🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Children in swimming trunks

‘O cities of the sea, I see among you your citizens, men and women, their arms and legs tightly bound in strong bonds by people who will not understand your language, and you will be able to exhale only among yourselves, through tearful complaints, lamentations and sighs, your pains and your regrets for lost freedom. For those who bind you will not understand your tongue, any more than you will understand them.’

Notebooks of Leonardo Da VINCI, Codex Atlanticus 145. r. a. Gallimard t. II, p. 400.

This little excerpt taken from the notebooks of Leonardo Da VINCI some months ago, and which I had completely forgotten, seems to me quite fit to introduce our lesson today. This rather grand passage is to be understood, of course, only in an allusive sense.

Today we are going to resume our reading of the texts of Little Hans, trying to hear the language in which Little Hans expresses himself. Last time I pointed out to you a certain number of stages of this development of the signifier, in which, all in all, he makes us consider that the enigmatic center, namely the signifier of the horse included in the phobia, presents itself as having the function of a crystal in a supersaturated solution.

It is around this signifier of the horse that there comes, all in all, to develop, to blossom into a kind of immense branching, this mythical development in which the story of Little Hans consists. Straightaway, in order now, if I may say so, to immerse this tree in the bath of what was lived by Little Hans, we must see what the role of this development of the tree was, and I want to indicate to you what a kind of balance sheet that we are going to have to draw up will tend toward, of what the progress of Little Hans was.

Straightaway he indicates to you that since what is at issue here is the object relation taken in the terms of a progress, and while Little Hans is going to live his Oedipus, nothing in the observation indicates that we should consider the results as, in some sense, fully satisfactory.

I would say that there is something that the observation at its beginning accentuates, it is I know not what that one could call a sort of precocious maturity in this Little Hans. One cannot say that at that moment he is before his Oedipus, but assuredly on the way out. The way, in other words, in which Little Hans experiences his relations with little girls already has—as is stressed to us in the observation—all the advanced characteristics of a relation; we will not say adult, but in some sense one that allows us to recognize in him a rather brilliant kind of analogy, which makes it so that, to tell the whole story, FREUD himself presents him as a kind of happy seducer, and that assuredly this complex term, even donjuanesque, tyrannical, whose term I once let slip here, to the greatest scandal of certain people, is entirely characterized in this precocious attitude of Little Hans, which indicates entry into a kind of happy adaptation to a real context. What do we see, on the contrary, at the end?

At the end, it must be said, one finds again the same little girls inhabiting the inner world of Little Hans. But if you read the observation, you cannot fail to be struck by seeing not only how much more imaginary they are and how truly radically imaginary they are. They are fantasies with which Little Hans converses, and in a sensibly changed relation moreover; they are far more his children.

I would say that if it is there that one must see, in some sense, the matrix left by the resolution of the crisis for the future relation of Little Hans with women, then assuredly we can say that from the point of view of the surface, the result is sufficiently acquired of the heterosexuality of Little Hans, but that these girls will remain marked by something that will be, if one may say so, the stigma of their mode of entry into the libidinal structure of Little Hans, and we will even see in detail how they entered it. Assuredly the narcissistic style of their position in relation to Little Hans is irrefutable, and we will even see more in detail what determines it, what situates it.

Assuredly Little Hans, if one may say so, will love women, but they will remain fundamentally bound for him to a kind of putting his power to the test. That is also why everything indicates to us that he will never be without fearing them: if one may say so, they will be his mistresses. It is also that they will be—and will remain—‘the girls of his spirit’ and, you will see, snatched from the mother, but it is certainly not beyond the relation to the feminine object that it comes to an end in Little Hans[…]
This is meant to show you or to indicate to you where the interest of such a research lies. Naturally this requires taking up our path again in order to be confirmed. We must, all in all, situate, since we have taken this as a point of reference in relation to the time of the signifying structuration of the myth of Little Hans, the different stages of what happens, namely of his progress.

We speak of object relation between the different times of the signifying mythic formation. What are the objects that successively move to the foreground of Little Hans’s interest? What are, all in all, the progresses that occur correlatively in the signified, in this particularly active period, fertile with a kind of renewal, of revolution of Little Hans’s relation to his world? Will we be able to grasp something that in parallel allows us to grasp what these successive crystallizations in the form of fantasies punctuate?

