🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

This is today our last seminar of the year. Last time I left certain things behind me.
I did not want to have to set about it entirely today in order to summarize, to resituate, to repeat,
what, whatever its effects may be, is not such a bad method. So last time I set aside a certain number
of things, and as a result I perhaps did not push this analysis all the way to the end.

I formalized small letters, and I tried to put to you in what sense one might make an effort to get used
to writing relations in such a way as to give oneself fixed points of reference, and ones to which one cannot return in discussion,
which one cannot evade after having set them down, by taking advantage of everything that can be too pliable usually
in this play between the imaginary and the symbolic, so important for our understanding of experience.
What I will therefore have initiated for you is a beginning of this formalization.

I know full well that I have not absolutely motivated all its terms, by which I mean that a certain indeterminacy may seem to you to persist in the way of linking these terms together. One cannot explain everything at once. What I want to tell you
is that in the article that is going to appear in the 3rd number of ‘La Psychanalyse’, you will perhaps see there in a closer
and tighter way the justification of the order of these formulas, namely respectively the formulas of metaphor and metonymy.
What matters, I believe, at the point we are reaching, is that from this suggestion you have been given the possibility of using similar formulas to situate functions, relations between the subject and the different modes of the Other, which cannot, in sum, be articulated otherwise, for which ordinary language does not give us the necessary foundations.

So I left certain things behind me, and after all I would say: why would I not leave some behind?
Why want—even in the very case of little Hans—that we provide an absolutely complete formula
of what little Hans puts as a question. You know that it is in this register of questions posed by FREUD
that I mean to make my commentary; that does not mean, however, that I want to make of each of his works
a system that closes, nor even of the totality of his works a system that closes.

What matters is that you have sufficiently learned, and that you learn each day better, that he changes the very bases,
so to speak, of psychological consideration, by introducing into it a dimension foreign to what psychological consideration as such has been up to now; that it is the foreign character of this dimension in relation to any fixation
of the object that constitutes the originality of our science and the basic principle in which we must conceive our progress in it.

Any other way—closing freudian questioning, reducing it to the field of psychology—leads to what I shall call,
without further formalism, a delirious psychogenesis, this psychogenesis that you see developing each day implicitly, in the way psychoanalysts envisage the facts and the objects they deal with, and whose mere fact of surviving is so paradoxical, so foreign to all neighboring conceptualizations, so shocking, and at the same time
so finally tolerated; the mere fact that it survives is to be added to the main part of the problem, and must be resolved at the same time in the solution that we will bring to this problem of freudian discussion, that is to say, of the unconscious.

So I did indeed set aside all this play that, I believe, you can now follow. You know enough of its elements to perceive, on rereading the text, all this mythical play between what I shall call, if you like, the reduction to the imaginary
of that element which is the sequence of maternal desire as I wrote it in the formula: M.ϕ.a, that is to say all the relation
of the mother with that other imaginary that is her own phallus, then everything that can happen from new elements,
that is to say the other children, the little sister on the occasion.

This play, this mythification by the child in this imaginary play, as it was triggered by the intervention, let us say, psychotherapeutic, is something that in itself shows us a phenomenon whose originality as such must be grasped, halted
as an essential element of the Verarbeitung of the whole analytic progression insofar as it is a dynamic element, crystallizing, in the symbolic progress that constitutes analytic cure as such.

Assuredly, if indeed I did not push it further, I still want to indicate to you the elements that I did not even touch, I mean that I indicated them in passing, but whose exact function I did not explain in relation to these mythical doings of the child under the stimulation of analytic intervention.

There is there a term, an element that is absolutely correlative to the great mythical invention around birth, especially around the birth of little Anna, around the permanence for all eternity of the presence of little Anna,
so nicely fomented by Hans as his mythifying speculation.
It is this mysterious character, truly worthy of the black humor of the best tradition, that is the stork,
this stork that arrives with a little hat, that salutes, that puts the key in the lock, that arrives when no one is there,
which, I must say, presents entirely odd aspects if one knows how to hear what little Hans said: ‘She came in your bed’,
that is to say ‘in your place’, then he corrects himself afterwards: ‘in her bed’, then which goes back out without anyone knowing,
not without making a little racket, a way of shaking the house after its departure.

This character who goes, who comes, endowed with an imperturbable air, almost unsettling, is assuredly not one of the least enigmatic creations of little Hans’s creation. It would deserve that one dwell on it at length, and in truth it is essentially appropriate to indicate its place in the economy, at that moment, of little Hans’s progress. If little Hans can manage,
and little Hans can manage to foment his imaginary manipulation of the different terms present, under the subjection of the psychotherapist father, himself topped by FREUD, he can manage to do so only by freeing something that is indeed announced just before the great mythical creation: Anna’s birth, and at the same time the stork.

We see stated by Hans’s text alone, and by the father, the theme of death, by the fact that little Hans has a stick
—one does not know why, one has never spoken before of this cane—with which he strikes the ground, and asks whether there are dead people underneath.
The presence of the theme of death is strictly correlative to the theme of birth. It is an essential dimension to note
for understanding and for the progress of the case.

But in truth, this theme, this power of a generation carried to its last degree of mystery, between life and death,
between existence and nothingness, is something that poses particular problems, different from that of the introduction
of this signifier the horse. It is not its homologue; it is something else that perhaps next year we shall see, and that I leave in reserve, so to speak. The heading that I will very probably choose for what I will develop for you next year will be this, namely: The formations of the unconscious.

Likewise, I will underscore again that it is significant that little Hans, at the end of the crisis that resolves and dissolves the phobia, settles into something as essential as the refusal of birth, which is the kind of treaty that will henceforth be established
with the stork, that will be established with the mother. You will see all the sense of the passage where it is a matter of the relations of the mother and of God, as to the possible coming of a child, that thing so elegantly resolved within the observation by FREUD’s little note: ‘What a woman wants, God wants’. It is indeed what the mother told him: ‘In the end, it depends on me’.

On the other hand little Hans says he wishes to have children, and in the same movement not to want there to be others;
he has the desire to have imaginary children, insofar as the whole situation has been resolved by an identification with maternal desire.
He will have children of his dream, of his mind; he will have children, in a word, structured in the mode of the maternal phallus,
of which, in the end, he will make the object of his own desire. But it is of course understood that there will be no new children, and this identification with the desire of the mother as imaginary desire constitutes only apparently a return to the little Hans
he once was, who played with little girls at that primitive hide-and-seek game of which his sex was the object.

