🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

What is involved today is formalizing in a slightly different way what is happening in the observation of little Hans.
If this has any interest—and it has only one—it is to tighten up, to wrap in a more rigorous way first what is in the observation.

Of course there are all the possible doors-¬windows in this observation of little Hans: since after all it is a horse phobia, for example one could rave about the horse endlessly since in the end this horse is a very singular animal, it is the same as the one that comes back throughout all the mythology of the horse, and which can just as well be validly brought closer to that of little Hans.

FLIESS, the son of FREUD’s correspondent who occupies an honorable place, produced under the title ‘Phylogenetic and ontogenetic experience’ for the jubilee centenary issue of FREUD, an elaboration of merit. Assuredly it is excessively striking, precisely because of its character of inadequacy.

Manifestly in Hans, since there are enigmas that are not resolved, he strives to resolve them by bringing in fact into the dossier a whole enormous extrapolation whose only disadvantage is the entirely unjustified one of supposing resolved precisely what is not. It is one of the most striking things to see the way he centers things in a wholly valid way on the famous dialogue between little Hans and his father, what I call ‘the great dialogue’, the one that culminates somewhere around April 21, the one where it is, in sum, about little Hans who literally invokes his father by telling him ‘You must be jealous’, whereas his father is there for something in the surfacing of this phrase that one feels ripened by everything that has just preceded.

[Ich : ‘Weshalb schimpf ich denn eigentlich ? ’
Er : ‘Das weiß ich nicht !’
Ich : ‘Warum ?’
Er : ‘Weil du eifern tust.’
Ich : ‘Das ist doch nicht wahr ! ’
Er : ‘Ja, das ist wahr, du tust eifern, das weiß ich. Das muß wahr sein.’]

Little Hans literally invokes his father to play his role as father, and he tells him: ‘You must be jealous’. ‘This, whatever happens and whatever the frightened denials may be, must be true’. It is on this that a dialogue closes in which little Hans develops the following fantasy, which is that of imagining that his father comes into his mother’s bedroom, and that there he hurts himself on a stone, as little Fritz once did, he comes to strike against a stone, and the blood must flow.

Our author insists with much finesse on the use of words that give a kind of more ‘elevated’ style than everywhere else to what little Hans says, and he brings out well on this point the inadequacies of the English translation. What is interesting is not so much these remarks, which assuredly have their value, and which show the sensitivity preserved among people of the first generation—if I may say so—analytic, to properly verbal relief, to the accent of certain signifiers, and to their essential role, but what is interesting is obviously also to see, with respect to a rather fine speculation on the role of the father on this occasion, the intervention of the father who himself introduces, and he says rightly, for the first time a word: ‘schimpf’[schimpfen: to scold] about which one translates: ‘Am I quarrelling with you? Am I bothering you?’.

The author remarks—and rightly—that there is there an intervention that comes at that moment in a slightly foreign way to the moment of the dialogue, that in a way interrupts the exchange with little Hans and that speculates on what participation on the father’s part there may be in something that, at that moment, is supposed to be in the ego of little Hans.

And all this does not constitute extrapolations still too audacious, but translates the necessity he finds himself in of telling us that at that moment, in a way, it is constituted because it has to be like that, because it is already in the implications of a kind of preformed register that must be applied to the case. In any case there is there something that makes us grasp, on the spot, the hesitations of the author in the way he expresses himself.

He translates on the spot by ‘if it is in the process of being born’. It is certainly not yet born; the birth of the superego is something quite strange, with reference at that moment to the works of Monsieur ISAKOWER who insisted a great deal on the predominance of the auditory sphere in the formation of the superego, that is to say who assuredly sensed the whole problem that we pose and re-pose perpetually concerning the function of speech in the genesis of a certain normative crisis which is the one we call the Oedipus complex.

That Monsieur ISAKOWER made remarks equally interesting and pertinent on the way there can manifest on occasion a sort of something whose framework, so to speak, we grasp, a kind of apparatus, of network of forms that constitute the superego, he is going to grasp it in the elements where the subject hears, he tells us, kinds of purely syntactic modulations, words empty properly speaking since it is only a matter of their movement and, he says, in these movements with a certain intensity, we can grasp on the spot something that must relate to that entirely archaic element.

The child must speak at certain moments, integrate entirely primitive moments, at the moment when he perceives of the adult’s speech only the structure before perceiving the meaning. That would in sum be internalization, and we would have the first form of what would allow us to conceive what the superego is properly speaking. This again is an interesting remark, and it would be interesting, if it were inside a seminar, to see it grouped with this dialogue with the father, but assuredly not to find there anything whatsoever that would fit.

It is certainly not at the moment when we are spoken to of an integration of speech in its general movement, in its fundamental structure as founding an internal instance of the superego, that we are going to relate that to the precise moment when the most externalized dialogue with the father takes place, even if by that we believed we were filling in its paradoxes.

I emphasize the necessity, although we must at every instant seek general references to what we describe, of doing something that must bring out a certain progress in the handling of the concepts of analytic experience, of doing it by tightening, as closely as possible, the movement of the observation of little Hans.

