🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Pursuing our reflections on the object, I am going to propose to you today what follows from it regarding a problem that materializes this question of the object in a particularly acute way, namely the fetish and fetishism. You will see there that assuredly the fundamental schemas I have tried to bring you in recent times, and which are expressed quite especially in these paradoxical affirmations: that what is loved in the object is what it lacks, and again: that one gives only what one does not have.

Thus this fundamental schema, which implies the permanence of the constituting character in every symbolic exchange of a beyond of the object, by whatever sense this exchange functions, allows us to see in a new light, to establish differently what I could call the fundamental equations of this perversion that has taken an exemplary role in analytic theory and that is called fetishism.

Already in the two fundamental texts of FREUD where this question of fetishism is addressed, which are spaced between 1904 and 1927—others will take up the question later, but these are the two most precious: one being the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, and the other the article on ‘Fetishism’—FREUD tells us from the outset that this fetish is the symbol of something, but that without any doubt, we are going to be disappointed by what he is going to tell us.

Much has been said about this fetish since one speaks of analysis, and since FREUD speaks of it. This something will once again be the penis. But immediately after he emphasizes that it is not just any penis. And this precision that he brings us does not seem to have been exploited in what one can call its structural ground, in the fundamental suppositions that it implies, naively, when reading it for the first time.

This fetish is not just any penis; to say everything, it is not the real penis:
– it is the penis insofar precisely as the woman has it,
– that is to say insofar exactly as she does not have it.

I emphasize the oscillating point around which we must here stop for an instant, to notice what is ordinarily eluded and that we must not elude, and which is this: for someone who does not use our keys, it is simply a matter of misrecognition of the real. Simply, it is a matter of the phallus that the woman does not have, and that for reasons that pertain to the child’s doubtful relation to reality, simply she must have it.

This, which is the common path, and which usually supports all kinds of speculations on the future, the development, the crises of fetishism, is precisely what I have been able to verify by a broad reading of everything that has been written on fetishism, and precisely what leads to all sorts of dead ends.

There, as always, I have endeavored not to linger too much in this kind of forest of analytic literature, for in truth there is there something that would require not only hours, but to be done effectively, a more restricted reading, for there is nothing more delicate, indeed more tedious, than seeing the precise point where a matter slips away, where the author avoids the crucial point of a discrimination, so that I give you the result more or less decanted for a part of what I set out to you here, and I ask you to follow me.

The differential nerve of the way it must be approached—to take its proper position, to avoid these wanderings into which authors, over the years, find themselves led if they avoid this point—is that one must see that what is at issue is not at all a real phallus—insofar as, as real, it exists or it does not exist—but that it is a symbolic phallus insofar as it is of its nature, to speak of what is symbolic, to present itself in exchange as absence.

As absence functioning as such since all that can, in symbolic exchange, be transmitted is always something insofar as it is as much absence as presence, that it is made to have this sort of fundamental alternation that makes it, having appeared at one point, disappear in order to reappear at another. In other words, it circulates leaving behind it the sign of its absence at the point from which it comes. [cf. the seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’]

In other words, the phallus at issue, we recognize it at once, is precisely that symbolic object by which, not only is established this structural cycle of imaginary threats that limits the direction and the use of the real phallus…
that is the sense of the castration complex, it is in this that the man is caught in the castration complex
…but there is another hidden use, if one may say, through the more or less dreadful fantasies of the man’s relation to prohibitions, insofar as they bear on the use of the phallus: it is its symbolic function.

I mean the fact that it is insofar as it is there, or that it is not there—and only insofar as it is there or that it is not there—that the symbolic differentiation of the sexes is instituted.

In other words, that especially for the woman, it is insofar as this phallus, she does not have it symbolically…
but not having the [real] phallus, symbolically, is to participate in it as absence,
it is to have it in a way [the symbolic phallus]
…that this phallus is always beyond any relation between the man and the woman, and that this phallus that can on occasion be the object of an imaginary nostalgia on the part of the woman, insofar as she has only a very small phallus, is not the only one that comes into function for her. Insofar as she is caught in the intersubjective relation, there is beyond her, for the man, this phallus that she does not have, that is to say the symbolic phallus that exists there as absence. Not only because she has only a very small insufficient one. This is entirely independent of the inferiority she can feel on the imaginary plane, as to what she has of real participation with the phallus.

