🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

So we have arrived at that moment in temporal space, and not necessarily to be confused with chronological distance, which plays out between April 5 and April 6. It is on the 5th that we followed the explanation by little Hans to his father of fantasies that he forges in which he expresses his desire to do a little climb onto the car that is usually in the process of being unloaded in front of the house.

I recall that we insisted on the ambiguity, in the simple perspective of the fear of separation, of the anxiety to which Hans gives form in this fantasy, and we pointed out this remark that assuredly it is not necessarily a matter of being separated from his mother, it is not so much that which he fears since, faced with his father’s question, he himself specifies that he is indeed sure, and almost too sure, that he will be able to come back.

It is on the afternoon of April 9th that the ‘wegen dem Pferd’[because of the horse] comes, which arises in the course of the explanation of the revelation of a moment that seems to him significant of the way in which ‘he caught the silliness’. You know well that it is not for nothing that in the retrospections of memory, this moment when Hans ‘catches the silliness’ is far from being univocal.

Each time he says it with as much conviction: ‘I caught the silliness’. At that moment, everything is founded on that, for what is involved there is only a symbolic retrospection linked to the meaning at each moment made present, of the signifying plurivalence of the horse. At at least two of those moments that we already know, he says ‘I caught the silliness’, when he is going to make the wegen dem Pferd appear, on which last time I found the punchline of my lesson, but of course at the price of a certain leap that did not leave me the time to show you in what context this manifest metonymy of the wegen dem Pferd appears, correlative to the story of little Hans’s fall when one plays ‘dada’ in the countryside.

Another time he will tell us: ‘I caught the silliness when I went out with mommy’, and the same text indicates the paradox of this explanation, because if that day he did not detach himself from mommy all day, it is because mommy already had on her arms his intensive anxiety. He has therefore already begun, and I would even say much more: in the context of the accompaniment, the horse phobia is already declared. So here we are situated on the one hand in the history of FREUD’s text, and on the other hand in a beginning of deciphering that I gave you last time at the level of this something that is taking shape.

I indicated to you its diagram in its three forms. These are moreover always things he thought, concocted; it is never a dream, he always says to his father ‘I thought such-and-such a thing’, and this thing is always rich with a particular resonance. We are accustomed to recognizing the very material on which we work when we work with children, the imaginary material of which I am in the process of trying to show you that all the imaginary resonances that one can, in some way, probe there, do not make up for this succession of structures of which I am going to try today to complete the series for you.

These structures are all marked by this something that, for example, also marked just as well:
– the 1st fantasy, which, supplemented by the father’s questioning, in sum marks the idea of a return,
– as the 2nd, where at another important moment of the development, Hans imagines his father’s departure, not without reason, with the grandmother, then through a gap, a void, he, little Hans, rejoins him in something that can just as well be inscribed in this cycle too, on the sole condition that here we have an enigmatic impossibility in this rejoining of the two characters separated for an instant.

Before committing ourselves further into a confirmatory exploration of this exhaustion of the possibilities of the signifier that is there the object, at the original level that is the one I am bringing you, I already indicated to you the tangency of this enigmatic circuit… manifestly anxiety-producing in the first example, manifested as impossible in the other …the tangency of this circuit, moreover, according to a formula exactly stated in the clearest way by FREUD, with the vaster circuit constituted by the other broader system of communications: that is how FREUD himself expresses it.

Let us not be surprised that Hans, playing on the system of communications, gradually passes from what is the circuit of the horse to the circuit of the railway. In sum it is between two nostalgias, that of going and that of returning, and it is the function of this return, that we see affirmed by FREUD as fundamental to the object, since it is never—he emphasizes—except in the found-again form in which the object ought to have been born, that it finds itself in the development of the subject to be constituted.

The necessity that is properly speaking correlative to the distance, to the symbolic dimension of the object’s moving-away, but in order to find it again, is this truth, if I may say so, of which half is eluded, even lost, in the incidence that ‘Psychoanalysis Today’ places on accentuating the term frustration, without understanding that frustration is never anything but the first stage of the return toward the object which must be, in order to be constituted, found again.