Everything we have done up to now rests in sum on a certain number of postulates—which are absolutely not postulates—of our earlier commentaries, where one finds a whole work of commentary and a reflection on what analytic experience gives us. It is quite certain that these so-called postulates, for example this one that neurosis is a question posed by the subject at the level of his very existence:

– ‘What is it to have the sex that I have?’ or
– ‘What does it mean to have a sex?’
– ‘What does it mean that I can even ask myself the question?’.

What introduces the symbolic dimension, namely that man is not simply a male or a female, but that he must situate himself with respect to something symbolized that is called male and female; if neurosis relates to that, it relates to it in an even more dramatic way with respect to another neurosis, obsessional neurosis, not only of the subject’s relation to his sex, but to the fact that he exists and that he situates himself as obsessional.

The question: ‘What is it to exist, how am I with respect to the one that I am without being it since I can in a way do without him?’, suffices to conceive whether it is in such a register that the question of neurosis is posed.

If neurosis is a kind of closed question for the subject himself, but organized, structured as a question, it is certain that we also understand better that it is in the register of what organizes a question that we can understand symptoms as the living elements of this articulated question without the subject knowing what he articulates of this in some way living question, without knowing within which he is often himself an element situated at various levels, and which can be situated at a quite elementary, quasi alphabetic level, as well as at a higher syntactic level.

And it is in this register that we allow ourselves to speak of the hypnopompic and hypnagogic function, discerning and thus proceeding from the idea given to us by linguists, at least by some of them, that these are the two great slopes of the articulation of language.

What makes it difficult for us to preserve, in a way, the exact line, the straight thread in the commentary of the observation, is that always we must guard against tipping in a too absolute, too total way to one side or the other of the two sides of what is proposed to us. For us to have an observation, we must begin by analyzing the very thing of the neurotic’s question being that it is absolutely closed; there is no reason for it to deliver itself more to someone who would purely and simply take a kind of inventory of it; it would be simply a hieroglyphic text, indecipherable, enigmatic, and that is why one could take observations of neuroses for decades before FREUD arrived, without even suspecting the existence of this language properly speaking.

So it is always to the extent that something intervenes that is a beginning of deciphering, that we arrive precisely at grasping, at seeing the transformations, the manipulations necessary for it to be confirmed to us, assured that it is indeed a text in which we find ourselves by means of a certain number of structures that appear, but only insofar as we handle it.

Whether we handle it at the level of pure and simple cutting-up as one does for riddles…
in certain respects it is thus that we proceed in particularly closed, enigmatic cases,
not quite differently from what we see set out in I do not know what text of POE that recalls for us the practices common to the deciphering of dispatches, even sent in a coded or archi-coded style
…or even finally by doing the count of the signs that come back the greatest number of times, where we manage to make interesting suppositions, namely that such a sign has a correspondence in such a letter in the supposed language where we will have to translate the coded text. Fortunately we are, for neuroses, at operations of a higher order, that is to say that we find certain syntactic groupings with which we are familiar.

Simply the danger is obviously always to be mistaken, that is to say to reify these syntactic groupings excessively toward what one can call the property of the soul, even of the έπος[epos]. It is a bit too much in the sense of a kind of ‘natural instinctualization’, and of not noticing that what dominates all at once is the organizing knot that gives to a certain number of groupings, indeed the value literally of a unity-signification, of what is commonly called a word.

Thus I recently alluded to that famous ‘identification’ of the child with the mother, when it is the boy. And I point out to you that it is the general fact that such an identification is never made except with respect to the general movement of analytic progress, and as FREUD signals very energetically in this observation:

‘That is why the path of analysis can never repeat the movement of development of the neurosis.’ – German text, page 205, Gesammelte Schriften VIII, 1924-[Little Hans][Bei der Bildung der Phobie aus den unbewußten Gedanken findet ja eine Verdichtung statt ;
darum kann der Weg der Analyse niemals den Entwicklungsgang der Neurose wiederholen.]
We have reached the heart of the matter. In this effort of deciphering we must follow what has in fact been knotted in the text, and this text is in itself subject to the use of an element of the subject’s past, in a current situation, as a signifying element for example. There is one of the clearest forms of this of a condensation.

It is certain that if we approach the signifying elements, we cannot at that moment abstract from the fact that this breaks down for us two terms, two points very far apart in the subject’s history, and that we nonetheless must indeed resolve things in the mode of organization in which they are currently. It is that which in sum allows us, and which commands us, to seek the laws proper to the solution of each of these organized discourses, according to the modes in which neuroses will present themselves to us. Only there is the organized discourse; there is something else still that comes to complicate things: the way a dialogue is engaged for the solution of this discourse.

This cannot be done otherwise without we ourselves offering properly speaking our place as the locus where a part of the terms of this discourse must be realized, which in principle, by the sole fact that it is a discourse, contains somewhere virtually and at the outset, this Other who is in sum the place, the witness, the guarantor, the ideal locus of its good faith.

It is indeed there that we place ourselves in principle. It is from there that we will at once see these elements of the subject’s unconscious come to light, emerge, that is to say these terms that will take the place we occupy, and thus we will be called in the revealing dialogue where the sense of the discourse is going to be formulated by a dialogue that progressively deciphers it for us by showing what the function is of the character we occupy. That is what is called transference. And this character, during the analysis, does not fail to change. Thus we attempt to bring to light the sense of this discourse.