But now Hans no longer thinks at all of playing the hide-and-seek game, or more exactly he no longer thinks of showing them anything, if I may say so, except his pretty stature of little Hans, of a character who, in a certain respect, has become in the end—this is where I want to come to—himself something like a fetish object, where little Hans situates himself in a certain passivized position, and whatever the heterosexual legality of his object, we cannot consider that it exhausts the legitimacy of his position.
Little Hans there joins a type that will not seem foreign to you in our time, the generation of a certain style that we know, which is the style of the years 1945, of those charming young men who wait for the initiatives to come from the other side,
who wait, in a word, to be taken down. Such is the one whose future I see taking shape, of this charming little Hans,
however heterosexual he may seem. Hear me well: nothing in the observation allows us at any moment to think that it
is resolved otherwise than by this domination of the maternal phallus, insofar as Hans takes his place there, identifies with it, masters it.

Certainly, everything that can answer to the phase of castration, or to the castration complex, is nothing more than what we see
taking shape in the observation under this form of the stone against which one can hurt oneself. The image that surfaces from it,
so to speak, is much less that of a toothed vagina, I would say, than that of a phallus dentatus. This kind of frozen object is
an imaginary object of which any masculine assault will be the victim, by hurting itself on it. That is the sense in which we can also say that little Hans and his Oedipal crisis do not lead, properly speaking, to the formation of a typical superego, I mean of a superego
such as it is produced according to the mechanism that is already indicated in what we have here taught at the level of the Verwerfung,
for example what is rejected from the Symbolic and reappears in the Real.

That is the true key, at a level closer to what happens after Oedipal Verwerfung: it is insofar
as the castration complex is at once crossed, but cannot be fully assumed by the subject, that it produces
that something of identification with a sort of raw image of the father, an image bearing the reflections of his real particularities in what they have, literally, of heavy or even crushing, which is that something through which we see once again renewed the mechanism of reappearance in the real, this time of a real at the limit of the psychic, within the boundaries of the ego,
but of a real that imposes itself on the subject literally in an almost hallucinatory way[cf. L’Homme aux loups], insofar as the subject,
at a moment, detaches from the symbolic integration of the process of castration.
Nothing similar in the present case is manifested. Little Hans assuredly does not have to lose his penis, since indeed
he acquires it at no moment. If little Hans is identified in the end with the maternal phallus, that is not to say that his penis, for all that, is something whose function he can recover, assume, properly speaking. There is no phase
of symbolization of the penis; the penis remains, so to speak, on the margin, disengaged, like something that has never been
anything but reviled, disapproved by the mother, and this something that is produced allows him to integrate his masculinity.

It is by no other mechanism than the formation of the identification with the maternal phallus, and which is likewise of an order
just as different as the order of the superego, quite different from that function, no doubt disturbing, but balancing too, that is the superego. It is a function of the order of the ego ideal. It is insofar as little Hans has a certain idea of his ideal,
insofar as it is the ideal of the mother, namely a substitute for the phallus, that little Hans settles into existence.

Let us say that if instead of having a Jewish mother and in the movement of progress he had had a Catholic and pious mother,
you see by what mechanism little Hans would on occasion gently have been led to the priesthood, if not to sainthood.
The maternal ideal is very precisely what in this case situates and gives a certain type of exit and formation, of situation
in the relation of the sexes to the subject introduced into an atypical Oedipal relation, and whose outcome is made by identification with the maternal ideal.
There are roughly drawn, delimited, the terms in which I give you the outlet of the case of little Hans.

Throughout, we have indications of it, so to speak confirmatory, and sometimes how moving at the end
of the observation, when little Hans, decidedly discouraged by paternal deficiency, is going, so to speak, to perform himself
his initiation ceremony fantasmatically, by going to place himself all naked—as he wanted the father to advance—
on this little wagon on which, literally like a young knight, he is supposed to keep watch all night, after which,
thanks again to a few coins given to the train conductor—the same money that will serve to appease the terrifying power of the Storch[stork]—little Hans rides on the big circuit.

The matter is settled: little Hans will be nothing other than perhaps, no doubt, a knight, a knight more or less
under the regime of social insurance, but a knight all the same, and he will have no father. This, I do not believe that anything new in the experience of existence will ever give him. Immediately afterwards the father tries—rather late, for the opening of the father’s understanding, as the observation proceeds, is also not one of the least interesting things—the father, after having been straightforward, believing like iron in all the truths he has learned from the good master FREUD, the father, as he progresses and sees how much this truth in handling is much more relative, at the moment when little Hans is going to begin
to make his great mythical delirium, lets slip a sentence like this one, which one hardly notices in the text,
but which is indeed important. It is the moment when one plays at saying, and where little Hans contradicts himself at every instant, where he says:

– ‘It’s true… It’s not true… it’s for a laugh, but it’s all the same very serious…’

– ‘Everything one says…
says the father, who is not a fool and who learns in this experience—
…Everything one says is always a little true.’[‘Alles, was man sagt, ist ein bissel wahr.’ 22 April]

In spite of everything, this father who did not succeed in his own position since it is he rather than it would have been necessary to put through analysis,
the father tries to put that back, when it is already too late, and says to little Hans: ‘In the end, you held it against me’.

It is around this delayed intervention of the father that one sees produced this very nice little gesture that is put in a kind of special lighting in the observation: little Hans lets his little horse fall. At the very moment when the father speaks to him,
he drops the little horse. The conversation is surpassed; the dialogue at that moment is obsolete; little Hans has settled into his new position in the world, the one that makes of him a little man with the power of children, capable of begetting indefinitely in his imagination, and of satisfying himself entirely with them. Thus, also, in his imagination the mother lives.

It is to be little Hans as I told you, not son of a mother, but son of two mothers. Remarkable point, enigmatic point, a point on which I had already halted the observation last time. Assuredly the other mother is the one he has too many occasions and reasons to know: the occasion and the power, it is the father’s mother. Nevertheless, that he assumes the conditions of terminal equilibrium, this duplicity, this doubling of the maternal figure, is indeed still one of the structural problems posed by the observation.

And you know it: it is on that that I ended my penultimate seminar to make for you the rapprochement with Leonardo DE VINCI’s painting, and at the same time with the case of Leonardo DE VINCI, to which it is not by chance that FREUD
paid so much attention. It is to him that we shall devote today the time we have left.

