🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Last time we tried to re-articulate the notion of castration, in any case the use of the concept in our practice.
I— in the second part of this lesson— located for you the place where the interference of the imaginary occurs in this relation of frustration infinitely more complex in its use than the habit that unites the child to the mother. I told you that it was only in a purely apparent way, and by virtue of the order of the exposition, that we thus found ourselves progressing from front to back, figuring— if I may put it that way, and it is not appropriate to return to it— kinds of stages that would succeed one another along a line of development.

On the contrary, it is always a matter of grasping what, intervening from outside at each stage, retroactively reshapes what was initiated in the previous stage for the simple reason that the child is not alone. Not only is he not alone, there is the biological entourage, but there is also an entourage much more important than the biological entourage, there is the legal milieu,
there is the symbolic order that surrounds him.

It is the particularities of the symbolic order— and I underscored it in passing— that give, for example, its accent, its prevalence,
to that element of the imaginary that is called the phallus. So that is where we had arrived, and to begin the third part
of my exposition, I had set you on the path of little Hans’s anxiety, since from the start we took these two exemplary objects: the fetish object and the real object.

It is at the level of little Hans that we will try to articulate what is going to be our subject today. An attempt, not
to re-articulate the notion of castration, because God knows how powerfully and insistently and repeatedly it is so in FREUD,
but simply to talk about it again, since for so long people have avoided talking about it, the use of this ‘complex’ in observations, in the reference one can take from it, is becoming rarer and rarer.

So let us take up today this notion of castration since we are linking up in the line of our discourse from last time. What is it about at the end of this pre-Oedipal phase and at the threshold of the Oedipus?
– It is that the child assumes this phallus as signifier, and in a way that makes it an instrument of the symbolic order of exchanges
that presides over the constitution of lineages.
– It is, in sum, that he is confronted with that order which will make, in the Oedipus, the function of the father the pivot of the drama.

It is not so simple. At the very least I have told you enough up to now on this subject so that, when I tell you
‘it is not so simple’, something answers in you ‘indeed the father is not so simple’. The function of existence on the symbolic plane in the signifier ‘father’, with all that this term contains of something profoundly problematic, raises the question
of the way this function came to the center of symbolic organization.

This leaves us thinking that we will have a few questions to ask ourselves regarding these 3 aspects of the paternal function [S.I.R.].
We have already learned…
and this from the 1ˢᵗ year of our seminars, the one where the second part was devoted to the study of The Wolf Man
…to distinguish the paternal incidence in the conflict under the triple heading: of the Symbolic father, the Imaginary father, the Real father,
and we saw that it was impossible to find one’s bearings in observation— in particular in the case of The Wolf Man—
without making this essential distinction.

Let us try to approach, at the point we have reached, this introduction into the Oedipus which is what is proposed
in chronological order to the child. In sum we could say that we see the child where we left him,
in this position of lure where he tries himself out with his mother, but not— I told you— a lure in which he would be completely implicated, a simple lure, in the sense that in the game of sexual display we can— we who are outside—
notice that the imaginary elements that captivate one of the partners thanks to the appearances of the other, that something
of which we do not know to what extent the subjects themselves act by it as by a lure, even though we know
that we, we could do it on occasion, that is to say, present a simple coat of arms to the desire of the simple adversary.

Here the lure in question is very clearly manifest in the actions, in the very activities that we observe in the little boy, for example the seductive activities toward his mother. When he exhibits himself, it is not pure and simple showing,
it is the showing of himself by himself to the mother who exists as a third, and with the emergence behind the mother
of something that is good faith, that by which the mother can be taken, so to speak. It is already a whole trinity,
indeed an intersubjective quaternity that is taking shape. But what is it about in the end?

If we take things here at the point where we left them, it is that, in sum, in the Oedipus, it is a matter that the subject
himself be taken in by this lure in such a way that he finds himself engaged in an existing order which, itself, is different from the psychological lure by which he entered into it and where we left him.