Without any doubt, successive crystallizations of a signifying configuration whose community of figure I showed you last time, namely that I allowed you at least to glimpse how, in these successive figures, the same elements permute with the others so as each time to renew, while fundamentally leaving the same, the signifying configuration.

On April 5 we have the theme that I called ‘of return’ which of course is not what he essentially explains, but it has that as its background. It is the theme of what we could call a departure, or more exactly [the theme] of an anguishing solidarity with the car, the Wagen, which is at the edge of the departure ramp, and which the fantasy of Little Hans develops in some sense, for it is not from the outset that it presents itself thus; the father’s questioning must make it easier for him to confess his fantasies, and at the same time to speak them, to organize them, and also to reveal them to himself at the same time as we can catch sight of them.

It is on April 11 that we see appear the fantasy of the bathtub that is unscrewed, with inside it Little Hans and his big hole in the belly, on which we concentrate an approximate silhouette. Between the two what happened?

It is on April 21 that we find the fantasy that we can call of the ‘new departure with the father’. It is a fantasy manifestly represented as fantasized and impossible: he leaves with the grandmother before the father arrives; when the father catches up with him, one does not know by what miracle Little Hans is there. That is the order in which things present themselves.

On April 22 it is the little wagon in which Little Hans goes off all alone. And then something else will probably mark the limit of what we will be able to reach today.

Before April 5, what is it about? Between March 1 and April 5 it is essentially and only about the phallus.

It is about the phallus with regard to which the father brings him the remark, suggests to him the motivation of his phobia, namely that it is insofar as he touches himself, insofar as he masturbates, that the phobia takes place. He goes further: the father suggests the equivalence of the phobia of what he fears with this phallus, to the point of drawing from Little Hans the reply that a phallus, a ‘Wiwimacher’, which is very exactly the term in which the phallus is inscribed in Little Hans’s vocabulary, does not bite.

We find ourselves there at the entry into the sorts of misunderstandings that are going to preside over the whole dialogue of Little Hans with his father, in the sense that the fact that a phallus—that is indeed what it is about—in what bites, in what wounds. This is something so true that someone who is not a psychoanalyst and to whom I had had this observation of Little Hans read, who is a mythologist, someone who has gone rather far in penetration of the problem on the subject of myths, was saying to me:

‘It is quite striking to see, in some sense underlying the whole development of the observation, one knows not what function, not of vagina dentata, but of phallus dentatus.’

Only, of course, this observation develops entirely under the register of misunderstanding. I will add: this is the quite ordinary case of every kind of creative interpretation between two subjects. It is even like that that it develops: in the way one must expect, it is the least abnormal there is. And I would say that it is precisely in the gap of this misunderstanding that something will develop that will have its fertility: at the moment when the father will speak to him about the phallus, he will speak to him about his real penis, about the one he is in the act of touching.

He is certainly not wrong, because the entry into play in the young subject of the possibility of erection, and everything it entails for him in new emotions, is something that incontestably changed the deep balance of all his relations with what then constitutes the stable point, the fixed point, the all-powerful point of his world, namely the mother.

And on the other hand, there is something that plays the prevailing role in the fact that all of a sudden something arrives that is this fundamental anxiety that makes everything totter, to the point that everything is preferable: even the forging of an anguishing image in itself completely closed, like that of the horse, and which at the very least, at the center of this anxiety, marks a limit, marks a landmark. What in this image opens the door to this bite, to this attack, is another phallus, it is the mother’s imaginary phallus, insofar as it is through that that for Little Hans the intolerable phobia opens up—what had until then been the game of showing or not showing the phallus, of playing with a phallus that he has long known to be perfectly non-existent and which for him is the stake of relations with the mother.

This plane on which this game of seduction is established, not only with the mother, but with all the little girls of whom he also knows very well that they have no phallus, but the maintenance of this game that they nevertheless have one, that is something on which he was pushed back until then by the whole relation fundamentally not simply of lure in some sense in the most immediate sense, but of play at that lure.

