🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The fact of taking a walk is not a bad way of recognizing yourself within a considered space. If you considered things like this: that it is a matter, in a field in which certain itineraries have been traveled, of teaching you to imagine its topography outside the itineraries. I mean, to notice when you have, for example, returned to your point of departure and you do not notice it, or again for example to think when you are in a place as familiar and as perfectly self-contained as your bathroom, it will not often occur to you that if you pierced the wall, you would find yourself on the first floor of the neighboring bookshop, and I even go so far as to tell you that every day when you take your bath, the work continues in the neighboring bookshop, and that it is there within reach of your hand. So people say ‘What a metaphysician, that damn LACAN!’.

Yet it is roughly that, that is at stake: it is a matter of allowing you to spot certain connections, at the same time of making you notice the elements of the overall plan so that you are not reduced to what I shall call, intentionally, ‘the ceremonial of marked itineraries’.

So here we are, with little Hans, arrived at the point where, in this situa¬tion where everything was not going so badly, anxiety and phobia arrive. It is not without intention that I have distinguished one from the other, conforming in this moreover strictly to what you can find in FREUD’s text.

Since it is a matter of topography and not of a walk at random, although it is by an unusual walk that I hope to be able to present this topography to you: it is unusual, it is not that it has not already been traveled, it has already been traveled in the observation of little Hans, I simply want to begin to show you these sorts of things that the first idiot who comes along could find there. Except a psychoanalyst, because he is not the first idiot who comes along.

This symbolic mother becomes real, precisely insofar as she mani¬fests herself in her refusal of love, and the very object of satisfaction, the breast, becomes symbolic of frustration: refusal of the object of love. This real hole is precisely that thing that does not exist. The real being full by its nature, to make a real hole one must introduce a symbolic object into it. What is it about?

We have reached the point where the child whose process—the one that is called ‘pre-Oedipal’—is going to consist, in sum, in making himself an object of love…
for this mother who is for him what is most important, who is even essentially what matters
…in making himself an object of love is led progressively to notice that he introduces himself as a third, that he must slip in, that he must push his way somewhere between this desire of his mother that he is learning to experience, and this imaginary object that is the phallus.

This that we must postulate, because it is the simplest representation that allows us to synthesize a whole series of accidents that are incon¬ceivable otherwise than as fruits of this structure of symbolic-imaginary relation of the pre-Oedipal period, this is strictly articulated as I tell you in a chapter of FREUD’s Three Essays on Sexuality, volume V, p. 85, a chapter entitled: ‘The child’s researches into sexuality’, or ‘Infantile theories on sexuality’.

There you will see formulated, as I tell you, that it is very precisely from his relation with the infantile theory of the phallic mother, and the necessity of passing through the castration complex, that what are called perversions as a whole are conceived and explained.

So that the notion that there are still people to maintain, that perversion is something fundamentally tendential, instinctual, that there is something in the pervert that is direct, a sort of short circuit in the direction of satisfaction that is something that truly makes its density and its balance, and who thus think they interpret the notion of perversion as ‘the negative of neurosis’, as if perversion were, in sum, in itself the satisfaction that is repressed in neurosis, as if it were the positive—this is exactly the contrary, because the negative of a negation is not at all necessarily its positive.

As is shown by the fact that FREUD affirms in the clearest way that perversion is structured in relation with everything that is ordered around the notion ‘absence and presence of the phallus’, and that perversion always has some relation, even if only on the horizon, with the castration complex itself. Conse¬quently it is held at the same level, if one can say, from the genetic point of view, as neurosis. It is structured in such a way as to be its negative, or more exac¬tly its inverse, perhaps, but which is just as structured as it is. It is structured by the same dialectic, to use the vocabulary close to that which I am using here.

This reference to infantile theories of sexuality unquestionably deserves that we linger on this notion of the importance very quickly given by FREUD to the very notion of infantile theory, and of the importance in the economy of the child’s development of this theory, but whose full flowering—namely the chapter that I am designating to you precisely here—was added to the Three Essays on Sexuality only much later, in 1920 I think. It is the defect of the German edition not to recall, with regard to each chapter, the date at which it came to be added to this composition of the Three Essays on Sexuality. The ‘infantile theories of sexuality’ and their importance in libidinal develop¬pement are something that, all by itself, should teach a psychoanalyst to relativize this massive notion, slightly marked by pejoration, which he handles at every turn under the term intellectualization; I mean to make us notice that something that, at first glance, can present itself as situated in the intellectual domain, obviously has an importance that the simple and massive opposition of the intellectual and the affective cannot in any way account for.

It is quite certain that what is called ‘infantile theory’, or this activity of research concerning sexual reality that is that of the child, is quite another necessity than what we call—moreover improperly—but what must be recognized to be a kind of diffuse notion of the superstructural character of intellectual activity, which is more or less implicitly admitted in what one can call the background of belief to which common consciousness is ordered.