If this symbolic penis that I placed the other day in the proper schema of the homosexual woman plays a role, an essential function, and so essential in her entry into symbolic exchange that FREUD told us: it is insofar as she does not have the phallus—that is to say, on the symbolic plane also insofar as she has it—insofar as she enters into the symbolic dialectic of having or not having the phallus, it is through that that she enters into this ordered, symbolized relation that is the differentiation of the sexes, insofar as assuredly it is the interhuman relation insofar as assumed, that is to say insofar as it is also disciplined, typified, ordered, struck with prohibitions, marked by the fundamental structure of the law of incest for example.

That is what FREUD means when he tells us that it is through the intermediary of what he calls the idea of castration in the woman—and which is precisely this that she does not have the phallus, but that she does not have it symbolically, therefore that she can have it—that it is through that that she enters into the Oedipus complex, he tells us, whereas it is through that that the little boy comes out of it.

In other words, we can see well that in a certain way, fundamentally, structurally speaking, the androcentrism that marks the Lévi-Straussian schematization of the elementary structures of kinship is justified. Women are exchanged between lineages founded on the male line, the one that is chosen precisely insofar as it is symbolic, insofar as it is improbable. It is a fact: women are exchanged as object between male lineages, and they enter there through an exchange that is that of this phallus that they receive symbolically, and in exchange for which they give that child who, for them, takes the function of ersatz, of substitute, of equivalent of the phallus, and by which precisely they introduce, into this patrocentric symbolic genealogy and in itself sterile, natural fecundity.

But it is insofar as they are attached to this unique, central object that is characterized by the fact that it is precisely not an object, but an object having undergone in the most radical way symbolic valorization, the phallus—it is through the intermediary of this relation to the phallus that they enter into the chain of symbolic exchange, that they install themselves there, that they take their place and their value there.

What is expressed in a thousand ways once you have seen it, is namely that in the end this fundamental theme that the woman gives herself—what does it express if we look at it closely, if not precisely this need to affirm the gift. Here we see concrete, psychological experience as it is given to us, and so paradoxically on this occasion, since in the end in the act of love it is clear that it is the woman who really receives; she receives far more than she gives.

Everything indicates to us—and analysis in experience has put the emphasis on this—that there is no position that on the imaginary plane is more captative, indeed more devouring, than hers. And precisely if this is reversed in the contrary affirmation that the woman gives herself, it is precisely insofar as symbolically it must be so, namely that she must give something in exchange for what she receives, that is to say the symbolic phallus. Thus the fetish, FREUD tells us, represents this phallus insofar as absent, this symbolic phallus.

How do we not see there at once that if it is indispensable that something of this order occurs, that there is this sort of initial reversal so that we can understand quite paradoxical things otherwise, that is to say for example that it is always the boy who is the fetishist and never the girl.

If everything were on the plane of imaginary deficiency or even imaginary inferiority, it seems at first glance that it would rather be in both sexes, in the one where one is really deprived of the phallus, that fetishism should most openly declare itself. Now it is nothing of the sort: fetishism is exceedingly rare in the woman, in the proper and individualized sense in which it is embodied in an object that we can consider itself as answering in a symbolic way to this phallus insofar as absent.

Let us try first to see how this singular relation to an object that is not one can be generated. The fetish, the analyst tells us, is a symbol. In this respect, it is almost from the outset put on the same footing as any other neurotic symptom. If it is not a neurosis, a perversion, it does not go so much by itself. That is how things are classified, nosographically speaking, for reasons of clinical appearance that undoubtedly have a certain value.

But to confirm it in the structure from the point of view of analysis, one must look at it fairly closely, and in truth many authors mark some hesitation and go so far as to place it at the limit of perversions and neuroses, precisely because of this character, especially electively symbolic, of the crucial fantasy.

Let us stop then for an instant at this, namely that starting from the highest of the structure to this position of interposition that makes that what is loved in the object of love is something that is beyond, that is no doubt nothing, but that precisely has this symbolic property of being there, and because it is a symbol, of being able not only to be, but to have to be this nothing.

What for us can materialize, if one may say, in the clearest way this relation of interposition that makes that what is aimed at is beyond, in sum, what presents itself, if not something that is truly one of the most fundamental images of the human relation to the world, which is the veil, the curtain?