Let us recall what is at issue in the story of little Hans. For FREUD it is nothing other than the Oedipus complex, that is to say this something whose drama brings by itself a new and necessary dimension to the constitution of a completed human world, and necessary to this constitution of the object which is not purely and simply the correlation of a supposedly genital instinctual maturation, but the fact of the acquisition of a certain symbolic dimension which we can here, with of course everything that I assume already known by you of my discourse, but which—for aiming at things here directly—consists in sum in what is at stake each time we have to deal… – as in the case of little Hans, – as in the other cases that I cited to you …with the appearance of a phobia.

Here it is manifest: it is in some way a matter of what comes to be revealed to the child under one angle or another, of the fundamental privation with which the image of the mother is marked, the moment when this privation is intolerable, since in the end it is from this privation that the fact is suspended that the child himself appears threatened with the supreme privation, that is to say, of being unable in any way to fill it. It is this privation to which the father must bring something.

This something, after all, is as simple as the hello of copulation. What she does not have, that one, let him give it to her! And it is indeed that which is at stake in the whole drama of little Hans that we see appear and arise little by little, reveal itself as the dialogue continues.

People say that the image, if one can say so, environmental as one expresses it nowadays, of the family circle of Hans, is not sufficiently drawn. What do they need? Whereas it suffices to read, not even between the lines, to see spread out during the observation this applied, constant presence of the father.

The mother, for her part, is never signaled except insofar as the father asks her whether what she has just recounted is exact, and in the end she is never with little Hans. But the father, very proper, very kind, very Viennese, is there not only diligently brooding over his little Hans, but in addition doing the work, and every Sunday going to see his mommy, with little Hans of course.

And one cannot help being struck by the ease with which FREUD—of whom one knows at that moment what are, if one can say so, the prevailing ideas—admits that this little Hans who lived in the parents’ room until the age of four, certainly never saw any kind of scene that could have worried him as to the fundamental nature of coitus. The father affirms it in his writings: ‘Freud does not discuss the question, he must probably have his idea about it.’

In truth, what we are going to see at the moment when this major scene of the dialogue takes place where little Hans says, in some way, to his father: ‘You must…’: it is untranslatable into French, as FLIESS’s son remarked in order to focus his attention on this scene, and he does not come out of it entirely to his honor, but his remarks are very accurate, and he emphasizes this almost untranslatable character of the expression; one can get out of it through the resonance of the jealous god, of the god who is identical to the figure of the father in the theory of Freudian doctrine: ‘You must be a father, you must hold it against me.’

All this must be true, but before he gets there, a lot of water passes under the bridges, and he needs, to reach that moment, a certain time. So let us immediately pose the question of knowing whether in the end little Hans is, in the course of this crisis, in any way satisfied on that point. Why would he be, if his father is in this critical position whose appearance, in some way as background, must be conceived by us as a fundamental element of the opening in which the phobic fantasy and its function arose?

It is certainly not, in any way, unthinkable that it is this very dialogue that has psychoanalyzed, if one can say so, not little Hans but his father, and which makes his father at the end of the story, which is in sum settled quite happily in four months, more virile than at the beginning. In other words, that if it is this real Father to whom in any case little Hans addresses himself so imperiously, this real Father, there is no reason for him to make him really emerge.

If therefore little Hans arrives at a happy solution of the crisis into which he has entered, assuredly it will be worthwhile for us as well to try to make it say whether at the end of the crisis we can consider that we are at the outcome of an Oedipus complex that is completely normal, whether the genital position that little Hans has reached is something that by itself suffices to assure us that for the future his relation with the woman will be everything one can imagine most desirable.

The question remains open, and not only does it remain open, but you will see that in this openness we can make many remarks, and I already indicate that assuredly if little Hans is promised, if one can say so, to heterosexuality, it perhaps does not suffice for us to have this guarantee in order to think that this heterosexuality by itself suffices to assure a full consistency, if one can say so, of the feminine object.

