🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

– 09 April: the two underpants.
– 11 April: the bathtub and the borer.
– 13 April: Anna’s fall.
– 14 April: the big box.
– 15 April: the stork.
– 16 April: the whipped horse.
– 21 April: the imaginary embarkation with the father, the great dialogue.
– 22 April: the consecration on the little wagon, the penknife in the doll.
– 24 April: the lamb.
– 26 April: Lodi.
– 30 April: Ich bin der Vati.
– 02 May: the installer.

Let us take up today a few remarks about Little Hans, who has for some time been the object of our attention.

I recall in what spirit this commentary is being pursued. What, in sum, is ‘Little Hans’?
It is the chatter of a five-year-old child, between 1 January and 2 May 1908. That is what ‘Little Hans’ appears to be to all unprepared readers. If he is prepared—and it is not hard for him to be—he knows that this chatter is of interest.

Why is it of interest? It is of interest because it is posited, at least in principle, that there is a certain relation between this chatter and something that is quite solid: it is a phobia
– with all the troubles it brings to the life of the young subject,
– all the worries it brings to those around him,
– all the interest it arouses in Professor FREUD.

There is a relation, in other words, between this chatter and this phobia. I consider it of the very first importance to elucidate this relation, not to look for this relation in a beyond of the chatter that is not in any way presented to us in the observation. It presents itself to us in our mind after the fact, with all the imperious character of prejudice. Example: the point at which I left you last time, namely the story of the doll that Little Hans pierces with a penknife.

I have redone today a chronology. I think that by now you have all, not only read, but reread the observation of Little Hans, and that these indications must be lively enough in themselves. Last time, when I stopped at Little Hans’s reactions toward the mother’s two underpants, with everything this involves:
– problematic exchanges at that moment,
– questions between the father and the child,
– and a sort of profound misunderstanding on which this dialogue continues.

I put—with FREUD, moreover—the emphasis on what seemed to him in any case the most essential residue of this dialogue about the mother’s two underpants. That is to say what is then very much affirmed by Hans, and which is in no way induced or suggested to him by the questioning, namely that the two underpants absolutely do not have the same meaning depending on:
– whether they are there and Little Hans spits and rolls on the ground, makes a whole scene, manifests a disgust of which he himself does not give the key, but manifests the desire that it be communicated to the Professor,
– or whether they are on the mother, in which case Little Hans says that they have for him literally a completely different meaning.

When I put the emphasis on that, I can hear from some, I do not know what kind of astonishment: that I evade in this connection the connection of the said ‘Hosen’, the mother’s underpants, with the Lumpf. In Little Hans’s vocabulary, the Lumpf [a child’s coined term; formed on a foreign-sounding word and used for feces, with an echo of ‘lump/clod’] is excrement. They are called in this atypical way, as is exceedingly frequent in children, that a found name, if not a chance one, is given to this function from a first denomination linked to a certain connection of the exercise of this function.

We shall see what it is about the Lumpf. As if, in sum, at that moment I were making, by I know not what spirit of system, the elision of this anal stage that arises at the right moment in our mind, exactly as when one presses an “on” button one provokes such-and-such a conditioned reaction in Pavlov’s dog. The moment you hear talk of excrement: anal stage! anal stage! anal stage! and let us talk about anal stage, because things have to proceed normally.

I would like you to take a little distance from this observation, and for you to notice that if there is in any case one thing that is really in no way indicated in the course of this cure… is it a cure? Assuredly I did not say that it was a cure, I said that it was something that has a fundamental function in our experience of analysis, like each of FREUD’s great observations… rapid, it is certainly a certain rhythm or a certain mechanism that could be inscribed in the register ‘frustration’.

He is precisely, throughout the whole time of the cure, not only subjected to no frustration, but satisfied. Regression or aggression? Aggression without any doubt, but assuredly not linked either to any frustration, or to any moment of regression. If there is regression, it is not in the instinctual sense, in the very sense of a resurgence of something that is prior; if there is indeed a phenomenon of regression, it is of a register that is of the order of what I have on several occasions indicated to you as possible. It is in fact what happens when, by the necessity of elucidation by the subject of his problem, it happens, he demands, he pursues the reduction of this or that element of his ‘being-in-the-world’, of his relations, the reduction for example of the symbolic to the imaginary, even sometimes as is manifest in this observation, of the real to the imaginary.