For in the end, if the Oedipus has the normativizing function of analytic theory, let us also recall that our experience
teaches us that this normativizing function is not satisfied with arriving at the fact that the subject has an object choice,
but that he has a choice of heterosexual object, and we know well that it is not enough to be heterosexual to be so according to the rules.

We know that there are all sorts of forms of apparent heterosexuality, and that on occasion the frankly heterosexual relation can conceal a positional atypicality that will make us see it, in analytic investigation, as derived
from a frankly homosexualized position for example. So it is necessary that not only the subject, after the Oedipus,
arrive at heterosexuality, but that he arrive there in such a way that he situates himself correctly with respect to the function of the father, whatever he may be, boy or girl, and this is the center of the whole problematic of the Oedipus.

Let us say it right away and because we have already indicated it by our way of approaching this year the object relation…
and FREUD articulates it expressly in his article on female sexuality
…in the end, taken from this angle and, so to speak, from the pre-Oedipal angle of view, the problematic of the woman
is much simpler. If it appears much more complicated in FREUD, that is to say in the order where he discovered it,
it is precisely because he first discovered, and not without reason, the Oedipus, and moreover it is entirely normal
to take things in this way.

Because if there is something that is pre-Oedipal, it is because first we posited the Oedipus and we cannot speak
of this greater simplicity of the feminine position at the level of the development that we can stop as
pre-Oedipal except because first we know that we must arrive at the complex structure of the Oedipus. That said, indeed for the woman we could say that it is only a matter of the sliding of this phallus that she has more or less located, approached in the imaginary where it is found, beyond the mother, in the progressive discovery of the fundamental dissatisfaction that the mother experiences in the mother-child relation itself.

It is a matter of the sliding of this phallus from the imaginary to the real, and that is indeed what FREUD explains to us:
when he tells us that in this nostalgia for the originary phallus, at this imaginary level where it begins to be produced
in the little girl in the specular reference to her similar, another little girl or a little boy, when he tells us that the child
is going to be the substitute for the phallus, in reality it is a somewhat abbreviated way of grasping what happens in the observed phenomenon.

And if you see the position as I drew it: here the imaginary, that is to say the desire for the phallus in the mother, and the child who is
our center, who has to make the discovery of this beyond, of this lack in the maternal object, it is quite obviously insofar
as, at a certain moment, the situation in one of the possible outcomes pivots around the child, namely from the moment when the subject, the child, finds a way to saturate the situation, to get out of it by conceiving it itself as possible.

But what is effectively what we find in the fantasy of the little girl and also of the little boy, is that
insofar as the situation pivots around the child, the little girl then finds the real penis where it is, beyond the child,
in the one who can give her the child, in the father, FREUD tells us. And it is precisely insofar as she does not have it as a possession, and even clearly that on this plane she renounces it, that she will be able to have it as a gift from the father.

And that is precisely why it is through this relation to the phallus that the little girl, FREUD tells us, enters the Oedipus, and as you see in a simple way, afterward he will only have to slip in through a kind of equivalence, it is the very term that FREUD uses.
The little girl will be sufficiently introduced into the Oedipus to accomplish what is sufficient; I am not saying that there cannot be much more and thus all the anomalies in the development of female sexuality, but already to have relations with this fixation on the father as bearer of the real penis, the one who can really give the child.

That is already sufficiently consistent for her that in the end one can say that if the Oedipus by itself brings
all sorts of complications indeed impasses in the development of female sexuality, conversely this Oedipus
as a path of integration into the typical heterosexual position is much simpler for the woman.

This is something we obviously need not be surprised at insofar as the Oedipus is essentially androcentric or patrocentric, an asymmetry that takes all sorts of particular, quasi historical considerations to make us perceive the prevalence, on the sociological, ethnographic plane, of individual experience that allows one to analyze the Freudian discovery.