It is quite another thing that is at stake; it is something that is situated—if one can also use this term—in the whole of the body, where its common sense is much deeper. This thing is much deeper because it envelops all the subject’s activity, and because it motivates what one can also call affective terms, which means that it directs the affects or affections of the subject along lines of master images, that it is, in sum, correlative to a whole series of fulfillments in the broadest sense, which manifest themselves in actions quite irreducible to utilitarian ends.

If you like, let us classify this whole of actions or activities by a term that is perhaps not the best, nor the most global, but the one to which I refer and that I take for its expressive value, by qualifying it as ceremonial activities, and not only ceremonious. I mean: the whole of everything that, in individual life as in collective life, can be put to this register, and you know that it is everywhere, that there is no example of a human activity that eliminates them, that even civilizations with a very strongly utilitarian and functional tendency see, singularly, these cere¬monial activities reproduce themselves in the most unexpected niches. There must be some reason for that.

To put it plainly, what we must refer to in order to center the exact importance, the value of what are called infantile theories of sexuality and of the whole order of activities that, in the child, are structured around them, is assuredly the notion of myth, and there is no need to be a great clerk, I mean to have deepened this notion of myth. Which is nonetheless very much my intention to do here. I shall try to do it gently, in stages, since indeed it seems necessary to me to accentuate more and more the continuity between what is our field of referential elements to which I believe I must connect them, not at all because, as I have sometimes been told, I claim here to give you a general metaphysics, nor to cover the whole field of reality, but only to speak to you about ours and the nearest ones, the most immedia¬tely connected.

It is precisely in order not to fall into an undue ‘system of the world’, into a projection that is quite insufficient and poor, which is very frequently made, of what is our domain, with a whole series of orders and layered fields of reality, which can have with what we do—because the big is always found again in the small—some overall analogy, but which assuredly cannot in any way exhaust reality and even the whole of human pro¬blems.

But on the other hand, not to isolate our field completely and to refuse to see what, in our field, is not analogous but directly in connection, I mean directly in grip, engaged with a reality that is accessible to us by other disciplines and other human sciences, that is what seems indispensable to me precisely in order to situate our domain well, and even simply in order for us to find our way in it: that is the reason for the notion of ‘infantile theories’ on which we are now emerging in the most natural way.

Because for as long as I have been speaking to you about Hans, you have been able to notice that if this observation is a labyrinth, even at first glance a muddle, it is precisely because of the place held by a whole series of the little Hans’s elucubrations, which are—some—very rich, and which give the impression of a proliferation, of a luxury that cannot fail to appear to you as falling precisely into the class of these theoretical [infantile] elaborations that play so great a role.

We shall simply approach myth as a first evi¬dence. What is called a myth, whatever it may be, religious, folkloric, I mean taken at different stages of its legacy, is something that presents itself as a kind of narrative.
– One can say many things about this narrative.
– One can take it under different structural aspects, for example say that there is something atemporal.
– One can also try to define its structure as to the sites that it defines.
– One can also take it under the character, the literary form, in which it strikes us that it has some kinship with poetic creation, and at the same time that it is something very distinct from it, in the sense that it is tied to certain constancies absolutely not subjected to subjective invention.

It is also something that would allow us at least to indi¬cate the problems that it poses. I think that, overall, we shall say that it has a character of fiction

– but of a fiction that has in itself a kind of stability that does not at all make it malleable to this or that modification that may be brought to it, or more exactly that implies that any modification thereby implies another, invariably suggesting the notion of a structure.

– That this fiction, on the other hand, has only a singular relation with something always implied behind, and even of which it carries in itself the formally indicated message, namely with truth, is also something that cannot be detached from myth.

I point out to you on this occasion that I was able to write somewhere in the seminar on The Purloined Letter, about the fact that I was analyzing a fiction, that I meant, at least in a certain sense, that this operation was entirely legitimate because, as I said, in any correctly structured fiction, one can touch with one’s finger this structure which, in truth itself, can be designated as the same as that of fiction. The structural necessity that is carried by any expression of truth is precisely a structure that is the same: truth has a structure—if one can say—of fiction.

These truths, or this truth, this aim of myth, presents itself with an even quite striking charac¬ter: it is a character that presents itself first as a character of inexhaustible, I mean that it participates in what one could call, to use quickly an old term, the character of a schema, something that is precisely much closer to structure than to any content, and that is found again and reapplied— in the most material sense of the word—upon all sorts of data, with this sort of ambiguous efficacy that characterizes every myth.

What is structured, what is most adequate to this sort of mold that the mythical category gives, is a certain type of truth of which, to limit ourselves to what is our field and our experience, we cannot not see that it is a relation of Man, but to what?

We shall certainly not say it quite at random, nor quite easily, and we shall not answer too quickly this ‘to what?’. To answer: ‘to nature’ will, I think, very quickly leave us dissatisfied after the remarks I have made to you: nature, as soon as it presents itself to man, as it is reckoned with him, is always deeply denatured. If we say ‘to being’, we shall certainly not say that these are inaccurate, but we shall perhaps go a little too far, to emerge into philosophy—indeed even the most recent one of our friend HEIDEGGER, however pertinent this reference may be.

