from which he will never be able to find himself again, that is anxiety.

Do you not see that at the moment when there appears in the child, in the form of a drive in the most elementary sense of the term, something that moves, the real penis, it is at that moment that what for a long time was
the very paradise of happiness begins to appear as a trap, namely this game where one is what one is not, where one is for the mother everything the mother wants,
because of course I cannot speak of everything at once, but all of that depends after all on what the child really is for the mother, and we are going to try to put into it in a moment some difference, and we are going to try to approach
more closely what Hans was for his mother.

But for the moment we remain at this crucial point that gives us the general schema of the thing.
Up to then the child, in a satisfactory way or not…
but after all there is no reason not to see that he can conduct this game for a very long time in a satisfactory way
…the child is in this paradise of deception with a bit of happiness, and even very little to sanction this relation, however delicate it may be to conduct. By contrast the child tries to slip into, to integrate into what he is for the mother’s love.

But from the moment when his own drive intervenes, his real penis, there appears this ungluing of which I was speaking just now,
namely that he is caught in his own trap, that he is duped by his own game, that all the discordances, that all the gaps,
and the particularly immense gap there is between the fact of satisfying an image and of, he, having there precisely something
to present, to present cash, if I may say.

And what does not fail to occur is not simply that the child, in his attempts at seduction, fails for this
or that reason, or that he is refused by the mother who plays at that moment the decisive role; it is that what he ultimately
has to present is something that can appear to him on occasion, and we have a thousand experiences of it in analytic reality, as something miserable. At that moment the fact that the child is put before this opening, this dilemma,
where from being the captive, the victim, the passivized element of a game, he becomes henceforth the prey of the significations of the Other.

It is very precisely at this point that what I indicated to you last year as the origin of paranoia branches off, because from the moment when the game becomes serious, and where at the same time it is only a game of deception, the child is entirely suspended from the way the partner indicates by all his manifestations; for him all the partner’s manifestations become sanction of his – yes or no – sufficiency.

This is what happens very precisely insofar as this situation is pursued, that is to say where Verwerfung does not come to intervene leaving outside this term of the symbolic Father, whose necessity we are going to see in the concrete, precisely how necessary it is.
So let us leave it aside for the other child, for the one who is not in this very particular situation of seeing and of being delivered entirely, from that moment, to the eye and to the gaze of the other, that is to say, to the future paranoiac.

For the other the situation is literally without outlet by itself. Of course it is with the outlet, since if I am here,
it is to show you in what the castration complex is its outlet. The castration complex takes up again on the purely imaginary plane everything that is at stake with the phallus, and it is precisely for that reason that it is fitting that the real penis be in a way put out of the running. It is by the intervention of the order that the father introduces with his prohibitions, with the fact that he introduces the reign of the law, namely that something that makes that the affair:
– at once gets out of the child’s hands,
– but that it is nonetheless regulated elsewhere: that he is the one with whom there is no longer a chance to win except by accepting the distribution of the stakes as such.

That makes that the symbolic order intervenes, and precisely on the imaginary plane. It is not for nothing that castration
is the imaginary phallus, but it is in a way outside the real couple that order can be reestablished where the child finds again
something within which he will be able to await the evolution of events.

This may seem simple to you for the moment as a solution to the problem. It is an indication; it is not a solution;
it is quick; it is a bridge thrown. If it were easy, if there were only a bridge to throw, there would be no need to throw it;
it is the point we are at that is interesting.

The point we are at is precisely the one at which little Hans has arrived at the moment when there occurs for him precisely
nothing of the kind, where he is confronted, where he is placed at this meeting point of the real drive and of this game of imaginary phallic deception, and this in relation to his mother.

What happens at that moment, since there is a neurosis? You will not be surprised to learn that a regression occurs.
I would nonetheless prefer that you be surprised by it, because the term “regression,” I articulate neither more nor less
than to the strict scope I gave it in the last session before the interruption, when we spoke of frustration.

Just as in the presence of the mother’s defect I told you that the child collapses into the satisfaction of feeding,
so too at this moment when it is he who is the center that no longer suffices to give what there is to give, he finds himself in this disarray of no longer sufficing. At that moment the regression occurs, which makes one feign this same short-circuit that is that by which primitive frustration is satisfied, just as he seized the breast to close off all problems.

The only thing that opens before him as a gap – it is exactly what is happening moreover –
is the fear of “being devoured by the mother,” and it is the first clothing that the phobia takes.

It is very exactly what appears in the case of our little fellow, for however much “horse” the object of the phobia may be,
it is nonetheless “a horse that bites” that is at issue, and the theme of devouring is always, in some respect, findable
in the structure of the phobia. Is that all? Of course not! It is not just anything that bites, nor that devours.
We find ourselves confronted with the problem of the phobia each time it occurs with an object in a certain number
of fundamental relations, some of which must be left aside in order to articulate something clear.