Let us understand that if we remember the fantasy on which the first part of the observation ends, from which… the one that begins from the moment when the phobia is declared, this fantasy of Little Hans relates to his parents. It is a fantasy that is moreover, at the limit, it is the only one that is moreover not a fantasy, it is a dream, it is a game where the child hides something in his hand, a forfeit game after which he receives the right of the little girl to make him pee.

And at that moment FREUD and the observation stress that it is an auditory dream. In this game of showing or of seeing, which is at the base of the first scoptophilic relation with little girls, is the spoken element, the game passed into the symbol, into speech not already prevailing?

What is going to happen is that, to every attempt of the father, in this first period, of the father to introduce everything that concerns the reality of the penis with what indicates to him that it is appropriate for the moment to do very exactly that, that is, not to touch it, there responds with an automatic rigor in Little Hans the return to the foreground of the themes of this game.

Understand that for example he immediately brings out this fantasy that he was with his mother all naked in a shirt. It is on this occasion that the father asks him the question: ‘But was she all naked, or in a shirt?’ Which does not trouble Little Hans: she was with a shirt so short that one could just see her all naked, that is to say that one could just see, and of course also not see. You recognize the structure of the edge or of the fringe, which characterizes the fetishistic apprehension.

It is always up to the point where one could see a little, and where one does not see that what is going to appear, what is aroused as hidden in the relation with the mother, namely this non-existent phallus, but with which one must also play that it is there, and in order, in some sense, to accentuate the character of what is at issue at that moment, namely a defense against the upsetting element that the father brings with his insistence on speaking of the phallus in real terms.

In this fantasy, Little Hans calls a witness, that is to say a little girl whom he calls Grete, and who is borrowed from the baggage, from his particular home, from the little girlfriends with whom he pursues his imaginary relations, but concerning perfectly real persons whom he pursues at that moment. That she is called Grete and that she intervenes in this fantasy, it is not useless to stress since we will find her again later. It is she who is called in the fantasy as witness to what mommy and he himself are in the act of doing, for at that moment he introduces, as if on the sly, very quickly, the fact that very quickly he touches himself a little.

The formation, all in all, of compromise, I mean the fact that for him shows the necessity of bringing in, on the background of the phallic relation with the mother, everything that can intervene as new, not only by the fact of the real existence of his penis, but by the fact that it is on that that the father tries to lead him on, is something that literally structures the whole period prior to April 5 as we see it in the drawn observation.

When I say the whole period prior to April 5, of course that does not mean that there is only that. Something secondary is going to appear around this March 30, date of the consultation with FREUD. Assuredly what is going to appear at this level is not entirely artificial, since as I told you, it is announced by what is already implied by the collaboration of Little Hans’s father in his fantasies where he calls, in some sense, his father to his aid.

So between March 1 and March 15 where the fantasy of Grete and of the mother is situated, it is above all about the real penis and the imaginary phallus. It is precisely between March 15 and the consultation with Freud that, at the moment when the father tries to make the phallus pass completely into reality by remarking to him that big animals have big phalluses, and that small ones have small ones, and which assuredly leads Little Hans to say: ‘Mine is well attached, and it will grow.’ The same schema as the one I indicated to you earlier is reproduced, namely something that is a reaction.

In Little Hans, if you like, we have at that moment something that is the complete attempt on the father’s part to realize the phallus, and the reaction of Little Hans once again will be something that does not consist at all in ratifying what he nevertheless attains, but in forging this fantasy of the two giraffes where what is essential in it manifests itself on March 27.

Namely a symbolization of the maternal phallus, this maternal phallus which is clearly represented in the little giraffe, and which for Little Hans, in some sense caught between his imaginary attachment and the insistence of the real by way of the father’s speech, enters into the path, is going to give, in some sense, its punctuation, the schema of everything that is going to develop in the myth of the phobia, namely that it is the imaginary term that is going to become for him the symbolic element.

In other words, far from our finding in the object relation the direct path, in some sense, of the passage to the signification of a new real, of an acquisition of the handling of the real by means of a pure and simple symbolic instrument, we see on the contrary that at least in the critical phase at issue in relation to Little Hans and that analytic theory points to as being that of the Oedipus, the real can be reordered in the new symbolic configuration only at the price of a reactivation of all the most imaginary elements, only at the price of a true imaginary regression of the first approach the subject made of it.