In other words, the change in the approach to the signifiers of one of the terms present, is indeed what you are going to see take place when in the course of this observation, you see Little Hans pursue, with this I know not what of rigorous, even imperious, which is indeed the character of the signifying process of the unconscious insofar as FREUD defined it as unconscious, that is to say that without the subject being able in any way to realize it, without literally his knowing what he is in the process of doing, it suffices that he be simply helped, prompted to the development of the signifying incidence that he himself introduced as necessary to his psychological support. By managing to develop it, he draws from it a certain solution which is not necessarily moreover a normative solution, nor the best solution, but assuredly a solution which in the case of Little Hans has the effect in the most evident way of resolving the symptom.

Let us return to this Lumpf. FREUD says it at one moment about these signs of disgust manifested about the mother’s underpants, and a little before, the father asked a few questions in this direction, that Little Hans surely showed that the question of excrement was not for him without significance nor without interest. FREUD speaks about the underpants, of a relation with the Lumpf, but of course this is reversed: conversely we can say that the Lumpf appears to us brought up in connection with the underpants.

And what does that mean? It is not simply—what is a fact—that it is around a clear manifestation of a disgust reaction that Little Hans manifests around the mother’s underpants, that he is brought to speak of the excremental functions at issue. FREUD himself underlines it at the moment when he speaks of the Lumpf: in what—in other words—do excrements, and what is of the anal in the occasion, intervene in the observation of Little Hans?

In what? In this which is immediately told to us, that Little Hans took in the Lumpf an interest which perhaps indeed is not without relation with these background elements, without connection with the very excremental function. But assuredly what is at issue at that moment? It is the participation fully admitted by the mother, in the mother’s excremental functions, insofar as Little Hans is hanging on the mother each time she puts on and takes off her underpants. He pesters her, and the mother excuses herself: ‘I cannot do otherwise than to take him with me to the toilet’. For the father at that moment, who moreover is not unaware of much of it, does his little inquiry again.

It is therefore indeed around this game between Little Hans and his mother: ‘to see and not to see’, and not only ‘to see and not to see’, but ‘to see what cannot be seen, because it does not exist’ and Little Hans knows it very well, and that to see ‘what cannot be seen’, one must see it behind a veil, that is to say maintain a veil in front of the nonexistence of what is to be seen.

It is all precisely around the theme of the veil, the theme of the underpants, the theme of clothing insofar as behind this clothing the fantasy essential to the relations between the mother and the child is concealed, which is the fantasy of the phallic mother, it is around this theme that the Lumpf is introduced, and consequently if I leave it on its plane, that is to say on its second plane: it is not by a systematic spirit, it is because in the observation it is brought to us only in this connection.

In other words, it is not enough in an analysis to find a familiar tune, to at the same time find oneself enchanted to be in known country, and to be content to say we are there in the process of finding again the refrain, namely ‘the anal complex’.

What is at issue is to know at such-and-such a moment of the analysis what the precise function is of this theme which is always important for us, not simply because of this signification moreover purely implicit, in itself vague and uniquely linked to ideas of geneticism that can at any instant be called into question in this concrete case at the level of each moment of an observation, but to know its connection in relation to the complete system of the signifier insofar as it is in evolution, as much during the symptom in the evolution of the illness, as in the process of the cure.

If the Lumpf within this system is something that has an additional meaning, it is also assuredly by what makes it strictly homologous to the function of the underpants in the occasion, that is to say of veil.

The Lumpf, like the underpants, is something that can fall: the veil falls, and it is precisely to the extent that the veil has fallen, that for Little Hans there is a problem. And if I may say so, this veil, he lifts the flap of it, since I told you that it is precisely to the extent of this experience of 9 April, of the long explanation about the underpants, that we shall then see appear: the bathtub fantasy, that is to say the introduction of something that has the closest relation with this fall, namely the introduction by the combination of this fall, of this fallen thing, with the other term in whose presence he is confronted in the phobia, namely the bite, and that we are going to have the introduction of the theme of removability, of unscrewing, which will continue as an essential element of reduction of the situation in the succession of fantasies.

It is therefore indeed necessary to see and to conceive this succession of Little Hans’s fantasies as being what I told you, namely a myth in development, something that is a discourse. Moreover it is absolutely nothing else in the observation. It is nothing else in the observation than a series of reinventions of this myth with the help of imaginary elements. And it is a matter of understanding in what this turning progress, these successive transformations of the myth have a function, are something which, at a deep level which is precisely the one we can understand, represents for Hans the solution of the problem, which is literally the problem of his own position in existence, insofar as it must be situated in relation to a certain truth, in relation to a certain number of truth-markers, in which he has to take his own place.

