🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

The year moves on; little Hans—let us hope so—is drawing to its close. It would be appropriate for me to remind you, at the threshold of this lesson, that this year we set ourselves the goal of revising the notion of the object relation. It does not seem useless to us to take, for an instant, a little bit of distance, simply to show you, not what I would call ‘the road traveled’—one always travels one—but, I hope, a certain demystifying effect to which you know I attach a great deal of importance.

In the matter of analysis, there is all the same, it seems, a minimum that is required in analytic training, namely to realize that if man is dealing with these instincts—these instincts in which I believe, whatever people may say—these instincts including the death instinct, if that is the essential of what analysis has brought us, then it is still to be expected that everything cannot be summed up, brought to an end, in a formula as simple and as bland as the one to which, however, we commonly see psychoanalysts rally, namely that, in short, everything is resolved when we have arrived at this ultimate goal: that the subject’s relations with his fellow being should be, as one says, relations ‘person to person,’ and not relations to an object.

It is certainly not because I have tried here to show you, in its real complexity, the object relation, that I am reluctant about this term object relation. And in fact why would our fellow being not validly be an object? I would even say more: would to heaven that he were, an object, for in truth, in what analysis shows us, it is that commonly and at the outset he is even much less than an object: he is that something that comes to fill his place as a signifier within our interrogation, insofar as neurosis is—as I told you, retold you, and repeated—a question.

– An object is not something as simple as that.

– An object is something that is certainly won, and even, as FREUD reminds us, is never won without first being lost.

– An object is always a reconquest, and it is, in sum and only by taking up again a place it first vacated, that man can arrive at that something that one improperly calls his own totality.

As for the person, you must realize that certainly it is desirable that something be established between us and some subjects who indeed represent the fullness of the person. It is precisely the terrain on which, in the end, it is the most difficult to make progress; it is also the terrain on which all the skids, all the confusions, are established.

A person, one commonly imagines, is obviously that something to which we recognize the right to say ‘I,’ as to ourselves. But since we are all too obviously the most embarrassed in the world each time it is a matter of saying ‘I,’ in the full sense—this which is powerfully highlighted by analytic experience—this is well suited to show us that what one most commonly slips into each time it is a matter of thinking of the other as someone who says ‘I’ is to make him say our own ‘I,’ that is to say, to induce him into our own mirages.

In short, as I emphasized to you last year at the end of my seminar on the psychoses, it is not the problem of the ‘I,’ but the problem of the ‘you’ that is certainly the most difficult to realize when it is a matter of encountering the person. And this ‘you,’ everything shows us that it is the limit signifier, that it is that something, in the end, halfway along which we always have to stop.

Nevertheless it is still from it that we receive all investitures. It is not for nothing that at the end of last year’s seminar, it was on ‘You are the one who will follow me’ or ‘…who will not follow me,’ or ‘who will do this’ or ‘…who will not do it,’ that I stopped.

If analysis is an experience that has shown us something, it is precisely that every interhuman relation is founded on this investiture that indeed comes from the Other—an Other that is already in us in the form of the unconscious, but such that nothing in our own development can be realized except through this constellation that implies the absolute Other, as the seat of speech.

And if the Oedipus complex has a meaning, it is precisely because it gives as the foundation of our progress, of our installation between the Real and the Symbolic, the existence of the one who has speech, of the one who can speak, the father. To put it bluntly, it concretizes it in a function which, I repeat to you, is in itself essentially problematic.

The interrogation ‘What is the father?’ is in the end an interrogation that is posed at the center of analytic experience as an interrogation eternally unresolved, at least for us analysts. This is the point on which I want today to take up again the problem of little Hans, to show you in what, and where, little Hans is situated with respect to what the father is and is not; and, to take it up from higher up, to make you notice that the only place from which it can be answered in a full and valid way to the interrogation about the father is certainly in a certain tradition. It is not the room next door, as I often say about phenomenologies [Cf. supra: bathroom and bookshop]. We shall say here: it is the door next door.

If the father must find somewhere his synthesis, his full meaning, it is in a tradition that is called the religious tradition. It is not for nothing that we see, over the course of history, being formed—and being formed only in the tradition that is the Judeo-Christian tradition—this attempt to establish the accord between the sexes on the principle of an opposition of ‘potency’ and ‘act’ that finds its mediation in a love.