From the first steps of Little Hans’s neurosis—infantile neurosis I mean—we have there the model and the schema:
– the father representing reality and its new order of adaptation to the real,
– Little Hans responding to it by a kind of imaginary profusion that reinforces, in some sense, in a way all the more typical because it is truly supported on this kind of deep mode of incredulity, in which moreover you are going to see in Little Hans the whole continuation pursue itself, in order to catch sight of this something that is given at the beginning of the observation in some sense almost materialized.

There it is obviously the exceptional side, the value fallen from the sky that the observation represents for us, to show us in what way he himself perceives that for us this can be taken, namely that not only can one play with it but that one can make paper stoppers out of it, this something crumpled.

In this first image of the little giraffe, it is the beginning of the solution, the synthesis of what Little Hans learns to do, namely how one can play with these images, and this something that he does not know but to which he is simply introduced by the fact that he already knows how to speak, that he is a little man, that he is in a bath of language.

He knows very well the precious value that the fact of being able to speak offers him, and that is moreover what he himself stresses ceaselessly when he says of this or that, and when one tells him that ‘it is good’ or that ‘it is bad’:

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, ‘it is always good, since one can send it to the Professor.’

And there is more than one remark of this kind, where at every instant Little Hans in some sense shows his feeling of this kind of proper fertility, of the path that is opened to him by the fact that, all in all, he finds someone to talk to. And there, of course, it would be very surprising if we did not perceive on this occasion that this is all the preciousness, the efficacy of analysis.

Such is this first analysis done with a child. Assuredly, from its text, from the way FREUD brings his Oedipus myth raw, all built, without the slightest attempt to adapt it to something that presents itself as immediate and precise in the child, one can think that this is indeed one of the most striking points of the observation.

Literally, deliberately, FREUD tells him:

‘I am going to tell you this great story that I invented, that I knew before you came into the world: it is that one day a Little Hans would come who would love his mother too much, and that because of that, he would hate his father.’ [p. 120]

[Lange, ehe er auf der Welt war, hätte ich schon gewußt, daß ein kleiner Hans kommen werde,
der seine Mutter so lieb hätte, daß er sich darum vor dem Vater fürchten müßte, und hätte es seinem Vater erzählt.]

I would say that the character of an original myth that the Oedipus represents in FREUD’s doctrine is there, in some sense, in sum by its very author, taken in an operation where its fundamentally mythical character is laid bare. FREUD uses it in the same way as one has always taught children that ‘God created heaven and earth’, or as one teaches them all kinds of other things, according to the cultural context in which he is involved. It is a myth of origins given as such, and because, all in all, one has faith in what it determines as orientation, as structure, as avenue for speech in the subject who is its depositary, it is literally its function of creation of truth that is at issue.

It is no otherwise that FREUD brings it to Little Hans, and literally what we see is that Little Hans, in some sense, says—it is the same ambiguity that is the one in which all his assent with what is going to pursue him continues—Little Hans says something that is more or less this:

‘It is very interesting, it is very exciting, how good it is; he must go talk with the good Lord for having found such a trick.’
[‘Spricht denn der Professor mit dem lieben Gott, daß er das alles vorher wissen kann ?’]

But what is the result of this? FREUD, for his part, tells us, articulates for us, very clearly of himself, of his own making, at that moment, that of course it is not to be expected that this communication on his part will bear—at the first blow, solely by the blow struck—its fruits. It is a matter, says FREUD—at that moment in the observation, articulating it as we articulate it here—of it producing its unconscious productions, of it allowing the phobia to develop.

It is a matter of an incitement, of another crystal if one may say so, that is implanted there in the unfinished signification that represents, all by itself, I mean in his whole being, at that moment, Little Hans: on the one hand what produced itself all alone, namely the phobia, and on the other hand FREUD who brings there in full what it is destined to come to.

Of course FREUD does not imagine for a single instant that this religious myth of the Oedipus that he approaches at that moment will immediately bear its fruits; he expects only one thing, he says it, that it help what is on the other side, that is to say the phobia, to develop. It clears, at most, the paths for what I called earlier the development of the signifying crystal. One cannot say it more clearly than in these two sentences of FREUD on the date of March 30, that is to say of the consultation with FREUD.