It is therefore indeed we ourselves, insofar as we are integrated as a person as a signifying element, who are put in a position, put under obligation on this occasion, to resolve the sense of the discourse of neurosis. And these two planes of intersubjectivity, so essential always to maintain before our eyes as the fundamental structure within which the history of deciphering develops, are something that, in part, must always be situated with respect to such an observation and with respect to little Hans.

In the case of little Hans, it was necessary for us to bring out the complexity of the relation to the father. Since it is about the father on this occasion, let us not forget that it is he who carries out the analysis. I told you that there was this real, actual Father, dialoguing with the child, thus already a father who has speech, but that beyond him there is this father to whom this speech reveals itself as the witness of his truth, this superior father, this all-powerful father represented by FREUD. That is something that does not fail to give an entirely essential characteristic to this observation, characteristic and structure that deserve to be retained since, in the end, it is certain that we must identify them with respect to every kind of relation.

This kind of superior instance is something so inherent in the paternal character, or in the paternal function, that in some way it always tends to reproduce itself, and in a sense, as I already pointed out in an earlier remark, that is indeed what makes the specificity of the case where the patient was dealing with the father, FREUD himself.

It is that there, the doubling not existing, the super-authority not existing behind him, the patient clearly felt he was dealing with someone who, having brought forth a new universe of signification and this relation of man to his own meaning and to his own condition, was that very person in front of whom he was, and for the use of the patient who was in front of him.

This explains for us what appears paradoxical in the sometimes very astonishing results, as also in the very astonishing modes of intervention that were FREUD’s in his technique. This, once related, allows us to better situate in what sense the shifting of our interest is made. I mean that if you have seen me over the previous years elaborate the fundamental subjective schema…

to wit that this symbolic relation between the subject and this ‘Other to himself’ which is the unconscious character who leads and guides him by showing what intermediate role, in a way as a screen, the imaginary other plays, namely the little other, if you have seen me insist on this over the years that preceded, you see well that little by little the interest shifts and moves, and that it is toward something that presents problems no less original and distinct from the previous ones, namely toward the very structure of the discourse in question, that we are little by little brought.

Over the course of the year, we have progressively shifted our interest, for there are of course laws of intersubjectivity, laws of the subject’s relation with the little other, and with the big Other, but that does not remove, without being the whole, and this original function deserves to be approached step by step.

The fact
– that it is essentially language,
– that it is essentially discourse,
– that discourse has laws,
– that the relation of signifier and signified is something other and distinct, even though it can overlap, like the relations of the imaginary and the symbolic,
…that is in sum what we have been led to progressively in all our movement of this year regarding the object relation.

We have seen emerge as an original place elements that are indeed objects, and that are even at a quite original and founding stage, and even formative of objects, but that are nonetheless something quite different from what can be called objects in the completed sense, in any case very different from real objects, since it is about the use of objects that can be taken and extracted from malaise, but that are objects put into the function of signifier.

I did it first for the fetish, this year, this extraction, and I will not have gone, by the end of the year, further than considering phobia. But if you have understood well what we have tried to bring into play each time we have spoken of little Hans’s phobia, you will have there a model from which every kind of further progress can be conceived for a greater, more extended deepening of the other neuroses, and namely of hysteria and obsessional neurosis.

In phobia, this is particularly simple and exemplary. Each time you have to do in a young subject with a phobia, you will be able to notice that it is always a signifier relatively simple in appearance. Of course it will not be simple in its handling, in its play, from the moment you enter into its play, but elementarily it is a signifier that occupies[the place], that was the meaning of the formula I had given you:

And it was in relation, insofar as these terms were the function for which the relation in the mother had come to be elaborated, it was what had progressively come to complicate this kind of elementary relation to the mother, which is the one from which we started when I spoke to you of the schema of the symbol of frustration: S(M), insofar as the mother is presence and absence, and in which the child’s relations to the mother are established in the course of development, in the course of ages.

Something in the case of little Hans first brought us to this extremely trying stage where the mother becomes complicated by all sorts of additional elements which are:

this phallus of which I told you that it was certainly the element of critical gaping of every two-person relation, which is represented for us in the current analytic dialectic so closed that one must notice to what extent it is itself in a certain relation to an imaginary function in the mother and on the other hand it is appropriate to arrive at what this other child[Anna] represents, who for an instant drives away, expels the child from the mother’s affection.

There is a critical moment that is typical for every kind of subject that our discourse presupposes. It is always thus that you will see a phobia appear in the child: it is that something is missing which, at a given moment, comes to play the fundamental role in the outcome of this crisis, apparently without outcome, that the child’s relation to the mother must be.

Here we do not need to make hypotheses. The whole analytic construction is made on the consistency of the Oedipus complex which in a certain way can be schematized thus: P(M). If the Oedipus complex means something, that means that from a certain moment the mother is considered, lived, as a function of the Father. The Father, here with a capital P, because we suppose that this is the father in the absolute sense of the term, it is the Father at the level of the symbolic Father, it is the Name-of-the-Father that institutes the existence of the father in this complexity under which he presents himself to us, a complexity that precisely the whole experience of psychopathology breaks down for us under the Oedipus complex. Basically it is nothing other than that. It is the introduction of this symbolic element that brings a new dimension, completely radical, to the child’s relation with the mother.