But outside this tradition, let us say it clearly, every relation to the object implies that third dimension that we see articulated in ARISTOTLE, which is precisely the one that is then eliminated by—I would say—the apocryphal ARISTOTLE, the ARISTOTLE of a theology that was attributed to him much later—everyone knows, and that it exists and that it is apocryphal—and the absolutely essential Aristotelian term concerning the whole constitution of the object is opposed to the third term of privation. It is around the notion of privation…
moreover you have seen it: it is from there that I started this year
…that the whole object relation turns as it is established in analytic literature and in Freudian doctrine.

The notion of privation is absolutely central there, and it is not outside privation that we can understand this: that all the progress of integration, both of man and of woman into their own sex, requires for the one and for the other the recognition of something
– which is essentially privation to be assumed for one of the sexes,
– and for the other privation to be assumed as well in order to be able fully to assume its own sex.

In short: penisneid on one side, castration complex on the other. Naturally all this reconnects with the most immediate experience. It is rather striking to see taken up again, under a more or less camouflaged form—but equally well, one can say, up to a certain point: dishonest—the idea that every maturation of genitality includes this oblative character, this full recognition of the other, by means of which this supposed harmony should be established, thus pre-established, between man and woman, of which, however, we clearly see that everyday experience is, in a way, only the perpetual failure.

Go tell, in a more direct form, today’s wife that she is…
as the unknown theologian who signed himself under the designation of ARISTOTLE expresses it,
after a whole medieval and scholastic tradition
…go tell today’s wife that she is ‘potency’ and that you, the man, you are ‘act.’
You will get a prompt answer: ‘No thanks!—you will be told—Do you take me for a limp dough?’ And certainly it is quite clear: the woman has fallen into the midst of the same problems as we have.

And there is no need to approach the, so to speak, feminist or social face of the question; it is enough to quote the pretty quatrain in which APOLLINAIRE put the profession of faith into the mouth of Thérèse-TIRESIAS, or more exactly of her husband, who, fleeing the journalist, says to him:

‘Je suis une honnête femme-monsieur
Ma femme est un homme-madame.
Elle a emporté le piano le violon l’assiette au beurre
Elle est soldat ministre merdecin, etc…’[G. Apollinaire: Les mamelles de Tirésias, I, 7.] [merdecin: portmanteau/pun blending ‘médecin’ (doctor) with ‘merde’ (shit)]

Certainly we must stand on our two feet on the terrain of our experience, and realize that if analytic experience has made some progress on the problem increasingly brought to the fore by all our experience of the development of life, even of neurosis, it is indeed precisely insofar as it has known how to situate the relations between the sexes on their different rungs of the object relation. But what does that mean?

That means…
as one had clearly realized, and since after all it is really only to draw aside a sort of veil of an absolutely unworthy modesty, a false modesty, not to see it
…that if analysis has made progress in something, it is very precisely on the plane of what one must indeed call by its name: on the plane of eroticism, that is to say on the plane where effectively the relations between the sexes are elucidated insofar as they are found on the path of something that is a fusion, a realization, a response to the question posed by the subject about his sex, and insofar as he is something that has at once entered the world, and is never satisfied in it.

As for the rest, namely the famous and perfect oblative character in which is found, in the end, the ideal harmony of man and woman, we find it only at a limiting horizon that does not even allow us to designate its goal as a goal to be realized by analysis.

We must know, in order to have, if I may say so, a salutary perspective on what the progress of our investigation consists in; we must realize that always, in the relation of man and woman, from the moment it is consecrated, there remains open this gap which makes it so that, for something ultimate to remain in the end acceptable in the eyes of the philosopher, that is to say of the one who gets out of it, it is after all the woman—namely the wife—who essentially has the function of what she was for SOCRATES, namely the test of his patience, of his patience with the Real.

In truth, to enter in a more vivid way into what today will still punctuate what I am affirming, and what will bring us back to little Hans, I shall report and act upon a piece of information that I found in the news journal par excellence, or more exactly that one of my excellent friends noticed there and reported to me.

He read, about ten days ago, this little news item that comes to us from the depths of America, about a woman bound to her husband by the pact of an eternal love, and you are going to see how. Since the death of her husband, this woman has had made for herself, very exactly every ten months, a child by him.

This may seem somewhat surprising to you; do not believe that it is a parthenogenetic phenomenon; it is on the contrary artificial insemination, namely that this woman devoted to eternal fidelity, at the moment of the ultimate illness that led her husband to pass away, had stored a sufficient quantity of the liquid that was to allow her to perpetrate the race of the deceased at her pleasure, and as you see, within the shortest delays, and, as one would say, repeated.

This little news item that looks like nothing, and that we had to wait for—we could have imagined it. In truth it is the most striking illustration, it seems to me, that we can give of what I call the x of paternity, for in the end you are not, I think, without grasping the problems that such a possibility introduces.

