🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

At the point we have reached in our attempt, it is a matter of preserving the relief and the Freudian articulation with regard to the famous and so-called ‘object relation’, which turns out, as people say, ‘upon examination’, not only not to be so simple, but never to have been as simple as that.

Otherwise one really would not see the why of the whole Freudian work, in particular these two dimensions, still it seems, perhaps still always more enigmatic, which are called the castration complex, and the fundamental notion of the phallic mother. This has led us, in the course of our research, to concentrate our examination on the case of Little Hans, and we are trying to decipher whether there is something that we see every time; we are now trying to approach the application of analysis to the disentangling of the subject’s fundamental relations—what is called his environment—by relational types of an analytic use. We have had to see how much this instrument leaves us wanting; we were able to see it again yesterday evening.

When we try to approach, as being a fundamental reference, this relation of the child to the mother, and we tell ourselves that, by keeping ourselves within general terms of a dual relation as fixed on the phallic mother, it is to the mother, enveloped by the mother, or not enveloped by the mother, we find ourselves faced with characteristics which are perhaps, as M.[…] told us yesterday evening, indeed too general for us to be able to pin down the incidences that could only be picked out there—incidences, I mean, ‘effective’ ones.

And indeed it is striking that categories as supple as those which were introduced by FREUD cannot, in current use, be cross-matched in a sufficiently usual way to allow us, at every instant, to differentiate within one and the same family of relations, a character trait for example from a symptom: it is not enough to establish their analogy; there must be, since they occupy different functions, a different structural relation. That is precisely what we are trying to do: to touch it with the finger with regard to these eminent examples that are the Freudian observations.

And as you know, we have, over the years, given a sense that we strive to make precise in experience…
because there is no better definition to give of a concept than to put it to use
…a sense that we therefore strive to make precise in the terms of the three relations said to be those of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, which are there, with respect to our experience, three essential modes which are profoundly distinct and without whose distinction we claim that it is absolutely impossible to find one’s bearings, even if only in the most everyday experience.

We had therefore reached, last time, this notion that Little Hans, whom we grasp at a moment of his biography, is marked by a certain type of relation with his mother, whose fundamental terms are defined by the manifest presence of the phallic object between him and his mother. This was not to surprise us after our earlier analyses, since we had already seen, through other observations, and since the beginning of the year:

– how much this term of the phallus as an imaginary object of maternal desire constituted a truly crucial point of the mother-child relation,

– and how much, in a first stage, one could define the child’s accession to his own situation in the presence of the mother as being unable to exclude, as requiring for the child a kind of recognition, even an assumption, of the essential role of this imaginary object, of this phallic object, which enters as an entirely primary element of composition into the mother-child relation, into its primitive structuring.

No observation assuredly can serve us better than the observation of Little Hans, at this point where everything indeed starts, for Little Hans, from something that is this game between him and his mother:
– to see,
– not to see,
– to watch for,
– to spy,
…where is the phallus.

Let us emphasize that we remain, at this point, in a complete ambiguity about the subject of what one can call Hans’s belief. We certainly have the impression that at the moment when the observation begins, from the real point of view he has long had, as people say, his little idea: ‘I already thought about all that’, he says when he is given those answers, at once quick and serving to drown the matter, which are the answers to which parents feel constrained in the face of any somewhat abrupt questioning by the child.

Here I am going once again to mark the presence already at this level…
at the level of the imaginary relation which can pass as being par excellence the reaction of ‘seeing’ and of ‘being seen’
…I want to mark how important it is to reserve, to maintain at this level the intersubjective articulation which is far from being dual, as you will see, and which shows us that already implicitly, in the relation called ‘scoptophilic’, with its two opposed terms ‘to show’ and ‘to show oneself’, how the scoptophilic relation deserves, for an instant, the stopping of our attention, to make us see how already it is distinct from the primitive imaginary relation, which is this sort of mode of capture in the field of what we could call ‘a reciprocal visual confrontation’.

The one on which I insisted at length at the time when I devoted myself, to make you understand it, to its primitive mode of visual imaginary relation, when we referred to the animal kingdom, to those singular visual duels of animal pairs, where one sees the animal caught in certain typical reactions called display—whether it is a lizard or a fish—after a confrontation where, from the two adversaries or partners, everything rises up from a certain set of appendages, signals, visual capture apparatuses in one and in the other. Literally something in one gives way, such that on the sole plane of this visual confrontation, he ‘fades’, one could say, to use a term of language which conjoins, in some way, motor withdrawal and the paling of colors. That is what this combat effectively produces: he turns away from the vision of the one who has taken the dominant position, and even experience shows us at this point that it is not always something that happens strictly to the benefit of the male against the female.