We must start from empirical data. It is the existence of something that, if you want roughly, perhaps with reserve of commentary, can approximately be instituted thus:

ΠsousX would be the real penis, and the (– p) precisely that something that opposes the child as a kind of imaginary antagonism; it is the imaginary function of the father, insofar as the father is aggressive, insofar as the father plays his role in this castration complex whose freudian experience, if we want to take it literally, admits at least provisionally, if we want to formalize it—and all experience affirms it—the constancy of this castration complex.

Whatever the discussions to which it may have lent itself thereafter, we never fail to keep its reference: it is insofar as something takes place in the relations with the mother, and that introduces the father as an essential symbolic factor. It is he who possesses the mother, who enjoys her legitimately, that is to say a function itself quite fundamental and pro¬blematic that can fragment, weaken, and on the other hand the coherence with that of something whose function is literally to bring into the subject’s instinctual play, into an assumption of his functions as an essential articulation, that signification of which we can say that it is truly specific to the human species, and insofar as the human order develops with this additional dimension of the symbolic order.

It is that his sexual functions are struck by something that is indeed there something signifying, quasi instrumental, which is that he must pass through taking into account, by bringing into play something that is there present, lived in human experience, that is called castration in the sense that analysis represents it in the most instrumental way: a pair of scissors, a sickle, an axe, a knife. It is something that is part, if one can say so, of the instinctual furniture of the sexual relation in the human species.

It is quite clear that then we could also try to make furniture for this or that animal species: we would see that for the robin, it is quite probable that the colored pectoral bib could be considered as a kind of signal element for display as for intersexual combat.

It is quite clear that one has in the animal the equivalent of the constant character of this properly speaking paradoxical element, linked in man to a signifier, which is called the castration complex. This is how we can write the formula of the Oedipus complex with its correlative the castration complex. The Oedipus complex itself is something that is organized on the symbolic plane, which presupposes behind it, for the subject as constitutive, the existence of the symbolic order?

It is something that we are going to see from little Hans: it is only from a certain moment of the dialogue with the father, while the father tries to push him toward the consideration of all sorts of elements, if one can say so, of psychological explanation…
the father is timid, and he will never push things completely to the end
…I make the remark that of course, the poor little Hans does not understand well the function of the feminine organ.

And it turns around: it is clear that at the moment when he says that, the father, in despair, ends up giving him the explanation, while it is clear from the fantasies already developed regarding the neurosis that the child knows very well that all that is in mommy’s belly, whether or not she is symbolized by a horse or by a car.

But what the father does not see is that he himself draws that conclusion after a long conversation where the child, for his part, was only interested in a kind of genealogical construction. One sees that that is what interests him the most: it is to know in what a certain moment of progress consists, that would be normal on this occasion, or here reinforced by the proper difficulties of the neurosis.

It is quite clear that it is normal, and that it is insofar as we are at a very advanced point of the observation where this happens, that the child has done nothing but a kind of long discussion to construct the genealogical possibilities that exist, that is to say: how a child is in relation with a father, with a mother, what it means to be in relation with a father, with a mother, and going as far as constructing what is called on this occasion, and what FREUD underscores as being one of the most original sexual theories.

He did not often find it in the child, and indeed as in every observation, there are particular elements: at one moment the child constructs something where he says that little boys give birth to little girls, and that little girls give birth to little boys. Do not believe that it is something that is entirely impossible to find again in the structure, in the genealogical organization. It is something that is given to us by the elementary structure of kinship. In the end there is truth in it: it is because women make men that men then can render—I speak in the symbolic order—this essential service to women, of allowing them to pursue their procreative function.

But this of course, on condition that we consider it in the symbolic order, that is to say in a certain order that assigns to all this a regular succession of generations. Of course, as I have often pointed out to you, if in the natural order there is no kind of obstacle to everything turning in an exclu¬sive way around the female line, without any kind of discrimination as to what can happen with respect to the product, without any discrimination and without any impossibility that it would be roughly the mother, and as her possible time of fertility, even later the following generations. It is of this order that it is a matter, it is of this symbolic order, it is around that that little Hans makes his extraordinarily luxuriant, fanciful construction gravitate; that is what interests him. In other words, it is with respect to big P that this interrogation of the symbolic order occurs in the child: ‘What is a father?’

Insofar as he is the pivot, the fictive and concrete center of this maintenance of genealogical order, of this order that allows the child to stimulate in a satisfactory way the world which, however it must be judged, culturally or naturally or supernaturally, is something into which he indeed comes into the world. It is in a human world organized by this symbolic order that he makes his appa¬rition. It is to that that he has to face up. Naturally the discovery of analysis is not to show us what is on this occasion the minimum requirement necessary on the part of the real Father for him to communicate, for him to make felt, for him to transmit to the child …the notion of his place in this symbolic order.

It is also pre¬supposed that everything that happens in neuroses is something that precisely is made on some side to supplement a difficulty, even an insufficiency in the way the child has to do with this essential problem of the Oedipus. It is certain of course that something else comes to complicate the elements that occur, and that are called regressions, these intermediate elements of the primitive relation to the mother, which already contain a certain dual symbolism.