When I tell you that the symbolic father is the dead father, I think you see an illustration of it there. But what this introduces that is new, and that is well suited to highlight the importance of this remark, is that in this case the real father too is the dead father. From that moment it would truly be very interesting to ask oneself the question of what becomes, in this case, of the Oedipus complex.

On the primary plane, the one that is closest to our experience, it would naturally be easy to make a few witticisms about what, at the limit, the term ‘cold woman’ can mean: cold woman, the new proverb would say, chilled husband. There is also the slogan launched by one of my friends who wanted to make it the advertisement for a brand of ‘frigidaires.’

It is true that there is everywhere some difficulty introducing this slogan to Anglo-Saxon souls, but it is indeed there that this slogan would take on its value. One can imagine a nice poster where one would see these ladies with a pinched air, and underneath the following caption: ‘She takes care of her frigidair until she turns her husband a Frigidaire’

It is indeed the case in the present case as well. In truth, the question that arises there and that is magnificently illustrated is certainly that the notion of the father, the real notion, in no case be confused, as father, with that of his fecundity.

We clearly see there that the problem is elsewhere, and certainly we also cannot not see that in introducing us into the notion of what becomes of the notion of the Oedipus complex—for I leave you the task of extrapolating—from the moment one has begun along this path, in a hundred years we shall make for women children who will be the direct sons of the men of genius who are living at present, and who will by then have been preciously preserved in little jars.

It is certain that the question arises: if one has cut something off from the father on this occasion, and in the most radical way, it also seems that speech is cut off from him, and the question is obviously to know how and by what route, under what mode, this speech of the ancestor will be inscribed in the child’s psyche, of which in the end the mother will be the sole representative and the sole vehicle: how will she make the ancestor in a tin speak, if I may express myself thus? This is not, as you see, science fiction at all, but simply has the advantage of laying bare for us one of the dimensions of the problem.

This, parenthetically, since a moment ago I was directing you—for the ideal solution of the problem of marriage—to ‘the door next door,’ it would be interesting to see how, in the presence of this problem of the posthumous insemination of the consecrated spouse, the Church will find a way to take a position.

For in truth, if it refers to what it puts forward in such cases, namely the fundamental character of natural practices, one can point out to it that it is precisely insofar as we have arrived at perfectly disengaging nature from what is not of it that such a practice can be introduced and is possible. From then on it will perhaps be appropriate to specify the term ‘natural,’ and one will of course come to put the emphasis there on the profoundly artful side of what has until now been called ‘nature.’ In short, we will perhaps not be, at that moment, completely useless as terms of reference. Our good friend Françoise DOLTO, or even one of her pupils, will perhaps at the same time become a Father of the Church.

In short, the whole question of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real will perhaps not suffice even to pose the terms of this problem alone, which does not seem to me absolutely close—since it can be engaged in reality—to being resolved. But this of course will make it easier for us to formulate, as I wish to do today, the term in which, not in itself but for the subject, what we can call the sanction of the function of the father can be inscribed. Every kind of introduction, so to speak, to the paternal function appears to us to be for the subject, from the moment we have let through this current of air that lays bare the columns of the scenery, of the order of a metaphorical experience.

I shall illustrate it, not by overwhelming you with new things, but by reminding you under what heading I introduced last year what I call here the metaphor. The metaphor is that function, that use of the signifying chain that proceeds by using, not its connective dimension in which every metonymic use of the signifying chain is installed, but that dimension of substitution.

Last year I did not go very far to look for something of which it was a question; I forced myself to go look for it in what is really within everyone’s reach, in the QUILLET dictionary where I took the first example that was given there, namely Hugo’s line: ‘Sa gerbe n’était pas avare ni haineuse.’ You will tell me that fortune favored me since, indeed, this comes to us today in my demonstration like a ring on the finger. [‘Booz endormi’, La légende des siècles, I]

I would tell you that any metaphor could serve for an analogous demonstration, but I am going to repeat to you, because it is exactly what leads us today, and what brings us back to our subject of phobia, what ‘metaphor’ means. It is not—as the surrealists said—the passage of the poetic spark between two terms that are imaginatively as disparate as possible. Certainly this seems to stick, for it is quite clear that it is not a question that this poor sheaf be miserly or hateful, and it is indeed the wholly human strangeness of explaining oneself like that, that is to say of putting into relation more by the intermediary of a negation, and this negation is, at bottom, of course, on the basis of a possible affirmation.