You see that we are forced to proceed by a kind of concentric touch, to stretch the canvas and the picture between the different poles where it is hung, in order to ensure its normal fixation, this screen on which we have to pursue a particular phenomenon, namely what happens in the correlative development of the treatment itself, the development of the phobia. A simple little example of this kind of ‘out-of-breath’ side of the father in the story comes back to my mind and comes to animate this thing in which we pursue our investigation. After a long explanation by little Hans with the father concerning the horse, they spent the morning on it, they have lunch and Hans says to him: ‘Vati, renn mir nicht davon !’. Which, in the translation that nonetheless remains irresistibly marked by I do not know what kind of cook’s style, gives us this thing that is not false:

‘Why are you galloping off like that!’.

And the father emphasizes at that moment being struck by this expression.

‘Why are you running yourself off like that!’.

And one can add, because in German it is permitted:

‘Why are you running yourself away from me like that!’.

And it is true: it does not suffice that we bring the question of the analysis of the signifier to the level of the hieroglyphic deciphering of this mythological function, for that not to mean that bringing attention to the signifier first of all means knowing how to read. That is obviously ‘the’ absolutely prior condition for knowing how to translate correctly. This is to be regretted for the proper resonance that FREUD’s work can have for French readers.

So here we are with this father, and we have already almost inscribed in this schema what he should be, the place he should occupy: it is through him, across him, through identification with him, that little Hans should find the normal path of this broader circuit onto which it is time that he pass. This is so true that, in some way doubling the consultation of March 30th, the one to which he was taken by his father to FREUD, that famous one which I believe to be—confronted as they are—the illustration of this doubling, even this tripling, of the paternal function on which I insist as being essential to any understanding of what is as well the Oedipus as an analytic treatment itself, insofar as it brings into play the Name of the Father, the father who—before FREUD—represents the super-father, the symbolic Father, and I must say: FREUD purely and simply, and not without his himself, in a stroke of humor, emphasizing it, prophesying it and in some way at once approaching the schema of the Oedipus.

And little Hans listens to the thing with a kind of amused interest, in the tone literally: ‘How can he know all that? He is nonetheless not the confidant of the good Lord, the Professor!’. And the properly speaking humorous relation that supports throughout the observation the relation of little Hans with this distant father that is FREUD, is also exemplary and at once marks the necessity of this transcendent dimension, and how mistaken one would be to incarnate it always in the style of terror and respect! It is no less fertile than that other register where its presence allows little Hans, in some way, to unfold his problem.

But in parallel, I told you, other things happen, and which have much more weight for little Hans’s progress. Read the observation, and you will see that on that Monday March 30th when he is taken to FREUD’s, the report that the father makes signals two things, whose exact function is moreover a bit erased by the fact that he reports them both in the preamble although the second succeeds the consultation, that is to say that it is a remark by little Hans on the way back from the consultation.

Little Hans’s father certainly does not minimize in the observation the importance of these two moments. Little Hans at the start tells the father—because we are on a Monday, therefore the day after the Sunday when they complicated the visit to the grandmother with a little walk to Schönbrunn—that he was doing with him a transgression. One cannot say things otherwise, because it is the very image of transgression; there cannot be a better one than this archi-pure transgression which is designated by a rope under which they passed both of them, and the father explains what this rope is, about which in the garden of Schönbrunn Hans asked him the following question:

– ‘Why is this rope there?’
– ‘It is to prevent passing onto the lawn,’ says the father, and Hans adds:
– ‘What prevents passing underneath?’. To which the father replies:
– ‘Well-brought-up children do not pass under ropes, especially when they are there to indicate that one must not cross them.’

Hans does not fail to answer this with this fantasy:

– ‘But let us do the transgression together.’

And it is this ‘together’ that is so important, and then they are going to tell the guard ‘Here is what we did’ and hop, he takes both of them away. The importance of this fantasy seems sufficiently to be grasped in its context, and assuredly that is what is at stake: it is a matter of passing to the register of the father and of doing something that takes them away together, and the question of the failed taking-away can thus be clarified.