Between that and the moment when the Oedipus is properly constituted, all sorts of accidents can occur that are nothing other than the fact that different other elements of exchange of the child come to play their role in this relation, in the construction, in the understanding of this symbolic order, that, to put it bluntly, the pregenital can be integrated and come to complicate the interrogation, the question of the neurosis. In the case of phobia, we have something simple. No one contests that things happen thus in the case of phobia, in the case where, at least for a moment, the child has reached what is called the genital stage where the problems of the integration of the subject’s sex are posed in their fullness, and that therefore we must conceive in a certain way the function of the phobic element.

This has already been fully articulated by FREUD, who integrated them as being something of the same order, homogeneous to what is called the primitive relation to a certain number of isolated elements of his time by ethnography: to totems. It is something that probably is no longer very tenable, and in the light of current progress in which [Lévi-Strauss] plays a prevalent and axial role, it is by others that things will be replaced, but for us analysts, in our practical experience, and insofar as in the end it is scarcely except on this plane of phobia that FREUD manifested in a clear way that the totem took its signification with respect to analytic experience, we nonetheless have to transpose it into a formalization that is in a way less subject to doubt than the totemic relation is.

That is what I called last time: ‘the metaphoric function of the phobic object’. The phobic object comes there to play that something which is not filled, in a given case, by the character of the father, due to some lack, due to a real lack on this occasion, and it is insofar as it is not filled that we see appear the object of the phobia that plays the same metaphoric role that I tried last time to illustrate for you by this kind of image:

‘Sa gerbe n’était par avare ni haineuse…’.
I showed you how the poet used metaphor to make the paternal dimension appear in its originality with respect to this decli¬ning old man, in order in a way to revive him with all the natural bursting-forth of this sheaf. The horse has no other function in this kind of living poetry that is on this occasion the phobia. The horse introduces that something around which all kinds of significations will be able to turn which, in the end, will give a kind of substituting element for what was missing from the subject’s development, for the developments provided to him by the dialectic of the sur¬roundings in which he is immersed. But that is only in a possible way, so to speak, imaginarily.

It is a signifier that is raw, that is not without some predisposition already conveyed by all the cartage of culture behind the subject. In the end, the subject did not have to look for it elsewhere than where one finds all kinds of heraldries. It is a picture book. That does not mean images; that means images drawn by the hand of man, containing a whole presupposition of history, in the sense that history is historiolated with myths in fragments, with folklore. It is insofar as in his book he found somewhere, just opposite the red box that constitutes the red chimney on which the stork is, a horse that is being shod, that we can touch with the finger, represent the horse.

Assuredly we do not have to be astonished that this or that typical form always appears in certain contexts, that a certain connection, certain associations that can escape those who are their vehicles, that the subject chooses to fill a function, the function that is in a way this momentary habilitation of certain states, in the present case of the state of anxi¬ety, that the subject chooses to fill the function of transforming this anxiety into localized fear, something that presents a kind of stopping-point, of term, of pivot, of piling around which is hung what wavers and what threatens to be carried off by the whole inner current of the crisis of the maternal relation.

The horse, at that moment plays a role, and assuredly it appears to entangle the child’s development a great deal, and it is also, for those around him, a parasitic, pathological element. But it is clear also that analytic instauration shows us that there is also a role of anchoring, a major role of stopping for the subject, of a point around which he can continue to make something turn that otherwise would be decided in an anxiety impossible to bear, and that thus all the progress of the analysis in this case is in sum to extract, to bring to light the virtualities that this use by the child of an essential signifier offers us to supplement his crisis, to allow this signi¬fier to play the role
– that the child’s fundamental relation to the symbolic reserved for it,
– that the child reserved for it in the construction of his neurosis.

He took it as help, as an absolutely essential landmark in the symbolic order. That is in sum what phobia, on this occasion, develops. It will allow the child to handle in a certain way this signifier, and by drawing from it possibilities of development richer than those it contains as signifier. Not that it itself contains in advance all the significations we will make it say: it does not contain them in itself; it contains them rather by the place it occupies.

It is insofar as it is in this place where there should be the symbolic Father and insofar as this signifier is there as something that corresponds metaphorically, that allows all the necessary transfers of everything that is problematic in the line of the denominator namely the appeal to its phallic function, and namely the child, namely of everything that is complicated in a relation that each time necessitates with respect to the real mother a distinct triangle, and that would be for the child unmasterable, it is insofar as something is posited that is called something that makes fear and even—one articulates why—something that bites, it is for that reason that on the other side of the line we have the other term: m + Π, it is what is most threatened, namely the child’s penis on this occasion.

What does the observation of little Hans show us? It is precisely that in a similar structure:
– it is not by attacking, so to speak, its plausibility or its implausibility,
– it is not by saying to the child ‘I despise you’,
– it is not either by making to him very per¬tinent remarks, namely that there is surely, one tells him, a relation between the fact that he touches his widdler and the fact that he experiences the fears inspired in him by stupidity in a reinforced way,
…that one seriously mobilizes the thing, quite the contrary.

If you read the observation, you notice, at that moment, in the light of this schema, the scope that the child’s reactions to these interventions can have, interventions that are not without themselves containing a certain scope, but that assuredly never have the direct persuasive scope of the primordial initial experience, the direct persuasive scope that one might wish. Of course, that is the interest of the observation: to show it in a clear and manifest way, and to see in particular that on this occasion the child reacts by reinforcing the essential elements of his own symbolic formulation of the problem, by insisting at that moment, by replaying the drama of phallic hide-and-seek—‘does she have it, does she not have it?’—with his mother, by showing clearly that it is a symbol, and something to which he clings as such and that it is a matter of not disorganizing for him. It is there that one sees at once a schema like that to be important and quite capital for us to understand what it is about for the child.