If one needed some additional proofs of what I am telling you, and I insist a little to the full extent that this objection has been made to me, since I encounter it, I want to pursue it to its last term, and ask you to refer to the text to know what in the end the Lumpf is. I would add that Little Hans at a determined moment, when one comes back from the grandmother’s on Sunday evening, marks his disgust in the wagon, for the black cushions of the compartment because it is Lumpf.

And in the explanation that follows with the father, I believe two days after, what comes in comparison with the black of the Lumpf? It is a shirt, a little black shirt and black stockings. The close relation of the theme of the Lumpf with the mother’s clothes, that is to say always with the theme of the veil, is emphasized in the observation itself by Little Hans himself. Moreover what then is the Lumpf, and where does it come from? Why did Little Hans call excrement a Lumpf? We are also told it in the observation: it is by comparison with black stockings.

To the full extent of the segment of observation whose examination we are pursuing in FREUD’s psychoanalysis, it is quite clear that the Lumpf, that is to say the excrement, intervenes there in a certain relation, in a certain function of signifying articulation. What is much more essential, much more important, what is in truth the only important thing for us to see, is its relation
– with this theme of clothing,
– with this theme of the veil,
– with this theme of that behind which is hidden the denied absence of a penis in the mother,
…that this is its essential meaning, and that we do not in any way modify the direction of the observation itself by any kind of partisan spirit, when we take this axis, this center to understand what is the progress of these mythical transformations through which the reduction of the phobia is accomplished in the analysis.

We had arrived at 11 April, with the bathtub fantasy of which I told you that the bathtub represented something that begins to be the mobilization of the situation. In other words, that to which Hans, for reasons X, feels bound, with for him maximal production of anxiety, namely this stifling, unique reality of the mother which from the moment when he feels absolutely at once delivered over to her, and annulled by her, and threatened by her, is something that represents the danger situation, a danger moreover absolutely unnameable in itself, of anxiety properly speaking, for Little Hans. It is a matter of seeing how the child will be able to get out of this situation. I remind you what the fundamental schema is of the child’s situation vis-à-vis the mother, of the child in the process of losing the mother’s love. It is situated as follows:

Symbolic mother, mother insofar as she is the first element of reality that is symbolized by the child, insofar as she can be essentially absent or present. And the whole relation of the child with the mother is linked to this, that in the refusal of love, the compensation is found in the crushing of real satisfaction—which does not mean that at that moment there is not produced an inversion, that is to say that precisely insofar as the breast becomes a compensation, it is it that becomes the symbolic gift and that at that moment the mother becomes a real element, that is to say an all-powerful element that refuses her love.

The progress of the situation with the mother is in this, that the child has to discover what beyond the mother is loved by the mother. It is not him the child, but the i, the imaginary element, that is to say the desire of the mother’s phallus. In the end, what the child has to do at that level—which does not mean that he does it—is precisely to manage to formulate this: i→S(i). What is shown to us in the game, in the alternative of the behavior of the child still infans, which accompanies his game of occultation on the symbolic side.

This came to be complicated for Little Hans, at a given moment, by the introduction of two elements which are two real elements, namely Anna, that is to say a real child who comes to complicate the situation of his relations with the beyond of the mother, and then here something that belongs to him indeed, and with which he literally no longer knows what to do, a real penis that begins to move, which received a bad reception from the person on whom it functions. Little Hans has just said: ‘Don’t you find it cute?’. The aunt said the other day: ‘They don’t make a prettier one.’

This was very badly received by the mother, and the question becomes very complicated from that moment on, because to probe this complication, you only have to take the two poles of the phobia, namely the two elements by which the horse is fearsome, I explained it to you: the horse bites, and the horse falls.

– The horse bites, that is to say since I can no longer satisfy the mother in anything, she will satisfy herself as I satisfy myself when she satisfies me in nothing, that is to say bite me as I bite her, since it is my last resort when I am not sure of the mother’s love.

– The horse falls, very exactly also like me, Little Hans, for the moment I am let fall, insofar as they now only care about Anna.

But on the other hand it is quite clear that in a certain way Little Hans must be eaten and bitten. He must because that is, in the end, what corresponds to a revaluation of this penis that was held for nothing, rejected by the mother to the full extent that it must become something, and that is precisely what Little Hans aspires to. Her bite, her taking hold of him by the mother is something that is as desired as it is feared. Likewise as concerns falling, it is also something that can be desired by Little Hans, that the horse falls.

