🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I would like to begin by clarifying something concerning the article published in La Psychanalyse N°2 under the title of one of my seminars[‘The seminar on the purloined letter’], and especially its introduction.

A certain number of you have had the time to read it and to look at it a little more closely. I am grateful to those who devoted themselves to this examination, for their attention. Nevertheless, one must believe that the memory of a context in which what is brought forward in this introduction was introduced is not easy for everyone to recover, since they fall back—if one can put it that way, with regard to the understanding of this text—into that sort of realizing error of another kind, which is the one into which certain people had been able to let themselves be caught at the moment when I was setting out these terms, for example when they imagined that I was denying chance.

I allude to this in my text itself, and I will not return to it. To shed light on what is at issue…
that is what one of the people who best understood and best examined this thing did,
and in the most precise way, I would say almost in the most competent way,
since, all in all, this person rediscovered a network that one can draw like this
…it suffices to have ordered, in a series of symbols 1,2,3, the groupings of signs: +,+,–,
ordered at random in a temporal succession. Then we order as 1, 2, 3 these series of signs
according to whether they represent:

– either (1) a succession of identical signs[( + + + ) , ( ––– )]

– or (3) an alternation[( + – + ) , ( – + – )]

– or (2) on the contrary something more different, which is represented by this: [( – + + ) , ( –– + )], but equally well by this:
[( + –– ) , ( + + – )], that is, a sign which at first glance is distinguished from the others, which has no symmetry.

That is what I call, with a term untranslatable into French, odd. It is the asymmetrical, it is the one that from the outset leaps to the eye as being odd, limping. It is a simple question of definition: it suffices to posit it like that, for it to be instituted as a convention, the existence of a symbol.

I remind you that the α, the β and the γ will give you here 2, 2, 2, then again here 3, then afterwards again the sign 3, naturally each sign relating to the three that precede in the temporal succession. This is what I believe is inscribed in my text without any ambiguity, but—so to speak—in a rather condensed way, so that it created difficulty for some, but the context prevents one from taking, for a single instant, as anything other than this definition, this convention, which is its initial convention.

From there, it is a matter of calling α, β, γ, δ another series of symbols that are constructed from the second series, and this being founded on this remark that when one knows the two extreme terms in the second series, the middle term is univocal.
We shall therefore take into account, in order to define the terms α, β, γ, δ, that the two extremes in the series being a case like that, you see where it is going from odd to odd. The convention is founded, then, on inscribing a sign which, by its span, catches the five antecedents of the first line by the sign γ, thus from same to same, that is to say from symmetrical to symmetrical, whether it is a matter of:
– from 1 to 1, from 1 to 3, from 3 to 1: that is α,
– from odd to odd: that is β,
– to set off in order to arrive at odd: that is γ,
– to return from odd: that is δ.

Such are the conventions. From there, if one wants to define by a network everything that is possible, we arrive at constructing a network that is made like this:

It must be oriented, and here is exactly how it is. The α can reproduce itself indefinitely by this vector.
This cannot but have this activation at each of the vertices, except if this is expressly indicated by the loop thus defined. You see summarized on this network, in an exhaustive way, all the possible successions, and the only possible ones indicated there, that is to say that any series whatsoever that cannot be laid onto this network is an impossible series.

Why did I not put that in my text? First because I had not represented it here. It is a kind of control apparatus, a way of enveloping, of locking, definitively the problem in such a way as to notice and to be sure that one has omitted none of the possibilities, none of the possible solutions. It is a simple check of the calculations.
It has this interest that you can always refer back to it as to something you can rely on, which will indicate to you that you may have, in certain cases, forgotten a possible solution, whatever the problem you were posing to yourself concerning this series, or that you were completely mistaken.

I come to the disputed point. You see it on this network: this shows you that there is, in a way:
– two kinds of β,
– and two kinds of δ.

If you look at each of these vertices, you see that there is always a dichotomous division that proposes itself from each of these vertices.

Example, here is γ:
– there can be after γ: a β,
– and there can be after γ: an α, because that vector[1] there has the privilege of being two-way.

Here you also see a δ, and there are two possible exits:
– there can be this δ[1] there and then γ, or another δ[2],
– it is not the same thing as this δ there[1] after which there can be a β or an α.

The objection that some made, concerning the bringing to light of this functional diversity, is the following: according to them, one could for example call them by 8 different letters instead of calling them by 4 different letters, or else put an a or a2.