What it is about for the child is perhaps indeed to make that evolve, to allow him to develop the significations with which the system is pregnant, which must allow him not to stick simply to the provisional solution that consists for him in being a little phobic who is afraid of horses, but to this: that this equation can be resolved only according to its own laws, which are the laws of a determined discourse, of a determined dialectic and not of another, and that he can begin by not taking into account what it does to sustain as symbolic order.

It is indeed for that reason that we will be able to give the general schema of what its progress is. What its progress consists in is this, that assuredly it is not vain that the father, the great symbolic Father is FREUD, as also the little father is this beloved father who in sum has there only one fault, and which is great, it is not to satisfy what the young Hans’s invective is, to fulfill his function as father, and for a time at least even his function as jealous father, eiferzuchtig, of a jealous god. It is not vain that both the one and the other intervene.

If assuredly in a first time the interventions of the father, who speaks to him with much affection, devotion, but without being able to be more than he has been for him until now. And it is indeed because he is not in fact in the real a father who fulfills—as everything indicates to us—fully his function—and as everything also indicates to the child—that he does literally, with his mother, only as he pleases.

Which does not mean that he does not love his father, but that his father does not fulfill for him the function that would allow giving to all that its schematic and direct issue, far from it. We find ourselves before a complication of the situation: the father begins by intervening directly on this term Π according to FREUD’s instructions, which proves that things are not yet completely in order in FREUD’s mind.

We must nonetheless consider what happens, and we could enter into kinds of articulations of detail that would allow us to formulate this in a completely rigorous way, I mean to give a series of algebraic for¬mulations of transformation of one into the other.

I am somewhat reluctant to do it, fearing that in a way minds are not yet completely accustomed, open to that something which, I believe, is nonetheless, in the order of our clinical and therapeutic analysis of the evolution of cases, the future. I mean that every case should be able, at least in its essential stages, to come to be summarized in a series of transformations of which I gave you last time two examples, by giving you first this one:

Then by giving you the terminal formulation:

And

I would say that it is very obviously insofar as all this is taken in a big Λ, in a logification.

It is from the moment when one speaks of it, and of this Λ that is taken between big P and little p, that we could give a certain development; we could ask ourselves on what occasion, at what major moment we can consider that it is the transformation, that is to say: that little p is going to intervene here: m + Π, and big P at the level of big ‘Iππος. [Wordplay: ‘Iππος’ uses the Greek-looking form of ‘hippos’ (horse), blending a letter-like sign with the Greek-root signifier for ‘horse’.]

I did not enter properly speaking into this formalization, I mean into these successive transformations, but nonetheless if we then pursue at the level of the observation what happens and the way things evolve, we see that on the day when there was FREUD’s intervention, immediately after the child’s fantasy occurs, which plays a quite major role, and which will then give them their place that will allow us to understand everything that is under the sign of Verkehr, that is to say transport, with all the ambiguous sense of the word.

It is that something happens that makes it so that one can say that in a certain way is embodied in the fantasy, rather well, something that would represent approximately the first term of this:

If truly the fantasy that Hans develops, that of seeing the cart on which he would have climbed in order to play, suddenly pulled along by the horse, is something that is a transformation of his fears, that is a first attempt at dialecticizing the thing, one cannot fail to be struck by how much it would suffice to be the subject of something, to make appear what is written here:

I mean that the horse is obviously there an element that pulls along, and that it is insofar as little Hans comes to situate himself on the same cart where all the loading of sacks is piled up. The continuation tells us: it is precisely what happened for him, namely all the possible, virtual children of the mother; it is the whole continuation of the observation that will demon¬strate it, insofar as nothing is more dreaded than seeing the mother again loaded, that is to say pregnant, rolling, carting—like all those loaded carts that frighten him so much—a child inside her belly. The whole continuation of the observation will show us that the cart, on this occasion the bathtub, have this function of representing the mother: one will put a pile of little children in it, I myself will put them in, one will transport them.

It is insofar, of course, that it is a matter, one can say, of a kind of first exercise imagined in an image that, itself, is truly as far as possible from any kind of natural assent to psychological reality, and on the contrary extremely expressive from the point of view of the structure of signifying organization, that we see little Hans draw the first benefit from a dialecticization of this function of the horse which is the essential element of his phobia. There we will be able to see it.

Already we had seen little Hans care a great deal about maintaining the symbolic function, for example of one of his fantasies, that of the giraffe; here we see little Hans, in everything that follows this intervention, making, as it were, all the possible trials of the play of this grouping.

Little Hans is first put on the carriage in the middle of all the heterogeneous elements of which he is so afraid that at last they will be carried off with him, God knows where, by a mother who henceforth is for him nothing but an uncontrolled power, and one that can no longer be foreseen, with whom one no longer plays, or as one might still say[…], to use a very expressive term of slang, with whom there is no longer any love, that is to say that there is no longer any rule of the game, because others get mixed into it, because little Hans himself begins to complicate the game by making intervene, no longer a symbolic phallus with which one plays hide-and-seek with the mother and the little girls, but a little real penis, and because of which he gets his fingers rapped.