Conversely, there it is quite clear that we see that the woman is in a position, so to speak…
since I spoke of ordinance, of symbolic order or of subordinate ordination
…that here, what is for her the object of her love, I say her love, that is to say an object of feeling that is addressed properly speaking
to the element of lack in the object, insofar as it is by way of this lack that she has been led to that object which is the father,
the latter becomes ‘the one who gives’ the object of satisfaction, the object of the natural relation of childbearing.

From there, for her, it only takes a little patience for the father to be replaced by the one who will fulfill exactly
the same role, the role of father. This involves something we will return to and which gives its particular style
to the development of the feminine superego, namely that there is a kind of balance between what has very rightly been called the importance,
the prevalence of the narcissistic relation in the woman’s development.

But if indeed this renunciation once made, the phallus is abjured as a possession, it becomes— insofar as it is
a possession of the one to whom from then on she attaches her love, the father from whom she in fact awaits this child—
it places the woman in a dependence on what from then on is for her only what must be given to her in this very particular dependence which, paradoxically— as the authors have noted— gives rise in development at a given moment to properly narcissistic fixations in the being most intolerant of a certain frustration. We will perhaps return to it
later when we talk again about the monogamous ideal in the woman.

It is also, moreover, around this simple reduction of the situation which identifies the object of love and the object that gives satisfaction that there is situated, in a development that one can qualify as normal, this side that is especially fixed, indeed arrested— prematurely arrested—
in the development in the woman, about which FREUD in certain passages and at certain turns of his writings takes a tone
so singularly misogynistic to complain bitterly of the great difficulty there is, at least for certain female subjects,
in making them move, in mobilizing them from a kind of morality, he says, ‘of soup and meatballs’, of that something so imperiously demanding as to the satisfactions to be drawn from analysis itself for example. I am only indicating there a certain number of beginnings, and in sum to tell you that we will have to return to the development provided by FREUD on female sexuality.

It is to the boy that we want to devote ourselves today, for the reason that if for him the Oedipus seems to us much more clearly intended to enable him to identify with his own sex— it comes about in sum in the ideal relation,
in the imaginary relation to the father— conversely the true aim of the Oedipus, which is his correct situation with respect to the function of the father,
that is to say that he himself one day attains this completely paradoxical and problematic position which is to be a father,
this presents a mountain of difficulties. Now precisely, it is not because one has not seen this mountain that one is interested less and less in the Oedipus; it is because precisely one has seen it, and because one has seen it one prefers to turn one’s back on it.

Let us not forget that in sum the whole Freudian interrogation…
not only in the doctrine, but in FREUD’s own experience, which we can find traced through the confidences he makes to us, his dreams, the progress of his thought, everything we now know of his life, of his habits, even of his attitudes within his family, which Mr. JONES reports to us in a more or less complete but certain way
… the whole Freudian interrogation is summed up in this:

‘What is it to be a father?’.

For him it was the central problem, the fertile point from which all his research is truly oriented.
Observe also that if this is a problem for each neurotic, it is also a problem for each non-neurotic in the course of his infantile experience. What is a father? This is a way of approaching the problem of the signifier of the father.
But let us not forget that it is also a matter that the subjects in the end become one, and to pose the question ‘What is a father?’ is still something other than being oneself a father, attaining the paternal position.

Let us look closely: insofar as for each man accession to this paternal position is a faith, a quest— one can
ask oneself the question— it is not unthinkable to say to oneself that in the end never has anyone really completely been it,
for in this dialectic we suppose— and one must start from this supposition— that there is somewhere someone
who can fully assume the position of the father and, he, can answer: I am, father. It is a supposition that is essential
to all the progress of the Oedipal dialectic but it in no way settles the question of knowing what the particular, intersubjective, position is of the one who, for the others, and especially for the child, fulfills this role.

So let us return to little Hans. It is a whole world, this observation! It is the one I left last, and it is not for nothing,
of the Five Psychoanalyses.

