🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

If it were necessary to remind you of the constitutive character of the incidence of the symbolic in human desire, it seems to me that, failing a just accommodation to the most common and everyday experience, a formula, a quite striking example could be found in the following formulation whose immediacy, whose omnipresence can escape no one: what can the formulation of this desire, which is perhaps the deepest of all human desires, the most constant in any case, which is difficult to fail to recognize at one or another turning point of our life for each of us, and in any case for those to which we grant the most attention, for those who are tormented by some subjective malaise that is called, to finally say it: the desire for something else—what can it mean, in terms of instinctual coaptation, as one says?

What can it mean in the register of the object relation…
conceived as a sort of evolution, of mental development, immanent to itself,
arising by a successive push that it is only a matter of fostering
…of the object relation as referred to a typical object, in some way preformed? From where can this desire for something else come?

This preliminary remark, to put you—if one can say so, as FREUD expresses it somewhere, regarding Egyptian milieus, in his letters—to put you in the […]. We take things up where we left them, that is to say with little Hans. What I have just told you is moreover not, of course, unrelated to my subject.

Indeed, what have we been trying to detect up to now, in this mythical fomentation that seems possible to us? The essential characteristic of Hans’s observation is above all what is at issue. What I call mythical fomentation are these different signifying elements for each of which I have shown you enough of the ambiguity, and how they are essentially made so as to be able to cover, we will say, roughly any signified, but not all signifieds, of course, at the same time. When one of the signifiers finds such an element of the signified, the other signifying elements that are at issue cover others. In other words, the signifying constellation operates by something that we can call a ‘transformation system’ or a ‘turning movement’.

This is, on closer look, something that at each instant covers in a different way, and by the same current seems to exert a deeply reworking action on what is the signified.

Why this? How can we conceive the dynamic function of this sort of witch’s operation whose instrument is the signifier, and whose aim, end, result must be a reorientation, a repolarization, a reconstitution after a crisis, of the signified?

That is how we pose the question. It is from this angle that we believe it is necessary to pose it, for the simple reason that if mythical fomentation…
let us call it by another term that is more common, but that is exactly the same thing, even if less well adapted
…the infantile theories of sexuality as we see them, as we take an interest in them in the child.
If we take an interest in them, it is indeed because they are not simply a kind of superfluity, an inconsistent dream; it is indeed because they themselves, in themselves, contain a dynamic element that is properly speaking that something that is at issue in Hans’s observation, failing which literally Hans’s observation has no kind of meaning.

This function of the signifier, we must approach it without a preconceived idea about that observation there, because it is more exemplary, better taken, better grasped in a way in the miracle of origins, there where, if I may say so, the mind of the inventor and of those who followed him has not yet had time to ballast itself with sorts of taboo elements, with the reference to a real founded on prejudices that in some way require, or that find I do not know what support in earlier references that are precisely those which, by the field that has just been discovered, are called into question, shaken, devalued.

Hans’s observation in its freshness still keeps all its revelatory power, I would almost say all its explosive power, and we must pause on the way in which Hans, in this complex evolution, is caught in this dialogue with the father who at that moment plays a role truly inseparable from the progress of the said mythical fomentation. One can even say that it is at each of the father’s interventions that this mythical fomentation, in some way stimulated, rebounds, starts again, re-vegetates anew. But, as FREUD expressly remarks somewhere, it indeed has its own laws and necessities.

It is not always, and far from it, what one expects that Hans gives us; he brings things that surprise, and that in any case the father does not expect—if FREUD indicates to us that he had foreseen them—and he also brings well beyond what FREUD himself could foresee, since FREUD does not seem to conceal that many elements still remain in some way unexplained, on occasion uninterpreted. But do we ourselves need them all to be interpreted? We can sometimes push a little further the interpretation that the two cooperators, the father and FREUD, made.

What we are trying to do here is the laws proper to the gravitation of the coherence of this signifier grouped apparently around that something of which—FREUD tells us expressly—we might be tempted to qualify the phobia, by its object, the horse on the occasion, if we did not notice that this horse goes well beyond what appears as a figure in some way prevalent, which is much more something like a kind of heraldic figure that centers the whole field, that is itself heavy with all sorts of implications, and re-implications signifying above all.