It is not a question, to put it bluntly, that it be either miserly or hateful, miserliness and hate being attributes that are the property of BOOZ no less than the sheaf, and BOOZ making, equally well of the one as of the other, namely of these properties and of these merits—the use that is appropriate without asking advice, nor making known his feelings either to the one or to the other.

That between what and what the metaphorical creation occurs is between what is expressed under this term ‘his sheaf,’ and the one to whom his sheaf is substituted, that is to say the gentleman about whom we have been spoken for a moment in balanced terms, and who is called BOOZ. It is very precisely insofar as the sheaf is there, if I may say so, having taken his place, that place a tiny bit cumulative on which he is already, he, endowed with these qualities of being neither miserly nor hateful, that is to say of having cleared away a certain number of negative virtues, it is there that the sheaf comes to take his place, and for an instant literally cancels him. We find again the schema of the symbol insofar as it is the death of the thing.

Here it is even better: the name of the character is abolished, and it is his sheaf that comes to be substituted for him. And if there is metaphor, if this has a meaning, if this is a moment of bucolic poetry, it is very precisely in this fact that it is because something like his sheaf, that is to say something essentially natural, can be substituted for him, that BOOZ reappears after having been eclipsed, occulted, abolished in what I can call ‘the precisely fertile radiance of the sheaf.’

He indeed knows neither miserliness nor hate and he is purely and simply natural fecundity, and this has its meaning precisely in the passage that follows. In the poem, what is at stake is to announce to us, or to have announced, in the dream that will follow for BOOZ, that although he is of a great age, as he says himself, 80 years of age, he is soon going to be a father, that is to say that there comes out of him and out of his belly that great tree at the foot of which a king sang, says the text, and at the top of which a God died.

This function of the metaphor, on which I am thus showing you what is at stake…
every creation of a new meaning in human culture is essentially metaphorical
…it is insofar as, by a substitution that at the same time maintains what it is substituted for, there passes…
in the tension between what is abolished, suppressed, and what is substituted for it
…that something new that introduces so visibly what is developed in poetic improvisation, that something new that on this occasion is, precisely by this Boozian myth, manifestly incarnated, namely the new dimension, this function of paternity.

One could push these things very far, and see in this poem where, as usual, old HUGO is far from always being on a rigorous path—he totters a little to the right and to the left—but what is perfectly clear is that:

‘Pendant qu’il sommeillait, Ruth, une moabite,
S’était couchée aux pieds de Booz, le sein nu,
Espérant on ne sait quel rayon inconnu,
Quand viendrait du réveil la lumière subite.’

Please see to what extent the style of that is in this ambiguous zone where realism mixes with I do not know what glimmer a little too raw, even troubled, and which evokes for us the chiaroscuro of those paintings by CARAVAGGIO, which with all their popular roughness are perhaps still what, nowadays, can give us most highly the sense of the sacred dimension. A little further on then, what is at stake is always the same thing:

‘Immobile, ouvrant l’œil à moitié sous ses voiles,
Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l’éternel été,
Avait, en s’en allant, négligemment jeté
Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des étoiles.’

I did not push…
neither in my teaching last year,
nor in what I recently wrote about this sheaf of the poem of BOOZ and of RUTH
…I did not push further the investigation nor the remarks on the subject of the point up to which the poet develops the metaphor. I left aside the sickle, because, equally well outside the text as outside what we are doing here, it could have seemed to readers a bit forced.

I do not think, however, that you cannot not be struck by this: it is that the whole poem points toward an image around which, of course, for a century, people have been marveling at the wonderfully intuitive and comparative character of the thing. It is the thin and clear crescent of the moon.

But it cannot, I think, escape you to what extent, if the thing carries, if it is something other than a very pretty brushstroke, a dab of yellow on the blue sky, it is very precisely insofar as the sickle in that sky there is the eternal sickle of maternity, the one that already played its little role between KRONOS and URANOS, between JUPITER and KRONOS, and that this femininity, the potency of which I spoke a moment ago, which is indeed represented there in that sort of mythical waiting of the woman, is indeed that something that is always there, that hangs within reach of her hand, that sickle with which the gleaner will indeed cut, if I may express myself thus, the sheaf in question, the one from which the lineage of the Messiah will spring forth again.

Our little Hans, in the development of the phobia, in its creation and in its resolution, cannot be conceived, cannot be correctly inscribed in an equation, except from these terms. Please note that we have there, in the Oedipus complex, that something that is at the x place where the child is with all his problems in relation to the mother, and it is insofar as something will have occurred that will have constituted the paternal metaphor, that this essential signifying element in every individual development that is called the castration complex will be able to take its place.