All one can say is that at that moment there is all the same a small reaction on the father’s side. It will not last long; I mean that the father, we will truly find him again in object relations… as I was telling you earlier, which are what we are trying to grasp today within the different stages of the signifying formation… only at the end, and that is not to surprise us. It is at the very end of the crisis that we will see him come to the foreground, at the moment when I told you the other day that just before the fantasy of the little wagon, the confrontation with the father takes place in the dialogue of the Oedipus:

– ‘Why are you so jealous?’

More exactly passionate; that is the term that is used, and to the father’s protest

– ‘I am not!’

– ‘You must be!’

It is the point of the encounter with the father, with what the paternal position represents as lack at that moment. Here we therefore find only a first appearance, a small shock that is given, all in all, by the fact that the father, one clearly sees in what way he is already there:
– he is there in a way that is quite brilliant,
– he is there in the way one can say as one commonly expresses oneself: that he shines by his absence.

And that is indeed how, from the very next day, Little Hans reacts: he comes to find him, the father tells us, and he tells him that he came to see him because he was afraid that he had gone away. He would in any case come to see him like that; what he is afraid of is that the father has gone away. This will take us further, since the father immediately questions: ‘But how could such a thing be possible?’

Here let us stop, let us learn to punctuate. I would say that faced with this fear of the father’s absence, what is truly in the fear is something that is, all in all, a small crystallization of anxiety. Anxiety is not the fear of an object. Anxiety is the confrontation of the subject with this absence of object where he is seized, where he loses himself and to which everything is preferable, up to and including forging the strangest, the least objectal of objects, that of a phobia.

The fear in question here, its unreal character is precisely manifested, if we know how to see it, by its form, namely that it is the fear of an absence, I mean of that object that has just been pointed out to him. Little Hans comes to say that he is afraid of his absence; understand it as when I tell you that what is at stake is to hear mental anorexia as, not that the child does not eat, but that he eats nothing. Here Little Hans is afraid of his absence; it is of his absence that he is afraid and that he is beginning there to symbolize.

I mean that while the father is racking his brains to know by what twist and by what after-effect the child can manifest there a fear that would be only the reverse side of desire, this is not completely false, but in some sense grasps the phenomenon only by its surroundings. It is indeed from the beginning of the subject’s realization that the father is precisely not what he was told he would be in the myth, and he says it to the father:

– ‘Why do you tell me that I am fond of my mother, when it is you that I love?’

What Little Hans comes to say does not fit at all:

– ‘It has to be you that I hate; that doesn’t work.’

And in some sense what is implied in that—beyond Little Hans, and where he is caught—is that it is indeed regrettable that it is so. But all the same, having been set on the path in question, that is, being able, in relation to the myth, to locate where an absence is, is something that is immediately recorded, that the observation notes, and if you like, for which it would be necessary—as I have just done—to hear a symbolization.

If we call by a capital I the signifier around which the phobia orders its function, something at that moment is symbolized that we can call small sigma: σ, absence of the father: I(σP°). That is not to say that it is the whole of what is contained in the signifier of the horse, far from it. We are going to see it; it is not going to vanish like that all of a sudden because one will have said to Little Hans: ‘It is your father that you are going to be afraid of; you must be afraid.’

No, but assuredly all the same, straightaway the signifier ‘horse’ is relieved of something, and the observation records it:

‘Not of all white horses…’

It is no longer now of all white horses that he is afraid; there are some that he is no longer afraid of, and straightaway the father, although he does not go by way of our theorization, understands that there are some that are Vati [Daddy], and from the moment when he senses that there are some that are Vati, one is no longer afraid of them.

One is no longer afraid of them, why? Because Vati is quite kind; that is what the father also understands without quite understanding, without even understanding at all—up to the end—that that is indeed where the drama is: that Vati is quite kind, for if there had been a Vati of whom one could really be afraid, one would have been within the rules of the game, if one may say so, that is, one could have had a real Oedipus, an Oedipus that helps you ‘get out of your mother’s skirts’. But since there is no Vati of whom one is afraid, since Vati is too kind, that explains that in evoking the possible aggressiveness of Vati in the myth, the phobic signifier of the ἵππος[hippos] is relieved to that extent, and it is recorded that very afternoon.