Sometimes it is between two males that a manifestation of this species occurs, and literally we see, on the plane of visual communication, the grip being prepared, and being prolonged directly into the act of embrace, even of oppression, the hold that bends one of the subjects before the other, which allows one to gain the upper hand over the other.

If assuredly there is there the point of reference, I would say ‘biological’, ‘ethological’, which allows us to give its full accent to the imaginary relation in its articulation with the whole process, not of a display, but of display, I would like it to be well marked how one can, from the outset, see that everything that relates to this domain…
and you see how interesting what is going to happen in what is at issue, which I called for you the child’s divining of the maternal imaginary world
…that assuredly we see there how things are different, and how what is at stake is not so much to see, to undergo the hold of ‘what is seen’, as to seek very exactly to ‘see’, to ‘spy’ as people say what at once is there and is not there, for what is properly aimed at in the relation at issue is ‘something that is there insofar as it remains veiled’.

In other words, what is at stake in this fundamental relation is to sustain the lure in order to maintain something that literally ‘is there and is not there’, and to arrive at this fundamental situation whose crucial character in the imaginary drama we absolutely cannot fail to recognize, insofar as it tends to insert itself into something else that will take it up again and give it an even more elaborated sense, this drama that leads to the fact of surprise.

Do not omit the ambiguous character of this term in the French language: ‘surprise’ in the sense where it relates to the act of surprising, where one says ‘I caught sight of him by surprise’. There is the surprise of the enemy force, or again the surprise of DIANE[1er sens], which is indeed the surprise that culminates in this mythology which you know it is not for nothing that I evoke again here, since likewise the whole Actaeon-like relation to which I allude at the end of a work, is founded there on this essential moment.

But conversely there is also this other face of this word:
if there is a surprise[1er sens : to surprise someone], it is not astonishment that he feels, but on the other hand to be surprised is indeed something that occurs through an unexpected discovery, and the use of the term surprise, you were able…
those who attended my presentation of patients, with one of our transsexualist patients
…to glimpse its truly rending character when he depicted for us the painful surprise he experienced on the day when, for the first time, he saw—he tells us—his sister naked.

Thus it is indeed in something that carries to a higher degree…
to the degree not only of seeing and being seen, but of ‘giving to see’ and of being surprised by the unveiling
…that the imaginary dialectic arrives, which is the only one that can allow us to understand the fundamental sense of the act of seeing. We have seen how essential it was in the very genesis, for example, of everything that is perversion, or again conversely, as is too evident through the technique of the act of exhibiting, and that by which the exhibitionist shows what he has, precisely insofar as the other does not have it, and seeks—as he affirms to us himself, as emerges from his statements—through this unveiling to capture the other in something that is far from being a simple grip in visual fascination, and which literally gives him the pleasure of revealing to him what he is supposed not to have, in order at the same time to plunge him precisely into the shame of what he lacks.

It is on this background that all of Hans’s relations with his mother play, and it is on this background as well that we can see that the mother participates fully. If only when we see that this mother who makes him participate with so much complaisance in everything that is the functioning of her body, cannot fail literally to lose her own mastery, and to manifest severity and rebuffs, even condemnations, toward the exhibitionistic participation that Little Hans demands of her.

I told you: it is from this departure that we see the imaginary object—but taken in this dialectic of veiling and unveiling—play its fundamental role; it is at this detour that we take up Little Hans, and that we ask ourselves why…
after an interval which is that of about a year after things happened in life, namely the birth of the little sister, and the discovery that she too is, she too, an essential term of Little Hans’s relation to his mother
…why Little Hans develops a phobia.

Already we have indicated that this phobia must, for us, be located in a process that can only be conceived if we see that what is at stake for the child is to change profoundly his whole mode of relations to the world, to admit what must ultimately be admitted at the end, what subjects sometimes take a whole life to assume, namely that there are indeed, in this privileged field of the world that is that of their fellow beings, subjects who are really deprived of this famous imaginary phallus, and you would be wrong to believe that it suffices to have the scientific notion of it, the very articulable notion, for this to pass, to be admitted into the whole set of the subject’s beliefs.