I say just as well for the man as for the woman, that is to say that we have to set down the following equation:

If indeed P is the paternal metaphor, and X must be more or less elided depending on the cases, depending on the points of development and the problems to which the pre-Oedipal period led the child in relation to the mother, it is in the linkage of the Oedipal metaphor that we can thus inscribe the essential phase in every concept of the object that is constituted by—let us inscribe what we want—a C or the sickle, plus something that is precisely the signification, that is to say that in which being finds itself again, that in which the X finds its solution. It is in such a formula that the essential moment of the crossing of the Oedipus is situated. And in the case of little Hans it is exactly what we are dealing with, namely that, as I explained to you, it is insofar as, in relation to his mother, there is something that is precisely the insoluble problem that, having reached the degree of his development that he has reached, is constituted by the fact that the mother is something as complex as this: mother + phallus + little a, with all the complications that that entails.

It is insofar as little Hans has arrived at this impasse, and cannot get out of it…
– because there is no father,
– because there is nothing to metaphorize this relation with his mother,
– because, to put it bluntly, he has no other way out on the other side,
…than:
not the sickle,
not the big C of the castration complex,
not the possibility of a mediation, that is to say, of losing, then of finding again his penis, but that on the other side he finds only the possible bite of the mother…
which is the same with which he rushes greedily upon her, insofar as she is lacking to him,
insofar as there is no other real relation with the mother than the relation that has the effect—what all present analytic theory brings into relief—namely the relation of devouring
…it is insofar as he has arrived at this impasse that he knows no other relation to the real than the one indeed that is called, rightly or wrongly, ‘sadistic-oral,’ that is to say that the little m, or again m plus everything that is the real at that moment there for him, namely in particular the real that has just come to light and that does not fail to complicate the situation, namely Π his own penis:

…it is insofar as the problem presents itself like that for him that it is necessary that be introduced, since there is no other, this element of metaphorical mediation: the horse. That is to say that the establishment in little Hans of the phobia is inscribed in that same formula that is the one I gave you a moment ago:

…ἵππος, with the rough spirit, being the horse, and M the mother. This will be the equivalent of something that will not be any more resolved for all that, that is to say the bite insofar as it is for him the major danger, the major danger of all his reality, and entirely and more especially still of the one that has just come to light, namely of his genital reality.

This may seem artificial to you. Do not believe it. Begin first by using it and you will see afterward whether it can indeed be of use to you. I can show you a thousand faces of it that are immediately applicable, and in particular this: that the horse which is the one of which it is said that it bites and that it threatens at once the penis, is also the one that falls, and it is indeed for that reason—according to what little Hans himself tells us—that the horse was brought in.

It was first brought in as the something that, put at the head of the van that must take away little Lizzie’s baggage, is that something that can turn around and that bites. But he tells us, that is where it caught the silliness, that is to say more exactly that what was already hooked to a signification was retained by him as being something that went well beyond all signification, as something that he sanctions with that sort of aphorism or definitional affirmation:

‘Now all horses are going to fall.’

It is indeed essentially as a function of the fall, which is precisely the common term among everything that is at issue in the lower part of the equation at the moment where little Hans has arrived, that the mother is introduced.

We have emphasized this element fall of the mother, the phallus of the mother which is what is no longer tenable; it is no longer play, and yet he does everything to maintain the existence of this play. Finally little Anna is very essentially what one wishes most in the world to see fall, even to push her a little.

It is insofar as the horse fills—in a way that is, it, effective, imaged, and in a sense active—all these functions of the fall brought together, that it begins to be introduced as an essential term, as the term of this phobia where we see affirmed, set down, what objects really are for the human psyche.

That is to say something, as I told you a moment ago, that perhaps deserves the title of object, but of which, of course, one cannot insist too much on the special chapter of the object qualification that it is necessary to introduce from the moment when the objects with which we are concerned are the objects of phobia, or the fetish, of which we know at once how much they exist as object, since they have to constitute truly, in the subject’s psyche, if one may say so, the true milestones of desire, in the case of the fetish and of its displacements.

In the case of phobia, this object is at once something that is there in the real, and at the same time that is manifestly distinct from it, which moreover in no way is accessible to conceptualization, except by the intermediary of this signifying formalization. Up to now, let us say it clearly, no other more satisfactory one has been given, and if I seem to be presenting it to you in a form a little more complicated than has been done up to now, I point out to you that it is not otherwise either that FREUD ends up speaking of it at the end of his work.