And I was told that there was not there a definition of a symbol that was, in a way, clear and distinct, and that consequently everything I was representing and articulating of what is said in my text was only a kind of opacification of the mechanism concerning the play of symbols, a kind of creation that would make arise from itself a kind of internal law that is always…
and it is there that the kind of disturbance begins that occurs in the mind of some
…an implication of something that is introduced by the creation of the symbol, which goes beyond what is given at the start, namely pure chance.

It is on that that I believe I must explain myself. It is entirely exact, and in a certain way one can indeed say that in the choice of symbols there is a certain ambiguity, in a way already given at the start, and it is given from the moment when you make the symbols.

The simple indication of oddity, that is to say of asymmetry, while since we have spoken of a temporal succession, things are oriented, and it is obviously not the same thing whether there is first 2 then 1, or 1 then 2. To confuse them would be to introduce into the symbol itself something that, in the affirmed reference, one can express more clearly. But it is a matter of knowing what the clarity in question means.

It is something you can call ‘ambiguity’, but tell yourselves clearly that it is precisely that which is at issue to make felt, namely that it is insofar as the symbol at a certain level is, at all levels, that:
– the symbol insofar as it is +, presupposes the –,
– the symbol insofar as it is –, presupposes the +.

The ambiguity is always there, the further we go in the construction, and I took the minimum step that one can take by grouping them in threes. I did not demonstrate it in the course of the article because I had no other aim than to remind you in what context The purloined letter had been introduced. Admit for an instant that it is the minimum step. When you take this minimum step, it is precisely insofar as the symbol contains this ambiguity that what I call the law appears.
In other words, if you supposed that you replace four of the vertices by the sequence ε, ζ, η, θ, you will indeed have possible sequences that will be different, that will be extremely complicated since you will have to deal with eight terms, and each will couple with two of the others, according to an order that will be far from being immediately evident.

But it is precisely the interest of the choice of these ambiguous symbols that couple, because they are indeed coupled by something,
this vertex α with another vertex that we have also called α, and which indeed has different functions.
It is in that that it is interesting to see that, by grouping them thus, you see emerge the extremely simple law that I expressed to you by one of the schemas of the text[p.5], the one that makes it possible to say that from one time to the third time, you always have this, which I write in a slightly different way:

α, δ → α, β, γ, δ →α, β
γ, βγ, δ

1er temps 2ème temps 3ème temps

You can have here [1er temps] any α, δ/γ, β and here[2ème temps] you have α, β/γ, δ.

From the first to the third time you can recover the α and the γ, [in the same places] but the δ[which follows α at the 1er temps] and the β[which follows γ at the 1er temps] are [at the 3ème temps] two essential impossibilities with respect to a dichotomy that excludes:
– that from the first to the third time there succeed a γ or a δ, to an α or a δ,
– likewise that, to a β or a γ, there succeed an α or a β.[cf. La Psychanalyse n°2, p.5]

In my text I indicated certain sequences of that, certain properties whose interest is to bring to light all sorts of other phases of the form, laws of syntax that can be deduced from this extremely simple formula, and I tried to do them in such a way that they are metaphorical.

That is to say that they allow you to glimpse that in which the signifier is truly organizing of something inherent to human memory, insofar as human memory, by implying in its weave always some elements of signifier, is found to be fundamentally structured in a way different from every kind of possible conception of vital memory, namely of the persistence or the erasure or the maintenance of an impression. Why?

Because what is important to see as soon as we introduce the signifier into the real, and it is introduced into the real from the moment when one simply speaks, but also from the moment when one simply counts, everything that is apprehended in the order of memory is caught in something that structures it essentially in a way fundamentally different from everything that a theory of memory founded on the theme of pure and simple vital property can come to make conceivable.

That is what I try to illustrate, and there obviously metaphorically, when I speak to you of the future, of the future perfect, when I bring in, after the third time, the fourth time, namely that if one fixes, at this fourth time, an arrival point, that is to say one of the possible symbols, any one whatsoever can be fixed since this fourth time becomes again the same function as a second time, that is to say that α, β, γ, δ can be found again at that moment, at this fourth time.

If you fix, at this fourth time, as end point an α, β, γ, δ, there will result certain eliminations at the second and at the third time, which can in a way serve to imagine what is specified in an immediate future, from the moment when it becomes—relative to an aim, to a determined project—the future perfect.

The fact that certain elements of signifier are made impossible by that sole fact is something that I will illustrate metaphorically as the function that we could give to what I will call on this occasion ‘the impossible signifier’.