The deep complexity of man’s relations to woman comes precisely from what we could call, in our rough language, the resistance of masculine subjects to admitting plainly and truly that: feminine subjects are truly deprived of something, all the more so that they might be endowed with something else.

That is what must be powerfully articulated on the fact, and in support of our analytic experience. And it is literally at this level that a misrecognition often maintained takes root—with a tenacity that influences, so to speak, the whole conception of the subject’s world, and especially his conception of social relations—maintained beyond all limit in subjects who would not fail to regard themselves, and with a smile, as having perfectly accepted reality.

This is something which, if effaced from our experience, if misrecognized, shows to what extent we are incapable of benefiting from the most elementary terms of Freudian teaching. Assuredly, that one must seek to realize why this something is so difficult to admit is perhaps what we will arrive at at the last term of our path this year.

For the moment, let us start from the observation of Little Hans that is at issue—and we are there today—and let us articulate how the problem of a similar recognition arises in Little Hans. Why first does it suddenly become necessary, whereas what, up to then, was most important was: ‘to play precisely at its not being so’? And it is also retroactively that we will shed light on why it was so important ‘to play precisely at its not being so’.

And let us also see how it comes about that, for this real privation to be in some way assumed, it cannot fail to be carried out…
to give results that are subjectively livable for the subject, I mean allowing the integration of the subject into the sexual dialectic as it allows the human being to live it, not simply to endure it
…it requires that something occur that is called the integration of this something, in sum, which is already given, from the fact that the mother, she, is already an adult, and that she is already caught in the system of symbolic relations around which and within which interhuman sexual relations must be situated.

The child himself must take that path, attempt this which is the Oedipus crisis. That castration is an essential moment there is what the example of Little Hans illustrates, but perhaps not completely, not perfectly. It is perhaps indeed in this incompleteness that we will be able to see coming, particularly in evidence, what I indicated to you to be the essential movement of the observation of Little Hans; we see it, so to speak, in a case of privileged analysis. We are going to try now to say why this analysis is privileged.

We see, in the open, this transition from the imaginary dialectic, called—if you like—‘the intersubjective game around the phallus with the mother’; we see it pass to the ‘game of castration’ in the relation with the father, through a series of transitions which are precisely what I call the constitution of the myths forged by Little Hans. Why do we see it in such a pure way? I begin to articulate it, that is to say that I take you back to the point where we remained last time.

So last time I left you on this striking phenomenon of the relation of Little Hans’s fantasy concerning the two giraffes, where we truly see there—as an illustration given in the seminar, it must be said—the passage from image to symbol, bearing the fact that literally Little Hans shows us, like the prestidigitator, the doubled image of the mother—what I called the metonymy of the mother—being a piece of paper, being a ‘crumpled giraffe’ on which he sits.

There is there something that is like the sketch, the general schema, the indication that we are on the right track.

For one cannot do better: if I had wanted to invent a metaphor, something that would mean the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, I could never have invented ‘the story of the two giraffes’ as Little Hans fantasized it, and as he articulates it with all the elements, and that he shows that it is a matter of transforming an image into a ball of paper, into something that at that moment is entirely symbol, drawing, element mobilizable as such, and that one seizes and exclaims ‘Ah! what a fine note Little Hans has’ from the moment when he sat on his mother at last reduced to this symbol, to this rag of paper.

Of course that is not enough; without that he would be cured. He shows by this act what is at stake, because assuredly the spontaneous acts of a child are something much more direct and much more vivid than the mental conceptions of an adult being after the long years of amplificatory cretinization that constitute the common run of what is called education.

Let us see clearly what happens; let us use this picture as if it were already confirmed. What does it mean that it must be an imaginary Father who definitively establishes the order of the world? It means that not everyone has a phallus. It is easy to recognize: it is the all-powerful Father; he is the foundation of the order of the world in the conception, I would say, common to God. It is the imaginary Father that is at issue; it is the guarantee of the universal order in its most massive and most brutal real elements; he is the one who made everything. When I tell you that, I am not merely forging my picture; you only have now to refer to the observation of Little Hans: when Little Hans speaks of the good Lord, he speaks of him in a very charming way.

He speaks of him on two occasions. His father began to give him certain clarifications, and it results in an improvement, moreover transitory, and at that moment, on 30 March, it is after the fantasy of the two giraffes that the next day an easing occurs, because indeed it is not entirely satisfactory to have made the mother a ball of paper, but it is in the right direction, and in any case there is one thing that strikes Little Hans: it is that the next day, 30 March, he goes out and he notices that there are a little fewer cars and horses than there usually are. He says: ‘How kind and clever of the good Lord to have put fewer horses today!’