I am forcing nothing in what I am telling you, since it is in the text; it is enough to shift the point of perspective imperceptibly so that it simply no longer becomes a kind of labyrinth in which one gets lost, but that each of the details, by contrast, takes on at every instant a meaning.

For I may seem to be going rather slowly there, to be starting again from the beginning, but I really must make you grasp it: it is that no detail of the observation escapes this putting into perspective, that from the moment when you see how the relation of the signifier reported quite raw by FREUD is articulated with the signified in gestation, we see it resonate mathematically on the functions of the signifier that is aroused in the spontaneous, natural state in Little Hans’s situation.

At that moment we see these effects of subtraction, of discharge, be recorded at once, insofar simply as one has brought in the father, and all the less since it has to be inscribed in some sense mathematically, as on the pan of a balance.

There is a part of the white horses that no longer frighten, and the observation itself articulates that there are two orders of anxiety, FREUD tells us—I mean that FREUD adds on to what I have just said—FREUD distinguishes:
– anxiety around the father,
– which he opposes to anxiety in front of the father.

We really do not have to take note of the way FREUD himself presents it to us in order to find there exactly the two elements that I have just described to you here: the anxiety around this empty, hollow place that the father represents in Little Hans’s configuration is precisely the one that seeks its support in the phobia, and to the extent that one has been able to arouse, even if only as a demand for something postulated, an anxiety in front of the father, to that extent the anxiety around what is the function of the father is discharged.

Finally one can have an anxiety in front of something; unfortunately it cannot go very far since the father, while being there precisely, is in no way fit to sustain the established function that the necessities of a correct, limpid mythical formation, and in all its universal scope that the myth of Oedipus has, give him.

It is precisely what forces our Little Hans to fall back into his difficulty. His difficulty after that, as FREUD had foreseen, is going to begin to develop, to take flesh, to precipitate itself in the productions that must develop from his phobia. And one begins straightaway to see more clearly, in the sense that there appears the 1ˢᵗ fantasy of April 5 from which I started last time as from a first term, and whose transformations we find up to the end, and which, all in all, along with everything that surrounds it, everything that announces it, highlights the weight—something that Little Hans, on the day that immediately precedes it, begins to articulate well: what is it that frightens me?

One begins to see it: it is that the horse—and it is articulated like that in the text—the father gives it a push; he really does analysis, that is, from time to time he no longer knows very well where to go, and that allows him to find things: he sees the four modes under which the horse frightens. They are all elements that bring into play this something that, for a man—that is, an animal that is destined to know himself to exist, unlike other animals—and that is indeed what must be articulated at the moment when it shows its most disturbing insistence, namely precisely what is developed, articulated at that moment in the neo-productions of the phobia by Little Hans, namely movement.

Understand well that it is not a matter of the uniform movement that we have known since always, or at least for some time, to be a movement in which one does not feel oneself, a movement in which one gets away. It is there already since ARISTOTLE that the discrimination of linear movement and rotary movement has that sense. In a more modern language: there is an acceleration.

I mean that where Little Hans tells us that the horse, insofar as it drags something behind it, is formidable; when it bolts, when it starts off—more when it starts off fast than when it starts off slowly—there, everywhere where, in some sense, one can feel this inertia that makes this movement…
for whoever is not implicated in this movement, and for whom this minimum detachment from life consists precisely in what I called earlier ‘knowing oneself to exist’, being a being conscious of himself taken in this movement
…manifest itself, presents this kind of inertia that makes it—there anxiety is to be analyzed—that anxiety is as much that of being carried along by the movement as its reverse side, namely the fantasy of being left behind, of being dropped.

The profound fall that this introduction represents for Hans, of something that all of a sudden carries him off in a movement, namely of everything that profoundly modifying his relations with this stability of the mother, sets him in the presence of the mother, as also in the presence of something that for him is truly subversive in its very foundations, this mother, he tells us in the form at that moment of what he says about the horse: ‘Umfallen und beißen wird’, it is what will at once fall and bite.