Likewise this will constitute…
we do not claim to exhaust this ‘Souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci’ in a single lesson
…a kind of little ‘lesson before the holidays’ that it is customary in all my teaching to do by way
of a relaxation for any attentive group such as you are, and for which I thank you. This little Hans, let us leave him to his fate.
I nevertheless point out to you that if I made, about him, an allusion to something profoundly current in a certain evolution in relations between the sexes, and if I referred to the generation of 1945, it is assuredly so as not to make an excessive actuality.

I leave to be depicted and defined what the current generation can be, leaving to others the care of giving it a direct and symbolic expression, let us say to Françoise SAGAN, whom I do not cite here at random, for the sole pleasure of making actuality,
but to tell you that as holiday reading you will be able to see what a philosopher, austere and accustomed to situating himself only at the level of HEGEL and of the highest politics, can draw from a work of appearance as frivolous. I advise you to read,
in the issue of Critiques, August-September 1956, Alexandre KOJÈVE, under the title ‘Le dernier monde nouveau’,
the study he made on the two books ‘Bonjour tristesse’ and ‘Un certain sourire’, by the best-selling author I have just named.

This will not fail to instruct you, and as one says: ‘it will do you no harm’; you will risk nothing.
The psychoanalyst is not recruited among those who give themselves entirely to the fluctuations of fashion in psycho-sexual matters. You are too well oriented, if I may say so, for that, even with a slight touch of ‘top of the class’ in this matter.

This indeed can make you enter into a kind of ban of actuality of the activation of perspective as regards
what you do and what you must be ready to hear sometimes from your patients themselves. This too will show you that something we must take into account, namely the profound changes in the relations between man and woman, which can occur over a period no longer than that which separates us from FREUD’s time, where, as one says, everything that was to be our history was in the process of being fomented.

All that is to tell you also that Don Juanism has perhaps not completely—whatever the analysts who have brought interesting things on it may say—said its last word. I mean that if something correct has been glimpsed
in the notion one makes of DON JUAN’s homosexuality, it is certainly not to be taken as it is usually taken.

I believe deeply that the figure of DON JUAN is precisely a figure that is too far from us
in the cultural order for the analysts to have been able to perceive it rightly; that MOZART’s DON JUAN,
if we take it as its summit and as something that effectively signifies the culmination of a question
properly speaking, in the sense I mean here, is assuredly something quite other than that reflected figure that RANK
wanted to construct for us. It is certainly not solely under the angle and by way of the double that it must be understood.

I think that contrary also to what is said, DON JUAN does not purely and simply, and far from it, coincide with the seducer, possessor of little tricks that can succeed every time. Assuredly I believe that DON JUAN loves women;
I would even say that he loves them enough to know on occasion not to tell them so, and that he loves them enough that when he does tell them,
they believe him. This is not nothing, and shows many things, even if assuredly the situation is always for him without issue.
I believe that it is in the sense of the notion of the phallic woman that one must look for him.

Of course there is something that is related to a problem of bisexuality in these relations of DON JUAN with his object, but it is precisely in the sense of that something that DON JUAN seeks the woman, and it is the phallic woman,
and of course since he truly seeks her, that he goes for it, that he does not content himself with waiting for her, nor with contemplating her, he does not find her, or he ends up finding her only in the form of that sinister guest who is indeed a beyond of the woman that he does not expect, and it is not for nothing indeed that it is the father. But let us not forget that when he presents himself it is in the form—curious thing again[cf. Hans]—of that stone guest, of that stone, in a word of that absolutely dead and closed side
and entirely beyond any life of nature. It is there that he comes, in sum, to break himself and to find the completion of his destiny.

Quite different will be the problem that a Leonardo DE VINCI presents to us. That FREUD took an interest in him is not something about which we have to ask ourselves questions. Why a thing happened rather than not happening is indeed what must in general be the last of our concerns. FREUD is FREUD precisely because he took an interest in Leonardo DE VINCI.
What is at issue now is to know how he took an interest in him. What could Leonardo DE VINCI be for FREUD?

There is nothing better for that than to read what he wrote about it: ‘A Childhood Memory…’. I warned you in time
so that a few of you would have done so, and would have noticed the profoundly enigmatic character of this work.
Here is FREUD, in 1910, having arrived at something we can call the summit of happiness of his existence.
That is at least how things appear outwardly, and as in truth he does not fail to underscore it for us. He is internationally recognized, not yet having known the drama nor the sadness of separations from his most esteemed pupils, on the eve of the great crises but up to then able to say that he had made up for the last ten years of delay in his life.

Here is FREUD taking up a subject: Leonardo DE VINCI, with regard to whom, of course, in his antecedents, in his culture,
in his love of Italy and of the Renaissance, everything allows us to understand that he was fascinated by this figure.
But what is he going to tell us about him? He is going to tell us things that, assuredly, do not demonstrate minimal knowledge, nor a sensitivity reduced to the mere relief of the figure, far from it.

One can say that, overall, ‘A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci’ can be reread with interest, I would say with an interest
that rather increases with age. By that I mean that even if it is one of FREUD’s most criticized works,
how paradoxical it is to see that it is one of those of which he was the proudest.

The most reluctant people, always in such cases, and God knows they could be, I mean those called specialists
in painting and in art history, end up over time, and as the greatest faults appear in FREUD’s work,
nevertheless becoming aware of the importance of what FREUD said. Thus, overall, FREUD’s work
was more or less universally rejected, despised, even scorned by art historians,
and yet, despite all the reservations that persist, they have nothing left but to reinforce themselves with the contribution of new documents.
Which proves that FREUD made errors.

It remains no less true that someone like, for example, Kenneth CLARK, in a not very old work,
recognizes the high interest of the analysis that FREUD made of that painting I showed you the other day,
namely the Sainte Anne of the Louvre doubled by the famous cartoon that is in London and to which we shall also return in a moment, namely the two works around which FREUD made revolve all the deepening he made, or thought he made, of Leonardo DE VINCI’s case.

That said, I assume I do not have to summarize for you the course of this little booklet. You know that there is first a rapid presentation of Leonardo DE VINCI’s case, of its strangeness. This strangeness, to which we ourselves are going to return with our own means, is certainly well seen, and everything FREUD said is assuredly well oriented in relation to the enigma of the figure.