What does that mean? We do not know. Does that mean that one needs fewer horses today? That is what it can mean, but the German word does not mean kind, but frankly shrewd. One tends to believe that it is because the good Lord had spared the difficulties, but if one believes that the horse is not only a difficulty, but an essential element, it means that one needs fewer horses today.

Be that as it may, this is to tell you that the good Lord is there as an essential point of reference, and that it is quite striking to see that after the meeting with FREUD, it is to the good Lord that Little Hans will allude; and, to put it plainly, he therefore has conversations with the good Lord, for having said everything he has just said. FREUD himself does not fail to feel in it a tickling at once amused and happy; moreover he himself makes the reservation that he is no doubt in it for something, for, he says, his own bragging did not fail to have him himself very singularly take up this arch-superior position, which consists in telling him:

‘Long before you were born, I had foreseen that one day a little boy would love his mother too much,
and because of that would get into difficulties with his father.’

Assuredly it is quite striking to see FREUD take up this position. We did not at all think of reproaching him for it; long ago I pointed out to you what original, exceptional dimension, in all the analyses that could take place, FREUD could have a hold of, precisely in this: that this interpretive speech that he gives to the subject is not something he transmits; it is truly something that he himself has found, which passes, in a way, directly through his own mouth, through FREUD’s mouth, and in the reference that seems to me, and that I teach you, to seem essential to me in the authenticity of speech. One obviously cannot fail to notice how different an interpretation by FREUD himself could be from all those that we can, in a way, give after him.

But here FREUD, as very often we have been able to see, imposes on himself no kind of rule; he truly takes up the position that I could call the divine position: it is from Sinai that he speaks to young Hans, and Hans does not fail to take the blow. Understand clearly that I said that on this occasion the position taken by symbolic articulation—the symbolic Father who also remains veiled—is that of being posed here, on FREUD’s part, as the absolute master, as something that is not the symbolic Father, but the imaginary Father on this occasion.

This is important because we are going to see that it is indeed thus, in the end, that FREUD approaches the situation, and that it is very important to conceive the particularities of Hans’s relation to his analyst. I mean: if we want to understand this observation, we must clearly see that it has, among all child analyses, something absolutely exceptional.

The situation, so to speak, is developed in such a way; the element of the symbolic Father is there sufficiently distinct from the real Father, and you see it, from the imaginary Father, such that it is no doubt owing to that—we will confirm it later—that we see, for example, in this observation, to what extent the phenomena that we can qualify as transference, for example, are absent, and likewise the phenomena of repetition.

And that is why, in the observation, we have in a way picked out in a pure state the functioning of fantasies insofar as their elaboration saturates[…]And that is also the interest of this observation: that it shows us the Dur¬charbeitung, insofar as it is not—contrary to what is commonly accepted—driven simply by this rumination at the end of which what is assimilated only intellectually would end up getting under the skin in the manner of a bit, or of an impregnation. If Dur¬charbeitung is a necessary thing, it is no doubt because a certain number of circuits—and this in several senses—is necessary for, obviously, something to be effectively fulfilled in the function of the symbolization of the imaginary.

That is why we see Little Hans follow an entire labyrinthine path that can…
insofar as one can reconstruct it, because of course it is broken at every instant, chopped up by the interventions of the father which are certainly not the best directed, nor the most respectful, as FREUD points out to us at every instant
…nevertheless we see a series of mythical constructions occur and recur, in which it is a matter of discerning what the true component elements are.

And to do so, rather than at every instant being satisfied with covering over with some ‘catch-all term’: complex of this, complex of that, anal relation, or attachment to the mother, trying to see, in those very articulated things that are the ancient myths, what the functions are, the representative, figurative elements they bring us; and since we are accustomed, to these terms and to these functions, to give massively equivalents: this represents the father, or this represents the mother, or this represents the penis, to realize for example that this work, if we tried to do it, will show us that at every instant each of the elements, the horse for example, is conceivable only in its relation to a certain number of other equally signifying elements, but that it is absolutely impossible to make it correspond—I say the horse, but also all the other elements of Freudian myths—to a univocal meaning: the horse is first the mother; in the end the horse is the father; between the two it could just as well have been Little Hans himself who plays it from time to time, or again the penis of which it is manifestly the representative at several points in the story and in the explanations concerning the phobia. This, which is true in the most manifest way for the horse, is no less true for whatever signifier you may take in the different modes of mythical creation—and you know that it is extremely abundant—to which Little Hans devotes himself.