When he fully articulates that, taking up again the phobia, he makes of the horse on the occasion…
since it is little Hans himself that he takes up as an example
…that object substituted for all the images, for all the confused significations, more or less badly disengaged, around which the subject’s anxiety cannot manage to settle, he makes of it the almost arbitrary object…
and it is for that reason that he calls it signal
…thanks to which, within this field of confusions, limits will be able to be defined which, for being arbitrary, nonetheless introduce the element of delimitation thanks to which, at least possibly, the beginning of an order is ensured, the first crystal of an organized crystallization between the Symbolic and the Real.

That is indeed everything that will occur in the course of the progress of what is called the analysis of Hans, insofar as one can, in the full sense of the term, call what happens in Hans’s case an analysis. I point out this to you: that the psychoanalysts do not seem—at least to read Mr. JONES—to have yet understood that if FREUD made a few reservations by saying that it was there a quite exceptional case—in the sense that it could be conducted and carried out by the child’s very father, no doubt guided by FREUD, but by the child’s father—he consequently made very few foundations on the possible extension of this method.

The analysts seem astonished at this timidity in FREUD. They would do better to look at things more closely, and to ask themselves whether indeed, from the fact that this analysis was pursued by the father, it does not present specific traits that exclude—at least partially—the properly transferential dimension; in other words, whether the blunder usually uttered by Miss Anna FREUD, who says that in child analyses there is no possible transference, is not precisely applicable in this case because it is the father.

Of course, whereas it is only too obvious that in every child analysis practiced by an analyst there is indeed transference, quite simply as—and better than anywhere else—there is in the adult, here it is a matter of something a bit particular, and of which we shall be led later to show the consequences.

Be that as it may, it is around such a formula that we can, in the most rigorous way, punctuate all the progress of the father’s intervention. This formula is useful—and I think I will show it to you next time—insofar as it really allows us to situate why certain interventions of the father are unfruitful, why others engender this shaking of mythical transformation, thanks to which this equation will find its power in little Hans’s case, and insofar as there intervened there, as quickly as possible there manifested themselves his possibilities of progress, his implicit metaphorical richness, namely the possibility of the transformation of such an equation.

I shall content myself for today with showing you its last and extreme term, written in the same formalization. I have already told you enough for you to be able to conceive of it, to understand the scope of what I will have written to you. What we see at the end is something that certainly is a solution, something that establishes little Hans in a register of object relations, as one says, that is livable.

Is it fully successful from the point of view of Oedipal integration? That is precisely what we shall try to see more closely next time. Already we are going to see in what it is and it is not. If we read the text as little Hans at the end formulates his position, he tells us, ‘Now I am the father.’ We do not need to ask ourselves how he can manage with a father whom throughout the observation he is forced, in a way, to stimulate, to beg, ‘But, do your job as a father then!’ and whose last and very fine fantasy that occurs with the father shows that, in a way, the father catches up with him only just on the train platform, whereas in reality little Hans has long been galloping ahead, and left with whom? As if by chance with the grandmother. The first thing the father asks him:

– ‘Now what would you do if you were the father in my place?’
– ‘Oh! it’s very simple, I would take you every Sunday to see grand-mama…’

There is nothing changed in the relation between the son and the father. On this occasion we can therefore presume that there is not there a quite typical realization of the Oedipus complex. To put it bluntly, we see it very quickly if we know how to read the text: certainly all the ties with the father are very far from being broken; they are even strongly knotted by all this analytic experience; but as little Hans very well says: ‘You will henceforth be the grandfather.’

He says it, but at what moment? Read the text carefully: at the moment when he began by saying that he, he was the father. This grandfather comes in there entirely apart; it is only after one has spoken of the mother—who will be, we shall see, what sort of mother on the occasion—it is after one has spoken of the mother that one comes to speak of the other woman who will be the grandmother.

But no link, from the perspective of little Hans for himself, between this grandfather and this grandmother. Certainly it is not wrongly that FREUD emphasizes on this occasion with a satisfaction—which for us is far from giving us an entire relief—that the Oedipus question was resolved very elegantly by this little fellow who henceforth makes himself his mother’s spouse, and who sends his father back to the grandmother. It is an elegant, even humorous way of eliding the question, but nothing indicates to us up to now, in all that FREUD wrote, that one can consider this solution—this may be an obvious solution—as a typical solution of the Oedipus complex.

To put it bluntly, what we see from that moment on is something that, on the part of little Hans, certainly maintains a certain continuity in the order of lineages. If one had not at least arrived that far, little Hans would have resolved absolutely nothing at all; and, to put it bluntly, the function of the phobia would have been, properly speaking, null.