Then FREUD questions the singular constitution, even a predisposition, the paradoxical activity of this painter,
while he was so much something else at the same time, let us for the moment say this great painter. FREUD will resort to this term that, at that time of his life, he so strongly brought into relief in all his developments, namely that sole childhood memory
we have of Leonardo DE VINCI, namely that childhood memory that is translated for us.

‘It seems to me to have been destined for me to occupy myself with the vulture. One of my earliest childhood memories is in fact that while still
in the cradle, a vulture came to me, opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with that tail between the lips.’

[‘Questo scriver si distintamente del nibio par che sia mio destino, perche nella mia prima ricordaiione délla mia infantta e mi parea che essendo
io in culla, che un nibio venissi a me e mi aprissi la bocca colla sua coda e molte volte mi percuotessi con tal coda dentro alle labbra.’
folio 66 v.b. Codex atlanticus.]

‘Here is a disconcerting childhood memory’[Eine Kindheitserinnerung also, und zwar höchst befremdender Art.] FREUD tells us, and he links it on,
and it is by this linking that he will lead us to something we follow because we are accustomed
to a kind of sleight-of-hand game that consists in making superpose in dialectic, in reasoning,
what very often is confused in experience and in the clinic.

Yet these are two quite different registers, and I am not saying that FREUD handles them in an improper way;
on the contrary I believe he handles them in a brilliant way, that is to say that he goes to the heart of the phenomenon. Only, we follow him with a complete laziness of mind, namely by accepting in advance, in a way, everything he tells us, namely that sort
of superposition, of overimposition, of a relation to the maternal breast with something he sets before us immediately and from the outset, namely also to see the meaning of a genuine sexual intrusion: that of a fellatio, at least imaginary.
This is given from the start by FREUD and it is on that that FREUD will continue to articulate his construction
to lead us progressively to the elaboration of what is profoundly enigmatic in Leonardo DE VINCI’s case: his relation with the mother, and to make rest on that all the particularities, whatever they may be, of his strange character,
namely first his probable inversion, on the other hand his quite unique and singular relation with his own work,
made of a kind of activity always at the limit, so to speak, of the doable and the impossible, as he himself writes on occasion,
with that sort of series of ruptures in the different departures of the enterprise of his life, with that singularity that isolates him among his contemporaries and makes of him a figure who already in his lifetime is a legendary figure and a figure supposed to be the possessor of all qualities, of all competences, of everything that is, properly speaking, a universal genius.

Already in his time, all that something that surrounds Leonardo DE VINCI, FREUD is going to deduce for us from his relation with the mother.
The starting point, I told you, he takes it in that childhood memory. That means that that vulture, its quivering tail that comes to strike the child is, we are told, first constructed as the screen memory of something that—and FREUD moreover does not hesitate for an instant to posit it other than as such—is the reflection of a fantasy of fellatio.

One must all the same recognize that for an unprejudiced mind there is there at least something that raises
a problem, for everything that the sequel will develop is precisely the interest of freudian investigation in revealing to us
that Leonardo very probably did not have, up to an age probably situable between 3 and 4 years:
– any presence precisely other than maternal presence,
– any other elements no doubt properly speaking of sexual seduction than what he calls the mother’s passionate kisses,
– any other object that could represent the object of his desire than the maternal breast,
…and that in the end it is indeed on the plane of fantasy that revelation, insofar as it can have this warning role,
is posited by FREUD himself. All this rests in sum on a point that is nothing other than the identification of the vulture with the mother herself, insofar as she is precisely that character source of imaginary intrusion on the occasion.

Now let us say it at once: there certainly happened in this affair what one can call an accident, even a fault, but it is a happy fault: FREUD read this childhood memory, and based his work, only on the quotation of the passage in HERZFELD, that is to say that he read it in German, and that HERZFELD translated as ‘vulture’ what is not a vulture at all.
We shall see that moreover FREUD might perhaps have had a suspicion, for he did, as usual, his work
with the greatest care, and he could have noticed the error because these things are translated with references to the pages of the manuscripts, on the occasion of the Codex Atlanticus, that is to say a file of Leonardo DE VINCI that is in Milan.

This has been translated more or less into all languages; in French there is a very insufficient but complete translation,
under the title ‘Carnets de Léonard de Vinci’, which is a translation of what Leonardo left as handwritten notes,
often in the margin of his drawings. He could have seen where this reference was situated in Leonardo DE VINCI’s notes,
which are in general notes of five, six, seven lines, or half a page at most, mixed with drawings. This is right
next to a drawing in a leaf where it is a matter of the study distributed in different places in Leonardo DE VINCI’s work,
of the flight of birds. Leonardo DE VINCI says precisely: ‘I seem to have been destined to occupy myself particularly…’ not with the vulture, but precisely with what is next to it in the drawing, and which is a kite.

That the kite is particularly interesting for the study of the flight of birds is something already in PLINY,
namely that for ever PLINY the Elder considers it as something quite specially interesting for pilots because, he says, the movement of its tail is particularly exemplary for any kind of rudder action.
It is with the same thing that Leonardo DE VINCI is concerned. It is very nice to see through the authors this fundamental character of this kite that is known not only since antiquity with PLINY the Elder, but is reproduced through all kinds of authors—some of whom I shall have to speak to you about incidentally in a moment—and has come to result in our day, I am assured,
in the on-the-spot study of the movement of the kite’s tail by Monsieur FOKKER at a certain time between the wars, who was in the process of fomenting those very pretty little preparations of that airplane maneuver ‘in a dive’, a true disgusting parody, I hope you are of the same opinion as I am on that, of natural flight, but in the end one should not have expected better
from human perversity.

So here is that kite, which moreover is in itself only well made to provoke it: it is an animal that has nothing especially attractive. BELON, who made a very fine work on birds, and who had been in Egypt and in various other places in the world on behalf of HENRI II, had seen in Egypt certain birds that he depicts for us as sordid
and not very nice. What is it?

Pierre Bellon: L’histoire de la nature des oiseaux, 1555, p. 130.

I must say that for an instant I had the hope that everything was going to be put right, namely that FREUD’s vulture, however much a kite it might be,
was still going to turn out to be nevertheless something that had to do with Egypt, and that the Egyptian vulture
would be that in the end. You see how I always desire to arrange things. Unfortunately it is nothing of the sort.
In fact the situation is complicated. There are kites in Egypt, and I can even tell you that while I was in the process of having
my breakfast in Luxor, I had the surprise of seeing in the marginal part of my field of vision
something that goes frr…out, and shoot off obliquely with an orange that was on my table.