Assuredly we have closer references, more arti¬culated terms. They are those very ones that we can immediately approach in our experience when we notice that it is a matter of the themes of life and death, of existence and non-existence, of birth quite espe¬cially, that is to say the appearance of what does not yet exist, and which is particularly linked to the existence of the subject himself and to the horizons that his experience brings him, and that on the other hand the subject of a sex, and quite especially of his own—his natural sex—is that something to which our experience shows us that this mythical activity is limited. There is in the child—and employed—this mythical activity.

So we see there, and easily, that by its content, by its aim, it finds itself at once in accord and at the same time not completely covering what we find under the proper term, properly speaking, of myth. In especially ethnographic exploration, myths as they present themselves in their fiction are always more or less myths aiming, no longer at the individual origin of man, but at his specific origin, the creation of man, the genesis of his fundamental nourishing relations, the invention, as one says, of the great human resources, that of fire, that of agri¬culture, that of the domestication of animals. Here is what we find in myths.

It is also the fiction that explains how this relation came to man with this something that is constantly put into question in myths, namely this secret force, malevolent or beneficent, but essen¬tially characterized by its sacred character of relation to sacred power, diversely designated in mythical narratives, but which assuredly allows itself, for us, to be situated in a manifest identity with the relation of man to this power of signification, and very especially of its signifying instrument, of what makes it so that man, in nature, introduces this something that, in moving it away, brings man closer to the universe, and that makes him capable of introducing into the natural order not only his own needs…
his factors of trans¬formation subjected to his needs
…but something that assuredly goes beyond, the notion of a deep identity never completely—nor even approximately so—grasped, between this power he has to handle or to be handled, to include himself in a signifier, and the power he has to embody the instance of this signifier in a series of interventions that do not set themselves up at the origin so much as gratuitous activities, as the pure and simple introduction of the signifying instrument into the chain of natural things.

These myths, whose connection, the relation of contiguity with infantile mythical creation is sufficiently indicated by the comparisons that I have just made to you, pose for us, in sum, this problem of something that has already lasted for some time, which is called the investigation of myths, if you like scientific or comparative mythology, which more and more elaborates in a method whose character of formalization already indicates that a certain step is crossed…
and also by the character of fecundity that this formalization entails
…that it is in this sense that perhaps in the end…
more than by the law of analogies and the various culturalist, naturalist references that have been employed up to now in the analysis of myths
…by this formalization, can be brought out from myths what one can call elements or units which, at their level, have the character of a structural functioning comparable—without for all that being identical [mythèmes/sémantèmes]—to that which is brought out in the study of linguistics by the elaborations of the different modern taxonomic elements.

People have been able to construct and put into practice the efficacy of the isolation of this or that element that we define as the unit of mythical construction that one calls myths. But in noticing that, in pursuing the experiment in a series of myths that one puts to the test precisely of this decomposition, to see how their recompositions are going to function, one notices a surprising unity among myths that appear the most distant, on the condi¬tion of moving away from what one can call the facial analogy of the myth.

For example, to say that an incest and a murder are two equivalent things is something that, at first glance, will not occur to you, but which, by comparing two myths or two levels of the myth, for example what happens at two different generations, makes us notice that by positing in a constellation that will have an aspect quite comparable to those little cubes that I was drawing for you last time on the board:

It seems that it is by placing at the different vertices of this construction the terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, for example…
mother unknown to the subject, father in this or that position in the 1st generation
…that you also find ‘incest’, for example at such or such other vertex, and when you pass to the following generation you find point by point…
and according to laws that have interest only in being able to give them a strict and unambiguous formalization
…the notion of twin brothers to intersect and be in a way the foreseen transformation of the father-mother couple in the 1st generation. You see murder arrive situated in the same place by this operation of transformation already regulated by a certain number of structural hypotheses on the way we must treat the myth.

This then gives us an idea of what I could call the weight, the presence, the instance of the signifier as such, its proper impact, of isolating something that is in a way always the most hidden, since it is a matter of something that in itself signifies nothing, but which assuredly bears the whole order of significations.

If something of this nature exists, it is nowhere more perceptible than in myth.

This necessary preamble indicates to you in what sense we think we are approaching, in order to submit it to this test of this profusion of themes that at first glance are frankly imaginative…
indeed, as FREUD himself evokes it as possible in the observation, since he suggests it as being the supposed remark of an interlocutor
…imaginative themes that could just as well be suggested, if indeed this term must be taken in the simplest sense, namely that something that is articulated by one subject passes into the other subject as a received truth, at least as an accepted form with a certain character of belief, in a way a covering, a garment, given to reality, which is thus received from one subject into another and which can therefore suppose some doubt, and by the term ‘suggestion’ implied, concerning the authenticity of the construction at issue.