One must, of course, see the schema backwards in order to understand it; it is the very nature of the signifier to present things in a strictly operative way. It is around the question of taking-away that the whole question is: it is a matter of knowing whether he is going to be taken away with his father. It is out of the question that he be taken away with his father, since precisely it is of this function that the father cannot make use, at least which is realized in the common taking-away, and we shall see what all the successive elaborations of little Hans are going to be used for in order to approach this goal at once desired and impossible. But that it already be initiated in the 1st fantasy that I have just explained to you, just before FREUD’s consultation, this is sufficiently indicative.

Here is now the 2nd, as if it were necessary that we could not ignore the reciprocal function of the two circuits:
– the small maternal circuit,
– and the large one, the paternal circuit.

The fantasy comes even closer to the goal that will go[…] On the way back from FREUD’s in the evening, and it is on a railway with his father, that little Hans again indulges in a transgression. One cannot say it better still: he breaks a windowpane. This is also what there can be of best as signifying the rupture toward the outside, and there again they are taken away together. It is again the point, the terminus of little Hans’s fantasy.

We see on April 2nd, that is to say three days after the observation, the first improvement, of which we suspect moreover that perhaps the father gave him a little nudge, for once Hans is cured he corrects himself to FREUD:

‘This improvement may perhaps not have been as marked as I told you.’

All the same, this kind of takeoff that little Hans begins to manifest that day in being able to take a few more steps in front of the porte cochère, that door which serves for its function in the context of the time. Let us not forget that it is that very one which represents in the family propriety and what is done, and, having to change apartment, the mother says to him: ‘Changing floors is not important, but the porte cochère, you owe it to your son!’

The porte cochère is therefore not nothing in the topology of what relates to little Hans, and as I told you last time, this porte cochère and the boundary that it marks, is something that here again is, point by point, doubled by what is a little further on—perhaps less near than what I told you last time—but still within view of the entrance façade of the station where one leaves on the city railway, the one that leads regularly to the grandmother’s. Indeed last time, thanks to carefully obtained information, I made you a little diagram where little Hans’s parents’ house was in Customs Street[Hintere Zollamtstrasse (Red dotted lines)]. That is not quite exact, and I noticed it thanks to a thing that reveals to you once more how blind one is to what one has under one’s eyes, and which is called the signifier, the letter.

In the very diagram that we have in the observation given by FREUD, there is the name of the street, it is the Untere Viaductgasse[Blue dotted lines]. There is a hidden street that suggests that there is on one side of the track, a small building that is indicated on the plans of Vienna and that corresponds to what FREUD calls the Lagerhaus, that is to say a special warehouse devoted to the granting of customs duties on the entry of foodstuffs into Vienna.

This explains at once all the connections, that is to say the presence of the Nordbahn railway track, with which the little wagon is going to play a certain role in Hans’s fantasy, and the possibility of having right opposite the house, the warehouse of which FREUD speaks, and at the same time of keeping the house in good view of the station entrance.

So here, in the set, is planted the scene on which this drama unfolds to which the poetic spirit, and if you like tragic, of little Hans, will allow us to follow its construction. How do we come to conceive that this passage to a wider circle was for little Hans a necessity?

Let us not forget it; I have already told you enough: this is in the relation that has been established, the point of grip, the point of impasse that has arisen in his relations with his mother, and which we also find indicated at every moment. The bottom of this child’s crisis, in that his mother has up to that moment assured him the support, the insertion in the world, is something whose translation we can grasp to the letter in this anxiety that prevents little Hans from leaving—from farther than a certain circle—the vision of his house.

Obsessed as we are by a certain number of prevailing meanings, we do not often see what is inscribed in the most evident way in the text, communicated, articulated by a symptom as close to the surface of the signifier as phobia is. If it is his house toward which little Hans at the moment of being taken away turns anxiously, why not understand that we have only to translate that in the very way in which it presents itself?