The veil, the curtain before something, which is again what allows one to better image this fundamental situation of love, one can even say precisely that with the presence of the curtain, what is beyond, as masked, tends to realize itself as image, if one may say. On the veil, absence is painted, and that is nothing other than the function of a curtain, whatever it may be: the curtain takes its value, its being and its consistency from being precisely that onto which the absence is projected and imagined.

The curtain, if one may say, is the idol of absence, and in the end if it is not for nothing that the veil of Maya is the metaphor most commonly in use to express the man’s relation with all that captivates him, that is doubtless not without the reason that assuredly the feeling he has of a certain fundamental illusion in all the relations of his desire is indeed that in which man embodies, idolizes his feeling of this nothing that is beyond the object of love.

This fundamental schema is the one you must keep in mind if you want to situate in a correct way the elements that come into play at whatever moment we consider the institution of the fetishistic relation. The subject then is here, and the object is:
– this beyond that is nothing,
– or again the symbol,
– or again the phallus insofar as it is lacking to the woman.

But as soon as the curtain is placed, on this curtain something can be painted that says: the object is beyond, and it is the object that can then take the place of the lack, and as such also be the support of love, but it is insofar as it is precisely not the point where desire attaches. In a certain way, here desire appears as a metaphor of love, but with what attaches it, namely the object insofar as illusory, and insofar as it is valorized as illusory.

For the famous splitting of the ego when it is a matter of the fetish, what we are explained by being told that through the fetish, for example, the castration of the woman is at once affirmed, but also that it is denied, since the fetish being there means that she has precisely not lost this phallus, but that also at the same time one can make her lose it, that is to say, castrate her.

And the ambiguity of this relation to the fetish is constant and in the symptoms ceaselessly manifested at every instant, this ambiguity that proves itself as lived, an illusion at once supported, cherished as such and at the same time lived in this fragile balance that is called illusion, which at every instant is at the mercy of collapse or of the raising of the curtain.

It is this very strictly that is at issue in the relation of the fetishist to his object. In fact FREUD, when we follow his text, emphasizes it: he speaks of Verleugnung with regard to the fundamental position of untying of this relation to the fetish. But he also says that it is a matter of holding up this complex relation—like he would speak of a stage set—that is at issue; these are the terms of that language so imagistic and so precise at once of FREUD, which here take their value.

He also says: ‘The horror of castration has set itself up in this creation of a substitute, of a monument.’ And he also says that this fetish is a trophy. The word trophy does not appear, but in truth it is there, doubling the sign of a triumph, and many times authors, in approaching the typical phenomenon of the fetish, will speak of that by which the subject heralds his relation with sex. Here FREUD makes us take a step further.

Observe that we are always in the structure. Why this occurs, why this is necessary, we will see after; but as always one hurries too much, one goes first to the why and one immediately enters into a kind of pandemonic chaos of all the tendencies that come there in a crowd to explain why the subject can be more or less far from the object and feel stopped, feel threatened, feel in conflict.

Let us first see this structure. Here it is then in this relation of beyond and of veil, which is that on which one can in a way image oneself, that is to say institute oneself as imaginary capture, as place of desire: this relation to a beyond that is fundamental to every institution of the symbolic relation. This descent onto the imaginary plane of the ternary rhythm, subject–object–beyond, which is fundamental to the symbolic relation, this projection into the function of the veil of the intermediate position of the object, that is what is at issue.

Before going further we will perceive another slant under which there is here also institution in the imaginary of a symbolic relation. We are not yet in the requirement that makes the subject need the veil. This second step that I want to take, here it is: you will find again what I told you last time about perverse structure as such. I spoke to you in that respect of metonymy, or of allusion, or of relation between the lines. These are elementary forms of metonymy.

Here FREUD tells us in the clearest way, short of the use of the word metonymy: what constitutes the fetish, the something symbolic—namely especially in the historical dimension that fixes the fetish, that projects it onto the veil—is this something that is the moment of history where the image stops.

I remember having formerly used the comparison of the film that suddenly freezes: it is precisely before this moment where what is sought in the mother, that is to say this phallus that she has or that she does not have, must be seen as presence-absence, as absence-presence, it is the moment just before which the recollection of the history stops and is suspended. I say ‘recollection of the history’ because there is no other sense to give to the term screen memory that is so fundamental in all the phenomenology, the Freudian conceptualization.

The screen memory is not simply a snapshot; it is an interruption of the history, a moment where it freezes and where it stops and where therefore at the same time it indicates the continuation beyond the veil of its movement.