It is a construction received by the subject, and of course there is no notion that is always easier to see coming as an element of critique, why not legitimate, and who more than we would fail to think that there is there something that deserves all the more to be taken into consideration? We do maintain that the cultural elements of symbolic organization of the world are something that is very precisely, by its nature, belonging to no one, is something that must be received, learned, and of course there is something that gives the incontestable foundation to this notion of suggestion. What is also striking is that not only does this suggestion exist in the case of little Hans, but that we see it spread out in broad daylight. One can say that the interrogatory mode of little Hans’s father presents itself at every instant as representing a real inquisition sometimes present, indeed even having all the characteristics of a direction given to the child’s answers.

Assuredly the father—as FREUD underscores in many places—inter¬venes in an approximate, coarse way, even frankly clumsy. He moreover himself manifests all sorts of misunderstandings in the way he records the child’s answers, in the way he presses him to understand too much, and too quickly, which FREUD also underscores. And what is also quite manifest on reading the observation is that precisely something occurs that is far from being independent of this paternal intervention, with all its defects at every instant pointed out and designated by FREUD. It is quite manifest:
– one sees Hans’s behavior and his constructions,
– one sees him in the most perceptible way respond to such paternal intervention,
– one even sees him in particular, from a certain moment, so to speak, get carried away, and the phobia take on a character of ac¬celeration, of quite perceptible hyperproductivity.

Of course it is the most interesting thing there is to see what these different moments of mythical production in little Hans correspond to, and there is also something that is quite manifest: it is that this production, while having this character that the term imaginative indicates implicitly in everyone’s vocabulary, namely this character of being invented, even of gratuitousness, which is implied in the use one makes of this term.

Someone recently, regarding an interrogation that I was doing of one of the patients whom I present, had pointed out to me in this patient the ima¬ginative character of certain of his constructions. And for him it was something that always seemed to indicate I do not know what hysterical note of ‘suggestion’ or effect of suggestion in this production of the patient. Whereas it was easy to notice that it was nothing of the sort, but that—although provoked, stimulated by a question—the patient’s pre-delusional productivity had manifested itself with its own stamp and its own force of proliferation, according strictly to its own structures. That is not even at all the impression one has when it is a matter of Hans.

One has the impression at no moment of a delusional production; I would even say more: one has the clear impression of a production of play, not only of play, but it is quite clear that it is so playful that Hans himself has some embarrassment in closing the loop and sustaining this or that path into which he commits himself after having indicated I do not know what magnificent and enormous story bordering on farce, about the intervention for example of the stork regarding the birth of his little sister Anna. He is quite capable of saying: ‘And then after all, what I have just told you there, do not believe it.’

Nevertheless, it remains no less true that in this play there appear less constant terms than a certain configuration, elusive sometimes, other times graspable in a striking way, and that is what I would like to introduce you into, namely this sort of structural necessity that presides not only over the construction of each of what one can call, with all the usu¬al precautions, ‘Hans’s little myths’, but also over their progress, their transformation, and especially by trying to draw your attention to this: that it is not always obligatorily their content that matters.

I mean that the more or less ordered reviviscence of earlier states of mind, of what is still called on this occasion ‘the anal complex’, for example, which will be exhausted in everything Hans lets himself go to show regarding the Lumpf which plays its role in this observation, and which literally for the father…
which FREUD tells us he had deliberately left in ignorance of themes that it was very likely he would encounter, and that he, FREUD, foresaw
…is unexpected. FREUD names two of them, and which have arisen in the course of the exploration of the child by his father, namely: the anal complex, and no more and no less: the castration complex.

Let us not forget that the castration complex in analytic theory at the time where we place ourselves [1906-1908] is a kind of already crucial key for FREUD, but which is not at all, at that moment, brought fully to light, revealed to everyone as being the central key. Far from it, it is a little key that lies around among the others, with a little air of nothing at all, and in the end FREUD means that the father was in no way warned about something that must have related to this essential relation that makes the castration complex the major linchpin: through which passes the establishment of its constellation and the reso¬lution of its constellation, through which passes the ascending or descending phase of the Oedipus.

So we see that little Hans indeed reacts. He reacts throughout the intervention of the real father, namely the greenhouse forcing of these cross¬fires of paternal questioning under which he finds himself for a certain time, and which, to view the observation massively, show themselves to have been favorable to a true development, even to a true cultivation, in Hans, of something that does not allow us to think, given its richness, either that the phobia would have had its prolongations and its echoes without paternal intervention, or even either that it would have had its very center, nor this development, nor this richness, without this so considerate insistence for a certain time.

This is admitted by FREUD, and I would even say taken up by him on his own account; I mean that he even admits that there could have been momentarily a kind of flare-up, of precipitation, of acceleration, even of intensification of the phobia under the action of the father. All this is nothing but first truths; still, they must be said.

Let us take things up again at the point where we are, and, all the same, so as not to leave you entirely in front of the crush, I am going to indicate to you what is, as it were, the general schema around which I think what we are going to try to understand in the phenomenon of Hans’s analysis, its outset and its results, will be ordered in a way that is satisfactory for us.

