🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Our progress in observing Little Hans has led us to highlight what one can call ‘the function of myth’ in the psychological crisis undergone by Little Hans.

A crisis inseparable from paternal intervention, guided by FREUD’s advice, this global, massive notion of the function of something called myth, not metaphorically but technically, at least insofar as we suppose it can be appreciated at its proper scope, insofar as this imaginative creation of Hans’s, which continues to develop as the father’s interventions—clever, or less clever, or clumsy—proceed, but in any case sufficiently well oriented not to dry up, and in the end to stimulate, this series of productions by Hans that present themselves to us as difficult to separate, though orderable, with respect to his symptom, that is to say, his phobia.

Last time we had reached the anniversary day of April 3, where Hans’s remarks on the content of his phobia are recorded. On the evening of the same day the father says, in sum, that if his son has taken on more courage in his behavior, it is the effect of the most recent events, and notably of FREUD’s intervention on March 30 with Little Hans. But if the child has taken on more courage in his behavior, the phobia has itself also taken on greater scope.

Indeed on that day, the phobia seems to become richer, in this obviously indiscernible ambiguity, to become richer all the same, and even with details of finer reach and incidence, more complicated at the same time, as Hans knows better how to entrust its reach, the mode under which this phobia presses him and seduces him.

It is indeed toward some reversal in your mind, or more exactly a restoration in your mind, of the true function, both of the symptom and of its diversely qualified productions, which have been summarized under the name of ‘transitory symptoms of the analysis’, that I am striving here. And to summarize before you the reach of what our approach means, I could try to set out a certain number of terms, definitions, and rules all at once.

I told you last time: we must distinguish, if we want to do work that is truly analytical, truly Freudian, truly in conformity with the major examples that FREUD developed for us, we must notice something that can be understood, can be confirmed, only by distinguishing the signifier and the signified.

I told you: none of the signifying elements of the phobia—and there are many at which one can stop; the first of course is the horse—and it is impossible in any way to consider this horse as something that would purely and simply be an equivalent, for example, of the function of the father.

One can very quickly—it is an easy path—say that it is a deficiency of the father, that according to the classic formula of Totem and Taboo, the horse comes there as a kind of neo-production or equivalence which in some way represents him, embodies him, plays a role determined by what indeed seems to be the difficulty at that moment, and what is even in conformity with what I am teaching you here, namely the passage from the pre-Oedipal state to the moment—in the physical sense of the word moment—to the Oedipal moment.

Which is quite obviously incomplete, insufficient: the horse is not simply this horse which indeed perhaps in the end it will be, at the moment when Hans, seeing a horse pass in the street with a proud air, cries out something equivalent to the virile pride of this horse that evokes the father, at a moment near the end of the treatment, he has that famous conversation with his father where he tells him something like:

‘You must be angry with me, you must hold it against me for occupying such and such a place,
or for monopolizing my mother’s attention and occupying your place in her bed.’

… and despite the father’s denials, who tells him in effect that he has never been nasty.

For an instant the child, without any doubt duly indoctrinated for some time, brings forth the Oedipal myth with a quite special imperativity, which moreover did not fail to strike certain authors, namely FLIESS, who wrote an article about it published in the issue devoted to FREUD’s centenary

The horse, before fulfilling in a terminal way this metaphorical function, so to speak, played many other roles. The horse when it is harnessed—and on April 3 we have on this all the possible explanations given by Little Hans—must this horse be harnessed, or not harnessed, to a cart with one horse, or with two horses? In each case there is a different meaning. What appears to us in any case is that at that moment, if the horse is symbolic of something, it is—as what follows will show in a more developed way—that it is symbolic, from a certain side, of the mother; it is also symbolic of the penis.

In any case it is irreducibly linked to this cart, which is itself a loaded cart, as Hans insists during the session of April 3, the one in which he explains what his interest is, what is the order of satisfaction he owes to all the traffic that goes on in front of the house around these carts that arrive and leave again, and which while they are there, are unloaded, reloaded.

The equivalence gradually appears of the function of the cart—and of the horse too at the same time—with something that is obviously of a quite different order, which suggests what relates essentially to the mother’s pregnancy—so we are told in the observation: FREUD and the father—which was essentially linked to the problem of the situation of the children in the mother’s belly, of their exit. The horse will therefore at that moment have a quite different reach, a quite different function.