What I want to mark for you today is that, of course, I interrupted my development there, but as some [maintain?] precisely, in the name of a kind of false self-evidence that could come out of the fact that every kind of mystery does not disappear because laws can be extracted, and all just as simple, by considering in a differentiated way the terms of the different vertices in the parallelepiped construction that I gave you.

The question is not there. What I would like you to hold for an instant before your mind is that this simply means that as soon as there is a grapheme, there is an orthography, and I am going to illustrate it for you at once in another way than this one, which will perhaps have in your eyes a more probative value, although I did not fabricate all this as a kind of excursion into mathematics, with the universal incompetence that would characterize me.

You would be wrong to believe it. First, these are not things I have been thinking about since yesterday; second, I had it checked by a mathematician. Do not believe that because these precisions have been added, the least element of uncertainty or fragility has been introduced; I repeat it to you: this has been checked.

I now want to tell you in what this has that value which pertinently illustrates what I wanted to say a moment ago, when I told you: ‘as soon as there is a grapheme, there is an orthography’. It is that, from these simple hypothetical data, and because of a certain simplicity to which I shall return in a moment in particular to justify why I started from odd and not what I could just as well have done at the start, namely to distinguish indeed as I was told:

– the odd with two light feet at the beginning, [( –– + ), ( + + – )],
– or the odd with two light feet at the end, [( – + + ), ( + –– )],
– the anapaest[Foot of three syllables, two short followed by a long],
– from the dactyl[Foot formed of a long syllable followed by two short].

I did not do it—we shall return to it—and it is precisely in that that the interest of the question consists, namely that, from certain definitions, perhaps indeed quite rudimentary and themselves eliminated, certain intuitive elements and especially that particularly striking intuitive element which is the one founded on scansion, already involve a whole kind of bodily commitment.

Poetry begins there, but we do not even enter into poetry; we make only the notion of symmetry or asymmetry intervene, and I will tell you why it seems to me interesting to limit, to this strict element, the creation of the first signifier, starting therefore from this hypothesis, but not in the sense in which the habitual usage understands the word hypothesis, in the sense of definition, action, or extremely simple premises that result from it.
α, δ → α, β, γ, δ →α, β
γ, βγ, δ

1er temps 2ème temps 3ème temps

I reproduce here my table with here the second time undetermined and here[3ème temps] α, β above and γ, δ below.
Now let us come to the fifth time: α, β, δ above and below which shows us that here, if we note
– what is possible after an α,
– then what is possible after a β,
– then what is possible after each of the others,
we see here that α, β, γ, δ can occur.

You see the excess of possibilities we have: we have all the possibles, and we have them at both levels.
Only the slightest examination of the situation shows you that if you choose here as arrival point, thus at the fifth time, any letter whatsoever, the letter δ for example, you perceive that if you also take as starting point another letter, for example the letter α, if you say I want to have a series such that at the first time there is α and at the fifth time there is β, you see at once that it cannot in any case be that letter there, nor anything of that line there. Since, from the fact that at the start you set off from α, you can have only what occurs here above the line of dichotomy, that is to say α or β, and then therefore you can have only what is also above this dichotomous line, that is to say α, β, γ, δ.

But what is needed for you to have β? It is necessary that here you have α because β can come only from α. It results from this that when you have the intention of making a series where there are two determined letters, at a time-spacing of 5, the median letter, this one, at the third time, is determined in an absolutely univocal way.

I could show you other properties just as striking, but I will keep to those to show you whether this can bring forth to your mind the dimension that is at issue to evoke. It is that it results from this property that if you take any term whatsoever, by considering the term two times prior and the term two times posterior, you can immediately verify—and then that in a simple way that absolutely involves no disturbance to the eye; it is a verification that a typographer can make—at any point whatsoever in the chain whether there is a fault. It suffices to refer back to the term that is two times prior and to the term that is two times posterior. There can be in that case only one possible letter.

In other words, as soon as there is a grapheme, the slightest emergence of the grapheme brings forth at the same time the orthography, that is to say the possible control of a fault[cf. supra p. 117: ‘control apparatus’]. That is why this example is constructed: to show you that from the most simple, the most elementary emergence of the signifier, the law emerges entirely—of course—independently of every real element. That does not mean that in any way chance is commanded; it is that the law comes out with the signifier, prior and independent precisely of every experience.

This is what is made to be demonstrated by this speculation on the α, β, γ, δ.
These things seem to entail a certain number of very great resistances for some minds.

