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(All parts in English)

Piera AULAGNIERLACAN

LACAN

It is not necessarily with the idea of sparing you—nor you nor anyone—that I thought today, for this resumption session, at a moment which is a two-month race that lies before us in order to finish dealing with this difficult subject, that I thought of making, for this resumption, a sort of relay.

I mean that for a long time I had wanted, not only to give the floor to one of you, but even, precisely, to give it to Mme AULAGNIER. I have been thinking about it for a very long time, since it was the day after a communication she gave at one of our scientific sessions.

This communication, I do not know why, some of you, who are not here unfortunately…
because of a kind of characteristic myopia of certain positions
that I elsewhere call ‘mandarin’ [i.e., academic/notability] ones, since this term has become current
…thought they saw in it I know not what return to the letter of FREUD, whereas to my ear it had seemed to me that Mme AULAGNIER, with particular pertinence and acuity, was handling the distinction, already long matured at that time, between demand and desire.

There is still some chance that one recognizes one’s own posterity better oneself than others do.
As it happens, there was one person who agreed with me on this point, and that was Mme AULAGNIER herself.
I therefore regret having taken so long to give her the floor, perhaps because of the feeling—excessive moreover—
of something that always presses and hounds us to move forward.

Precisely, today we are for a moment going to make this sort of ‘loop’ which consists in passing through what, in the mind
of one of you, can answer, bear fruit, concerning the path we have traveled together—it is already long, since that moment I am evoking—and it is very specifically at this overlap, this crossroads, constituted in the mind of
Mme AULAGNIER, on what I have recently said about anxiety, that it happens she has offered me, for the past few sessions, to intervene here.

It is therefore by reason of an opportunity that is worth what another would have been worth: the feeling of having something
to communicate to you, and at just the right time, on the anxiety of the psychotic—and this in the closest relation
to what she has heard, like you, of what I am teaching this year about identification—that she is going to bring you
something she has prepared quite carefully, having provided us with a text.

This text, she was kind enough to share it with me; I mean that I looked it over with her yesterday, and that I believed, I must say,
that I had only to encourage her to present it to you. I am sure that it represents an excellent medium—and by that I mean
something that is not an average—of what, I believe, the most sensitive ears, the best among you,
can hear, and of the way things can be taken up again, by reason of that listening.

I shall therefore say, after she has conceived this text, what use I intend to make of this stage that what she brings us
must constitute, what use I intend to make of it in what follows.

 

Piera AULAGNIER: Anxiety and identification

During the last ‘Provincial Days,’ a certain number of interventions concerned the question of whether
different types of anxiety could be defined. Thus, the question was raised whether one should give, for example,
a particular status to psychotic anxiety.

I will say right away that I hold a somewhat different view: anxiety, whether it appears in the so-called normal subject,
in the neurotic, or in the psychotic, seems to me to correspond to a specific and identical situation of the ego,
and this indeed seems to me to be one of its characteristic traits.

As for what one might call ‘the subject’s position vis-à-vis anxiety,’ in psychosis for example, one has been able to see that
if one does not try to define more precisely the existing relations between affect and verbalization, one can arrive at a sort of paradox
that would be expressed as follows:
– on the one hand, the psychotic would be someone particularly prone to anxiety, and it would even be in the mirror response he would arouse in the analyst that one of the major difficulties of the cure [treatment/analysis] would be sought,
– on the other hand, we have been told that he would be incapable of recognizing his anxiety, that he would keep it at a distance, alienate himself from it.

By stating this, one formulates an untenable position if one does not try to go a little further. Indeed, what could ‘recognizing anxiety’ really mean? It does not wait, and does not need to be named in order to overwhelm the ego, and I do not understand
what one could mean by saying that the subject is anxious without knowing it.

One may ask whether the very property of anxiety is not precisely not to name itself. Diagnosis, appellation, can only come from the side of the Other, from the one before whom it appears. He, the subject, is the affect ‘anxiety’; he lives it totally,
and it is precisely this impregnation, this capture of his ego, which dissolves in it, that prevents him from the mediation of speech:
think of inhibition and acting-out.

At this level, one can draw a first parallel between two states which, different as they may be, seem to me to represent two extreme positions of the ego, as opposed as they are complementary: I am speaking of orgasm.
In this second case there is the same profound incompatibility between the possibility of living it and that of taking the distance necessary to recognize it and define it in the hic et nunc of the situation that triggers it.

To say that one is anxious already indicates in itself that one has already been able to take a certain distance with respect to affective experience;
this shows that the ego has already acquired a certain mastery and objectivity vis-à-vis an affect which, from that moment on,
one may doubt still deserves the name of anxiety. I do not need to recall here the metaphorical, mediating role
of speech, nor the gap existing between an affective experience and its verbal translation.

From the moment man puts his affects into words, he thereby makes them into something else; by speech, he makes of them a means
of communication, he makes them enter the domain of relation and intentionality, he transforms into something communicable
what was lived at the level of the body and which, as such, in the last analysis, remains something of the order of the non-verbal.
We all know that saying one loves someone has only a very distant relation to what is, as a function of that same love, felt at the bodily level. To tell someone that one desires them, Monsieur LACAN reminded us, is to include them in
our fundamental fantasy. It is also no doubt to make them the testimony, the witness of our own signifier.

Whatever we may say on this subject, everything is arranged to show us the gap existing between affect as bodily, interiorized emotion, as something that draws its deepest source from that which by definition cannot be expressed in words—I mean fantasy—and speech, which thus appears to us in all its function as metaphor.

If speech is the indispensable magic key that alone can allow us to enter the world of symbolization,
well then, I think that anxiety corresponds precisely to that moment:
– when this key no longer opens any door,
– when the ego has to confront what is behind or before all symbolization,
– when what appears is what has no name, this mysterious figure, this place from which a desire arises that can no longer be grasped,
– when there occurs for the subject a telescoping between fantasy and reality: the symbolic vanishes to leave place to fantasy as such, the ego dissolves in it, and it is this dissolution that we call ‘anxiety.’

It is certain that the psychotic does not wait for analysis in order to know anxiety.
It is also certain that for every subject, the analytic relation is, in this domain, a privileged terrain.