Likewise another element for a long moment becomes a subject of questioning for the father as for FREUD: the famous Krawall; it is the idea of noise, of tumult, of disorderly noise, with some extensions such that it can—so it seems—go so far as to be used to designate a scene, a scandal. In all cases there appears the disturbing, especially anxiety-provoking character of the Krawall as it is apprehended by Little Hans when it can occur after the horse has fallen, which was one of the events, by his own account, precipitating for him, Umfallen, the phobic value of the horse.

It is the moment of this fall which occurred once and which will henceforth be found in the background of the fear. There is what can happen to certain horses, especially big horses harnessed to big carts, to loaded carts. This fall is accompanied by the noise of the horse’s pawing, and this Krawall will return in the course of Little Hans’s interrogation, from more than one angle. In truth never in any established way at any moment of the observation will something be given to us that would be a kind of interpretation of the Krawall. One must note moreover that throughout the observation, in Little Hans’s case, FREUD as well as the father will be led to remain in doubt, in ambiguity, even in abstention.

One can say, as to the interpretation of a certain number of elements, that it turns out they press the child to confess, that they suggest to him all the equivalences and all the possible solutions, without obtaining from him anything other than evasions, allusions, escape routes; sometimes one even has the impression that in certain respects the child is making fun.

This is not doubtful: the parodic character of certain of the child’s productions, of his fabulations, is manifest in the observation, principally of everything that happens around what I could call the stork myth that Little Hans makes so rich and so luxuriant, so loaded with humorous elements.

This parodic, so caricatural side of certain of the child’s productions is indeed such as to have struck the observers themselves, and all this in the end is made to put us at the heart of this something which is restored in a perspective not of incompleteness of the observation, but on the contrary in a perspective of a demonstrative phase characteristic of the observation.

It is not one of its inadequacies; it is on the contrary by this route that it must show us the path of a mode of understanding of what is at stake in this symptomatic formation, at once already so simple and already so rich, which is the phobia, and on the other hand in the work itself, and this is expressed, finds its place again. There is no better illustration of this observation insofar as precisely it is a Freudian observation, that is to say, an intelligent observation.

We essentially see the signifier as such distinguished from the signified. The symptomatic signifier was essentially constituted in such a way that it is of a nature to cover, in the course of development and evolution, the most multiple, the most different signifieds. That not only is it of a nature to be able to do that, but that it is its function.

That the fact that the apparatus—the set of signifying elements that are given to us in the course of the slice of observation constituted by Hans—is made in such a way that we must impose on ourselves[ a certain number of rules ]if we want this observation not to be purely and simply an enigma, a confused, failed observation.

And why would this one be failed, and not this or that other to which we are accustomed to refer? Except that we cannot fail to be struck by all the arbitrary, solicited, systematic character of interpretations, especially in the case of analytical observations and interpretations vis-à-vis the child.

Here we have the testimony—precisely insofar as this observation is remarkably rich and complex—that is given to us in this register among the rarest by their abundance, because if one has a feeling when one enters it, it is indeed at every instant that of getting lost in it.

A certain number of rules—which I would like to propose here, on this subject—can be formulated more or less as follows: that in an analysis of a child, or just as well of an adult, no element that we can consider as signifying… in the sense in which we promote it here, that is to say either an object, a relation, or a symptomatic act …whether this object, this relation, or this symptomatic act is primitive, in a way still confused like the first emergence of this horse when it appears after a certain interval where the child’s anxiety manifests itself, and where the horse is going to play there a function that has to be defined, it already appears quite singularly marked by this something dialectical.

It is indeed what we are trying to grasp, already sufficiently perceptible in the fact that it is at the precise moment when it is a matter of his mother going away. That is the anxiety: he is afraid that the horse will come into the room. On the other hand what is it that comes into the room? It is he, Little Hans.

At every turn we therefore see there a very ambiguous double relation, which is at once linked to the mother’s function at that moment by way of an affective tonality of anxiety, but on the other hand also to Little Hans by his movement and his act. Already the horse, as soon as it appears, is loaded with a profound ambiguity; it is already a sign suited to do everything, very exactly as a typical signifier is. As soon as we will have taken three steps in the observation of Little Hans, we will see that at every instant overflow on all sides.