Nevertheless it seemed to me that it was a simpler path to make felt a certain dimension than to advise, for example, the reading, even the commenting, of Mr. FREGE, a mathematician of this century who devoted himself to this science apparently the simplest of the simple, which is arithmetic, and who believed he had to take considerable detours…
because the closer a thing is to simplicity, the harder it is to grasp
…but assuredly detours entirely convincing for demonstrating that there is no possible deduction of the number 3 from experience alone.

This, of course, leads us into a series of philosophical or mathematical speculations of which I did not think I should make you undergo the ordeal. This is nonetheless very important, for if no deduction from experience…
contrary to what Mr. JUNG could believe
…can make us reach the number 3, it is certain that the distinction of the symbolic order in relation to the real order enters into the real like a plowshare and introduces into it an original dimension, and that this dimension, we analysts, and insofar as we work on this register of speech, we must take account of its originality. That is what is at stake on this occasion.

To tell the truth, I fear tiring you, and I am going to do something else for you: I am going to tell you a more intuitive idea that came to me, and that one is less certain in its assertion. Nevertheless I can tell it to you: it is the remark that came to me one day in my mind, while I was in a formidable zoo located somewhere sixty kilometers from London and where the animals appear there in the most complete freedom, the grilles being buried in the ground at the bottom of invisible ditches. I was contemplating the lion surrounded by three magnificent lionesses, this in the aspect of good understanding and of the most peaceful mood.

It seems to me that I did not make in my mind too great a leap when I was asking myself why this good understanding among these animals about which I should normally, according to what we know, see the most manifest signs of rivalry or conflict break out. It is simply because the lion does not know how to count up to 3. Understand clearly that it is because the lion does not know how to count up to three that the lionesses do not feel between themselves the slightest feeling of jealousy, at least apparent. I offer this to your meditation.

In other words, we must in no case neglect the introduction of the signifier, in order to understand the emergence that is at issue, each time we find ourselves before the appearance of reality that is our principal object in analysis, the reality of interhuman conflict. One could even go further and say that, in the end, it is because men do not know how to count much better than the lion—namely that this number 3 is never completely integrated, that it is only articulated—that conflict exists.

Because, of course, the maintenance of the dual relation, fundamentally animal, nonetheless continues to prevail in a certain zone, precisely that of the imaginary, and it is precisely insofar as man does nonetheless know how to count that, in the last analysis, there occurs this something that we call conflict.

If it were not so difficult to arrive at articulating the number three, there would not be this gap between the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal that we are precisely trying these days to cross as we can, with the help of little rope ladders and other tricks, of which I simply want to make you see that from the moment when one tries to cross it, it is always to the tricks to which one is delivered, that there is no kind of truly experiential crossing of this gap between the 2 and the 3.

It is very precisely at the point we have reached with little Hans, at the moment when he is going to approach this passage that we have defined, and which is called the castration complex, and of which we can see that at the start it is quite obviously what he does not have, since he plays with this Wiwimacher that is here, that is not there, that is his mother’s or the big horse’s or the little horse’s or daddy’s, which is his too but of which, in the end, we do not see for a single instant that it is for him anything other than a very pretty object for a game of hide-and-seek, and even one in which he is capable of taking the greatest pleasure.

For a certain number of you, I think, will have referred to this text. That is where one starts, it is only that that is at issue. This child finds himself—no doubt with the intention of his parents—presenting to us at the outset this sort of problematic of the imaginary phallus which is everywhere and which is nowhere, as being the essential element of his relation with what is for him what FREUD would at that moment call ‘the other person’ in the clearest way, and which is the mother.

That is where he has arrived, and it is at that moment, when everything seems to be going so well that FREUD emphasizes it to us, thanks to a kind of liberalism, even educational laxity, quite characteristic of the pedagogy that seems to have emerged in the early days of psychoanalysis, that we see the child develop in the frankest, clearest, happiest way.

It is indeed after these three pretty antecedents, to everyone’s surprise, that what we can call, without overly dramatizing, a small snag occurs: the phobia. That is to say that from a certain moment this child has shown a great fright before something, this privileged object which turns out to be the horse, of which I already told you that it was in a certain way metaphorical. In the text, when the child had said to his mother: ‘If you have a make-pee, you must have a very big make-pee, a make-pee like a horse.’ It is clear that if we see the image of the horse appear on the horizon, it is from that moment that the child enters into the phobia.