What he is afraid of is not simply that this or that will no longer be there when he returns home, all the more so since if the father—and it seems that the mother also gives it a good nudge—is not always inside the circuit, it is because what is in question at the moment where little Hans has arrived is that, as the little Hans fantasy about the car expresses it, the whole house goes away.

It is essentially the house that is at issue; it is the house that has been in question since the moment when, in sum, this mother, he understands that she can at once be lacking to him and at the same time that he has remained totally in solidarity with her. What he fears is not being separated from her; it is being taken away with her God knows where. And this we find at every instant surfacing in the observation, this element that has to do with the fact that insofar as he is in solidarity with the mother, he no longer knows where he is. That is indeed something that we can feel at every instant of the observation.

I would here allude only to the fact where the day when, he tells us…
it is the second occasion in which I emphasized to you just now that it was necessary to note that little Hans had noted ‘the silliness’ in a perhaps somewhat arbitrary way
…he was with his mother, and he specifies: ‘Just after we had gone to buy the vest, then we saw an omnibus horse that was falling to the ground.’ Those omnibuses, from the inside of which he saw the horses.

If we look, not simply in an arbitrary way, to revive the Japanese flower in the water of the observations, and if we added something else to it, quite simply we would follow the father’s curiosity who all the same at that moment questions him: ‘What had your mommy done that day?’. And then one sees the program: they went to buy a vest, then right after there was the fall, and finally—it is something that quite sharply breaks with what we have followed up to then—they went to the confectioner.

The fact that one had been with mommy all day seems to indicate that there is, I would not say a hole, a censorship on the part of the child, but assuredly the indication that at that moment something is happening, something that makes Hans clearly emphasize that one was indeed ‘with mommy’, and that one was not with someone else who was perhaps there hovering around.

This ‘with mommy’ has exactly the same value of emphasis in little Hans’s discourse as when one speaks to him at the beginning about Mariedl, and about which he emphasizes: ‘Not only with Mariedl, all alone with her’. Assuredly this has the same role, and the tone with which the father both pushes the interrogation rather far, then in some way very quickly drops it, if one can say so, has something that will be no less confirmed further on when—this is just after—the father, speaking with little Hans who has come to find him in his bed, little Hans indicates to him that perhaps he, the father, would have left.

– ‘Who could have said that I was capable of leaving?’
– ‘No one ever told me that you would leave, but mommy told me one day that she would go away.’

To which the father, to caulk the abyss, says to him: ‘She no doubt told you that because you were naughty’.

And indeed one sees well at every instant this something of which assuredly we cannot push further the character of police investigation, but which is there to emphasize that it was exactly this something that for little Hans put into question the solidity of this parents’ household, which we find in the follow-up history of the observation perfectly untied, that it is there around that this anxiety carried off with maternal love lies, which shows its presence enough from the first fantasy.

This horse that is there with this property of representing the fall with which little Hans is threatened, and on the other hand this danger that is expressed by the bite. Must we not be struck that this bite… I already indicated to you, insofar as the crisis opens, where little Hans can manifestly no longer satisfy his mother… that this bite is the retaliation?

There is here the implied case of what is put to use in a confused way in the idea of this return of the sadistic impulse which, as you know, is so important in Kleinian themes. Perhaps it is not so much that which I indicated to you, namely that in which the child crushes his disappointment in love.

Conversely, if he disappoints, how would he not see that he is also within reach of being swallowed up? It has become more and more threatening by its very privation, and elusive since he cannot also bite it. The horse is what represents ‘to fall’ and what represents ‘to bite’; these are its two properties. I indicate it to you here, and very precisely insofar as in this first circuit we see, in some way, only eluded the element of the bite.

Yet let us pursue things, and punctuate today before we leave each other, even if we return one by one to the succession of little Hans’s fantasies, what will follow, from a moment from which we will have to detach how it came: these are a certain number of other fantasies that in some way punctuate what I called the succession of mythic permutations.