It is perfectly clear for example that the bathtub is at a given moment the mother, but that it is for example in the end Little Hans’s backside, this in the observation in the way they understand it literally, both FREUD and the father, and Little Hans himself. You can also do the same operation with regard to each of the elements that are at issue. You will see it for the bite for example, or again for nudity.

In order for you to realize these things, it is in any case absolutely necessary, as a point of method, that you strive at each stage, at each moment of the observation, not to understand right away. You must put yourself…
as FREUD expressly recommends to you at two points in the observation, and as I repeat to you
…to not understand right away.

The best way not to understand on this occasion is to make little index cards, to note day by day on a sheet of paper what Hans himself brings up as elements that must be taken as such, as signifiers. For example the one on which I insisted in one of my previous seminars: ‘Not with Mariedl, quite alone with Mariedl…’ If you do not understand anything about it, you retain this signifying element, and as understanding will come to you while eating, you will notice that this cross-matches strictly with something else that you can write on the same sheet.

Not being only ‘with’ someone, but being ‘all alone with’ someone—what does that suppose? It supposes that there could be another. You would proceed, in other words, according to this method of analysis of myths that M. Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS gave us in an article of the Journal of American Folklore, October-December 1955, and you will notice that thus one can arrive at ordering all the elements of Hans’s observation in such a way that, read in a certain sense, it is the sequence of these myths, but that one is forced after a certain time…
by the sole element of return, not simple, but of the transformed return of the same elements
…to order them, not simply on a line, but in a superposition of lines that are ordered as in a musical score.

And you can see established a series of successions readable both horizontally and vertically:

– the myth reading in one direction,

– and its sense or its understanding referring, in the superposition of analogical elements that return in diverse forms, each time transformed, no doubt in order to accomplish a certain path very precisely that goes from the starting point, as M. DE LA PALLICE would say, to the point of arrival.

And which makes it so that, in the end, something that at the beginning was inadmissible, irreducible…
this is what I told you we start from in the story of Little Hans, namely the irruption into this child-mother game, which is our starting point, of the real penis
…how in the end the real penis finds a place to lodge itself in a sufficient way, so that one can say that for Little Hans, life can be continued without sufficient anxiety. I said necessary. Sufficient means that it could perhaps still be fuller.

That is indeed what we will see: that in the end the Oedipus complex in Little Hans perhaps does not arrive at a solution that is completely satisfactory; it is simply satisfactory in any case insofar as it frees, insofar as it leaves unnecessary the intervention of this element, of this conjunction of the imaginary with anxiety that is called the phobia, in other words insofar as it leads to the reduction of the phobia.

Indeed, let us not forget—for going straight to the epilogue—when FREUD later finds the child Hans again at an age that is about sixteen or seventeen, that he no longer remembers anything. He is given to read his whole story, and FREUD himself, very nicely, makes this erasure correspond to something quite comparable, he tells us, to what happens when a subject wakes up at night and tries to retain a dream, even begins to analyze it—we know this—and with the rest of the night passing over it, in the morning everything is forgotten: dream and analysis.

There is indeed something quite seductive there, which allows us to think, like FREUD himself, that what is at stake in Hans’s observation, as we can touch it with the finger, is something that is in no way comparable to this integration or reintegration by the subject of his history that would be that of the effective lifting of an amnesia, with maintenance of the elements gained. It is indeed a very special activity that is at the limit of the imaginary and the symbolic, which is exactly of the same order as what happens in dreams. Likewise dreams—in this mythification that is at issue throughout Hans’s observation—play an economic role in every point assimilable to those of fantasies, even of Hans’s simple games and inventions.

But let us not forget what FREUD tells us in passing: that all the same something holds Hans in the reading of his story, something of which he says: ‘Indeed it may well be that it relates to me.’ It is everything that relates to all the fantasmatic elaborations that lodge there, concerning the little sister. And indeed at that moment Hans’s parents are divorced, as one could quite well have anticipated, even foreseen, at the moment when everything—over the course of the observation—let it be thought, and Hans is not any more unhappy than that.