In order to make this path metaphorically through the observation of little Hans, one must understand how the child is going to pass from a relation so simple, in the end so happy, so clearly articulated, to the phobia. Where is the unconscious at that moment? Where is repression? It does not seem that there is any:
– he questions, with the greatest freedom, his father, his mother, about the presence or absence of the make-pee,
– he tells them that he went to the zoo and that he saw an animal, the lion on that occasion provided with a big make-pee-pee.

And the make-pee plays a role which moreover tends to make itself present for all sorts of reasons, not stated entirely at the beginning of the observation, but which we see appear after the fact.

That the child finds great pleasure in exhibiting himself, some of his games clearly showing the essentially, at that moment, symbolic character of the make-pee, he is going to exhibit it in the dark, he shows it at once as a hidden object, he also uses it as an intermediary element for his relations with the objects of his interest, that is to say the little girls whom he asks to intervene, to help him, to whom he lets it be looked at. That the fact that his mother or his father help him—which is also emphasized—plays the greatest role in the establishment of his organs as an element of interest by which, without any doubt, he gives himself the joy of captivating the attention, the interest, even the caresses of a certain number of people around him.

That is where we are when something is going to happen. To have an idea of the harmony in which this something finds itself, tell yourselves that it is before the phobia that little Hans happens to manifest, on the imaginary plane, all the most formally typical attitudes one can expect from what we call in our rough language ‘virile aggression’.

He is with the little girls in this state of putting into play of a courtship that is more or less present, and which even differentiates itself, distances itself into two modes:
– there are the little girls whom he presses, whom he embraces, whom he aggresses,
– there are others with whom he deals under the mode of the Lieberklass-distanz,
…two very differentiated modes of relations, already very subtle, I would say almost very civilized, very ordered, very cultivated. The very term ‘cultivated’ is used by FREUD to designate the differentiation that little Hans makes in his objects. He does not behave in the same way with the little girls he considers as cultivated ladies, ladies of his world, and with the little girls of his landlord.

There is there every appearance of a particularly happy outlet in what one can call the transference, the reinvestment of feelings carried toward the feminine object, under the aspect of the mother, toward other feminine objects. We can conceive that something occurs that brings, into this development made easy, we are told, by this particularly open, dialoguing relation that in no way forbids any mode of expression to the child.

What is it that occurs? How already can we try to approach the problem, since it is a matter not of skimming over, as I have done up to now, but of following step by step the critique of the observation? I think I am not forcing the text in already saying what the sign of this underlying structuration is, which is the one I gave you as that of the child’s relation to the mother, and from which the introduction of the crisis is conceived, in the form of the putting into play, of the entry into the play of the real penis.

There is one thing that in the text has never been commented on. The child has a dream; he thinks that he is with little Mariedl, who is one of his little playmates whom he sees in the summer in a resort in Austria. He recounts that he is with the little girl, then his dream is recounted again and one says:

‘It’s funny, he dreamed that he was with the little girl’

And there is a very pretty correction by Hans:

‘Not only with Mariedl, alone with Mariedl….’

I think that this reply…
which, like many other things, teeming in the observation, passes by in the reading,
or more exactly that one gets rid of in the sense that these are only children’s stories
…has its importance, and FREUD says it well: everything has a meaning. I think that this is strictly conceivable only within this imaginary dialectic which is the one I opened up for you as being the starting plane of the child’s relations to the mother.

This occurs at 3 years and 9 months, and we were told that at 3 years and 6 months the birth of the little sister took place; consequently this can already, of course, satisfy you. ‘Not only with, but alone with…’, that is to say that one can be with while being completely alone, that is to say not to have, as with the mother, this intruder. There is no doubt at that moment that the child Hans begins to get used to the presence of the little sister. I therefore think that, on the plane of the remark of the most classic type, this cannot in any case but appear to you as obvious, and satisfy you.

Nevertheless you know very well that that is not where I stop; namely that I say that certainly this real intrusion of the other child into the child’s relation with the mother is indeed made to precipitate this or that critical moment, this or that decisive anxiety, but that what I started from and what I insist on, and why I do not hesitate to place the emphasis concerning this ‘alone with’, is that—whatever the position—the child is never alone with the mother.

All the progress of what takes place in the apparently dual relation of the child with the mother is marked by this absolutely essential element: it is that the child intervenes…
as the experience of the analysis of female sexuality gives us the assurance of it, and to which one must keep the point of reference, the axis, firmly, of what FREUD maintained to the end concerning this female sexuality
…only as substitute, compensation, in short in some reference to this something that is what essentially lacks in the mother, and which therefore never leaves him alone with the mother.