You must well conceive that here at the individual level… if myth assuredly by all sorts of characteristics cannot in any way be completely restored to a sort of identity with the developed mythology that is that which is at the base of the whole social foundation in the world, everywhere there where myths are present by their function, and do not believe that even there where they are apparently absent as in our scientific civilization, they are not all the same somewhere… all the same at the individual level this character is maintained of mythic development, that in sum we must conceive its function of solution in a closed impasse situation, like that of little Hans, between his father and his mother.

The myth reproduces in miniature this fundamental character of mythic development; everywhere we can grasp it in a sufficient way, it is in sum the way of facing an impossible situation by the successive articulation of all the forms of impossibility of the situation. It is in that that, if one can say so, mythic creation answers a question: it is to go through, if one can say so, the complete circle of what both presents itself as possible opening and as impossible opening to take. The circuit being completed, something is realized that signifies that the subject has put himself at the level of the question.

It is in that that Hans is a neurotic and not a pervert, and next time I will show you what literally allows one to say that it is not artificial to distinguish this sense of his evolution from another possible sense. It is indicated in the observation itself, as I will show you next time, that everything that happens at the moment when it is a matter of the maternal underpants indicates in negative the path that Hans could have taken on the side of what leads to fetishism.

The little underpants are there for nothing other than to present to us that the solution could have been that Hans attach himself to these little underpants behind which there is nothing, but on which he could have wanted to paint everything he would have wanted.

It is precisely because little Hans is not a simple lover of nature, that he is a metaphysician, that little Hans brings the question to where it is, that is to say to the point where there is something missing, and where he asks reason—use the word in the sense in which one says mathematical ratio of this lack—to be where it is.

And he will, just as well as any collective spirit of the primitive tribe, behave in the rigorous way we know, by making the whole tour of the possible solutions, with a certain choice of a part of chosen signifiers. The signifier is not there—never forget it—in the relation to the signified to represent meaning; it is there, and much more, to fill the gaps of a situation that means nothing. It is because meaning is literally lost, because the thread is lost as in the tale of Tom Thumb, that the pebbles of the signifier arise to fill this hole and this void.

Today then, I will content myself with tightening the sequence of these fantasies of which I gave you three examples last time: with the fantasy of the car in front of the loading ramp, with that of the missed getting off the train at Gmunden, finally with that of the departure with the grandmother at Lainz, and the return toward the father afterward, despite its evident impossibility.

We are going to see a whole series of other fantasies which, if we know how to read them, cover in a certain way and precisely modify the permutation of the elements that allows us to illustrate what I am in the process of telling you.

The first, in order immediately to show you where the passage is here, is placed at a rather late moment in the progress of the dialogue between the father and little Hans. It is the one of the bathtub over which everyone bends with this kind of confused tenderness that makes one find there I do not know what familiar face, while moreover being quite incapable of saying which one.

The bathtub fantasy is this: Hans is in the bathtub… I have told you enough for you to feel that this ‘in the bathtub’ is something that is exactly as close as possible to the ‘in the car’ that is involved, in other words to the fundamental ‘in the house’, to the connection, to the attachment to this thing always ready to slip away from the platform of maternal support… and here someone enters, who is obviously in a certain form the third here awaited; someone enters, who is obviously the plumber who unscrews the bathtub. We are told nothing more.

He unscrews the bathtub; after that, with his drill[Bohrer]—and here FREUD introduces the possibility of an equivocation with geboren, without resolving it—he drills into little Hans’s belly. With the usual methods of interpretation that we use, one tries right away to force things, and God knows what one can say about it. In any case, he, the father, does not fail to see in it the fact that something there relates to the scene that commonly occurs at the level of the mother’s bed, namely that little Hans drives out the father, replaces him in some way, and that here in this fantasy he is afterward the object of an aggression by the father.

All this assuredly is not fundamentally tainted with error, but to remain strictly at the level of things, we say that if the bathtub answers to this something whose solidarity with little Hans is a matter of overcoming, it is certain that the fact that it is unbolted is assuredly in any case something that must be retained.