Hans is therefore in a certain relation with his mother, where there is mingled the direct need he has for his mother’s love with something that we have called the game of the intersubjective lure, namely this something that manifests itself in the clearest way in the child’s remarks, and which indicates on all sides—it is enough to read the beginning of the observation to see it—that he needs his mother to have a phallus, which does not mean for all that that for him this phallus is something real.

At every instant, on the contrary, there bursts forth in his remarks the ambiguity that this relation brings out in a perspective of play. The child knows well, in the end, something, at least something that indicates it; he says it: ‘I had just thought’, and he stops. What he thought about is: ‘does she have it, or does she not have it?’ And he asks her, and he makes her say it, and who knows to what point the answer satisfies him, that she has a Wiwimacher as they say in the observation, that is to say a make-pee, and this ‘Macher’, something that is not completely translated, it is a maker of pee; there is a masculine implied in that; this is found again in other words preceded by the prefix wiwi.

The child is in this intimacy, this complicity of imaginary play with his mother, and he suddenly finds himself in a situation where, on some side, a certain decompensation occurs since something happens that manifests itself by an anxiety manifesting itself very precisely in the relations with his mother.

Last time we tried to see what this anxiety corresponded to. This anxiety is linked, we said, to various elements of the real that come, as it were, to complicate the situation. These elements of the real are not univocal; there are elements of the real in the mother’s objects that are new:

– there is the birth of the little sister with all the reactions it entails in Hans, but which do not come right away; it is only 15 months later that the phobia breaks out,

– there is the intervention of the real penis, but the real penis has also been at stake for quite a while, at least for a year; masturbation is confessed by the child thanks to the good relations that exist between him and his parents, on the level of utterance by little Hans, and we also have no doubt that this real penis, with what it introduces of complications into the situation, has also been there for some time.

We also noted last time through what these elements of decompensation can come into play: in one case it is Hans who is excluded, who falls, so to speak, out of the situation, who is ejected from the situation by the little sister; in the other case it is something else: it is the intervention of the phallus in a form—I am speaking of masturbation—it is the intervention that remains for Hans the same object, but the same object that presents itself in a wholly different form, and let us say it at once: the integration of sensations linked at the very least to tumescence, and very possibly to something that we can go so far as to qualify as orgasm, and of course it is not a matter of ejaculation.

It is of course understood that there is around that a question and a problem. I mean that, for example, FREUD does not settle it; he does not at that moment have enough observations to tackle this difficult problem of orgasm in infantile masturbation, which I do not tackle right away and straight off on this matter, and of which I point out to you that it is on the horizon of our questioning.

And it is even a question of knowing why, regarding something very evident that happened in the course of the observation, regarding the ‘cha¬rivari’, the tumult that is one of the fears the child has of the object of the phobia, in front of the horse then, the question is almost that FREUD does not ask the question of knowing whether precisely there is not there something that is in relation with orgasm: indeed with an orgasm that would not be his, indeed a scene glimpsed of the parents for example.

FREUD readily accepts the affirmation that the parents give him, ‘that nothing of the sort could have been glimpsed by the child’. It is a little enigma of which we shall have the absolutely certain solution, but assuredly here then is something of which all our experience indicates to us that there is in children’s past, in their lived experience, in their develop¬ment, something very difficult to integrate, and I would say very manifest.

I have insisted on it for a long time, I think it is in my thesis or in something almost contemporary: it is the ravaging character—very espe¬cially in the paranoiac—of the first complex orgastic sensation. Why in the paranoiac? We shall try to answer that on the way, but assuredly it is a testimony that we find in a very constant way, of the character of tearing invasion, of overturning irruption, that this experience presents in certain subjects, in a particularly clear way, thus indicating to us that in any other way, at the turn where we find ourselves, this must play its role as an element of difficult integration, this new¬ness of the real penis.

Nevertheless, it is not right away what comes to the foreground regarding the bursting-forth of anxiety, since already that has been lasting. What is it that in the end makes anxiety arrive at that moment, and only at that moment? The question—and very obviously—remains posed.

So here then is our little Hans arrived at a moment that is that of the appearance of the phobia. Let us take this appearance of the phobia, and right away see that it is not FREUD, that it is without any doubt the father communicating with FREUD, as the continuation of the whole text of the observation promotes it, that the father has at once the notion that there is something that is linked to a tension with the mother. And for the rest, for the character of what particularly triggers the phobia, it is also […]
and he sets it down in the first lines with the quite clear character that gives all its scope to the 1st account of the observation:

‘The excitant of what is properly speaking the disturbance, I could in no way give you…’

And he goes into the description of the phobia. What is it about? Let us set aside the continuation of the appearance of the phobia, and reflect. We have given all this importance to the mother, and to this symbolic-imaginary relation of the child with her; we say that the mother for the child presents herself with this ‘requirement’ of what she lacks, of this phallus that she does not have.