This need not surprise us, if one admits that anxiety has the closest relations with identification.
Now, if in identification what is at stake is something that takes place at the level of desire, the subject’s desire in relation to the Other’s desire, it becomes evident that the major source of anxiety in analysis is going to be found in what is its very essence:
the fact that the Other is in this case someone whose most fundamental desire is not to desire, someone who by that very fact, while allowing all possible projections, also unveils them in their fantasmatic subjectivity and obliges the subject
periodically to pose the question of what the analyst’s desire is, a desire always presumed, never defined,
and thereby able at any moment to become that place of the Other from which, for the analysand, anxiety arises.

But before trying to define the parameters of the anxiogenic situation—parameters that can only be outlined
on the basis of the problems proper to identification—one can ask a first, more descriptive question
which is this: what do we mean when we speak of oral anxiety, castration anxiety, death anxiety?

Trying to differentiate these different terms at the level of a sort of quantitative calibration is impossible; there is no ‘anxiometer.’ One is not a little or very anxious; one is anxious or one is not.
The only path allowing an answer at this level is that of placing ourselves in the place that belongs to us, that of the one who alone can define the subject’s anxiety on the basis of what that anxiety signals to him.

If it is true, as Monsieur LACAN pointed out, that it is very difficult to speak of anxiety as signal
at the level of the subject, it seems certain to me that its appearance designates, signals, the Other as source, as the place
from which it arose, and it may not be useless to recall in this connection that there is no affect that we bear
worse in the other than anxiety, that there is no affect to which we risk responding more in a parallel way.

Sadism, aggressivity may, for example, arouse in the partner an opposite reaction, masochistic or passive. Anxiety
can provoke only flight or anxiety. There is here a reciprocity of response that is not without posing a question.
Monsieur LACAN objected vehemently to this attempt made by several, which would be the search for a content of anxiety.

This reminds me of what he had said about something else altogether: that to pull a rabbit out of a hat, one still had to have put it there.

Well then, I wonder whether anxiety does not appear precisely, not only when the rabbit has come out, but when it has gone off to graze the grass, when the hat represents only something that recalls the torus, but that surrounds a black place from which every nameable content has evaporated, before which the ego no longer has any point of reference, for the first thing that can be said of anxiety is that its appearance is the sign of the momentary collapse of every possible identificatory reference point.

It is only by starting from there that one can perhaps answer the question I was asking concerning the different denominations we can give to anxiety, and not at the level of the definition of a content,
the property of the anxious subject being, one might say, to have lost his content. It does not seem to me, in other words,
that one can treat anxiety as such. To take an example, I would say that doing so would seem to me as false as wanting to define an obsessional symptom while remaining at the level of the automatic movement that may represent it.

Anxiety can teach us something about itself only if we consider it as the consequence, the result of an impasse in which the ego finds itself, a sign for us of an obstacle arisen between these two parallel and fundamental lines
whose relations form the keystone of the whole human structure, namely: identification and castration.

It is the relations between these two structuring pivots in different subjects that I will try to sketch in order to attempt
a definition of what anxiety is, of what, depending on the case, it bears witness to. Monsieur LACAN,
in the seminar of April 4 to which I refer throughout this presentation, told us that castration could be conceived as a transitional pas¬sage between what is in the subject as the natural support of desire, and that habilitation
by the law thanks to which it will become the pledge by which he will designate himself in the place where he has to manifest himself as desire.

This transitional passage is what must make it possible to attain the penis-phallus equivalence, that is to say that what was, as bodily stirring [émoi], must become, give way to, a signifier, for it is only from the subject, and never from a partial object, penis or other, that the word desire can take any meaning whatsoever.

‘The subject demands and the phallus desires,’ said Monsieur LACAN—the phallus, but never the penis. The penis, for its part, is only an instrument
in the service of the phallus signifier, and if it can be a very unruly instrument, this is precisely because, as phallus,
it is the subject that it designates, and for it to work, the Other must precisely recognize it, choose it, not as a function
of this natural support, but insofar as he is, as subject, the signifier that the Other recognizes, from the Other’s own place as signifier.

What differentiates, on the plane of jouissance, the masturbatory act from coitus, a difference that is obvious but impossible to explain physiologically, is indeed that coitus—for insofar as the two partners have in their history been able to assume their castration—means that at the moment of orgasm the subject will recover, not as some have said a sort of primitive fusion,
for after all one does not see why the deepest jouissance man can experience should necessarily be linked to an equally total regression, but on the contrary that privileged moment where for an instant he attains that identification
always sought and always elusive, where he is, he the subject, recognized by the other as the object of the other’s deepest desire,
but where at the same time, thanks to the other’s jouissance, he can recognize the other as the one who constitutes him
as phallic signifier.

In this unique instant demand and desire can for a fleeting instant coincide, and that is what gives the ego
that identificatory blossoming from which jouissance draws its source. What must not be forgotten is that if in this instant
demand and desire coincide, jouissance nonetheless bears within it the source of the deepest dissatisfaction, for if desire
is above all desire for continuity, jouissance is by definition something instantaneous. That is what makes it so that immediately
the gap between desire and demand is re-established, and dissatisfaction, which is also the guarantee of the permanence of demand.

But if there are simulacra of anxiety, there are even more simulacra of jouissance, for in order for this identificatory situation, source of true jouissance, to be possible, it is still necessary that the two partners have avoided the major obstacle
that lies in wait for them, namely that for one of the two, or for both, what is at stake has remained fixed on the partial object,
the stake of a dual relation in which they, as subjects, have no place. For what everything linked
to castration shows us is indeed that, far from expressing the fear that it will be cut off from him, even if this is how the subject may verbalize it,
what is at stake is the fear that it will be left to him and that everything else will be cut off from him, that is to say that one wants his penis
or the partial object, support and source of pleasure, and that one negates him, misrecognizes him as subject.

This is why anxiety not only has close relations with jouissance, but also why one of the situations most readily anxiogenic
is indeed that in which the subject and the Other have to confront each other at its level. We shall then try to see what obstacles the subject may encounter on this plane. They represent nothing other than the very sources
of all anxiety.

For this, we will have to refer back to what we call ‘pregenital object relations,’ to that period, determinative above all others for the subject’s destiny, where mediation between the subject and the Other, between demand and desire, took place around
that object whose place and definition remained highly ambiguous, and which is called the partial object.

The relation between the subject and this partial object is nothing other than the relation of the subject to his own body, and it is from this relation, which remains fundamental for every human being, that the whole range
of what is included in the term ‘object relation’ takes its starting point and its mold.

Whether one stops at the oral, anal, or phallic phase, one encounters there the same coordinates. If I choose the oral phase,
it is simply because for the psychotic, of whom we shall speak shortly, it seems to me to be the fertile moment
of what I have elsewhere called ‘the opening of psychosis.’