That at that level, on the other hand, little Hans, he, in his fantasy is personally at the level of his belly, perforated, is something that we must also retain as answering to something that we can conceive in the system of a permutation where it is he, in the end, who personally assumes the mother’s hole, which is precisely the abyss, the crucial and final point that is in question, the thing not lookable at, the thing that floats in the form of the black forever elusive before the figure of the horse, and precisely at the level where it bites, that is to say somewhere around there, this thing that up to then was that into which one must not look.

And when I say that one must not look into it, it is little Hans also who says it. For when you refer back to the moment when it is a matter of the mother’s underpants, you will see that little Hans, who at that moment is questioned in spite of common sense by the father, brings, against all the suggestions of the paternal interrogation, two elements, and two only. The second I will tell you next time when we return to the analysis of that moment, but the first is this:

– ‘You are going to write to the Professor and you are going to say that I saw the underpants, that I spat, that I fell on the ground and that I closed my eyes so as not to look.’

Here, at the level of the bathtub fantasy, little Hans does not look any more, but he assumes the hole, the maternal position. We are here precisely at the level of the inverted Oedipus complex of which we see, in a certain perspective, that of the signifier, how necessary it is, how it is literally a phase of the positive Oedipus complex.

What happens next? We return, in one of the fantasies that follow, to another position, which is the one called that of the little wagon: little Hans, perfectly recognizable by the form of the little boy who is on the little wagon, spends an entire night naked on the little wagon. It is moreover something very ambiguous: he climbed onto the little wagon, he was left there all naked for an entire night; it is at once a desire and a fear; it is strictly in connection with the moment when he said to his father in the dialogue that I indicated as being a capital dialogue, and to which we will return: ‘You were there like a naked one’.

FLIESS, in the article I spoke to you about, in some way emphasizes the sharp character in the child’s vocabulary, as if all of a sudden it were the biblical spirit that he possessed, and in truth this disconcerts everyone, to the point that one rushes to fill the hole by putting in parentheses: that means that he must have bare feet. FLIESS very rightly remarks how much this is to be noted, this style of the term; it is indeed in the clear succession of the moment when once again he invokes his father: ‘Do your job’.

This thing finally that one cannot see, how the mother is satisfied, that at least she be so: ‘You must do it, this must be done’. This ‘must be done’, which means ‘be a real father’, it is just after he has managed to give birth to this formula, and to show what is called for in reality, it is just after that that little Hans foments in his fantasy that he spends an entire night on the car, on the plane and the broader circle of the railway. He spends an entire night there, whereas up to then the relations with the mother have essentially been sustained by relations provided at full speed. Up to then, that is what he wishes. He moreover explains to his father, still at the moment of the dialogue I am speaking to you about, and indeed, he says… for he continues the fantasy:

– ‘You should go and bang your foot against something, hurt yourself, bleed and disappear and,’ he says, ‘that would give me just the time to be in your place for an instant, but you would come back…’

That is to say that one would find again the rhythm of what one can call ‘the primitive game of transgression with the mother’, which was sustained precisely only by this clandestinity. Here little Hans spends the whole night in the form of his fantasy on the little wagon, and the next morning one gives 50 000 Gulden—which at the time of the observation is something that has all its weight—to the driver so that he will allow the boy to continue on the same little train his journey.

Another fantasy, and a fantasy that seems to be in the story the last, the summit, the terminal point, is the one by which little Hans ends and which says this time that it is not only the plumber, but the installer who here accentuates the character of unscrewing, who comes with his pliers. It is inaccurate to translate it by ‘screwdriver’ on the pretext that there was precisely a pointed instrument, the Bohrer. Zange is indeed the pliers, and what one unscrews is indeed little Hans’s behind, in order to put another one on him.

So here is another step crossed, and whose superposition onto the preceding bathtub fantasy is sufficiently brought to light by the fact that the temporal relations of this behind with the bathtub were articulated in the most precise and the most complete way by little Hans himself. It happens that in the bathtub that one has in Vienna in the house, because his little behind fills it well, he weighs enough. That is the whole question: does he or does he not weigh enough? There he fills it; he is even forced to stay seated there; and assuredly it is everywhere the bathtub is far from representing the same guarantees that the fantasies of being swallowed up, of anxiety resume, which are the ones that make him literally refuse to bathe elsewhere.