We posit the rule: no signifying element—given that it is thus defined: an object, a relation, or a symptomatic act in the neurosis for example—can be considered as having a univocal reach, as being in any way equivalent as such to any of these objects, relations, even imaginary actions—I say in our register—which are what the notion of object relation always as it is used now is founded on.

Nowadays the object relation, with what it includes of normative, of progressive in the subject’s life, of genetically defined, of mental development, is something that is in the imaginary register, which of course is not without value, which on the other hand, when one tries to articulate it, presents all the characters of untenable contradiction that I had to tell you to caricature for you in the most obvious way… in the two volumes published at the beginning of the year, one only had to read the text that was before us …the very contradictions of the play of this notion from the moment when it tries to express itself in the order of a pregenital relation that becomes genital, with the idea of progress that that includes. We are immediately in contradictions and it is a matter of ordering the terms on that in the most summary way.

So if we follow what for us is the golden rule and which rests on the notion we have of the structure of symbolic activity, the signifying elements first must be defined by their articulation with the other signifying elements, and it is in this that there is the rapprochement with the recent theory of myth as it has imposed itself in a singularly analogous way to the way in which simply the apprehension of facts forces us also to articulate things, in the way I for the moment articulate them, which is what guides Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS in his article in the Journal of American Folklore. [The structure of myths]

By what is the notion of a structural study of myth opened in Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS’s text? It is by this remark that he moreover himself intentionally borrows from one of his colleagues, from HOCART [A. M. Hocart :Social Origins, London, 1954, p. 7.], to say that if there is first one thing we must overturn, it is this position that has been taken over the ages and which consisted in rejecting psychological interpretations in the name of I know not what intimate anti-intellectualist prejudice, of a presumed intellectual domain on an affective terrain.

It results—this author says very formally—that, to the defects already inherent in what one calls the psychological school… that is to say the school that seeks, in its analysis of myths, to find their source in this so-called constant of human philosophy, I would say as being in a way generic …one already adds, together with these disadvantages, this difficult error of deriving well-defined ideas, clearly cut out, as always these are the things we have to deal with, as much in myth as in a symptomatic production.

In the name of I know not what intellectualism, we are led to reduce to a confused drive something that in the patient presents itself in a very generally articulated way; it is even what makes its paradox; it is even what in our eyes makes it appear as parasitic. It is enough simply that we not confuse what is mental play, I know not what superfluidity of intellectual deduction that can be qualified as such only in a perspective of the rationalization of delirium for example, or of the symptom, which is something quite surpassed since in our perspective we have on the contrary the notion that this play of the signifier seizes the subject and takes him well beyond everything he can intellectualize of it, but which is nonetheless the play of the signifier with its own laws.

To put it plainly, what we see, what is perceptible, what I would like to presentify before your eyes by a sort of image, what is it? We have the notion of it when we see Little Hans little by little bring out these fantasies for us, and just as well in a certain perspective when we have eyes sufficiently opened for that.

It is that the development of a neurosis, when we begin to glimpse its history, its development in the subject, the way the subject has been taken in it, enclosed, I would say that it is something into which he does not enter head-on; he enters it in a way backwards. It seems that Little Hans, at the moment when this shadow of the horse has arisen above him, himself little by little enters into a set that is ordered and organized, is built around him, but which seizes him far more than he develops it. It is the articulated side with which this delirium takes its development, for I say ‘the delirium’ almost like a slip, it is something that has nothing to do with a psychosis, but for which the term is not inappropriate. We cannot in any way satisfy ourselves with a deduction from vague emotions, says Mr. LÉVI-STRAUSS.

The impression we have is that in the ideational edification which—if we can call it that in Little Hans’s case—is something that has its own motivation, its own plan, its own agency, which perhaps responds to this or that need, or to this or that function, certainly not to anything that could at any moment be justified by such a drive, such an impulse, such a particular emotional movement that would be transposed into it, that would express itself in it purely and simply.

It is a quite other mechanism that is at stake, and that necessitates this something called ‘the structural study of myth’, whose first step, whose first move, is never to consider any of the signifying elements independently of the others that come to arise, and in a way to reveal it—but I mean to reveal it and even to develop it on the level of a series of oppositions that are first and foremost of the combinatory order.

What we see produced in the course of the development of what is happening in Little Hans is the emergence, not of a certain number of themes that would more or less have their affective or psychological equivalence as one says, but of a certain number of groupings of signifying elements that progressively transpose from one system into another. Example: since it is a matter of illustrating what I am telling you, we had, after the father’s first attempts at clarification directed by FREUD, a disengagement in the horse of this especially painful element that will make Hans react to the first clarification that FREUD gave by this compulsion to look at the horse.