The screen memory is linked by an entire chain to the history; it is a stoppage in the chain and it is in that that it is metonymic: it is that the history, by its nature, continues by stopping there: it indicates its henceforth veiled continuation, its absent continuation, repression, FREUD says clearly, that is at issue.

We speak of repression only insofar as there is a symbolic chain, and if with regard to a phenomenon that can pass for an imaginary phenomenon insofar as the fetish is in a certain way image, and projected image, can be designated here as the point of a repression, it is because precisely this image is only the limit point between history insofar as it continues and the moment from which it is interrupted; it is the sign, it is the marker of the point of repression.

If you read FREUD’s text attentively, you will see there that the way of articulating things is the clearest way to take, at their full weight, the place of all the expressions he employs. Here, once again, we see the distinction between the relation to the love object and the relation of frustration of the object. These are two different relations: love here is transferred by a metaphor of desire that attaches to this object as illusory. However, the constitution of this object is something else: it is not metaphoric, it is metonymic; it is a point in the chain of history, where history stops. It is the sign that it is there that the beyond constituted by the subject begins. And why?

– Why is it there that the subject must constitute this beyond?
– Why is the veil more precious to man than reality?
– Why does the order of this illusory relation become an essential, necessary constituent of his relation with the object?

That is what is the question posed by fetishism. Of course, within what I have just told you, and before going further, you can see all sorts of things that shed light for you. Up to and including, for example, the fact that FREUD gives us as the first example of an analysis of a fetishist this marvelous story of a pun [calembour: a French term for a pun] that makes that a gentleman who had spent his early childhood in England and who had come to become a fetishist in Germany, was always looking for a little shine on the nose, which he moreover saw, whereas this meant nothing other than look at the nose, which nose was itself of course a symbol. You can see well there the articulation, the entry into play at this point of projection that is made on the veil of the historical chain insofar as it can contain even an entire phrase, and much more still a phrase in a forgotten language.

What are the causes of the institution of this structure? On that, the Kleinians certify nothing for you; in any case they have for some time been embarrassed because in truth:
– we cannot lose contact with the notion of the essential articulation of the relation of the genesis of fetishism with the castration complex, on the one hand,
– on the other hand it no longer appears certain that in pre-Oedipal relations—as is moreover indicated by the very notion that it is the phallic mother who is at the center—this is the element and the decisive spring.

That, in conjoining the two things, the authors are more or less at ease in doing so.

Let us simply observe the moreover average ease that members of the English school can find thanks to the existence of Madame Melanie KLEIN’s system which, by the structuring it gives to the first stages of oral tendencies, and particularly of their most aggressive moment, and by introducing within this very moment the retroactive projection and the presence of the paternal penis, that is to say by retroacting the Oedipus complex into the first relations with objects insofar as introjectable, obviously provides more easily the material that will in any case allow one to interpret what is at issue.

I have never yet launched into an exhaustive critique of what Madame Melanie KLEIN’s system means. We will therefore for the moment leave aside what can on that be brought by this or that author, to hold ourselves to what we have, we, brought to light here, by saying that indeed it is in relation to a fundamental relation, which is that of the relation between the real child, the symbolic mother and her phallus, imaginary for her.

It is therefore a schema that must be handled with caution: inasmuch as it concentrates on a single plane, it answers to diverse planes, and it comes into function at successive stages of history, for for a long time, of course, the child is not in a position to appropriate the relation of imaginary belonging that makes the mother’s deep division in regard to him. And it is only that which we are going here, this year, to try to elucidate in this question. We are on the way to seeing how and at what moment this is taken up by the child, how also this comes into play in the child’s own entry into this relation to the symbolic object, insofar as it is the phallus that is its major currency.

This poses chronological, temporal questions of order and succession, which are those we are attempting to approach as is natural, as is indicated by the history of psychoanalysis, from the angle of pathology. What do the observations show us here? In stripping them closely, it is very exactly around and correlatively to this singular symptom that puts the subject in an elective relation to this something that is a fetish around which his erotic life gravitates—I say ‘gravitates’ because if it is precisely the fascinating object, the object inscribed on the veil, it is of course that it retains a certain freedom of movement.