It is insofar as the mother is situated, and little by little is learned by the child, as being marked by this fundamental lack, and by this lack after which she herself seeks, and of which he, the child, gives her a satisfaction only—if we want to call it thus provisionally—that is substitutive. It is on this essentially basis that every kind of new gap is introduced, that every kind of reopening of the question is conceived, and especially the one that arises with real genital maturation, that is to say in the boy with the introduction of masturbation, this real enjoyment with his own real penis.

It is within this constellation that nothing can be understood otherwise than within this starting constellation, which is the one that is the foundation by which the critical elements can be introduced that can have the diverse outcomes that constitute
– an Oedipus complex with a normal outcome,
– or an Oedipus complex more or less approached in a more or less negativized way, and which is not at all—what one usually teaches you—a neurosis.

So let us take up again where we are, and make here a small remark, namely that if the child has to discover this dimension, namely that something is desired by the mother beyond himself, that is to say beyond the object of pleasure first that he feels himself to be in his mother, and that he aspires to be, the situation must be conceived, like every kind of analytic situation, only in the essentially intersubjective reference that always includes, at once, and correlatively, the original dimension of each subject, but at the same time the reality of this intersubjective perspective as it has entered into each subject. In other words, I point out to you in passing this something that is veiled at the outset, and that we shall manage to unveil only at the end.

But you already know enough from the observation to be able at least to pose the question, and to refer to terms that I used formerly to good or bad effect, namely these essential terms as of a wholly major division of the signifying approach to whatever reality it may be in a subject, namely metaphor and metonymy. It is indeed the case to apply it and at least to let so many question marks run. It is that in every intersubjective situation as it is established between the child and the mother we shall have a prior question, so to speak, to pose to ourselves. It will be prior and it will probably be only at the end that it will be decided, namely that in this function of substitution what finally makes an image to express it means nothing.

Substitution, that is easy to say; so let us try to substitute a pebble for a piece of bread. When you put it into the elephant’s trunk, he will not take it in quite the even tone you might believe. It is not a matter of substitution; it is a matter of knowing what this signifying substitution means, and to tell the truth it is a matter of knowing, for the mother and in relation to this phallus which is the object of her desire, what the function of the child is.

It is clear that it is not quite the same thing
– if the child for example is the metaphor of her love for the father,
– or if he is the metonymy of her desire for the phallus that she does not have and that she will never have.

Everything indicates very precisely in the mother’s conduct…
which is there wholly evident, with this child whom she literally drags everywhere with her, from the W.C. right up to her bed
…that the child is for her an absolutely indispensable appendage and that consequently…
for that is exactly Hans’s mother, whom FREUD adores, this mother whom he treated, this mother so good and so solicitous for this child—and in addition she is pretty—it is this lady who finds the means to change her underpants in front of her child, it is all the same of a very particular dimension
…and if something is done in this observation, if something comes to illustrate what I am telling you as essential in this order, it is that what is behind the veil is indeed the observation of little Hans and many others as well that show it to us. What does it mean that: the child is the metonymy of her desire for the phallus?

That does not mean that she has more consideration for the child’s phallus, as she shows well, in truth, this person so liberal when it is a matter of education, of talking about things, when it is a matter of coming to the point and putting her finger on this little bit of thing that the child brings out for her, she is seized by a terrible fright.

It is all the same like that in this kind of living tonus; one must try to reassemble this observation of little Hans so that it shines. So you see it: it is not quite the same thing to say that the child is taken as a metonymy of the mother’s desire for the phallus; that implies this very important thing that it is not as phallus-bearer that he is metonymic, it is as totality.

It is precisely there that the drama is established. For him everything would go very well if it were a matter of Wiwimacher, but it is not a matter of that: it is he, entirely, who is at issue, and it is because it is he, entirely, who is at issue that the difference begins very seriously to appear at the moment when the real Wiwimacher enters into play. It becomes for him an object of satisfaction. It is at that moment that what is called anxiety begins to occur.

What is called anxiety is tied to this: that he can measure all the difference there is between that for which he is loved, and what he can give, and that from that moment this child who, by the sole fact that he is in the position which is the original position of the child in relation to the mother, that is to say that he is there to be an object of pleasure, thus that he is in a relation where he is fundamentally imagined, and all that can happen to him that is best is to pass from the purely passive state…
this is what is essential: this primordial passivity, we shall see it again, and if we do not see that this is where this primordial passivation is inserted, we can understand nothing of the observation of The Wolf Man
…what he can do best…
beyond being imagined, caught in the capture, in the trap of this something into which he enters in order to be the object of his mother and where he realizes, so to speak, little by little what he truly is, he is imagined
…what he can do best is to imagine himself as he is imagined, that is to say to pass to the middle voice, if one may express oneself thus.