So a certain number of reference points are necessary to mark what will now be the progress of our path. It is clear that we start from this, and again we are not approaching anything new at all since FREUD himself articulates it in the most explicit way, after a dialogue that is the first dialogue where Hans, with his father, begins to bring out of the phobia what I call precisely its signifying implications. Namely everything that Hans is capable of constructing around it, which is rich with a whole mythical or even novelistic aspect if you like, of a fantasizing that is not simply of the past, but just as much of what he would like to do with the horse, around this horse, of what accompanies and no doubt modulates his anxiety, but that also has its own force of construction.

After this interview, to which we will come now, of Hans with his father, FREUD indicates at another moment that the phobia here takes more courage, it develops, it shows its various phases. And FREUD writes this:

‘Here we have the experience how diffuse it is, and this phobia goes onto the horse, but also onto the carriage, but also onto the fact that horses fall, and also onto the fact that horses bite, and onto horses that are of a certain nature, but also onto carriages that are loaded or not… Let us say quite simply that all these particularities touch the quick in this, that the anxiety originally has absolutely nothing to do with the horse or with wicked horses, so much so that it will be transported onto it (the horse phobia), and that it will then become fixed on the place, not of the horse, but of the horse complex, so that on that can therefore become fixed and be transported everything that will show itself appropriate to certain transfers.’

[Wir erfahren so, wie diffus sie eigentlich ist. Sie geht auf Pferde und auf Wagen, darauf, daß Pferde fallen, und daß sie beißen, auf Pferde besonderer Beschaffenheit, auf Wagen, die schwer beladen sind. Verraten wir gleich, daß alle diese Eigentümlichkeiten daher rühren, daß die Angst ursprünglich gar nicht den Pferden galt, sondern sekundär auf sie transponiert wurde und sich nun an den Stellen des Pferdekomplexes fixierte, die sich zu gewissen Übertragungen geeignet zeigten.]

It is therefore, in the most expressly formulated way, in FREUD.

We have there two poles: the pole that is first, which is of a signifier, and this signifier will serve as support for the whole series of transfers, that is to say for this reworking in all the possible permutations of the signified, which in principle…
we can suppose it as a working hypothesis,
and insofar as it is in conformity with everything our experience requires
…is different from what was at the beginning, that is to say that something has happened on the side of the signified.

And this something that happens on the side of the signified, I already indicate it to you: it can be something that is absolutely demandable, namely that by means of the signifier, the field of the signified has either been reorganized, or extended in some way. And then why the horse? On that one can embroider: the horse is a rather rich theme in what is mythology, in legends and fairy tales, in the mathematics of dreams, in what it has that is most constant, most opaque, than the nightmare called ‘night mare’ [‘cauchemar’, in English, is said ‘nightmare’: night mare]. [wordplay: the French term ‘cauchemar’ does not literally contain ‘mare’; the remark hinges on the English compound ‘night’ + ‘mare’, i.e., ‘jument de nuit’]

The whole book of Monsieur JONES is centered on that in order to show us to what extent there is not simply chance there, that ‘night mare’ is not simply the night witch, the anguishing apparition, that it is not a matter of chance if the mother mare comes there to substitute for the witch.

There of course Monsieur JONES seeks—according to the good habit—to find, in analysis, on the side of the signified, which leads him to find that everything is in everything, and to show us that there is no play of ancient mythology, nor even modern, that escapes the fact of being, in some respect, a horse. And indeed, MARS, ODIN, ZEUS, all have horses; the question is to know why.

So they have horses, they are horses, everything is in horse in this book. It is obviously not difficult to show from there that the root ‘MR’ which is at once mother, mara, and just as much the sea in French, is also a root that all by itself contains this signification that is all the easier to rediscover, since it covers roughly everything. It is obviously not by this route that we will proceed, and we will not go so far as to think that it is on the side of the horse that all the implications are.

There is certainly on the side of the horse something that contains all sorts of analogical propensities that make it, in effect as an image, something that can be a favorable receptacle for all sorts of symbolizations of natural elements that come to the foreground of infantile preoccupation at the turning point where we indeed see little Hans. The emphasis I am trying here to place for you—which is always and everywhere omitted—is that that is not what is essential. The essential is this: a certain signifier is brought at a critical moment in little Hans’s evolution, which is going to play an absolutely polarizing, recrystallizing role in a way that appears to us as pathological no doubt, but that assuredly is constitutive in that way.