For an instant I thought it was a falcon: HORUS, the solar disk… But I immediately realized that it was nothing of the sort.
It was not a falcon because the beast had gone to perch at the corner of a roof, and had set down the little orange to show that it was a simple story of joking. One could see very well that it was a reddish beast with a particular style. I immediately made sure it was a kite. You see how much the kite is a familiar beast, observable.
That is indeed what Leonardo DE VINCI took an interest in regarding the flight of birds.

But there is something else: there is an Egyptian vulture that resembles it very much, and that is what would have arranged things; it is the one BELON speaks of, and that he calls the Egyptian sacred one, and that has been spoken of since HERODOTUS under the name Hierax[falcon in Greek].

Pierre Bellon: L’histoire de la nature des oiseaux, 1555, p. 110.

There are a great number of them in Egypt and naturally it is sacred, that is to say that HERODOTUS informs us: one could not kill it without having the worst troubles in ancient Egypt. It has an interest because it resembles a little the kite and the falcon.
It is that one that is found in Egyptian ideograms to correspond more or less to the letter aleph that I speak of in my discourses on hieroglyphs and their exemplary function for us. It is vulture, that is to say more or less the ‘Egyptian sacred one’ that is at issue. Everything would be fine if it were that one that served for the goddess MOUT, about which you know FREUD spoke with regard to the vulture.

So that cannot work: FREUD truly was quite mistaken, because despite all this effort at solution, the vulture
that serves for the goddess MOUT is that one, the one that was drawn on the right in the picture.

It does not, for its part, have a phonetic value like the other. This vulture serves as a determinative element, in the sense that one adds it.
Or else it designates by itself simply the goddess MOUT; in that case one puts a little flag in addition, or else it is integrated into a whole sign that will be written MOUT and then the little determinative, or else one will content oneself with making it itself equivalent to M,
and will nevertheless add a little t, that is to say to phoneticize nevertheless the term. See the drawings of the hieroglyphs in the original.
It is found in more than one association; it is indeed always a mother goddess, and in that case it is this vulture,
quite different, a true gyps, and not at all this kind of vulture on the border of kites and falcons and other neighboring animals, but entirely different.

It is this true gyps that is at issue when it is a matter of the mother goddess, and it is to this vulture that everything FREUD is going to report to us from bestiary-type tradition, namely for example what is reported to us in HORAPOLLO,
which constitutes Egyptian decadence, and whose writings, moreover fragmentary, a thousand times transposed, recopied and deformed, became the object, at the time of the Renaissance, of a certain number of collections to which the engravers of the period contributed little emblems, and which were supposed to give us the significative value of a certain number of major Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This work ought to be familiar to all of you, because it is the one from which I borrowed the drawing that adorns the journal
La Psychanalyse.

HORAPOLLO gives the description of what I see here written: ‘The painted ear signifies the work done or that one must do.’
See drawing in the original. But we will not let ourselves be carried away on that by the bad habits of an era
where not everything is to be taken. And it is in HORAPOLLO that FREUD took this reference of the vulture to the meaning
not only of the mother, but of something much more interesting, and which makes him take a step in the dialectic,
namely of a bird animal in which there exists only the female sex.

This is an old zoological blunder that, like many others, goes back very far, and that one finds in antiquity
attested, not all the same among the best authors, but which assuredly is nonetheless generally accepted
in medieval culture. One would be quite wrong to believe—and the slightest opening suffices, for the ‘Notebooks of Leonardo
de Vinci’ are there to prove it—that Leonardo DE VINCI’s mind made revolution in a certain perspective,
and did not bathe in medieval stories. FREUD admits that because Leonardo DE VINCI did some reading, he must have known that story. That is quite likely; it has nothing extraordinary, for it was very widespread, but it is not proven. And it is all the less of interest to have it proven, since it is still not a vulture.

I pass over the fact that Saint AMBROSE takes the story of the female vulture as being an example that nature
shows us expressly to favor the entry into our understanding of the virginal conception of JESUS. FREUD seems to admit there without criticism that it is in almost all the Fathers of the Church. In truth I must tell you that I did not go to check that;
I have known since this morning that it is in Saint AMBROSE.

In truth, I already knew it, because a certain Piero VALERIANO, who made a collection of these legendary elements from the year 1566, seemed to me a particularly important source to consult in order also to see what the kite
could be at the time, and a certain number of symbolic elements, and notes that Saint AMBROSE made mention of it. He also notes BASIL the Great,
but he does not note all the Fathers of the Church, as seems to be admitted by the author to whom FREUD refers.

The vulture was only female, just as the snail was only male. It was a tradition, and it is interesting to put
the one in relation with the other, from the fact that the snail is a terrestrial, crawling beast. All this has its correlatives in the vulture
which is, for its part, in the process of conceiving in the sky, offering widely its tail to the wind, as there is a very pretty image of it.

Piero Valeriano: Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Aegyptiorum literis commentarii, 1556, p. 132

Where does all this lead us? All this leads us to this: that assuredly the story of the vulture is a story that has its interest,
like many other stories of this nature. In truth there are lots of stories of this kind that swarm
in Leonardo DE VINCI, who was very interested in kinds of fables constructed on these stories.

One could draw many other things from it; one could draw for example that the kite is an animal strongly inclined to envy,
and that mistreats its children. See what would have resulted if FREUD had come upon that—the different interpretation
we could give of the relation with the mother.

To show you that from all this nothing remains, and that there is, from this whole part of freudian elaboration, nothing to retain.
That is not why I tell it to you; I would not give myself the easy advantage of criticizing after the fact a brilliant intervention, and indeed it often happens that with all sorts of defects, the view of the genius, which was guided by many other things
than these little accidental researches, had gone much further than these supports.

What does that mean? What does all this allow us to see, to retain? It allows us to retain that 6 years after the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, 10 or 12 years after the first perceptions FREUD had of bisexuality,
in the reference to everything FREUD had up to then brought out of the function of the castration complex on the one hand,
of the importance of the phallus and of the imaginary phallus on the other hand, insofar as it is the object of the woman’s penis-neid,
what does FREUD’s essay on Leonardo DE VINCI introduce?

It introduces, very precisely in May 1910, the importance of the function of the phallic mother, the phallic woman,
not for the one who is its subject, but for the child who depends on that subject. There is the ridge, there is what emerges as original
in what FREUD brings us on this occasion.