Then afterwards we find something in the continuation of the father’s interventions where we can see that the child finds himself, at certain moments, relieved by the forbidding help that the father brings him concerning his masturbation. We come closer to a first attempt at analysis of Hans’s concern concerning what relates to his urinary organ, the Wiwimacher as he calls it. And at that moment we see that there is something that is in the way of real clarification, this something strong that the father does to reach more directly what he thinks is only the real support of the child’s anxiety, namely that little girls do not have one—FREUD incited him to intervene in this direction—and that he does.

Assuredly Hans takes the blow, and on this point in a way whose significance does not escape FREUD, he underscores for us that his pee-thing is adherent or rooted, that it is something that will push, will grow with him. Is there not assuredly already sketched something that seems to be in the sense of making the phobic support, in a way, useless, if it is indeed purely and simply the equivalent of this anxiety linked to the apprehension of a real that until then has not been fully realized by him.

We see arise at that moment the fantasy of the big giraffe and the little giraffe whose character I showed you that throws us back into the field of a creation whose style, thus whose symbolic demand, is something quite striking. I repeat it for some who were not here: I gave a reach, which cannot be given otherwise than in our perspective, to the fact that for Hans there is no contradiction at all, not even ambiguity, in the fact that one of the giraffes—perhaps the little one—can be a crumpled giraffe, and a crumpled giraffe is a giraffe that one can crumple like this: he shows us.

The character of passage here from an object that until then has had its imaginary function to a sort of intervention of radical symbolization formulated by the subject himself as such, underscored by the gesture he then makes of taking hold of, of occupying, so to speak, this symbolic position—he sits on it, and this despite the cries and protests of the big giraffe—is there in Little Hans something especially satisfying. It is not a dream; it is a fantasy he fabricated himself. He came to speak about it in his parents’ room; he develops it.

The perplexity in which one remains about what is at stake, once again already from the outset, is there well marked. You will notice the oscillation in the observation itself: this big and this little giraffe are first for the father, him, the father, and the mother. Nevertheless he expresses himself in the most formal way by saying that: the big giraffe is the mother, and that the little one is his member. So there is another form of the value of the relation of these two signifiers.

But is that going to be enough for us? Assuredly not, since by the father’s intervention, who says at one moment to the mother: ‘Goodbye, big giraffe!’ addressing his wife, and who underscores to the child that his mother is the big giraffe, the child replies—who until then had admitted a different interpretive register—in the following way, and the French translation does not convey—I think—the point and the reach: he does not say ‘it’s true’ as it has been translated, but he says: ‘Not true!’ and he adds: ‘And the little giraffe is Anna.’ What are we putting our finger on there? It is again a mode of interpretation, and what has it come to do there?

Is it really about Anna, and on occasion about her Krawall, for much further on in the observation we will see little Anna appear as quite bothersome by her cries, exactly a cry that cannot—provided we always keep our ear open to the signifying element—for us be identified with the mother’s cry in this fantasy.

What does in the end, and only this ambiguity, mean? What appears at that moment as gaiety, even already as a sharp edge of mockery in Hans’s ‘not true!’, is something that by itself alone designates for us that by which the father tries to make correspondences two by two between the two terms of the symbolic relation, and this or that imaginary or real element that they would be there to represent.

The father goes off track; at every instant Hans is close to demonstrating to him that it is not that, and it will never be that. Why would it never be that? Because what Hans is dealing with at the moment when his phobia emerges, at the moment of the observation we are talking about, is something he has to manage. It is a certain apprehension of certain symbolic relations that have not, up to then, been constituted for him, that have the proper value of symbolic relation, that are related to this fact: that man, because he is man, is placed face to face with problems that are problems of the signifier as such, in that the signifier is introduced into the real by its very existence as signifier, namely because there are words that are said, for example, or because there are sentences that are articulated and that link up, bound by a medium, a copula of the order of ‘why’ or ‘because’.