At that moment the horse begins to punctuate the external world with what FREUD later, regarding little Hans’s phobia, will qualify as a ‘signal function’, signals in fact that restructure for him at that moment the world, deeply marked with all sorts of limits whose property and function we now have to grasp. What does it mean that with these limits being constituted, there is constituted at the same time the possibility, by fantasy or desire—we will see it—of a transgression of this limit, at the same time as an obstacle, an inhibition that stops him short of this limit? This is done with this element that is a signifier: the horse. To understand the function of the horse, the way is not to seek on which side is the equivalent of the horse: whether it is little Hans himself, or little Hans’s mother, or little Hans’s father, for it is successively all that, and still many other things.

It can be all that, it can be any of all that, insofar as the signifying system…
coherent with the horse in the successive attempts, let us say, that little Hans makes,
to apply them to his world in order to restructure it
…finds itself, in the course of these attempts, at such or such a moment, touching, covering such or such a major component element of little Hans’s world, namely his father, his mother, himself, little Anna his little sister, and the little comrades, the fantasmatic girls, and many other things. What is at issue is that first we must consider that the horse, when it is introduced as the central point of the phobia, introduces a new term that precisely has as its property first of all to be an obscure signifier.

I would almost say that the pun I have just made in saying ‘a signifier’, you can take it in a complete way: it is in certain respects ‘insignificant’ [wordplay: in French, ‘un signifiant’ (a signifier) echoes ‘insignifiant’ (insignificant); the point is that its very lack of inherent meaning enables its function], and that is why it has its deepest function, why it plays this role of a plowshare that will split reality anew. We can conceive its necessity, for everything had been going very well up to then for little Hans. It is indeed this something—I think I have already indicated it to you sufficiently and I repeat it here—that arises with the secondary appearance of the horse.

FREUD underscores it well: a short time after the appearance of the diffuse signal of anxiety, the horse will come into function, and it is by the development of this function, it is by what is going to happen thereafter—namely everything one is going to do with the horse—and by following it at each instant and to the end, that we can arrive at understanding what happened, what is the function of this signifier and of this horse.

Little Hans therefore suddenly finds himself in this position of being in a situation that assuredly is decompensated. And why is he in this decompensated situation? Everything seems, up to a certain moment that is the 5 or 6 February 1908, that is to say about a trimester before his fifth year, everything seems very well borne. Something occurs at that moment.

Let us take it for an instant, and as directly as possible, in the terms of reference that are those we see up to then. The game continues with the mother on the basis of this lure of seduction that is the one that up to then has fully sufficed and whose terms I recall: the love relation with the mother is what introduces the child into the imaginary dynamic itself, in which little by little he is initiated, and in which, I would almost say—in order to introduce here under a new angle the relation to the breast, I mean in the sense of the lap—he insinuates himself. We saw in the beginnings of the observation this spread out at every instant as being the very game, with the hidden observation that Hans makes there in a kind of perpetual veiling or unveiling.

At the base of his relations with his mother, something has occurred that is the introduction of certain real elements. What continues up to then on the basis of the game, this continuation of the dialogue around the symbolic present or absent, is something whose rules all of a sudden for Hans are violated, because two things appear: it is at the moment when Hans finds himself most in a position to respond ‘cash’ to the game, I mean to finally show her, for real, and in the most glorious state, his little prick, that at that moment he is rebuffed. His mother tells him literally, not only that it is forbidden, but that it is a little dirty thing, that it is something repugnant, and we assuredly cannot not see there an altogether essential element.

FREUD moreover underscores that these kinds of aftershocks of the depreciative intervention are something that does not come right away. He literally underscores this term that I wear myself out repeating, promoting to the forefront of analytic reflection: ‘afterwards’. He says ‘nachträgliche gehorsam’: nachträgliche: afterwards, gehorsam: obedience, which means to obey, to hear before any hearing. It is not right away that either such threats or such rebuffs take effect; they take effect after some time.