There is more than one element of the situation that Little Hans desires to see fall, and the first is the one which, as soon as we have introduced into the observation the category of the ‘fallen thing’, will present itself, namely little Anna when he wishes that she fall, that she fall out the window, that she fall if possible, through the bars a little too wide of the secessionist balcony, for we are with people at the vanguard of progress, and to which it was necessary to add an ugly wire mesh to prevent Little Hans from pushing young Anna a little too quickly through the space. So, the function of the bite as the function of the fall, are given in the very structures, apparent, of the phobia. They are an essential element, they are as you see a two-faced signifying element.

That is the true meaning of the term ambivalence, that is to say that this fall is not simply feared and dreaded, any more than the bite, by Little Hans. They are an element that can intervene in an equally opposite sense: there, the bite also from a certain side is desired, since it will play an essential role in the solution of the situation, just as the fall is also desired, and if the girl herself must not fall, there is one certain thing, it is that the mother throughout the observation will also describe a curve of fall from a certain moment, which is precisely the one conditioned by the appearance of this curious function, of this instrumental function of unscrewing which appears for the first time, first in an enigmatic way in the bathtub fantasy.

Namely that in sum, since as I told you last time, what is at issue is the anxiety concerning, not simply the mother in reality, but really the whole set: the whole milieu, everything that has constituted up to then the reality of Little Hans, the fixed reference points of his reality, what I called last time ‘the shack’, with the 1st fantasy of the arrival of the plumber and the unscrewing of the bathtub, one begins to dismantle in detail ‘the shack’. There we also have connections that make that this does not at all have an abstract connection, but something perfectly contained in experience.

Let us not forget that in the observation, we have this revealed, that bathtubs have already been unscrewed in front of Little Hans, since when one went to Gmunden on vacation, one carried a bathtub in a crate, and that on the other hand we have the notion—which we regret in the observation not to find a precise date—of prior moves that must be situated roughly in the time span that corresponds to what is called the anamnesis of the observation, that is to say the two years before the illness on which we have a certain number of parental notes.

The move as the transport of the bathtub to Gmunden is something which, for Little Hans, already provided the signifying material of what it means to dismantle the whole shack. Already he knows that it can happen, but without any doubt it has already been for him an experience more or less integrated into his properly signifying manipulation.

We find ourselves there in the fantasy that brings him from the unscrewed bathtub as a first step in the perception of what first presents itself with this opaque character, purely and simply signaletic, of inhibition, of stop, of boundary, of limit beyond which one cannot pass, which is the phobia. That can be mobilized only in the phobia itself where there are elements that can be combined otherwise.

In other words, this bite of the horse with its front teeth, this clamp… which I explained to you last time the plural meaning of, namely that it is precisely in many languages: in the German language as in the French language, and as in many others, notably in the Greek language, the horse’s biting apparatus, and also something that means clamp or pincers… makes appear to us for the first time the character who, with clamps and pincers, begins to enter the game and to introduce an element of evolution, I repeat it, of purely signifying evolution.

You are not going to tell me that there are already instinctual traces in the child, to explain to us that the bathtub was unscrewed, that it is at once the same thing and that it is even from certain sides the opposite. In other words, that it is something else, elsewhere than in the signifier itself—that is to say in the human world of the symbol which includes of course the tool and the instrument—that the development of the mythical evolution in which Little Hans engages by this kind of obscure and groping collaboration that is established between him and the two characters who bent over his case to psychoanalyze him will be situated.

I pause for an instant on this, that there is not simply in the bathtub fantasy only the bathtub nor only the unscrewing; there is also at that moment the Bohrer, the borer. There, as always, there is a very vivid perception, linked to the freshness of the discovery, which means that the witnesses who are at the exploratory threshold of the analysis have no doubt about what this borer is: it is the maternal penis, they say, and this penis—there too a certain wavering appears in the text:
– is it aimed at Little Hans,
– is it aimed at the mother?

I would say that this ambiguity is entirely valid, and that it is all the more valid insofar as we understand better what is at issue. Once again, see in it the proof of what I am telling you, that it is not enough to have in one’s head the more or less complete file of classic situations in analysis, namely that there is an inverted Oedipus complex, that in a perception of the parents’ coitus, a child can identify with the feminine party.

That we find there therefore in an identification of Little Hans with his mother, that is true, why not? But on one single condition, it is that we understand in what it is true. For simply saying that, not only has, properly speaking, no interest, but does not fit to any degree with anything whatsoever that represents the ins and outs that accord with this appearance in the fantasy of this: the child conceiving, imagining and articulating himself that something came to make a big hole in his belly.

That can literally take its meaning only in the context, in the signifying evolution of what is at issue. Let us say that at that moment, Little Hans explains to his father: ‘Fuck her once and for all where it has to be’. And that is indeed everything that is in question in Little Hans’s relation with his father.