We have said: this phallus is imaginary. Imaginary for whom? It is imaginary for the child. If we speak of it like this, for what reasons is it? It is because FREUD has told us that it always plays a role in the mother. Why? You will tell me: ‘It is because he discovered it!’. But let us not forget that if he discovered it, it is because it is true, and if it is true, why is it true? It is a matter of knowing in what sense it is true, for in truth the objection that analysts regularly make, quite especially female analysts: ‘One does not see why women would be doomed more than others to desire precisely what they do not have, or to believe themselves provided with it.’

It is indeed for reasons that are—let us limit ourselves to that—of the order of the existence of the instance proper and as such of the signifier; it is because the phallus has, in the signifying system, a symbolic value, that it is thus transmitted through all the texts of inter-human discourse in such a way that it imposes itself, among other images and in a predominant way, upon the woman’s desire.

Is not the problem precisely at this turn, at this moment of decomp¬ensation, that the child take this step—literally insurmountable for him all alone—take this step that this imaginary element with which he plays, of the phallus desired by the mother, become for him, even more than what it has become for her, an element of the mother’s desire, thus this something through which it is necessary that he pass in order to captivate the mother? It is now a matter that he realize this something in itself insurmountable, namely that he notice that this imaginary element has symbolic value.

In other words, if the system of the signifier…
or the system of language to define it synchronically, or of discourse to define it diachroni¬cally
…is this something into which the child enters from the outset, but does not enter into it in all its breadth, in all the span of the system, he enters into it in a punctiform way regarding the relations with the mother who is there, or who is not there.

But the first symbolic experience is something quite insufficient; one cannot construct the whole system of the relations of the signi¬fier around the fact that something one loves ‘is there’ or ‘is not there’; we cannot content ourselves with 2 terms, we need others. It is not that that is at stake; it is to know that there is a minimum of terms necessary for the functioning of the symbolic system. It is to know whether it is 3, whether it is 4.

It is certainly not only 3: the Oedipus gives us three assuredly, and certainly implies a 4th by telling us that the child must go through the Oedipus; that means that someone must intervene in the affair, that it is the father, and we are told how, and we are told the whole little story, the rivalry with the father, and the inhibited desire for the mother.

But at the level where we are, that is to say when we go step by step, and when we find ourselves in a particular situation, we have already said that the father has a strange presence. We shall see whether it is simply this strange presence, in other words this degree of paternal lack, that plays its role in this affair, but even before relying on these supposedly real and concrete features, and of which it is so difficult to have the last word, for what does it mean that the father is real, is there more or less lacking?

Everyone contents himself on this point with approximations, and in the end we are told, without having to stop there all the same, in the name of I do not know what logic that would be our own, that on that the things are more contradictory. On the other hand, we shall perhaps see that everything is ordered as a function of this for the child: that certain images have a symbolic functioning.

And what does that mean? That means that these images, which are those that reality for the moment brings him, are too abundant, present, teeming, but assuredly in a state of quite manifest incoordination, for what is at stake for him is to approach a world that, up to a certain point, had functioned harmo¬niously, this world of the maternal relation, with this element of imaginary opening or lack that in the end made it so amusing, so exciting even for the mother, of whom it is said somewhere that she is slightly irritated at the moment when the father tells her to send the child away from the bed, and she protests, she plays, she acts coquettish, which is translated as rather irritated, and that means quite excited. It is not for nothing that he is there of course. We shall know exactly one day why he is there in the mother’s bed; it is one of the axes of the observation. What happens?

Already today I am going to give you an example of what happens and of what I mean, when I say that these images are first those that come out of this relation with the mother, but are also the other, new ones, that this child confronts not badly at all, for of course now, since he has a little sister, and since it can no longer simply fit in this world with the mother, notions intervene to which he knows very well how to face up on the plane of reality:
– the notion of big and small,
– the notion of what is there and of what is not there but of what appears,
– the notion of growth and of emergence,
– the notion of proportion, of size.

Here are different phases in which big and small find themselves confronted, according to different pairs, different antinomies. We see him handle all that extremely well. When he speaks of his little sister, he says: ‘She does not yet have teeth’, which implies that he has a very exact notion of this emergence, and FREUD, who makes ironies, makes ironies beside the point, because there is no need to think that this child is a metaphysician.

What the child says is quite healthy and normal; he very quickly confronts, and in a way that does not go so much without saying, notions like that of the appearance of something new, of the emergence of these three terms: emergence on the one hand, growth on the other, she will grow or what she does not have will grow—there is nothing to be ironic about there—and then the third term, seemingly the simplest but not the most immediately given, of proportion or of size.

People are going to talk about all that to this child, and it seems that it is still early to accept what one will give him as explanations also to himself: there are those that do not have any; the female sex does not have a phallus. That is what his father is going to tell him; he is going to intervene, and this child who is quite capable of handling these notions in a clear way, for he handled them himself earlier in an adroit and pertinent way, far from contenting himself with it, goes through detours that appear at first glance stupefying, frightening, morbid, to be part of the phobia, to arrive in the end at what? At this something that we shall see to be, at the end, the solution he gives to the problem.