And just as well there, were I in a position far from being partial, I would also bring…
moreover FREUD underscores it well, and not only between the lines
…a real element of comparison: he was able, by comparisons between the big and the small, to situate in its just measure the reduced, tiny, ridiculously insufficient character of the organ in question.

It is this real element that comes to add itself and weigh down this rebuff which already, for him, sets in motion, down to the very foundations of the edifice of relations with his mother. Add to that that the presence of little Anna is something that at first was taken in diverse faces, the multiple angles of very diverse modes of assimilation under which he can take her, but that also more and more comes for an instant to testify that in some way another element of the game is indeed present there, which can also call the whole edifice into question, all the principles, all the bases of the game, and which renders it itself, and even perhaps on occasion, superfluous.

Those who have experience of the child know well that these are facts of common experience that child analysis constantly puts within our reach. For the moment what occupies us is the way this signifier is going to operate in the midst of all this. What must be done? One must go to the texts and make construction. One must know how to read.

And when we see things that are reproduced in a certain way with all the same elements, but recomposing themselves in a different way, one must know how to record them, and notice that this does not simply have a kind of distant analogical reference, does not allude, so to speak, to internal events that we extrapolate, that we suppose in the subject; it is not—as we say in ordinary language—the symbol of something he is himself in the process of thinking over; it is something quite other.

These are laws that manifest this structuration, not of the real, but of the symbolic, which will start to play among themselves, to operate, if I may say so, all alone in an autonomous way, which it suits us in any case for a time to consider as such, so as to notice whether in itself this operation of reworking, of restructuring is precisely that something that on occasion operates.

I will illustrate what I am going to tell you. On 22 April, the father has—as every Sunday, an essential point—taken his little Hans to see the grandmother at Lainz. The heart of the city of Vienna is situated at the edge of an arm of the Danube. It is in that part of the inner city encircled by the Rings that the house of little Hans’s parents is located. Behind the house is the customs office, and a little farther the famous station that is often spoken of in the observation, and in front you have the War Ministry Square and a very pretty museum. [K.K. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie]

It is to that station that Hans thinks of going when he will have made progress and will have managed to go beyond a certain field that lies in front of the house. Everything leads me to think that the house is situated very much at the end, for he once alludes to the fact that very near their home is the Nordbahn line, now the Nordbahn is on the other side of the Danube canal. There are quite a few small railway organizations in Vienna: there is everything that arrives from the East, from the West, from the North, from the South, but there are in addition quantities of little local railways, in particular a belt line down below, probably the one into which threw herself ‘the young homosexual woman’ of whom I spoke to you at the beginning of this year.

But two lines interest us as regards the adventure of little Hans: there is a connecting railway that has the property of linking the Nordbahn to the Hauptzollamt station behind the block of houses, and where little Hans can see the little wagons—the ‘draisines’ as FREUD expresses it—on which little Hans so much covets going.

Meanwhile, he has gone to another station. And it is this railway, underground in places, that goes toward Lainz. This Sunday 22 April, the father proposes to little Hans a route a little more complicated than usual. They are indeed going to make a stop at Schönbrunn, on the Stadtbahn, which is the ‘Viennese Versailles’, and where the zoological garden is located where little Hans goes with his father, and which plays so important a role in the observation. But a Versailles much less grandiose; the HABSBOURG dynasty was probably much closer to its people than that of the BOURBON, because one sees very well that even at a time when the city was much less extended, the horizon is there quite near.

After the visit to the park of Schönbrunn, they will take again a steam tramway—the tramway 60 at the time—which will take them to Lainz; to give you a sense of scale, Lainz is roughly at the same distance from Vienna as Vaucresson from Paris, and which continues up to Mauer and Mödling. When they go directly to the grandmother’s, they take a tramway that passes much farther to the South and that arrives directly.

Another tramway line links this direct line and the Stadtbahn, which is the famous Sankt Veit. This will allow you to understand what little Hans will mean the day when he will have a departure fantasy from Lainz in order to return home, when he will say that the train left with him and his grandmother, and that the father, who missed it, can have the second train arrived from Sankt Veit. This network thus forms a virtual loop, for the two lines do not communicate; they simply allow, both of them, to reach Lainz. A few days later, in a conversation with his father, little Hans will produce something that is classified among these many things of which little Hans bears witness to us of having thought. Even when one wants absolutely to make him say that he dreamed it, he underscores well that these are things that he thought.