There is only one thing that remains for him a wound: it is this little sister who is now separated from him, who has been brought by the course of life to center, to represent this distant term, beyond, so to speak, what is accessible to love, and which is the idealized love object: this girl-phallus indeed from which we started in our analysis, and which will remain without any doubt—we have no reason to doubt it—the mark that will give its style and its type for all the rest, although of course one can only make there a supposition, an extrapolation, for the whole love life of Little Hans. So assuredly everything shows itself indeed not to have been, through the masterly analysis of which Hans was the object, everything has not been fully closed, nor has it led to an object relation that is in itself entirely satisfactory.

But let us return to the starting point, let us return to FREUD, to his disciple who is the child’s father, and to the instructions that FREUD gives him, for we have now seen how FREUD here assumes his own role. How is he going to tell the one who is his agent to behave? He makes two recommendations to him.

First of all, when one has declared to him what Little Hans’s attitude is, and the more or less painful and anxiety-provoking phenomena of which he is the object, he tells the father to explain to the child that this phobia is a stupidity, that the stupidity in question is tied to something that is tied to his desire to get close to his mother. That on the other hand Hans, for some time, is much occupied with the Wiwi-macher, that he must surely know that this is not quite good, and that it is for that reason that the horse is so nasty and wants to bite him.

This goes far: we have here a sort of direct maneuver, from the outset, on guilt, which consists at once in lifting it by telling him that these are all natural and all simple things, and that there is simply a matter of ordering and mastering a little. But at the same time he does not hesitate to accentuate the element of prohibition, at least relative, that exists with regard to approaching masturbatory satisfactions. We will moreover see what the result will be in the child.

There is something even more characteristic in the very language that FREUD uses. The second thing, he says, since manifestly Little Hans’s satisfaction for the moment is to go and discover…
that is why earlier I took up again the dialectic of discovering, of surprising
…the hidden object that is the mother’s penis or phallus.

They are going to remove this desire from him by removing from him the object of satisfaction: ‘You are going to tell him that this phallus does not exist.’ This is textually articulated by FREUD at the beginning of the observation—pages 263 and 264 [Gesammelte Werke].

One must say that as an intervention of the imaginary Father, I mean of the one who orders the world and says that here there is nothing to look for, one hardly sees better, and one also sees how the real Father is quite incapable of assuming such a function, for in truth when he does it, we do not fail to see that it is precisely at that moment that Hans reacts by a wholly different path from what is suggested to him.

For immediately after the affirmed articulation that is made to him of this absence, just as at another moment he reacted by the story of the two giraffes, here he reacts again in a wholly different way: he fantasizes the following story, which is very beautiful: he recounts that he saw his mother, in her shift and completely naked, show him her Wiwimacher, that he himself did the same, and that he took as witness the maid, who came in at that moment into the game, the famous Grete, of what his mommy was doing. Splendid response, and perfectly in accord with what I was trying to articulate for you earlier, namely that what is at stake is very precisely to see what is veiled insofar as veiled. His mother is at once naked and in her shift, exactly as in Alphonse ALLAIS’s story where he cried out, arms raised to the sky: ‘Look at this woman: under her clothes she is naked!’ A remark whose incidence and scope you perhaps have never sufficiently measured in the metaphysical underpinnings of your social behavior, but which is fundamental to interhuman relation as such.

On that, Little Hans’s father—who is not distinguished by an excessively shrewd mode of apprehending things—tells him: ‘But she has to be one or the other; she has to be either naked or in her shift.’ Now that is the whole problem: that for Hans she is at once ‘naked’ and ‘in her shift’, exactly as for all of you who are here.

Hence the impossibility of assuming the order of the world simply by an authoritarian intervention: there is none. The imaginary Father obviously has existed for a long time, forever; it is also a certain form of the good Lord. But that is not what resolves our difficulties in a no less tried and permanent way. In truth we are here at a more advanced point. But first the father made a first approach to this essential element; he first tried—as FREUD told him—to lower Little Hans’s guilt; he gave him the first clarification concerning the relation that there is between the horse and something forbidden that is very precisely to put his hand on his sex.

He made his first intervention, aiming in sum to appease the anxiety of guilt, that intervention which we analysts, all the same, after some twenty or thirty years of experience, know precisely is the one in which we always fail if we want to approach it head-on, and that there is no question of ever approaching guilt face to face, except precisely to transform it into diverse metabolic forms which are precisely those that will not fail to occur. At the very moment, then, when one has told this child that the horse is there only as a more or less frightening substitute for something about which he does not have to make such a big world, we see here also in the observation, and in the most articulated way, something occur: namely that the child who until then was afraid of the horse is obliged, he says, to look: ‘I have to look at horses now.’