This complicates the task singularly, and thus shows us that the child, beginning immediately after a Gentleman spoke like the Good Lord, believed absolutely nothing of what he was telling, but he found that he spoke well, and it came out of it that little Hans can begin to speak, that is to say that he can begin to tell stories. The first thing he will do will be to maintain with his father something that clearly shows the real path and the symbolic path. He will say: ‘Why did he say that I loved my mother, when it is you whom I love?’

He indeed made the distinction, and after that he made yield what is virtual, and that the horse was there accompanied by all its possibilities: it is something that can bite and that can fall. We will see what this is going to give, and little Hans begins there the whole movement of his phobia.

Little Hans begins to make the horse yield everything it can give; that is why we have all these paradoxes, and at the same time, and at a time when the horse is this signifier that is pregnant with all the dangers it is supposed to cover over, it is this same signifier with which at the same time little Hans allows himself to play with extreme nonchalance.

Do not forget this paradox, for at the same moment, at the moment when he is most afraid of the horse, little Hans begins to play horse with a new maid, and it is then for him the occasion to indulge with her in all the possible incongruities, and to suppose the most impertinent ways, to undress her, etc. All that is part of the role of maids in FREUD. You see that the horse, at that moment, does not intimidate him at all, to such a point that he, at that moment, takes the place of the horse. We find him at once in the maintenance of the function of the horse, and, if one can say so, the child’s use of everything that this grouped set of signifiers can reserve for him in occasions of elucidation, of apprehension of the problem, the fact of playing with these signifiers thus grouped.

But on condition that the movement is maintained, otherwise all this no longer has any kind of sense, and one does not see why in that case we would retain any longer what the child tells us. I told you: the absolutely radical point of transformation is the one where the child discovers one of the most essential properties of such a situation, namely that from the moment when the set is logified, that is to say when one has played enough with the thing with which one can indulge in a certain number of exchanges and permutations: it is nothing else that happens in this initial transformation, and that will be decisive, namely the unscrewing of the bathtub, the transformation of the bite into that something that is quite different, in particular for the relation between the characters.

It is a bit something else than greedily biting the mother as an act or apprehension of her signification as quite natural, or even fearing in return that famous bite embodied by the horse, or unscrewing, unbolting the mother, mobilizing her in this affair, making it so that she enters, she too, and for the first time, as a mobile element, and at the same time, as an equivalent element in the whole set of systems of what is going at that moment then to be a kind of vast game of marbles from which the child is going to try to reconstitute a tenable situation, even to introduce the new elements that will allow him to recrystallize the whole situation. That is indeed what happens in the moment of the bathtub fantasy which could for example be inscribed approximately thus, that is to say that we will have a permutation that would make:

Π representing his sexual function, and little m the way of making her herself enter into the dialectic of movable elements, of those that are going to make of her an object, if I may express myself thus, like another, and that are going to allow him at that moment to manipulate the mother in question. One can therefore say that this whole kind of progress that is the analysis of the phobia represents, in a way, the decline with respect to the child, the mastery he progressively takes of the mother.

The next stage is this one, and that is what is important; it is there also that I will have to stop in order to conclude next time: the next stage is entirely around that something that is going to happen on an imaginary plane, thus with respect to what has been up to now in a certain way regressive, but in another way on the imaginary plane where we are going to see little Hans bring into play his sister herself, that element so painful to handle in the real, make of it that something around which he deploys this kind of dazzling fantasy, namely his sister insofar as he brings her into this kind of astonishing construction that consists first in supposing that she has always been there at a moment in the big box, this since almost all eternity, one can say.

You are going to see how that is possible, and how much it already presupposes in him an extremely advanced signifying organization, how this sister is supposed to have been, and this even before she came into the open, but at a moment when, he says, she was already in the world. Under what title? Under an imaginary title, that is too obvious.

There we have FREUD’s ex¬planation that in a way something presents itself under this indefinitely repeated, constant, permanent imaginary form, under the form of a kind of absolutely essential reminiscence. Little Anna has always been there, and he underscores well that she is all the more there because in reality he knows very well that she was not there. It is precisely the first year when she was not yet in the open that he underscores that she was in the open, and that at that moment she indulged in all that in sum someone can indulge in, in all that little Hans indulged in, logically, dialectically in his discourse and in his games in the first part of the treatment. There, imaginarily in the fantasy, he articulates to us that the sister not only is there since always in the big chest that is at the back of the carriage, or that travels separately depending on the occasions, he also tells us at another moment that she is next to the coachman and: ‘that she holds the reins… no she was not holding the reins!’[April 14]

[‘Der Kutscher war am Bocke und die Hanna hat die vorige (vorjährige) Peitsche gehabt und hat das Pferd gepeitscht und hat immer gesagt: ›Hüöh‹, und das war immer lustig, und der Kutscher hat auch gepeitscht. – Der Kutscher hat gar nicht gepeitscht, weil die Hanna die Peitsche gehabt hat. – Der Kutscher hat die Zügel gehabt – auch die Zügel hat die Hanna gehabt (wir sind jedesmal mit einem Wagen von der Bahn zum Hause gefahren; Hans sucht hier Wirklichkeit und Phantasie in Übereinstimmung zu bringen). In Gmunden haben wir die Hanna vom Pferde heruntergehoben, und sie ist allein über die Stiege gegangen.’]