What do the first pages give us, which are very precisely at the level where I had left you the last times?
It is not without reason that FREUD presents things to us in this order, the question is that of this Wiwimacher which one translates into French as fait-pipi. It is a matter— I am speaking only of the way things are presented literally by FREUD— only of the questions that little Hans asks himself concerning not simply his own fait-pipi, but the fait-pipi of living beings, says FREUD, and especially of living beings bigger than him.

You saw the pertinent remarks concerning the child’s order, but in the order, it is first his mother that he asks the question: ‘Do you also have a fait-pipi?’. What his mother answers him, we will talk about it again, and Hans lets slip at that moment:
‘Yes, I had only thought…’, that is to say that he is precisely in the process of simmering quite a lot of things.

He then asks the question again to his father, he then rejoices at having seen the lion’s fait-pipi, which is not entirely by chance,
and from that moment, that is to say before the appearance of the phobia, he marks clearly that if his mother must have this fait-pipi
as she affirms it to him— not in my opinion without a certain impudence— it ought to be seen.

For one evening, which is not very far from the time of this interrogation, he literally watches her while she is undressing, remarking to her that if she had one, it ought to be as big as that of a horse. The notion of Vergleichung which one translates
into French as comparison or compared, we will almost say that it is the word equalization that would seem to us to be best there,
at least in economics if not in strict tradition, this sort of effort of equalization between what we can call
in his imaginary phallic perspective, the one where we left him last time, it is a matter of an equalization
between a sort of absolute object, the phallus, and its testing by the real.

It is not a matter of an ‘all or nothing’ with which the subject has played up to then. With the shell game, the hide-and-seek game,
it is never there where one looks for it, never there where one finds it; it is now a matter of knowing where it really is.

There is there the whole distance to be crossed that separates the one who pretends or who plays at pretending, and it is not for nothing that, a little further on in the observation, when little Hans has a dream— the first dream, FREUD and his parents tell us—
where an element of deformation intervenes, a displacement, it will be precisely by means of a forfeit game.

If you moreover follow this whole imaginary dialectic, if you remember it as I approached it in these last lessons, you will be struck to see that it is there, playing on the surface, at this pre-phobic stage of little Hans’s development.
Everything is there, including even the fantasmatic children: all of a sudden, after having had his little sister, he adopts a bunch of little imaginary girls to whom he does everything one can do to children.

The game, properly speaking imaginary, is truly gathered in full, almost without intention. It is a matter of the whole
distance to be crossed that separates the one who pretends from the one who knows he has the power. What does a first approach to the Oedipal relation give us? It is this: that at that moment there is what we see being played out on the plane of this compared act, it is that we can conceive that the game continues on the plane of the lure, on the imaginary plane, that simply the child adds to his dimensions the maternal model, the larger image but essentially homogeneous.

It remains that if this is how the Oedipal dialectic is engaged, in the end he will never have to deal with anything but a double of himself, an enlarged double of this perfectly conceivable introduction of the maternal image under the ideal form of the ego,
we remain in the imaginary dialectic, in the specular dialectic of the subject’s relation to the little other whose sanction
does not take us out of this ‘either…—or…’, ‘either him or me’, which remains tied to the first symbolic dialectic, that of presence
or of absence. We do not get out of the game of odd or even. We do not get out of the plane of the lure.

And in the end we know— and we know it from both the theoretical and the exemplary side— we see only the symptom come out of that, the manifestation of anxiety, FREUD tells us. And FREUD underscores at the beginning of the observation
of little Hans, that it is fitting to separate anxiety well from phobia. There are there two things that succeed one another and without any doubt, not without reason, the one comes to the aid of the other, the phobic object comes to fulfill a function on the background of anxiety.

But on the imaginary plane, nothing allows us to conceive the leap that would make the child come out of this lure-game before the mother, someone who is all or nothing, the one who suffices or the one who does not suffice. Assuredly from the sole fact that the question is posed, it remains
on the plane of fundamental insufficiency. This is the first schema of the notion of entry into the Oedipus complex, the quasi fraternal rivalry with the father, on the plane that we are led to nuance much more than it is commonly articulated.