What is certain is that the objects of phobia – which are in particular animals – are marked from the outset to the eye of the most superficial observer by that something that makes them essentially an object of the symbolic order. If the object of the phobia is a lion,
whether or not the child lives – and especially when he does not live – in regions where this animal has the slightest character not only of danger but simply of presence, that is to say that “the lion,” “the wolf,” even “the giraffe” are precisely these strange objects, among which “the horse” shows precisely a kind of extremely precise limit, which clearly shows to what extent these are objects,
so to speak, that are borrowed from a kind of list or category of signifiers that are of the same homogeneous nature:
what one finds in coats of arms.

These objects, which led FREUD and also made necessary for FREUD, in the construction of ‘Totem and taboo,’ the analogy between the father and the totem, have a very special function, and are there insofar as precisely in some respect they have to make up for
this signifier of the symbolic father, a signifier whose last term we do not see what it is, and whose question is precisely
to know why it takes on such or such a form, such or such a clothing.

There must indeed be something that is of the order of fact or of experience and of the positive and of the irreducible
in what we encounter. This is not a deduction, but is something that is an apparatus necessitated by the support of what we find in experience. Likewise we are not there to resolve “why does the phobia take the form
of such or such an animal?”; that is not the question.

What I want to leave you with is to ask you, by next time, to take the text of little Hans
and to notice that it is a phobia without any doubt, but if I may say it is “a phobia in motion.”
As soon as it appeared, right away the parents took up the thread, and up to the point where it ends the father does not let it go.
I would like you to read this text; you will have all the fluttering impressions one can have of it,
you will even have the feeling on many occasions of being completely lost.

Nevertheless, I would like those of you who will have been willing to submit to this test to tell me next time
whether something in what they will have read does not strike them, which makes the contrast between the starting stage where we see
little Hans develop at full blast all sorts of extraordinarily novelized imaginings concerning his relations
with everything he adopts as his children.

It is a theme of the imaginary where he shows himself with great ease, as in a way still in the state where he can prolong, where it is so much even the game of deception with the mother that he prolongs, that he can feel entirely at ease himself in a position that mixes identification with the mother, adoption of children and at the same time a whole series of loving forms of all ranges, which goes from the little girl whom he serves and courts somewhat closely, who is the daughter of the owners of the vacation place where they go, up to the little girl whom he loves at a distance, and whom he situates as already inscribed
in all the forms of the love relation that he can pursue with very great ease on the plane of fiction.

And the contrast between that and what is going to happen, when after the interventions of the father, under the pressure of the more or less directed analytic questioning of the father with him, he gives himself over to this kind of truly fantastic novel in which
he reconstructs the presence of his little sister in a box in the car on the horses, many years before her birth.

In short, the coherence that you will be able to see massively marked between what I will call the imaginary orgy in the course of the analysis of little Hans, with the intervention of the real Father. In other words, if the child arrives at a most satisfactory cure…
we shall see what “satisfactory cure” means regarding his phobia
…it is very clearly insofar as the real Father intervened, who had intervened so little up to then, because he was able to intervene, moreover because he had behind him the symbolic Father who is FREUD. But he intervened!

And to the extent that he intervenes, everything that was trying to crystallize on the plane of a sort of premature real starts again in an imaginary so radical that one no longer even knows so well where one is, that at every instant one asks oneself whether little Hans is not there to make fun of the world or to make a refined humor, and he is moreover indisputably so, since it is an imaginary that plays in order to reorganize the symbolic world.

But in any case there is one certain thing: the cure comes at the moment when, in the clearest way,
under the form of an articulated story, castration as such is expressed, that is to say that “the installer” comes, unscrews it for him and gives him another one. It is exactly there that the observation stops. The solution of the phobia is linked to, so to speak, the constellation
of this triad: intervention of the real Father, and we will return to it next time, however much supported and buttressed it may be by the symbolic Father. He enters into it like a poor fellow. FREUD at every instant is forced to say:
“It is better than nothing; one had to let him speak.”

“Above all,” he says, and you will find it at the bottom of a page as I articulate it to you, “do not understand too quickly!”

And those questions with which he presses him! Manifestly, he goes astray. Never mind! The result is punctuated
by these two points: Hans’s imaginary orgy, the advent, so to speak, of castration fully articulated as this:
one replaces what is real with something more beautiful, bigger. The advent, the bringing to light of castration
is what both puts an end to the phobia, and what shows, I will not say its finality, but what it makes up for.

There is here – you feel it well – only an intermediate point of my discourse; I simply wanted to give you enough
so that you see where the range, where the fan of its question is staged, where it unfolds.

We will take up again next time this dialectic of the child’s relation with the mother,
and the value of the true meaning of the castration complex.