There is there a kind of difficulty in distinguishing reality from imagination, but little Hans continues his fantasy by way of this imaginary child who has been there forever, and who will always be there besides. Also he indicates it: it is by way of this imaginary child that this time a certain equally imaginary relation is sketched out, which is—I underscored it to you—the one in which in the end the relation of little Hans will stabilize with respect to the maternal object, that is to say to this object of eternal return with respect to this woman to whom this very small man must accede.

It is by way of this imaginary game, which makes it so that someone whom he literally uses as a kind of ego ideal, namely his little sister, it is insofar as this little sister becomes there the mistress of the signifier, the mistress of the horse, that she dominates it, that little Hans can come to, he—as I remarked to you one day—whip this horse, beat it, dominate it, become its master, find himself in a certain relation that is of mastery with respect to what will henceforth be essentially inscribed in the register developed by the subsequent creations of his mind, of a certain mastery of this Other that will henceforth be for him every kind of feminine fantasy, namely what I could call ‘the girls of his dream’, ‘the girls of his mind’.

And it is with that that he will always have to do insofar as this kind of narcissistic fantasy in which for him is embodied the dominating image, the one that resolves the question of the possession of the phallus, but that leaves in an essentially narcissistic, essentially imaginary relation, the fundamental relation, the domination to put it bluntly, that he has taken of the critical situation. That is what will mark, for the continuation of his profound ambiguity, everything that is going to happen that we can conceive as an outcome or as a normalization of the situation in little Hans.

The stages are sufficiently indicated in the observation: it is after the development of his fantasies, it is after this imaginary game, this reduction to the imaginary of the ele¬ments once fixed as signifier, it is from there that the fundamental relation will be constituted that will allow the child to assume his sex, and to assume it in a way that remains so normal, that it can apparently be supposed that the child nonetheless remains marked by a deficiency, by something of which it is no doubt only next time that I will be able to show you all the accents.

But already today, and in a way to end on something that indicates to you well to what extent and where the defect of the point the child reaches is situated in order, as it were, to fill or hold his place, I believe that nothing is more significant than that something that is expressed in the fantasy of terminal unscrewing or unbolting, the one where one changes the child’s seat, where one gives him a bigger behind.

And why? In order in the end to fill this place that he has made much more manageable, much more mobilizable, this bathtub from which the dialectic of falling can enter, be evacuated on occasion, and that is possible only from the moment when the bathtub is unscrewed.

I would say that in a certain way it is also there that one sees the atypical, anomalous, almost inverted character of the situation in this observation. I would say in a normal formula that it is insofar as the child—for speaking only of the boy—possesses his penis, that he finds it again insofar as it is returned to him, that is to say insofar as he lost it, insofar as he passed through the castration complex.

Is it not striking to see that here where everywhere this castration complex is called for by the child, where he himself suggests the for¬mula of it, where he hooks onto it the images…
he almost summons his father to make him undergo the ordeal of it or in any case in a reflected way,
he foments and he organizes the ordeal of it on the image of his father, he wounds him and he wishes that this be realized
…is it not striking to see that through all these vain efforts for this kind of fundamental metamorphosis in the subject to be completed, for it to be crossed, what happens is something that does not concern sex, but that concerns essentially his seat, his relation with his mother, which makes it so that he can furnish the place, but this at the expense of something that does not appear to us in this perspective: it is about the dialectic of the subject’s relation to his own organ.

There, unless it is the organ that is changed, it is the subject himself at the end of the observation, while assuming himself at that moment as something that is a kind of mythical father as he came to conceive him. And God knows that this father is not at all a father like the others since this father remains all the same, in his fantasies, able to engender—as we are told in ‘Les mamelles de Tiresias’, by APOLLINAIRE—a man, as the journalist says:

‘Revenez dès ce soir voir comment la nature
Me donnera sans femme une progéniture.’[I,8]

On that, one cannot say that everything is assumed of the relative position of the sexes, of this gaping that remains of the integration of these relations. We want to insist on this: that it is precisely in a notation by + or by – in the paradox of the inversion of certain terms that we can truly judge the result of a certain progress, and thus say that here, if it is not through the castration complex that little Hans passed, it is through something that had its title in his transformation into another little Hans, as is indicated by the myth of that installer who changes his behind. And to put it bluntly, in the end, if later in FREUD we see little Hans again, it is to see someone who says to him: ‘I no longer remember anything of all that.’ We find there the sign and the testimony of a kind of essential moment of alienation.

You know the story, as it is told, of that subject who had left for an island to forget something, and the people who find him, approach him and ask him: ‘What is it?’ He had therefore left to forget, and when one asks him why, he cannot answer. As the story says finely: ‘He forgot.’ In the case of little Hans, I would say that something allows us to rectify essentially the accent, I would say almost also the formula of the story.

If little Hans, up to a certain point, can show one of the stigmata of incompletion, as well of his analysis as of the oedipal solution that was postulated by his phobia, it is in this: that after all these salutary turns that from a certain moment made unnecessary, even superfluous, recourse to the signifier of the horse, to put it bluntly made the phobia progressively vanish, it is nonetheless from something that one can say that little Hans forgot.