This aggressiveness in question is an aggressiveness of the type of those that come into play in the specular relation, in this either me or the other which is always defined as being the fundamental spring, and on the other hand the fixation remains completely on the one who has become the real object after the first frustrations, that is to say the mother. It is because this stage exists, more exactly
this central lived essential of the Oedipus on the imaginary plane, that the Oedipus spreads out in all its neuroticizing consequences, found in a thousand aspects of analytic reality.

It is by this in particular that we see one of the first terms of Freudian experience enter, this sort of degradation of love life to which FREUD devoted a special study which is linked to this: that by reason of the permanent attachment to this real object, to this primitive real object of the mother insofar as frustrating, no feminine object from then on will any longer be
it too, anything other— in relation to the mother— than devalorized, a substitute, a broken, refracted mode, always partial
with respect to the first maternal object. And we will see again a little later what it is fitting to think about it.

Let us not forget however that if the Oedipus complex can have its lasting consequences as to the imaginary spring
that it brings into play, that is not all. Let us not forget that normally— and this from the start of Freudian doctrine—
it is in the nature of the Oedipus complex to be resolved, and when FREUD speaks to us about it, he tells us that assuredly what
we can conceive of the relegation of hostility toward the father, is something that we can legitimately
link to a repression.

But in the same sentence, he is concerned to underscore that this is one more opportunity for us to put our finger on the fact that the notion
of repression always applies to a particular articulation of history, and not to a permanent relation.
He says: I am willing that by exception one apply here the term repression, but understand well, he tells us, that it is normally at this age— between five years and five and a half years when the decline of the Oedipus complex occurs— of the cancellation
and the destruction of the Oedipal complex.

There is something other than what we have described up to now, which would be, in a way, the effacement, the imaginary attenuation of a relation fundamentally in itself lasting:
– there really is crisis,
– there really is revolution,
– there really is something which is what leaves behind it this result, and this result is the formation of something particular, very precisely dated in the unconscious, namely the formation of the superego.

And it is here that we are confronted with the necessity of bringing forth something new, original and new,
and which has its own solution in the Oedipal relation. To see it, one need only use what is our habitual schema,
namely that, at the point we had reached last time: the child here offers the mother the imaginary object of the phallus
to give her complete satisfaction, and this in the form of a lure.

That is to say, by bringing into play, with the mother, this Other which is in a way the witness, the one who sees the whole
of the situation, this term without which no exhibition of the little boy before the mother has its meaning, simply which is implied by the sole fact that what we are describing of the presentation, even of the offering that the little boy makes to his mother,
it is obviously there, at the level of this Other, that it must occur for the Oedipus to exist, that he must produce the presence
of something which, up to then, was not in the game, that is to say someone who always, and in every circumstance,
is in a position to play and to win.

The schema of the forfeit game is there to tell us among a thousand other traits…
that one can read in the observations, that one can see being played out in the very activity of the child at this stage
…is there to show us that it is indeed in fact a moment where the game, which one finds in a thousand forms in the case
of little Hans, which one finds again in his way all of a sudden of going to isolate himself in the dark in a little closet which is that very one which becomes his own, whereas up to that moment he was in everyone’s, there are a thousand traits, there is a moment where everything oscillates around the passage of the game.

There is the notion of something that adds to the dimension that one expected on the plane of the symbolic relation, namely that what up to then was in the contribution of the symbolic relation only that call and recall of which I spoke to you last time which characterizes
the symbolic mother, becomes the notion that at the level of the big Other there is someone who can answer in any state of affairs, and who answers that in any case the phallus, the true one, the real penis, it is he who has it. It is he who has the master trump and who knows it. It is this introduction of this real element into the symbolic order— inverse of the first position of the mother— which is symbolized in the real by her presence and her absence.

That is what at that moment makes this object which was both there and not there…
because that was where it had started from with respect to every object, namely that an object is both present and absent,
and that one can always play at the presence or at the absence of an object
…this object, from that moment on, becomes an object which is no longer the imaginary object with which he can delude himself,
but the object of which it is always in the power of another to show that he does not have it, or that he has it insufficiently.