By what can we define it? By a demand which, from the beginning, we are told, is a demand for something else.
By a response too, which is not only, and in an obvious way, a response to something else, but is—and this is a point
that seems to me very important—what constitutes what is a cry, perhaps a call, as demand and as desire.

When the mother responds to the child’s cries, she recognizes them by constituting them as demand, but what is more serious is that she interprets them on the plane of desire, desire of the child to have her near him, desire to take something from her, desire to aggress her, no matter… what is certain is that through her response, the Other will give the dimension of desire
to the cry of need, and that this desire with which the child is invested is always at the beginning the result of a projective interpretation, a function solely of maternal desire, of her own fantasy. It is by way of the unconscious of the Other that the subject
makes his entry into the world of desire.

His own desire, for his part, he will above all have to constitute as response, as acceptance or refusal to take
the place that the unconscious of the Other designates for him. It seems to me that the first moment of the key mechanism of the oral relation,
which is projective identification, starts from the mother: there is a first projection on the plane of desire that comes from her.
The child will have to identify with it or combat it, deny an identification that he may feel as destructuring.

And at this first stage of human evolution, it is also the response he can make to the subject that allows him the discovery
of what his demand conceals. From that moment onward, jouissance, which does not wait for phallic organization to enter into play, will take on that aspect of revelation that it will always keep. For if frustration is what signifies to the subject the gap existing between need
and desire, jouissance, by the inverse movement, reveals to him, by responding to what was not formulated, what is beyond
demand, that is to say desire.

Now what do we see in what the ‘oral relation’ is? Above all: that demand and response signify themselves for the two partners around the partial mouth-breast relation. This level, we may call it that of the signified: the response
will provoke at the level of the oral cavity an activity of absorption, source of pleasure; an external object, milk, will become one’s own, bodily substance. Absorption derives its importance and its signification from there. From this
first response onward, it is the search for this activity of absorption, source of pleasure, that will become the aim of demand.

As for desire, it is elsewhere that we will have to seek it, although it is on the basis of this same response, of this same experience of the satiation of need, that it will be constituted. Indeed, if the mouth-breast relation and the absorption-food activity are the numerators of the equation representing the oral relation, there is also a denominator:
the one that calls into question the child-mother relation, and it is there that desire can be situated.

If, as I think, the activity of breastfeeding—as a function of the investment of which it is on both sides the object,
because of the contact and bodily experiences at the level of the body taken in the broad sense, which it allows the child—represents,
by its very repetitive scansion, the essential fundamental phase of the oral stage, one must indeed recall that never more
than here does the proverb that says: ‘The way of giving is worth more than what one gives’ seem to burst forth as true.

Thanks, or because of this way of giving, as a function of what that will reveal to him of maternal desire,
the child will apprehend the difference between the gift of nourishment and the gift of love.

In parallel with the absorption of nourishment, we will then see outlined, in the denominator of our equation,
the absorption, or better the introjection of a relational signifier, that is to say that in parallel with the absorption of nourishment,
there will be introjection of a fantasmatic relation where he and the other will be represented by their unconscious desires.

Now, if the numerator can easily be invested with the sign +, the denominator can at the same time be invested with the sign –.
It is this difference of sign that gives the breast its place as signifier, for it is indeed from this gap between demand and desire,
from this place from which frustration arises, that every signifier finds its genesis, is disengaged. From this equation
which mutatis mutandis could be reconstituted for the different phases of the subject’s evolution, four eventualities
are possible; they lead to what are called: normalization, neurosis, perversion, psychosis.

I shall try to schematize them, simplifying them of course in a somewhat caricatural way, and to see the relations existing
in each case between identification and anxiety. The first of these paths is no doubt the most utopian.
It is the one where we would have to imagine that the child could find in the gift of nourishment the desired gift of love.

The breast and the maternal response could then become symbols of something else. The child would enter the symbolic world:
– he could accept the parade [procession/sequence] of the signifying chain,
– the oral relation, as an activity of absorption, could be abandoned,
– and the subject would evolve toward what is called a normative solution.

But for the child to be able to assume this castration, for him to be able to renounce the pleasure offered him by the breast as a function of this little note, this uncertain draft on the future, it is necessary that the mother herself have been able to assume her own castration.
From this moment on, in this so-called dual relation, the third term, the father, must be present as maternal reference.
Only in this case, what she will seek in the child will not be a satisfaction at the level of a bodily erogeneity
that makes him a phallic equivalent, but a relation which, while constituting her as mother, recognizes her just as much
as the father’s woman.

The gift of nourishment will then for her be the pure symbol of a gift of love, and because this gift of love will not precisely
be the phallic gift that the subject desires, the child will be able to maintain his relation to demand. The phallus, he will have to seek elsewhere;
he will enter into the castration complex which alone can allow him to identify with something other than a barred subject.

The second eventuality is that for the mother herself castration has remained something badly assumed. Then any object capable of being for the other the source of a pleasure and the aim of a demand risks becoming for her the phallic equivalent she desires. But insofar as the breast has no privileged existence except in function of the one to whom it is indispensable—namely the child—we see this equivalence child=phallus taking shape, which is at the center of the genesis of most neurotic structures.

The subject then, in the course of his development, will always have to confront the dilemma of being or having, whatever the bodily object—breast, feces, penis—that becomes the phallic support:

– either he will have to identify with the one who has it, but for lack of having been able to go beyond the stage of natural support, for lack of having been able to accede to the symbolic, having will always signify for him ‘having castrated the Other,’

– or else he will renounce having it: he will then identify with the phallus as object of the other’s desire, but will then have to renounce being, himself, the subject of desire.

This identificatory conflict, between being the agent of castration or becoming the subject who undergoes it, is what defines this continual alternation, this question always present at the level of identification which clinically is called a neurosis.

The third eventuality is the one we encounter in perversion. If the latter has been defined as the negative of neurosis, we find this structural opposition again at the level of identification. The pervert is the one who has diverted the identificatory conflict. On the plane we have chosen, the oral, we shall say that in perversion the subject constitutes himself as if the activity of absorption had no other aim than to make of him the object allowing the Other a phallic jouissance.

The pervert neither has nor is the phallus; he is that ambiguous object which serves a desire that is not his own; he can derive his jouissance only in this strange situation where the only identification possible for him is the one that makes him identify, not with the Other nor with the phallus, but with that object whose activity procures jouissance to a phallus whose belonging, in the end, he does not know.
One could say that the pervert’s desire is to respond to the phallic demand [demande phallique / ‘demandephal¬lique’ pun]. To take a banal example, I would say that the sadist’s jouissance needs, in order to appear, an Other for whom—by making himself whip—pleasure arises.