[‘Ich -Hast du von den Giraffen geträumt?
Er -Nein, nicht geträumt; ich hab’ mir’s gedacht … – das Ganze hab’ ich mir gedacht – aufgekommen war ich schon früher’.]

The essential point where in a certain way the Verkehrkomplex intervenes, FREUD indicates it to us himself somewhere:

‘We can see,’ he says, ‘that it is entirely natural that at the point where things are, what relates to the horse and to everything the horse is going to do, to the role of the horse, extends much farther in the transport system.’

In other words, on the horizon traced by the circuits of the horse, there are the circuits of the railway. And it is so true and evident that the first explanation that Hans gives his father when it is a matter of giving him the details of the lived experience of his phobia is something that is linked to the fact that in front of his house there is a courtyard and a very wide driveway. One understands why it is quite an affair for little Hans to cross them. In front of the house the harnessed carts come to load and unload, they line up along an unloading ramp.

The tangency, so to speak, of the horse-circuit system with the railway-circuit system, is indicated in the clearest way the first time little Hans begins a little to explain himself about the horse phobia. What does little Hans say?

Little Hans says this: ‘One thing that I would madly like to do would be to climb onto the cart…’ Where he saw kids playing, and on the sacks and parcels, he would pass quickly, and he could go onto the plank that is the unloading ramp.

What is he afraid of?
That the horses will start moving and prevent him from doing this little quick thing, and then quickly climbing back down.

That must still have a meaning. I believe that to understand this meaning, as to understand anything whatsoever in the system of signifying functioning, on this occasion one must not start from the idea:
– What can the plank possibly be in all that?
– What can the cart possibly be?
– What can the horse possibly be?

The horse is assuredly something, and we will be able to say at the end, when we will know it from its functioning, what it could have served for. But we can as yet know nothing about it; we must stop at this horse; the father stops at it, everyone stops at it, except the analysts who reread endlessly the observation of little Hans while seeking to read something else there. The father, for his part, is interested in it and asks him why he is afraid:

– ‘Would it be for example because you could not come back?’
– ‘Oh!’ says little Hans, ‘not at all, I know very well where I live, I would always be able to say it and they would bring me back. I might even come back with the cart.’

There is no difficulty. No one seems to stop at that, but it is striking that Hans is afraid of something, and that this something is not at all simply what would go so well. That could even go in the direction of what I think I am trying to set you onto the understanding of things: to be in fact carried along by the situation. That would be a fine metaphor. Not at all: he knows very well that he will always return to his point of departure, to the point that if we have a very little bit of understanding, we can suspect that it is perhaps that after all that is at issue, that is to say that indeed whatever one does, one cannot get out of it. This is a simple indication that I give you in passing, but it would perhaps be to show subtlety and not enough rigor.

We must realize that there are situations that cannot—in the observation—not be brought close to that one, which we see well now that we must stop there, because it is the phenomenology itself of the phobia. We see there the total ambiguity of what is desired and of what is feared. In the end we could believe that indeed it is the fact of being carried along, of leaving, that makes little Hans anxious. But according to his own testimonies, this fact of leaving is entirely this side of it, since he knows very well that one always comes back, and consequently what can it indeed mean that he would want in some way to go beyond?

Assuredly already this formula ‘that he would want to go beyond’ is something that provisionally we can, we, hold in a kind of minimum construction. If indeed everything is—in his system—in a certain disarray because one no longer respects the rules of the game, he can feel purely and simply caught in an untenable situation, the most untenable element of the situation being that he no longer knows, he, where to situate himself.

I will therefore now bring you closer to the other elements that, in a certain way, reproduce what is indicated in the fantasy of phobic fear. Little Hans is going to leave with the horses, and the unloading plank is going to move away, and he is going to return, to flow back again—what is too desired or too feared, who knows?—with his mommy. When we have read and reread the observation, we must remember at least two other stories. First it concerns a fantasy that does not come at just any moment, and that is supposed to take place—he imagined all the rest—with his father. This time too it is on a railway line, but one is in a car, and he is with his father. They arrive at the station of Gmünden where they are going to spend their summer holidays, so they gather their things and they dress.