And which from that moment on makes it so that for all the rest of his development, if castration plays this absolutely essential role, it is because, being essentially to have to be assumed as the maternal phallus, as having essentially to be a symbolic object, it is only starting from the fact that in the essential Oedipal experience, it is by the one who has it,
who knows that he has it on every occasion, and who was at one moment deprived of it, that the child can conceive that this same symbolic object
will one day be given to him. In other words, the assumption of the very sign of the virile position of masculine heterosexuality
implies castration at its outset.

As for this natural appendage of the naturally masculine being that is the male, in man, what the notion
of the Oedipus in FREUD teaches us is that what he already possesses perfectly, what he has as his own possession,
quite the contrary of the feminine position, precisely because he has it as a possession, he must hold it from someone else.

It is in this relation to something which is the real in the symbolic, the one who is really the father and of whom no one can finally say what it really is to be the father, except that it is precisely something which is already there
in the game, it is in relation to this game played with the father, this game of whoever loses wins, so to speak, that the child can conquer the faith
that deposits in him this first inscription of the law.

What becomes of this drama where he is— as it is described to us in the Freudian dialectic— a little criminal.
It is by way of this imaginary crime that he enters the order of the law. But he can enter this order of the law only if,
for at least an instant, he had before him a real partner, someone:
who in fact brought, at this level of the Other, something that is not simply call and recall,
that is not simply the couple of presence and absence, element fundamentally nihilating of the symbolic,
…but someone who answers him.

Now if things can thus be expressed on the plane of imaginary drama, it is at the level of the imaginary game that this experience must be made. It is not without reason that from this requirement of this dimension of absolute otherness of the one who simply has
the power and answers for it, no particular dialogue is born. It is embodied in real characters, but these real characters themselves are always dependent on something which, in relation to them, presents itself in the end
as an eternal alibi.

The only one who can answer absolutely to this position of the father insofar as he is the symbolic father, is the one who could say, as the God of monotheism said: ‘I am that I am’. But it is something which— apart from the sacred text where we encounter it—
cannot be literally pronounced by anyone.

You will tell me then: ‘You taught us that the message we receive is our own in an inverted form, in other words,
that everything will be resolved by the “You are he who is”’. Do not believe a thing of it, because to say that to anyone else, who am I?

In other words, what I want to indicate to you there is that the Symbolic Father is properly speaking unthinkable:
he is nowhere, he intervenes nowhere, and the proof of it is that at the same time this shows us that it took a mind as bound to the demands of scientific and positive thought as FREUD was, to make this construction, to which JONES confides to us that he held more than to all his work. He did not put it in the foreground, for his major work and the only one,
he wrote it, affirmed it and never denied it, is The Interpretation of Dreams, but the one that was dearest to him, as a success
that seemed to him a performance, is Totem and Taboo, which is nothing other than a modern myth, a myth constructed
to explain to us what remained gaping in his doctrine, namely: where is the father?

It suffices to read Totem and Taboo with simply an open eye to notice that if it is not what I am telling you,
that is to say a myth, it is absolutely absurd. But on the other hand, if Totem and Taboo is made to tell us that for fathers to subsist, it is necessary that the true father, the only father, the unique father be before the entry into history, and that it be the dead father,
more: that it be the killed father, really why would this even be thought outside of this properly mythic value? For— as far as I know— the father in question is not conceived by FREUD, nor by anyone, as an immortal being.
Why must the son have, in a way, brought forward his death? And all of this why? In order in the end to forbid
to himself, the subject, what it was a matter of snatching from him, namely precisely that he killed him only to show that he is unkillable.

It is this notion that FREUD introduces around a major drama whose essence rests on a notion that is strictly mythic, insofar as it is the very categorization of a form of the impossible, indeed of the unthinkable, this eternalization
of a single father at the origin, whose characteristics will be that he will have been killed. Why? To be preserved!
And I point out to you in passing that in French, and in a few other languages, in German in particular:
tuer comes from the Latin tutare which means to preserve.