If I spoke of phallic demand—which is a play on words—it is because for the pervert the other has no existence except as the almost anonymous support of a phallus for which the pervert performs his sacrificial rites. The perverse response always carries within it a negation of the other as subject. Perverse identification is always made in function of the object source of jouissance, for a phallus as powerful as it is fantasmatic.

There is one more word I would like to say on perversion in general. I do not think it is possible to define it if one remains on the plane that we could, in quotation marks, call ‘sexual,’ although that is what the classical views in this matter seem to lead us toward. Perversion is—and in this it seems to me I remain very close to Freudian views—a perversion at the level of jouissance: it matters little which bodily part is put into play to obtain it. If I share Monsieur LACAN’s distrust regarding what is called genitality, it is because it is very dangerous to make anatomical analysis.

The most anatomically normal coitus can be as neurotic or as perverse as what is called a pregenital drive. What marks normality, neurosis, or perversion is only at the level of the relation between the ego and its identification, allowing jouissance or not, that you can see it. If one wanted to reserve the diagnosis of perversion to sexual perversions alone, not only would one get nowhere, because a purely symptomatic diagnosis has never meant anything, but moreover we would be obliged to recognize that then there are very few neurotics who escape it.

And it is not at the level of a guilt from which the pervert would be exempt that you will find the solution either: there is not, at least to my knowledge, a human being happy enough to ignore what guilt is. The only way to approach perversion is to try to define it where it is, namely at the level of relational behavior. Sadism is far from always being unrecognized or always being held in check in the obsessional.

What it signifies in him is indeed the persistence of what is called ‘an anal relation’: that is, a relation where it is a matter of possessing or being possessed, a relation where the love one feels, or of which one is the object, can be signified to the subject only in function of this possession which can precisely go as far as the destruction of the object. The obsessional, one might say, really is the one who chastises well because he loves well: he is the one for whom the father’s spanking has remained the privileged mark of his love and who is always seeking someone to whom to give it, or from whom to receive it.

But, having received it or given it, having assured himself that he is loved, jouissance, it is in another type of relation to the same object that he will seek it, and whether this relation is made orally, anally, or vaginally, it will not be perverse in the sense in which I mean it, and which seems to me the only one that can avoid putting the label perverse on a great number of neurotics or on a great number of our fellow human beings.

Sadism becomes a perversion when the spanking is no longer sought or given as a sign of love, but when it is, as such, assimilated by the subject to the only existing possibility of making a phallus enjoy, and the sight of this jouissance becomes the only path offered to the pervert for his own jouissance. Much has been said about the aggressivity from which exhibitionism would draw its source. One shows ‘it’ in order to aggress the other, no doubt, but what must not be forgotten is that the exhibitionist is convinced that this aggression is a source of jouissance for the other.

The obsessional, when he lives an exhibitionistic tendency, tries, one could say, to dupe the other: he shows what he thinks the other does not have and covets; he shows what for him indeed has the closest relations with aggressivity. Think of what happens in the Rat Man: the dead father’s jouissance is the least of his concerns. To show the dead father what the latter—the Rat Man—thinks the dead father would have desired to tear from him fantasmatically, that indeed is something called aggressivity, and from this aggressivity the obsessional derives his jouissance.

The pervert, by contrast, seeks his own only through a foreign jouissance. Perversion is precisely that, this zigzag course, this detour that means that his ego is always, whatever he does, in the service of an anonymous phallic power. It matters little to him who the object is; it will suffice that it be capable of enjoying, that he be able to make of it the support of this phallus before which he will always identify himself, and only as with the object presumed capable of procuring jouissance for it. This is why, contrary to what one sees in neurosis, perverse identification, like its type of object relation, is something whose striking feature is stability, unity.

And we now arrive at the fourth eventuality, the most difficult to grasp: psychosis. The psychotic is a subject whose demand has never been symbolized by the Other, for whom the real and the symbolic, fantasy and reality, have never been able to be delimited, for lack of being able to accede to that third dimension which alone allows this indispensable differentiation between these two levels, namely, the imaginary.

But here, even while trying to simplify things as much as possible, we are obliged to situate ourselves at the very beginning of the subject’s history, before the oral relation, that is to say at the moment of conception. The first amputation the psychotic undergoes takes place before his birth; he is for his mother the object of her own metabolism, paternal participation is denied by her, unacceptable. He is from that moment onward, and throughout pregnancy, the partial object coming to fill a fantasmatic lack at the level of her body. And from his birth onward, the role that will be assigned to him by her will be that of being the witness of the negation of her castration.

The child—contrary to what has often been said—is not the mother’s phallus; he is the witness that the breast is the phallus, which is not the same thing. And for the breast to be the phallus, and an all-powerful phallus, the response it brings must be perfect and total. The child’s demand cannot be recognized as anything other than a demand for nourishment. The dimension of desire at the level of the subject must be denied, and what characterizes the psychotic’s mother is the total prohibition made to the child against being the subject of any desire.

One then sees from that moment how his particular relation to speech will be constituted for the psychotic, how from the beginning it will be impossible for him to maintain his relation to demand. Indeed, if the response is never addressed to him except as a mouth to be fed, as a partial object, one understands that for him every demand, at the very moment of its formulation, carries within it the death of desire.

For lack of having been symbolized by the Other, he will be led, himself, to make symbolic and real coincide in the response. Since, whatever he asks for, it is nourishment that is given to him, nourishment as such will become for him the key signifier. From that moment onward the symbolic will irrupt into the real.

Instead of the gift of nourishment finding its symbolized equivalent in the gift of love, for him every gift of love can signify itself only by an oral absorption. To love the other or be loved by the other will be translated for him in terms of orality, to absorb the other or be absorbed by the other. There will always be for him a fundamental contradiction between demand and desire, because:

– either he maintains his demand, and his demand destroys him as subject of a desire, he must alienate himself as subject in order to make himself mouth, object to be fed,

– or else he will seek to constitute himself as subject, as best he can, and he will be obliged to alienate the bodily part of himself that is source of pleasure and site of a response incompatible for him with any attempt at autonomy.