When one analyzes and does not simply make the clinical description, when one takes an observation:
– one sees—and already BINET had himself seen it—elements that I have already articulated for you today, namely for example this striking point of the screen memory and of the stoppage at the hem of the mother’s dress, indeed of her corset,
– one sees the essentially ambiguous relation, of an illusion lived as such, and as such moreover preferred by the subject to this fetish,
– one sees the particularly satisfying function of an object itself inert, and fully at the mercy of the subject for the maneuvering of his erotic relations.

All that is seen, but it takes analysis to see a little more closely what is at issue, namely what happens each time that, for some reason or other, recourse to the fetish slackens, becomes exhausted, wears out, simply withdraws. What we see in amorous behavior, and more simply in the erotic relation of the subject, is summed up…
and you will be able to verify it by reading in the International journal, the observations of Mrs. Sylvia PAYNE, of Mr. GILLESPIE, of Mrs. GREENACRE, of Mr. DUGMOREHUNTER, or again in the Psychoanalytic of the child
…in a defense. This was also glimpsed by FREUD and is articulated in our schema. FREUD tells us: ‘Fetishism is a defense against homosexuality.’ As Mr. GILLESPIE tells us: the margin is extraordinarily thin.

In short, what we find in the relations to the love object that organize this cycle in the fetishist is an alternation of identification with the woman insofar as, for him, the imaginary phallus of primordial experiences of the oro-anal period is centered on the aggressiveness of the sadistic theory of coitus, in which many of the experiences that analysis brings to light show an observation of the primal scene perceived as cruel, aggressive, violent, indeed murderous.

It is therefore of identification with the woman as confronted with this destructive penis, or inversely of identification with this imaginary phallus on the part of the subject, which makes him be for the woman a pure object, something she can devour and destroy, at the limit. But it is this oscillation between the two poles of this primitive imaginary relation to which the child is confronted in a raw way…
if one may say, not yet instituted in its Oedipal legality by the introduction of the father as subject, as center of order and legitimate possession
…it is insofar as he is delivered over to this bipolar oscillation of the relation between the two objects, if one may say inconcilable, and which in any case leads to a destructive, indeed murderous outcome, it is this that one finds at the bottom of love relations each time they attempt to sketch themselves, to order themselves, each time they rise up in the subject’s life.

And it is that whose sense, in a certain way of understanding analysis which is precisely the modern way and which on this point is not without constituting its own path, it is there that the analyst will intervene to make the subject perceive the alternation of his positions, at the same time as their significations, that is to say to introduce in a certain way the symbolic distance necessary for him to perceive the sense.

Here the observations are extremely fruitful and risk, when they show us for example the thousand forms that the actuality of the subject’s early life can take, this fundamental de-completion that makes that the subject is delivered as such to the imaginary relation by the route, either of identification with the woman, or of the place taken of the imaginary phallus, that is to say in any case in an insufficient symbolization of the third relation.

For example very frequently, the authors say, we note the absence, sometimes repeated in this history, the deficiency as one says, of the father as presence: he leaves on a journey, to war, etc.

Much more still, a certain type of position sometimes singularly reproduced in fantasy, which is that of a forced immobilization, sometimes manifested by a tying-up of the subject that effectively and really took place. There is a very fine example of it in Sylvia PAYNE’s observation: following an extravagant medical prescription, a child had been prevented from walking until the age of two; he was kept by actual ties in his bed, and this was not without having some consequence, up to and including that the fact that he thus lived closely supervised in his parents’ room put him for us in this exemplary position of being entirely delivered over to a purely visual relation, without any sketch of muscular reaction coming from his source, in the presence of his parents’ relation, assumed in the style of rage and anger that you can suppose. Assuredly such exemplary cases are rare. But certain authors have insisted on the fact that certain phobic mothers for example, and who keep their child at a distance from their contact, more or less as if it were a source of infection, are certainly not for nothing in the prevalence given to the visual relation in the constitution of the primitive relation to the maternal object.

Be that as it may, much more instructive than this or that example of vitiation of the primary relation is, if one may say, what appears as pathological relation, which presents itself as the reverse or the complement of libidinal adherence to the fetish. Fetishism is a class that nosologically encompasses all sorts of things, of which, in a way, our intuition simply gives us the indication of the affinity of kinship.

It is quite clear, for example, and we are not mistaken about it, that the fact that the subject is attached to the raincoat seems of the same nature as if he were attached to shoes. Structurally speaking, however, this raincoat contains by itself revelations and indicates a somewhat different position from that of the shoe or the corset insofar as they are themselves properly speaking and directly in the position of the veil between the subject and the object.