It seems that the gathering and the loading of luggage, at a time perhaps less free-flowing than ours, has always represented a kind of concern. FREUD himself in the observation of the homosexual woman mentions it as terms of comparison:
– the first stage of the analysis corresponds to the gathering of the luggage,
– the second to their loading onto the train.
Hans and his father do not have time to get dressed again before the train departs.

Then there is the 3rd fantasy that Hans reports to his father on 21 April, and that we will call ‘the platform scene’. This ‘platform scene’ is situated just before what we will call ‘the great dialogue with the father’, conventional labels intended to find one’s bearings later. Hans thought that he was leaving from Lainz with the grandmother, this woman whom one goes to see with the father every Sunday, about whom we are told absolutely nothing in the whole observation, and I must say that this gives much to think about the formidable character of the lady, for it was at a time when it was much easier than for me to locate the whole family.

The Lainz woman, as little Hans calls her, is supposed to have boarded the train with him before the father had managed to get down from the footbridge, and they left. And since trains pass often, and one sees the line up to Sankt Veit, little Hans recounts that he arrives on the platform in time to take the second train with his father. How did little Hans, who had already left, come back? That is indeed the impasse. In truth it is an impasse that no one manages to elucidate, but these questions, the father asks himself. In the observation twelve lines are devoted to what could well have happened in little Hans’s mind.

As for us, let us content ourselves with our schemas:
– in the 1st schema one leaves as two with grandma,
– in the 2nd schema, mysteriously, it is the path of the impossible, of the non-solution,
– then in the 3rd one ends up leaving again as two with the father.

In other words, we see on this subject something that cannot fail to strike us if one already knows in broad outline the two poles of little Hans’s observation:
– at the start all this evident maternal drama, ceaselessly underscored,
– and at the end I am now with the father.

One still cannot fail to see that there must be a certain relation between this implacable going and returning toward the mother, and the fact that one fine day at least one dreams of leaving at a good pace with the father; it is a simple indication but it is in plain sight, with this exception that it is quite impossible, that is to say that one absolutely does not see how little Hans—since he has already left ahead with grandma—can leave again with the father. That is only possible in the imaginary.

In other words what we see appearing there, as if in filigree, is this fundamental schema that I told you to be that of all mythical progress:
– that one leaves from an impossible or an impasse,
– to arrive at another impasse and at another impossibility.

In the first case, it is impossible to get out of this mother; one always returns to it: ‘Do not tell me that it is for that that I am anxious.’ In the other case one can indeed think that one only has to permute and leave with the father, as Hans himself thought to the point of writing it to the Professor—which is the best use one can make of his thoughts[sic]—only it appears equally in the text of the myth that it is impossible, that there is always somewhere something that gapes.

If we start from this schema, we will see that it is not limited to these elements that in some way give us quite easily and by themselves the occasion to bring them close to this harnessing schema: with whom is one harnessed? This is something that is assuredly one of the absolutely primary elements of the appearance of the choice of the signifier of the horse, or of its use. Here the direction in which the coupling is done is absolutely useless to discern; the sense in which Hans operates is just as much dictated by the favorable occasions that the horse function provides him, and we can say that that guided for him the choice of the horse.

In any case he himself takes care to show us its origin when he tells us at what moment—it is also a moment of dialogue with the father, which is no more than the others just any one—where he tells his father at what moment he thinks he caught the silliness, that is to say 9 April. We will see in the sequel from what this came. He tells us that he was playing at horse and that something happened that has a very great importance, namely what gives the first model of something that will be found again later, namely the fantasy of the wound. It happened that this fantasy manifested itself later regarding his father, but that first was extracted from the real, precisely in one of these horse games.

His father asks him what the horse was like at that moment: was it harnessed to a cart?

‘Not necessarily,’ Hans replies, ‘the horse can be without a cart, and in that case the cart is at home, or on the contrary it can be harnessed to a cart.’

Hans himself articulates that first and foremost the horse is an element made to be harnessed, removable, attachable. This character, so to speak, of amboceptor that we are going to find all the time in the functioning of the horse, is given in the first experience from which Hans extracts it. The horse, before being a horse, is something that binds, that coordinates, and you will see it, it is indeed precisely in this mediation function that throughout the development of the ancient myth we are going to find the horse, and if it were necessary, to support what is going to be confirmed from all sides in what thereafter I am going to develop for you in this function of the signifier of the horse.