From the moment when he also exists as real, he does not have much choice: obviously it is certain that he can imagine himself as fundamentally other and rejected, other than what is desired, and as such outside the imaginary field where she could up to then find satisfaction by the place he occupied in it.

FREUD emphasizes it: what is at issue is something that first arises, an anxiety, but anxiety of what? We have traces of it: a dream; he wakes up sobbing because his mother was going to leave, where ‘you were going to leave’ he says to the father, something that is a separation.

We can complete these terms with a thousand other features: it is insofar as he is separated from his mother and when he is with someone else that these anxieties manifest themselves. What is certain is that these anxieties appear first, and FREUD emphasizes it: the feeling of anxiety is distinguished from the phobia, that is to say from this something that is not so easy to grasp, and that we are going to try to delimit.

What is a phobia? Naturally one can jump blithely and say: the phobia is the representative element in it. Fine, but you are not much further along after that:
– why this representative element?
– and why such a singular representation?
– and what role does it play?

Another trap consists in telling oneself that there is a purpose, and that it must serve something.
– Why, then, would it serve something?
– Would there not also be things that serve no purpose?
– Why decide in advance that the phobia serves something?
– Perhaps it serves exactly no purpose.

Everything would have gone just as well if it had not been there; why have preconceived ideas of purpose on this occasion? We are going to try to know the function of the phobia. What is the phobia on this occasion? In other words, what is the particular structure of little Hans’s phobia? Which will perhaps lead us to have some notions about what the general structure of a phobia is.

Be that as it may, I would like from now on to draw your attention, on this point, to the difference between anxiety and phobia; it is quite perceptible here. I do not know whether the phobia is such a representative thing as that, because we shall see that it is very difficult to know what he is afraid of. He articulates it in a thousand ways, but there remains an entirely singular residue. If you have read the observation, you know that this horse—which is brown, white, black, green, and these colors are not without interest—poses an enigma that, up to the end of the observation, is never resolved. It is I do not know what kind of black patch that it has there, which makes it an animal from prehistoric times.

In front of this horse’s muzzle there is this kind of black patch, and the father to question the child:
– ‘Is it the bit that he has in his mouth?’
– ‘Not at all,’ says the child.
– ‘Is it the harness?’
– ‘No, no…’
– ‘And the one you see there, does he have the patch?’
– ‘No, no…’ says the child.
– And then one fine day, tired, he says: ‘Yes, that one has it, let’s not talk about it anymore.’

What is certain is that one never knows what this black is that is in front of the horse’s mouth. So it is not so simple, a phobia, since there are even elements that are almost irreducible.

It is rather little representative, and if there is something that really gives the feeling of what one has expressed in those surges that periodically occur in analysis, this notion of a kind of negative hallucinatory element, it is indeed something there in this sort of blur, for in the end that is what appears clearest to us in this horse’s head, and which is well suited to give us the idea of it.

But there is one certain thing: there is a radical difference between two feelings, between this feeling of anxiety insofar as the child suddenly feels himself, as something that can suddenly be completely put out of play. Of course the little sister prepares, and at most, the question, and I repeat it to you: it is on a much deeper ground that the crisis opens, that the ground gives way under one’s feet, from the moment when the child can conceive that he can suddenly no longer in any way fulfill his function, that he can be nothing anymore, and that quite simply he is nothing more than this something that looks like something, but that at the same time is nothing, and that is called a metonymy.

That is to say—I am speaking of something that we have already seen—the metonymy is the procedure of the realist novel: if a realist novel interests us, it is not because of all the minute real shimmer that is brought to us, for the realist novel is always in the end only a piling-up of clichés; if these clichés interest us, it is precisely because behind that they always aim at something else; they aim precisely exactly at what seems to be the most contrary, that is to say everything that is lacking, everything that makes it so that, very far beyond all these details, beyond this whole kind of glittering of pebbles that is given to us, there is the something that precisely holds us; the more metonymic it is, the more beyond is the aim of the novel.