The existence of the signifier introduces into the world of man this something that… as I believe I once expressed it at the end of a short introduction to the 1ˢᵗ issue of La Psychanalyse[‘Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis’, La psychanalyse n° 1, PUF 1956, pp. 81-166] …makes it so that it is by diametrically crossing the course of things that the symbol attaches itself, to give it another meaning; it is to problems of the creation of meaning, with everything that that entails of free, of ambiguous, of what it is possible at every instant to reduce to nothingness by the completely arbitrary side that there is in the irruption of the witticism.

At every instant Hans, like HUMPTY-DUMPTY in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, is capable of saying:

‘Things are like that because I decree it so, and because I am the master.’
[‘Alice—The question is whether you can make words mean different things.
Humpty-Dumpty—The question is who will be the master, that’s all.’
Lewis Carroll: ‘Through the Looking-Glass’]

Which does not prevent him at that moment from being completely subordinated to the solution of the problem that for him arises from a need to revise what has up to then been his mode of relations to the maternal world, the one that was already organized on a certain dialectic, on this dialectic of the lure whose importance I underlined for you, between him and the mother:
– Who, or which one, has the phallus or does not have it?
– What does the mother desire when she desires something other than me, the child?

That is where the child was, and it is a matter for him, exactly as we see in a myth, always from the moment when we have entered into this correct analysis where we see that a myth is always an attempt to articulate a solution to a problem, that is to say that it is a matter of passing from a certain mode, let us say of explanation of the relation to the world of the subject or of the society in question, to a transformation necessitated by the fact that different new elements come into contradiction with the first formulation, and in a way demand a passage that as such is impossible, that as such is an impasse. This gives the myth its structure.

Likewise Hans is confronted at that moment with something that necessitates the revision of the first sketch of symbolic system that structured his relation to the mother. And that is what is at stake with the appearance of the phobia, but far more still with the development of everything it carries with it as signifying elements. It is with that that Hans is confronted, and which by that same fact makes appear derisory to him every attempt at partial reading to which at every instant the father applies himself.

I cannot, as to the style of Hans’s replies, not ask you to refer to the absolutely admirable passages constituted by this immense work of FREUD still hardly exploited for our experience that is called the Witz, this work of which there is perhaps no equivalent in what one can call ‘psychological philosophy’, because I do not know a work that has brought something as new and as sharp as this work; all the works on laughter, whether they are by BERGSON or others, will always be of a lamentable poverty alongside this one. What is essential that is brought to us in FREUD’s Witz?

It is that it points directly—without slackening, without getting lost in considerations—to what is essential in the nature of the phenomenon. What it puts in the foreground from the first chapter, as in the dream, is that first ‘the dream is a rebus’.

No one notices it; this sentence has passed completely unnoticed. Likewise one does not seem to have noticed that the analysis of the witticism begins above all with something that is the famous familiar table of the analysis of the phenomenon of condensation insofar as fabrication founded on the signifier, on the superposition of the familiar and millionaire.

And everything he is going to develop in what follows will consist in showing us that it is at the level of this case of annihilation that this truly destroying, disrupting term is situated: the play of the signifier as such in relation to what one can call the existence of the real, and which has played with the signifier.

At every instant man calls his world into question down to its root, and the value of the witticism—that is what distinguishes it from the comic—is its possibility of playing on, so to speak, the fundamental nonsense of every use of sense, the at-every-instant possible character of calling into question every sense insofar as it is founded on a use of the signifier, that is to say on something that in itself is profoundly paradoxical in relation to every possible signification since there is the institution in this use; it is this very use that creates what it is destined to sustain.

The distinction is among the clearest between these domains of the mind and the domain of the comic. When FREUD touches on the comic, he will approach it in this book only secondarily and to illuminate it by its opposition with wit, and first he will encounter the notions of intermediary, and he will make us glimpse the dimension of the naïve. It is for that that I make this digression into the dimension of the naïve, that is to say this so ambiguous naïve. Since it exists:
– on one side it must indeed be defined in order to see what can arise from this comic, from the manifestations of the naïve,
– on another side we see clearly to what extent this naïve is something intersubjective.

The child’s naïveté is what we impute to him, and in a certain way there always hovers over the child’s naïveté some doubt. Why? Here too once again let us take an example. FREUD begins his illustration of the naïve with something that is the story of the children who in the evening hold a big gathering of adults, having promised them to put on a little theatrical performance for them, and the puppet begins to stir.