Let us take advantage of our being at this point of the observation to stop, for an instant, at this mechanism that deserves to be noted. What in sum does what was said to him mean?

It comes down ultimately to saying that it is permitted to look at horses, and just as in totalitarian systems that are defined by the fact that ‘everything that is permitted is obligatory’, that is indeed what happens from having told Little Hans that one can go toward horses, since the problem is elsewhere. It results that Little Hans feels ordered, obliged, to look at the horse. What can this mechanism possibly mean, which I have summarized under this form, that ‘what is permitted becomes obligatory’?

In truth, in what is permitted on this occasion we have a transition, that is to say the elimination of what was previously forbidden. No doubt this transformation, since transformation there is, must have as its cause the fact that what is permitted is at the same time clothed in the term of obligation. That must be something like a mechanism whose effect is to maintain precisely under another form the rights of what was forbidden; in other words what must now be looked at is precisely what previously one must not look at; in other words, as we already know, something, by the horse, was forbidden.

We know that the phobia is an outpost that is in sum a protection against anxiety. It is a matter of the horse marking a threshold, so to speak, and of it being that above all at this level, and we know it. That is also what has just been said to the subject. It is something that has a relation with what is at issue with the new element at stake, and which throws the whole of the subject’s game into turmoil, namely the real penis.

But as I told you earlier, is that to say for all that that the horse is the real penis? Certainly not! As you will see by a thousand examples later on, the horse is very far from being the real penis, since it is just as much, over the course of the transformations of Hans’s myth: the mother, in the end the father, Little Hans on occasion.

Let us introduce here an essential symbolizing notion, the one that I developed for you throughout the courses of the year before last on Angelus SILESIUS’s pun: ‘Ort – Wort’, and let us say that it is on this occasion the place where must come to lodge itself—and not without provoking fear or anxiety—the real penis. In the end, with this first contribution of the father, assuredly still little encouraging, we nonetheless see, in the child, the properly signifying structure engage itself, react: the one that resists imperative interventions, the one that nonetheless will react to the father’s even clumsy, confused interventions, and produce this series of mythical creations that will be those in the course of which we are going to see, little by little, by a series of transformations, what is at stake integrate itself into Hans’s system.

Namely this something that requires no longer simply this intersubjectivity of the lure, yet fundamental…
with the help of which Hans can play at surprising and at being surprised, and at presenting himself as absent
…but at the same time, by the always-present play, a third object that is the first element of his realization with his mother, which in the end must integrate itself there himself.

For for some time now this new element has arrived, this inconvenient element that is his own penis, his real penis, with its own reactions which risk, as people say, blowing the whole set sky-high, and which for him manifestly, as you are going to see in the series of his imaginary creations, is the element of disturbance and turmoil.

Since we are on 3 April, we are going to go straightaway to what happens on 3 April 1908, when the father and the child speculate, from behind their windows, about what is going on in the courtyard opposite. In the courtyard opposite there are already the signifying elements with which Hans is going to give a first support to his problem, is going to make his first mythical construction under the sign, as FREUD tells us, of means of transport, of what is constantly happening before his eyes, namely the horses and the carts that move, that unload things, that have packages that kids climb onto.

What is all this going to serve for Hans? Do you believe that there is a kind of preadaptation, planned from all eternity by the eternal imaginary Father, between the means of conveyance that are in use under the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph in pre-1914 Vienna, and the drives, the natural tendencies each arising around, according to the good order of instinctual development in a child like Little Hans?

It is quite the contrary: it is with regard to elements that also have their order of reality, but that the child is going to use as elements necessary to the game of permutation—and I always come back to it—that a kind of use of the signifier is neither conceivable nor comprehensible if you do not start from the origin of this: that the elementary, fundamental game of the signifier is permutation.

It is not a reason that—however civilized, and even educated, you may be—you are, in the ordinary use of life, as clumsy as can be in the exhaustion, for example, of all possible permutations…
and I am going to prove it to you on myself: I have a tie that has a side a bit paler and another a bit darker, and in order to manage to put the pale side underneath and the darker one in front, I have to do a permutation mentally, and I get it wrong every time
…that you must ignore the permutative order. That is what is at stake in everything Little Hans is going to construct, and right away you are going to see an example of it.