The psychotic is always obliged to alienate his body as support of his ego, or to alienate a bodily part as support of a possibility of jouissance. If I do not use here the term identification, it is precisely because I believe that in psychosis it is not applicable. Identification, in my perspective, implies the possibility of an object relation where the subject’s desire and the Other’s desire are in a conflictual situation, but exist as the two constitutive poles of the relation. In psychosis, the Other and its desire, it is at the level of the subject’s fantasmatic relation to his own body that they would have to be defined. I will not do so here; that would take us away from our subject, which is anxiety.

Contrary to what one might think, it is indeed of it that I have spoken throughout this presentation. As I said at the beginning, it seemed to me possible to reach it only from the parameters of identification.
Now what have we seen?

Whether in the so-called normal subject, in the neurotic, or in the pervert, every attempt at identification can be made only on the basis of what he imagines, true or false no matter, of the Other’s desire. Whether you take the so-called normal subject, the neurotic, or the pervert, you have seen that it is always a matter of identifying oneself in function of or against what one thinks the other’s desire is. As long as this desire can be imagined, fantasized, the subject will find in it the reference points necessary to define himself as object of the other’s desire or as object refusing to be so. In both cases he is, himself, someone who can define himself, find himself again.

But from the moment the Other’s desire becomes something mysterious, indefinable, what is unveiled there to the subject is that it was precisely this Other’s desire that constituted him as subject.

What he will recover, what will unmask itself at that moment before this nothingness, is his fundamental fantasy; it is that being the object of the Other’s desire is a sustainable situation only insofar as this desire can be named, shaped, in function of our own desire. But to become the object of a desire to which we can no longer give a name is to become ourselves an object whose signs [enseignes: marks/signboards/emblems] no longer have meaning, since they are, for the Other, undecipherable. This precise moment, where the ego refers itself in a mirror that sends back to it an image that no longer has identifiable signification, that is anxiety. By calling it oral, anal, or phallic, we are only trying to define what the signs were with which the ego adorned itself in order to have itself recognized.

If it is only we—as what appears in the mirror—who can do it, it is because we are the only ones able to see what type these signs are that we are accused of no longer recognizing. For if, as I said at the beginning, anxiety is the affect that most easily risks provoking a reciprocal response, it is indeed because from that moment onward we become for the other the one whose signs are just as mysterious, just as inhuman.

In anxiety, it is not only the ego that is dissolved, it is also the Other as identificatory support. In this same sense, I will position myself by saying that jouissance and anxiety are the two extreme positions in which the ego may be situated:

– in the first, the ego and the Other for an instant exchange their signs, recognize each other as two signifiers whose shared jouissance ensures for an instant the identity of desires.

– In anxiety, the ego and the Other dissolve, are annulled in a situation where desire is lost, for lack of being able to be named.

If now, to conclude, we pass to psychosis, we will see that things are a little different. Of course, here too anxiety is nothing other than the sign of the loss for the ego of every possible reference point. But the source from which anxiety is born is here endogenous; it is the place from which the subject’s desire may arise; it is his desire which, for the psychotic, is the privileged source of all anxiety.

If it is true:
– that it is the Other who constitutes us by recognizing us as object of desire,
– that its response is what makes us become aware of the gap existing between demand and desire,
– and that it is through this breach that we enter the world of signifiers,
…well then, for the psychotic, this Other is the one who never signified to him anything other than a hole, an emptiness at the very center of his being.

The prohibition that has been placed upon him with regard to desire means that the response made him apprehend, not a gap, but a fundamental antinomy between demand and desire, and from this gap, which is not a breach but an abyss, what came to light was not the signifier but fantasy, namely what causes the telescoping between symbolic and real, which we call psychosis.

For the psychotic—and I apologize for confining myself to simple formulas—the other is introjected at the level of his own body, at the level of everything that surrounds this primary gaping [béance: gap/yawning opening] which alone is what designates him as subject. Anxiety is for him linked to those specific moments where, from this gaping, there appears something that could be called desire, for in order for him to be able to assume it, the subject would have to accept situating himself in the only place from which he can say ‘I,’ namely: that he identify with this gaping which, in function of the other’s prohibition, is the only place where he is recognized as subject.

All desire can only send him back to a negation of himself or to a negation of the other. But insofar as the other is introjected at the level of his own body, and this introjection is the only thing that allows him to live
—I said elsewhere that, for the psychotic, the only possibility of identifying with a unified imaginary body would be to identify with the shadow projected before him by a body that would not be his own—any disappearance of the other would be for him the equivalent of an automutilation that would only send him back to his own fundamental drama.

If in the neurotic it is from our silence that we can find the sources triggering his anxiety, in the psychotic, it is from our speech, from our presence. Everything that can make him become aware that we exist as different from him, as autonomous subjects and thereby can recognize him, him, as subject, becomes what can trigger his anxiety.

As long as he speaks, he only repeats a monologue that situates us at the level of that introjected Other that constitutes him. But if he comes to speak to us, then, insofar as we can, as object, become the place where he has to recognize his desire, we will see his anxiety triggered, for to desire is to have to constitute oneself as subject, and for him the only place from which he can do so is the one that sends him back to his abyss.

But here—again in conclusion—you see, one can say that anxiety appears at the moment when desire makes of the subject something that is a lack of being, a lack of naming oneself.

There is one point I did not deal with and that I will leave aside—I regret it, for it is fundamental for me and I would have liked to be able to do it; unfortunately, for me to be able to include it, I would have had to have more mastery vis-à-vis the subject I tried to deal with—I am speaking of fantasy.

It too is intimately linked to identification and to anxiety, to such an extent that I could have said that anxiety appears at the moment when the real object can no longer be apprehended except in its fantasmatic signification, that it is from that moment onward that every possible identification of the ego dissolves and anxiety appears.

But if it is the same story, it is not the same discourse, and for today I will stop here. But before concluding this discourse, I would like to bring you a very short clinical example on the sources of anxiety in the psychotic.
I will tell you nothing else of the history except that it concerns a major schizophrenic, delusional, institutionalized on different occasions.

The first sessions are an exposition of his delirium, a fairly classic delirium; it is what he calls ‘the problem of the robot-man,’ and then in a session where as if by chance the question is the problem of contact and speech, where he explains to me that what he cannot bear is the form of demand, that:

‘the handshake is a progress over verbally greeting civilizations, where speech falsifies things, it prevents understanding, where speech is like a wheel turning where each person would see one part of the wheel at different moments, and then when one tries to communicate it is necessarily false, there is always a shift [décalage].’