The young actors, says FREUD, begin to tell the story of a husband and a wife who are in the deepest misery; they try to get out of their condition, and the husband leaves for distant lands. He returns having accomplished immense exploits, laden with numerous riches, speaking of his prosperity before his wife. His wife listens to him; she opens a curtain that is at the back of the stage, and she says to him: ‘Look, I too worked hard while you were gone.’ And one sees at the back ten dolls lined up.

There is the example that FREUD gives to illustrate naïveté, that is to say one of these forms of the comic where the discharge would arise if the definition of the comic implied in it something that would consist in a sort of economy spontaneously realized in something that, in a different order, said by a less naïve mouth, would involve a share of tension, even going so far as to engender embarrassment to a certain degree.

It is something in the fact that the child goes directly, without giving himself the least supposed trouble, to an enormity, that this triggers something that becomes laughter, that is to say that becomes very funny, with what this word funny can entail of strange resonance. But what is at stake? If on this occasion we are in a borderline domain of the comic, the economy at stake is very precisely the economy made from what such a construction would have had to undergo if one wanted to evoke the same things coming from the mouth of an adult.

The child in a way directly realizes this something that carries us to the height of the absurd; he in a way does what one calls a naïve witticism; it is a funny story; it triggers laughter because it is in the mouth of a child, and that leaves to the adults the whole field to revel: these kids are priceless! And they are supposed to have in all innocence and at the first blow found that which another would necessarily have taken much more trouble to find, or which he would have had to enrich with some additional subtlety in order for it properly to pass for funny.

But that also allows us to see that this ignorance that is given to speak is not absolutely sure to be total; and to put it plainly, the perspective of the naïve in which we include childish stories when they have this disconcerting character that in us triggers laughter, this naïveté is not always—as we know very well—something we should take literally. There is being naïve, and pretending to be naïve. Here, a feigned naïveté is very precisely what restores to this play of childish comedy all its character of the most tendentious wit, as FREUD expresses it, and it is a matter of very little, after all, precisely the supposition that this naïveté is not complete, for it to be they who gain the upper hand and who indeed are the masters of the game.

In other words, this something that FREUD also brings out and to which I ask you to refer in the text is that the witticism always includes the notion of a third person: one tells a witticism of someone, before someone else; whether or not there are really the three persons, there is always this necessary ternarity, essential in the triggering of laughter by the witticism, whereas the comic is content with a dual relation; the comic can be triggered simply between two persons.

The sight of a person who falls, for example, or who sets about operating by absolutely disproportionate routes in order to realize an action or an effort that for us was among the simplest, is something that by itself alone can and suffices, FREUD tells us, to trigger the relation of the comic in this naïve.

We see essentially that the perspective of the 3ʳᵈ person, if it remains virtual, is always more or less implied. In other words, that beyond this child whom we take to be naïve, there is an Other, who is indeed after all the one we suppose so that it makes us laugh so much; it might well after all be that he pretends to pretend, that is to say that he affects being naïve. This dimension of the symbolic is exactly what, at every instant, makes itself felt in this sort of game of hide-and-seek, of perpetual mockery, which is what colors, what gives the tone of all Hans’s retorts to his father.

At another moment we will see a phenomenon like that occur: the father questions him:

‘What did you think when you saw the horse fall?’

And about which Hans tells us he would have ‘caught the stupidity.

‘You thought,’ says the father, ‘that with its big hooves the horse was dead?’

It is quite certain that, as the father notes afterwards, it is with a little air quite serious that—at the first moment—Hans replies:
‘Yes, yes indeed I thought that.’

And then all of a sudden he corrects himself, he starts to laugh—this is noted—and he says:

‘But no, that’s not true; it’s only a good joke I have just made by saying that.’

What can that mean? The observation is punctuated with all these little bits. What can that mean, if not that after letting himself be caught for an instant by the tragic echo, so to speak, of the fall of the horse… is it quite sure that there is this tragic echo, occasionally along with many others, in the psychology of Little Hans …all of a sudden the child thinks of the other, of this moustached, bespectacled father that FREUD represents for us and whom he saw at the consultation next to Little Hans: a funny little man, all fussing, and the other who is there, heavy, with lots of reflections in his glasses, painstaking, full of good will.