This mythic father, which shows us what sort of difficulties FREUD had to deal with, shows us at the same time what he was indeed aiming at in the notion of the father: it is that something which at no moment of the dialectic intervenes,
except by the mediation of the real father who comes at some moment to fill its role and function, which makes it possible to vivify,
to give its new dimension to the imaginary relation, to bring in, not this pure specular game of me or the other,
but to give its incarnation to this unpronounceable phrase: ‘You are he that you are’ of which we said a moment ago
that it was not pronounceable by someone who is not, himself.

But if you allow me the play on words, and the ambiguity that I already used at the moment when we studied
the paranoid structure of President SCHREBER, not therefore ‘You are he that you are’ but ‘You are he who kills’.

It is essentially insofar as something at the end of the Oedipus complex marks, situates the repressed in the unconscious,
but permanent in the form of the establishment of something which is regulated, that there is something that answers in the symbolic.

The law is no longer simply that something about which we ask ourselves why after all, the whole community of men is implicated in it and introduced into it, but it has passed into the real in the form of this kernel left by the Oedipus complex,
in the form of that something which analysis once showed, and once and for all, to be the real form
under which is inscribed, is attached what philosophers up to then showed us with more or less ambiguity, as being that density, that permanent kernel of moral consciousness, that something of which we know that in each individual,
it is very precisely embodied by something that can take the most multiple forms, the most diverse forms,
the most odd, the most grimacing, and which is called the superego.

It takes this form because it is always introduced, and it participates in its introduction— here at the level of the Es—
it always participates in some accident of this profoundly accidental situation that makes it so that one does not necessarily know at what moment of the imaginary game the passage was made, from the one who was for a moment there to answer, and who introduces here into the Es as an element homogeneous with the other libidinal elements, this tyrannical superego, fundamentally
in itself paradoxical and contingent, but which all by itself represents, even in non-neurotics, that something
which has this function of being the signifier that marks, imprints, leaves the seal in man, of his relation to the signified.

That there is a signifier in man that marks his relation to the signified, there is one, that is called the superego, there are even many more than one, that is called symptoms. I underscore that with this key— and only with this key— you can understand what is at stake when little Hans foments his phobia.

What is characteristic, and I think I can demonstrate it to you in this observation, is precisely that despite all his love, all his kindness, all his intelligence, thanks to which we have the observation, there is no real Father.
The whole continuation of the game proceeds in this lure, in the end unbearable, anguishing, intolerable, of little Hans’s relation to his mother,
insofar as he is: him or her, one or the other, never without one knowing which, the phallus-bearer or the phallus-bearer, the big or the little giraffe.

And despite the ambiguities of appraisal that the various authors who take up the observation make of it, it is quite clear
that the little giraffe is precisely this maternal belonging around which the question is played out of knowing who has it, and who will have it.
It is a kind of waking dream that little Hans has, and which for a moment makes him— amid the loud cries uttered by his mother
and despite these loud cries— the possessor of the stake, and which is there to underscore for us in the most imagistic way the very mechanism.

I would like to add to this a certain number of considerations that allow us, if not to affirm…
to accustom you to the strict handling of this category of ‘castration’
as I am in the process of trying to articulate it before you
…but to try now to see what, in this perspective which situates each in their plane, in their reciprocal relations:
– the imaginary game of the ego ideal on the one hand,
– in relation to this sanctioning intervention of castration, thanks to which these imaginary elements take their stability, their fixed constellation in the symbolic.

Let us try to see whether it is necessary that in this perspective and this distinction, we dare to articulate that something which pertains directly to the notion of an object relation conceived as in advance, harmonious, uniform, as if by some concurrence
of nature and of law, it were ideally and in a constant way that each was supposed to find his each for the greatest satisfaction of the couple, not without your being able to pause, at least for an instant, at the question of knowing
what the whole of the community can have to think about it.