It is that little Hans, insofar as he conceives himself as the father, is a function of something that is inscribed more or less like this: the mother is the grandmother; the mother at the end of the progress is doubled. This is a very important point: he recognized something that allows him to find a three-legged balance, which is indeed the minimum of what the relation with the object can be established on, as we have always said, and this third that he did not find in his father is precisely in the grandmother, whose absolutely decisive, even crushing, value in object relations he has indeed only too well seen.

His own father: it is precisely insofar as behind the mother he adds on a second one that little Hans establishes himself, he, in a paternity. What sort of paternity? Imaginary paternity precisely. From that moment, what does little Hans tell us? Who is going to have children? It is he; he says it very clearly. But when his father, putting his foot in it, asks him:

– ‘Is it with mama that you are going to have children?’
– ‘Not at all,’ little Hans answers him, ‘what does this story mean? You told me that the father cannot have children all by himself, so now you want me to have some?’

There is there a moment of oscillation in the dialogue between the child and the father that is quite striking and that shows the precisely and very precisely repressed character of everything that is of the order of paternal creation as such, whereas what he articulates on the contrary from that moment on is precisely that he is going to have children, but imaginary children. Children, he wishes—as he says in the most precise and most articulated way—he wishes to have them, but on the other side he does not want his mother to have any. In other words, he is absolutely precise: the assurances that he desires above all to take regarding the future are that his mother have no more children.

For that one is ready for everything, even up to bribing lavishly—since we are all the same in the presence of a little offshoot of capitalists—the great begetter par excellence, the one to which I shall return next time to show you the true face, for it is a very important element, the begetter par excellence who is the stork with the so strange a face; we shall see next time very exactly what place and what function it is appropriate to grant him; one will go so far as to bribe the father stork so that there will be no more real child.

The fundamental distinction of a certain paternal function that there is in the child—and imaginary—has been substituted for the mother: he has children as she has them; he will take care of his imaginary children in the way in which he arrived at completely resolving the notion of the child, up to and including that of little Anna. It is the fantasy around little Anna, of which I began to speak to you last time, and to which I shall return. All his fantasy around the box, the stork, the little Anna who existed already well before her birth, consisted in imagining her, in fantasizing her.

He is thus going to have fantasmatic children; he is going to become a character essentially poet, creator in the imaginary order, and the last form he gives to these sorts of imaginary creations is the one he calls Lodi, about which he is questioned:

– ‘What does this Lodi mean?’

And the father is very interested:

– ‘Is it Chocolodi? Is it Saffalodi?’.

And indeed ‘Saffalodi’ means little sausage. The image of a fundamentally imaginary character, phallic-shaped, to put it bluntly the imaginary transmutation that took place of this phallus at once not ceded and eternally imagined for the mother, is what we see reproduced in little Hans, under this form.

The woman will never be for him other than the fantasy of those little sisters-daughters around which his whole childhood crisis turned. It will not quite be a fetish since indeed it will precisely be the true fetish, if I may say so, that is to say that he will not have stopped at what is inscribed on the veil; he will have found again the typical heterosexual form of his object.

All the same, his relation with women will henceforth and forever without any doubt be marked by this narcissistic genesis during which he found how to put himself in orthoposition in relation to the feminine partner: the feminine partner will have been engendered not, to put it bluntly, from the mother, but from the imaginary children that he can make for the mother, themselves heirs of this phallus around which all the primitive play of the love relation, of the capture of the love toward the mother, will have been primitively played out.

So we have in the end: with on the one hand the affirmation of his relation, he as new father—as Vati—to a maternal lineage; we shall have, as correspondence to this second part of the equation, on the other side, that is to say little Anna riding the horse, little Anna taking the position of domination in relation to all the haulage, to all the train, to everything that the mother drags after her.

And it is through the intermediary of little Anna that he, little Hans, arrived at doing what we said last time that he was doing, that is to say at dominating the mother, not simply at whipping her, namely—as the continuation of the story shows us—at seeing what she had in her belly, namely at extracting the little castrating penknife which henceforth indeed extracts, makes her much less harmful.

Such is the formula which, opposed to this one, marks the point of arrival of little Hans’s transformation. Little Hans certainly will have all the appearances of a normal heterosexual; nevertheless the path he will have traveled in the Oedipus in order to get there is an atypical path tied to this deficiency of the father, of which you may perhaps be surprised that it is so great, but of which certainly the whole line of the observation shows us at every instant the failures and the faults, underlined at every instant by little Hans’s own call, and of which there is certainly no reason to be surprised that it marks with a terminal atypicality the progress and the resolution of the phobia.