For an instant FREUD wavers: it is at that moment a matter of that famous ‘black’ that there is in front of the horses’ mouth, about which they are there questioning, seeking what it means with a lantern, when FREUD says to himself: ‘But there’s the long face, it’s that donkey there, to put it plainly!’ And when I say ‘it’s that donkey there’, do tell yourselves all the same that this kind of violent black that is there and never elucidated in front of the horse’s mouth, it is all the same indeed this real gaping always hidden behind the veil and the mirror, and which emerges from the depths always like a stain, and that, to put it plainly, in the end this kind of short-circuit in a superior divine character, and not without humor, of professorial superiority, and this appraisal that experience and the confidences of contemporaries show us was always fairly ready to spring from FREUD’s mouth, which is expressed in French letters by the third letter followed by three little dots: ‘Quel brave président c…’.

I have before me something that comes to cut across and join the intuition of the fundamentally abyssal character of what is there before him, that comes up from the depths. So there is no doubt that under these conditions Little Hans conducts the game quite well and at every instant, when he pulls himself together, when he laughs, when he suddenly cancels an entire long series of what he has just developed before the father. At every instant we have precisely the impression that what he is telling him is ‘I see you coming.’ Obviously at first glance the word ‘dead’, he accepts it as equivalent of ‘fallen’, but at the second moment he says to himself: ‘You are repeating to me the professor’s lesson,’ that is to say very precisely what the professor has just insinuated, namely that he bears a strong grudge against his father, up to wanting his death.

All the same this something therefore comes to contribute to the ‘rules’ that are ours, I told you: first, to pick out the signifiers of this essentially combinatory value by which the set of signifiers put into play come there to restructure the real by introducing into it this new combined relation. Since we must take up our reference to the first issue of La Psychanalyse, it is not for nothing that on the cover one finds the symbol of the function of the signifier as such.

The signifier is a bridge in a domain of significations; consequently the significations are not reproduced, but transformed, re-created. That is what is at stake, and that is why we must always center our aim, our question: we must see what is the signifier’s turn that Little Hans carried out in order, starting from what, to arrive at what? I mean the turn, that is to say, at each of these stages that he goes through, the first five months of the year 1908 during which successively we see Little Hans take an interest in what is loaded and what is unloaded, or in what enters into movement all of a sudden, in a more or less abrupt way, and which is also liable to tear him prematurely from his departure platform.

All this linkage of signifying elements, diversely fantasmatic, around the themes of movement, or more exactly if you allow me, the theme of everything that in movement is modification, acceleration, and to put it plainly the word ‘branle’ is an absolutely essential element in the whole structuring of the first fantasies, and which from there little by little brings forth other elements among which we cannot fail to give quite special attention to what happens around the mother’s two pairs of underpants, one yellow and the other black.

This passage—outside the perspectives that I am trying to introduce you to—is absolutely incomprehensible. The father, so to speak, loses his Latin. As for FREUD himself, he simply says that the father has inevitably muddied the ground; nevertheless he indicates to us at the end a certain number of perspectives: no doubt the father misunderstood a fundamental opposition that must no doubt be linked to different auditory perceptions concerning the urination of man and woman, for example.

But we also see that in a note FREUD tells us what Little Hans means at that moment, and Little Hans says things that are very incomprehensible. No doubt Little Hans wants to tell us that as the underpants are worn, they become blacker, this after numerous developments where one notices that:
– when they are yellow, they have for him such-and-such a value,
– when they are black they do not have it,
– when they are separated from the mother it makes him want to spit,
– when the mother wears them, it does not make him want to spit.
In short, FREUD insists and says: without any doubt what Little Hans wants to indicate to us here is that the underpants have for him a quite different function while they are worn by the mother, or when they are not.

We thus have enough indications to see that FREUD himself is moving toward an opening, so to speak, of total dialectical relativization of this pair, the yellow underpants and the black underpants, which turns out… in the course of the long and complicated conversation during which Little Hans and his father try to sort out together the question …to turn out at every instant to take on value only by manifesting a series of oppositions that must be sought in features that at first pass for quite unnoticed, in any case that pass radically unnoticed when one tries to identify in a massive way the yellow underpants with something that would be for example urination, and the black underpants with something that in Hans’s language is called the Lumpf, defecation. And one is quite wrong to identify the Lumpf with defecation, and to omit this essential element that would truly be for Hans a Lumpf.

We have, from the father’s own testimony, the notion that because this is a transformation of the word Strumpf, which first of all means the black stocking, and which, associated elsewhere in the observation by Little Hans with a black blouse, is part of this absolutely essential element of clothing as concealing; it is also the screen, that on which there manifests itself and is projected the major object of his pre-Oedipal interrogation, namely the missing phallus.