All along we have the notion, and of this lack and of the effort that Little Hans makes to restore, I would not say a normal situation, for it cannot be a question of it from the moment when the father is in the process of playing the role he plays with him, that is to say to beg him to believe firmly that he, daddy, is not mean, but a structured situation.

And in this structured situation, there are strong reasons for, at the same time as Little Hans approaches the unbolting of the mother, he correlatively and in an imperious way provokes the entry into function of this father toward the mother. I repeat it to you: there are a thousand ways, a thousand angles under which these fantasies of passivity of the little boy can intervene during an analysis, to take the little boy in a fantasmatic relation with the father, where he identifies with the mother.

To go no further than my own analytic experience, not so very long ago a man, who was not more homosexual than in my view Little Hans ever could become, nevertheless at a certain moment of his analysis articulated this: that without any doubt he had fantasized in his childhood in the maternal position, precisely to, if I may say so, offer himself as a victim in her place. The whole childhood situation having been lived by him as a sort of importunity of the father’s sexual insistence, a very exuberant personage, even demanding in his needs toward a mother who repulsed them with all her strength, and of whom the child had the perception that in this occasion—justified or not—she lived the situation like a victim.

Insofar as this became integrated into the development of the subject’s symptomatology, for this subject is a neurotic, we cannot in any way stop at the simply feminized, even homosexual, position that represents what functionally at a given moment of the analysis represents the outcome of this fantasy, without its context which there gives it a completely different and completely opposite meaning from what happens in the observation of Little Hans.

Little Hans says to his father: ‘Fuck her a bit more’, and the other says to him ‘Fuck her a bit less’. It is not the same, obviously; for both one must use the term ‘Fuck her’ and even: ‘Fuck me in her place if it is necessary’. It is to the extent of the signifying connection of the term that we can appreciate what is at issue. Indeed in the situation that is thus created and which in appearance is without issue, since the father does not intervene there either way, you will tell me nonetheless: the father exists, the father is there. What is the father’s function in the Oedipus complex?

It is obviously at some point or under whatever form the impasse of the child’s situation with the mother must present itself, that one must introduce another element. I underline to you that we are going to—because things have to be repeated, and if one does not repeat them one loses them—once again rearticulate them, and of course it will not be a rearticulation, because by definition if the Oedipus complex is fundamental, it must be explained in a thousand different ways. Nevertheless there are still structural elements that we can always find again and that are the same, at least as to their disposition and as to their number.

The fact that the father arrives on a certain plane as a third—if we take him on another plane: as a fourth, because there are already three elements because of this nonexistent phallus—in the situation between the child and the mother, that is something that… if you will forgive me this expression that I do not like very much, but I am forced to take it to go quickly… that is the ‘in-itself’ of the situation. I mean that for the moment, I consider the father insofar as he must be there, in the situation with the others, independently of what is going to happen for a ‘for-itself’ of the subject. And I do not like this expression very much because you can take this ‘for-itself’ for something that is given in the subject’s consciousness, whereas this ‘for-itself’ is for the greatest part in the subject’s unconscious, namely the effects of the Oedipus complex.

But it is to mark the difference that I note in the fact that the father must be there, and in-itself what his role must be. I cannot all the same redo on this occasion the whole theory of the Oedipus complex; nevertheless the father is the one who possesses the mother, who possesses her as father, with his real penis which is a sufficient penis, unlike the child who, he, is prey to this problem of an instrument at once poorly assimilated and insufficient, if not repulsed and scorned.

What analytic theory teaches us about the Oedipus complex, what makes the Oedipus complex in a way necessary—understand by necessary, something that is not of a biological necessity nor of an internal necessity, but of a necessity in any case empirical, because it was discovered in experience, and if it means something that the Oedipus complex exists, it is that the natural rise of the appearance of sexual potency in the young boy does not happen all by itself, neither in one time, nor in two times. For after all it could also happen in two times, as it does in fact, if we consider purely and simply the physiological plane. But the sole consideration of this natural rise is not sufficient to any degree to account for what happens.

It is a fact that for the situation to develop in normal conditions, I mean in those that allow the human subject to preserve in a sufficient way his presence, not only in the real world, but in the symbolic world, that is to say that he tolerates himself in the real world as it is organized with its symbolic weave, there must be not simply this kind of perception of what I called last time the movement, with its acceleration, with this something that carries the subject away and transports him, there must be something else, something that is stoppage on the one hand, fixation of two terms:

– the true penis, the real penis, the valid penis, the father’s penis, the penis that functions,
– and the child’s penis which is situated comparatively in a Vergleichung[comparison] with this father’s penis, and which is going to in a way rejoin its function, its reality, its dignity, its integration as penis, insofar as there will be passage through this annulment that is called the castration complex.