This, I ask you simply to keep the two extreme terms of it, to tell you that it is possible, that it is conceivable to try to articulate by a series of stages the transformation of the one into the other. Without any doubt it is appropriate not to be too systematic there: certainly this sort of logic, if one may say so, is new, and perhaps it must be, if it is pursued, simply introductive of a certain number of questions regarding its formalism, that make us ask ourselves whether it has absolutely the same laws as what could already have been formalized in other domains of logic.

Certainly FREUD, at the level of the Traumdeutung, has already begun something that consists in telling us that the logic of the unconscious, in other words of the signifiers in the unconscious, is certainly not the same as the one we are used to handling. There is a vast quarter of the Traumdeutung that is essentially devoted to showing us how a certain number of essential logical articulations—the ‘either…, or…,’ transposition, causality—can be carried over into the order of the unconscious. It is perhaps distinct from our customary logic, from topology. You know what a topology is: it is a rubber geometry. Here too it is a rubber logic, and one that perhaps asks of us a certain number of definitions of terms that allow us to define a certain rubber logic.

But that does not mean that everything is possible; in particular, that two rings passed one into the other [sic], up to further notice nothing allows us to untie them—this to tell you that rubber logic is not condemned to entire freedom.

In short, what we see arriving there at the end of the resolution of little Hans’s phobia is a certain configuration, which is this: despite the presence, the very insistence of paternal action, that in which little Hans inscribes himself is in a kind of matriarchal line, or more exactly—for the sake of being simpler, for the sake of being stricter too—of maternal reduplication, as if it were necessary that there be a third character and that, failing it being the father, it be that famous grandmother.

On the other hand, something that places him in relation to the object that will henceforth be the object of his desires, and I have already emphasized to you that we have the testimony in the anamnesis of something that attaches him essentially to Gmunden and to his little sister: that is to say very precisely to little girls, that is to say to children insofar as they are the daughters of his mother, but that they are also his daughters, his, the imaginary daughters.

The originally narcissistic structure of his relations with the woman is indicated at the outcome, at the opening out of the solution of his phobia. What is going to remain as traces, if one may say so, of the passage through the phobia?

Something very curious: something that is the role of the little lamb with which at the end he tells us that he engages in very particular games, for example of letting himself be jostled by it, and this little lamb is a lamb on which one once tried to put his sister on horseback, that is to say to put her in the position—as it is called in the fantasy—of the big box.

The sister came, in Hans’s imagination; it is she who, if you remember, is on horseback on the horse. It is the last step before the resolution of the horse phobia: it was necessary that the sister dominate that before he, little Hans, could treat the horse as it deserves, that is to say beat it, and at that moment the equivalence between the horse and the mother is ensured: to beat the horse is also to beat his mother. So in the end there remains something on which the little sister rode, namely this lamb. There is the configuration that remains at the end.

I cannot refuse myself the pleasure, nor refuse you this enigma, of showing you that something around which our master FREUD made his analysis of Leonardo DA VINCI revolve, namely not The Virgin of the Rocks:

but the great cartoon of Saint Anne that is in the Louvre [The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne], and which is preceded by a drawing that is at Burlington House and which is this:

The whole analysis that FREUD made of Leonardo DA VINCI revolves around this Saint Anne with the face so strangely androgynous—she resembles, moreover, Saint John the Baptist

…this Virgin with the child, and as is emphasized here, not as in the Burlington House cartoon, the cousin, namely John the Baptist, is precisely a little lamb.

This very singular configuration, which did not fail to attract FREUD’s attention, is truly the bone of his demonstration, of that very singular work that is his study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.

I hope that you will take the trouble by the end of the year—for perhaps I will manage to bring you the closure of my seminar on it—to read Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. If you do not notice, in reading this childhood memory, the unbelievably enigmatic character of every situation where the term narcissism is introduced for the first time; if you do not realize the almost insane audacity of that, of writing such a thing at the moment when it was written…
since then we have literally managed to scotomize that,
to fail to recognize the existence of things like that in FREUD’s work
…read it to realize to what extent it is difficult, in the end, to know what he is trying to get to say, but read it at the same time to see to what extent it holds together, despite all the errors—for there are errors, but that does not matter—it is something that is absolutely consistent.

I ask you to take cognizance of it, to read this Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.

This singular configuration, which, if I may say so, is there to present to us a humanissima trinita, a very human trinity, even too human, opposed to the divinissima for which it substitutes, is something to which we shall have to return. What I wanted to indicate to you as a standing point, as a waiting stone, is by what singular necessity we find a 4th term, as a kind of residue in the form of this lamb, of the animal term where we find again the very term of phobia.