Not the equivalence of the significant of course, but the superposition in the schema of the behind that is unscrewed with the bathtub unscrewed previously is also something that we can place at the level of opening where it is a matter of something that corresponds—and with at the same time something changed—to the fact that the car pulls away more or less quickly, pulls away or does not pull away, from the ramp to which it is momentarily pressed up.

And I complete the last fantasy: it is said that the installer then says to little Hans: ‘Turn around to the other side and show your Wiwi’, which is there the insufficient reality since he did not succeed in seducing the mother, and on that everyone completes the interpretation: he unscrews it to give him a better one. Unfortunately it is not in the text; nothing indicates that in the end little Hans has gone through completely, if one can say so, in a signifying way, the castration complex, for if the castration complex is something, it is that. There is not somewhere a penis, but the father is capable of giving another one. And we will say more: insofar as the passage to the symbolic order is necessary, it is always necessary that up to a certain point the penis has been taken away and then given back. Naturally, it can never be given back, since everything symbolic is by definition quite incapable of being given back.

It is around that that the drama of the castration complex lies: it is only symbolically that it is taken away and given back. But in a case like this one we see symbolically that it is taken away and that it is not given back. It is therefore indeed a matter of knowing to what extent it can suffice to have made this whole tour. It is equivalent from the point of view of examinations. He made an additional circuit, and the mere fact that it is a cycle and a circuit suffices to make it, something that ensures the rite of passage to have a value equal to what it would be if it were completely achieved. In any case, that is a question that is posed, and it is not outside this strict terrain […] of the list of the signifier that we can make progress in what we can understand of symptomatic formations.

Before we leave each other, I want to point out one thing to you, because I always try to end on a stroke that amuses you: in all this, this screwdriver, these pliers that are in question, what will that be? Because in the end one has never spoken of it during the whole story, never did the father say: ‘We will screw it back on you’, so where does it come from? Here again I do not see simply by remaining at the level of the signifier, after which the installer intervenes when it is a matter of unscrewing his behind.

This therefore leaves no doubt: it is a pair of pliers or a pair of tongs. It happens that for the little experience of the horse that I had in ancient times, that these kinds of big teeth with which a horse can bite a finger of little Hans are called, in all languages, pincers. And not only are the teeth called pincers, but the front of the hoof with which the horse does all its little work is also called a ‘pincer’ in German.

So it is something that means pincer, and that means pincer in the two senses of the word pincer in French. I would tell you more: in Greek, χηλή[kélê] has exactly the same meaning, and this of course I did not find by leafing through in Greek the locksmith’s manual that does not exist, but I found it by chance in the prologue of the play The Phoenician Women[Euripides], namely that JOCASTA, before recounting the whole story of ANTIGONE, gives a very curious detail concerning what happens at the moment of the murder: she explains very well, with as much care as I put into the construction of these little railway networks and these Viennese avenues, by where the one and the other arrived: they met at the crossroads and they were both going to Delphi.

At that moment the quarrel of precedence breaks out, the one who is on a big chariot, the other who is on foot. One goes, one comes, one grabs each other, finally the stronger one, that is to say OEDIPUS, passes in front, and at that moment—a detail that I did not find elsewhere—JOCASTA takes care to note that if the quarrel in some way bounced back, it is because one of the horses went to strike with its hoof, χηλή, the heel of OEDIPUS.

Thus it was not enough that his foot was swollen because of the little pin that had been passed through his ankles for him to accomplish his destiny; it was necessary that he have at the foot—exactly like little Hans’s father—this wound that is made to him precisely by the hoof of a horse, which hoof is called in Greek, as in German, as in French, a pincer, for χηλή also designates pincer or tongs.

This is intended to show you that when I tell you that in the succession of little Hans’s phantasmatic constructions, it is indeed always the same material that serves and that turns, I tell you nothing exaggerated.