I believe we must think, if we know how to distinguish the order of the law from imaginary harmonies, indeed from the very position
of the love relation, we will begin to posit that if it is true that castration is the essential crisis by which every subject is introduced, is authorized, so to speak, to be Oedipalized in full right, you will conclude after all that it is entirely natural to formulate,
even at the level of complex structures— indeed entirely free— of kinship like those in which we live,
even at this level, and not only in elementary structures, that one can at the limit posit the formula
that every woman who is not permitted is forbidden by the law.

This will allow us to conceive the very clear echo that every marriage carries within it, and not simply in neurotics,
castration itself, that if a particular civilization which is the one in which we live, produced marriage symbolically as the fruit of a mutual consent, this will explain to us what could have blossomed as an ideal, the equally ideal confusion
of love and of the conjugal. It is all the same entirely clear that it is insofar as this civilization put precisely in the foreground this fact of mutual consent, that is to say pushed as far as possible the freedom of unions. It pushed it so far that it is always bordering on incest and besides it suffices for you to dwell a little on what is the very function of the primitive laws of alliance and kinship to realize that every conjunction, whatever it may be, even instantaneous, of individual choice within the law, every conjunction of love and law, even if it is desirable,
even if it is a kind of necessary crossing point of union between beings, is something that partakes of incest.

So that in the end, if in the failures, indeed the degradations of love life, Freudian doctrine attributes
to the lasting fixation on the mother, as of a constant permanence of I do not know what that strikes with an original taint the ideal
that would be desired of monogamous union, one must not believe that there is there, in a way, something else, a new form of an ‘either—or’, which shows us that if incest does not occur where we wish it, that is to say in the actual
or in perfect households, as one would say, it is precisely because it occurred elsewhere, but that in both cases, it is indeed incest that is at issue.

In other words, something that bears within itself its limit, that bears within itself a fundamental duplicity, an ambiguity always ready to be reborn, and that allows us to affirm that, in accordance with experience but with this sole advantage of not being astonished by it, if the ideal of conjugal conjunction is monogamous in the woman for the reasons we stated at the outset, there is absolutely nothing to be astonished at.

One need only return to the starting schema of the child’s relation to the mother to realize that there always tends to reproduce itself on the man’s side— and insofar as the typical, normative, legal union is always marked by castration—
there tends to reproduce itself in him this division or this split that makes him fundamentally a bigamist, I do not say a polygamist, contrary
to what one believes, although of course from the moment when two is introduced, there is no longer any reason to limit the game in the palace of mirages.

But it is fundamentally insofar as beyond what the real father authorizes, so to speak, the one who has entered
into the Oedipal dialectic to fix his choice, beyond this choice there is always in love what is aimed at,
that is to say not legal object, nor object of satisfaction, but being, that is to say object grasped in precisely what it lacks.

It is very precisely for that reason that, in an institutionalized or anarchic way, we see love and the consecrated union never coincide. Or else, I repeat to you, this occurs in an institutionalized way, as many evolved civilizations have absolutely not hesitated to doctrinate it, to affirm it and to put it into practice.

When one is in a civilization like ours, where one knows how to articulate nothing, except that everything happens in a way by accident, namely because one is more or less an ego more or less weak, more or less strong, and that one is more or less bound to this or that archaic fixation, indeed ancestral, one realizes that it is in the very structure, which distinguishes the primitive imaginary relation, the one by which the child is already introduced to this beyond of his mother, which is what already through his mother
he sees, he touches, he experiences, of that something by which the human being is a deprived being and an abandoned being, it is the distinction of this imaginary experience and of the symbolic experience that norms it.

It is only by the mediation and by the intermediary of the law that many things are preserved that do not allow us
in any case to speak of them as being simply of the object relation, even if of the most ideal, of the most motivated by choice
and by the deepest affinities and which leave fundamentally open a problematic in every love life.

It is very precisely what FREUD, his experience and our daily experience, is there to make us touch,
and at the same time to affirm.