The bite, we know what it is tied to: it is tied to the emergence of what is produced each time, all in all, when the mother’s love comes to be lacking, at the moment when the mother, all in all, falls for him; she is at the same time this something that has no other outcome than what is for Little Hans himself the anxiety reaction of necessity, the reaction that is called catastrophic:
– first stage: to bite,
– second stage: to fall, to roll on the ground.

‘From now on…
Little Hans tells us, when he tries to restore, in a way that is moreover completely fantasized, the moment when for him the phobia was caught, it is this something that also expresses itself for him in this formula whose structure must be retained
…“From now on, always the horses harnessed to the omnibus will fall”.’

Such is the formula in which for Little Hans what is at issue takes flesh, namely the calling into question, on these very bases, of everything that at that moment constituted the foundations of his world.

This is very precisely what leads us up to April 9 to the elaboration around the phobia of the theme of the anxiety of movement, a theme in which whatever it is that the father tries to bring of tempering is absolutely without effect, because indeed nothing can resolve, for a being like man whose world is structured in the symbolic, this sensed becoming, this something that carries him off in a movement, and that is why, in his signifying structuration, Little Hans has to make this conversion that will consist in changing, in converting the schema of movement into a schema of substitution.

This by stages. There will first be the introduction of the theme of the removable, then afterwards with this the substitution will be produced. That is, the two schematic stages that are expressed in the formation of the bathtub, there where it is at the moment when one unscrews it. And one does not unscrew it without cost, for as I told you, at that moment Little Hans has to have something done to him, and we know that it is never without cost that this passage is made, this something that will perfectly consist in this, which is not sufficiently highlighted in the observation, that for a time not only is castration sufficient, but that it is formally symbolized by this gimlet, this big gimlet that goes into his belly.

Then the second stage: that when one unscrews something, one can screw something else back in its place. And that by this signifying form, the something at issue, namely the operation of transformation for the subject, of movement into substitution, of the continuity of the real into the discontinuity of the symbolic, is what is demonstrated, throughout the whole observation, as the very path without which the stages and the progress of the observation are incomprehensible.

What happens in the signified, I mean in what happens to Little Hans that is at once confused and pathetic, between April 5, namely the schema of the fantasy of the car that starts off, with everything of the phobia that is attached to it, and the fantasized unbolting of the bathtub where this symbolization of possible substitution begins to be initiated? What is there between the two?

Between the two there is a whole surrounding set of material that I am forced to clear away. It is the whole long passage that will last very exactly about almost all this time during which, for Little Hans, the only element that is capable, in the earlier situation, of introducing removability as a fundamental element of his restructuring of his world is produced. What is it?

It is very exactly what I told you to be the element that we must introduce into the dialectic of showing and not seeing, of arousing what is not as what is, but hidden, namely ‘the veil’ itself.

In other words, during these two days of anxious questionings, the father literally understands nothing of it and thereby does, as nowhere else, only a kind of awkward groping that FREUD himself underscores, and of which he specifies that it is the part in some sense failed of the analytic investigation.

No matter; enough remains for us, not only to see what constitutes its essential, but to see what FREUD himself took care to underscore there as the essential: what happens in front of the veils, namely ‘the pair of little underpants’ that are there in their details, cared for, finicked in the observation, the little yellow underpants and the black underpants, of which we are told that it is a reformhosen.

The reformhosen is this something that obviously is a novelty for the use of women who go by bicycle. Indeed we know well that Hans’s mother is at the cutting edge of progress. Hans’s mother, we will find her again, and I think that a few judicious excerpts from some very pretty comedies of APOLLINAIRE, in particular Les mamelles de Tirésias, will help us to paint her more closely. As one says in that admirable drama:

‘They are everything that we are
And yet are not men.’[Act I, scene 9]

That is indeed where the whole drama is. It is from there that everything started from the beginning, not simply because Little Hans’s mother is more or less feminist, but because what is at issue, all in all, for Little Hans is the fundamental truth inscribed in the lines that I have just cited, and about which FREUD never concealed from us the essential and decisive value, reminding us of the sentence that ‘Anatomy is destiny’.