That the child is bound to a mother who, on the other hand, is someone who is bound on the imaginary plane to this phallus as lack—there is the relation
that FREUD introduces as essential, which is absolutely distinct from everything FREUD could have said up to then
about the relation of the woman and the phallus. And it is from there, it is in this originality of the structure which is—you see it—the one around which I made revolve this year all fundamental critique of the object relation insofar as it is destined
to institute a certain stable relation between the sexes, founded on a certain symbolic relation.

This thing that I made revolve this year around that, that I have perfectly brought out for you, at least I think
you took it as such in the analysis of little Hans—here we find its testimony in FREUD’s thought as being something that all by itself allows us to access the mystery of Leonardo DE VINCI’s position.
In other words, the fact that the child, insofar as confronted, isolated by dual confrontation with the woman, finds himself confronted
at the same time with the problem of the phallus as lack for his feminine partner—that is to say for the maternal partner on the occasion—it is around that that everything FREUD is going to construct, to spin out around Leonardo DE VINCI, turns.
That is what makes the relief, the originality of this observation which moreover, and not by chance, happens to be the first work where FREUD mentions the term narcissism. It is therefore the beginning of the structuring as such of the whole register
of the imaginary in freudian work.

Now we must pause for an instant on what I shall call the contrast, the paradox of Leonardo DE VINCI’s character, and ask ourselves the question of the other term, not new but which appears there also with a particular insistence,
of another term introduced by FREUD, and which is that of sublimation.

I mean that from time to time FREUD refers to a certain number of references to what one can call Leonardo DE VINCI’s neurotic traits. I mean that at every instant he goes to seek, so to speak, traces of a critical passage, of a trace left in I do not know what repetition of terms, in kinds of obsessional slips.

He also goes to bring closer this I do not know what paradoxical thing in the thirst for knowledge, that traditional cupido sciendi; for Leonardo’s curiosity he almost makes of it something obsessional as well, in the sense that he calls it ‘a compulsion to snoop around’.
One cannot say that there is not there a certain indication; nevertheless the whole personality of Leonardo DE VINCI
is not explained by neurosis. And he brings in, as one of the essential outcomes of what remains of an exalted infantile tendency, even fixed—precisely the one at issue in Leonardo’s case—he brings in, not without having already introduced it in the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, the notion of sublimation.

You know it: FREUD in the end, apart from the fact that sublimation is a tendency that indeed will be directed toward objects that are not the primitive objects, but that are the highest objects of what is offered to human
and inter-human consideration, FREUD brought to this only later some further complementing, by showing what role
sublimation could have in the establishment of the interests of the ego.

Since then, this theme of sublimation has been taken up by a certain number of authors of the psychoanalytic community,
by being linked by them to the notion of neutralization and of ‘deinstinctualization of instinct’. I must say that this is something
very difficult to conceive: a delibidination of libido, a deaggressivization of aggressivity. Here are the kindest terms we see most commonly in what HARTMANN and LŒWENSTEIN wrote.

All this scarcely enlightens us on what sublimation can truly represent as a mechanism.

The interest of an observation like that of Leonardo DE VINCI, as it is articulated by FREUD, is that we can
take from it a few ideas, at least initiate something that can allow us to posit the term where one would have
something more structured than the notion ‘of an instinct that deinstinctualizes itself’, even of an object that, as one says,
becomes more sublime, for it would seem that that is what is the Saft[sap,juice] of sublimation.

Leonardo DE VINCI has himself been the object of an idealization, if not a sublimation, which began in his lifetime and which tends to make of him a kind of ‘universal genius’, and assuredly also a surprising precursor of modern thought for some,
and even very learned critics like those who began, like FREUD moreover, to clear the ground of the problem, like others on other planes: DUHEM for example says that Leonardo DE VINCI glimpsed the law of the fall of bodies, or even the principle of inertia. A somewhat close examination from the point of view of the history of the sciences,
and which can be done methodically, shows that it is nothing of the sort.

It is nevertheless clear that Leonardo DE VINCI made astonishing findings and that these kinds of drawings he leaves us
in the order of kinematics, dynamics, mechanics, ballistics often account for his extraordinarily pertinent perception, far in advance of what had been done in his time. Which does not mean,
and does not in any way allow us to believe, that there had not been, on all these planes, works that had already been
very advanced in mathematization, especially for example of kinematics.

Nevertheless a remainder of Aristotelian tradition, that is to say of a tradition founded on certain evidences of experience,
meant that the conjunction was absolutely not made of the fairly advanced mathematical formalization that had been made
of a whole abstract kinematics, with what one can call the domain of experience, I mean real and existing bodies, those that seem to us delivered to that law of weight, and which has so encumbered the human mind by its experiential evidence, that one took all the time you know to arrive at giving it a correct formulation.

Think that for Leonardo DE VINCI we still find in his drawings and in the commentaries that accompany them assertions such as this one: that a body falls all the faster the heavier it is…
I think you have all retained enough from your secondary schooling to know that it is a theorem of profound falsity, although of course experience, as one says, experience at the massive level of experience
…seems to impose it. Nevertheless what is it that gives the originality of what we see in these drawings?

I am alluding there to a part of what he left us, as this work of engineer properly speaking, which so astonished, interested, even fascinated, both contemporaries and successive generations. These are very often things extraordinarily in advance indeed of his time, but which of course cannot go beyond certain limits
that are still not crossed, as to the use, the living entry, so to speak, of mathematics into the order of the analysis of phenomena of the real. In other words, what he brings us is often absolutely admirable, I mean in inventiveness,
in construction, in creativity, and it is already quite enough to see for example the elegance with which he determines the theorems
that can serve as a basis for evaluating the progressive change of the instance of a force attached to a circummobile body, that is to say one that can turn around an axis.

This force is tied to an arm, and the arm turns. What will be the variation of the effectiveness of this force as
the lever turns? These are problems that Leonardo DE VINCI will excel at translating by what I shall call
a kind of vision of the force field that is determined, not so much by his calculation as by his drawings. In short the intuitive element,
the element of creative imagination in him is tied to a certain predominance given to the principle of experience
and to the source of all kinds of dazzling, original, but nevertheless partial intuitions at the level of the engineer’s blueprint.