In this same session, at the moment when he approaches the problem of woman’s speech, he suddenly says to me:

‘What worries me is what I was told about amputees, that they would feel things through the limb they no longer have.’

And at that moment, this man whose discourse retains in its delusional form a dimension of precision of mathematical exactitude, begins to search for his words, to get tangled up, tells me he can no longer follow his thoughts, and finally pronounces this sentence that I find really interesting regarding what the psychotic’s body image is:

‘A ghost would be a man without limbs and without a body who, by his intelligence alone, would perceive false sensations of a body he does not have. That, that worries me enormously.’
‘Would perceive false sensations of a body he does not have.’ This sentence will find its meaning in the next session, when he comes to see me to tell me that he wants to interrupt the sessions, that it is no longer bearable, that it is unhealthy and dangerous, and what is unhealthy and dangerous, what arouses an anxiety that throughout this session will make itself heavily felt, is that:

‘I realized that you want to seduce me and that you might succeed.’

What he realized is that from these ‘false sensations of a body he does not have’ his desire might arise, and then he would have to recognize, to assume this lack that is his body; he would have to look at what, for lack of having been able to be symbolized, is not bearable to man, castration as such. Still in this same session he will himself say, better than I could, where the source of anxiety is for him:

‘You are afraid of looking at yourself in a mirror, because the mirror changes according to the eyes that look at it, one does not really know what one is going to see there. If you buy a golden mirror it is better…’

One has the impression that what he wants to make sure of is that the changes are on the side of the mirror. You see, anxiety appears at the moment when he fears that I might become an object of desire, because from that moment on, the emergence of his desire would imply for him the necessity of assuming what I called ‘the fundamental lack that constitutes him.’ From that moment anxiety arises, because his position as ghost, as robot, is no longer sustainable; he risks no longer being able to deny his false sensations of a body he cannot recognize. What provokes his anxiety is indeed the precise moment when, faced with the irruption of his desire, he asks himself what image of himself the mirror is going to send back to him, and this image he knows risks being that of lack, of emptiness, of what has no name, of what makes all reciprocal recognition impossible and that we, spectators and involuntary authors of the drama, call anxiety.

LACAN

I would very much like, before trying to point out the place of this discourse, that certain of the people I have seen
with various mimics [facial expressions/gestures], interrogative, expectant—mimics [facial expressions/gestures] that became more definite at this or that turn in Mme AULAGNIER’s discourse—would kindly simply indicate the suggestions, the thoughts produced in them at this or that bend in this discourse, as a sign that this discourse has been heard—I regret only one thing: it was read.
That will provide me myself with the supports on which I will accentuate the comments more precisely.

Xavier AUDOUARD

What struck me associatively was truly the clinical example you brought at the end of the presentation,
it is this sentence of the patient about speech that he compares to a wheel of which different persons never see the same part.
That seemed to me to illuminate everything you said, and to open, I do not know why moreover, a whole amplification
of the themes you presented. I believe I more or less understood the meaning of the presentation.
I am not used to schizophrenics, but as concerns neurotics and perverts, anxiety, insofar as it cannot be an object of symbolization: because it is precisely the mark that symbolization could not take place and symbolize itself,
is truly to disappear into a sort of non-symbolization from which at every instant the call of anxiety departs.

It is obviously something extremely rich, but which perhaps, on a certain logical plane, would call for some clarifications. How, indeed, is it possible that this fundamental experience, which is in some way the negative of speech, comes to be symbolized, and what then happens such that, from this central hole, something bursts forth that we have to understand? Finally, how is speech born? What is the origin of the signifier in this precise case? How does one pass from anxiety insofar as it cannot be spoken, to anxiety insofar as it is spoken? There may perhaps be there a movement that is not unrelated to this turning wheel, which might perhaps need to be somewhat clarified and specified.

Antoine VERGOTTE

I asked myself whether there are not two kinds of anxieties. Mme AULAGNIER spoke of castration-anxiety. The subject is afraid that it will be taken away from him and that he will be forgotten as subject; that is the disappearance of the subject as such. But I wonder whether there is not an anxiety where the subject refuses to be subject, if for example in certain fantasies he wants on the contrary to conceal the hole or the lack.

In Mme AULAGNIER’s clinical example, the subject refuses his body because the body reminds him of his desire and his lack. In the example of castration-anxiety, you rather said: the subject is afraid of being misrecognized as subject. An anxiety therefore has the two possible senses, either he refuses to be subject… there is also the other anxiety where he has, for example in claustrophobia, the impression that there he is no longer subject, or on the contrary he is enclosed, that he is in a closed world where desire does not exist. He can be anxious before his desire and also before the absence of desire.

Piera AULAGNIER

Do you not think that when one refuses to be subject, it is precisely because one has the impression that for the Other one can be subject only by paying for it with one’s castration? I do not believe that refusing to be subject is really being a subject.

LACAN

We are indeed at the heart of the problem. You can see immediately there the point at which one gets muddled. I find that this discourse is excellent, insofar as the handling of certain of the notions that we find here has allowed Mme AULAGNIER to bring out, in a way that would not otherwise have been possible for her, several dimensions of her experience. I am going to take up what seemed remarkable to me in what she produced. I say right away that this discourse seems to me to remain halfway.

It is a sort of conversion, you do not doubt it—that is indeed what I am trying to obtain from you through my teaching, which is not, my God, after all such a unique pretension in history that it might be held exorbitant—but it is certain that a whole part of Mme AULAGNIER’s discourse, and very precisely the passage where, out of a concern for intelligibility, both her own and that of those to whom she addresses herself, to whom she believes she is addressing herself, returns to formulas which are those against which I warn you, I address you, I put you on guard, and not simply because in me it is a form of tic or aversion, but because their coherence with something that is a matter of abandoning radically, shows itself every time one uses them, even if aptly.

The idea of an antinomy, for example, any antinomy whatsoever, of speech with affect, even though it is empirically verified in experience, is nevertheless not something on which we can articulate a dialectic, if indeed what I am trying to do before you has a value, that is to say, to allow you to develop as far as possible all the consequences of the effect that man is an animal condemned to inhabit language.

Whence it follows that we could in no way hold affect to be anything whatsoever without falling into some kind of primarity. No significant effect, none of those with which we are dealing, from anxiety to anger and all the others, can even begin to be understood, except in a reference where the relation of x to the signifier is primary.

Before marking the distortions that Mme AULAGNIER’s discourse has undergone from this—I mean in relation to certain crossings-over that would be the further stage—I want, of course, to mark the positive of what this use alone of these terms has already enabled her to do, foremost among them those she used with correctness and skill: desire and demand.