It is certain, by contrast, that this raincoat, like every species of other fetish of clothing more or less enveloping, which moreover in addition have the special quality that rubber brings, have a trait very frequently encountered that does not fail to conceal some last mystery that would doubtless be illuminated psychologically by sensoriality, by what this special contact of rubber itself perhaps conceals: perhaps something that can be, more easily than anything else, the lining of the skin, or again that conceals capacities of special isolations.

Be that as it may, from the very structure of the relations as they are delivered in a sense of observation analytically taken, one sees that the raincoat plays there a role that is not exactly quite that of the veil, but rather that something behind which the subject centers himself, not in front of the veil, but as behind, that is to say in the place of the mother, and more especially adhering to this position of identification with the mother where the mother needs to be protected, here by the enveloping, and it is that which gives the transition between cases of fetishism and cases of transference. The enveloping is clearly a protection, and more simply not a veil, but an aegis with which the subject, identified with the female character, envelops himself.

Other typical and true relations, sometimes particularly exemplary, are the explosions, indeed sometimes the alternations with fetishism, of an exhibitionism in certain cases truly reactional. Here it is always with regard to some effort of the subject to get out of his labyrinth, with regard to some putting into play of the real, which puts the subject in these positions of unstable equilibrium where this type of crystallization or reversal of position occurs, which I consider as very manifestly illustrated by the schema of the case of female homosexuality, insofar as we see there at a moment, by the introduction of this real element that is the father, the terms exchange, and what was situated in the beyond, the symbolic father, come to be taken in the imaginary relation under the form of the homosexual and exemplary and demonstrative position with respect to the father, which the homosexual woman takes.

Likewise we have in the observations very nice cases where one sees the subject, insofar as he has attempted under certain conditions of artificial realization, of forcing of the real, to accede to a full relation, the subject precisely at that moment express through his acting out, that is to say on the imaginary plane, what was symbolically latent in that situation. Example: the subject who is going to attempt for the first time a real relation, but precisely in this position of experience where he goes there to show, if one may say, what he is capable of doing, and who succeeds, thanks to help, on the part of the woman for example, more or less well, and who in the exact following hour, whereas nothing up to then let one foresee symptoms of such a possibility, gives himself over to a very singular, very well calculated exhibition, the one that consists in showing his sex to the passing of an international train, so that no one can catch him red-handed.

It is therefore from having been forced in a way to give outlet to something, of which you see that it is precisely only the expression or the projection on the imaginary plane where this something was implicit and contained, to this something of which he himself did not understand all the symbolic repercussions, namely the act he had just done, which in the end was only the act of trying to show, and simply to show, that he was capable like another of having a normal relation.

We find this sort of reactional exhibitionism several times in observations very close to fetishism, or even plainly of delinquent acts insofar as they are equivalences of fetishism; one can sense well what is at issue.

It is very curious to see at the same time how much she manages to avoid the major and the essential of the thing. She therefore presents this man who had married a woman about twice as tall as he; he was truly her victim, the horrible whipping boy, and one fine day this man who was doing his best to face the horrible situation finds himself informed that he is going to be a father; he rushes into a public garden and begins to show his organ to a group of young girls.

Assuredly Mrs. SCHMIDEBERG, who seems a little too Anna-Freudian in this, finds there all sorts of analogies with the fact that already the boy’s father was someone somewhat victim-like who had managed to free himself from the situation by having himself one day caught with a maid, which through the intermediary of jealous claim had put his wife somewhat at his mercy. It nevertheless seems that nothing is explained by something that seems to Mrs. SCHMIDEBERG an example of a case where she was able to analyze a perversion.

There is no need at all to marvel at it, for it is not a perversion at all, and she did no analysis at all, for she leaves aside the fact that all the same it is by an act of exhibition that the subject on that occasion manifested himself. And there is no other way to explain this act of exhibition than by referring to this triggering mechanism by which what in the real comes there in a way as an extra, symbolically unassimilable, tends to make precipitate what is at the bottom of the symbolic relation, namely in this good man very exactly the phallus-child equivalence, and that for lack of being able in any way to assume, even believe in, this paternity he went to show the equivalent of the child in the right place, what remained to him at that moment of use of his phallus.