In other words, it is insofar as his own penis is momentarily, in a moment that is a dialectical moment, annihilated, that the child is promised later to accede to a full paternal function, that is to say to be someone who feels legitimately in possession of his virility. And it appears that this ‘legitimately’ is essential to the happy functioning in the human subject of the sexual function. Without that, everything we say about determinism, premature ejaculation and the different troubles of sexual function, literally has no kind of sense, if it does not have its sense in those registers.

It matters to conceive this—this is only the general resituating of the problem—that experience tells us, and what was not foreseeable moreover. Already what I have just given you previously, the schema of the situation, is not obligatorily foreseeable in itself; the proof is that analytic experience which discovered this Oedipus complex, insofar as it is integration into the virile function, allows us to push things further and to say that if the Symbolic Father… namely the Name of the Father is essential to the structuring of the symbolic world, to this weaning-exit more essential than the primitive weaning by which the child exits from the pure and simple coupling with maternal omnipotence… if the Symbolic Father is the essential mediating element of the symbolic world, if the Symbolic Father is so essential to all articulation of human language, that is properly speaking the reason why Ecclesiastes says:

‘The fool has said in his heart: there is no God.’

It is precisely because he ‘says it in his heart’, and that on the other hand it is properly speaking foolish to say in one’s heart that ‘there is no God’, quite simply because it is foolish to say something that is contradictory with the very articulation of language. And you know very well that it is not a profession of deism that I am here in the process of making. There is the Symbolic Father.

Experience teaches us that as for what relates to the proper incidence of the father’s entry in this assumption of the virile sexual function, it is the Real Father who plays there an essential role of presence. Namely that it is insofar as the Real Father really plays the game, his function of castrating father, his function of father if I may say so, under its concrete, empirical form, and let us even say up to a certain point, I was almost going to say degenerated… the character of the primordial father under his tyrannical form and more or less horrifying under which the Freudian myth presented him to us… insofar in other words as the father as he exists fulfills his imaginary function in what it has, it, of empirically intolerable, if you like of revolting, in the fact—in some way—that he makes his incidence felt as castrating and only under that angle, that the castration complex is lived.

What we have there is moreover wonderfully illustrated in the case of Little Hans: there is a Symbolic Father, and Little Hans, who is not a fool, believes in this Symbolic Father right away: FREUD is the Good God. Imagine well that it is one of the more essential elements of the establishment of equilibrium for Little Hans. Naturally, it is the Good God.

He believes in it right away, and he believes in it as we all believe in the Good God: he believes in it without believing in it, he believes in it because it is an essential element of any kind of articulation of truth that this reference to a sort of supreme witness is in the end that. There is someone who knows everything, he has found him: it is Professor FREUD. What luck! He has the good God on earth. We do not all have as much. In any case it serves him well, but does not in any way make up for the lack of the Imaginary Father, of the father truly castrating. And the whole problem is there: it is a matter of Little Hans finding a substitute for this father who persists in not wanting to castrate him.

That is the key of the observation. It is a matter of knowing how Little Hans will be able to bear his real penis, precisely insofar as it is not threatened. That is the foundation of anxiety. What is intolerable in his situation is that, it is this lack on the side of the castrator. And in fact through the whole observation, you see nowhere appear anything whatsoever that represents the structuring, the realization, the lived experience, even fantasmatic, of something that is called a castration. There is a wound imperiously called for by Little Hans, and about that everything is good for him.

Quite contrary to what FREUD says there, there is nothing in this experience of Little Hans injuring himself in the foot against a stone, that in itself called the connection, and the wish that the father undergo this injury, this kind of mythical circumcision, as it will then appear at the level of the great dialogue on 21 April, when he will say to his father:

‘You have to arrive there like a naked man.’ [Ja, du sollst als Nackter]

And everyone is so stunned that one wonders what this child can mean, for one says to oneself that this child begins to speak ‘biblical’; even in the observation one puts a parenthesis: that means that he comes with bare feet. And yet Little Hans, it is he who is in the true. It is a matter of knowing whether the father will indeed prove himself, that is to say will confront as a man his formidable mother, and whether he himself, the father, yes or no has gone through the essential initiation, through the wound, through the удар against the stone. That is to tell you to what point the theme under its most fundamental form, the most mythical, is something that Little Hans literally aspires to with all his being.