It is not enough to have heard of this which, if one uses it in a certain way—but they are not all the same such esoteric words that everyone cannot believe himself entitled to use them—it is not enough to employ these terms, desire and demand, to make an exact application of them.

Some have ventured it recently, and I do not know that the result was in any way either brilliant, which after all would have only secondary importance, or even having the least relation to the function we give these terms. That is not Mme AULAGNIER’s case, but it is what allowed her to attain, at certain moments, a tone that manifests what sort of conquest—even if only in the form of questions posed—the handling of the terms allows us.

To designate the first, very impressive opening she gave us, I will point out to you what she said about orgasm, or more exactly about amorous jouissance. If I may address her as SOCRATES could address some DIOTIMA, I will tell her that in this she proves that she knows what she is talking about. That she does so as a woman is what traditionally seems to go without saying. I am less sure of it!

Women, I will say, are rare, if not in knowing, at least in being able to speak, while knowing what they are saying, about the things of love. SOCRATES said that assuredly, that, he himself could testify to, that he knew. Women are therefore rare, but understand well what I mean by that: men are even more so!

As Mme AULAGNIER told us, concerning what the jouissance of love is, by rejecting once and for all that famous reference to fusion, of which precisely, we who have given a quite archaic meaning to this term fusion, that should put us on alert: one cannot at once require that it be at the end of a process that one arrives at a qualified and unique moment, and at the same time suppose that it be through a return to some primitive undifferentiation.

In short, I will not reread her text, because I lack the time, but taken as a whole it would not seem useless to me that this text—to which certainly I am far from giving the grade 20/20, I mean considering it a perfect discourse—be considered rather as a discourse defining a level from which we will be able to situate progress, to which we will be able to refer ourselves, to something that has been touched, or in any case perfectly grasped, caught, circled, understood by Mme AULAGNIER.

Of course I am not saying that she gives us there her last word; I will even say more, on several occasions she indicates the points where it would seem to her necessary to advance in order to complete what she said, and no doubt a large part of my satisfaction comes from the points she indicates.
 

These are precisely the very ones that could be turned, if I may say so. These two points, she indicated them:
– with regard to the psychotic’s relation to his own body on the one hand: she said that she had many things to say, she showed us a little of it,
– and on the other hand with regard to fantasy, whose obscurity in which she left it would seem to me sufficiently indicative of the fact that this shadow is, in groups, somewhat general! That is one point.

Second point, which I find very remarkable in what she brought us, is what she brought when she spoke to us of the perverse relation. Not certainly that I subscribe in every point to what she said on this subject, which is truly of incredible audacity; it is to congratulate her highly for having been in a state, even if it is a step to be corrected, to have done it all the same.

So as not to qualify it otherwise—this step—I will say that it is the first time, not only in my circle—and in that I congratulate myself on having here been preceded—that there comes forward something, a certain way, a certain tone for speaking of the perverse relation, which suggests to us the idea which is precisely what has prevented me from speaking of it until now, because I do not want to pass for the one who says: ‘Everything that has been done up to now is worth nothing at all.’ [‘ne vaut pas tripette’ idiom]

But Mme AULAGNIER, who does not have the same reasons for reserve as we do, and besides says it in all innocence, I mean who has seen perverts and has taken an interest in them in a truly analytic way, begins to articulate something which, by the sole fact of being able to present itself in this general form—I repeat to you, incredibly audacious—that the pervert is the one who makes himself object for the jouissance of a phallus whose belonging he does not suspect
—he is the instrument of the jouissance of a god—that means, in the end, that this deserves some adjustment, some rectification of directive maneuver and, all told, that this poses the question of reintegrating what we call the phallus, that this poses the urgency of the definition of the phallus.

That is not doubtful, since it surely has as an effect to tell us that if, for us analysts, a diagnosis of perverse structure is to have a meaning, that means that we must begin by throwing out the window everything that has been written, from KRAFT-EBING to HAVELOCK-ELLIS, and everything that has been written of any so-called clinical catalogue of perversions.

In short, there is, on the plane of perversions, to overcome this sort of distance taken, under the term clinic, which is in reality only a way of misrecognizing what there is in this structure of absolutely radical, of absolutely open to whoever will have known how to cross this step, which is precisely the one I require of you, this step of conversion that allows us to be, from the point of view of perception, where we know what perverse structure means in an absolutely universal way.

If I evoked the gods it was not for nothing, for I might just as well have evoked the theme of metamorphoses and the whole mystical relation, a certain pagan relation to the world which is that in which the perverse dimension has its value, I will say classical. It is the first time that I hear a certain tone spoken which is truly decisive, which is the opening in this field where precisely, at the moment when I am going to explain to you what the phallus is, we need it.

The third thing is what she told us regarding her experience of psychotics.

I do not need to underscore the effect that can have, I mean that AUDOUARD certainly bore witness to it. There again, what appears eminent to me is precisely that by which it also opens to us this psychotic structure as being something where we must feel at home.

If we are not capable of noticing that there is a certain degree—not archaic, to be put somewhere on the side of birth, but structural—at the level at which desires are properly speaking mad. If for us the subject does not include in its definition, in its first articulation, the possibility of psychotic structure, we will never be anything but alienists [old term for psychiatrists].

Now how can one fail to feel it as alive—as happens all the time to those who come to listen to what is said here in this seminar—how can we fail to notice that everything I have begun to articulate this year, concerning the surface structure of the Ψ system and the enigma concerning the way the subject can accede to his own body, is that it does not go by itself.

That of which everyone, since forever, is perfectly forewarned, since that famous and eternal distinction of disunion—or union—of soul and body is always, after all, the point of aporia on which all philosophical articulations have come to break.

And why would it not be possible, for us analysts precisely, to find the passage? Only, that requires a certain discipline, and in the first rank of that, knowing how to speak of the subject.

What makes speaking of the subject difficult is this, which you will never sufficiently get into your heads in the brutal form in which I am going to state it, namely that the subject is nothing other than this, the consequence of this that there is signifier, and that the birth of the subject consists in this: that it can think itself only as excluded from the signifier that determines it.

That is the value of the little cycle that I introduced to you last time and of which we have not finished hearing talk, for in truth I will still have to unfold it more than once before you before you can see quite exactly where it leads us.