But it is very clear that there are paths to this solution, which are paths he must follow, and which, while having this apprehension of forms that can be satisfactory to objectify the real, are nevertheless, relative to that, dreadfully detoured. This crossing, this raising-up of the imaginary and the symbolic, we shall find it at every instant, and you will see that of course it cannot occur without something that is always the structuring in circles at the very least ternary, of which I shall show you next time a certain number of consequences.

But right away today, I am going to take you an example. It is precisely after an intervention of the father…
who in the end, on FREUD’s instructions—and you will see next time what these instructions of FREUD mean—hammers into him that women do not have a phallus, that it is useless for him to look for it. That it is FREUD who told the father to intervene like that is something else, for it is strictly by following FREUD’s instructions that he does it, but let us leave that aside
…that the fantasy of the giraffes occurs. So how does the child react to this intervention of the father?

He reacts by something that is called the fantasy of the two giraffes. The child bursts in in the middle of the night saying ‘I thought of something’. He is afraid, he takes refuge—people tell him that he is afraid, one does not know whether he is afraid—in any case, he comes to fall asleep again in his parents’ bed, after which he is carried back to his room, and the next day he is asked what it is about.

It is a fantasy; it is the two giraffes…
‘the big giraffes are mute, the little giraffes are rare.’[Jacques Prévert: ‘The Opera of the Giraffes’]
…there, there is a big giraffe and a little giraffe that has been translated as ‘crumpled’—it was translated as best one could. German Verwutzelen means to roll into a ball. The child is asked what it is about, and he shows it: he takes a piece of paper and rolls it into a ball. So let us see how this is interpreted.

It is not in doubt right away for the father that these two giraffes, one—the big one—is the symbol of the father, the other—the little one—that the child seizes in order to sit on it—this to the loud cries of the big one—is a reaction to the maternal phallus, the nostalgia for the mother and for her lack, named, perceived, recognized, spotted by the father right away as being the signification of the little giraffe, which does not prevent him moreover, in a way that does not seem contradictory to him, from also making of this pair, the big and the little giraffe, likewise the pair father-mother.

All this naturally poses the most inte¬resting problems; I mean that one can discuss without end the question of knowing whether the big giraffe is the father, whether the little giraffe is the mother. It is indeed a matter for the child of taking back possession of the mother, to the greatest irritation, indeed anger, of the father. This anger is not a real anger; the father never lets himself go to anger; little Hans points it out to him with his finger: ‘You must be angry, you must be jealous.’ Unfortunately the father is never there to play the thunder-god.

Let us pause a bit at what is quite manifest and visible. A big giraffe and a little giraffe is all the same something that in itself has its like; one is the double of the other; there is the big and little side, but there is also the side that is always ‘giraffe’. We find again there, in other terms, something quite analogous to what I was telling you last time, when I was telling you that the child was caught in the mother’s phallic desire as a metonymy.

The child in his totality is the phallus, and at the moment when it is a matter of restoring to the mother her phallus, the child phallicizes, in the form of a double, the whole mother; he manufactures a metonymy of the mother. What up to then was only the enigmatic phallus, at once desired, believed and not believed, plunged into ambiguity, belief, and into the term of reference and of deceptive play with the mother, becomes something that begins to be articulated as a metonymy.

And as if it were not enough to show us the creation, the introduction of the image into a properly symbolic play, to explain to us well that we have passed, that we have crossed there the passage from image to symbol…
this ‘little giraffe that really nobody understands anything about in this observation, whereas it is visible there
…he tells us: this little giraffe is so much a symbol that it is something one can crumple, like the little giraffe when it is on a sheet of paper, that is to say from the moment when the little giraffe is no more than a drawing.

The passage from the imaginary to the symbolic cannot be better translated than in these things that are in appearance absolutely contradictory and unthinkable, because you always make of everything children tell, something that on each side participates in the domain of three dimensions.

But there is also something, of the play of symbols, that is in two dimensions, and as I told you in The Purloined Letter, when there remains nothing, except something that is between the hands, and that there is nothing left but to roll into a ball. It is the same gesture by which Hans strives to make understood what it is about in the little giraffe. The crumpled little giraffe signifies at that moment something that is quite of the same order as the drawing of a giraffe that he once had, and that I gave you here, with its make-pee, and which was already on the way to the symbol.

For whereas this drawing is entirely unbound, and all the limbs hold well in their place, this make-pee that he adds to the giraffe is something that is truly graphic, a stroke, and on top of that so that we do not ignore anything about it: separated from the giraffe’s body.

But now we enter the great game of the signifier, the same as that on which I gave you a seminar on The Purloined Letter. This double of the mother is something that is of the order reduced to this support always necessary for the conveyance of the signifier as such, namely something one can crumple, that one can also hold, and on which one can sit. It is so loving a testimony that it nonetheless has something that is a kind of screed, of pamphlet.

Observe that it is not on a particular point that I articulate to you what we can grasp of this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic. There are all sorts of others, for we see little by little a parallel established between the observation of the Wolf Man and that of Little Hans.