That is indeed what is at issue, but what we see, at the moment when Little Hans articulates what he has to say, and which the father’s passionate questions interrupt all the time, which make it difficult in some sense to sift, but FREUD does it, for what FREUD tells us is the essential; what one sees most clearly in it is that there are two stages under which Little Hans recognizes and differentiates the underpants that are projected onto their duality in a confused way, as if each could at a certain moment fulfill one of the functions more than the other. But the essential is this: the underpants in themselves are tied for him to a reaction of disgust.

Still more: Little Hans asked that one write to FREUD that when he had seen the underpants, he had spat and he had fallen to the ground, then he had closed his eyes. It is precisely for that, because of this reaction, that the choice is made that Little Hans will never be a fetishist. If on the contrary he had recognized that these underpants were precisely his whole object, namely that mysterious phallus that no one will ever see, he would have been satisfied with it and would have become a fetishist.

But since fate willed otherwise, Little Hans is precisely disgusted by the underpants, but he specifies that when it is the mother who wears them, it is another matter, that is to say that there they are no longer repugnant at all. It is precisely that, namely the difference there is between what could offer itself to him as object—namely the underpants in themselves—and the fact that they retain their virtue, if one may say so, only by being in function, only there where he continues to sustain the lure of the phallus; that is the nerve, the passage that allows us to apprehend the experience.

At that moment, reality has been brought out by this long interrogation around which Little Hans tries to explain himself, and insofar as he is pushed in divergent and confused directions, explains himself so badly, but of which nonetheless the essential is, by way of this privileged object, to introduce the element of removability that we will find again in what follows, and which from that moment makes pass onto the plane of instrumentation, of the formidable material of instruments that we are going to see develop as dominant from that moment on, the evolution of the signifying myth.

I told you last time, I brought some of them, I even showed you how already in the ambiguities of the signifier singular things were inscribed, this extraordinary homonymy between the pincer, the hoof and the tooth of the horse. I could develop this much further if I told you that the hoof is called the pincer in the middle, and that on both sides it is called the udders!

Last time, in speaking to you of the Schraubendreher which means screwdriver, I told you that that is precisely not what is in the fantasy of the installer, namely that it is a pincer, of tongs, and that it is FREUD who brings out his Schraubendreher at that moment, without having really seen the value that this instrumentation offered him. So do not believe that it is unique; you are going to see appear in the objects that are going to come now to impose themselves progressively, the relations not only of the mother and the child, but of this fundamental removability that is expressed for man in the question of birth and death.

You are going to see them now be introduced, and behind them the absolutely enigmatic, disturbing, burlesque character that is going to be the stork. But do not forget either that it has a wholly other style, through this Monsieur STORCH [Stork] whom you are going to see arrive with his extravagant silhouette, a little hat and his keys, not in his pockets because he has none, but in his beak, and he also uses his beak like forceps, a seesaw and a padlock.

From that moment on we are submerged by the material, and that is indeed what will characterize the whole continuation of the observation. But in order not to let you leave without something, I will tell you that it is the axial, turning moment of what is going to happen around the mother and the child.

We will take all this up again, step by step, next time, and we will see by way of what precise signifying form this mother and this child are always the same, transformed.

The car will become a bathtub, then a box, etc. All of this fitting into one another. But at a moment that was obviously very pretty—and this when one has made enough progress with the mother—and you will see which, there intervenes a very pretty little fantasy which is this: Little Hans takes a little rubber doll that he calls, as if by chance, Grete. He is asked why: ‘Because I called it Grete.’

Obviously if one has read the observation well, what seems to have somewhat escaped the father is that it is indeed the same one who was witness to the game with the mother. But there, progress has been made; since one has already advanced enough in the mastering of the mother, and you will see that this term must be used in its most technical sense; you will see by way of whom one learned to drive her at the end of the reins, and even to hit her a little.

And at that moment, when the little doll is pierced by the knife, one introduces something to make it come out again. Little Hans makes his little perforation again, but this time with a little penknife that one has previously made enter by the little hole that is made to make ‘Quich…’.

Little Hans has definitively found the heart of the matter and the ultimate point of the farce: this mother had in her head, in reserve, a little knife to cut it off for him, and Little Hans cut her off at the pass to make it come out.