If the subject is only that, this excluded part of a field entirely defined by the signifier, if it is only from that that everything can be born, one must always know at what level one brings in this term ‘subject.’ And despite herself…
because she is speaking to us, and because it is to her, and because there is still something
that is not yet acquired, assumed, all the same, when she speaks for example of this choice
that there is to be subject or object in the relation of desire
…well then, despite herself, Mme AULAGNIER lets herself slip into reintroducing into the subject ‘the person,’ with all the consequent dignity that you know we grant it in our enlightened times: personology, personalism, personality
and all that follows, an aspect that suits, of which everyone knows that we live in the midst of that.

Never has there been so much talk of the person. But finally, since our work is not a work that should take much interest in what happens in the public square, we have to take an interest in the subject otherwise.

There, Mme AULAGNIER called to her aid the term ‘parameter of anxiety.’ Well there all the same,
with regard to ‘person’ and ‘personology,’ you can see a quite considerable work that took me a few months, a work of remarks on the discourse of our friend Daniel LAGACHE[Écrits p. 647].

I ask you to refer to it in order to see the importance that would have had, in the articulation she gave us of the function of anxiety and of this sort of cut-off whistle [sifflet coupé: interrupted/strangled whistle] that it would constitute at the level of speech, the importance that the function i(a), in other words the specular image, should normally have taken in her presentation, which certainly is not at all absent from her presentation, since in the end it is before his mirror that she ended by dragging her psychotic for us, and that is why, because he had come there all by himself, this psychotic, therefore that is where she had quite rightly given him rendezvous.

And to bring in a bit of a smile I will write, in the margin of the remarks that won her admiration in what she cited, these four little verses inscribed at the bottom of a plate that I have at home:

‘To Mina her faithful mirror
Shows, alas, elongated features.
Ah heaven! Oh God! she cries,
How mirrors have changed!’ [play on mirrors changing vs face/image changing]

That is indeed what your psychotic tells you, showing here the importance of the function, not of the ego-ideal,
but of the ideal ego as place, not only where properly egoic identifications come to be formed,
but also as place where anxiety is produced, the anxiety that I qualified for you as ‘sensation of the Other’s desire.’

To bring back this ‘sensation of the Other’s desire’ to the dialectic of the subject’s own desire facing the Other’s desire, there is the whole distance between what I had initiated and the already very effective level at which the whole development of Mme AULAGNIER was sustained.

But this level, in some sense, as she said, conflictual, which is a reference of two desires already—in the subject—constituted, is not what can in any way suffice for us to situate the difference, the distinction there is in the relations of desire, for example at the level of the four species or genera that she defined for us under the terms normal, perverse, neurotic, psychotic.

That speech indeed fails in something with regard to anxiety is in this that we cannot fail to recognize as one of the absolutely essential parameters that it cannot designate who is speaking, that it cannot refer to this point i(a)
the ‘I’ shifter of discourse itself, the ‘I’ which, in discourse, designates itself as the one who is currently speaking,
and associates it with this image of mastery that at that moment is wavering.

And this could be recalled to her by what I noted in what she was willing to take as a starting point, regarding the seminar of April 4. Remember the wavering image that I tried to set before you of my obscure confrontation with the praying mantis, and this that if I first spoke of the image reflected in its eye, it was in order to say that anxiety begins from this essential moment where this image is missing.

No doubt the little(a) that I am for the Other’s fantasy is essential, but where this is missing—Mme AULAGNIER does not fail to recognize it, for she restored it in other passages of her discourse—the mediation of the imaginary, that is what she means, but it is not yet sufficiently articulated: it is the i(a) that is missing, and that is there in function.

I do not want to push further, because you realize well that it is nothing less than resuming the seminar discourse, but that is where you must feel the importance of what we are introducing. It is a matter of what will make the link, in the signifying economy, of the constitution of the subject to the place of its desire.

And here you must glimpse, bear, resign yourselves to this, which requires of us something that seems as far from your ordinary concerns, finally from something one can decently ask of honorable specialists like you, who do not come here all the same to do elementary geometry.

Rest assured, it is not geometry, since it is not metric, it is something of which geometers have had up to now no sort of idea: the dimensions of space. I will go so far as to tell you that Monsieur DESCARTES had no sort of idea of the dimensions of space.

The dimensions of space are something, on the other hand, that has been devalued by a certain number of jokes made around this term such as ‘the fourth dimension,’ or ‘the fifth dimension’ and other things that have a quite precise meaning in mathematics, but of which it is always rather amusing to hear incompetents speak, so that when one speaks of that, one always has the feeling one is doing what is called ‘science fiction,’ and in spite of everything it still has rather a bad reputation.

But after all, you will see that we have something to say about it. I began to articulate it in this sense, psychically, by telling you that we have access only to two dimensions. For the rest, there is only a sketch, a beyond. As for experience, in any case for a research hypothesis that can be of some use to us, to kindly admit that there is nothing well established beyond—and that is already sufficiently rich and complicated—the experience of the surface.

But that does not mean that we cannot find, in the experience of the surface all by itself, the testimony that it—the surface—is plunged into a space that is not at all the one you imagine, with your visual experience of the specular image.

And all told, this little object, which is nothing but the most elementary knot—not the one I only made for lack of having been able to have a little cord braided for me that would close on itself, but simply this:

the most elementary knot, the one traced like that, suffices to carry within itself a certain number of questions that I introduce by telling you that the third dimension is absolutely not sufficient to account for the possibility of that.

Yet a knot, all the same, is something within everyone’s reach. It is not within everyone’s reach to know what they were doing in making a knot, but finally, it has taken on a metaphorical value: the knots of marriage, the knots of love, knots, sacred or not, why is it that people speak of them?

These are completely simple, elementary ways of placing within your reach the usual character, if you will set yourselves to it, and once it has become usual, a possible support of a conversion which, if it is realized, will still show well after the fact that, perhaps, these terms must have something to do with these references of structure
that we need in order to distinguish what happens, for example, at those levels that Mme AULAGNIER
divided for us in going from the normal to the psychotic.

Is it at this point of junction where, for the subject, there is constituted: the image of the knot, the fundamental image, the image that allows mediation between the subject and its desire—is it there that we cannot introduce very simple distinctions,
and you will see: entirely usable in practice, which allow us to represent to ourselves in a simpler way,
and less a source of antinomy, of aporia, of muddles, of labyrinth finally, than what we had up to now
at our disposal, namely this summary notion for example of an inside and an outside, which indeed looks
as if it goes without saying from the specular image, and which is not at all necessarily the one given to us in experience?