Before trying to understand anything at all about what the horse means, about what the cart means, Little Hans who is on it, or the unloading, you must retain this: a cart, a horse, Little Hans who wants to climb onto it, and who is afraid—but afraid of what? That the cart will start moving before he gets onto the unloading platform.

No need to hurry and start saying: ‘We know that, he is afraid of being separated from his mother,’ because Little Hans reassures you right away: he says: ‘If I am taken away, I will take a cab and I will come back.’ Little Hans is quite firm in reality. So it is that something else is at stake. So it is that the fact of being on a cart in front of something from which the cart can separate, can move away, and then when you will know with respect to what the cart can move away, and when you will have isolated that element, you will find it again in a thousand traits of Little Hans’s observation: with regard to the story of the train in which he is also embarked—it is one of those fantasies that arises much later—when they pass through Gmünden and they do not have time to put on their clothes before having been able to get off the train in time.

And so on; there will be many more, since one of Little Hans’s last fantasies will be that of being hoisted by a driver, triumphantly and completely naked, onto a thing where there is no horse, of spending the night there, and the next day being able to continue his journey on the same thing, having simply given a thousand florins to the driver. You cannot fail to see the evident kinship there is between these different stages, these different moments of Little Hans’s fantasizing.

You will also see the whole fantasizing around the good and excellent little Anna, who at one moment is with Little Hans in another cart that closely resembles the previous carts, since they have the same anxiety-horses, and who will go ride one of the horses, within this process, of this first myth that one can call the myth of the cart. You will try to see, if I may say so, how these different signifiers that compose the team—for that is indeed what is at stake; people talk all the time about the horse, but it can be without a cart, it can be with a cart—how these different elements that compose the team and the drivers, and the cart’s reference to a certain fixed plane, as the story progresses, come to have different meanings.

You will try to see what in that is most important:

– whether it is the role of the signifier as I explained it to you in my seminar on The Purloined Letter, or whether it is precisely through the displacement of the signifying element onto the different persons who are in some way taken under its shadow, inscribed in the possession of the signifier,

– whether it is in that that progress consists, in this turning movement of the signifier around the different characters in whom the subject is more or less interested, who can be taken there, captivated, captured in the permutatory mechanism; whether it is in that that the essential of Little Hans’s progress consists, or whether it is in the opposite, in something of which one does not see well on this occasion what sort of progress that could be.

For one cannot say that at any moment any of the elements of the reality that surrounds him is really beyond Hans’s means. There is in this observation no trace of what one can call regression. And if you think that there is regression because at one moment Little Hans makes the whole immense anal phantasmagoria around the Lumpf, you are gravely mistaken. This is a formidable mythical game; it contains at that moment no kind of regression; Little Hans maintains his rights, if one can express oneself thus, to masturbation from one end of the observation to the other, without letting himself be shaken, and if there is something that characterizes the general style of Little Hans’s progress, it is precisely its irreducible side.

And FREUD himself underscores it: it is indeed because the genital element is, in such a subject, quite solid, present, installed, resistant, very strong, that he does not develop a hysteria, but a phobia. That is articulated very clearly in the observation. That is what we will try to see next time, and we will see that there is not only one myth, only one alphabetic element employed by Little Hans to resolve, if one can say so, his problems, that is to say the passage:
– from a phallic apprehension of the relation to the mother,
– to a castrated apprehension of the relations to the whole parental couple.

There are others: there is the famous story of the bathtub and the brace, of what I called, again last time, the screw. It is something that turns entirely around what I would call the logical function of fabricated instruments.

One cannot fail to be quite seized and struck by the way this child uses, as a logical instrument, elements that are grouped around these modes of coaptation very elaborated in human adaptation, and which allow one to oppose to what is rooted, as people say, or even simply naturally adherent, and in opposition to a perforated, which is the point of apprehension in the sense of fear and of the dreaded pole before which the child indeed stops, the introduction of this element that is the screwed, or again the clamped, I mean what is held by the clamps, which—you will see it in what I would call the other myth, the myth of the bathtub and the faucet—plays an absolutely essential role.

It is in the detail of this mythical structuring, that is to say using imaginary elements for the exhausting of a certain exercise of symbolic exchange, that all the progress operated by Hans resides, and what allows him to make useful this threshold element, that is to say this first symbolic structuring of reality, which was his phobia.