That is not nothing, for compared to what exists in engineers’ books, you have all the difference—tells us a critic of the history of the sciences like KOYRÉ—that there is from a drawing to an engineer’s blueprint. But an engineer’s blueprint, even if it can manifest
all by itself all kinds of intuitive elements in the relation of certain quantities, certain values that in a way are imaged and materialized in the sole arrangement of the apparatuses, it is also not capable of resolving certain problems at higher, primary-symbolic levels.

And in the end, for example, we shall see in Leonardo DE VINCI an insufficient, even false, theory
of the inclined plane that will assuredly be resolved only with GALILEO and—still to use a term of KOYRÉ—
with that revolution that constitutes, as regards the mathematization of the real, the fact that from a certain moment on
one decides to purify the method radically, that is to say to put experience to the test of terms, of ways, of positions
of the problem that start outright from the impossible.

Understand that it is only from the moment when one frees the formulation of formulas subjected to the hypothesis
of every kind of purported intuition of the real that, for example, one renounces an evidence that is that it is the bodies
that are heaviest that will fall the fastest.

In other words, that one began to elaborate from another point of departure such as the correct one of gravity,
that is to say from a formula that can in a way satisfy itself nowhere, for one will always be in conditions of impure experiments to realize it, because one starts from a pure symbolic formalization, that experience can be realized in a correct way, and that begins the institution of a mathematized physics of which one can say that entire centuries
made efforts to attain it and never attained it before this separation of the symbolic and the real at the outset
was a thing admitted in the succession of experiments and gropings, moreover truly fascinating to follow
from generation to generation of researchers.

There is the interest of a history of the sciences: that in sum up to then one remained in this in-between, in this incomplete,
in this partial, in this imaginative, in this dazzling, which could make formulated—this is where I want to come to—by Leonardo DE VINCI himself, that in sum his relation was essentially a relation of submission to nature. If the term ‘nature’ plays a role
so important, so essential still in Leonardo DE VINCI’s work, it is at every instant what one must grasp as the essential element, absolutely first: presence. It is still in a kind of way of opposing oneself to another whose signs it is a matter
of deciphering, from the reverse, the double, and as if one can say, the co-creator. All these terms moreover are in
Leonardo DE VINCI’s notes. It is the perspective with which he questions this nature, it is, so to speak, to arrive
at what I mean in this kind of confusion of the imaginary with a kind of other that is not the radical Other with which
we have to do and that I have taught you to situate, to sketch as being the place, the locus of the unconscious, which is that other who…

It is very important to see how much Leonardo DE VINCI insists on saying that there is no voice in nature,
and he gives demonstrations of it so amusing, so curious, that it would be worth seeing to what point that becomes for him something properly speaking obsessional: to demonstrate that there could not be someone who answered him, who is called at that moment what everyone believes: a spirit that speaks somewhere in the air.
That is something of all importance for him: he insists on it, and he returns to it often, and indeed there were people for whom it was a quasi scandalous truth to proclaim it. Nevertheless, the way Leonardo DE VINCI questions this nature is like that of this other which at once is not a subject, but whose reasons there is occasion to read; and when I say this, I say it because it is in Leonardo DE VINCI:
‘Nature is full of infinite reasons that have never been in experience.’
The paradox of this formula—if we make of Leonardo DE VINCI, as one very often does, a kind of precursor of modern experimentalism—is there precisely to show the distance and the difficulty there is in grasping after the fact, when a certain evolution, when a certain clearing in thought
has been accomplished, what the thought of the one generally called a precursor is engaged in.

As for Leonardo, his position vis-à-vis nature is that of the relation with, if you like, this other that is not a subject, this other whose history, sign, articulation, and speech it is nevertheless a matter of detecting, whose creative power it is a matter of grasping. In short, this other is that something that transforms the root of otherness of this absolute Other into something accessible by a certain imaginary identification.

It is this other that I would like to see you take into consideration in the drawing to which FREUD himself refers,
and about which he himself remarks as an enigma this kind of confusion of bodies that makes Sainte Anne
hard to distinguish from the Virgin. It is so true that if you turn over the drawing, you will see the Louvre painting,
and you will notice that:
– the legs of Sainte Anne are on the side where, at first, in the most natural way, and with roughly the same position,
– the legs of the Virgin were, and that where the legs of the Virgin are, it was previously the legs of Sainte Anne.
That it is a kind of double being, and detaching one behind the other, this is not doubtful. That the child in the London drawing
extends the mother’s arm roughly like a puppet in which the arm of the one who moves it is engaged is something no less striking.

But alongside that, the fact that the other woman, without one knowing moreover which one, outlines beside the child that raised index finger that we find throughout Leonardo DE VINCI’s work and which is also one of his enigmas, is also something, in a word, where you will see imaged this ambiguity of the real mother and the imaginary mother, of the real child and the hidden phallus of which I do not make here the finger the symbol because it reproduces its profile roughly, but because this finger that we find everywhere in Leonardo DE VINCI is the indication of that lack-to-be whose term we find inscribed everywhere in Leonardo’s work.

It is in this certain taking up of position of the subject in relation to the problematic of this other which is either this absolute Other, closed, this closed unconscious, this impenetrable woman, and behind her the figure of death which is the last absolute Other.
It is the way a certain experience composes with this last term of human relation, how within that it reintroduces all the life of imaginary exchanges, how it displaces this last and radical relation to an essential otherness in order to make it inhabited by a mirage relation. That is what is called sublimation; that is what, at every instant on the plane of genius
and creation, Leonardo’s work gives us the example of.

I believe that this too is expressed in this kind of singular cryptogram that this drawing is, which is not unique.
This drawing is only the double of another drawing made for a painting that Leonardo DE VINCI never made, for a certain chapel, and where he reproduced this theme of Sainte ANNE, of the Virgin, of the child and of the fourth term we spoke of,
namely Saint JOHN who elsewhere is the lamb, who is the fourth term in this composition of four where we must find very evidently—as every time I have spoken to you of it, and from the moment this fourfold relation is embodied—
where we must find the theme of death. Where is it? Naturally it is everywhere; it passes from one to the other.

Death is likewise that something that will leave dead Leonardo DE VINCI’s sexuality, for that is his essential problem,
the one around which FREUD posed his question. Nowhere do we find in Leonardo DE VINCI’s life the attestation of something that represents a true bond, a true captivation other than ambiguous, than passing.