And we can note that in these paths by which the phobic image is approached, this phobic image whose signification we have not yet pinned down, but in order to pin it down one must indeed have recourse to the experience by which the phobic image is approached by the child,

– in the Wolf Man it is frankly an image without doubt, but an image that is in a picture book, and the child’s phobia is this wolf that came out of the book,

– in Hans it is not absent either: it is in a page of his book, the one that is just opposite the image that he shows us, of the red box in which the stork brings children to the top of the chimney, that there is a horse that is being shod as if by chance.

Now what are we going to find? We are going to find—since we are looking for them—structures throughout this observation, playing in a kind of rotating play of logical instruments completing one another, and forming a kind of circle through which little Hans seeks the solution. The solution of what?

In this series of elements or instruments that are called: the mother, him, and the phallus, with this new element that makes the phallus something that has become not only something one plays with, it is that it has become refractory, it has ‘its fancies’, if one can express oneself thus; it has its needs, it has its demands, and it makes a mess everywhere.

It is a matter of knowing how that is going to get arranged, that is to say in the end at least within this trio, within this eternal original, how things are going to be able to get fixed. We are going to see a triad appear: my penis is rooted. There is a form of guarantee. Unfortunately, when one has led him to profess that it is rooted, immediately afterwards one has a flare-up of the phobia.

One must believe that there is also a danger in its being rooted, whereas we see other terms appear. We see the term of the perforated appear, and we see appear, when we know how to look for it in a way conforming to myth-analysis of themes, this theme of perforated in a thousand ways. First:
– he, in a dream, is perforated,
– the doll is perforated,
– there are things perforated from outside to inside, from inside to outside.

Then there is a third term that he finds, and that is particularly expressive, because it cannot all the same be deduced from natural forms, but is introduced as a logical instrument in his mythical passage, and that truly makes of the 3rd term the apex of the triangle with this ‘rooted’, and on the other hand this ‘gaping hole’ leaving an emptiness, for if it is not rooted there is nothing left: so there is a mediation; one can put it and put it back, take it off and put it back; it is removable.

And what does the child use for that? He introduces the screw. The fitter or the locksmith comes and unscrews, after which the fitter or the plumber comes, and unscrews his penis to put on another bigger one. This introduction as a logical instrument of this sort of theme borrowed from his little child’s experience, as a mythical element of this 3rd term…
and we shall see what role it plays, for it is properly speaking an element that is going to bring a true resolution in the problem, namely that in the end it is through the notion that this phallus too is something that is caught in the symbolic play, that can be combined, that is fixed when one puts it on, but that is mobilizable, that circulates, that is an element of mediation
…it is from that moment on that we are going to find ourselves on the slope where the child is going to find this first respite in this frantic search for conciliatory myths never satisfying, which will lead us quite fully in the last term to the final solution that he will find, of which you will see that it is an approximate solution of the Oedipus complex. This is to indicate to you in what sense we must analyze the terms and the use of terms in this child.

Another problem takes shape, which is no smaller: that of the signifying elements that he brings in within their organization, borrowing them already from symbolic elements: the horse that is being shod is only one of the forms hidden in the observation of solutions to the problem of the fixation of this something that is the missing element, which can therefore, as such, be represented by anything, and which more easily than by anything is represented by every object that has in itself a sufficient hardness.

In the end we shall see what the object is that symbolizes in the simplest way, in this mythical construction, the phallus for the child: it is the stone. We find it everywhere, in the major scene of the dialogue with the father, the true resolutive dialogue that we shall see. You will see the role of this stone.

It is just as much the iron that is hammered into the horse’s hoof; it is also it that plays its role in the child in the auditory panic: he is especially frightened when the horse strikes on the ground with that hoof to which is fixed this something that must not be completely fixed, for which finally the child finds the solution of the screw.

In short, it is in a progress from the imaginary to the symbolic; it is in an organization of the imaginary into myth, that is to say at least into something that is on the way to a true mythical construction, that is to say to a collective mythical construction. That is why on all sides it reminds us of them, to the point even that in certain cases it reminds us of kinship systems. It never reaches them properly speaking, since it is an individual construction, but it is on this path that the progress is accomplished; it is on this path that something must have been satisfied, that a certain number of detours must have been accomplished in minimal number, so that the notion, the efficacity of this sort of relation of terms of which you can find the model, the skeleton, in metonymy, or if you prefer in my stories of α, β, γ, δ.

It is nonetheless something of that order, and up to a certain point, that the child must have traversed in order to find his rest, his harmony, in order to have crossed the difficult passage, this passage realized by a certain gapingness, by a certain lack. Perhaps not all Oedipus complexes need to pass in this way through this mythical construction, but that they need to realize the same fullness in symbolic transposition is absolutely certain, in another more effective form because it can be in action, because the presence of the father could have symbolized the situation by his being or by his non-being, but assuredly it is something of that order whose crossing is implied in everything we find in the analysis of little Hans.

I hope to show it to you in more detail next time.