So our dear little Hans suddenly finds himself precipitated, or at least precipitable, in his function of metonymy. He imagines himself as a nothingness, in order nonetheless to say this word in a more living way than a theoretical one. What happens from the moment when the phobia enters into play in his existence? One thing in any case is certain: in front of horses, it is not anxiety that he feels, it is fear. He is afraid that something real will happen; he tells us two things:
– that horses bite,
– that horses fall.

The difference there is between anxiety…
which literally is something without an object, and here I am only repeating FREUD because he articulated it perfectly
…and the phobia, is that for the phobia what is at issue is not at all anxiety, despite the tone he gives here to the horses: the horses carry anxiety, but what they carry is fear, and fear in a certain way always concerns something articulable, nameable, real:
– these horses can bite,
– these horses can fall.

They have quite other properties: that they can keep within themselves the trace of the anxiety that is at issue, and perhaps indeed there is some relation. We shall see later the relations there are between this blur, this kind of black patch, for the horses cover over something, and there is nevertheless something underneath that appears, that casts light behind what begins to float: it is this black.

But in the lived experience as such of anxiety, what there is in little Hans is fear. Fear of what? Not fear of the horse, fear of horses, so that from that moment on the world appears punctuated by a whole series of dangerous points, of alarm points, so to speak, which is something that, in a certain way, restructures it for him.

Here, following FREUD’s advice, who at a given moment asks himself questions about the function of the phobia, and who himself advises, in order to decide among these questions, to refer to other cases. Let us nonetheless not forget that one of the most typical forms of phobia…
we shall also see afterwards what a phobia is: is it a morbid species, or is it a syndrome
…one of the most widespread forms of phobia is agoraphobia, the phobia of castration. Agoraphobia is something that assuredly carries within itself its value: there is the world punctuated with signs of alarm; agoraphobia even shows us that these signs of alarm trace a field, a domain, an area.

Up to a certain point we can say that we know, if we absolutely have to attempt it, in what direction begins, I would not say the function, because one must not rush, but the sense of the phobia: it is indeed this, it is to introduce into the child’s world a structure, a certain way of putting into the foreground the function of an inside and an outside. Up to then the child was, in sum, in the inside of his mother; he has just been cast out of it, or to imagine himself cast out of it in anxiety; here he is who, with the help of something—it is an attempt, we approach the phobia from this side—the phobia, in sum, establishes a new order of the inside and the outside; a series of thresholds begin to structure the world.

It is not so simple; I am convinced that there would be much to learn here from a study of certain elements given to us by the ethnographer, of the way spaces are constructed in a village. In primitive civilizations one does not build villages any which way: there are cleared fields, and others virgin, and within that there are still limits that signify things truly fundamental as to the bearings of these people more or less close to the clearing-away from nature; there would be much to learn there, perhaps I will nonetheless say a few words to you about it. Be that as it may, there is threshold. There is more: there is also something that can present at this threshold as an image of what guards it, the term Schutzbau [protective construction] or of Vorbau [porch] of a building that comes in front, or of a guard building. [Es bleibt ihr nichts anderes übrig, als jeden der möglichen Anlässe zur Angstentwicklung durch einen psychischen Vorbau von der Art einer Vorsicht, einer Hemmung, eines Verbots zu sperren, und diese Schutzbauten sind es, die uns als Phobien erscheinen und für unsere Wahrnehmung das Wesen der Krankheit ausmachen.]

It is the term by which FREUD expressly articulated the phobia: it is something that is built in front of the point of anxiety. Already even there something begins to appear to us, to be articulated, that shows us its function. I simply want not to go too fast, and I ask you not to stop there, because one is accustomed to being content with little, and after all the idea that it is very pretty, that we have transformed anxiety into fear, fear is apparently more reassuring than anxiety, that is not certain either.

Simply we want to punctuate today that in the genesis, we cannot absolutely mark fear as a primitive element, primordial in the construction of the ego, as someone articulated it in the most formal way as the basis of all his doctrine, someone whom I never name and who is to be found on the [text] of a report to a certain ‘school’ said—more or less rightly—‘Parisian’.

Fear in no case can be considered as a primitive element, as a first element in the structure of neurosis. If there is a point on which we touch it, where we see that fear intervenes in the neurotic conflict as something that defends in front, as something entirely other, which is essentially and by nature without an object, which is anxiety, it is indeed the phobia that allows us to articulate it.

I will also remain today on this Vorbau of my discourse. I think I have brought you to this precise point where the question of the phobia is posed, in relation to what it is brought— and I ask you to take it in the deepest sense of the term—to respond to. We shall try to see next time where the continuation of things can lead us.