Unfortunately it is nothing of the sort. It is not enough that Little Hans said that in the dialogue with his father. Little Hans showed at that moment that he was burning in relation to what is by him imperiously desired, namely the jealousy of the jealous God, for that is the term used in the Bible, namely a father who has it in for him, but who castrates him. But he does not have him, and it is quite otherwise that the situation turns. I will tell you in a moment how we can conceive it.

Note that if there is no castrator, since we are on the side of the father, we have on the other hand a certain number of personages who have come in the place of the castrator: we have the plumber who began to unscrew the bathtub, and then the borer. We shall moreover see in a moment another who is not properly speaking involved in the desired function of the father.

There is in any case indeed what Little Hans himself calls the installer of the last fantasy, of the fantasy of 2 May which comes to close the situation. The installer, that is to say that God does not do all his functions very well, so one brings out the deus ex machina. That is that in relation to the castration complex, to this castrator required by the situation.

The installer is really the deus ex machina, namely that Little Hans makes him fulfill what he can make him fulfill, a part of the functions that he is there to fulfill.

I point out to you that everything is reduced to this. One must know how to read the text; it cannot be more striking than it is in this last fantasy, the fantasy that literally closes the cure and the observation, namely that what the installer comes to change is something that is Little Hans’s behind, Little Hans’s seat.

They began to dismantle the whole shack, that is not enough, something has to be changed in Little Hans, and without any doubt we find there the fundamental symbolization schema of the castration complex. But one sees in the observation itself to what point FREUD himself lets himself be carried away by the schema: there is not a trace in Little Hans’s fantasy of a replacement of what he has in front.

If the schema of the castration complex is the one I gave you, and it is very precisely FREUD who says it and who admits it, FREUD fantasizes, he says: ‘Obviously they also gave you another penis’.

Unfortunately there is nothing of the kind in Little Hans’s fantasy. They unscrewed his behind and gave him another one, and they told him: ‘turn around to the other side’, then it stops there. One must take the text as it is, and it is clear that it is in this that the specificity of the observation of Little Hans resides, and also the something that must allow us to understand the whole set. If indeed, after having gone so close, it did not go further, it is that it could not go further.

Because if it had gone further there would not have been a phobia, but a normal Oedipus and castration complex, and there would have been no need for all this complication: neither the phobia, nor the symptom, nor the analysis, to arrive at a point that is not necessarily the stipulated point, the typical point.

Let us then take things up again at the point where we left our Little Hans, because this is roughly to situate for us the father’s function on the occasion, or more exactly what he is: at once incontestably there, acting, useful, in the analysis, but at the same time, from the fact that he is there in the analysis, in functions manifestly incompatible, predetermined by the overall situation, to play his effective function of castrating father.

You will observe that in sum if there is castration, insofar as the Oedipus complex is castration, that castration, it is not for nothing that one noticed—in a shadowy way—but that one noticed that it had just as much relation with the mother as with the father. Maternal castration, we see it in the description of the primitive situation insofar as it implies for the child the possibility of devouring and biting.

In relation to this anteriority of maternal castration, paternal castration is a substitute for it that is no less terrible perhaps, but that is certainly more favorable because it is susceptible of development, whereas in the other case as for engulfment and devouring by the mother, it is without developmental outlet.

It is very precisely, between these two terms, a term where there is a possible dialectical development, namely a rivalry with the father, a possible murder of the father, a possible emasculation of the father, that the castration complex is fertile in the Oedipus, whereas it is not on the side of the mother, for a simple reason: it is that it is quite impossible to emasculate the mother because she has nothing that one could emasculate.

So here is Hans at the crossroads, and we already see taking shape the mode of substitution through which something will be able to be surpassed from the primitive situation of pure threat of total devouring by the mother. Already something of it is taking shape in the fantasy that I call that of the bathtub and the borer. Like all of Little Hans’s fantasies, it is a beginning of articulation of the situation: there is a ‘return, if one may say so, to the sender’, toward the mother, of the threat.

It is the mother who is unbolted, it is the father who is called to play his role of borer. Here too I point out to you that I do nothing other than take literally what FREUD brings us. He is so struck by this role of borer that he makes the remark to us without resolving it himself, and for a good reason, it is that one would still have to see with philology, ethnography, myths, etc., what relation there can be between Bohrer and geboren.

Geboren means in German to be born or to be born, and Bohrer means borer. There is no relation between these two roots. Let us summarize. It is all the difference of ferio in Latin, and of fero, to strike or to carry. It is not the same root, and when one pursues in the different languages these two roots, they remain perfectly distinct. Finally there is ferare, to pierce, which is obviously not the same thing as fero, to carry, and it is always to this term ‘to carry’ that the geboren refers.