We have at once, from Hans’s own mouth, the indication that it is in this sense of grammatical coordination of the signifier that one must go, for it is at that very moment, at the moment when he articulates this about the horse, that Hans himself says: ‘I caught the silliness.’ The term ‘caught’ is used all the time, not either about just anything, but about ‘the silliness’, and all the time about catching children when one says literally that a woman ‘catches a child’.

This neither do I extract from something that passed unnoticed by the authors, namely by the father and FREUD: there is a large note of FREUD about it, and everyone takes an interest in it, to the point that it makes a little difficulty for the translator which for once was resolved very elegantly. [p. 133]

Hans says: ‘It is all the time because of the horse…’ [wegen dem pferd]. He evokes in some way this refrain: that he caught the silliness.

And FREUD cannot be mistaken in identifying this fact that an association of words can be made between wegen and wägen, the plural of wagen which means cart, and in saying that this is how the unconscious functions.

[‘Ich erläutere, Hans will nicht behaupten, daß er damals die Dummheit gekriegt hat, sondern im Zusammenhange damit. Es muß ja wohl so zugehen, die Theorie fordert es, daß dasselbe einmal Gegenstand einer hohen Lust war, was heute das Objekt der Phobie ist. Und dann ergänze ich für ihn, was das Kind ja nicht zu sagen weiß, daß das Wörtchen » wegen« der Ausbreitung der Phobie vom Pferde auf die Wagen (oder wie Hans zu hören und zu sprechen gewohnt ist: Wägen) den Weg eröffnet hat. Man darf nie daran vergessen, um wieviel dinglicher das Kind die Worte behandelt als der Erwachsene, wie bedeutungsvoll ihm darum Wortgleichklänge sind.’]

‘I must explain that Hans does not mean to say that he then caught the silliness, but that all this is in connection with the silliness. It must therefore be so, for theory requires that what is today the object of a phobia must previously have been that of a keen pleasure, and I will complete here what the child was incapable of expressing: that the term “because of” opened the way to the extension of the phobia from horses to “carts”. One must never forget how much more concretely the child treats words than the adult does, which gives for him to verbal consonances a wholly different importance. Wegen (because of), Wagen (cart).’ (Instead of ‘Wegen dem Pferd’ (because of the horse) in German, where Wegen = Wagen = carts in the plural, we have transcribed ‘do you see the horse’ in order to render in French the pun.) (Translator’s note.)’ Puf 1954]

In other words, the horse drags the cart in exactly the same way as the something that drags behind itself the word wegen. There is therefore absolutely nothing abusive in our noticing that it is precisely at the moment when Hans is prey to something that is not even a why…
for beyond the point where the rules of the game are respected,
there is only the trouble, the lack of being, the lack of why
…that Hans at that moment makes in some way drag his because, which answers nothing, by something that is precisely this pure and simple x that is the horse.

In other words, we find ourselves there at the birth, at the very point where the phobia arises, before the typical process of metonymy, that is to say the passing of the weight of sense—more exactly of the interrogation that the statement contains—the passing from a point of the text, of the textual line, to the point that follows.

The definition of metonymy is essentially, and in its structure, this: it is because the weight of this wegen is entirely veiled and transferred onto what is just following: dem Pferd, the horse, that the term takes its articulatory value, at that moment assumes in itself all the hopes of solution. The whole gaping of Hans’s situation at that moment is attached around a transfer of grammatical weight of this same thing after all where you in the end only find the concrete associations, and not imagined in I do not know what psychological hyperspace, associations of which we have two kinds:
– the metaphorical association that to one word responds by another that can be substituted for it.
– the metonymic association that to one word gives the following word that can come in a sentence.

You have the two kinds of response in psychological experience, and you call that ‘association’ because you absolutely want it to happen somewhere in the cerebral neurons. But I know nothing about it; in any case as an analyst, I want to know nothing about it. I find them, these two different types of associations that are called ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’, there where they are in the text of this bath of language in which Hans is immersed, and in which he found the original metonymy that brings the first term, this horse around which his whole system is going to be reconstituted.