That hence the fact that it is by a term of this symbolization allied to the symbolization of the lack of object that excrement as such is designated shows us enough also that at that level the instinctual relation, the anality of the thing involved in the mechanism of defecation, is little beside the symbolic function which here once again dominates and is linked for Little Hans to something that is for him indeed essential.

What is lost? What can go away through the hole?

They are all the primary elements of what one can call a symbolic instrumentation, which will then be integrated in the development of Little Hans’s mythic construction in the form of this bathtub that the installer comes to unscrew, in his first dream, or later of his behind, his own, which will also be unscrewed—for the greatest joy of the father as of FREUD, it must be said—from his own penis which, we are told, will be unscrewed.

And these people are so in a hurry to impose their signification on Little Hans that they do not even wait for Hans to have finished, concerning the unscrewing of his little penis, to tell him—and FREUD himself!—that the only possible explanation is naturally to give him a bigger one. Little Hans did not say that at all; in any case we do not know whether he would have said it, and what is certain is that nothing indicated that he would have said it. Little Hans spoke of replacement. This is indeed a case where one can touch countertransference. It is the father who puts forward the idea that if it is changed for him, it is to give him a bigger one.

Here is an example of the mistakes that are made at every instant, and that one has not failed to perpetuate the tradition since FREUD, in a world of interpretation of someone who always seeks in I know not what affective tendency what would at every instant want to be placed to motivate us and justify us, what has its own laws, its own structure, its own gravitation, and what must be studied as such.

We will end by saying that what must be considered in the mythic development of a symptomatic signifying system is this something that is its systematic coherence at each moment, and this kind of proper development that is its own in diachrony, in time, and by which one can say that the development of whatever mythic system in the neurotic… I once called that ‘The individual myth of the neurotic’ …must present itself as the development, the emergence, the progressive disjointing, and a series of mediations that is resolved by a signifying chain that always has a more or less apparent but fundamentally circular character, in that the point of arrival has a profound relation with the point of departure, and that nevertheless it is not all the same.

I mean that there, some impasse that is always contained at the start is found again in what is at the point of arrival, to be considered as the solution in an inverted form.

I mean, short of a change of sign, that the impasse from which one started is always found again in some mode at the end of the operative displacement of the signifying system. This I will illustrate for you later. So today we set out again on a progression that we will make after the holidays, from the given, then, that presents itself to Little Hans.

At the outset Little Hans is confronted with something that up to then was the play of the phallus in already this sort of deceptive relation that suffices to maintain between him and the mother this something progressive that up to then could in a way give him as a goal, as a perspective, as a sense to his whole maternal relation, perfect identification with the object of maternal love.

Something occurs that is above all… and on that I agree with the authors, with the father and with FREUD …a problem whose importance in the child’s development you could not exaggerate, which is this: it is nothing other than this, founded on the fact that nothing, in the subject himself, is pre-established, ordered in advance in the imaginary order, that would allow him to take on this perspective with which he is confronted in an acute way at two or three moments of his child development, which is growth.

And from the fact that nothing is pre-established, is predetermined on the imaginary plane, what brings into it an essential element of disturbance is very precisely a completely distinct phenomenon, but one that for the child comes to be imaginatively stuck onto it at the moment when the first confrontation with growth occurs: it is the phenomenon of turgescence.

In other words, that the penis, from smaller becomes bigger at the moment of the first masturbations or infantile erections, is nothing other than one of the most fundamental themes of the imaginary fantasies of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, which illustrate it in a way that gives it this character of absolutely elective value for infantile imagination. It is a problem of this sort, namely the integration of this something that is linked to the existence of the real penis and to the distinct existence of a penis that can itself become bigger, or smaller, but which is also the penis of the small and of the big.

To put it plainly, it is precisely to the presence of the penis of the bigger one, that is to say of the father, that the problem of Hans’s development at that moment is linked; it is insofar as Hans must confront his Oedipus complex in a situation that necessitates for him a particularly difficult symbolization that the phobia occurs.

But if the phobia develops, if the analysis produces this abundance of mythic proliferation, it is something that is of a nature to indicate to us—in the way pathology reveals the normal—what is the complexity of the phenomenon at stake for the child to integrate this real of his genitality, the fundamentally and profoundly symbolic character of a moment of passage.