One finds it as far as one pursues the essential distinction of the two roots. But the important thing is precisely that FREUD stops there, and stops there at something that is literally a meeting of signifier with the purely signifying problematic that this proposes, for in the end the borer evokes in this respect PROMETHEUS who is a piercer. The borer is the geboren, that is to say the term of the fundamental carrying of the bringing-to-light of the child. Two elements remain distinct, even opposed. This is an incidental parenthesis to show you the importance that he himself, FREUD, gives to the signifying term.

What is going to be the line along which the continuation of the solution of the substitution brought by Little Hans is going to develop, at the point where he is in a way powerless to make ‘ripen’. Allow me this expression; it is not a matter here of instinctual maturation to push in a direction that is not an impasse, the dialectical development of the situation. One must believe that there is something, since there is a development. At least it is a matter of understanding it, and understanding it as a whole. I therefore can today only indicate it to you.

The slant is the one through which passes the whole development from the point where we arrived, around mid-April, that is to say from the introduction of Anna as an element whose fall is possible and desired, just as the maternal bite is taken as an instrumental element, as a substitute for castrating intervention, which moreover is diverted in its direction, which does not bear on the penis, which bears on something else, that something which, in the last fantasy, results in a change.

One must believe that this change already has a certain degree of sufficiency in itself, in any case of sufficiency for the reduction of the phobia. Hans at the end is changed, that is what is obtained, and we shall see next time all the consequences of it which are absolutely crucial for Hans’s development and which are fascinating. Anna enters, that is to say the other unassimilable term of the situation. The whole process of Hans’s fantasies is going to consist in stages, stages that we shall strive to describe one by one, to restore this intolerable element of the real, to the imaginary register in which it can be reintegrated.

Read or reread with this key the observation; see how Anna is reintroduced under a completely fantasmatic form, the Anna from before the birth, when Little Hans tells us: two years ago Anna had already come with us to Gmunden; at that moment she was in her mother’s belly, but Little Hans tells us that they had taken her along in a little trunk-rear of the car, and that there she led a very funny life, or else again that all the previous years they had thus taken her along, for little Anna has been there forever.

What is intolerable in the situation is that Little Hans cannot envisage that there is another Anna in the holidays at Gmunden. He compensates for it in reminiscence—I mean in this term very precisely that I use with the Platonic accent, as being opposed to the function of repetition—namely of the object found again, he makes of the object an object whose idea is there since always. PLATO had to have something that explained our access to the higher world, since we could enter it even while not being part of it.

It is the same thing that Little Hans does; he reduces Anna to something one remembers since always. First stage of this imaginification of this real, reminiscence if you like, and that has another meaning than the stories of instinctual regression. And then after that, from the moment when she is an idea in the Platonic sense of the term, even an ideal, she is in fact an ideal, and at that moment what does he make her do?

That too is in his fantasy; he makes her mount astride the horse, and it is at once humorous, brilliant, mythical, epic, and it has at the same time all the characters of those epic texts in which we wear ourselves out describing two states of condensation, two stages of the epic, and supposing all sorts of interrogators, commentators, mystifiers to explain something which, in the epic as in the myth, depends on this: it is a matter of explaining
– what happens in the imaginary world,
– and what happens in the real world.

Here Little Hans cannot eliminate the coachman, and on the other hand it is necessary that little Anna be on the horse, and that she too hold the reins. So in the same sentence he says that the reins were in the hands of the one, but also in the hands of the other. And there you have in the living state this sort of internal contradiction which often in myths makes us suppose two registers that are of the confusion, of the incoherence of two stories, whereas in reality it is because the author is prey—whether it is the Odyssey or Little Hans—to a contradiction which is simply this: the contradiction of two essentially different registers. And there you see it living in the Hans case.

It is in sum by the intermediary of this sister who becomes his higher self from the moment when she is an image, and with this key you can see the signification of all the appraisals maintained from a certain moment on the subject of little Anna, including the admiring appraisals. They are not simply ironic; they are essential of this little other who is there facing him. He does what will allow him to begin to dominate the situation, from the moment when little Anna will have ridden long enough the fearsome horse. And I told you that from that moment on, Little Hans will also be able to fantasize that he tames this horse, and it is immediately after that that there is ‘the whipped horse’, namely that Little Hans begins to experience the truth, the warning given by NIETZSCHE: ‘If you go to women, do not forget the whip.’

It is a simple way to mark my lesson today, it is a simple stop. Do not see in it the essential of the lesson that I want to bring you today; see in it simply a break necessitated by the late hour to which this discourse has led us.