But in the end that is not what his story gives the impression of; it is a kind of ‘dream paternity’.[Cf. Hans]
He protected, patronized a few young men for refined decors, who passed through his life, several of them, without any major attachment having truly marked his style; and if there were to be someone seen, classified, as homosexual,
it would much rather be MICHEL-ANGELO.

Is death in this kind of double? Namely the one who is there, facing him, and who is so easily replaced by that lamb about which contemporaries, and namely Pietro DA NOVELLARA, who wrote to his correspondent that all Florence had filed past for two days in front of this cartoon for the preparation of a work for the high altar of the Annunciata
in Florence, and that Leonardo never made? But each person bent over the sense of this scene of four where we see the child held back by the mother at the moment when he is going to ride that lamb. Everyone understands the sign of this drama, of his passion, of his future destiny, while Sainte ANNE who dominates everything holds back the mother so that she will not divert him from his own destiny.

There too, on the side of that something that is his destiny and his sacrifice, the term can be situated, and likewise death essentially, of his relation with his mother. But it is from his separation from her that FREUD makes start all the dramatization that followed in Leonardo DE VINCI’s life, and likewise this last figure, the most enigmatic of all, Sainte ANNE restored, instituted in this purely feminine, purely maternal relation, this Other with a capital A that is necessary to give all its balance
to the scene, and which of course—contrary to what Monsieur KRIS says—is far from being an invention of Leonardo.

Even FREUD did not believe for a single instant that the theme: Anne, the Virgin, the child with the fourth character introduced here
was an exclusive invention of Leonardo DE VINCI. Without any doubt the fourth character poses a problem in the history of religious motifs that is fairly specific to Leonardo DE VINCI, but as for the fact of the representation together
of Sainte Anne, of the Virgin, and of the child, it suffices to have the slightest notion, historically, of what happened at that time; it suffices to have read a little bit of any history to know that it is precisely in these years between 1485 and 1510
that the cult of Sainte Anne was promoted in Christendom as a degree of elevation linked to all the dogmatic critique around
the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, which made it, properly speaking at that moment, the outcome of a theme of spirituality
and of much other than spirituality, since it was the time of the campaign of ‘indulgences’ and of the inundation
over Germany of all kinds of little pamphlets where Anne, the Virgin, and the Child were indeed represented,
and by the purchase of which one had some ten thousand, even twenty thousand years of indulgence for the other world.

It is not a theme invented by Leonardo DE VINCI, nor one whose invention FREUD imputed to Leonardo DE VINCI. There is only Monsieur Ernst KRIS to say that Leonardo was the only one to represent such a trio, whereas it would have sufficed to open FREUD to see simply the theme of this painting represented in FREUD with the title: Anna Selbstdritt, that is to say:
Anna self-third, the trinity. It is the same thing in Italian: Anna self-three, Anna Metterza.

This function of Anna’s trinity is in the fact that at a moment without any doubt critical…
and if it is not for us to rethink, we cannot let ourselves be carried away
often by the historical critiques of Christian devotion
…we find again, so to speak, the constancy of an over-trinity that here takes all its value in finding in Leonardo DE VINCI its psychological incarnation.

By that I mean that if Leonardo assuredly was a man placed in a profoundly atypical position, dissymmetrical as regards his sexual maturation,
and that this dissymmetry is like the meeting in him of a sublimation that has reached degrees of activity and realization that are exceptional, assuredly nothing in the elaboration of a work a hundred times begun again
and truly obsessional, nothing in his work could have been structured without something reproducing this relation of the ego
to the other, and the necessity of the big Other, which is inscribed in the schema that is the one by means of which I sometimes ask you
to orient yourselves in relation to these problems.

But here what must we think, so to speak, of the atypia realized by the engagement of this especially dramatic being
in the paths of the imaginary? That assuredly he draws, so to speak, this skill of his essential creations only from this trinitarian scene that is the same as the one we had found at the end of the observation of little Hans is one thing, but on the other hand does this not allow us to shed light on a correlative disturbance of his own position as subject?

I indicate to you this: Leonardo DE VINCI’s inversion—if indeed one can speak of his inversion—is something
that for us is far from being able to be reduced only to paradox, even to the anomaly of certain great men, his affective relations, and it is something that appears to us singularly marked by a kind of singular inhibition in this man
endowed with all gifts, and assuredly one has perhaps said a little too much that there was nowhere in Leonardo DE VINCI
an erotic theme. That may be going a little too far.

It is true that in FREUD’s time one had not discovered the theme of LEDA, that is to say a very beautiful woman and a swan that joins with her almost in a movement of undulation no less delicate than her forms. It would obviously be quite striking for us to notice that here again it is the bird that represents the masculine theme, and assuredly an imaginary fantasy. But let us leave it. There is something I must say: if we keep to the experience we can have of Leonardo, we cannot eliminate it: his manuscripts.

I do not know whether it has ever happened to you to leaf through a volume of reproductions. It does have a certain effect
when you see all a gentleman’s notes in mirror writing, when you then read these notes,
and when you see him speaking all the time to himself, calling himself:

‘You will do that. You will ask Jean de Paris for the secret of dry painting’
or ‘You will go fetch two pinches of lavender or rosemary at the shop on the corner’.
For they are things of that order; everything is mixed. That is something that also ends up impressing and gripping.

In a word, in this relation of identification of the ego to the other that seems so essential as established for understanding how the identifications from which the ego of the subject progresses are constituted, it seems to come to mind that as
and correlatively to all sublimation…
that is to say to that process, so to speak, of desubjectivation, of naturalization of the Other that would constitute
its essential phenomenon insofar as of a more or less great totality or perfection
…of that sublimation something would always be produced at the level of the imaginary which would be, in a more or less accentuated form, this inversion of the relations of the ego and of the other, which would make that in a case like that of Leonardo DE VINCI
we would truly have someone, so to speak, addressing and commenting on himself from his imaginary other.

And that truly we would have to take his mirror writing as purely and simply the fact of his own position vis-à-vis himself, of that kind of radical alienation which is the one on which I also left posed
the question of little Hans’s jealousy in my last seminar, and by which I shall assuredly pose the question:
whether we cannot conceive that correlatively to a whole direction of a process…
– that we shall call sublimation,
– that we shall call psychologization,
– that we shall call alienation,
– that we shall call ego-ization,
…the dimension by which being forgets itself as imaginary object of the Other, that is to say something
that accounts for a fundamental, essential possibility of forgetting in the imaginary ego.

[End of the seminar 1956-57]